An insightful book on one of the most important countries of the current age

FOR SEVEN years Edward Luce has been reporting on the United States for British and global audiences for the Financial Times. His observations have been compiled into a book— Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Decline. Time to Start Thinking focuses chiefly on USA’s politics and economy, drawing upon the author’s experiences in a country which he ‘greatly admires’. Luce’s focus is on the American middleclass, what he hails as the "greatest mass middle-class of the twentieth century", which propelled the country’s rise as a superpower. The underlying assumption is that this middle-class is hollowing out with people getting trapped in debt and dead-end jobs—“America’s middle is increasingly getting lonelier”. Luce points out to a decline of this ‘solid mass’ with its participants being ‘paid less for doing more’. “Meanwhile, the median American household, which accounts for the bulk of America’s workforce, saw its income decline by $2,000—the first time in the modern era that the bulk of Americans were worse off at the end of a business cycle than they technolwere at the beginning”. Luce’s central thesis is that America is slowly rolling into an economic and geopolitical decline and to establish his point Luce looks at the changing structure of the US economy, increasing polarisation of its politics, desperation of the middle class and American innovation in technology and business. He says, “America is seeing growth in two types of jobs. On one hand there are the top 10 per cent who continue to do well. These are the Wall Street financiers, Silicon Valley developers, managerial and intellectual elites and doctoral engineers and physicists whose salaries are more in every other educational category, from high school dropouts to a growing share of those with only undergraduate, or vocational degree, as opposed to postgraduate education... Their numbers will grow while their incomes will most likely continue to tread water”. This collapse of “social mobility— the main ingredient in the American Dream—is eating into the economy and this slippage is a result of misguided policies". Luce turns attention to Washington— he identifies the city’s lobbying culture, politicians’ need to raise funds, as key stumbling blocks to an organised, functioning political system. The book raises two primary questions: the first is economic. “Can the United States sustain an open economy while simultaneously reviewing income growth for the majority of the population? Whether via the Tea Party or a more broad-based descent into apathy and cynicism, middleclass Americans are losing faith in their country’s direction”. The second question is, according to Luce, cultural. “Can America forge a consensus it would need to respond effectively to growing challenges?” “So if you look at 2002 to 2007 and you observe the structural forces at play in that business expansion— mainly that the middle class income dropped, that very, very few jobs were created and that the higher value-added jobs tended for the most part to be replaced by lower paying ones—those trends became pronounced in the 2009 recovery onwards. That suggests that this is a deep structural problem with the way globalisation and technology ogy is impacting the majority of the American workforce. I am agnostic as to whether this reduces America's overall growth rate. The gains of growth are so deeply skewed to the very highest earners. But there is a lot of evidence in studies of other economies that when you have gross, Latin American-style inequality, growth and competitiveness tend to get adversely hit.” Luce finishes by noting that “America’s biggest challenges are not unique”. Its difficulties are not fundamentally different from those all the developed countries face in responding to the global shift of economic power. One of the primary criticisms of the book is that it is written in a classic journalistic style—people and stories interspersed with somewhat sweeping generalisations. An insightful book that leaves you hoping for a bit more.