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Leaders in the early Republic had it easier. The work of taming a continent provided every American who wanted one with a full-time job and drew settlers from oceans away. Laws like the Homestead Act of 1862 - which granted any man or woman up to 160 acres of public land if they pledged to cultivate it for five years - tapped into the frontier spirit, providing work opportunities for even the most down-and-out Americans. As more and more members of the workforce began laboring in factories in the 19th century, however, society grew more polarized and new technology...
Still, President Franklin Roosevelt - who rode into office on a platform of deficit reduction - initially hedged his bets, taking stabs at public-works projects and farm subsidies while also rolling out balanced-budget initiatives. When a British economist visited the White House in 1934 saying deficit spending was the best engine to boost consumer demand and create jobs, Roosevelt balked. (Two years later, the economist - John Maynard Keynes - published that advice in his seminal work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which revolutionized economic thought by debunking the widely held belief that the market naturally tends toward full...
...aside from computerization and expansion has not fundamentally changed over the years - centers on interviews with a rotating sampling of 60,000 households. Workers are sorted into three categories: employed, unemployed and not in the labor force. To be counted as unemployed, a worker must have "actively looked for work" in the past month - a definition some analysts say is too narrow to capture the breadth of the economic pain. A more realistic one, they argue, would include discouraged workers who have looked for work within the past year as well as underemployed Americans seeking full-time jobs. Taking these...
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and Nov. 24 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the landmark work in which Darwin laid forth his theory of natural selection. While celebrations have emphasized the British naturalist's giant role in the advancement of human progress, British political journalist Dennis Sewell is not convinced. In a new book, The Political Gene: How Darwin's Ideas Changed Politics, he highlights how often - and how easily - Darwin's big idea has been harnessed for sinister political ends. According to Sewell, evolution...
...unexpectedly modern setting: school shootings. Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a Finnish schoolboy who murdered eight people at his high school in November 2007, wrote on his blog that "stupid, weak-minded people are reproducing ... faster than the intelligent, strong-minded" ones. Auvinen thought through the philosophical implications of Darwin's work and came to the conclusion that human life is like every other type of animal life: it has no extraordinary value. The Columbine killers made similar arguments. One of the shooters, Eric Harris, wore a "Natural Selection" shirt on the day of the massacre. These are examples of how easily...