Frank Carlson Library

"In 1947, Forbes magazine declared Lancaster, Ohio, the epitome of the all-American town. Today it is damaged, discouraged, and fighting for its future. In Glass house, journalist Brian Alexander uses the story of one town to show how seeds sown thirty-five years ago have sprouted to give us Trumpism, inequality, and an eroding national cohesion."--Jacket flap.

America in 2105 is beset with mass inequality, poverty and increasingly large numbers of the poor. A fractured America ushers in an authoritarian government that promises to solve these problems by redistributing children born to the poor to be adopted by the rich. Robin, a single teen mother, fell within the scope of the scheme and lost her baby two years ago. A life of factory work doesn't provide much hope until she stumbles upon a group of misfits...

Today's most widely read economist challenges America to reclaim the values that made it great. Here he studies the past eighty years of American history, from the reforms that tamed the harsh inequality of the Gilded Age to the unraveling of that achievement and the reemergence of immense economic and political inequality since the 1970s. Seeking to understand both what happened to middle-class America and what it will take to achieve a "new New...