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By Root 6827 0

People of Plenty, argued that affluence has shaped the American character. The performance of the U.S. economy has generally made it possible for most Americans who worked hard to enjoy at least a modest rise in their material circumstances during their lifetimes—and enabled them to be confident that their children would do the same. Economic growth created opportunity for each generation of Americans, and over time most Americans came to expect that the future would be better than the past, that hard work would be rewarded, and that each generation would be wealthier than the previous one. That expectation came to have a name: “the American dream.” The American dream depends on sustained, robust economic growth, which now depends on the country meeting the four major challenges it faces.

As Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, put it to us: “America needs to think long term just at a time when long-term thinking has never been more difficult to achieve. I hope it is just more difficult, not impossible.” He added: “Those who do not think the American dream is being jeopardized are living in a dark corner somewhere … It is my hope that the Tea Party, Wall Street, labor unions, and soccer moms will all rally around the idea that ‘I don’t want to lose the American dream on my watch.’”

More and more Americans, though, fear that the American dream is slipping away. A poll published by Rasmussen Reports (November 19, 2010) found that while 37 percent of the Americans polled believed that the country’s best days lay ahead, many more, 47 percent of those polled, thought that the country’s best days had already passed. Failing to take collective action to solve the problems that globalization, IT, debt, and energy and global warming have created risks proving the pessimists right.

“Lots of things in life are more important than money,” goes the old saying, “and they all cost money.” In his 2005 book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, the Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman shows how periods of economic prosperity were also periods of social, political, and religious tolerance that saw the expansion of rights and liberties and were marked by broad social harmony. By contrast, when the American economy did poorly, as after the crash of 1929, conflict of all kinds increased. The American dream is the glue that has held together a diverse, highly competitive, and often fractious society.

The manager of the Liverpool, England, soccer team once observed of his sport, which everyone except Americans calls football: “Some people say that football is a matter of life and death. They are wrong. It’s much more important than that.” Similarly, while America’s success or failure in mastering the challenges of globalization, IT, debt, energy, and global warming will define the country’s future, more than the American future is at stake. Because America plays such a vital role in world affairs, the way things turn out in the United States will have effects on the people of the next generations all over the world.

As Michael argued in his 2006 book, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the Twenty-first Century, since 1945, and especially since the end of the Cold War, the United States has provided to the world many of the services that governments generally furnish to the societies they govern. World leaders appreciate this role even when they do not publicly acknowledge it. America has acted as the architect, policeman, and banker of the international institutions and practices it established after World War II and in which the whole world now participates. While maintaining the world’s major currency, the dollar, it has served as a market for the exports that have fueled remarkable economic growth in Asia and elsewhere. America’s navy safeguards the sea-lanes along which much of the world’s trade passes, and its military deployments in Europe and East Asia underwrite security in those regions. Our military also guarantees the world’s access to the oil of the Persian Gulf, on which