That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back is a nonfiction book written by Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and author, with Michael Mandelbaum, a writer and foreign policy professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Ferguson remarked that "Friedman can turn a phrase into cliché faster than any Madison Avenue jingle writer", specifically criticizing the repetition of the metaphor 'War on X', and he also stated that "the authors' frustration is unoriginal and ill-defined" since complaints about underfunded American infrastructure such as "potholes and schools have been favorites of declinists for generations."

He argued as well, "They employ lively examples and telling statistics to make their points, and buttress them with incisive quotes from those inside America’s political system.

"[2] Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College and the editor-at-large of The American Interest, wrote for Friedman's home paper The New York Times that he found the book "compelling, engaging and enlightening."

However, Mead criticized that, in his opinion, people with differing views than the authors "are denigrated rather than engaged"; he specifically describes ignored examples of the limitations of government power such as how "energy regulations contribute to the gridlock that is driving California’s economy down" and how "lobbyists and private interests distorted Fannie Mae mortgage programs in ways that worsened the housing bubble".