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In all but a handful of instances, the shooter was male. Boys also accounted for more than 80 percent of the victims.

The Times sought to identify every accidental firearm death of a child age 14 and under in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio dating to 1999, and in California to 2007. Records were also obtained from several county medical examiners’ offices in Florida, Illinois and Texas.

In four of the five states — California, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio — The Times identified roughly twice as many accidental killings as were tallied in the corresponding federal data.

Another important aspect of firearm accidents is that a vast majority of victims do not die. Tracking these injuries nationally, however, is arguably just as problematic as tallying fatalities, according to public health researchers. In fact, national figures often cited from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site are an estimate, projected from a sampling taken from hospital emergency departments. Nevertheless, in 2011, the most recent year with available data, the agency estimated that there were 847 unintentional nonfatal firearm injuries among children 14 and under.

More concrete are actual counts of emergency department visits, which are available in a small number of states. In North Carolina, for instance, there were more than 120 such visits for nonfatal gun accidents among children 17 and under in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available.

While about 60 percent of the accidental firearm deaths identified by The Times involved handguns as opposed to long guns, that number was much higher — more than 85 percent — when the victims were very young, under the age of 6. In fact, the average handgun victim was several years younger than long gun victims: between 7 and 8, compared with almost 11.

Over all, the largest number of deaths came at the upper end of the age range, with ages 13 and 14 being most common — not necessarily surprising, given that parents generally allow adolescents greater access to guns. But the third-most common age was 3 (tied with 12), a particularly vulnerable age, when children are curious and old enough to manipulate a firearm but ignorant of the dangers.

About half of the accidents took place inside the child’s home. A third, however, occurred at the house of a friend or a relative, pointing to a potential vulnerability if safe-storage laws apply only to households with children, as in North Carolina.

Even in accidental shootings where criminals were in some way involved, they usually were not the ones pulling the trigger. Rather, they — like many law-abiding adults in these cases — simply left a gun unsecured.

In state after state and often with considerable success, gun rights groups have cited the federal numbers as proof that the problem is nearly inconsequential and that storage laws are unnecessary. Gun Owners of America says on its Web site that children are “130 percent more likely to die from choking on their dinner” than from accidental shootings.

Under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, in fact, gun accidents were the ninth-leading cause of unintentional deaths among children ages 1 to 14 in 2010. (The agency reported 62 such killings that year.) If the actual numbers are, in fact, roughly double, however, gun accidents would rise into the top five or six.

The rifle association and its allies also often note that studies on the impact of safe-storage laws have found mixed results. But those studies are based on the flawed government statistics. “When we’re evaluating child access laws, we’re using total trash data,

A safe-storage bill was introduced in the Ohio legislature in February, prompted by a shooting that killed three students at a high school in suburban Cleveland. But the measure, which would prohibit storing a firearm in a residence in a place readily accessible to a child, has encountered skepticism from the Republicans who control the legislature. “The tenor was, somebody breaks in, do I have time enough to get to my gun?” said State Representative Bill Patmon, a Democrat who introduced the bill.

The N.R.A. has long argued that better education is the key to preventing gun accidents, citing its Eddie Eagle GunSafe program, which teaches children as young as 3 that if they see a gun, they should “stop, don’t touch, leave the area and tell an adult.” The association, which did not respond to a request for comment, says its program has reached more than 26 million children in all 50 states and should be credited for the deep decline in accidental gun deaths shown in federal statistics dating to the mid-1980s.

Beyond the unreliability of the federal data, public health experts have disputed the N.R.A.’s claims, pointing to other potential explanations for the decline, including improvements in emergency medical care, along with data showing fewer households with firearms. They also highlight research indicating that admonishing children to stay away from guns is often ineffective.

As part of Dr. Kellermann’s study, researchers watched through a one-way mirror as pairs of boys ages 8 to 12 were left alone in an examination room at a clinic in Atlanta. Unknown to the children, an inoperative .38-caliber handgun was concealed in a cabinet drawer.

Playing and exploring over the next 15 minutes, one boy after another — three-quarters of the 64 children — found the gun. Two-thirds handled it, and one-third actually pulled the trigger. Just one child went to tell an adult about the gun, and he was teased by his peers for it. More than 90 percent of the boys said they had had some gun safety instruction.

Other research has found that simply having a firearm in the household is correlated with an increased risk of accidental shooting death. In one study, published in 2003 in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, the risk was more than three times as high for one gun, and almost four times as high for more than one.

requiring, or even encouraging, efforts to introduce “smart gun” technology remains unpopular with the gun lobby, which has worked to undermine such research and attempts to regulate firearms as a dangerous consumer product.

But Taurus backed out within a few months, citing competing priorities, and the project fell apart. Charles Vehlow, Metal Storm’s chief executive at the time, said that while he did not know exactly what pressures Taurus faced, there was a general wariness of smart-gun efforts among manufacturers and pro-gun groups. “There was no question that the N.R.A. was very sensitive and was aware of what we were doing,” he said.

The Colt’s Manufacturing Company and Smith & Wesson experienced a backlash against their own smart-gun programs, which were abandoned amid financial problems caused, in part, by boycotts from gun groups and others in the industry. So unpopular was the whole smart-gun concept that Colt’s Manufacturing later could not even find a buyer for its patents, said Carlton Chen, a former lawyer for the company.

Gun rights lobbyists have also helped keep firearms and ammunition beyond the reach of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has the power to regulate other products that are dangerous to children. The N.R.A. argues that the commission would provide a back door for gun control advocates to restrict the manufacture of firearms. Proponents of regulation say guns pose too great a hazard to exclude them from scrutiny.

On Sept. 30, Congress passed legislation extending a special visa program for Iraqis. That a Congress seemingly incapable of accomplishing anything unanimously passed this bill just before the government shutdown is encouraging, but legislation meant to improve the special visa system for Afghans remains up in the air.

Amin was probably as indispensable to those other Marines as he was to me. And if our leaders would apply the same sort of focus and industriousness to the special visa program that Amin applies every day to the war effort they oversee, perhaps they could prevent any more of our linguists from being dishonored on Facebook.

[T]he Obama Administration, which promised voters that it would be the most transparent in history, has bowed to pressure from a faction within the CIA to keep secret the most thorough accounting we have of the agency’s lawless, immoral behavior during the Bush years. In doing so, Team Obama makes it less likely that we learn the lessons of CIA torture, and more likely that America tortures again one day.

“The American culture is so in love with athletics that even though many people know the right thing to do, they can’t do it.”

the growth in educational spending trails far behind that of athletic spending — especially at community colleges and Division II and III institutions.

Inflation-adjusted athletic spending also increased, by 24.8 percent, at public four-year colleges in all divisions in those years, while spending on instruction and academic support remained nearly flat, and public service and research expenditures declined

The fastest growth in athletic spending was at Division III schools without football programs, where median inflation-adjusted spending for each student-athlete more than doubled from 2004 to 2012.

Even colleges without powerhouse sports programs, she said, are racing to build their athletic programs as a recruitment tool.

“My hypothesis, and it’s not yet fully proven, is that these are mostly schools that are very tuition-dependent, and they’re spending more on sports to recruit more students,” Ms. Thornton said. “But I think it’s ludicrous.”

Faculty salaries increased 2.4 percent last year, on average, while top administrators received large raises.

Lower taxes means less for government to spend on programs to help those near the bottom. Social Security typically provides a retiree with about half of his working income; European countries often replace two-thirds of earnings.

And income taxes for the highest-earning Americans have fallen sharply, contributing meaningfully to the income inequality problem. In 1995, the 400 taxpayers with the biggest incomes paid an average of 30 percent in taxes; by 2009, the tax rate of those Americans had dropped to 20 percent.

Conservatives may bemoan the size of our government; in reality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, total tax revenues in the United States this year will be smaller on a relative basis than those of any other member country.

Similarly, we spend less on early childhood education and care. And another big difference, of course, is the presence of national health insurance in most European countries.

All told, social spending in the United States is below the average of that of the wealthiest countries. And other governments help their less fortunate citizens to a greater extent than we do in ways that are not captured in the income statistics

The United States, which is the only developed country without a national paid parental leave policy, also has no mandated paid holidays or annual vacation; in Europe, workers are guaranteed at least 20 days and as many as 35 days of paid leave.

, on the programmatic side, among the many meritorious aspects of the much-maligned Affordable Care Act are its redistributionist elements: higher taxes on investment income and some health care businesses are being used to provide low-cost or free health care to a projected 26 million Americans near the bottom of the income scale.

more can and should be done — like raising the minimum wage nationwide and expanding the earned-income tax credit (a step supported by Republicans).

Critics from the right argue that doing more to level the income pyramid would hurt growth. In a recent paper, the International Monetary Fund dismissed that concern and suggested that a more equal distribution of income could instead raise the growth rate because of the added access to education, health care and other opportunities.

developers are turning 57th Street in Manhattan into “Billionaires’ Row,” with apartments selling for north of $90 million each.

Forbes’s list of the world’s billionaires has added more than 200 names since 2012 and is now at 1,426. The United States once again leads the list, with 442 billionaires.

Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, recently released a study finding that a staggering 5.8 million young people nationwide — one in seven of those ages 16 to 24 — are disconnected, meaning not employed or in school, “adrift at society’s margins,” as the group put it.

“In 2012, real median household income was 8.3 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.”

“During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

“The 1,168,354 homeless students enrolled by U.S. preschools and K-12 schools in the 2011-2012 school year is the highest number on record, and a 10 percent increase over the previous school year. The number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the recession.”

“These new poverty estimates released on Sept. 19, 2013, suggest that child poverty plateaued in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but there is no evidence of any reduction in child poverty even as we enter the fourth year of ‘recovery.’ ”

the number of households living on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month increased from about 636,000 in 1996 to about 1.46 million households in early 2011, a percentage growth of 130 percent.”

“Cash assistance benefits for the nation’s poorest families with children fell again in purchasing power in 2013 and are now at least 20 percent below their 1996 levels in 37 states, after adjusting for inflation.”

The number of Americans now enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is near record highs, and yet both houses of Congress have passed bills to cut funding to the program. The Senate measure would cut about $4 billion, while the House measure would cut roughly ten times as much, dropping millions of Americans from the program.

Chile’s effort, started as a pilot program in 2010, has attracted nearly 2,000 entrepreneurs, whose businesses have raised more than $100 million in financing.

Mr. Wadhwa described Chile’s initiative as the world’s most aggressive effort to lure entrepreneurs and said it was putting Chile on the map as a destination for start-ups.

A sweetener that the Spanish government should highlight, he said, is its unsecured lending program, which has about €100 million, or $125 million, to lend to innovative small and midsize companies annually. The loans, from €25,000 to €1.5 million, are available to all entrepreneurs, regardless of nationality, who have a business based in Spain

Last year, it made more than 600 unsecured loans to entrepreneurs, with an average amount of about €131,000.

this, of course, is not an accident. When a former president and vice-president openly back torture, and when the CIA has been engaging in a massive p.r. campaign to argue – against what we now know are incontrovertible facts from the CIA’s own records – that it saved thousands of lives, it will affect public opinion. There are always atavist and repellent sentiments in war time. The difference now is that a huge section of the elite endorses them.

We now know that the CIA contracted out the torture to two individuals without “specialized knowledge of al Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism or any relevant cultural or linguistic experience.” They had never interrogated anyone – yet they got a $181 million contract to run the program. They were sadists:

They had a pecuniary interest in the criminal enterprise. And they were making things up as they went along:

Why aren’t the defenders of torture horrified by this amateurism? Where are the Republican voices of outrage that a serious torture program was handed out to amateur contractors who had no idea what they were doing and no moral compass at all?

CIA sources were lying. KSM was waterboarded 183 times over a matter of weeks. And the waterboarding was not just 2 1/2 minutes of panic. It was full-fledged, endless, soul-breaking, body-destroying torture of a kind practiced in the past by totalitarian or authoritarian police states:

What this report proves – not asserts, but proves – is that the torture the US inflicted on prisoners was of an uncontrolled, nightmarish quality whose impact was so great that even the junior grunts on the night beat at Abu Ghraib knew what they were supposed to do.

In a civilized society, there really would be no debate over this. And before 9/11, there wasn’t. Ever since, this country has slid and then fallen out of the civilized world and out of the core American traditions of humanity and legal warfare. Krauthammer can be seen as emblematic of that slide – someone whose early abhorrence at torture and defense of it only in its mildest and rarest forms has slowly succumbed to a full-fledged defense of a program that violated every rule he said should be in place to protect us from the abyss. This is not surprising. When you start to torture, the sheer evil of what you are doing requires that you believe ever more in its value. You can never admit error, because it would mean you have committed crimes against humanity without even the defense of acquiring any useful intelligence. You are revealed as monsters – and you cannot accept that of yourself or of those you know. And so you insist – with ever-rising certainty – that the torture worked – even though that’s irrelevant as a matter of morality and of law, and even though your own internal documents prove that it didn’t.

And so you become the monster you were supposed to be fighting. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

But with the web, “all of the sudden we began moving to a market where first mover advantage became enormous,” he said. Connection speeds were growing faster, Americans were starting to shop online, and multiplying e-commerce sites fought gladiatorial battles to control most every area of spending.

If the dawn of the start-up era meant that consumer-oriented ideas were becoming more important than proprietary technology, he asked himself aloud, shouldn’t more women have flooded in?

“The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,” he added. “The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.”

David Sacks, on the other hand, was unmarried and unencumbered, and in 1999 he left politics, his law degree and a job at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company to join his Stanford Review friends at a technology start-up, because of “the desire to live on the edge, to fight an epic battle, to experience in a very diluted way what previous generations must have felt as they prepared to go to war,” he wrote at the time. For his generation, he wrote, “instead of violence, unbridled capitalism has become the preferred vehicle for channeling their energy, intellect and aggression.”

his lack of social grace became an asset, according to Mr. Thiel and other former colleagues. He did not waste time on meetings that seemed pointless, and he bluntly insisted that the engineers whittle an eight-page PayPal registration process down to one.

But those debates did a great deal for Mr. Sacks. After graduation, he and Mr. Thiel published “The Diversity Myth,” a book-length critique of Stanford’s efforts. Within a few more years, he, Mr. Thiel, Mr. Rabois and others had transformed themselves into a close-knit network of technology entrepreneurs — innovators who created billion-dollar business after billion-dollar business, using the ideas, ethos and group bonds they had honed at The Stanford Review.

he and Mr. Thiel now had a setting in which to try out their ideas about diversity and meritocracy. “In the start-up crucible, performing is all that matters,” Mr. Sacks wrote about that time. He wanted to give all job applicants tests of cognitive ability, according to his colleague Keith Rabois, and when the company searched for a new chief executive, one of the requirements was an I.Q. of 160 — genius level.

intentionally or not, he stated something many people quietly believed: The same thing that made Silicon Valley phenomenally successful also kept it homogeneous, and start-ups had an almost inevitable like-with-like quality.

The kind of common ground shared by the early PayPal leaders “is always the critical ingredient on the founding teams,” Mr. Thiel said in an interview. “You have these great friendships that were built over some period of time. Silicon Valley flows out of deep relationships that people have built. That’s the structural reality.”

Another woman from the class of 1994 was quoted in the Fortune article: Trae Vassallo, who was Traci Neist when she built the taco-eating machine all those years ago, attended Stanford Business School with Ms. Herrin and Ms. Bianchini, co-founded a mobile device company, and then joined Kleiner Perkins, a premier venture capital firm.

The success of the struggle to create PayPal, and its eventual sale price, gave the men a new power: the knowledge to create new companies and the ability to fund their own and one another’s. Billion-dollar start-ups had been rare. But in the next few years, the so-called PayPal Mafia went on to found seven companies that reached blockbuster scale, including YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp and a business-messaging service called Yammer, founded by Mr. Sacks and sold a few years later to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.

Since 1999, the number of female partners in venture capital has declined by nearly half, from 10 percent to 6 percent, according to a recent Babson College study.

in early 2014, Ms. Vassallo was quietly let go. The firm was downsizing over all, especially in green technology, one of Ms. Vassallo’s specialties, and men were shown the exit as well. But in interviews, several former colleagues said it was far from an easy environment for women, with all-male outings and fierce internal competition for who got which board seat — meaning internal credit — for each company, not to mention a sexual discrimination lawsuit filed by a female junior partner, scheduled for trial in early 2015.

They also said that Ms. Vassallo, earnest and so technical that she started a robotics program at a local girls’ school, had not been as forceful, or as adept a politician, as some of her male peers.

Less than 10 years after graduation, he and Mr. Thiel had been transformed from outcasts into favorites with a reputation for seeing the future. Far from the only libertarians in Silicon Valley, they had finally found an environment that meshed perfectly with their desire for unfettered competition and freedom from constraints. The money they made seemed like vindication of their ideas.

As classmates started conversations with greetings like “How’s your fund?” some of those who did not work in technology joked that they felt like chumps. The Stanford campus had gone computer science crazy, with the majority of students taking programming courses. A career in technology didn’t feel like a risk anymore — it felt like a wise bet, said Jennifer Widom, a programming professor turned engineering dean. Computer science “is a degree that guarantees you a future, regardless of what form you decide to take it in,” she said.

The nature of start-ups was shifting again, too, this time largely in women’s favor. From servers onward, many components could be inexpensively licensed instead of custom-built. Founders could turn to a multiplying array of investment sources, meaning they no longer had to be supplicants at a handful of male-run venture firms. The promise that the Internet would be a leveler was finally becoming a bit more fulfilled.

The frenzy had an unlikely effect on the some members of the Stanford Review group: They were becoming cheerleaders for women in technology, not for ideological reasons, but for market-based ones.

Like many others, he was finding that the biggest obstacle to starting new companies was a dearth of technical talent so severe they worried it would hinder innovation.

The real surprise of the reunion weekend, however, was that more of the women in the class of ’94 were finally becoming entrepreneurs, later and on a smaller scale than many of the men, but founders nonetheless.

The rhythms of their lives and the technology industry were finally clicking: Companies were becoming easier to start just as their children were becoming more self-sufficient, and they did not want to miss another chance.

“I think this anxiety is the idea of seeing France give up on itself, of changing to the point of no longer being recognizable,” said the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, whose much-debated 2013 book, “L’identité Malheureuse,” or “The Unhappy Identity,” discussed the problems immigration poses for French identity and cultural integration. “People are homesick at home,

Mr. Houellebecq rejected the idea that literature could alter events.“I don’t have other examples of a novel changing the course of history,” Mr. Houellebecq said on the same program. “Other things change the course of history. Essays, ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ things like that, but not novels. That has never happened.”Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

Mr. Houellebecq called the novel “a political fiction,” in the same vein as those of Joseph Conrad or John Buchan.

Commentators said that both “The French Suicide” and “Submission” would ultimately shore up the political fortunes of the National Front, a growing if incoherent mix of anti-establishment nativism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-NATO and anti-European Union fervor.

“The left has nothing to propose or to respond, and Zemmour and Houellebecq profit from this absence,” said Eric Naulleau, Mr. Zemmour’s more left-leaning co-host on a weekly television program and the author of a 2005 essay critical of Mr. Houellebecq.“One flees to the past and the other flees to the future,” Mr. Naulleau added of the two authors, “but neither offers any answers.”

Mr. Graham added: “They’ve tried to create a nuclear program, not a peaceful nuclear power plant. They’re the enemy of us.”

in reality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, total tax revenues in the United States this year will be smaller on a relative basis than those of any other member country.

That’s because our taxes, while progressive, are low by international standards and our social welfare programs — ranging from unemployment benefits to disability insurance to retirement payments — are consequently less generous.

Lower taxes means less for government to spend on programs to help those near the bottom. Social Security typically provides a retiree with about half of his working income; European countries often replace two-thirds of earnings.

Similarly, we spend less on early childhood education and care. And another big difference, of course, is the presence of national health insurance in most European countries.

other governments help their less fortunate citizens to a greater extent than we do in ways that are not captured in the income statistics. The United States, which is the only developed country without a national paid parental leave policy, also has no mandated paid holidays or annual vacation; in Europe, workers are guaranteed at least 20 days and as many as 35 days of paid leave.

Critics from the right argue that doing more to level the income pyramid would hurt growth. In a recent paper, the International Monetary Fund dismissed that concern and suggested that a more equal distribution of income could instead raise the growth rate because of the added access to education, health care and other opportunities.

what if the template for football’s future is not the fate of boxing but rather that of the tobacco industry?

About 18 percent of American adults now smoke — fewer than one in five. Tobacco’s shift from integral part of American life to its fringes took about half a century.

The proposed settlement has been almost universally perceived as a victory for the league. With it, the N.F.L. bought itself — cheaply, considering its $9 billion in annual revenue — a degree of short-term business certainty. It initially agreed to set aside $765 million for brain-injured players or, in the case of those who died, their heirs. After Brody, who presides over the suit, said the fund might not cover payments to all those who qualified, the league agreed to a deal with no upper limit on its liability. But because of how the settlement delineates which afflictions qualify for financial compensation and caps the awards on what can go out to individuals, the N.F.L.'s total liability, paid out over decades, may not rise much beyond $1 billion

That’s nothing for an entity as rich as the N.F.L. Goodell, the league’s commissioner, made $44 million last year — or nearly nine times the maximum payment for the most severely brain-damaged N.F.L. retiree.

But the settlement does get money into the hands of some players who need it desperately, perhaps soon. It also sets aside $112 million for lawyers, who, if the case had gone to trial, might have waited years to be paid.

It is shortsighted, however, to assume that the N.F.L. and its owners will emerge from the settlement unscathed or that the league’s economic and cultural status are not under threat. Now that the N.F.L. has acknowledged that its product comes with dire health consequences, the sport, below the professional level, faces legal and regulatory challenges that will most likely intensify in the coming years.

It’s possible that the very thing meant to protect players — new protocols that define how they should be evaluated for a possible brain injury, and how long they should be kept out of play if one is diagnosed or suspected — will actually put school districts, administrators and coaches at more legal risk. Now that they have, in a sense, been forewarned, what happens if they don’t follow the protocols or don’t have certified athletic trainers on staff or coaches smart enough to deal with possible concussions while they are also deciding on the right third-down play?

What’s more, insurers may in time deem the sport too risky. Health insurers might treat it as a costly risk factor like smoking or a bad driving record. As football becomes more and more regulated, many districts may reasonably conclude that it’s more than they can handle.

“but you have to ask how the concussions issue changes the landscape from a law-enforcement perspective. I think it has to over time, because we now know that players are suffering repeated insults to the parts of the brain that cause changes in behavior.” Rates of smoking plunged and the industry declined because tobacco use could not be made safe. The N.F.L. may be at a similar juncture now. It has instituted rules changes to make its own games less violent and is funding and promulgating supposedly less dangerous ways to play at the youth level. But there is no assurance that any of it will make football any more healthful than low-tar cigarettes made smoking. The burden will fall on the N.F.L. to litigate the concussion issue in public and prove that its sport does not rob participants of their consciousness.

Between 2010 and 2012, Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth-football program, experienced a 10 percent drop in participation after years of steady growth. It attributed the decline to concerns over concussions. There’s no reason to think its numbers won’t continue to fall.

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.

There are strong theoretical justifications for the use of a relative poverty measure. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development puts it this way:In order to participate fully in the social life of a community, individuals may need a level of resources that is not too inferior to the norms of a community. For example, the clothing budget that allows a child not to feel ashamed of his school attire is much more related to national living standards than to strict requirements for physical survival

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.

Instead of increasing public funds for higher education, it suggests taking financial assistance that now goes to higher-income families and redirecting it to the neediest.

We now have robust results showing that vocational programs like career academies help disadvantaged young people get jobs and raise their marriage rates. Parent-coaching programs improve disadvantaged children’s outcomes so much that they save public money.

The sad truth is that neither party has done enough to address the shame of deep-rooted poverty in America. So let’s hope for a real contest in this area, because everybody loses — above all, America’s neediest — when most of the time one party doesn’t even bother to show up.

Much depends, however, on whether China — North Korea’s leading trade partner and diplomatic shield — will enforce it.

The measure’s toughest component would require all countries to inspect all cargo passing through their territory to or from North Korea. In the past, inspections were required only if there was reasonable suspicion of contraband aboard.

It prohibits North Korea from sending martial arts experts to train police officers in foreign countries, as a United Nations panel recently accused Pyongyang of doing in Uganda.

Although prices have fallen in recent years, minerals still account for 53 percent of North Korea’s $2.5 billion in exports to China, its chief supplier of oil.

The Chinese ambassador, Liu Jieyi, focused on the North’s Jan. 6 and Feb. 7 tests, done in violation of previous resolutions. He also expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of sanctions, and used the occasion to criticize an American proposal to deploy a missile shield in South Korea.

China’s agreement to limit imports of North Korean coal and iron ore came with a condition: that it should be demonstrated that such imports would support the North’s illicit weapons programs

Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.

Meanwhile, the dividing line that used to be the most crucial of them all—class—has increasingly become a division within the parties, not between them.

Since 1984, nearly every Democratic presidential-primary race has ended as a contest between a “wine track” candidate who appealed to professionals (Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and Barack Obama) and a “beer track” candidate who mobilized the remains of the old industrial working class (Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton).

The Republicans have their equivalent in the battles between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” candidates. Until this decade, however, both parties—and especially the historically more cohesive Republicans—managed to keep sufficient class peace to preserve party unity.

The Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S. economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In 2014, real median household income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well below the level in 1999. The country has recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have not. Many Republicans haven’t shared in the recovery and continued upward flight of their more affluent fellow partisans.

What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors—himself included!—as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite.

It’s uncertain whether any Tea Partier ever really carried a placard that read keep your government hands off my medicare. But if so, that person wasn’t spouting gibberish. The Obama administration had laid hands on Medicare. It hoped to squeeze $500 billion out of the program from 2010 to 2020 to finance health insurance for the uninsured. You didn’t have to look up the figures to have a sense that many of the uninsured were noncitizens (20 percent), or that even more were foreign-born (27 percent). In the Tea Party’s angry town-hall meetings, this issue resonated perhaps more loudly than any other—the ultimate example of redistribution from a deserving “us” to an undeserving “them.”

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Owners of capital assets, employers of low-skill laborers, and highly compensated professionals tend to benefit economically from the arrival of immigrants. They are better positioned to enjoy the attractive cultural and social results of migration (more-interesting food!) and to protect themselves against the burdensome impacts (surges in non-English-proficient pupils in public schools). A pro-immigration policy shift was one more assertion of class interest in a party program already brimful of them.

The Republican National Committee made it all official in a March 2013 postelection report signed by party eminences. The report generally avoided policy recommendations, with a notable exception: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.

Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid. Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership

In 2011–12, the longest any of the “not Romneys” remained in first place was six weeks. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated among social and religious conservatives.

The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”

What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans

Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.

Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.

More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim.

Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”

He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told The Washington Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”

He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

Trump has destroyed one elite-favored presidential candidacy, Scott Walker’s, and crippled two others, Jeb Bush’s and Chris Christie’s. He has thrown into disarray the party’s post-2012 comeback strategy, and pulled into the center of national discussion issues and constituencies long relegated to the margins.

Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.

there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.

Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.

Yet even if the Republican donor elite can keep control of the party while doubling down, it’s doubtful that the tactic can ultimately win presidential elections.

The “change nothing but immigration” advice was a self-flattering fantasy from the start. Immigration is not the main reason Republican presidential candidates lose so badly among Latino and Asian American voters, and never was: Latino voters are more likely to list education and health care as issues that are extremely important to them. A majority of Asian Americans are non-Christian and susceptible to exclusion by sectarian religious themes.

Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.”

Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.

Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuitio

Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right

True, center-right conservative parties backed by broad multiethnic coalitions of the middle class have gained and exercised power in other English-speaking countries, even as Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012. But the most-influential voices in American conservatism reject the experience of their foreign counterparts as weak, unprincipled, and unnecessary.

“The filibuster used to be bad. Now it’s good.” So Fred Thompson, the late actor and former Republican senator, jokingly told an audience on a National Review cruise shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency for the first time. How partisans feel about process issues is notoriously related to what process would benefit them at any given moment.

There are metrics, after all, by which the post-2009 GOP appears to be a supremely successful political party. Recently, Rory Cooper, of the communications firm Purple Strategies, tallied a net gain to the Republicans of 69 seats in the House of Representatives, 13 seats in the Senate, 900-plus seats in state legislatures, and 12 governorships since Obama took office. With that kind of grip on state government, in particular, Republicans are well positioned to write election and voting rules that sustain their hold on the national legislature

Maybe the more natural condition of conservative parties is permanent defense—and where better to wage a long, grinding defensive campaign than in Congress and the statehouses? Maybe the presidency itself should be regarded as one of those things that is good to have but not a must-have, especially if obtaining it requires uncomfortable change

“Iran has undertaken significant steps that many people — and I do mean many — doubted would ever come to pass,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday evening at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which earlier issued a report detailing how Iran had shipped 98 percent of its fuel to Russia, dismantled more than 12,000 centrifuges so they could not enrich uranium, and poured cement into the core of a reactor designed to produce plutonium.

The release of the “unjustly detained” Americans, as Mr. Kerry put it, came at some cost: Seven Iranians, either convicted or charged with breaking American embargoes, were released in the prisoner swap, and 14 others were removed from international wanted lists.

They particularly object to the release of about $100 billion in frozen assets — mostly from past oil sales — that Iran will now control, and the end of American and European restrictions on trade that had been imposed as part of the American-led effort to stop the program.

In Tehran and Washington, political battles are still being fought over the merits and dangers of moving toward normal interchanges between two countries that have been avowed adversaries for more than three decades.

But Mr. Kerry suggested that the nuclear deal had broken the cycle of hostility, enabling the secret negotiations that led up to the hostage swap.

“Critics will continue to attack the deal for giving away too much to Tehran,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who started the sanctions against Iran that were lifted Saturday as the No. 3 official in the State Department during the George W. Bush administration.

A copy of the proposed sanction leaked three weeks ago, and the Obama administration pulled it back — perhaps to avoid torpedoing the prisoner swap and the completion of the nuclear deal. Negotiations to win the release of Mr. Rezaian, who had covered the nuclear talks before he was imprisoned on vague charges, were an open secret: Mr. Kerry often alluded to the fact that he was working on the issue behind the scenes.

Then, several weeks ago the Iranians leaked news that they were interested in a swap of their own citizens, which American officials said was an outrageous demand, because they had been indicted or convicted in a truly independent court system.

The result was two parallel races underway — one involving implementing the nuclear deal, the other to get the prisoner swap done while the moment was ripe.

For example, the United States and Iran were struggling late Saturday to define details of what kind of “advanced centrifuges” Iran will be able to develop nearly a decade from now — the kind of definitional difference that can undermine an accord.

The result was that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Zarif veered from the monumental significance of what they were accomplishing — an end to a decade of open hostility — to the minutiae of uranium enrichment.

But Iran has something it desperately needs: Billions in cash, at a time oil shipments have been cut by more than half because of the sanctions, and below $30-a-barrel prices mean huge cuts in national revenue.

senior American official said Saturday that Iran will be able to access about $50 billion of a reported $100 billion in holdings abroad, though others have used higher estimates. The official said Iran will likely need to keep much of those assets abroad to facilitate international trade.

The Obama administration on Saturday also removed 400 Iranians and others from its sanctions list and took other steps to lift selected restrictions on interactions with Iran

Under the new rules put in place, the United States will no longer sanction foreign individuals or firms for buying oil and gas from Iran. The American trade embargo remains in place, but the government will permit certain limited business activities with Iran, such as selling or purchasing Iranian food and carpets and American commercial aircraft and parts.

It is unclear what will happen after the passing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has protected and often fueled the hardliners — but permitted these talks to go ahead.