Book: The Untied States of America: Written by Juan Enriquez

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Book: The Untied States of America:
Written by Juan Enriquez
Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future

Written by Juan Enriquez Category: Current Affairs
Publisher: Crown
Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Pub Date: November 2005
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0-307-23752-4

Can a country be like a marriage that has run out of cash and steam, resulting in the inevitable frank discussions about just who is pulling his or her own weight? Eventually, even those who love each other sometimes conclude they cannot stay together.

Juan Enriquez’s unique insights into the financial, political, and cultural issues we face will provoke shock and surprise and lead you to ask the question no one has yet put on the table: Could “becoming untied” ever happen here? It’s a question made especially relevant when we are faced with such unpromising facts as:

• At no other time have we had the unwelcome convergence in which the three key sectors of business, government, and consumers are so tapped out due to debt that each lacks the financial wherewithal to come to the rescue of the others.

• Most assets are not being used for productive purposes but for speculation, resulting in people lacking incentives to create real wealth, focusing instead on buying, selling, and flipping real estate.

• As religion starts to mix with politics, we have a culture that allows us to fall behind what were previously third world nations, because we are now treating science the way we did sex in the 1950s, banning or burying evolution theories and research into promising lifesaving areas such as stem-cell research.

When the enemy was outside—for example, the threat perceived when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and people feared America would lose the brain race—we rallied. Now the enemy is within, and we polarize. Defaming the legitimacy of people on the “other” side becomes the currency of the day, where people in blue states are seen as godless liberal elitists and those in red states are seen as, well, rednecks.

Citizenship, Enriquez says, is like buying into a national brand. If the brand promises one thing and delivers another, could it then have the same fate as a tired product on a supermarket shelf, eroding, losing support, even disappearing? Countries, even one as powerful and successful as America, live on fault lines. When a fault line splits, it’s near impossible to put things back together again. What America will look like in fifty years depends on what we do today to act on the issues raised in The Untied States of America.

Also available as an eBook

“Persuasive, thought-provoking, and, ultimately, deeply unsettling.” —Eugene B. Skolnikoff, MIT

“Priority number one for all of us these days, from the White House to Main Street to pillow talk about our lives and careers, is thinking deeply about uncomfortable truths and possibilities. I guarantee that Untied will bring on a big case of the intellectual fidgets and provoke deep thought. . . . It is a masterpiece.” —Tom Peters

“If you think you know North America, then you need to read this book. You will learn things that shed a fresh light on who we are and what are the choices for our continent. Freshly written, provocative, and informative.” —Senator Bill Bradley

“With an outsider’s eye and an insider’s knowledge, Enriquez is a modern-day de Tocqueville, carefully observing daily customs and mores in a country that is increasingly divided between those who understand and embrace the future and those that seek to maintain yesterday’s status quo. This is the best book I have seen on what could happen if we do not immediately address the growing divisions within our society.” —J. Craig Venter, sequenced the human genome in 2001, cofounder of Synthetic Genomics, Inc.

“This is a surprising book, different in format than any you are likely to see. Enriquez has an important message: that nations are always beset with pressures from both outside and within, while history teaches that invariably they do not survive in their original form or size. He convincingly does not exempt the United States. But he presents his arguments with great originality in staccato form, with an astonishingly wide range of data, quotes, and speculation; in sum, persuasive, thought-provoking, and, ultimately, deeply unsettling.” —Eugene B. Skolnikoff, professor of political science, MIT

“Brilliantly researched . . . a must-read for all Americans from red and blue states and for policymakers on both sides of the aisle. Interesting, factual, scary, and entertaining—don’t miss the opportunity to see our future, read this book.” —Russ Howard, Brigadier General, U.S. Army (retired)

“Juan Enriquez makes connections and observations that elude other intellectuals of our day.” —Paula Stern, U.S. trade representative and member of the Clinton Administration Cabinet

“Juan Enriquez delves into the social gaps caused by ethnic discrimination and inequality of wealth, highlighting the unspoken fissures that sooner or later could threaten the unity of the United States or Mexico.” —Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica, winner of the Nobel Prize

“A cold shower of wit and wisdom, revealing the power of nonparadigmatic thinking.” —George Lodge, Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo professor of business administration, emeritus, Harvard Business School

Juan Enriquez has a career that spans business, domestic and international politics, and science. He was the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School, a fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, and a peace negotiator during Mexico’s Zapatista rebellion. He has appeared on 60 Minutes, is the author of As the Future Catches You, and has published his work in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Science, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Boston Globe. Mr. Enriquez is the CEO of Biotechonomy, a life-sciences research and venture capital firm.
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307237521
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http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307237521
The Untied States of America
Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future
Written by Juan Enriquez
Current Affairs Hardcover | November 2005
$ 24.95 | 0-307-23752-4

About This BookCan a country be like a marriage that has run out of cash and steam, resulting in the inevitable frank discussions about just who is pulling his or her own weight? Eventually, even those who love each other sometimes conclude they cannot stay together.

Also available as an eBook

More Titles Written by Juan Enriquez

As the Future Catches You
How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth
Written by Juan Enriquez
Current Affairs Trade Paperback | October 2005
$ 13.00 | 1-4000-4774-9
Also available as an eBook and a hardcover.

As the Future Catches You
Written by Juan Enriquez
Hardcover | Crown Business
Current Affairs; Business & Economics - Economics | 0-609-60903-3
October 2001 | $ 24.95
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http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneblog/columns/barone_051122a.htm

11/22/05
Bookshelf: The Untied States of America

Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications — including the Economist and the New York Times. More from Michael Barone

No, that's not a misprint. The book is called The Untied States of America, and the author is Juan Enriquez, a CEO of a life sciences research firm and a former fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. We take national boundaries for granted, Enriquez says, and yet they often change. And of course he's right. Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union look a lot different on the map now than they did 20 years ago; the United Nations has something like four times as many members as it did in 1960. In the Americas, it is seemingly different. Boundaries in North America and South America haven't changed, he says, since 1910. Actually, that's slightly wrong. Newfoundland, a separate dominion in the British Commonwealth of Nations, was absorbed into the Dominion of Canada in 1949 after the Newfoundland government went broke. But that only makes Enriquez's point stronger.

Every two years in revising The Almanac of American Politics, I have to deal with the politics of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa, all of which send nonvoting delegates to Congress (the resident commissioner—misleading title—of Puerto Rico is the only member of the House with a four-year term). I have been fascinated with those at the margins of United States nationality. Also, I have been following in the Alaska and Hawaii write-ups the treatment, legally and politically, of Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians. Enriquez mentions all these and notes that the anomalies—Puerto Ricans have U.S. citizenship only by virtue of an act of Congress passed in 1917, and Congress could reverse that at any time—might produce an "untying" of the United States. He mentions briefly the demand for Native Hawaiian sovereignty. That's before Congress; a vote on Sen. Daniel Akaka's bill for sovereignty was promised for September in the Senate but was set aside after Hurricane Katrina. "A bad idea whose time has come," I wrote in this space in August.

Enriquez also touches on the question of Hispanic separateness in the United States. He makes another mistake here, writing that Hispanic immigration was blocked before the 1965 immigration act; actually, there were no limits on intra-Americas immigration before then. There was just very little immigration from that quarter, the notable exception being the huge migration from Puerto Rico in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Enriquez does a good job of raising interesting questions. He describes how Canada could be divided up into three countries that would resemble, demographically and economically, Australia, Finland, and New Zealand, and how Mexico could be divided up into four countries that would resemble Poland, Chile, Tunisia, and Ecuador. The regions are as follows:

Australia = Ontario and western Canada

Finland = Quebec (but is Quebec Hydro Nokia?)

New Zealand = the maritime provinces

Poland = Central Mexico

Chile = Northern Mexico

Tunisia = Maya Mexico

Ecuador = Southern Mexico

All interesting stuff. But I think Enriquez tends to downplay the negative aspects of "untying." Does it really make sense to encourage some large number of the residents of Hawaii (almost none of them of purely Native Hawaiian descent) to think of themselves as Polynesians instead of Americans? Do Lower 48 Indian reservations do as good a job of allowing people of aboriginal descent to choose the degree of assimilation they want as the Alaska Native corporations? (My answers: no and no.) And what is the empirical evidence about whether the people the Census Bureau classifies as Hispanics want a degree of separateness in the United States? Enriquez also lards up the book with some silly talk about how religious fundamentalists are preventing people from learning (I'd look at the teacher unions and education schools instead) and writes that the standards of living of ordinary Americans have deteriorated over the past 40 years (I guess all those DVDs and all that air conditioning that people have now and didn't have 40 years ago don't count). All that is evidence that he's spent too much time in Cambridge and not enough in getting around the rest of the country.

Enriquez's book will enrage some readers in another way. It is written not in conventional sentences and paragraphs but in sentence fragments, asides, and statistics all presented in different typefaces and font sizes. I found this not irritating but refreshing. It struck me that it would have been hard to compose a book in this way with precomputer technology, but it must be easy to do it on your laptop now. It's a good way to raise interesting questions, as Enriquez has done. A thought-provoking and sometimes thoughtful book.
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http://www.biotechonomy.com/juan.htm

Juan Enriquez ~ Chairman and CEO

BIO | Recent Research & Publications

Juan Enriquez, bestselling author, businessman, and academic, is currently Chairman and CEO of Biotechonomy LLC, a life sciences research and investment firm. He was the Founding Director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, and author of the global bestseller As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth. (Selected by Amazon's editors as one of the best business books of the year). He is currently finishing his next book, The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future, which explores why some countries are successful while others disappear. It will be published by Crown Business in November of 2005.

Over the past several years, he has published several key articles including, "Transforming Life, Transforming Business: the Life Science Revolution," co-authored with Ray Goldberg, which received a McKinsey Prize in 2000 (2nd place). He recently co-authored the first map of global nucleotide data flow as well as HBS working papers on "Life Sciences in Arabic Speaking Countries", "Global Life Science Data Flows and the IT industry", "SARS, Smallpox, and Business Unusual," and "Technology, Gene Research and National Competitiveness." Harvard Business School Interactive picked Juan as one of the best and most charismatic teachers at HBS and showcased his work in its first set of faculty products.

He is recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the economic and political impacts of life sciences. The Harvard Business Review showcased his ideas as one of the breakthrough concepts in its first HBR List. Fortune profiled him as Mr. Gene. Time asked him to co-organize the life sciences summit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of DNA. Seed picked his ideas as one of fifty that "shaped our identity, our culture, and the world as we know it."

Mr. Enriquez serves on a variety of boards including Cabot Corporation, The Harvard Medical School Genetics Advisory Council, The Chairman's International Council of the Americas Society, the Visiting Committee of Harvard's David Rockefeller Center, Tufts University's EPIIC, Harvard Business School's PAPSAC, the J. Craig Venter Foundation, The Institute for Genomic Research, and the J. Craig Venter Institute.

Juan is also part of a world discovery voyage led by Craig Venter, who sequenced the human genome. The multi-stage sailing voyage will sample microbial genomes throughout the world's oceans. This expedition involves a number of institutions and top scholars including The Institute for Genomic Research, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, The Explorers Club, and Prof. E.O. Wilson. It will likely lead to the discovery of an unprecedented number of new species.

He previously served as CEO of Mexico City's Urban Development Corporation, Coordinator General of Economic Policy and Chief of Staff for Mexico's Secretary of State, and as a member of the Peace Commission that negotiated the cease-fire in Chiapas' Zapatista rebellion.

He earned a B.A. and an MBA from Harvard, with honors.

He can be reached at jenriquez@biotechonomy.com.

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