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Democratic supporters of safety net programs can use Jencks’s finding that poverty has dropped below 5 percent as evidence that the war on poverty has been successful.

At the same time liberals are wary of positive news because, as Jencks notes:It is easier to rally support for such an agenda by saying that the problem in question is getting worse

The plus side for conservatives of Jencks’s low estimate of the poverty rate is the implication that severe poverty has largely abated, which then provides justification for allowing enemies of government entitlement programs to further cut social spending.

At the same time, however, Jencks’s data undermines Republican claims that the war on poverty has been a failure – a claim exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 quip: “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.”

Jencks’s conclusion: “The absolute poverty rate has declined dramatically since President Johnson launched his war on poverty in 1964.” At 4.8 percent, Jencks’s calculation is the lowest poverty estimate by a credible expert in the field.

his conclusion — that instead of the official count of 45.3 million people living in poverty, the number of poor people in America is just under 15 million — understates the scope of hardship in this country.

Jencks argues that the actual poverty rate has dropped over the past five decades – far below the official government level — if poverty estimates are adjusted for food and housing benefits, refundable tax credits and a better method of determining inflation rates. In Jencks’s view, the war on poverty worked.

using a relative measure shows that the United States lags well behind other developed countries:If you use the O.E.C.D. standard of 50 percent of median income as a poverty line, the United States looks pretty bad in cross-national relief. We have a relative poverty rate exceeded only by Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Israel (which has seen a big increase in inequality in recent years). And that rate in 2010 was essentially where it was in 1995

While the United States “has achieved real progress in reducing absolute poverty over the past 50 years,” according to Burtless, “the country may have made no progress at all in reducing the relative economic deprivation of folks at the bottom.”

the heart of the dispute: How severe is the problem of poverty?

Kathryn Edin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins, and Luke Schaefer, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan, contend that the poverty debate overlooks crucial changes that have taken place within the population of the poor.

welfare reform, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act), which limited eligibility for welfare benefits to five years. The limitation has forced many of the poor off welfare: over the past 19 years, the percentage of families falling under the official poverty line who receive welfare benefits has fallen from to 26 percent from 68 percent. Currently, three-quarters of those in poverty, under the official definition, receive no welfare payments.

he enactment of expanded benefits for the working poor through the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit.According to Edin and Schaefer, the consequence of these changes, taken together, has been to divide the poor who no longer receive welfare into two groups. The first group is made up of those who have gone to work and have qualified for tax credits. Expanded tax credits lifted about 3.2 million children out of poverty in 2013

he second group, though, has really suffered. These are the very poor who are without work, part of a population that is struggling desperately. Edin and Schaefer write that among the losers are an estimated 3.4 million “children who over the course of a year live for at least three months under a $2 per person per day threshold.”

ocusing on these findings, Mishel argues, diverts attention from the more serious problem of “the failure of the labor market to adequately reward low-wage workers.”To support his case, Mishel points out that hourly pay for those in the bottom fifth grew only 7.7 percent from 1979 to 2007, while productivity grew by 64 percent, and education levels among workers in this quintile substantially improved.

So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence? But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

Investment is usually the result of forgoing consumption. In a purely agrarian society, early humans had to choose how much grain to eat after the harvest and how much to save for future planting. The latter was investment.

In a more modern society, we allocate our productive capacity to producing pure consumer goods such as hamburgers and hot dogs, and investment goods such as semiconductor foundries. If we create one dollar worth of hamburgers today, then our gross national product is higher by one dollar.

Investment need not always take the form of a privately owned physical product. The most common example of nonphysical investment is investment in human capital.

In an economy that is closed to the outside world, investment can come only from the forgone consumption—the saving—of private individuals, private firms, or government.

In an open economy, however, investment can surge at the same time that a nation’s saving is low because a country can borrow the resources necessary to invest from neighboring countries.

That economists have a fairly strong understanding of firms’ investment behavior makes sense. A firm that maximizes its profits must address investment using the framework discussed in this article.

The theory of investment dates back to the giants of economics. irving fisher, arthur cecil pigou, and alfred marshall all made contributions; as did john maynard keynes, whose Marshallian user cost theory is a central feature in his General Theory.

Investment fluctuates a lot because the fundamentals that drive investment—output prices, interest rates, and taxes—also fluctuate. But economists do not fully understand fluctuations in investment. Indeed, the sharp swings in investment that occur might require an extension to the Jorgenson theory.

In Jorgenson’s user cost model, firms will purchase a machine if the extra revenue the machine generates is a smidgen more than its cost.

The general conclusion is that there is a gain to waiting if there is uncertainty and if the installation of the machine entails sunk costs, that is, costs that cannot be recovered once spent.

Although quantifying this gain exactly is a highly mathematical exercise, the reasoning is straightforward. That would explain why firms typically want to invest only in projects that have a high expected profit.

The fact of irreversibility might explain the large fluctuations in investment that we observe.

This method of financing investment has been very important in the United States. The industrial base of the United States in the nineteenth century—railroads, factories, and so on—was built on foreign finance, especially from Britain. More recently, the United States has repeatedly posted significant investment growth and very low savings.

Consumer behavior is harder to study than firms’ behavior. Market forces that drive irrational people out of the marketplace are much weaker than market forces that drive bad companies from the market.

Because the saving response of consumers must be known if one is to fully understand the impact of any investment policy, and because saving behavior is so poorly understood, much work remains to be done.

Biden’s proposal to establish a national pre-K and child care system would be a huge step forward for children and for working parents alike.

You drop a kid off at a high-quality prekindergarten program in the morning and pick the child up on the way home from work.

When my wife and I lived in Japan in the late 1990s, we sent our kids to one of these nurseries, and they were a dream.

But the United States never developed such a system, because for half a century as other countries were investing in children, the United States was stiffing them.

Today one of our saddest statistics is this: American children ages 1 to 19 are 57 percent more likely to die than children in other rich countries.

Some of those kids die because the United States doesn’t provide universal health care to children — only to senior citizens, who vote and thus are a priority.

Just as Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized conditions for the elderly by instituting Social Security, Biden may be able to do the same for children.

But still more important for America’s future, in my view, will be the elements focused on children.

Making his child allowances permanent.

Expanding home visitation programs that help at-risk moms and dads from pregnancy through early childhood

Working toward universal access to high-quality pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.

Ensuring high-quality affordable day care for parents

One model the White House is studying is the excellent day care system offered by the U.S. military,

For some of my middle-aged friends wrestling with homelessness, mental health crises and decades of addiction, with more of a criminal record than an educational record, it may not be possible to turn lives around. For their kids and grandkids, we have to try.

please, President Biden, push on. This is about America’s future. This is your chance to preside over a Rooseveltian revolution that sprinkles opportunity and averts tragedies for decades to come.

he question isn’t whether we can afford to invest in children and break cycles of poverty, educational failure and substance abuse. It’s whether we can afford not to.

Williams ceded the microphone, and Padilla was able to speak. “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”

“I believe in merit. I don’t look at the color of the author.” She pointed a finger in Padilla’s direction. “You may have got your job because you’re Black,” Williams said, “but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”

What he did find was a slim blue-and-white textbook titled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome.” “Western civilization was formed from the union of early Greek wisdom and the highly organized legal minds of early Rome,” the book began. “The Greek belief in a person’s ability to use his powers of reason, coupled with Roman faith in military strength, produced a result that has come to us as a legacy, or gift from the past.” Thirty years later, Padilla can still recite those opening lines.

In 2017, he published a paper in the journal Classical Antiquity that compared evidence from antiquity and the Black Atlantic to draw a more coherent picture of the religious life of the Roman enslaved. “It will not do merely to adopt a pose of ‘righteous indignation’ at the distortions and gaps in the archive,” he wrote. “There are tools available for the effective recovery of the religious experiences of the enslaved, provided we work with these tools carefully and honestly.”

Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he told me.

He also gravitated toward contemporary scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Lorgia García Peña and Saidiya Hartman, who speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system o

In response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, Mary Beard, perhaps the most famous classicist alive, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the Romans “would have been puzzled by our modern problems with migration and asylum,” because the empire was founded on the “principles of incorporation and of the free movement of people.”

In November 2015, he wrote an essay for Eidolon, an online classics journal, clarifying that in Rome, as in the United States, paeans to multiculturalism coexisted with hatred of foreigners. Defending a client in court, Cicero argued that “denying foreigners access to our city is patently inhumane,” but ancient authors also recount the expulsions of whole “suspect” populations, including a roundup of Jews in 139 B.C., who were not considered “suitable enough to live alongside Romans.”

The job of classicists is not to “point out the howlers,” he said on a 2017 panel. “To simply take the position of the teacher, the qualified classicist who knows things and can point to these mistakes, is not sufficient.”

Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today

To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether.

. “What I want to be thinking about in the next few weeks,” he told them, “is how we can be telling the story of the early Roman Empire not just through a variety of sources but through a variety of persons.” He asked the students to consider the lives behind the identities he had assigned them, and the way those lives had been shaped by the machinery of empire, which, through military conquest, enslavement and trade, creates the conditions for the large-scale movement of human beings.

ultimately, he decided that leaving enslaved characters out of the role play was an act of care. “I’m not yet ready to turn to a student and say, ‘You are going to be a slave.’”

Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,”

“I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.”

In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike.

Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race

Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”

Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries. During that period, as European universities emancipated themselves from the control of the church, the study of Greece and Rome gave the Continent its new, secular origin story. Greek and Latin writings emerged as a competitor to the Bible’s moral authority, which lent them a liberatory power

Historians stress that such ideas cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions. “The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” Winkelmann wrote.

While Renaissance scholars were fascinated by the multiplicity of cultures in the ancient world, Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below.

Jefferson, along with most wealthy young men of his time, studied classics at college, where students often spent half their time reading and translating Greek and Roman texts. “Next to Christianity,” writes Caroline Winterer, a historian at Stanford, “the central intellectual project in America before the late 19th century was classicism.

Of the 2.5 million people living in America in 1776, perhaps only 3,000 had gone to college, but that number included many of the founders

They saw classical civilization as uniquely educative — a “lamp of experience,” in the words of Patrick Henry, that could light the path to a more perfect union. However true it was, subsequent generations would come to believe, as Hannah Arendt wrote in “On Revolution,” that “without the classical example … none of the men of the Revolution on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be unprecedented action.”

Comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire became popular as the country emerged as a global power. Even after Latin and Greek were struck from college-entrance exams, the proliferation of courses on “great books” and Western civilization, in which classical texts were read in translation, helped create a coherent national story after the shocks of industrialization and global warfare.

even as the classics were pulled apart, laughed at and transformed, they continued to form the raw material with which many artists shaped their visions of modernity.

Over the centuries, thinkers as disparate as John Adams and Simone Weil have likened classical antiquity to a mirror. Generations of intellectuals, among them feminist, queer and Black scholars, have seen something of themselves in classical texts, flashes of recognition that held a kind of liberatory promise

The language that is used to describe the presence of classical antiquity in the world today — the classical tradition, legacy or heritage — contains within it the idea of a special, quasi-genetic relationship. In his lecture “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,” Kwame Anthony Appiah (this magazine’s Ethicist columnist) mockingly describes the belief in such a kinship as the belief in a “golden nugget” of insight — a precious birthright and shimmering sign of greatness — that white Americans and Europeans imagine has been passed down to them from the ancients.

To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves

Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression.

Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past.

if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”

One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments.

many classicists are advocating softer approaches to reforming the discipline, placing the emphasis on expanding its borders. Schools including Howard and Emory have integrated classics with Ancient Mediterranean studies, turning to look across the sea at Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa. The change is a declaration of purpose: to leave behind the hierarchies of the Enlightenment and to move back toward the Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity and mixture.

Ian Morris put it more bluntly. “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,” Morris said to me. “Do we really want that sort of thing?”

There’s a more interesting story to be told about the history of what we call the West, the history of humanity, without valorizing particular cultures in it,” said Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford. “It seems to me the really crucial mover in history is always the relationship between people, between cultures.”

“In some moods, I feel that this is just a moment of despair, and people are trying to find significance even if it only comes from self-accusation,” he told me. “I’m not sure that there is a discipline that is exempt from the fact that it is part of the history of this country. How distinctly wicked is classics? I don’t know that it is.”

“One of the dubious successes of my generation is that it did break the canon,” Richlin told me. “I don’t think we could believe at the time that we would be putting ourselves out of business, but we did.” She added: “If they blew up the classics departments, that would really be the end.”

Padilla, like Douglass, now sees the moment of absorption into the classical, literary tradition as simultaneous with his apprehension of racial difference; he can no longer find pride or comfort in having used it to bring himself out of poverty.

“Claiming dignity within this system of structural oppression,” Padilla has said, “requires full buy-in into its logic of valuation.” He refuses to “praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.”

Last June, as racial-justice protests unfolded across the nation, Padilla turned his attention to arenas beyond classics. He and his co-authors — the astrophysicist Jenny Greene, the literary theorist Andrew Cole and the poet Tracy K. Smith — began writing their open letter to Princeton with 48 proposals for reform. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” the letter began. “Indifference to the effects of racism on this campus has allowed legitimate demands for institutional support and redress in the face of microaggression and outright racist incidents to go long unmet.”

Padilla believes that the uproar over free speech is misguided. “I don’t see things like free speech or the exchange of ideas as ends in themselves,” he told me. “I have to be honest about that. I see them as a means to the end of human flourishing.”

“There is a certain kind of classicist who will look on what transpired and say, ‘Oh, that’s not us,’” Padilla said when we spoke recently. “What is of interest to me is why is it so imperative for classicists of a certain stripe to make this discursive move? ‘This is not us.’

Joel Christensen, the Brandeis professor, now feels that it is his “moral and ethical and intellectual responsibility” to teach classics in a way that exposes its racist history. “Otherwise we’re just participating in propaganda,”

Christensen, who is 42, was in graduate school before he had his “crisis of faith,” and he understands the fear that many classicists may experience at being asked to rewrite the narrative of their life’s work. But, he warned, “that future is coming, with or without Dan-el.”

On Jan. 6, Padilla turned on the television minutes after the windows of the Capitol were broken. In the crowd, he saw a man in a Greek helmet with TRUMP 2020 painted in white. He saw a man in a T-shirt bearing a golden eagle on a fasces — symbols of Roman law and governance — below the logo 6MWE, which stands for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough,

New financial constraints on family formation are a potential cause, as implied by another striking finding in the Journal poll — 78 percent of adults lack confidence this generation of children will enjoy a better life than they do.

Yet a recent analysis for the Aspen Economic Strategy Group by Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine, economics professors at the University of Maryland and Wellesley College, respectively, determined that “beyond the temporary effects of the Great Recession, no recent economic or policy change is responsible for a meaningful share of the decline in the US fertility rate since 2007.”

Their study took account of such factors as the high cost of child care, student debt service and housing as well as Medicaid coverage and the wider availability of long-acting reversible contraception. Yet they had “no success finding evidence” that any of these were decisive.

Kearney and Levine speculated instead that the answers lie in the cultural zeitgeist — “shifting priorities across cohorts of young adults,”

A possibility worth considering, they suggested, is that young adults who experienced “intensive parenting” as children now balk at the heavy investment of time and resources needed to raise their own kids that way: It would clash with their career and leisure goals.

another event that year: Apple released the first iPhone, a revolutionary cultural moment if there ever was one. The ensuing smartphone-enabled social media boom — Facebook had opened membership to anyone older than 13 in 2006 — forever changed how human beings relate with one another.

We are just beginning to understand this development’s effect on mental health, education, religious observance, community cohesion — everything. Why wouldn’t it also affect people’s willingness to have children?

one indirect way new media affect childbearing rates is through “time competition effects” — essentially, hours spent watching the tube cannot be spent forming romantic partnerships.

a 2021 review of survey data on young adults and adolescents in the United States and other countries, the years between 2009 and 2018 saw a marked decline in reported sexual activity.

the authors hypothesized that people are distracted from the search for partners by “increasing use of computer games and social media.

during the late 20th century, Brazil’s fertility rates fell after women who watched soap operas depicting smaller families sought to emulate them by having fewer children themselves.

This may be an area where incentives do not influence behavior, at least not enough. Whether the cultural shift to lower birthrates occurs on an accelerated basis, as in the United States after 2007, or gradually, as it did in Japan, it appears permanent — “sticky,” as policy wonks say.

Mr. Trump, the bombastic businessman who’s never held office, and Mr. Johnson, the former journalist turned mayor of London, might not put it this way, since they continue to cling to a conservative mantle. But they are riding a revolt of the working class against a 40-year-long project of the political right and its corporate backers that has dominated policy making in the English-speaking world for a generation.

The British political scientist Andrew Gamble at the University of Cambridge has argued that Western capitalism has experienced two transformational crises since the end of the 19th century. The first, brought about by the Depression of the 1930s, ended an era in which governments bowed to the gospel of the gold standard and were expected to butt out of the battles between labor and capital, letting markets function on their own, whatever the consequences

Mr. Keynes’s views ultimately prevailed, though, providing the basis for a new post-World War II orthodoxy favoring active government intervention in the economy and a robust welfare state. But that era ended when skyrocketing oil prices and economic mismanagement in the 1970s brought about a combination of inflation and unemployment that fatally undermined people’s trust in the state.

The Keynesian era ended when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan rode onto the scene with a version of capitalism based on tax cuts, privatization and deregulation that helped revive their engines of growth but led the workers of the world to the deeply frustrating, increasingly unequal economy of today.

After the Brexit vote, Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary under President Clinton and one of President Obama’s top economic advisers at the nadir of the Great Recession, laid out an argument for what he called “responsible nationalism,” which focused squarely on the interests of domestic workers.

Instead of negotiating more agreements to ease business across borders, governments would focus on deals to improve labor and environmental standards internationally. They might cut deals to prevent cross-border tax evasion.

There is, however, little evidence that the world’s leaders will go down that path. Despite the case for economic stimulus, austerity still rules across much of the West. In Europe, most governments have imposed stringent budget cuts — ensuring that all but the strongest economies would stall. In the United States, political polarization has brought fiscal policy — spending and taxes — to a standstill.

Last week, President Trump’s sketch of a budget underscored how little interest he has in the nation’s social insurance programs — proposing to shift $54 billion next year to the military

Republicans in the House plan to vote this week to undo the Affordable Care Act. That law was Mr. Obama’s singular contribution toward an American welfare state, the biggest expansion of the nation’s safety net in half a century.

Welfare reform did hurt many poor people by converting antipoverty funds into block grants to the states. But it was accompanied by a big increase in the earned-income tax credit, the nation’s most effective antipoverty tool today.

“No other Congress or administration has ever put forward a plan with the intention of having fewer people covered.”

Who knows where this retrenchment takes the country? Maybe attaching a work requirement to Medicaid, as conservatives propose, will prod the poor to get a job. Or perhaps it will just cut more people from Medicaid’s rolls. Further up the income ladder, losing a job will become more costly when it means losing health insurance, too.

Millions of Americans — poor ones, mainly — will use much less health care. They will make fewer outpatient visits, have fewer mammograms and cholesterol checks.

In any event, public health insurance will take a big hit.

Under the House Republican plan, 24 million more Americans will lack health insurance by 2026, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Might depression and mental health problems destabilize families, feeding down into the health, education and well-being of the next generation?

Yet it is worth remembering that among advanced nations, the United States is a laggard in life expectancy and has one of the highest infant mortality rates.

If American history provides any sort of guidance, it is that continuing to shred the social safety net will definitely make things worse.

As a 15-year-old, I was condemned to long-term solitary confinement in the Florida prison system, which ultimately lasted for 18 consecutive years

From age 15 to 33.

For 18 years I didn’t have a window in my room to distract myself from the intensity of my confinement

I wasn’t permitted to talk to my fellow prisoners or even to myself. I didn’t have healthy, nutritious food; I was given just enough to not die

These circumstances made me think about how I ended up in solitary confinement.

United Nations standards on the treatment of prisoners prohibits solitary confinement for more than 15 days, declaring it “cruel, inhuman or degrading.”

For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder.

My court-appointed lawyer advised me to plead guilty, telling me that the maximum sentence would be 15 years. So I did. But my sentence wasn’t 15 years — it was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.

Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive

I was finally released from prison in 2016 thanks to my lawyer, Bryan Stevenson

Researchers have long concluded that solitary confinement causes post-traumatic stress disorder and impairs prisoners’ ability to adjust to society long after they leave their cell.

In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived. It was reckless and foolish on my part, the act of a 13-year-old in crisis, and I’m simply grateful no one died.

More aggressive change is needed in state prison systems

In 2016, the Obama administration banned juvenile solitary confinement in federal prisons, and a handful of states have advanced similar reforms for both children and adults.

Yet the practice, even for minors, is still common in the United States, and efforts to end it have been spotty

Because solitary confinement is hidden from public view and the broader prison population, egregious abuses are left unchecked

I watched a corrections officer spray a blind prisoner in the face with chemicals simply because he was standing by the door of his cell as a female nurse walked by. The prisoner later told me that to justify the spraying, the officer claimed the prisoner masturbated in front of the nurse.

I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television

On occasion, I purposely overdosed on Tylenol so that I could spend a night in the hospital. For even one night, it was worth the pain.

Another time, I was told I’d be switching dorms, and I politely asked to remain where I was because a guard in the new area had been overly aggressive with me. In response, four or five officers handcuffed me, picked me up by my feet and shoulders, and marched with me to my new dorm — using my head to ram the four steel doors on the way there.

The punishments were wholly disproportionate to the infractions. Before I knew it, months in solitary bled into years, years into almost two decades.

As a child, I survived these conditions by conjuring up stories of what I’d do when I was finally released. My mind was the only place I found freedom from my reality

the only place I could play basketball with my brother or video games with my friends, and eat my mother’s warm cherry pie on the porch.

No child should have to use their imagination this way — to survive.

It is difficult to know the exact number of children in solitary confinement today. The Liman Center at Yale Law School estimated that 61,000 Americans (adults and children) were in solitary confinement in the fall of 2017

No matter the count, I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity. Perhaps they didn’t want to. Staying in their mind was the better, safer, more humane option.

Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, yet prisons continue to practice it.

When it comes to children, elimination is the only moral option. And if ending solitary confinement for adults isn’t politically viable, public officials should at least limit the length of confinement to 15 days or fewer, in compliance with the U.N. standards

As I try to reintegrate into society, small things often awaken painful memories from solitary. Sometimes relationships feel constraining. It’s difficult to maintain the attention span required for a rigid 9-to-5 job. At first, crossing the street and seeing cars and bikes racing toward me felt terrifying.

I will face PTSD and challenges big and small for the rest of my life because of what I was subjected to.

And some things I never will — most of all, that this country can treat human beings, especially children, as cruelly as I was treated.

Sadly, solitary confinement for juveniles is still permissible in many states. But we have the power to change that — to ensure that the harrowing injustice I suffered as a young boy never happens to another child in America.

Which is why many leaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, conservatives as well as liberals, attached a safety net to such an unsafe, bewildering, constantly shifting web of human demand and supply. They did so in part for humane reasons – but also because they realized that unless capitalism red in tooth and claw were complemented by some collective cushioning, it would soon fall prey to more revolutionary movements. The safety net was created to save capitalism from itself, not to attack capitalism.

The forces of global capitalism – now unleashed on an unprecedented global scale with China, Russia, Brazil and India – are destroying the kind of society which allows and encourages stability, traditional families, and self-sufficient community.

One reason, I think, that Obama’s move toward a slightly more effective welfare state has not met strong resistance – and is clearly winning the American argument – is that the sheer force of this global capitalism is coming to bear down on America more fiercely than ever before. People know this and they look for some kind of security

it is precisely capitalism’s post-1980s triumph that has helped create the social dependency so many conservatives bemoan today. And this time, there is even a sense that whole industries are disappearing faster than ever before – not simply because of outsourcing but because of technology itself

the sheer speed at which this is now happening. It makes the conservative project all but impossible, if still necessary. It does require a defense of the family, of marriage, of personal responsibility. But it also demands a compassion toward the victims of this economic and social change, an understanding of their bewilderment

in my bleaker moments, I wonder whether humankind will come to see this great capitalist leap forward as a huge error in human history – the moment we undid ourselves and our very environment, reaching untold material wealth as well as building societies in which loneliness, dislocation, displacement and radical insecurity cannot but increase.

Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.

“the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned

One reason the attack drew so much international attention was that France doesn’t experience nearly as much terrorism as countries with comparable recent attacks, such as Lebanon or Kenya.

attacks were unusually terrifying precisely because they did not target a particular class of people — such as only Christians, university students, or government officials. They targeted anyone and everyone. A life lost in this manner is not “more tragic” than a life lost in a civil war. However, it might be more newsworthy, because it’s unusual

Terrorists, of course, seek out such targets. Attacking tourism hot spots is excellent for drawing attention to their cause.

The Paris attack also stands out for the tactics used by the perpetrators. This attack played out over time in multiple public locations. It also seemed to target everyone, instead of a specific group.

The attack on Paris also shocked observers around the world because many have been there, or plan to visit. France is the most visited country in the world. This creates an “it could happen to me” factor, and also suggests that terrorism could affect someone we know.

drawing international attention because it suggests a new outward turn for the Islamic State

The Islamic State leadership apparently directed the attack, according to French officials. That would set it apart from attacks that were only inspired by the group, such as the few killings that have occurred in Western countries in the past year.

One reason why we often see lone-actor attacks in high-capability states is that organized terror is difficult to accomplish in these countries

realization that the Islamic State is apparently willing and able to carry out complex, coordinated attacks in developed countries outside of its home region has European security services worried. Beyond Europe, what other targets might be next? This further adds to the global interest

Paris attack shocked the world for many reasons. It’s true that terrorism in less-developed countries is worth our attention as well. Crises, such as the Syrian civil war, deserve much more media coverage and policy focus. But the Paris attack continues to draw interest because of the relative rarity of terrorism in France, the fact that the country receives visitors from around the globe, the shocking nature of the attack, and the potential implications for the Islamic State’s future plans.

When a man shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., gun sales did not set records until five days later, after President Obama called for banning assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.

“It would be like you’ve never owned a toaster, you don’t really want a toaster, but the federal government says they’re going to ban toasters,” Mr. Ruttenbur said. “So you go out and buy a toaster.”

Gun sales rose in New Jersey in 2013 after Gov. Chris Christie proposed measures that included expanding background checks and banning certain rifles. (Mr. Christie later vetoed one of the most stringent parts

Catch-22 for gun control proponents: Pushing for new restrictions can lead to an influx of new guns.

Maryland approved one of the nation’s strictest gun-control measures in May 2013, gun sales jumped as buyers tried to beat the October deadline specified in the measure

after Hurricane Katrina, legally registered guns were confiscated from civilians. The confiscations outraged gun owners and prompted an increase in gun sales in the area. Conservatives responded by pushing for a federal law prohibiting the seizure of firearms from civilians during an emergency

Gun sales have more than doubled in a decade, to about 15 million in 2013 from about seven million in 2002. More firearms are sold to residents in the United States than in any other country

These estimates undercount total sales because they omit some purchases in states that do not require background checks for private sales. They also exclude permits that allow people in some states to buy multiple guns with a single background check.

The increase is mostly due to higher sales of handguns, which are typically bought for self-defense. Two of the fastest-growing segments of the market are women and gun owners with concealed carry permits.

When Missouri repealed a requirement that gun buyers obtain a permit to buy a handgun in 2007, estimated gun sales went up and stayed up, by roughly 9,000 additional guns per month. The influx shifted gun-trafficking patterns, reducing the number of guns used in crimes that had been brought in from neighboring states.

Supreme Court invalidated a ban on handguns in Washington, estimated handgun sales in the city went from near-zero to about 40 every month.

Annual data, which go back to 1929, show that the unemployment rate peaked during the Great Depression at an average of 24.9% in 1933.

Goldman Sachs warned Wednesday that the real jobless rate will peak at 35%, up from the bank's previous projection for a peak of 29%.

, told CNN last week that the real jobless rate could hit 25% before "hopefully" falling following a transition period this summer.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday that the "consequences could be really serious" if states reopen ahead of the guidelines issued by the White House.

Goldman also upgraded its GDP forecasts, predicting a "somewhat more V-shaped path" as states relax lockdown orders. The bank now expects rapid annualized growth of 29% in the third quarter, up from 19% previously.

And Goldman noted several "serious health risks": "insufficient testing and contact tracing" in some states, reopening high-risk sectors and limited evidence of how effective measures like social distancing and will be.

"Prolonged weakness could cause severe scarring effects such as permanent layoffs and business closures that delay the recovery," Goldman Sachs economists wrote.

"If you are a US citizen, and you are abroad at the moment, take a look at your circumstances, determine whether this is a place where you'd be willing to hunker down for an indeterminate period of time, as airspace and borders, etc., close down," the senior official said.

Last week alone, though, 1.6 million people newly applied for unemployment benefits. That’s the equivalent of 2,300 Carrier plants

Somehow, for years, the four tragic deaths in Benghazi consumed the agenda of six GOP-controlled congressional committees and the programming of the most-watched cable news channel. But today, a deadly shock magnified by government ineptitude that has led to 46,000 times as many lives lost “is what it is.”

the coronavirus death toll is about 46,000 Benghazis

According to congressional investigators, Navarro negotiated a contract that resulted in the government overpaying for ventilators by $500 million. (The contract was canceled Monday.) He also championed a $765 million federal loan to Eastman Kodak to transform it into a drugmaker. (The loan has since unraveled and is the subject of a securities investigation.)

So how many taxpayer dollars was Navarro involved in wasting through these two deals alone? Measured in units that should be familiar to consumers of right-wing news, it’s roughly two Solyndras.

The debt increase under Trump during a single term is on track to surpass that under Obama across two terms.

For each Hillary Clinton private email scandal (one), there are at least eight senior Trump officials who have reportedly used private email to conduct official business

For every Obama-era incident involving supposed retaliation against political opponents, there are literally dozens of instances of Trump trying to use the power of his office to punish perceived enemie

it helped shift moral psychology away from rationalist models that dominated in the 1980s and 1990s. In its place Haidt offered an understanding of morality from an intuitive and automatic level. As Haidt says on his website, “we are just not very good at thinking open-mindedly about moral issues, so rationalist models end up being poor descriptions of actual moral psychology.”

“the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does.”

In the last few decades psychology began to understand the unconscious mind not as dark and suppressed as Freud did, but as intuitive, highly intelligent and necessary for good conscious reasoning. “Elephants,” he reminded me, “are really smart, much smarter than horses.”

we are 90 percent chimp 10 percent bee. That is to say, though we are inherently selfish, human nature is also about being what he terms “groupish.” He explained to me like this:

they developed the idea that humans possess six universal moral modules, or moral “foundations,” that get built upon to varying degrees across culture and time. They are: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation, and Liberty/oppression. Haidt describes these six modules like a “tongue with six taste receptors.” “In this analogy,” he explains in the book, “the moral matrix of a culture is something like its cuisine: it’s a cultural construction, influenced by accidents of environment and history, but it’s not so flexible that anything goes. You can’t have a cuisine based on grass and tree bark, or even one based primarily on bitter tastes. Cuisines vary, but they all must please tongues equipped with the same five taste receptors. Moral matrices vary, but they all must please righteous minds equipped with the same six social receptors.”

The questionnaire eventually manifested itself into the website www.YourMorals.org, and it has since gathered over two hundred thousand data points. Here is what they found:

This is the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives. As the graph illustrates, liberals value Care and Fairness much more than the other three moral foundations whereas conservative endorse all five more or less equally. This shouldn’t sound too surprising, liberals tend to value universal rights and reject the idea of the United States being superior while conservatives tend to be less concerned about the latest United Nation declaration and more partial to the United States as a superior nation.

Haidt began reading political psychology. Karen Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic, “conveyed some key insights about protecting the group that were particularly insightful,” he said. The work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim was also vital. In contrast to John Stuart Mill, a Durkheimian society, as Haidt explains in an essay for edge.org, “would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for out-groups.”

He was motivated to write The Righteous Mind after Kerry lost the 2004 election: “I thought he did a terrible job of making moral appeals so I began thinking about how I could apply moral psychology to understand political divisions. I started studying the politics of culture and realized how liberals and conservatives lived in their own closed worlds.” Each of these worlds, as Haidt explains in the book, “provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders.” He describes them as “moral matrices,” and thinks that moral psychology can help him understand them.

“When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups. We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.” This is what people who had studied morality had not realized, “that we evolved not just so I can treat you well or compete with you, but at the same time we can compete with them.”

At first, Haidt reminds us that we are all trapped in a moral matrix where

our “elephants” only look for what confirms its moral intuitions while our “riders” play the role of the lawyer; we team up with people who share similar matrices and become close-minded; and we forget that morality is diverse. But on the other hand, Haidt is offering us a choice: take the blue pill and remain happily delusional about your worldview, or take the red pill, and, as he said in his 2008 TED talk, “learn some moral psychology and step outside your moral matrix.”

The great Asian religions, Haidt reminded the crowd at TED, swallowed their pride and took the red pill millennia ago. And by stepping out of their moral matrices they realized that societies flourish when they value all of the moral foundations to some degree. This is why Ying and Yang aren’t enemies, “they are both necessary, like night and day, for the functioning of the world.” Or, similarly, why the two of the high Gods in Hinduism, Vishnu the preserver (who stands for conservative principles) and Shiva the destroyer (who stands for liberal principles) work together.

It doesn’t help that the Trump administration is rapidly stripping away as many regulations as it can, promising to repeal two for every new one implemented — an ultra-wealthy administration’s attempt to formalize the plutocratic free-for-all that has followed decades of growing corporate power, defined by massive income inequality, regulatory capture, a revolving door between agencies and the industries they oversee, and steadily eroding consumer rights. The empowered consumer is a figment of our imagination.

Experiences that used to be standardized are being divided into tiers denoting various rights, access and costs. The result is to both pit consumers against one another — as they compete for a limited pool of guaranteed seats on an airplane, for example — and to extract more money out of better-heeled customers.

If we violate any of the strictures of the contract we’ve implicitly signed by buying a ticket, then the airline — backed with the imprimatur of state authority, perhaps even with the help of local police — has every right to remove us from the plane without apology.

Survey the economic landscape and you’re likely to find similarly scrambled power relationships. During the foreclosure crisis, banks acted like arms of the state, with local sheriffs becoming the banking industry’s eviction force. Health insurers dictate access to health care for millions while a small coterie of chief executives reaps huge payouts. The telecommunications industry has consolidated into a handful of industry behemoths that maintain regional monopolies

The result is a lack of competition and slow, pricey service

Increasingly we’re not just paying more for less; we are sacrificing our privacy rights in the process, as personal data has become a huge driver of the digital economy

Those are the economic costs of this arrangement. The social and cultural costs are harder to define but no less important. As Sandel explains, common experiences become increasingly fragmented and subjected to the vicissitudes of the market: “At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools.”

traditionally guaranteed rights become more contingent and benefits accrue to the wealthy.

We get what we pay for, which increasingly means whatever a company like United decides.

One aspect of the future that demographics can’t help predict are technological innovations.

About 70 percent of the world population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050, according to data from the United Nations.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that the world will need about 28 percent more energy in 2040 than it did in 2015 based on the number of people in the country and consumption patterns; on our current trajectory, about 42 percent of electricity in the United States will come from renewable sources.

Technology has led us to expect that goods and services will be delivered at the push of a button, often within minutes.

Entrepreneurs, industry leaders and policymakers are already at work solving some of the problems that demographic data suggest are ahead of us, whether it’s figuring out how to incentivize farmers to sequester carbon, use insurance as a tool for reducing coal production, reinvent the motors that power heavy industry so they use less energy, or write laws that help govern code.

What about the metaverse? Or crypto technology? Or robots taking our jobs? Or A.I. taking over everything? Demographics can’t answer those questions. All of those things may happen, but life in 2041 may also look a lot like it does today — maybe with the exception of those flying cars.