I, like many others, awoke last Tuesday to read the following in The Boston Globe:

“The alarm is going off, but Massachusetts keeps hitting snooze. Its economy is slouching toward a future far less extraordinary than its past,” read the lead of an article by economics columnist Larry Edelman.

“Other states once envied our powerful mix of knowledge-based industries. Today, we are a cautionary tale about the pernicious effects of building too few homes and tolerating a business climate that is, to put it charitably, ‘challenging.’ ”

The article argues that the Massachusetts economic engine, which outperformed the rest of the country from the 1980s to 2020, is sputtering because of a broken housing market, soaring living costs, high taxes, an aging population, and a hostile White House.

Edelman’s article appeared several days after another disconcerting piece, by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker magazine, which made the following argument: America has been napping or distracted by trivialities while China is racing toward the future, in part by taking advantage of President Trump’s trade, immigration and budget policies.

The article, entitled “The Future – Made in China,” maintains that China is speeding ahead toward a new technological future.

A summary provided by the magazine says that Jim Farley, the C.E.O. of Ford, recently called China’s automotive progress “the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen.” China operates more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and, in 2024, it rolled out nine such new robots for every one in America. It already produces the majority of the world’s drones, lithium batteries, and solar panels, and its ship-building capacity is around two hundred times that of the U.S.

Without re-litigating all of challenges outlined in both articles, one thing is clear – the time has come for business, government, universities and others to come together to plan the next chapter of the Massachusetts and American economies. The good news in Massachusetts is that we have done this before Edleman notes that the deindustrialization of the late 1970s produced the Massachusetts knowledge economy with the Route 128 mini-computer wave, the Reagan-era defense buildup and the emergency of the mutual fund industry.

And Osnos writes that a pre-eminent China is not a forgone conclusion. He notes that the success of the engineering state “carries you only so far if people are so alienated that they decline to bring children into the future being built for them.

For both the state and the country, it’s time to move forward.