That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [17]
Another reason that Americans have not recognized the magnitude of the challenges they face is that these challenges are all the products of American success. For years, the United States was the world’s most vigorous champion of free trade and investment—the essence of globalization. Globalization spread due to the remarkable productivity of the free-market economies of the West, which traded and invested heavily among themselves. By contrast, the communist countries were discredited by their dismal record in achieving economic growth. So they embraced free markets and globalization.
Likewise, the IT revolution was started in the United States. The transistor, communications satellites, the personal computer, the cell phone, and the Internet, not to mention the PalmPilot, the iPad, the iPhone, and the Kindle, were all invented in the United States and then were brought to the world market by American-based companies. That gave more people than ever the tool kit to compete with us and remove the barriers erected by their own governments.
Similarly, the American government has been able to borrow several trillion dollars because of confidence, both at home and abroad, in the American economy and because of the special international role of the dollar, which dates from the days of American global economic supremacy. And the global population uses so much fossil fuel that it threatens to disrupt the climate precisely because economic growth, which is expanding rapidly, goes hand in hand with a rise in fuel consumption. The surge in growth over the last two decades has come about because of the expansion of American-sponsored globalization and the adoption, especially in Asia, of the American and Western system of free-market economics.
In sum, the world to which the United States must adapt is, to a very great extent, “Made in America.” But in this case familiarity and pride of authorship have bred complacency. We are dangerously complacent about this new world precisely because it is a world that we invented.
Another feature of the four challenges America confronts is the fact that they will require sacrifice, which makes generating collective action much more difficult. This is most obvious in the case of the federal deficits. Americans will have to pay more in taxes and accept less in benefits. Paying more for less is the reverse of what most people want out of life, so it is no wonder that deficits have grown so large. Similarly, Americans won’t begin to use less fossil fuel and industry won’t invest in nonfossil sources of energy unless the prices of coal, oil, and natural gas rise significantly to reflect the true cost to society of our use of them. Higher American fuel bills will ultimately be good for the country and for the planet because they will stimulate the development of renewable energy sources, but they will be hard on household budgets in the short term. To meet the challenge of globalization and the IT revolution and to achieve the steadily rising standard of living U.S. citizens have come to expect, Americans will have to save more, consume less, study longer, and work harder than they have become accustomed to doing in recent decades.
Ours is “no longer a question of sacrificing or not sacrificing—we gave up that choice a long time ago,” notes Michael Maniates, a professor of political science and environmental science at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, who writes on this theme. We cannot choose whether or not Americans will sacrifice, but only who will bear the brunt of it. The more the present generation shrinks from the nation’s challenges now, the longer sacrifice is deferred, the higher will be the cost to the next generation