Thomas L. Friedman said on Meet the Press:

"We made the worst mistake a country or species can make, at the end of the Cold War, when we misread our environment.

 

"We interpreted the end of the Cold War as victory...not understanding that it was actually the onset of one of the biggest challenges we've ever faced as a country.

 

"We had...unleashed two billion people just like us.

 

"But the nineties turned out to be quite a party thanks to the peace dividend, thanks to the massive productivity boost of the Internet and thanks, most importantly in many ways, to the collapse in oil prices, which was like a huge tax cut."

"9/11 set us on a really bad course. We spent the last decade--in many ways necessarily, in many ways excessively--chasing the losers from globalization rather than the winners.

 

"And we made up for a lot of the fall behind...by basically injecting ourselves with steroids.

 

"Just as baseball players did it to hit home runs, we injected ourselves with credit steroids, creating a huge housing boom and construction boom to create jobs."

"The number of people who can compete, connect and collaborate exploded in the last decade. You know," Freidman continued, "I wrote a book in 2004 called The World is Flat, which was about this connecting of the world.

 

"We've gone from connected to hyper-connected....

 

"When we sat down to write this book, I actually went back to The World is Flat, I looked in the index, and I realized that Facebook wasn't in it.

 

"When I said 'the world is flat,' Facebook didn't exist, or for most people it didn't exist, Twitter was a sound, the Cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking place, Linked In was a prison, Applications were what you sent to college, and for most people Skype was a typo...

 

"That all happened in just the last seven years.

 

"And what it's done is taken the world from connected to hyper-connected.

 

"And that's been a huge opportunity, and a huge challenge."

"We went from the Greatest Generation, whose philosophy was basically to save and invest, and we are still living off their saving and investing, to basically the Baby Boomer generation, whose philosophy turned out to be 'borrow and spend.'

 

"And we've really shifted from a generation born in the Depression, World War II and the Cold War--these were serious people, they wouldn't think of shutting down the government for a minute--to a generation...that is much less serious.

 

"We've gone from basically the values of the Greatest Generation...to a Baby Boomer generation whose values are situational....

"You put them all together, and I think you really account for a lot of the hole we're in right now..."