In 1990, Japan was at the peak of its prosperity. It seemed an unstoppable force. But the boom turned out to be a bubble. Remember MITI, Japan’s economic planning agency? It’s now defunct, but then it was the envy of “competitiveness” gurus the world over. MITI, plus public-private cooperation, plus thrifty citizens and dedicated workers, plus demanding schools and diligent students, plus a sheltered domestic economy, plus ferociously competitive exporters — all worked together to create a new variety of capitalism, one destined to eat America’s lunch. Or so it seemed.  If you stepped into any bookstore in Tokyo, however, you saw stacks, veritable towers, of a discordant book. “The Sun Also Sets,” by Bill Emmott, sold spectacularly in Japan. The Japanese felt that something was amiss; they (and Emmott, later the editor of The Economist) were right.  So now, two Japanese lost decades later, a generation has passed. Again Americans are worried about decline; again we fear that an Asian economic superpower — now China, of course, not Japan — will eat our lunch. For those old enough to have lived through the competitiveness debate of 20 years ago, Edward Luce’s new book, “Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent,” will seem awfully familiar.  As with Japan then, so with China today. Its advantages include a nimble government, a shrewd industrial policy, enormous investment in infrastructure, motivated and diligent students and workers, piles of savings. Meanwhile, the United States hobbles itself with laissez-faire dogma and ­government-bashing ideology. America is hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs. Bad enough that we no longer have a shoe industry; worse yet that we are handing our competitors the industries of the future — computer chips (a generation ago), clean energy (today). “If America is to restore its competitiveness,” Luce writes, “it will need to do many things, few of which will be possible without a much more effective federal government. In today’s world, smart government is a critical ingredient of national competitiveness. Unless America can address government’s role in a more pragmatic light, it may doom itself to continued descent.”  Luce is British, but he has lived and worked in the United States for years (as a columnist for The Financial Times and a speechwriter in the Clinton administration’s Treasury Department). He knows the country well, and he wishes it well, too. A result is that he leavens his yearning for smarter, more nimble government with a realism not always found among Europeans. He recognizes that the accumulation of interest groups guarding the status quo, and the remarkable increase in partisan polarization (especially on the right), are structural changes, difficult, at best, to reverse. No politician wielding cries of “Change!” — whether that politician is named Obama or Gingrich — can make decades’ worth of governmental and political sclerosis go away.  So where does that leave the country? Not in a great place, if Luce is right. Jobs are disappearing, median household income is declining, skills are in short supply, health costs hobble competitiveness, outsourcing and offshoring and automation marginalize working-class men, and through it all political leaders either sit by helplessly or actively oppose remedies. And that’s just in Chapter 1. Later sections bring us dysfunctional schools, demoralized government, burdensome debt and deficits, failing innovation, hidebound regulation, crumbling infrastructure, a paralyzed Congress, a broken campaign-finance system and more, much more.  Luce is a good writer with a vacuum-cleaner for a notebook. His book could not be bettered as a compendium of American problems, at least as filtered through the center-left sensibilities of a pro-American European. But a narrower, more focused approach would have gone a long way. As I marched through the list of failures and obstacles, I began to think a better title for the book might be “Time to Start ­Drinking.”  Jonathan Rauch, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, is the author of âGovernmentâs End: Why Washington Stopped Working,â among other books.
Edward Luce argues that Americaâs economy and political system are in worse shape than they have been in a long time.