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after the military in Myanmar used Facebook to stoke the murder of the Rohingya people, Haugen began to worry that this was a playbook that could be infinitely repeated — and only because Facebook chose not to invest in safety measures, such as detecting hate speech in poorer, more vulnerable places. “The scale of the problems was so vast,” she writes. “I believed people were going to die (in certain countries, at least) and for no reason other than higher profit margins.”

After a trip to Cambodia, where neighbors killed neighbors in the 1970s because of a “story that labeled people who had lived next to each other for generations as existential threats,” she’d started to wonder about what caused people to turn on one another to such a horr

ifying degree. “How quickly could a story become the truth people perceived?”

she points out is the false choice posited by most social media companies: free speech vs. censorship. She argues that lack of transparency is what contributed most to the problems at Facebook. No one on the outside can see inside the algorithms. Even many of those on the inside can’t. “You can’t take a single academic course, anywhere in the world, on the tradeoffs and choices that go into building a social media algorithm or, more importantly, the consequences of those choices,” she writes.

In that lack of accountability, social media is a very different ecosystem than the one that helped Ralph Nader take on the auto industry back in the 1960s. Then, there was a network of insurers and plaintiff’s lawyers who also wanted change — and the images of mangled bodies were a lot more visible than what happens inside the mind of a teenage girl. But what if the government forced companies to share their inner workings in the same way it mandates that food companies disclose the nutrition in what they make? What if the government forced social media companies to allow academics and other researchers access to the algorithms they use?

research elsewhere has found that people are less satisfied when choosing from a larger group: in one study, for example, subjects who selected a chocolate from an array of six options believed it tasted better than those who selected the same chocolate from an array of 30.

evidence shows that the perception that one has appealing alternatives to a current romantic partner is a strong predictor of low commitment to that partner.

But the pace of technology is upending these rules and assumptions. Relationships that begin online, Jacob finds, move quickly. He chalks this up to a few things. First, familiarity is established during the messaging process, which also often involves a phone call. By the time two people meet face-to-face, they already have a level of intimacy. Second, if the woman is on a dating site, there’s a good chance she’s eager to connect. But for Jacob, the most crucial difference between online dating and meeting people in the “real” world is the sense of urgency. Occasionally, he has an acquaintance in common with a woman he meets online, but by and large she comes from a different social pool. “It’s not like we’re just going to run into each other again,” he says. “So you can’t afford to be too casual. It’s either ‘Let’s explore this’ or ‘See you later.’ ”

he phenomenon extends beyond dating sites to the Internet more generally. “I’ve seen a dramatic increase in cases where something on the computer triggered the breakup,” he says. “People are more likely to leave relationships, because they’re emboldened by the knowledge that it’s no longer as hard as it was to meet new people. But whether it’s dating sites, social media, e‑mail—it’s all related to the fact that the Internet has made it possible for people to communicate and connect, anywhere in the world, in ways that have never before been seen.”

eople seeking commitment—particularly women—have developed strategies to detect deception and guard against it. A woman might withhold sex so she can assess a man’s intentions. Theoretically, her withholding sends a message: I’m not just going to sleep with any guy that comes along. Theoretically, his willingness to wait sends a message back: I’m interested in more than sex.

people who are in marriages that are either bad or average might be at increased risk of divorce, because of increased access to new partners. Third, it’s unknown whether that’s good or bad for society. On one hand, it’s good if fewer people feel like they’re stuck in relationships. On the other, evidence is pretty solid that having a stable romantic partner means all kinds of health and wellness benefits.” And that’s even before one takes into account the ancillary effects of such a decrease in commitment—on children, for example, or even society more broadly.

As online dating becomes increasingly pervasive, the old costs of a short-term mating strategy will give way to new ones. Jacob, for instance, notices he’s seeing his friends less often. Their wives get tired of befriending his latest girlfriend only to see her go when he moves on to someone else. Also, Jacob has noticed that, over time, he feels less excitement before each new date. “Is that about getting older,” he muses, “or about dating online?” How much of the enchantment associated with romantic love has to do with scarcity (this person is exclusively for me), and how will that enchantment hold up in a marketplace of abundance (this person could be exclusively for me, but so could the other two people I’m meeting this week)?

Other big thinkers believed that if people are left perfectly free to follow their desires, their baser ones will end up dominating their nobler ones. For these writers, the goal in life is not primarily to be free but to be good. Being virtuous often means thwarting your inclinations, obeying a power outside yourself. It means maintaining a balance between liberty and restraint, restricting freedom for the sake of an ordered existence.

Recently, the balance between freedom and restraint has been thrown out of whack. People no longer even have a language to explain why freedom should sometimes be limited. The results are as predicted. A decaying social fabric, especially among the less fortunate. Decline in marriage. More children raised in unsteady homes. Higher debt levels as people spend to satisfy their cravings.

who knows, maybe we’ll see other spheres in life where restraints are placed on maximum personal choice. Maybe there will be sumptuary codes that will make lavish spending and C.E.O. salaries unseemly. Maybe there will be social codes so that people understand that the act of creating a child includes a lifetime commitment to give him or her an organized home. Maybe voters will restrain their appetite for their grandchildren’s money. Maybe more straight people will marry.

The proponents of same-sex marriage used the language of equality and rights in promoting their cause, because that is the language we have floating around. But, if it wins, same-sex marriage will be a victory for the good life, which is about living in a society that induces you to narrow your choices and embrace your obligations.

You're here because you're smart, but you're smart because you're fortunate.

The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.

Whatever life may have in store for you, each of you has a grand, lifelong project, and that is the development of yourself as a human being.

Those most worthy of admiration are those who have made the best use of their advantages or, alternatively, coped most courageously with their adversities.

Speaking as somebody who has been happily married for 35 years, I can't imagine any choice more consequential for a lifelong journey than the choice of a traveling companion. 

“And one of the things we want is to spend more time with people who think like us and less with people who are different,” Haidt added. “The Facebook effect isn’t trivial. But it’s catalyzing or amplifying a tendency that was already there.”

prevalent for many users are the posts we see from friends and from other people and groups we follow on the network, and this information is utterly contingent on choices we ourselves make

The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same, whatever that same is

So it goes with the fiction we read, the movies we watch, the music we listen to and, scarily, the ideas we subscribe to. They’re not challenged. They’re validated and reinforced.

this colors our days, or rather bleeds them of color, reducing them to a single hue.

We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it

Carnival barkers, conspiracy theories, willful bias and nasty partisanship aren’t anything new, and they haven’t reached unprecedented heights today. But what’s remarkable and sort of heartbreaking is the way they’re fed by what should be strides in our ability to educate ourselves.

The proliferation of cable television networks and growth of the Internet promised to expand our worlds, not shrink them. Instead they’ve enhanced the speed and thoroughness with which we retreat into enclaves of the like-minded.

there’s no argument that in an era that teems with choice, brims with niche marketing and exalts individualism to the extent that ours does, we’re sorting ourselves with a chillingly ruthless efficiency. We’ve surrendered universal points of reference. We’ve lost common ground.

Marc Dunkelman, adding that it also makes it easier for us to avoid “face-to-face interactions with diverse ideas.” He touched on this in an incisive 2014 book, “The Vanishing Neighbor,” which belongs with Haidt’s work and with “Bowling Alone,” “Coming Apart” and “The Fractured Republic” in the literature of modern American fragmentation, a booming genre all its own.

We’re less committed to, and trustful of, large institutions than we were at times in the past. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities, many of which we’ve formed online, and their sensibilities can be more peculiar and unforgiving.

Facebook, along with other social media, definitely conspires in this. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges.

It’s not about some sorcerer’s algorithm. It’s about a tribalism that has existed for as long as humankind has and is now rooted in the fertile soil of the Internet, which is coaxing it toward a full and insidious flower

For example, psychologist Tim Pychyl has co-authored a paper showing that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on a previous exam were actually less likely to procrastinate on their next test. He and others have also found that people prone to procrastination are, overall, less compassionate toward themselves — an insight that points to ways to help.

But psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism, as an emotion-focused coping strategy. [People who procrastinate are] using avoidance to cope with emotions, and many of them are unconscious emotions.

they found our brain processes present self and future self differently. We think of future self more like a stranger.

I used to procrastinate, and now I don't, because I got all these wicked strategies. And it’s every level: some of it’s behavioral, some of it’s emotional, some of it’s cognitive.

Whenever we face a task, we’re not going to feel like doing it. Somehow adults believe that their motivational state has to match the task at hand. We say, "I’m not in the mood." Our motivational state rarely matches the task at hand, so we always have to use self-regulation skills to bring our focus to it. So at first it will be, "Okay, I recognize that I don’t feel like it, but I’m just gonna get started."

We know from psychological research by [Andrew] Elliot and others that progress on our goals feeds our well-being. So the most important thing you can do is bootstrap a little progress. Get a little progress, and that’s going to fuel your well-being and your motivation.

mplementation intentions take the form of "If, then." "If the phone rings, then I’m not going to answer it." "If my friends call me to say we’re going out, I’m going to say no." So you’ve already made this pre-commitment.

OHIO rule: only handle it once. And I’m like that with email. I look at that email and say, "I can reply to it now, or I can throw it out," but there’s not much of a middle ground. I’m not going to save it for a while.

We [think] that people will make less procrastinatory choices now because they’ll realize that "It’s me in the future we’re talking about here. I’m going to be under the gun."

Roughly 5 percent of the population has such a problem with chronic procrastination that it seriously affects their lives

Conventional wisdom has long suggested that procrastination is all about poor time management and willpower. But more recently, psychologists have been discovering that it may have more to do with how our brains and emotions work.

Procrastination, they've realized, appears to be a coping mechanism. When people procrastinate, they're avoiding emotionally unpleasant tasks and instead doing something that provides a temporary mood boost. The procrastination itself then causes shame and guilt — which in turn leads people to procrastinate even further, creating a vicious cycle.

But psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism, as an emotion-focused coping strategy. [People who procrastinate are] using avoidance to cope with emotions, and many of them are unconscious emotions.

Recently we’ve been doing research that relates to the work on "present self"/"future self" because what’s happening with procrastination is that "present self" is always trumping "future self."

He’s shown that in experimental settings if someone sees their own picture digitally aged, they’re more likely to allocate funds to retirement. When [the researchers] did the fMRI studies, they found our brain processes present self and future self differently. We think of future self more like a stranger.

The people who see the present and future self as more overlapping have more self-continuity and report less procrastination.

e [think] that people will make less procrastinatory choices now because they’ll realize that "It’s me in the future we’re talking about here. I’m going to be under the gun."

Our motivational state rarely matches the task at hand, so we always have to use self-regulation skills to bring our focus to it. So at first it will be, "Okay, I recognize that I don’t feel like it, but I’m just gonna get started."

Implementation intentions take the form of "If, then." "If the phone rings, then I’m not going to answer it." "If my friends call me to say we’re going out, I’m going to say no." So you’ve already made this pre-commitment.

Because it’s all about self-deception — you aren’t aware that it’s going to cost you, but you are.

OHIO rule: only handle it once. And I’m like that with email. I look at that email and say, "I can reply to it now, or I can throw it out," but there’s not much of a middle ground. I’m not going to save it for a while.

And it’s every level: some of it’s behavioral, some of it’s emotional, some of it’s cognitive

In debates and on the trail, various GOP candidates have spent time discussing the merits and demerits of specific justices. 

He has vowed to pick "rock-ribbed conservatives" to the court, and has also said that Chief Justice John Roberts -- whom Cruz himself once supported -- is actually a bad choice to lead the court because he lacks a "true conservative record."

Clinton's op-ed is also notable in that she argues how Republicans see this election as their chance to "pack the courts with jurists who will turn back the clock" on progress -- apparently an acknowledgement that some of the more controversial cases to go before the justices got their start in lower courts that were willing to hear them.   

"After years of accusing liberals of judicial activism, conservatives are wholeheartedly relying on Republican-appointed judges to undo progressive achievements," Clinton wrote. "They’re using radical legal strategies to accomplish through the courts what they’ve failed to do through legislation, like dismembering the Voting Rights Act or attacking unions."

they're voting for many things at once.

If you know everyone is going to see what you wear and judge it, then what you wear becomes fraught with meaning.

She realized very early on that everything she did had ramifications

Just because something appears trivial does not mean it is any less powerful as a means of persuasion and outreach. In some ways its very triviality — the fact that everyone could talk about it, dissect it, imitate it — makes fashion the most potentially viral item in the subliminal political toolbox.

as she said to Vogue in her third cover story, the most of any first lady, one of the factors in choosing a garment always has to be, “Is it cute?”

she saw it as a way to frame her own independence and points of difference, add to her portfolio and amplify her husband’s agenda.

Mrs. Obama seemed to work with them all.

We all tend to gravitate toward certain designers in part because of sheer laziness: We know what suits us, what we like, and so we go there first. To have been so, well, evenhanded in her choices could have happened only with careful calculation.

Especially because Mrs. Obama not only wore their clothes, she also took their business seriously, framing fashion as a credible, covetable job choice during her education initiatives.

If you think that was an accident, there’s a bridge I can sell you — just as the fact she wore Jason Wu to her husband’s farewell address in Chicago, a designer she also wore at both inaugural balls, was no coincidence. It was closure.

But above all, her wardrobe was representative of the country her husband wanted to lead.

It may be because the point of what Mrs. Obama wore was never simply that it was good to mix up your wardrobe among a group of designers, but rather that clothes were most resonant when they were an expression of commitment to an idea, or an ideal, that had resonance.

One common strategy for thinking about this is to suggest that what we used to call the whole universe is just a small part of everything there is, and that we live in a kind of bubble universe, a small region of something much larger

Newton realized there had to be some force holding the moon in its orbit around the earth, to keep it from wandering off, and he knew also there was a force that was pulling the apple down to the earth. And so what suddenly struck him was that those could be one and the same thing, the same force

That was a physical discovery, a physical discovery of momentous importance, as important as anything you could ever imagine because it knit together the terrestrial realm and the celestial realm into one common physical picture. It was also a philosophical discovery in the sense that philosophy is interested in the fundamental natures of things.

The problem is that quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world. And that's very clear when you look at any of the foundational discussions. This is what Einstein was upset about; this is what Schrodinger was upset about. Quantum mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong, Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong about that. But the effect of it was to shut down perfectly legitimate physics questions within the physics community for about half a century. And now we're coming out of that

The basic philosophical question, going back to Plato, is "What is x?" What is virtue? What is justice? What is matter? What is time? You can ask that about dark energy - what is it? And it's a perfectly good question.

right now there are just way too many freely adjustable parameters in physics. Everybody agrees about that. There seem to be many things we call constants of nature that you could imagine setting at different values, and most physicists think there shouldn't be that many, that many of them are related to one another. Physicists think that at the end of the day there should be one complete equation to describe all physics, because any two physical systems interact and physics has to tell them what to do. And physicists generally like to have only a few constants, or parameters of nature. This is what Einstein meant when he famously said he wanted to understand what kind of choices God had --using his metaphor-- how free his choices were in creating the universe, which is just asking how many freely adjustable parameters there are. Physicists tend to prefer theories that reduce that number

You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn't really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don't change -- which is perfectly true -- and then you're always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn't change, because your representations of it don't.

physicists for almost a hundred years have been dissuaded from trying to think about fundamental questions. I think most physicists would quite rightly say "I don't have the tools to answer a question like 'what is time?' - I have the tools to solve a differential equation." The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore.

The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.

Young people, who have no place in this dead-eyed, sanitized landscape, scarcely venture from their bedrooms. Political freedom now means choosing between alternative versions of market fundamentalism.

Even the freedoms we do possess we tend not to exercise. We spend hours every day watching other people doing what we might otherwise be doing: dancing, singing, playing sports, even cooking. We venture outdoors to seek marginally different varieties of stuff we already possess

We entertain the illusion that we have chosen our lives. Why, if this is the case, do our apparent choices differ so little from those of other people? Why do we live and work and travel and eat and dress and entertain ourselves in almost identical fashion? It’s no wonder, when we possess and use it so little, that we make a fetish out of freedom.Continue reading the main story

our survival in the modern economy requires the use of few of the mental and physical capacities we possess. Sometimes it feels like a small and shuffling life. Our humdrum, humiliating lives leave us, I believe, ecologically bored.

Across many rich nations, especially the United States, global competition is causing the abandonment of farming on less fertile land. Rather than trying to tame and hold back the encroaching wilds, I believe we should help to accelerate the process of reclamation, removing redundant roads and fences, helping to re-establish missing species, such as wolves and cougars and bears, building bridges between recovering habitats to create continental-scale wildlife corridors, such as those promoted by the Rewilding Institute.

This rewilding of the land permits, if we choose, a partial rewilding of our own lives. It allows us to step into a world that is not controlled and regulated, to imagine ourselves back into the rawer life from which we came

Domenech is right that Zuckerberg’s empire still needs vigilant watchdogs and rigorous critiques. True, any Facebook bias is likely to be subtler-than-subtle. But because so many people effectively live inside its architecture while online, there’s a power in a social network’s subtlety that no newspaper or news broadcast could ever match.

Human nature being what it is, a social network managed and maintained by people who tend to share a particular worldview — left-libertarian and spiritual-but-not-religious, if I judge the biases of Silicon Valley right — will tend to gently catechize its users into that perspective.

. The way even an “impersonal” algorithm is set up, the kind of stories it elevates and buries, is also a form of catechesis, a way of teaching human beings about how they should think about the world.

even what seem like offhand choices — like Google’s choice of its Doodle subject, to cite a different new media entity — point people toward particular icons, particular ideals.

There is a genuine psychological reality behind the idea of free will. The debate is merely about whether this reality deserves to be called free will.

Our actions cannot break the laws of physics, but they can be influenced by things beyond gravity, friction, and electromagnetic charges. No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization.

Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them

Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there—it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.

If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting

That, in a nutshell, is the inner deciding process that humans have evolved. That is the reality behind the idea of free will: these processes of rational choice and self-control

Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it

Self-control furnishes the possibility of acting from rational principles rather than acting on impulse.

Understanding free will in this way allows us to reconcile the popular understanding of free will as making choices with our scientific understanding of the world.

This corruption map of France seems to be a local initiative. Similar maps of other countries would make for equally compelling reading. Except of course the corruption maps of Somalia, South Sudan and North Korea – they would be totally blank.

Nevertheless, she seemed to choose her words carefully as she spoke about the campaign.

she wanted to get away from the idea that this project was politically motivated, or anti-Trump.

But the issue of ambition, and the way it is used to defame women, is nevertheless personal to her.

This was confusing to Ms. Burch, who never saw herself as being a particularly threatening person.

“I do it, too,” she said. “I’m guilty of all of it.”

And the word “feminist” began to shed its Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan connotations, as women like Madonna went from saying they are “not feminists” but “humanists” to wearing T-shirts at anti-Trump events that had the word “feminist” emblazoned across the center.

what exercize and diet and sleep do for the body, thought and practice and sleep do for the brain. And when this kind of practice of something becomes effortless, when it becomes second nature, instinctual, it becomes part of you and you of it. You simply cannot describe the great skill of a craftsman, or a cook, or a priest, or an artist except by observing how he or she has become what she creates and does.

where the idea and the practice and the person simply become one, human activity takes flight. It becomes integral.

He contends in “Coming Apart” that there was far greater social cohesion across class lines 50 years ago because “the powerful norms of social and economic behavior in 1960 swept virtually everyone into their embrace,” adding in a Jan. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal thatOver the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.According to Murray, higher education has now become a proxy for higher IQ, as elite colleges become sorting mechanisms for finding, training and introducing to each other the most intellectually gifted young people. Fifty years into the education revolution, members of this elite are likely to be themselves the offspring of cognitively gifted parents, and to ultimately bear cognitively gifted children.

“Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere.”

Murray makes the case that cognitive ability is worth ever more in modern advanced, technologically complex hypercompetitive market economies. As an example, Murray quotes Bill Gates: “Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war or we won’t have a future.”

Murray alleges that those with higher IQs now exhibit personal and social behavioral choices in areas like marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity that allow them to enjoy secure and privileged lives. Whites in the lower social-economic strata are less cognitively able – in Murray’s view – and thus less well-equipped to resist the lure of the sexual revolution and doctrines of self-actualization so they succumb to higher rates of family dissolution, non-marital births, worklessness and criminality. This interaction between IQ and behavioral choice, in Murray’s framework, is what has led to the widening income and cultural gap.

Despised by the left, Murray has arguably done liberals a service by requiring them to deal with those whose values may seem alien, to examine the unintended consequences of their policies and to grapple with the political impact of assertions made by the right. He has also amassed substantial evidence to bolster his claims and at the same time elicited a formidable academic counter-attack.

To Murray, the overarching problem is that liberal elites, while themselves living lives of probity, have refused to proselytize for the bourgeois virtues to which they subscribe, thus leaving their less discerning fellow-citizens to flounder in the anti-bourgeois legacy of the counter-cultural 1960s.

“Great Civic Awakening” among the new upper class – an awakening that will lead to the kind of “moral rearmament” and paternalism characteristic of anti-poverty drives in the 19th century. To achieve this, Murray believes, the “new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”

The cognitive elites Murray cites are deeply committed to liberal norms of cultural tolerance and permissiveness. The antipathy to the moralism of the religious right has, in fact, been a major force driving these upscale, secular voters into the Democratic party.

changes in the world economy may be destructive in terms of the old social model, but they are profoundly liberating and benign in and of themselves. The family farm wasn’t dying because capitalism had failed or a Malthusian crisis was driving the world to starvation. The family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended.Mead continues:Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim. It is raining soup, and we are stuck holding a fork.The 21st century, Mead adds,must reinvent the American Dream. It must recast our economic, social, familial, educational and political systems for new challenges and new opportunities. Some hallowed practices and institutions will have to go under the bus. But in the end, the changes will make us richer, more free and more secure than we are now.Mead’s predictions may or may not prove prescient, but it his thinking, more than Murray’s, that reflects the underlying optimism that has sustained the United States for more than two centuries — a refusal to believe that anything about human nature is essentially “intractable.” Mead’s way of looking at things is not only more inviting than Murray’s, it is also more on target.