Some critics have dubbed President Obama?s administration the ?second Carter term.? That description came to mind as I read Fareed Zakaria?s new TIME cover story. It documents the evidence of American decline.
Turn back the clock to 1980, and Zakaria?s words would fit right in with our 39th president?s description of the American ?crisis of confidence.?
TIME offers a counterweight to Zakaria?s gloom and doom: an optimistic column from David Von Drehle:
Even worse than flawed statistics, though, is the tendency to interpret the gains of other countries as losses for America. It’s true that the U.S. used to generate more patents than the rest of the world combined. Now we produce slightly fewer than half. It is a safe bet that we will generate a smaller and smaller proportion in the future. We’re not inventing less; instead, others are being empowered to imagine and invent. Will we always have more airports than the next dozen nations combined? Will we always have three times as many miles of railroad track as China? Probably not, because the rest of the world wants to be as connected as we are.
The fact that students in Finland score well on tests is no threat to us ? even as we keep trying to improve our own performance. Attempts by China and Saudi Arabia to create world-class universities don’t endanger our institutions ? and nothing prevents us from making better use of those resources for more and more of our people.
Looking for more reasons for optimism? The 39th president?s administration eventually ended, and the 40th president?s administration commenced.
