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Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface: Growing Up in America

PART I - THE DIAGNOSIS

ONE - If You See Something, Say Something

The National Watercooler

Frustrated Optimists

China, Again

TWO - Ignoring Our Problems

Anybody Around Here Know How to Write a Telegram?

The Big Four

The Stakes

THREE - Ignoring Our History

The Five Pillars of Prosperity

The Formula Builders

The Secret of Our Success Is Too Secret

PART II - THE EDUCATION CHALLENGE

FOUR - Up in the Air

The Merger

Flat World 1.0

Flat World 2.0

Everyone Is Feeling the Pressure

From St. Louis to New Delhi

Creators and Servers

Who Ate My Job?

FIVE - Help Wanted

White-Collar Indian

White-Collar American

Green-Collar American

Blue-Collar American

Carlson’s Law

SIX - Homework x 2 = The American Dream

We Have a “More” Problem

Teachers and Principals

Colorado, Here We Come

No Teacher Is an Island

Home Alone

SEVEN - Average Is Over

The Three C’s

The Good News

Creative Crimson Tide

An Idealab

Yes, And

“I Kill Jobs”

PART III - THE WAR ON MATH AND PHYSICS

EIGHT - “This Is Our Due”

NINE - The War on Math (and the Future)

Paint by Numbers

Present at the Creation

Young Republicans

Hey, Big Spender

The Return of Gravity

TEN - The War on Physics and Other Good Things

Honk If You Believe in Climate Change

Honk If You Think Like Dick Cheney

Of Science and Political Science

Hot, Flat, and Crowded; Hungry, Thirsty, and Unstable

PART IV - POLITICAL FAILURE

ELEVEN - The Terrible Twos

If 2 Plus X Equals 4, What Is the Value of X?

Bridges

Brain Drain

Million? You Must Mean Billion? No. Million!

Rules

Income Inequality

Chasing the Losers

Crazy Heart

TWELVE - “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”

The Great Disjunction

The Way We Were

A Broken System

Mount Rushmore

Meet Me in the Lobby

Show Me the Money

Media Madness

California, Here We Come

THIRTEEN - Devaluation

Jerry Maguire

The Decline of Authority

Service Envy

PART V - REDISCOVERING AMERICA

FOURTEEN - They Just Didn’t Get the Word

Far Too Dumb to Quit

Ride, Mister?

America’s All-Girl Navy

Teach for America

Tianjin Again

Buffalo Bob

A Hand Up, Not a Handout

Hope in the American Dream

FIFTEEN - Shock Therapy

Why Shock Therapy?

A Third Way to a New Way

Imagine

SIXTEEN - Rediscovering America

Also by

Acknowledgments

Index

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Copyright Page

It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth—that used to be us.

—President Barack Obama, November 3, 2010

Preface: Growing Up in America

A reader might ask why two people who have devoted their careers to writing about foreign affairs—one of us as a foreign correspondent and columnist at The New York Times and the other as a professor of American foreign policy at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies—have collaborated on a book about the American condition today. The answer is simple. We have been friends for more than twenty years, and in that time hardly a week has gone by without our discussing some aspect of international relations and American foreign policy. But in the last couple of years, we started to notice something: Every conversation would begin with foreign policy but end with domestic policy—what was happening, or not happening, in the United States. Try as we might to redirect them, the conversations kept coming back to America and our seeming inability today to rise to our greatest challenges.

This situation, of course, has enormous foreign policy implications. America plays a huge and, more often than not, constructive role in the world today. But that role depends on the country’s social, political, and economic health. And America today is not healthy—economically or politically. This book is our effort to explain how we