DC Metro Vs. Chinese Efficiency

It's hard to imagine, perhaps, but the escalator problems at the Bethesda Metrorail station provided an 'ah-ha' moment for Bethesda's Tom Friedman, inspiring him to write a book,—co-authored by foreign policy expert Michael Mandlebaum of Johns Hopkins University—on how the 'American Dream' has been lost and how the U.S. continues to fall behind in international competition against China and other nations. 

"They've been repairing the Bethesda Metro's escalators for more than six months and it's still not finished," said Friedman, a well-known columnist for the New York Times and an internationally acclaimed author at last month's Aspen Institute's Seventh Annual Ideas Festival.

"I've been over there," Friedman said, amid chuckles. "We're talking about 21 steps on an escalator. ... It's been six months and it's still not finished."

He noted that the long delays in making basic repairs to the Bethesda station stand in stark contrast to what he saw during a recent visit to China where a construction company built what he described as a world-class convention center from scratch in less than eight months. 

In an important way, this contrast is central to the major theme of his forthcoming new book, "That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back." The book is due out Sept. 5, he said.

Even worse is the fact that the U.S. is accepting a "sub-par performance like the series of Bethesda Metro fiascoes as good enough. ... It's emblematic of the country's failure to stand up and face the serious problems faced on a wide range of fronts," he suggested. 

"That's the problem in a nutshell," he added. "Here we are in the midst of this crisis and we're sort of getting used to it." 

That, he asserted, is even worse—and more damaging for the future—than a simple six-month delay in making a fairly fundamental repair. "That's the trouble ... we're sort of getting used to it." 

"Where we are today is that we (as a country) have made two fundamental errors and we misread our environment," Friedman said.

"We (mis)read the end of the Cold War as a tremendous victory and just when we thought we won," we wound up facing a whole new set of economic challenges from China, India and other nations.

Second, instead of facing these tremendous challenges, "we spent a whole decade chasing Al Queda ... chasing the losers (in the global competitive struggle) rather than the winners," like China and India. 

It's food for thought the next time you find yourself struggling up those escalator stairs at the Bethesda station...or any of the other malfunctioning Metrorail escalators as well.