That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [153]
Every one of us has a friend who looked great in high school, maybe even quarterbacked the football team, but over the years put on more and more weight, so that at the high school reunion, when he walked through the door at the hotel, everyone smiled politely while muttering under his or her breath, “Wow, he really let himself go.” That was America after the end of the Cold War: lots more gadgets, and much bigger houses, but so much of it bought with liar loans, bailouts, stimulus, cheap credit, and more tax cuts with money borrowed from China and from the next generation. We really did let ourselves go …
“Don’t pretend we didn’t see this coming for a long, long time, the writer Kurt Andersen observed of this era in a Time magazine article (March 26, 2009), which he later turned into a book called Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America.
In the early 1980s, around the time Ronald Reagan became President and Wall Street’s great modern bull market began, we started gambling (and winning!) and thinking magically. From 1980 to 2007, the median price of a new American home quadrupled. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 in the fall of 2007. From the beginning of the ’80s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent servicing its mortgage and consumer debt increased 35%. Back in 1982, the average household saved 11% of its disposable income. By 2007 that number was less than 1%. The same zeitgeist made gambling ubiquitous: until the late ’80s, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos, but now 12 states do, and 48 have some form of legalized betting. It’s as if we decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun, we ought to make them a year-round way of life.
This is not the place to undertake a comprehensive review of all the norms that have underpinned American society. Nor do we believe that the core values responsible for American greatness over the decades have disappeared. To the contrary, we are confident that they can be revived. They do, however, need reviving.
Jerry Maguire
The first shift, from deferred to instant gratification, from a long-term to a short-term perspective, has been described by Dov Seidman, the CEO of LRN, whose book How explores how values issues play out in the business world. In Seidman’s view, two competing kinds of values animate business, government, leadership, individual behavior, and relationships. He calls them “situational values” and “sustainable values.”
Relationships propelled by situational values, he says, involve calculations about what is available in the here and now. “They are all about exploiting short-term opportunities rather than consistently living the principles that create long-term success. They are all about what we can and cannot do in any given situation.”
Sustainable values, by contrast, are “all about what we should and should not do in all situations.” As such, they literally sustain relationships over the long term. Sustainable values, according to Seidman, are the “values that connect us deeply as humans, such as transparency, integrity, honesty, truth, shared responsibility, and hope.” They are therefore “all about how—not how much … Situational values push us toward the strategy of becoming ‘too big to fail.’ Sustainable values inspire us to pursue the strategy of becoming ‘too sustainable to fail,’” by building enduring relationships. As the collapse of major Wall Street banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers has demonstrated, Seidman explains, “What makes an institution sustainable is not the scale and size it reaches but how it does its business—how it relates to its employees, shareholders, customers, suppliers, the environment, society,