That Used to Be Us
That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back is a nonfiction book written by Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and author, with Michael Mandelbaum, a writer and foreign policy professor at Johns Hopkins University. They published the book on September 5, 2011, in the United States. It addresses what the authors see as the four major problems America faces today, and possible solutions. These problems are defined as: globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption. Praise appeared in The Christian Science Monitor as well as Friedman's home paper, The New York Times, while criticism appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Contents The authors write in support of what they view as the 'radical center'. They describe picking out ideas from both the left and right parts of the modern American political spectrum. They state, "Americans will have to save more, consume less, study longer, and work harder than they have become accustomed to doing in recent decades". In terms of details, they advocate a variety of measures that may prove unpopular such as carefully planned