That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [122]
On education, in short, we have not updated our formula for greatness the way we did when we made sure that every American had access to a tuition-free high school education. “We have not made an equivalent commitment to the twenty-first century—to say everyone should be able to get postsecondary schooling free of tuition,” said Lawrence Katz, the Harvard labor economist. Just when we needed to speed up, we stayed where we were. Katz quoted a telling, discouraging statistic: “American fifty-five-year-olds are still the most educated people in their cohort in the world. But American twenty-five-year-olds are in the middle of the pack. That,” he added, “is a new phenomenon.”
Bridges
If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who had lost World War II. When you ride from New York to Washington on the Amtrak Acela, America’s bad imitation of a Japanese bullet train, trying to have any kind of sustained cell-phone conversation is an adventure, to say the least. Your conversation can easily be aborted three or four times in a fifteen-minute span. Whenever, we, the authors, have a cell-phone conversation from the Acela, one of us typically begins by saying, “Speak fast, I’m not calling from China. I’m on the Acela.” Our airports? Some of them would probably qualify as historic monuments. We would nominate both Los Angeles International and several terminals at John F. Kennedy in New York for this distinction. LAX’s dingy, cramped United Airlines domestic terminal feels like a faded 1970s movie star who once was considered hip but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. But in many ways, LAX, JFK, and Penn Station are us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. (China, by contrast, is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification.)
In the Terrible Twos, our roads got more crowded, our bridges got creakier, our water systems got leakier, and the lines in our airports got longer. In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issued a Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, and gave America an overall grade of D. The report also gave individual grades to fifteen infrastructure categories. None got higher than C+. “Decades of underfunding and inattention have endangered the nation’s infrastructure,” the engineers said, adding that since the ASCE’s last report card in 2005, there has been little change in the condition of America’s roads, bridges, drinking-water systems, and other public works, but the cost of repairing them (when they do get repaired) has risen. ASCE estimated in 2009 that America’s infrastructure needed $2.2 trillion in repairs—up from the $1.6 trillion price tag in 2005.
“In 2009, all signs point to an infrastructure that is poorly maintained, unable to meet current and future demands, and in some cases, unsafe,” the engineers said. A story on the Environment News Service (January 28, 2009) about the infrastructure study noted that the engineers gave “solid waste management the highest grade, a C+. The condition of the nation’s bridges receives the next highest grade, a C, while two categories, rail as well as public parks and recreation scored a C–. All other infrastructure categories were graded D or D–, including: aviation, dams, hazardous waste, inland waterways, levees, roads, schools, transit and wastewater.”
The condition of American infrastructure is even worse than the report suggests. “The U.S. government defines 18 of America’s infrastructures as ‘critical’ to the nation,” wrote Mark Gerencser in an article entitled “Re-imagining Infrastructure” in The American Interest (March–April 2011). “Of the 18 categories, three are basic, underlying ‘lifeline’ infrastructures: energy, transportation