That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [21]
Throughout our history, these five pillars have made it possible for Americans to apply their individual energies, their talents, and their entrepreneurial drive to make themselves, and their country, richer and more powerful. Taken together, the five make up a uniquely American formula for prosperity, one in which the government creates the foundations for the risk-taking and innovation delivered by the private sector. This formula has made possible America’s two centuries of increases in living standards. It is what has made America the world’s greatest magnet for dreamers everywhere.
The Formula Builders
For nearly 235 years, America has managed to produce leaders who could sense that we were in a major turn, frame the challenges involved so that people could understand what was happening, and then rally the public to adopt the policies needed to upgrade the American formula to meet the challenges. Here is a sampler of our leading formula builders.
The father of America’s public-private partnership was the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton saw the need for a strong and active although limited government. We now reside, as the biographer Ron Chernow, put it, “in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned.” He established a budget and tax system, a funded debt, a customs service, and a coast guard. He encouraged manufacturing and, out of office, drew up plans for the kind of peacetime army that the United States did not field until after World War II. Although he did not live to see it develop, the five-part formula for a public-private partnership that has evolved in the United States over the years descends directly from Hamilton’s vision, at the end of the eighteenth century, of both the character of the country and the role of its government as an enabler of prosperity.
Starting with the founding fathers, government has supported public education. Before he died on July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson asked that three of his achievements be engraved on his tombstone—that he wrote the Declaration of Independence, that he authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and that he was the father of the University of Virginia. Unlike other major industrial countries, though, the federal government in the United States never has had the primary authority over K–12 public education. That has fallen to individual states and local school districts, which are funded through a combination of local property taxes, state tax receipts, and federal dollars. This combination of government support has transformed education in America from an elite privilege to a universal entitlement. In their book The Race Between Education and Technology, Harvard University’s Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz noted that thanks to the steady expansion of primary education, then the high school movement, and then the expansion of two- and four-year colleges and universities, “each generation of Americans achieved a level of education that greatly exceeded that of the previous one, with typical adults having considerably more years of schooling than their parents.” As a result, racial and regional differences in educational resources, educational attainment, and economic outcomes had narrowed substantially.
At the dawn of the twentieth century only about 6 percent of teenagers graduated from high school. By the end of the century that was up to 85 percent. At the beginning of the century about 2 percent of Americans age eighteen to twenty-four were enrolled in a two- or four-year college; by the end of