page_title: That Used to Be Us
section_title: Contents
hierarchical_section_title: That Used to Be Us / Contents
caption_attribution_description: Thomas Friedman, American journalist, columnist, author and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, currently working as an op-ed contributor for The New York Times.
context_page_description: That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back is a non-fiction book written by Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and author, with Michael Mandelbaum, a writer and foreign policy professor at Johns Hopkins University. They published the book on September 5, 2011 in the United States. It addresses what the authors see as the four major problems America faces today and possible solutions. These problems are defined as: globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption.
  Praise appeared in the Christian Science Monitor as well as Friedman's home paper The New York Times, while criticism appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
context_section_description: The authors write in support of what they view as the 'radical center'. They describe picking out ideas from both the left and right parts of the modern American political spectrum. They state, "Americans will have to save more, consume less, study longer, and work harder than they have become accustomed to doing in recent decades".
  In terms of details, they advocate a variety of measures that may prove unpopular such as carefully planned tax increases. In general, they write that Americans must "invest in education, infrastructure, and research and development, as well as open our society more widely to talented immigrants and fix the regulations that govern our economy" given that "[i]mmigration, education, and sensible regulation are traditional ingredients of the American formula for greatness."
  The authors state that America needs to implement changes and the only way that this is going to have a long-term impact is with a major wake-up call that gets people's attention: "Our big challenges today require the kind of national responses that wars have evoked, but without a major ongoing conflict it will be difficult to mobilize the American people to make the difficult policy choices needed to meet them." There is a call for true investment in this statement.
caption: Co-author Thomas Friedman pictured in May 2005.
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