The Atlantic

The American family changed dramatically over the last decades of the twentieth century. In the postwar years up to the early 1970s a single breadwinner -- working forty hours a week, often for the same employer, until retirement -- generally earned enough to support children and a spouse. Today fully 70 percent of families with children are headed by two working parents or by an unmarried working parent. The traditional family -- one breadwinner and one homemaker -- has been… more

In 1983 a federal education commission warned that "a rising tide of mediocrity" threatened the well-being of the republic. That tide has not ebbed. Nearly two decades later, in 2000, the Program for International Student Assessment found that American fifteen-year-olds ranked fourteenth in science literacy and eighteenth in mathematics literacy among the thirty-two countries administering the test, scoring below the average for developed countries in both categories. And although President George W. Bush and Congress recently united behind the grandiosely… more

Terrorists intent on damaging the United States need not fly planes into America's buildings; they need only do something to raise the price of oil. Far-off international crises -- and relatively mild forms of extortion -- have in the past brought the U.S. economy to its knees. The price spikes caused by the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s and the Iranian revolution of 1979 each led to economic misery for the United States in the form of a… more

Two of our country's most cherished dreams are at risk. One is the American dream of upward mobility. The other is the romantic dream of settling the American heartland. These two dreams cannot be separated in the information age any more than they could be in the frontier past. Indeed, for many Americans in this century moving up may mean moving inland.

Throughout our history, periods of unbounded market exuberance, like the one we recently experienced, have been followed by periods of far-reaching social and economic reform. The Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century gave way to the Populist and Progressive reforms of the early twentieth century, the Roaring Twenties to the New Deal, and the Eisenhower-Kennedy Nifty-Fifty bull market to the Great Society and the War on Poverty. From this cycle of great wealth creation (and abuse) followed by great… more

Nothing illustrates America's profound contradictions more starkly than a comparison with other advanced democracies: among these the United States is either the very best or the very worst performer on a wide range of social and economic criteria. We are simultaneously the leader and the laggard among our peers -- almost always exceptional, almost never in the middle.

Without question we are the richest, most powerful, and most creative nation on the planet. Our economic and military might stems from… more

Without trust, social life is all but impossible. We walk down the street unarmed, invest our money with strangers, and pay taxes -- all because we trust that nobody will mug us, take the cash to Cancun, or use government revenue to enrich a family company. The only other way to coordinate complex activity is coercion -- which, as the Soviets learned, is neither efficient nor pleasant. Today, when your credit-card number makes regular trips to Bangalore and Ghana, start-ups… more

In August of 2000 the National Center for Children in Poverty, at Columbia University, released a study showing that despite the country's recent economic boom, 13 million American children were living in poverty -- three million more than in 1979. For most Americans that was unsettling news, but for a small group of publicly traded companies it represented an opportunity. As the ranks of children living in poverty have grown during the past two decades, so have the… more

Seventy years ago, in a book called Convicting the Innocent, the Yale Law School professor Edwin Borchard produced a classic study of how the wrong person gets sent to prison or to death. The hapless innocents Borchard profiled included a coal miner and a doctor, Central European immigrants and American blacks, an unemployed religious visionary and an Algerian john named Frenchy. In those days exoneration was almost always a matter of luck -- occasionally, for example, a supposed murder victim… more

There are things about one's life and especially about one's children that cannot be known in advance and to which it would be foolish to assume a right outcome or a wrong one. How, for example, could you possibly know whether you and your family would be better off having had a boy child and then a girl, or a girl first, or two girls or two boys? What would your standard for comparison be? Which child would you have… more