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“As the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, “The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.”
In the middle years of the twentieth century, the United States moved closer to a happy medium among these competing objectives. It discovered a system that avoided both the inefficiencies of socialism and the excesses of rough-and-tumble capitalism. The country was still terribly flawed and unjust during these decades, but it was moving in the right direction.
No other country was doing a better job of providing decent living standards to its citizens and raising those living standards over time.
Today, these forces have reversed. Our investments in the future have stagnated. Our workers have strikingly little influence over the economy and political system. Our culture is individualist and angry rather than community oriented and hopeful. As a result, American exceptionalism often has a bleak meaning.
We live in the only high-income country that does not provide parents with paid leave.
We live in one of the stingiest countries for daycare, preschool, and the resources devoted to children.
A typical thirty-year-old American man is not much more educated than his parents were.
The United States remains the only rich country without universal health insurance.
American women are more likely to die in childbirth than women in many other countries. American babies are more likely to die, too.
Income inequality is higher than in western Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, or Australia.
Almost two million Americans wake up each day in a prison or jail.
Our children consider it normal to spend time at school preparing for a mass shooting.
Our opioid death rate leads the world.
Our roads are more dangerous than the roads in other affluent countries, which was not true only a few decades ago.
In 1980, life expectancy in the United States was similar to that in other high-income countries. We have since become a grim outlier.
This litany is certainly cause for frustration. But it is not cause for apathy.
The United States retains tremendous advantages.
It remains a wealthy country with broad political freedoms, a place where many of millions of people around the world would live if they could choose any country.
Imagine how successful the country could be if we stopped pursuing strategies that have been failing for so long.”
*Every word above is from OURS WAS THE SHINING FUTURE: THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN DREAM by David Leonhardt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
If you are puzzled by what’s happening in our government today, what’s been happening in America since the 1970s, this book is the place to begin.