What matters for social success today is less whether your father was rich or poor than whether you knew your father at all. That’s the crucial verdict of recent research on childhood, as summarized by Professor Lawrence Mead. Fatherless households, which are this country’s fastest growing family type at present, are risky places for children … Read more
Poverty may be our age’s most over-discussed social phenomenon. There is only one justification for barreling on: it is also one of the least well apprehended and most often misportrayed of all public issues. Fortunately, our misunderstandings of poverty fall into several fairly simple clusters. The first concerns composition. Most discussions tend to treat the … Read more
Mankind has just endured another cataclysm. In the last two years, an estimated one-half million humans have perished in quiet misery on the tortured grasslands of Africa. And, tragically, despite an avalanche of attention and concern, most of the world has failed to recognize the simplest truth about the event: The deaths were needless, entirely … Read more