One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the “high school movement” made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education.

The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.

And when the chickens that didn't hatch come home to roost, we will rue the day when, misled by sloppy accounting and rosy scenarios, we gave away the national nest egg.

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

On the political as on the economic front it's important not to fall into the "not as bad as" trap. High unemployment isn't O.K. just because it hasn't hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.

Can we break the machine that is imposing right-wing radicalism on the United States? The scariest part is that the media is part of that machine.