That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [20]
The Constitution’s framers themselves knew that the document they had produced—through protracted and sometimes bitter negotiation—was necessary but not sufficient to secure the future of the country they had founded. And it certainly hasn’t been the only shaper of America’s destiny. We have always relied on something more: not a single document but a set of practices for prosperity that began with our founding and has been updated and applied over and over again. We call it “the American formula.” Although we think its importance should be obvious, it is not obvious today. America has lost sight of this traditional source of strength precisely when we should have been upgrading it. There is no chance—none—that America can address the great challenges it now faces without renewing, refreshing, and reinvesting in its formula. And yet this formula has been allowed to erode in almost every aspect for the last two decades.
It is in particular jeopardy now because America will have to reduce public expenditure sharply in the years ahead to address the government’s soaring deficits. In an era of retrenchment it will be all too easy to underinvest in our traditional, time-tested formula. We will do this at our peril. A brief history of the American formula makes clear why this is so.
The Five Pillars of Prosperity
There is a business adage that says, “You win in the turns.” That is, when there are big shifts in the marketplace, the best companies gain market share and put distance between themselves and their competitors because they have the vision and flexibility to spot tectonic change and leap ahead when it occurs, while others are simply overwhelmed. They have, that is, a formula for success. Countries face similar challenges. If America were a company, Wall Street analysts would say that it has a remarkable track record. It has thrived at every turning point in its history—with every change in technology and social norms. America built the world’s most vibrant economy and democracy precisely because, in every historical turn since its founding, it has applied its own particular formula for prosperity.
That formula consists of five pillars that together constitute the country’s own version of a partnership between the public and private sectors to foster economic growth. The first pillar is providing public education for more and more Americans. As technology has improved, the country has prepared people to exploit new inventions—from cotton gins, to steamships, to assembly lines, to laptops, to the Internet.
The second pillar is the building and continual modernizing of our infrastructure—roads, bridges, ports, airports, bandwidth, fiber-optic lines, and wireless networks—so that American workers and firms can communicate and collaborate effectively and deliver their goods and services swiftly and cheaply to their destinations. Since the building of the Erie Canal between 1817 and 1825, governments at every level in the United States have financed the infrastructure necessary for commerce to flourish.
The third pillar involves, with a few periods of exception, keeping America’s doors to immigration open so that we are constantly adding both the low-skilled but high-aspiring immigrants who keep American society energized and the best minds in the world to enrich our universities, start new companies, and engineer new breakthroughs from medicine to manufacturing.
The fourth pillar is government support for basic research and development, which not only increases the store of human knowledge by pushing out the frontiers of basic chemistry, biology, and physics but also spawns new products and processes that have enriched American entrepreneurs and workers. For the American economy to keep growing in an information age in which innovation will have a greater economic importance than ever before, research on every front will be more vital than ever before.
The fifth