BOOK REVIEW
The Measure of a Nation: How to Regain America’s Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing, Author: Howard Steven Friedman.
By Howard Steven Friedman – If America were a corporation, it would today be the equivalent of IBM in the early 1990s — an industry giant that’s failing to keep up with the times. Once a world leader, it is now in effect facing bankruptcy, lagging behind in major market segments like health, safety, education, democracy, even equality.
In health, back in 1987, only seven other countries had longer life expectancies. Today, we’re not even in the top twenty! In education, America once enjoyed the highest rate of college education in the world but today has a below-average performance. In democracy, we introduced the world to modern representative democracy, with landmark documents including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its Bill of Rights. Today we struggle with an inefficient and archaic voting system that ignores improvements in democracy that have been developed in the past 200 years and we rank miserably in levels of voter participation. In equality, the United States has been extolled since the days soon after its founding as a land of opportunity and a destination for millions of immigrants striving for a better life, yet our social mobility is worse than in many other countries, while income inequality has been exploding since the late 1970s. more> http://tinyurl.com/cxaredl
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- America’s long slope down, David Cay Johnston, Reuters
