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crisis and the four long-term challenges that America faces. The deep recession of late 2007 to 2009 was what economists call a “cyclical event.” A recession reduces economic growth to a point below its potential level. But the economy, and the country, eventually recover. By contrast, the four great challenges will determine our overall economic potential. A recession is like an illness, which can ruin a person’s week, month, or even year. The four challenges we face are more like chronic conditions. Ultimately, these determine the length and the quality of a person’s life. Similarly, how we respond to these major challenges will determine the quality of American life for decades to come. And it is later than we think.

A few years ago, fans of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, which last won the World Series in 1908, took to wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan “Any team can have a bad century.” Countries, too, can have bad centuries. China had three of them between 1644 and 1980. If we do not master the four major challenges we now face, we risk a bad twenty-first century.

Failure is by no means inevitable. Coming back, thriving in this century, preserving the American dream and the American role in the world, will require adopting policies appropriate to confronting the four great challenges. For this there are two preconditions. One is recognizing those challenges—which we have clearly been slow to do. The other is remembering how we developed the strength to face similar challenges in the past. As Bill Gates put it to us: “What was all that good stuff we had that other people copied?” That is the subject of the next chapter.

THREE

Ignoring Our History

On January 5, 2011, the opening day of the 112th Congress, the House of Representatives began its activities with a reading of the Constitution of the United States. The idea originated with the Tea Party, a grassroots movement whose support for Republican candidates in the 2010 elections had helped sweep them to victory, giving the GOP control of the House. The members of the new majority wanted to drive home the point that they had come to Washington to enforce limits on both the spending and the general powers of the federal government—which they believed had gone far beyond the powers granted to it in the Constitution. Historians said it was the first time the Constitution, completed in 1787, was read in its entirety on the House floor.

The Constitution has served as the framework of American political and economic life for nearly 225 years, a span of time in which the United States has grown from a series of small cities, towns, villages, and farms along the eastern seaboard to a superpower of continental dimensions with the largest economy in the world. For America’s remarkable history, the Constitution deserves a large share of the credit.

But even reverence for the Constitution can be taken too far. Former congressman Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican from South Carolina who lost his party’s 2010 primary to a Tea Party–sponsored opponent, told us about an experience he had speaking to members of that group at the main branch of the Greenville, South Carolina, county library several weeks before the primary. “About halfway into the hour and a half program, a middle-aged fellow stood up to ask his question,” Inglis said. “He identified himself as a night watchman/security guard. Pulling a copy of the Constitution out of his shirt pocket and waving it in the air, he asked me, ‘yes or no,’ if I would vote to eliminate all case law and go back to just ‘this’—the Constitution.”

“‘No,’ I replied. The crowd hissed and the night watchman shook his head in disgust. ‘Well, think about it.’ Pulling my cell phone out of its holster, I held it up and said, ‘The Constitution says nothing about cell phones, but there are lots of cases and some statutes that govern the use of these things. If we eliminated all case law, we wouldn’t have these cell phones.’ I went on to explain that without Judge Green’s decisions in the AT&T breakup we might not have any cell