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The Betrayal of American Prosperity
Clyde Prestowitz
Free Market Delusions, America's Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era
Free Press
May 2010
On Sale: May 11, 2010
288 pages
ISBN: 1439119791
EAN: 9781439119792
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
CONSIDER THIS SHOCKING FACT: while China’s number one
export to the United States is $46 billion of computer
equipment, the number one export from the U.S. to China is
waste—$7.6 billion of waste paper and scrap metal.
Bestselling author Clyde Prestowitz reveals the
astonishing extent of the erosion of the fundamental pillars
of American economic might—beginning well before the 2008
financial crisis—and the great challenge we face for the
future in competing with the economic juggernaut of China
and the other fast-rising economies. As the arresting facts
he introduces show, the U.S. is rapidly losing the basis of
its wealth and power, as well as its freedom of action and
independence. If we do not make dramatic changes quickly, we
will confront a painful permanent slide in our standard of
living; the dollar will no longer be the world’s currency;
our military strength will be whittled away; and we will be
increasingly subject to the will of China, Russia, Saudi
Arabia, and various malcontents. But it
doesn’t have to be that way. As Prestowitz shows in a
masterful account of how we’ve come to this fateful
juncture, we have inflicted our economic decline on
ourselves—we abandoned the extraordinary approach to growth
that drove the country’s remarkable rise to superpower
status from the early days of the republic up through World
War II. For most of our history, we supported our home
industries, protected our market against unfair trade, made
the world’s finest products—leading the way in technological
innovation—and we were strong savers. But in the post-WWII
era, we reversed course as our leadership embraced a set of
simplistically attractive but disastrously false ideas—that
consumption rather than production should drive our economy;
that free trade is always a win-win; that all globalization
is good; that the market is always right and government
regulation or intervention in the economy always causes more
harm than good; and that it didn’t matter that our factories
were fleeing overseas because we were moving to the "higher
ground" of services. In a devastating account, Prestowitz
shows just how flawed this orthodoxy is and how it has
gutted the American economy. The 2008 financial crisis was
only its most blatant and recent consequence. It is
time to abandon these false doctrines and to get back to the
American way of growth that brought us to world leadership;
Prestowitz presents a deeply researched and powerful set of
highly practical steps that we can begin implementing
immediately to reverse course and restore our economic
leadership and excellence. The Betrayal of
American Prosperity is vital reading for all Americans
concerned about the future of the economy and of our power
in the coming era.
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