Medicate, educate and incarcerate.

Last December, I did a post called Have Grandchildren? Give their parents this book! I implored you to read Thomas Friedman's new book titled That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. If you didn't have time to read the book, I said, at least invest an hour in watching the video of Friedman discussing his book (which is part of the blog post). If I had one hour with the attention of the president and congress, this is the video I would show them.


Friedman wrote an earlier book in 2005 titled The World is Flat. On his book tour for his latest book, he likes to talk about what's happened between 2005 and now: "When I wrote The World is Flat, Facebook didn't exist, twitter was a sound, the cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking place, applications were what you sent to colleges and Skype, for most people, was a typo. That's how much the world has changed in just a few years."


Friedman wrote a column in today's NY Times titled "Do you want the good news first?" He writes about the tremendous amount of innovation happening today in America: "Facebook, which didn’t exist nine years ago, just went public at a valuation of nearly $105 billion — two weeks after buying a company for $1 billion, Instagram, which didn’t exist 18 months ago." He speaks of other innovation leaders, naming "Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, LinkedIn, Zynga and Twitter...all headquartered in America." Then he spells out the problem.


"...we’re leaving an era of some 50 years’ duration in which to be a president, a governor, a mayor or a college president was, on balance, to give things away to people; and we’re entering an era — no one knows for how long — in which to be a president, a governor, a mayor or a college president will be, on balance, to take things away from people. And if we don’t make this transition in a really smart way — by saying, “Here are the things that made us great, that spawned all these dynamic companies” — and make sure that we’re preserving as much of that as we can, this trend will not spread as it should. Maybe we could grow as a country without a plan. But we dare not cut without a plan. We can really do damage. I can lose weight quickly if I cut off both arms, but it will surely reduce my job prospects." [Emphasis mine.]


"What we must preserve is that magic combination of cutting-edge higher education, government-funded research and immigration of high-I.Q. risk-takers. They are, in combination, America’s golden goose, laying all these eggs in Seattle and Silicon Valley. China has it easy right now. It just needs to do the jobs that we have already invented, just more cheaply. America has to invent the new jobs — and that requires preserving the goose." [Emphasis mine.]


"It is terrifying to see how budget-cutting in California is slowly reducing what was once one of the crown jewels of American education — the University of California system — to a shadow of its old self. And I fear the cutting is just beginning. As one community leader in Seattle remarked to me, governments basically do three things: “Medicate, educate and incarcerate.” And various federal and state mandates outlaw cuts in medicating and incarcerating, so much of the money is coming out of educating..... A new report just found that federal investment in biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health has decreased almost every year since 2003." [Emphasis mine]


"This is not a call to ignore the hard budget choices we have to make. It’s a call to make sure that we give education, immigration and research their proper place in the discussion....As I've said, nations that don’t invest in the future tend not to do well there." [Emphasis mine.]


Let me say it one more time, at least watch the video. It's non-partisan and you will enter this election season with a better understanding of the real problems facing America. Here's the video: