ARTICLE:The Breathing Trick That Puts You to Sleep in Seconds

The 4-7-8 breathing technique was pioneered Dr. Andrew Weill from Arizona, who describes the yoga-inspired method as “utterly simple, takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can be done anywhere.”

Dr.Weill claims that 4-7-8 breathing can help people fall asleep in just 60 seconds by acting as a “natural tranquiliser for the nervous system” that reduces stress and tension in the body.

How do you do it?

1. Before you begin, place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth just above your teeth and keep it there throughout the exercise.

2. Exhale completely through your mouth quite forcefully so you make a “whoosh” sound.

3. Close your mouth and inhale quietly and softly through your nose for a mental count of four.

4. Hold your breath and count to seven.

5. Next, exhale completely through your mouth, making another whoosh sound for eight seconds in one large breath.

6. Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three times for a total of four breaths.

Related: Mom With Skin Cancer Shares Graphic Photo as a Warning Against Tanning

Remember: All inhaling breaths must be quiet and through your nose and all exhaling breaths must be loud and through your mouth.

How does it help?

It takes on more oxygen relaxes the parasympathetic nervous system and promotes a state of calmness.
It helps rebalance the nervous system which can become over stimulated during times of stress.
It helps you connect with your body and your breathing and distract you from everyday thoughts that can prevent you from sleeping.

VIDEO: He tried getting her number, but she refused, when he came back in a luxury car she has gone crazy!

THOUGHTS: WHAT I LEARNED FROM MY DIVORCE

Do you want me to tell you what I learned from my divorce: Marriages become beautiful when two people embrace the only good reason to get married: to practice the daily sacrifice of their egos.You were born with a good and beautiful heart, and it will never leave you. But you started to doubt if your heart was good enough.At first, we only use the ego-wall to keep people out. But eventually, as we grow up, we get tired of hiding fearfully and we decide the best defense is a good offense. We put cannons on our ego-wall and we start firing. For some people that looks like anger. For other people, it looks like gossip and judgment and divisiveness. One of my favorite ego-cannons is to pretend everyone on the outside of my wall is wrong. It makes me feel right and righteous, but really it just keeps me safe inside of my ideas

The entire purpose of marriage is to dismantle your ego-wall, brick by brick, until you are fully available to the person you love. Open. Vulnerable. Dangerously united.People have sex because for a moment at the climax of it, their mind is without walls, the ego goes away, and they feel free and fully connected. With sex, the feeling lasts for only a moment. But if you commit yourself to marriage, you commit yourself to the long, painful, joyous work of dismantling your ego-walls for good. Then, the moment can last a lifetime.

What’s the secret to a happy marriage? Marry someone who has also embraced the only good reason to get married. Someone who will commit to dying alongside you—not in fifty years, but daily, as they dismantle the walls of their ego with you.Someone who will be more faithful to you than they are to their own safety.Someone willing to embrace the beauty of sacrifice, the surrender of their strength, and the peril of vulnerability.In other words, someone who wants to spend their one life stepping into a crazy, dangerous love with you and only you.With my walls down,

VIDEO: REVEALED: The alarming effects of sleep deprivation on the nation's skin

VIDEO: MAD MEN ENDING

THOUGHTS: WHY NO ONE BUY MUSIC, MOVIES AND BOOKS ANYMORE

The music industry and piracy, the movie industry and torrents, newspapers and online news. What do all these have in common? Supply, demand and a shifting market.

I’m a big fan of capitalism and lean quite a bit to the libertarian side of the political spectrum. I believe that free markets almost always find the right direction to move to. Every time I see the government cracking down on piracy, file-sharing and smuggling I wince. And every time I see the government defend an industry, I wince a bit more. I wince because I don’t believe black markets would be around if it weren’t for organizations monopolizing their products and defending their huge profits.

The Internet has opened the market on music and it’s saturated. When I was a child, I didn’t realize that there were millions of artists in the world. The marketplace only had room for hundreds or thousands. For me it was just KISS. Now that the marketplace has opened up, demand has stayed the same but the supply is everywhere. It’s only natural to see that the costs of music would spiral downward while the supply increased.

But it didn’t. The price of an album hasn’t changed in 25 years despite the incredible supply of music and the ease at which it’s distributed via the web. No one complained when the music industry was selling CDs a hundred times their cost. And, with movie stars, rappers and rock stars showing off their new Bentleys, it’s hard for me to empathize at all with the industry. If honest people are sharing music instead of buying it, it means the risk of being caught outweighs the price of the music. The problem isn’t honest people, music, or filesharing… it’s that the music industry ain’t what it used to be.

In my living room I have a HDTV and a surround sound system that I can shake the house with. Why would I go pay for a $12 movie ticket and $10 popcorn and a drink when I can watch a movie for the fraction of the cost in the comfort of my own living room? I can’t match IMAX… I’m willing to pay extra for that experience. The movie industry isn’t a battle between piracy and the movie cinema, it’s a battle between the home theater and the movie cinema. And the home theater is winning!

If the movie industry hopes to succeed, they’d lower the price of cinema tickets and food, add some additional luxuries (perhaps dinner, wine and some cappuccino), and put in some circular seating with an intermission so I can make it a night out with friends. I can’t download that experience!

I’ve read that newspapers are going to attempt putting up pay walls again. I think we’ve been through this a few times… and they still don’t get it. The Internet is the information superhighway… newspapers are the potholes. Newspapers use content to fill the holes that they can’t sell ads into and many have given up on digging deep to find the real story. I don’t pay for a newspaper because I find better news online, direct from the source, without a slant, and without advertising wrapping around it.

Oh sure, I gave a go at The Daily.. an attempt by the newspaper industry to bring all the unreliability of newspaper delivery to the iPad. It’s slow, it crashes, and it’s rarely news. They should call the it The Yesterday! But, since news is an entire industry, there’s somehow some entitlement they deserve outside the bounds of capitalism that entitles them to continue trying to make 40 percent profit margins? Sorry oldspapers… get back to great reporting and people will pay for the content.

In each of these cases, I don’t fault the consumer and I empathize with the folks breaking the law. After all, isn’t this just capitalism? When the cost surpasses the desire, the only thing left is a black market to get the product or service from. Unfortunately, these industries grew so big and powerful that they’ve got politicians in their back pocket to try to crank out laws every week to try to stop the hemorrhaging. Folks… this isn’t a criminal issue, it’s a market issue.

Given this rant, you may think that I’m all about piracy. Absolutely not! There are countless examples of products and services that have adjusted. And I believe that people are paying for content more than they ever have in the past. When I was a kid, my parents had a phone, a newspaper, a black & white television, and paid for vinyl albums. As an adult, I pay for smart phones, voice messaging, mobile apps, a data plan, a text messaging plan, (x my kids’ plans) cable television, on demand movies, broadband internet, XBox Live, iTunes and Netflix.

These aren’t just a few bad apples that have taken to a lifetime of crime. Chances are, the average person you know is pirating or distributing music or movies. When the crime goes mainstream, the problem isn’t the crime… you have to start wondering what’s flawed with the market that generates that type of response.

Locking up a guy that creates a network where people distribute and download isn’t the answer, either. We’ve been through this with Napster and the Pirate Bay. With Megauploads down, a few thousand other sites are out there that will enable the activity. The newest ones are virtual private networks with anonymous gateways and encrypted communications so governments can’t snoop. The piracy and theft market on music and movies isn’t going anywhere.

I’m tired of these corporations stating that the money lost to the industry is in the [insert]illions. That’s just a bold lie. People that were going to steal a movie weren’t ever planning on spending the money in the theater. You didn’t lose money by them stealing it, you lost money because you charged too much and the home theater is kicking your butt.

And don’t tell me that people won’t pay for content and our only recourse is to lock everyone up. We’re all paying for content everyday! The price simply has to match the value. The folks at Angie’s List have proven this… paid reviews are trustworthy and save their subscribers thousands of dollars. Angie’s List has great retention with their customers and are so popular they were able to go public!

Markets are changing and these other industries are NOT adapting. Why are they making that a criminal issue and not an economic one? Keep up with the efforts of large corporations to criminalize more and more of the web by reading the Deeplinks blog at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

THOUGHTS: WITH MY WALLS DOWNS

Marriages become beautiful when two people embrace the only good reason to get married: to practice the daily sacrifice of their egos.You were born with a good and beautiful heart, and it will never leave you. But  you started to doubt if your heart was good enough.At first, we only use the ego-wall to keep people out. But eventually, as we grow up, we get tired of hiding fearfully and we decide the best defense is a good offense. We put cannons on our ego-wall and we start firing. For some people that looks like anger. For other people, it looks like gossip and judgment and divisiveness. One of my favorite ego-cannons is to pretend everyone on the outside of my wall is wrong. It makes me feel right and righteous, but really it just keeps me safe inside of my ideas

The entire purpose of marriage is to dismantle your ego-wall, brick by brick, until you are fully available to the person you love. Open. Vulnerable. Dangerously united.People have sex because for a moment at the climax of it, their mind is without walls, the ego goes away, and they feel free and fully connected. With sex, the feeling lasts for only a moment. But if you commit yourself to marriage, you commit yourself to the long, painful, joyous work of dismantling your ego-walls for good. Then, the moment can last a lifetime.

What’s the secret to a happy marriage? Marry someone who has also embraced the only good reason to get married. Someone who will commit to dying alongside you—not in fifty years, but daily, as they dismantle the walls of their ego with you.Someone who will be more faithful to you than they are to their own safety.Someone willing to embrace the beauty of sacrifice, the surrender of their strength, and the peril of vulnerability.In other words, someone who wants to spend their one life stepping into a crazy, dangerous love with you and only you.With my walls down,

ARTICLE:How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage By DAVID LEONHARDT and KEVIN QUEAL (THE PROBLEM IS WHERE I AM LIVING)

How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage

By DAVID LEONHARDT and KEVIN QUEALY MAY 15, 2015

Growing up in some places — especially liberal ones — makes people less likely to marry, new data shows.

Places that make being married at age 26...

Less likely

More likely

The place where you grow up doesn’t affect only your future income, as we wrote about last week. It also affects your odds of marrying, a large new data set shows.

The most striking geographical pattern on marriage, as with so many other issues today, is the partisan divide. Spending childhood nearly anywhere in blue America — especially liberal bastions like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington — makes people about 10 percentage points less likely to marry relative to the rest of the country. And no place encourages marriage quite like the conservative Mountain West, especially the heavily Mormon areas of Utah, southern Idaho and parts of Colorado.

These conclusions — based on an Upshot analysis of data compiled by a team of Harvard economists studying upward mobility, housing and tax policy — are not simply observations about correlation. The economists instead believe that they have identified a causal role that geography plays in people’s lives. The data, which covers more than five million people who moved as children in the 1980s and 1990s, suggests that children who move from, say, Idaho to Chicago really do become less likely to marry, even if the numbers can’t explain exactly why these patterns exist.

We have also written about other findings from the study, focusing on upward mobility, and we encourage you to explore them when you’re done here.

Not Married? The New York Effect

The places that discourage marriage most tend to be cities, including San Francisco, Philadelphia and New Orleans, as well as their surrounding areas. Nationwide, the jurisdiction with the single largest marriage-discouraging effect is Washington. But the New York area stands out even more. If we boiled down the list to only the country’s 50 largest counties, the top five in discouraging marriage would all be in the New York area.

How can the researchers think they’re capturing a causal effect here — in which a child who moves to New York actually becomes less likely to marry? Because they have studied more than five million people who moved as children during the 1980s and 1990s. Those who moved to New York, among other places, were indeed less likely to marry than otherwise similar people who grew up elsewhere. And the younger that children were when they moved to New York, the less likely they were to marry.

One caveat: All of these statistics analyze a child’s odds of being married by age 26. We asked the researchers, Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, whether the differences in marriage may be much smaller than these comparisons suggest. That is, does a childhood make marriage less likely — or simply delay marriage?

It does not seem to simply delay marriage; the researchers found very similar patterns when they looked at the data up to age 30. The places that made marriage more likely at 26 also tended to make it more likely at age 30. The children in the study aren’t yet old enough for conclusions beyond age 30. But the best guess for now is that these differences aren’t only about timing. Children who grow in New York, among other places, appear less likely to be married by 26, less likely to be married by 30 and probably less likely to marry at any point.

Red and Blue America

Marriage effects by 2012 presidential vote

Each circle represents one county; circles are sized by population

90% Romney80% Romney70% Romney60% RomneyEven60% Obama70% Obama80% Obama90% Obama-15 pts.-10 pts.-5 pts.+5 pts.+10 pts.+15 pts.+20 pts.+25 pts.↑ Marriage more likely↓ Marriage less likelyMore Democratic →← More Republican

Based on share of two-party vote; estimates are based on a full childhood in each county (up to age 20).

One of the most striking relationships we found in the data was between political ideology and the marriage effect: The more strongly a county voted Republican in the 2012 election, the more that growing up there generally encourages marriage.

And it’s not simply about rural areas leaning Republican and promoting marriage — although both are true. The few metropolitan counties that voted Republican in 2012 turn out to be in marriage-encouraging places, such as Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Fort Worth, as well as Waukesha County, Wis., just west of Milwaukee.

Polling data tells the same story about partisanship and marriage attitudes. When the Pew Research Center asked last year if society was better off when people made marriage and having children a priority, 59 percent of Republicans (a group that includes people who lean Republican) said yes, while only 36 percent of Republicans said society was just as well off if people had other priorities. For Democrats, the shares were virtually flipped: 35 percent and 61 percent. These attitudes evidently affect children growing up in different places.

It’s also worth noting that this data set isn’t the only one to suggest that a child’s environment affects later marriage patterns. In a 1990s experiment with housing vouchers, known as Moving to Opportunity, poor children who moved to less poor neighborhoods at a young age became more likely to marry as adults than similar children who grew up in poorer areas.

The Complicated South

For poor people



For rich people

Places that make being married at age 26...

Less likely

More likely

The Deep South presents the most complex picture. It nudges affluent children toward marriage and lower-income children away from it. By comparison, the Northeast generally discourages marriage for children of all income levels, and the Mountain West encourages it for children of all levels.

Race certainly plays a role here. Lower-income children in the South are disproportionately black, and marriage rates are also lower among African-Americans. But the data suggests that race is not the only factor: When poor families move to the South, their children become less likely to marry, and there is no evidence that the effect is restricted to only one race.

Consider Tate, a mostly white county in northern Mississippi, about 35 miles south of Memphis. It has one of the largest class differences. If you’re rich, it’s one of the best places in the country at making marriage more likely; if you’re poor, it’s one of the worst.

The Small-Town Effect

Politics isn’t the only dividing line on marriage. Less densely populated places also seem to promote marriage, even after taking an area’s political leanings into account.

The only two states that both make marriage significantly more likely and that voted Democratic in 2012 are Iowa and Oregon. Those two states have a much lower population density than California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and most other blue states. That’s a sign that rural areas and small towns encourage marriage more than cities.

A Pew analysis, similarly, found that the five states where the highest share of men were currently married (with at least 56 percent in each) were the Republican bastions of Idaho, Kansas, Utah and Nebraska — as well as Iowa. None of these states are especially urban.

Utah is worth special attention. It’s not surprising that it leads the nation in encouraging marriage: The state is home to a large Mormon population, which is well known for marrying young. Yet Utah isn’t just on top of the list; it’s on top with a bullet. A childhood in Utah County, home of Brigham Young University and the city of Provo, makes marriage 20 percentage points more likely by age 26 than an average childhood in the United States.

By comparison, a childhood in Manhattan, on the other end of the spectrum, makes marriage only 12 percentage points less likely

LETTER: THE LETTER THAT NICE GUY USUALLY GET

I’d say you probably don’t remember me, but I know you do. I know you remember me the way you remember every single girl you’ve ever latched onto like a leech who also happens to recommend books and carry shopping bags. I know you remember me because this is a small town and people talk and you wouldn’t believe some of the things people tell me you say about me, except that I guess you would because I know for sure that you said them.

I know you’ve waxed poetic at length to anyone who will listen (and a fair few people who won’t) about how I don’t know what I’m missing. And you know what? I guess you’re right. I don’t know what I’m missing. Maybe if, somewhere between the endless offers of a lift home and the free coffees I didn’t want and the little intimate gifts “just because”, I’d read your mind and deduced using my psychic powers that you were in love with me, things might have turned out differently. (Like maybe I’d have filed a restraining order. Maybe I’d have stopped seeing the favours you did me as the acts of a friend and started seeing them as the acts of a predator. Maybe I’d have never allowed myself to be alone in a room with you. But I digress.) For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right and I don’t know what I let slip by when I decided to go after that [confident] jerk [with a sense of self-worth and a whole host of interesting hobbies] instead of letting you woo me like a princess in the tackier class of fairy tale.

Then what?

You want me to know you’d have treated me like a princess, but I’m not a princess. You want me to know you’d have worshipped me like a goddess, but I’m not a goddess. You want me to know you’d have waited on me hand and foot, but I’m a functioning human being with agency and independence and I don’t need anyone to wait on me. You want me to know you’d have given me everything I could ever have possibly wanted, but you’re wrong there, because one of the things I wanted – one of the things I still want – is not you.

That’s the thing, see? You could drive me to the edges of the Earth as a “favour”, you could come shopping with me and take me out to dinner and watch movies and let me cry to you over the phone, but you couldn’t make me want you as anything other than a friend and you still can’t. You’ll never be able to. Oh, sure, if you’d asked me out when we first met, before we settled into the routine of girl-and-secret-admirer, maybe I’d have thought about it. Maybe I’d have let you take me out to lunch at a little bistro somewhere and we could have talked like real people and not like Pygmalion attempting to breathe life into his Galatea, and maybe we’d have found out that we had things in common and it would have led to a few more dates and maybe a relationship. Or maybe I would have turned you down and you’d have felt sad about it for a while but you would have moved on and we could have been friends – real friends – and you wouldn’t be obsessively combing through my Facebook photos at midnight and I wouldn’t be writing you this letter.

But you couldn’t make me love you just because you wanted me to, and you still can’t.

You say I’ll regret it. You say that ten, twenty, fifty years from now, you’ll be the one that got away. You say that when I’ve been rejected by a string of [confident, interesting, engaging] jerks and I no longer have my youthful beauty and I’m too old to have kids, I’ll wish I’d settled for you. And maybe you’re right. Maybe one day I’ll be fifty years old and single and childless – but even then, I still wouldn’t regret not being with you. I wouldn’t regret not signing up for a lifetime of being treated like a marble statue on a pedestal created by an obsessed boy-child with an ideal of perfect womanhood to which I could never truly measure up. I wouldn’t regret avoiding that slavish devotion, that expectation of reciprocity of a passion I didn’t and don’t and will never feel. No, I’m sorry – even if you end up being right and I find myself alone and unloved and unlovable, I will never regret that.

Since we’re making predictions, though – and oh, how you love to do that when you talk about me (did you really think I wouldn’t hear of it? did you really think they’d never tell?) – let me make a few of my own.

I predict that I’ll have an enjoyable, interesting relationship with my jerk (who has introduced me to sports and taught me how to shoot a gun and helped me rediscover my love of philosophy and supported my dreams of being a writer and held my hand while I cried without expecting anything in return). I predict that if things don’t work out, I’ll find someone else, and maybe he’ll introduce me to painting or sculpture or belly dancing or yoga or basketball because he’ll have interests other than pleasing me and he’ll want to share them with the woman he loves. I predict that some day, if I choose to, I’ll marry one of those jerks you hate so much and we’ll probably have a few kids and we’ll fight sometimes because nobody’s perfect, not even people in love, but we’ll make up because nobody stays angry forever, especially people in love. And maybe we’ll divorce in five years or maybe we’ll grow old together and see the birth of our great-grandchildren, but the one thing we won’t do is live out some fantasy of a man “winning” a woman with niceness and a woman showing her gratitude with sex.

That’s what you never understood about relationships, Nice Guy. You can’t win people, not with all the put-on niceness in the world. You can’t mould yourself into what you think a woman wants and hope she’ll fill all the gaps in you. You have to be your own person (do you even know who that is any more?) and cultivate your own interests and live your own life and hope that one day, you’ll find someone who thinks your life is pretty neat and wants to share it with you, someone with a life of her own that’s so neat you want to share it with her.

That’s a relationship, Nice Guy. Not unwanted gifts and free rides home and pining over someone and hoping that if you hang around her long enough, she’ll feel the way you want her to feel. A relationship is two people sharing their lives – their messy, imperfect, fantastic, exciting, terrifying, amazing lives – because it’s what both of them want to do, not because one of them wants the other to want it.

This guy I’m seeing, this jerk? He’s pretty sweet. We’re talking about getting married, maybe having kids some day. He read Hamlet for me because I mentioned I liked Shakespeare and I went to a football game with him and had the time of my life. We fight sometimes and we laugh a lot of the time and we never expect anything of each other that the other wouldn’t be willing to give. I think maybe we’re going to go the distance. But even if we don’t, it still will have been worth it, because he’s helped me grow as a person and I’ve helped him grow as a person and neither of us is Galatea and neither of us would want to be Pygmalion because what kind of relationship can there be between a man and his idol?

I hope you figure that out one day. I’d hate for all your prophecies about other women to come true for you.

Get over me. You never had me to begin with. You never will.

Sincerely,

A girl who goes for jerks.

ARTICLE:Income Inequality Is Costing the U.S. on Social Issues bY Eduardo Porter

Income Inequality Is Costing the U.S. on Social Issues


Eduardo Porter


Thirty-five years ago, the United States ranked 13th among the 34 industrialized nations that are today in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of life expectancy for newborn girls. These days, it ranks 29th.

In 1980, the infant mortality rate in the United States was about the same as in Germany. Today, American babies die at almost twice the rate of German babies.

“On nearly all indicators of mortality, survival and life expectancy, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries,” says a report on the nation’s health by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

What’s most shocking about these statistics is not how unhealthy they show Americans to be, compared with citizens of countries that spend much less on health care and have much less sophisticated medical technology. What is most perplexing is how stunningly fast the United States has lost ground.


The blame for the precipitous fall does not rest primarily on the nation’s doctors and hospitals.

The United States has the highest teenage birthrate in the developed world — about seven times the rate in France, according to the O.E.C.D. More than one out of every four children lives with one parent, the largest percentage by far among industrialized nations. And more than a fifth live in poverty, sixth from the bottom among O.E.C.D. nations.

Among adults, seven out of every 1,000 are in prison, more than five times the rate of incarceration in most other rich democracies and more than three times the rate for the United States four decades ago.

The point is: The United States doesn’t have a narrow health care problem. We’ve simply handed our troubles to the medical industry to fix. In many ways, the American health care system is the most advanced in the world. But whiz-bang medical technology just cannot fix what ails us.

As economists from the University of Chicago, M.I.T. and the University of Southern California put it in a recent research paper, much of America’sinfant mortality deficit is driven by “excess inequality.”

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American babies born to white, college-educated, married women survive as often as those born to advantaged women in Europe. It’s the babies born to nonwhite, nonmarried, nonprosperous women who die so young.

Three or four decades ago, the United States was the most prosperous country on earth. It had the mightiest military and the most advanced technologies known to humanity. Today, it’s still the richest, strongest and most inventive. But when it comes to the health, well-being and shared prosperity of its people, the United States has fallen far behind.

Pick almost any measure of social health and cohesion over the last four decades or so, and you will find that the United States took a wrong turn along the way.

How did we get here? How do we exit?

As the presidential campaign draws the political debate to our national priorities, these questions must take center stage. As candidates argue over the budget deficit and the national debt, debate what to do about income inequality, address the problem of mass incarceration or refight the battles over the Affordable Care Act and the minimum wage, they should be forced to address how their policy wish list adds up to an answer.

Looking at how the United States compares with other nations is illuminating. As I noted in last week’s column, over the last four decades or so, the labor market lost much of its power to deliver income gains to working families in many developed nations.

But blaming globalization and technological progress for the stagnation of the middle class and the precipitous decline in our collective health is too easy. Jobs were lost and wages got stuck in many developed countries.

What set the United States apart — what made the damage inflicted upon American society so intense — was the nature of its response. Government support for Americans in the bottom half turned out to be too meager to hold society together.

The conservative narrative of America’s social downfall, articulated by the likes of Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute, posits that a large welfare state, built from the time of the New Deal in the 1930s through the era of the Great Society in the 1960s, sapped Americans’ industriousness and undermined their moral fiber.

A more compelling explanation is that when globalization struck at the jobs on which 20th-century America had built its middle class, the United States discovered that it did not, in fact, have much of a welfare state to speak of. The threadbare safety net tore under the strain.

Call it a failure of solidarity. American institutions, built from hostility toward collective solutions, couldn’t hold society together when the economic underpinning of full employment at a decent wage gave in.

The question is, Is there a solution to fit these ideological preferences? The standard prescriptions, typically shared by liberals and conservatives, start with education, building the skills needed to harness the opportunities of a high-tech, fast-changing labor market that has little use for those who end their education after high school.

Ensuring everybody has a college degree might not stanch the flow of riches to the very pinnacle of society. But it could deliver a powerful boost to the incomes and the well-being of struggling families in the bottom half.

And yet the prescription — embedded in the social reality that is contemporary America — falls short. In contemporary America, education is widening inequity, not closing it. College enrollment rates have stagnated for lower-income Americans. Sean Reardon from Stanford University notes that the achievement gap between rich and poor children seems to have been steadily expanding for the last 50 years.

On the left, there are calls to build the kind of generous social insurance programs, which despite growing budget constraints remain largely intact among many European social democracies. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, for example, is calling for an expansion ofSocial Security, paid for by lifting the cap on payroll taxes so the rich pay the same share of their income to support the system as everybody else.

That may be desirable, though at the moment, our greatest problems are not about the elderly. And at least for the foreseeable future, it remains a political nonstarter in a nation congenitally mistrustful of government. Just in time to kick off the presidential campaign, Republicans in the House and Senate were working on a budget that would gut Obamacare — most likely increasing the pool of the nation’s uninsured — and slash funding for programs for Americans of low and moderate income.

Yet despite the grim prognosis, there is hope. The challenge America faces is not simply a matter of equity. The bloated incarceration rates and rock-bottom life expectancy, the unraveling families and the stagnant college graduation rates amount to an existential threat to the nation’s future.

That is, perhaps, the best reason for hope. The silver lining in these dismal, if abstract, statistics, is that they portend such a dysfunctional future that our broken political system might finally be forced to come together to prevent it.