● Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline… and the Rise of a New Economy
By Daniel Gross
Q&A with author via Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace)
Ryssdal: All right, so here comes the put-up-or-shut-up: You say early in this book that the ingredients are already here. You say ‘it’s tough to see what exactly is going to propel the United States forward, but the ingredients are already here.’ Like what?
Gross: Well exports is obviously one of them. The fact that the world has been growing more rapidly than the U.S. is a big source of this declinist thinking. An author like Tom Friedman goes to China and says, ‘Oh boy, they’re building high-speed rails and look at us, we can’t build infrastructure; we’re finished.’ Exports started turning up in April 2009, before the economy at large did. In the last two years, they’re up 35 percent. When the rest of the world gets rich, or gets middle-class, they buy what we make. That includes Boeing jets, gas turbines. I found a family-controlled, little company in suburban Pennsylvania that makes wallpaper. 2007, 2008 — 80 percent of this business was at home; now 70 percent is overseas.
