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How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit Of Modern History, Got Sick, And Will(Eventually) Feel Better
Dutton
June 2011
On Sale: June 9, 2011
128 pages
ISBN: 0525952713
EAN: 9780525952718
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
America is in disarray and our economy is failing us. We
have been through the biggest financial crisis since the
Great Depression, unemployment remains stubbornly high, and
talk of a double-dip recession persists. Americans are not
pulling the world economy out of its sluggish state -- if
anything we are looking to Asia to drive a recovery.Median
wages have risen only slowly since the 1970s, and this
multi-decade stagnation is not yet over. By contrast, the
living standards of earlier generations would double every
few decades. The Democratic Party seeks to expand government
spending even when the middle class feels squeezed, the
public sector doesn’t always perform well, and we have no
good plan for paying for forthcoming entitlement spending.
To the extent Republicans have a consistent platform, it
consists of unrealistic claims about how tax cuts will raise
revenue and stimulate economic growth. The Republicans, when
they hold power, are often a bigger fiscal disaster than the
Democrats. How did we get into this mess?Imagine a tropical
island where the citrus and bananas hang from the trees.
Low-hanging literal fruit -- you don’t even have to cook the
stuff.In a figurative sense, the American economy has
enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the
seventeenth century: free land; immigrant labor; and
powerful new technologies. Yet during the last forty years,
that low-hanging fruit started disappearing and we started
pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize
that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are
barer than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what
has gone wrong.The problem won’t be solved overnight, but
there are reasons to be optimistic. We simply have to
recognize the underlying causes of our past prosperity—low
hanging fruit—and how we will come upon more of it.
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