That Used to Be Us:
How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented
and How We Can Come Back
By Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 380 pp; $28
First, great title. Slap some American-flag imagery on the cover, call your book That Used to Be Us, and already, you’ve touched a nerve among a populace itchy with downward-mobility anxiety. The words are a lift from a Barack Obama quote about Asia’s advancing techno-industrial might—“We just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth; that used to be us,” the President said at a press conference last year—but the broader lament is that America the superpower isn’t super anymore. Massive budget deficits, political gridlock, economic inertia, underperforming schools—this isn’t the thrifty, can-do U.S. that the Greatest Generation grew up in, fought for, and populated with cheery kids in coonskin caps and gingham pinafores.
