Director’s Corner | What America for the Class of 2025?

Hard to believe, but the children born in the United States this year will graduate from high school in the year 2025. It’s worth wondering: When those children—the Class of 2025—walk across the graduation stage, how will they look back at the presidential election of 2008? Their conclusion, most likely, will be: “Why couldn’t the leaders back then have done more for the next generation?”

If you’re one of the 300 million or so people who now call themselves Americans, you can be grateful—very grateful—for how far your country has come and how much it has achieved. The expressions to describe the country’s current status in the world are different—unipolar, lone superpower, hyperpower, and so on—but they all convey the same message, more or less. By any reasonable index, the United States has reached a point at which there are no clearly recognizable competitors in the foreseeable future. Five discreet dimensions of this preeminence only begin to describe how far we have come:

• First, there’s population. The U.S. population now stands at roughly 4.5% of the world population—third only to demographic heavyweights China and India—and by the middle of the century it will have grown to 400 million (holding on, owing to immigration inflows, to third place and a 4.3% share of the projected world population of 9.2 billion).
• Second, despite the many consequences of the agonizing adventure ongoing in Iraq, the country’s military capabilities—the elements at the core of its “hard power”—are off the charts compared to the rest of the world. U.S. military spending is greater than the rest of the world combined, and there is possibility that it could mobilize even greater military resources were the need (and, of course, the corresponding political will) to arise.
• In the area of economics, depending on how you decide to count it, the United States accounts for between 20 and 28 percent of total world output. Its level of per capita GDP (based on purchasing power parity) is the ninth highest on the planet—behind only substantially smaller populations such as Luxembourg, Bermuda, Jersey, Equatorial Guinea, the United Arab Emirates, Norway, Guernsey, and Ireland. It is, to be blunt, the largest and most powerful economy in the world. Hands down. Beyond that, its financial markets are unparalleled. For example, it is often noted that California alone has more venture capital than any other country other than the United States itself.
• Fourth, the U.S. work force is highly agile and mobile. The International Labor Organization’s latest data suggest that the United States has the highest labor productivity levels in the world—by far. These figures reflect, among other things, the rapid infusion of information technology in the U.S. workplace and the higher efficiencies it implies.
• Fifth, the U.S. higher education system in the country is unrivalled. Across the world, its academic institutions are regarded as the standard for excellence.

These and other indicators all reinforce the basis for the exceptional historical moment at which the United States has arrived.

All in all, then, there’s a strong case that the previous generations of Americans contributed to the development of a world power par excellence. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Now that we have reached hyperpower status, we need to ask ourselves: For what? What a supreme irony that at the apogee of its influence in the world, the strategic purpose for the use of U.S. preeminence remains to be defined. Certainly there is no clear consensus in the country on how we should engage the rest of the world or even what the country should stand for among both friends and adversaries.

Unfortunately, the question of identifying strategic goals for the United States in the world is only the starting point. It goes well beyond that. The basis of the rise of the United States in the world—the qualitative and quantitative expansion of its infrastructure writ large—is diminishing both in absolute terms and in relation to other countries. This includes physical and cyber infrastructure as well as human infrastructure—in short, our capacity to generate leaders and workers with abilities commensurate with the world of change around them. Here’s the painful conclusion: At the peak of its potential influence in the world, the country is hollowing out.

That’s where the Class of 2025 comes in. At graduation ceremonies 18 years from now, students will rise to the podium and ask the parents and other adults in the audiences: “How could you have let it happen?” They will point to the degradation of the physical infrastructure, the erosion of the educational system, the obscene drag of health care costs, the effects of run-away litigation, regulation persistently driving opportunity offshore, trend disinvestment in research, continued lack of progress on energy security, and consistently reckless path of financial policy (i.e., deficit spending and mounting debt). They will ask why spending on the retired Boomers is crowding out public programs geared to their age segment. And they will point to the profound ramifications of the “sudden decompression” of U.S. moral authority in the world, the unraveling of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, the unrelenting environmental degradation, the incessant threat of infectious disease, and the constant shift in the global balance of economic and financial power.

The symptoms, after all, were more than obvious. They will point to a sampling of striking indicators dating back to the year of their birth--2007:

• In that year, the United States led the world in stock of debt (personal, fiscal, current account). By any measure, it was the biggest debtor nation on the planet.
• The United States had fallen behind Germany and, more recently, China as the world’s leading exporter.
• What had been the epicenter of technology development, the United States, had become a net importer of high technology products.
• The Euro has displaced the dollar (which fell to one all-time low after the other) as the international currency of choice
• China had surpassed the United States in the production of cars, and GM had been surpassed by Toyota as the world’s largest car company.
• The U.S. health care system stood in crisis, fewer and fewer Americans had health insurance, and there were few attempts to take on runaway costs.
• Fifty years after an American president from the last century declared “the moral equivalent of war” against national energy dependence, U.S. reliance on imported oil and refined products had edged up steadily to between 65 and 75 percent.

All these factors, the students will argue, translate into real-life, lasting foregone opportunities for them and their own families—loss of competitiveness, loss of opportunity, and loss of stability and security. In short, they will argue, their future will have been compromised by the short-sightedness of the previous generation.

And they will have a point. Each one of the symptoms contributing to the hollowing-out process they will bemoan was easily identifiable way back when they were born—in the year 2007—or even well before. Each could have been addressed—solved if not ameliorated—with the overwhelming power, innovation and dynamism that existed in the United States at the turn of the century. But it wasn’t….

Those of us still around in the year 2025 will have to look them in the eyes when they ask: Why couldn’t we have seen a nationwide effort to ensure the prolongation of America’s exceptional moment? What prevented the previous generation from taking on the hard, strategic issues that shaped the world around them?

I hope that we have a good answer…. The likelihood is that we’ll need to resort to excuses.