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| Version 0 | Version 1 |
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| A Tangled Fate of Prosperity and Struggle | A Tangled Fate of Prosperity and Struggle |
| (7 months later) | |
| If today’s America were a cocktail, the recipe might be: a single shot of Shanghai, a double shot of Greece and a couple dashes of French bitters. | If today’s America were a cocktail, the recipe might be: a single shot of Shanghai, a double shot of Greece and a couple dashes of French bitters. |
| That is to say, a part of the country still lives on history’s cutting edge; a part of it is corroding from within, its people losing faith in the state and their own power to bend fate; and a part of it muddles in between, fretting over what once was. | That is to say, a part of the country still lives on history’s cutting edge; a part of it is corroding from within, its people losing faith in the state and their own power to bend fate; and a part of it muddles in between, fretting over what once was. |
| Inequality is the watchword of the season in America. But in many ways the country’s divisions are stranger and more complex, less clear-cut and straightforward than disparities of class, race, gender, geography. What is so puzzling about modern America is how it thrives and withers at the same time — often within the same industries, neighborhoods and families. Hope and fear, resilience and resentment, in a close, tangled dance. | |
| America still runs laps around its peers in so many ways, and yet America is falling behind those peers on everything from infant mortality rates to Internet speeds. This is the country of crumbling bridges and the country of Apple. A question hovering over the republic — a question this column will keep asking — is how the dance between these Americas plays out. Can the America of cars powered by renewable energy save the America of Detroit? Can the America of Twitter save the America of bankrupt newspapers? Can the America of MIT OpenCourseWare, the online publication of course content from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, save the America of Chicago Public Schools? | |
| Former President Bill Clinton argued that “there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” But these days, at least, the medicine, abundant as it is, isn’t reaching the right targets. America brims with problem-solving capacity, but its problems persist undaunted. | Former President Bill Clinton argued that “there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” But these days, at least, the medicine, abundant as it is, isn’t reaching the right targets. America brims with problem-solving capacity, but its problems persist undaunted. |
| Among other reasons, this may be because the hurting America belongs to what the writer C.Z. Nnaemeka calls the “unexotic underclass” — people with “big problems” but “maybe not the Big Problems — capital B, capital P — that get ‘discussed’ at Davos” during the World Economic Forum meetings. | Among other reasons, this may be because the hurting America belongs to what the writer C.Z. Nnaemeka calls the “unexotic underclass” — people with “big problems” but “maybe not the Big Problems — capital B, capital P — that get ‘discussed’ at Davos” during the World Economic Forum meetings. |
| In other words, if you need an app to find you lattes or, at the opposite end of things, you live in Rwanda and have malaria, citizens of the thriving America will innovate for you. If you’re an American single mother and waitress, or a flailing veteran, or a laid-off car worker, you’re invisibly in-between. | In other words, if you need an app to find you lattes or, at the opposite end of things, you live in Rwanda and have malaria, citizens of the thriving America will innovate for you. If you’re an American single mother and waitress, or a flailing veteran, or a laid-off car worker, you’re invisibly in-between. |
| The thriving America has made remarkable strides in financial innovation of late. Kickstarter gives people a new way of funding dreams without institutional permission. Investors have learned to use laser and ultrafast Internet to trade without traders, and a company called Upstart allows debt-saddled graduates to fund their lives by selling a share of their future income. But this flourishing hasn’t made it any easier for many middle-class families to afford university tuition. | The thriving America has made remarkable strides in financial innovation of late. Kickstarter gives people a new way of funding dreams without institutional permission. Investors have learned to use laser and ultrafast Internet to trade without traders, and a company called Upstart allows debt-saddled graduates to fund their lives by selling a share of their future income. But this flourishing hasn’t made it any easier for many middle-class families to afford university tuition. |
| Manufacturing has returned to vogue, and graduate-schooled tinkerers have begun to squirt-print and lathe-cut in their apartments, declaring a new industrial dawn. But the tinkerers have shown less ability to change the fact that two million fewer Americans work in manufacturing than did a decade ago. | Manufacturing has returned to vogue, and graduate-schooled tinkerers have begun to squirt-print and lathe-cut in their apartments, declaring a new industrial dawn. But the tinkerers have shown less ability to change the fact that two million fewer Americans work in manufacturing than did a decade ago. |
| For Daron Acemoglu, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and the co-author of “Why Nations Fail,” the split personality of these years of crisis and recovery is “no puzzle.” | For Daron Acemoglu, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and the co-author of “Why Nations Fail,” the split personality of these years of crisis and recovery is “no puzzle.” |
| “The United States is still the most innovative country in the world,” he said in an email. The problem, he added, is that the innovations produced by the thriving set don’t necessarily translate into jobs for the struggling set — often, in fact, on the contrary. | “The United States is still the most innovative country in the world,” he said in an email. The problem, he added, is that the innovations produced by the thriving set don’t necessarily translate into jobs for the struggling set — often, in fact, on the contrary. |
| This dynamic suggests three broad scenarios for 21st-century America. First, the innovative America and the hollowed-out America — boasting of the Mayo Clinic on one hand, and plagued by poor nutrition on the other — continue their sometimes jarring coexistence. Second, the rot in hollowed-out America slowly infects and overwhelms the dynamic one. Or third, the thriving America decides to make the ailing country down the block its problem, too. | This dynamic suggests three broad scenarios for 21st-century America. First, the innovative America and the hollowed-out America — boasting of the Mayo Clinic on one hand, and plagued by poor nutrition on the other — continue their sometimes jarring coexistence. Second, the rot in hollowed-out America slowly infects and overwhelms the dynamic one. Or third, the thriving America decides to make the ailing country down the block its problem, too. |
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