Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent

by Edward Luce Narrated by Ralph Lister

Overview

In Time to Start Thinking, Edward Luce offers an incisive and highly engaging account of America's economic and geopolitical decline. The Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times for the last four years, Luce has traveled the country interviewing public officials like Lawrence Summers and Senator Don Riegle, business leaders including Jeff Immelt and Bill Gates, as well as teachers, health care workers, and scientists. His interviews are candid and revealing: former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen told Luce about the catch-22-like situation of American defense spending: “We are borrowing money from China to build weapons to face down China.” Mullen is just one of many voices who are united in their belief that America must evolve or face serious consequences.

Luce's research, analysis, and reporting covers areas from education to health care to politics to business and innovation. Luce frames the issues historically, comparing America today to Britain in the early-twentieth century, when U.S. inventors developed the light bulb and the internal combustion engine, usurping Britain's position as the center of research and development, while Germany took the lead in the chemicals and metallurgy industries. As a result, Britain lost its place at the top of the world's pecking order. Today, the same situation is evolving in America: Chinese and Korean scientists and innovators are becoming increasingly competitive with those in America, and companies like IBM and General Electric now employ more people outside the United States than inside it. In domestic politics, things are also dire: conversation between Republicans and Democrats has all but ceased-Barney Frank calls it “the dialogue of the deaf,” and the once noisy Senate dining room, specifically designed so that members of different parties would be forced to talk to one another, is now empty most lunch hours. No surprise, when the politicians are busy talking to lobbyists and trying to raise campaign funds.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has more than 2,300 different I.T. systems on which it spends more than $10 billion a year and the crippling bureaucracy in the education system leads more than a fifth of new teachers to leave their jobs within three years.

In what may be the smartest book yet on why and how America is broken, Luce offers a critical, nonpartisan analysis of the issues facing America today and a renowned journalist's report on a country in economic, social, and political crisis.

Editorial Reviews

Jonathan Rauch

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…Time to Start Thinking raises the right questions at the right moment, which is what books are supposed to do. It deserves an audience in America.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Less a call to arms than a call to thought, this sharply written analysis by Financial Times columnist Luce (In Spite of the Gods) presents a sobering account of the U.S. in decline. Utilizing statistics, polls, studies, and scores of interviews conducted with cultural, political, and economic luminaries (including Dean Kamen, Bill Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, and Timothy Geithner), Luce diagnoses factors behind the country’s waning global leadership, devoting a chapter each to the most dire problems: the shrinking middle class; an ineffective and flawed educational system; the stagnation of innovation in business and technology; a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy; the virulent polarization of national politics; and the damage caused by the influence of money in politics, along with endless campaigning. In the end, Luce assesses the prospects for change and offers a bleak outlook: the perfect storm of economic catastrophe and political paralysis leads him to conclude: “America is losing its ability to tackle problems.” Though he emphasizes the increasing gap between conservative rhetoric and reality, Luce doles out blame to both sides; indeed, particularly damning is his chapter on how moneyed interests have polluted Obama’s agenda. Despite ample doom and gloom, Luce’s analysis is sound, and his data irrefutable—required reading for pessimists and pious optimists alike. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, A.P. Watt. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

“[Luce] 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 . . . 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. . . . Time to Start Thinking raises the right questions at the right moment, which is what books are supposed to do. It deserves an audience in America. And I wouldn’t be surprised, too, if it ends up stacked on the best-seller tables in China.”—Jonathan Rauch, The New York Times Book Review

“Luce puts his finger right on some obvious and less obvious problems, all the time pointing the way out of the swamp. . . . Some of his observations are simply delightful. . . . This book needs to be read as a dose of cold water, but also as a goad to action to change its sad prognosis before it is too late. The waterfall is just ahead.”—Dan Simpson, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"In a tradition stretching back to de Tocqueville, sympathetic foreigners are often the keenest observers of American life. Edward Luce is one such person. He paints a highly disturbing picture of the state of American society, and of the total failure of American elites to come to grips with the real problems facing the country. It rises far above the current political rhetoric by its measured reliance on facts rather than canned ideological posturing to reach its conclusions."—Francis Fukuyama, author of The End Of History and The Last Man

"Time to Start Thinking is not only a wonderful tapestry of the current state of America, it provides a deeply insightful narrative on the origins of our current economic and political malaise. Ed Luce is a brilliant reporter who has spoken to everyone: CEOs and members of the cabinet, lobbyists and small town mayors, recent MBAs and unemployed teachers. In his acutely observed, often witty, and very humane portraits he succeeds in converting the abstractions of economics and bringing them to life. This is a book that will transform the way you think about this country."—Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Lords of Finance

“Americans need friends who will tell us what we need to hear and how to think about the troubles, many of our own making, that threaten our democracy, prosperity, and leadership in the world. We’ve got just such a friend in Ed Luce. He’s a foreign observer who has not just traveled widely in the United States but listened carefully to a wide array of our citizens. His concerns reflect what he has seen and heard from us, and he shares with his predecessor de Tocqueville a belief that America’s greatness lies in an ‘ability to repair her faults.’ ”—Strobe Talbott, president, The Brookings Institution

“Warning: this book could be a danger to your peace of mind. One of the finest journalists of our time, Ed Luce has crisscrossed the United States, trying to understand what ails the country and what must be done. His conclusions are highly disturbing—and may sometimes set your teeth on edge—but they are a “must read.” Once again, a visitor to these shores has written a masterful portrait of America.”—David Gergen, professor, Harvard Kennedy School; senior political analyst, CNN

“A superb new book. . . Ed has done a far greater public service than all speeches touting America’s greatness that will be given during this campaign season.”—James M. Lindsay, The Council on Foreign Relations

“Luce is a very good reporter. He has spoken to a terrific array of characters—including eccentric entrepreneurs, bankers, captains of old industries, new technology evangelists, senior politicians, an admiral, academics, a community college head, a recruitment agency boss, brilliant immigrant students who are “going back” (ie away from the US). Best of all are his vivid portraits of Americans struggling to get by, assailed by what he calls “the hollowing out” of America’s middle class.”—The Financial Times

“Superb reporting of the on-ground reality of America’s current economic crisis . . . an unflinchingly brave book. Luce does not shy away from conclusions that are hard for many Americans to hear, not does he cop out and offer up the happy ending many in his audience may want to read. Rather, he offers what is most needed now: an objective profoundly thoughtful look at the underpinnings of America’s economic troubles, what makes the current crisis different from the past, and where we are likely headed from here.”—Foreign Policy

“Deeply-researched.”—Bernd Debusmann, Reuters.com

“[A] lucid, reported tour d'horizon. It provides an excellent snapshot of America in 2010 and 2011, a country grappling with serious issues and unsure about its place in the world.”—Yahoo.com

“[A] thoughtful and gently polemical book on contemporary American society. . . an engaging read, filled with anecdotes, stories and character vignettes that make the main arguments easy to follow and interesting to read.”—The Irish Examiner

“[T]his sharply written analysis by Financial Times columnist Luce (In Spite of the Gods) presents a sobering account of the U.S. in decline. . . . Despite ample doom and gloom, Luce’s analysis is sound, and his data irrefutable—required reading for pessimists and pious optimists alike.”—Publishers Weekly, boxed review

"Carefully balanced and often startlingly evocative analysis and reportage . . . It is true that there have been serious errors in policy. Luce, formerly the Financial Times’s south Asia bureau chief based in New Delhi and now the paper’s chief Washington correspondent, spells out these exercises in self-damage in painful and illuminating detail.”—The Guardian

“The book is not simply a laundry list of present-day policy failures (of which there have been many) but as hinted at by the title of a political system that’s stopped constructively engaging with policy challenges. . . . It’s time to start thinking.”—Slate.com

“[Luce] makes a convincing case.”—Matthew Partridge, MoneyWeek

“Luce wisely refrains from prescribing what America needs to do to get out of the rut. . . . They need new ideas, the lack of which Time to Start Thinking hopes to have captured. That in itself is no meager achievement.”—Hindustan Times

“Every half-decade or so, Financial Times journalist Edward Luce delivers an easy-reading but insightful country profile. . . . Luce’s books profile nations at the tipping point. . . . Edward Luce is carrying forward the great tradition of foreign correspondents from the Anglo-Saxon world, going back at least to Edgar Snow, who have produced penetrating outsider accounts of nations in the throes of change.”—Indian Express

“Luce finds plenty of fresh thinking . . . Essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of the US and its consequences for the rest of us.”—Irish Times

JULY 2012 - AudioFile

America is falling behind other developed and developing countries in terms of education, job growth and salaries, and research and development. Luce does not pull any punches in his analysis of our nation’s decline as a global force. Ralph Lister employs a commanding British accent as he delivers the words of the Sussex native. This serves to highlight Luce’s perspective as an outsider examining the issues at hand. While Lister is convincing in his reading of Luce’s words, his delivery of quotations used as supporting evidence throughout the text is somewhat lacking as he tends to drift into a more American accent, even when it is not appropriate. His narration, however, is perfectly paced, and he follows Luce’s text from topic to topic with aplomb. E.N. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172676192
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	04/03/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos