The Edge of Disaster
Rebuilding a Resilient Nation
Chapter 1
A BRITTLE NATION
The United States has become a brittle superpower. We are the world’s economic and cultural 900-pound gorilla and spend more on our military muscle than the rest of the world combined. Yet we increasingly behave like the occupants of a grand old mansion who have given up on investing in its upkeep. We depend on complex infrastructure built by the hard labor, capital, and ingenuity of our forbears, but we seem oblivious to the fact that it is aging—and not very gracefully. Bridges are outfitted with the civil engineering equivalent of a diaper. Public works departments construct “temporary” patches for dams that leave those living downstream one major storm away from waking up to a wall of water rolling through their living rooms. Our electricity comes to us via a decades-old system of power generators, transformers, and transmission lines that has utility executives holding their breath on every hot day in July or August.
It is not just modernity’s hardware that is being neglected. Two decades of taxpayer rebellion have strippe ...
read full excerpt from The Edge of Disaster ebook
