Economy

When Egyptians took to the streets celebrating the departure of the long-reigning president Hosni Mubarak nearly four months ago, a wave of euphoria seemed to grip the country. A new dawn beckoned. Exhilaration abounded. The Egyptian people would decide their own destiny.

Today, while much of that pride remains, according to a newly released poll conducted by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center, an undercurrent of anxiety about the economy and security has settled in. The dawn has broken, but the future is foggy.

Unemployment over nine percent, the highest rate this far into a “recovery” in modern times, reflects only the surface of our problems. More troubling is that over six million American have been unemployed for more than six months, the largest number since the Census began tracking their numbers. The pool of “missing workers” – those neither employed nor counted as unemployed – has soared to over 4.4 million, according to the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute.

After concluding some business in Frankfurt, Germany, recently, I found myself with a day to kill and decided to use it to tour the historic Cologne Cathedral, about 120 miles away. I could have rented a car and driven through traffic on the autobahn for about two hours, but instead I decided to walk a few blocks from my hotel and board Intercity-Express #616. The sleek bullet train left Frankfurt's magnificent nineteenth-century main terminal on time and sped along a super-engineered, beeline right-of-way completed in 2002 at a cost of $5.6 billion.

For a country of immigrants, the U.S. remains vexed about how to deal with the fact that people from elsewhere still want to come here. Two successive Presidents have now been stymied in their attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The latest foray is the DREAM Act, a narrow but important piece of the immigration reform puzzle that would, at a minimum, give the children of undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. The bill failed in the Senate last December, despite the Obama Administration’s support.

Among the most important high-tech endeavors at Shanghai Jiaotong University -- widely considered to be China's No. 2 engineering school -- is a cavernous showroom that resembles nothing so much as a futuristic Home Depot.

The evolution of certain aspects of the American social contract has lagged behind that of other developed countries for decades, but the insecurity resulting from our lack of social protections has traditionally been offset by high employment levels, a stable middle class and widespread perceived opportunity for upward mobility. The value of this trade-off has been undermined, though, by unequal wage growth and polarization of the labor market into low and high skill jobs, with a decline of middle income jobs and the retirement and health benefits that accompanied them.

Amidst the doom and gloom surrounding the labor market, there are bright spots that offer some hope for the return of good jobs in the United States. Foremost among them is the resurgence of employment in durable goods manufacturing.

Things are not working. Two years after the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) declared the recovery underway, it is clear that things are not working, at least not in the sense that most Americans expect. The U.S. economy is like an aging sports car running on three cylinders, fouled spark plugs and a flat tire.

Last April, M.I.T. held a business conference on campus titled “Africa 2.0: Achieving Growth Through Innovation.” In the keynote speech, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank, announced to a packed room, “Africa is now the new frontier.”

Or, such is the distillation of the comments made yesterday at the event "Rebuilding the Road to Financial Stability" (co-sponsored by the Congressional Savings and Ownership Caucus and the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) made by Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin.