
Time to Reboot America - raheemm
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/opinion/24friedman.html?_r=1&em
======
tptacek
Thomas Friedman was able to get steady wi-fi on a bullet train running through
the wealthiest outpost of a country of 1.3 billion people, 3/4 of which are
rural poor living at or near the $1/day poverty level. Therefore, America
needs a reboot.

~~~
raheemm
The key point is not how many poor people China has and hence we should
reboot; but that the rest of the world is sprinting towards new opportunities
in spite of their handicaps. 60 years ago (after WW2), there was no real
competition to America - we built cars, planes, trains, and the world ate it
all up. About 40 years ago, the Japanese started giving us a run for the money
in some sectors. Today the competitors are increasing in quantity if not in
quality - there is Japan, Europe, China, etc. Friedman uses generic examples
such as bullet trains and broadband access. But these are valid nonetheless.
The larger point remains - we need a massive reboot.

~~~
tptacek
How lazy the writing, which cloaks itself in a thesis reinforced in
conventional wisdom and flits about a series of misleading and superficial
anecdotes. Is Friedman "right"? Either way, he serves his argument poorly by
comparing the wealthiest splinter of southeast Asia to the whole expanse of
America.

Or engage his column elsewhere: are we _really_ losing our most promising
engineers to "financial engineering"? Perhaps a less famous writer could
support that argument with evidence. For instance, that writer might marry
Friedman's argument with the fact that people like John Meriwether managed to
nearly destroy capitalism with nothing more than an MBA.

Are there nuclear physicists on Wall Street? Of course. Are most nuclear
phsyisicists on Wall Street? Prove it! Are the nuclear physicists on Wall
Street the ones responsible for speculating on netted-out credit default
swaps? The CDS racket was no more complicated than the MBS racket Michael
Lewis wrote about in "Liar's Poker", and the BSD's on the Salomon trading
desks were definitely not rocket surgeons.

~~~
potatolicious
I think you're losing the message he's trying to push - the wealthiest
splinter of southeast Asia has created a beacon for talent to gather, for the
rural poor to have something to aspire to (and many do, go to China and you
will hear many of these success stories). Yes, the poorest of Chinese are
still far poorer than the poorest of Americans, but what we're talking about
is the ability for a country to forge ahead, something we haven't done for a
while now. Take my (former) home country, Taiwan, for example - it has a
massive, efficient, fast, and reliable public transport infrastructure that is
both affordable and safe. This is country-wide. How many American cities can
say the same? We are losing the war on infrastructure, which in the end means
losing every other war that matters.

And to answer your question: yes we are. I will be graduating in a few months
from a fairly good engineering school, and _many_ of my fellow engineering
majors are panicking - they all went down the financial engineering route
instead of traditional electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering, and now
they're all jobless. Before the big collapse of '08 there was definitely a
large sense floating about campus that people who did "real" engineering were
suckers. This is not an uncommon phenomenon.

Same thing back in high school - everyone guns for the big money. Tons of
smart high school students went into business school instead of science or
engineering, simply because one pays the bills, and the other not so much. My
evidence is anecdotal, but this is based on observation from entire graduating
classes.

~~~
tptacek
I questioned Friedman's use of anecdotal evidence to make this point about
engineering talent being redirected to finance. You've supported Friedman's
point with more anecdotes. People were taking physics and engineering degrees
and eschewing careers in engineering long before the Wall Street mess
happened. My cousin has a nuclear engineering degree; he's in advertising now.

~~~
trominos
29% of MIT's graduating class goes into finance.

[http://www.questbridge.org/cmp/partner_schools/mit/academics...](http://www.questbridge.org/cmp/partner_schools/mit/academics.html)

I'm sure a large number of those graduates would still work in a non-
engineering field if the finance industry didn't exist, but I think that a) a
substantial fraction of them _would_ go into engineering, and b) an even more
substantial fraction would at least be doing something that creates wealth.

I guess we'll see next year; I don't imagine finance will be a major
destination for several years to come.

~~~
tptacek
Can you add an argument to your statistic? MIT also runs one of the best-
regarded business schools in the country.

------
tokenadult
"China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The
New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your
people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our
missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs."

Full openness to information is indeed a great advantage. A country where lots
of people ponder what everyday people and governments in other countries are
doing better has many sources of ideas for local improvement.

~~~
delackner
"A country where lots of people ponder what everyday people and governments in
other countries are doing better has many sources of ideas for local
improvement"

In a country where most people have never even set foot in a modern european
or asian city, the trouble is that most people don't have any idea how far
behind US infrastructure has gotten.

~~~
tokenadult
Remembering how rare, and how emblematic of family wealth, foreign travel was
when I was growing up, I'm amazed these days at how many Americans I know who
have been to both Asia and Europe. The people I know would claim to be only
"middle class," not at all rich, but they are well traveled.

The United States has been issuing passports by the millions for quite some
time.

[http://travel.state.gov/passport/services/stats/stats_890.ht...](http://travel.state.gov/passport/services/stats/stats_890.html)

Note that unlike some other countries, there is essentially no domestic use
for a United States passport. United States citizens get passports if they are
traveling overseas, and until recently travel to Canada and Mexico without
passports was quite routine. So there are evidently plenty of Americans who
have had a chance to go look around and learn from other countries. I would be
quite happy to hear of more: in many respects, I think four years spent doing
almost ANYTHING overseas and living in the local economy of a country with
another language is more educational than four years spent pursuing a college
degree, but meanwhile plenty of Americans, for business or for pleasure, do
plenty of foreign travel.

------
puzzle-out
I think Americans put too much emphasis on the link between freedom of speech
and information and creativity/innovation. Sometimes the most explosive
innovations are made during the transition from censorship to an open public
sphere - such as the parliamentary innovations of the English civil wars.
Americans, and people in the West in general, need to be defamiliarised with
the concept of freedom of speech and information, so that when they recognise
how valuable it is, they will make better use of it.

~~~
tempest67
Great point about the explosiveness of transition periods -- the Renaissance
comes to mind as well, powered both by new intellectual openness and the
thuggish Medicis. But calling for "defamiliarization" with free speech sounds
kind of horrible -- like putting us in jail for a while so we appreciate our
freedom of movement.

But isn't the process of technological upheaval a continual defamiliarization
of sorts, with people constantly changing modes and methods of communication
with every new development? We don't need to be subjected to tyranny to be
continually thrown off balance and required to innovate...

~~~
puzzle-out
Sorry, I was using 'defamiliarisation' in the context of the Russian critical
readings of literature - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization> \- I
can see how it takes on sinister overtones outside of this, and I have no idea
how it can be done in practice, other than looking at examples of tyranny
elsewhere, contemporaneously or historically, of which there are many. There
are certainly parallels between today's technological upheaval and say the
English civil wars, when the printing press was being celebrated by people
like Milton in similar terms - "as good as almost kill a man as kill a good
book". I guess the point I'm getting at it is often the struggle that leads to
the creativity - and thus why the Renaissance as you say is so interesting.

~~~
tempest67
Oh, like Brecht -- Verfremdung! I should have gotten that -- sorry. I love the
Milton quote (and I wonder what it means in the age of technical hyper-
reproducibility online...).

I also wonder what could accomplish defamiliarization nowadays, when satire
and Dadaism have become commodities and every crap sitcom breaks the fourth
wall. But perhaps utter economic collapse will do the trick?

------
gruseom
Yay, another reason to roll out the Tom Friedman smackdown to end all Tom
Friedman smackdowns (as well as possibly the best book review of the last 10
years):

[http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html](http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html)

------
patrickg-zill
Buy gold and/or silver.

The US Dollar is in the early stages of collapse; it will be severely
devalued, perhaps down to being worth 50 or 60 Yen or more.

This is not being political, it is not Bush's or Obama's fault, but the result
of an entire generation or more of mistakes, which started back in 1913 with
the creation of the Federal Reserve and accelerated in 1933 under FDR and then
again in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window.

~~~
potatolicious
Don't buy gold and silver. I don't know where this "buy gold" superstitious BS
came from. I think it's out of some mistaken idea that gold has intrinsic
value where paper money does not. This is false.

The value of gold is not intrinsic - it is assigned by people, just like fiat
currency (which is also why gold-backed currency, or the lack thereof, is not
our problem). In fact, gold's value also fluctuates with the economy, _just
like everything else_ \- when the economy tanks, gold prices rise, etc etc.
It's almost expected for people to run screaming back to gold every time the
economy hiccups, and this has made it an unsafe commodity to hold.

Not to mention when you buy gold - you are _not buying any actual, physical
gold_ , you are buying gold production, which will _never ever reach your
hands_. If you _really_ want to hoard precious metals, at least go out and
physically have it. Your gold is just as imaginary as fiat money until you
have it in your hands.

~~~
patrickg-zill
Gold can be argued to have intrinsic value, when it has shown to retain some
amount of value across over 5000 years of human history; and it would be
almost impossible to have a working electronics industry without some amount
of gold, or some other metal with nearly-equivalent properties (right now the
industry is working on ways to minimize gold but it is still needed). It is
not superstition.

I don't know where you got the idea that I was recommending a non-physical
holding of gold or silver, but it is a good point to address: all COMEX
contracts state that in the event of default (non-delivery) they can just give
you USD, which of course is exactly what you don't want.

------
bbgm
I think Friedman makes a fair point. I've lived in three very different
countries for some lengths of time, and traveled to many others over the
years, so the following is a little more than anecdotal. When I first came to
the US several years ago, my first reaction was that in many ways (and
remember this was over a decade ago) the US was a little backwards,
culturally, socially and most definitely when it came to infrastructure and
facilities. Is it still the technological leader of the world? Yes, but that's
less due to its own efforts and more due to sheer inertia from the heyday of
US technology and an inability of the rest of the world to take advantage of
the sense of ennui that seems to be pervasive.

There are many countries, out there, young democracies (or not), that are
hungry, eager. When they figure it out, watch out. You can't assume that the
US will stay ahead forever.

America does need a reboot. Our future depends on it.

------
Prrometheus
You know what, Friedman? It's a lot harder to manage a continent-spanning
country of 300 million people than a tiny, rich city-state. That's where the
wisdom of decentralization comes in, but we completely abandoned that in the
1930s. Can you imagine the bureaucracy to manage a country of 300 million
people as well as Hong Kong? Neither can I. It probably doesn't exist.

The One's election to office and his promise to shovel out $1 trillion in
green pork doesn't change a whole lot. Friedman says:

>"Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to
spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout
dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely."

There is not a single example from American history to give me hope of this.

~~~
potatolicious
As hard to manage as a country of 1.3 billion people? Or an industry leading
nation of 130 million people? Hong Kong is _not_ the only example of a hyper-
advanced Asian city. Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, Beijing... you name it, and
we're not even approaching India and further west.

The success of China, Japan, South Korea, and the myriad of other east Asian
powers is not an isolated case of blind luck. Incredible dedication has been
shown here to grow a nation's infrastructure, and the US would be wise to take
heed and follow suit if they want to maintain their lead.

Take a look at the bureaucracy needed to manage a country of 1.3 billion
people, including a wealth gap far wider than that of the US, and yet
continually building out massive infrastructure projects both urban and rural.
This is something America is not doing, and I'd hate to see a repressive
dictatorship out-do the West in anything.

~~~
Prrometheus
Have you heard about the economist Mancur Olson and his theory of
institutional sclerosis? His thesis is that bureaucracy tends to build on
itself, becoming less rational and more wasteful as a society ages.
Occasionally, there is a catastrophic event that overturns the established
order, wiping out the cruft and allowing society to start fresh. However, over
time the waste grows again.

He uses this theory to explain why the American South did so well after
reconstruction and after the Civil Rights movement. He would likely also argue
that this explains why Japan and China have done so well, since both underwent
massive disruptions in the last century. Our own society, however, has been
very stable for many centuries and has had plenty of time to accumulate
bureaucratic lard.

------
gahahaha
Sorry to repeat what everybody else is saying, but Thomas Friedman is a total
loser. Why he is famous is beyond me.

3/5 cheap rhetoric, 1/5 bragging about some "exotic" place he has been, 1/5
self evident observation equals one Thomas Friedman column.

Dear NYT. Fire this man already!

Oh, wait. NYT is the newspaper who thinks it is a good idea to employ Ben
Stein too. They will not see the incompetence of Friedman if they are blind to
the insanity of Ben Stein (search google for Ben Stein Watch)....

~~~
potatolicious
I'm not sure his observations are so self-evident, which may be why he's
emphasizing the fact that he has been to these "exotic" places. I don't like
the folksey tone either, but it sells papers and gets attention.

Believe it or not, there are many Americans who still believe that they are
the top of the world, that in Asia people are still wallowing in shantytowns
and mud-brick houses. When my mother first came to Canada, someone actually
asked her if we had running water and electricity.

The "USA No. 1" mentality that many people still seem to have is the main
reason why the US cannot proceed to fixing itself - most people have never
traveled outside of the USA, least of all to Asia, and the media doesn't cover
this nearly enough - Asia is advancing rapidly, its wealth and quality of life
is rapidly approaching that of the US, and unless you _act now_ your supremacy
in the world will be lost forever.

Until more people realize how advanced Asia has become, I think Thomas
Friedman's message is entirely appropriate and welcome.

~~~
dangoldin
I think you hit the nail on the head there. You need to be the underdog to
keep you motivated and innovative.

------
known
No Risk No Return.

I think post 9/11 average American has stopped taking risks.

Instead he invested (time & money) in buying houses.

------
illume
The author needs needs to get some exercise... like a lot of Americans.

------
sabat
He's right that we need to reboot -- but the irony is that it's his generation
(and his mentality itself) that is forcing this. The I-got-mine, greed-is-
always-good, me-first, I'm-entitled generation of baby boomers (circa
1940-1958) is directly responsible for this mess. And, as usual, it's up to us
Xers to clean up.

Friedman is emblematic of his generation. He likes to make blanket statements
like "the world is flat!", leaving out precious details (like the fact that
cultural differences mean that a guy in Mumbai cannot so easily start the next
Amazon), and expects parental-like approval from all of us. Look what I did!
Look at me!

Same attitude -- self-satisfied under-achievement -- created this gigantic CF
we're calling an economy. Reboot? Yes. That probably means forcing all these
codgers into retirement homes where they can bitch and moan about how we Xers
aren't doing well enough recovering from their disaster.

~~~
Hoff
Blame is wasted effort.

Agism (either way) can be legally hazardous.

Bailing out a failed business model is wasted investment.

Given your perception of the older folks, I'd suggest pursuing a business
model based on catering to and profiting from those entitled boomers you
appear to despise. But trust me on this one: some of those older folks are
looking to profit from the perceptions of and the views of the younger folks,
too.

Whether US-based or international, looking forward at what might change - what
an upgrade from Acela to service competitive with TGV might mean, for instance
- would be my preference. I'm looking at where I can improve, and how I can
best deal with and can profit from the changes that are inevitably coming. At
what and where the target is going to be. At what products and services I can
milk or can sell off or can retire, too.

Changes are underway in the world economy. And I'd prefer to profit from both
the "Xers" and from the "codgers" if I can manage it, as you'd termed these
two large pools of potential consumers.

Blame? There's enough of that to go around.

Profit? Positioning for that in the current chaos is far more interesting.

~~~
lutorm
Blame is _not_ a wasted effort, if it leads you to think about what policies
are to blame for where we are now and think about what needs to change. I'd
say that _profit_ is much less interesting, people find ways of enriching
themselves without caring about improving society or doing anything useful.
I'd wager that that mindset is at least partially to blame for the current
state of affairs.

~~~
skmurphy
I think that Hoff is suggesting that creating value is better than blaming. As
an entrepreneur I seek to create value, this enables me to make a profit.
Adjusting my business to changed circumstances is a requirement for survival.

~~~
Hoff
Correct.

If you're looking to assign blame, then do evaluate your own particular
motivations. You have probably already made or you are now about to make a
mistake; you've taken your eye off your particular goals of creating value for
your customers.

Certainly don't repeat (unprofitable) mistakes. Do learn from your own
mistakes, and do particularly learn from the mistakes of others.

Competing against an organization that seeks to place blame on others? Now
that's a potential business opportunity. That individual or that organization
is not competing effectively. They're dissipating their competitive efforts.
They're potentially vulnerable. Do you have a wedge here? An opening? Use it.

Do continue to move toward where the target business will be, regardless.
Whatever goal or profit here you might view as your motivation. Blame doesn't
move you toward that goal.

------
kingkongrevenge
How is this guy famous? Everything he has ever written sounds like something
anybody's uncle might toss out at the dinner table. The guy is not original
and has nothing insightful to say. Frequently, he sounds like an idiot. I'm
just completely mystified at his acclaim.

~~~
byrneseyeview
There are a lot of "somebody's uncle"s out there, and they all buy Friedman's
books to give to their nephews.

