The endangered American dream : how to stop the United States from becoming a Third World country and how to win the geo-economic struggle for industrial supremacy /

Luttwak's volume is must reading for all concerned about the decline in America's industrial supremacy in the world's economy. With the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, military warfare among the industrial powers has given way to economic warfare: geo-economics has replaced geopolitics. In this arena, military tools of guns, boats, and bombs have been replaced by new economic tools like "national technology programs," predatory finance, hidden protectionisms, and national industrial policies. Luttwak examines the major economic and social trends in the US, and more specifically, explains the problems in US schools related to low levels of savings and investment, the widening gap between the incomes of the middle class and the elite, growing paralysis created by unrestrained legalism and litigation and, lastly, the poor in the inner cities. To compete in the world's marketplace, Luttwak calls for reforms in public education, in taxes to create needed capital, in industrial policy, and in controlling "globalization." All levels. P. R. Kressler; Rowan College of New Jersey

Both of these books consider the role of the U.S. in the "new" global economy, and both consider relations between the U.S. and Japan to be the critical factor in shaping that role. That, though, is where the similarity ends.Emmott expands on the premise he introduced in The Sun Also Sets: Limits to Japan's Economic Power (1989). He attempts to shatter what he sees as the myth of inevitable Japanese economic superiority and argues the merits of multinational investment in the U.S. He spends the first part of his book debunking Michael Crichton's best-selling novel Rising Sun [BKL F 1 92] and the arguments of Japan-bashers, who, he says, don't really understand either business or economics. Emmott, editor in chief of The Economist, writes well, and his insights have been acknowledged even by those who don't always agree with his conclusions.Luttwak, a top analyst with Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, sees it much differently. He warns that the U.S. is becoming a third-rate and Third World country. He emphasizes "our Japan problem," documents the decline in our standard of living, and cites the decay of our major cities. His solutions include controls on immigration, abandonment of free-trade policies, a value-added tax, and federalization of education. Both books seem guaranteed to generate controversy. ~--David Rouse

Surveying the country's increasing numbers of working poor, the decline in our living standards, mounting federal and personal debt and a work force that is becoming lax and ill-equipped for employment, Luttwak predicts that the United States could become ``a Third World country'' by the year 2020. This powerful, tough-minded, alarming report combines a slashing analysis of the nation's economic and social ills with a decidedly mixed batch of prescribed remedies. Luttwak, a director of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggests abolishing corporate and Social Security taxes and replacing them with a value-added tax on goods and services. This, he claims, would encourage corporations to save and invest while alleviating ``the central problem of the U.S. economy: overconsumption.'' He also calls for the creation of a federal office for industrial policy; restrictions on immigration and on free trade; investment in plants, research and infrastructure; and allocation of federal money to those school districts that get proven results. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Having made a name for himself as a military sage, Luttwak (Strategy, 1987, etc.) now turns his attention to geoeconomics--the battleground on which, he asserts, a self-defeating US must best commercial rivals if it's to thrive in the wake of the USSR's collapse. In his wide-ranging, alarmist overview, the author argues that America is on the decline toward Third World status--citing a downward slide in domestic wage scales; measurable drops in living standards; ongoing job losses in major industries (owing to the transfer of advanced technologies); urban decay; spiraling debt burdens; inadequate savings rates; and a persistent failure to invest in capital goods, infrastructure, research, or people. In the meantime, Luttwak warns, an unfortunate trend to unfettered individualism (driven to a great extent by misguided concessions to cultural diversity in schools, the workplace, and other venues) has undermined the nation's unity and, hence, its capacity to compete in global markets. Following his worst-case diagnosis of what ails the body politic, the author prescribes some strong medicine: e.g., he commends vocational as well as academic education (with uniform countrywide standards), value-added taxation (to curb excessive consumption), and a formal industrial policy that enables the US government to support American business (rather than the ad hoc practices that currently preclude effective action). Now that the cold war's end has all but eliminated the nation's need to propitiate erstwhile allies, the US can no longer afford to pay even lip service to free-enterprise principles more honored in the breach than the observance, Luttwak maintains. Indeed, he concludes, America's political leaders must mobilize all available resources for the trade conflicts that will determine economic dominion in the 21st century and beyond. A shrill wake-up call to arms.