Middle-class incomes, the core of what we call the "standard of living," have been falling for more than two decades. Though people have known this intuitively, only recently have we heard much about it. Economists and the media have been conditioned to look for the ups and downs in the business cycle, meanwhile missing the single most ominous trend in American economic life.
To Renew America conveys a vivid sense of its author's unusual personality. But the vital core of the book lies elsewhere.
The customary approach to immigration by libertarians has been a simple one.
Newt Gingrich claims that "Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given us the key to viewing current disarray within the positive framwork of a dynamic, exciting future" .
One of the persistent Clintonian themes of the 1994 campaign still endures: if "it's the economy, stupid," then why hasn't President Clinton received the credit among the public for our glorious economic recovery? Hence the Clintonian conclusion that the resounding Democratic defeat was due to their failure to "get the message out" to the public, the message being the good news of our current economic prosperity.
History usually proceeds at a glacial pace, so glacial that often no institutional or political changes seem to be occurring at all. And then, wham! a piling up of a large number of other minor grievances and tensions reaches a certain point, and there is an explosion of radical social change. Changes begin to occur at so rapid a pace that old markets quickly dissolve. Social and political life shifts with blinding speed from stagnation to escalation and volatility. This is what it must have been like living through the French Revolution.
