The United States of America has dominated the world economy since the 1920s, and its decline has been predicted for even longer. Edward Luce’s new book, Time to Start Thinking, begins thus with the rather doubtful premise that nobody has bothered to consider why, precisely, America is apparently in decline. In actual fact, of course, there is a small cottage industry devoted to producing such theories. The title also reveals, accurately, that this is a statement of the problem rather than an attempt to suggest coherent solutions. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — but readers who’ve already been exposed to those arguments, be warned.
Luce, who wrote the engaging and insightful In Spite of the Gods during his time in India as a correspondent for the Financial Times, attempts something similar with the slightly less complex canvas that is today’s America. The central problem he wants to delineate is this: America is losing its pre-eminence as an economic powerhouse and the source of innovation; its economy benefits the super-rich more than the middle class; and its politics seems helpless to correct that. It is puzzling, however, that Luce — who has spent time in India and must be familiar with the pitfalls of confusing the relative and the absolute when it comes to economic development — doesn’t quite explain to his readers what the real worry is. Is it that America is no longer as dominant as it once was, or that it’s actually declining? And is the absurd increase in the relative incomes of America’s super-rich in itself a sign that its middle class, drowning in iPads and SUVs, is really worse off now than it was three decades ago?The book is divided into six main sections, by problem: on the hollowing out of the middle class; on the failures of American education; on innovation; on red tape; on divisive politics; and on Washington’s continuing dependence on electoral financing. Luce seems unaware when the thrust of one section contradicts another. For example, deregulation, free trade and the lack of controls are blamed for the end of the manufacturing sector that he thinks was central to middle-class prosperity — but, a few sections later, excessive regulation is said to be hurting America’s competitiveness. The sections on politics leave you confused as to whether the reason for America’s dysfunctional politics is a cultural disconnect between voters of the two main parties, or that the electoral system is too dependent on money. One chapter declares that America is more democratic than ever before, which is a problem; the other says that money warps policy away from voters’ priorities, which is a problem. Luce probably has a coherent argument as to why both, or neither of these summations is true. But it doesn’t quite come through in his book.
Where the book does do extremely well is in locating individuals and companies who are adapting to their changed economic environment with skill and initiative. As a set of case studies, it works brilliantly. Luce writes these episodes excellently, with sympathy and context, and it will be a rare reader who doesn’t walk away from this book with several of Luce’s examples stuck in her mind. As a collection of long essays, Time to Start Thinking works well. Perhaps it’s best dipped into as a source of well-reported, narrow-focus insight.
One other way that the book works is as a source of the most current wisdom on the nature of America’s decline. It can be a little tiresome to read it at length — relentless negativity can get you down — but it does summarise the talking points well. We are reminded, for example, that the American education system has big holes in it: that a quarter of American students drop out of high school, and half fail to complete their college degrees in the time that they’re allotted to do so.
The reason that education is looked at, again, is because Luce wishes to remind his reader that technological innovation and trade have created a giant premium for skilled jobs. This has caused the death of the much-glorified 1950s industrial middle class; the polite 1950s consensus between political parties has also broken down, replaced with partisan bickering, whining and obstruction. He disdains “shopping lists of policy prescriptions”, but he insists that “America will ultimately stand or fall by the health of its middle class”. Recapturing that prosperity, he says, will require “a renewed pragmatism that can see the world afresh”. Yet there’s little of that pragmatism between the lines of Luce’s book. Perhaps inevitably, given many of Luce’s interview subjects, it is instead suffused with a nostalgia for a world gone by, when America was the manufacturing hub of the world. Luce never asks himself: how did that happen in the first place? After all, when Britain became the First Industrial Nation, the industrial proletariat was hardly middle class. China is leapfrogging to wealth on the backs of factory workers who endure working conditions that are hardly conducive to the sort of middle-class utopia Luce imagines. Perhaps the very idea of a middle class of industrial workers is something that is exceptional, not the norm? Perhaps it emerged from a specific set of circumstances — that the rest of the industrial world was ravaged with war, or that a fifth of America was considered to be a permanent low-wage underclass for racial reasons?
Or perhaps it emerged from a redistributive bargain? Oddly, for a book that actually talks about inequality, the problems of redistribution are not tackled squarely. Even more oddly, for a book that purports to be about the death of the industrial-worker utopia, the precipitous decline of the American trade union is not considered a worthy subject. In the end, Luce’s omissions are as telling about the limits of thinking about America’s problems as anything he puts into his book.
