Politicians, journalists, and commentators on the left argue that most Americans have been exposed to grave economic peril in recent decades — with exploding risks of job and income loss, of bankruptcy, of debt, and of being left without health care threatening the broad middle class well before the recent recession. An honest look at the data, however, shows this popular narrative to be vastly exaggerated — and a major obstacle to fixing America's real economic troubles.
Most Americans now realize that a college degree is essential to upward economic mobility, but for many young people it is a crucial credential that remains out of reach. This situation — intense demand combined with a shortage of affordable supply — cannot last. Much as upstarts and new technologies revolutionized telecommunications and consumer electronics, sweeping changes are about to transform the business model of American higher education.
One of the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis was the need for more effective capital requirements on large banks. If such regulations are poorly designed, however, higher capital requirements can lead to a disastrous credit crunch. By pursuing a balanced approach — one that harnesses the power of markets rather than stifling it — policymakers can both effectively regulate banks' risk-taking and avoid undermining economic growth.
Each year, massive federal programs disburse billions of dollars with no real sense of whether they achieve their goals. New programs are created based on vague and ill-informed projections of their future effects, and bureaucrats in Washington are expected to know far more than any small group of technocrats ever really could. New information technologies can help us close such knowledge gaps — but only if lawmakers allow these innovations to shape and enhance our politics. 
Think tanks are enormously influential in our politics, and are becoming only more so. But recent trends — especially the emergence of more advocacy-oriented think tanks — suggest that these organizations may also be growing more political and less inclined to produce creative policy ideas. Unfortunately, this transformation is occurring just as our public institutions cry out for intelligent reform.
Today's Tea Party movement heavily emphasizes a recovery of the Constitution — including that document's constraints on popular will — as a means of restraining the left's resurgent Progressive impulses. The clash between the Tea Partiers and their critics therefore carries powerful echoes of the last great debate between Progressives and constitutionalists — exactly 100 years ago, in the battle for the soul of the Republican Party before the election of 1912.
Efforts to help the poor in America are frequently derailed by the misguided notion that poverty is best understood through the lens of inequality. Far too often, policymakers succumb to the argument that a widening gap between the richest and poorest Americans is the fundamental economic problem to be solved. But a serious examination of both the premises and reasoning behind this belief show that the left's obsession with the income gap risks neglecting the poor for the sake of an ill-advised ideological quest.
The West's great philosophers and religious thinkers have always insisted that justice must be at the center of political life. But because the term "justice" has been hijacked by the left for the better part of a century, we no longer quite understand what the call to justice means. It is time for conservatives to reclaim this central political idea, and to offer the public their own vision of the just society.
In today's academy, there is a growing movement to judge societies by the happiness (or "subjective well-being") of their people, and to formulate economic and social policy accordingly. But what these scholars mean by happiness turns out to be a shallow hedonism, and the policies they hope to implement would produce an endlessly expanding welfare state.
JANUARY 27, 2012
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