Adam Ozimek

The surprising story of how declining marriage rates are driving many of the country’s biggest economic problems. In The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa S. Kearney makes a provocative, data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution’s decline has led to a host of economic woes—problems that have fractured American society and rendered vulnerable populations even more vulnerable. Eschewing the religious and values-based arguments that have long dominated this conversation, Kearney shows how the greatest impacts of marriage are, in fact, economic: when two adults marry, their economic and household lives improve, offering a host of benefits not only for the married adults but for their children. Studies show that these effects are today starker, and more unevenly distributed, than ever before. Kearney examines the underlying causes of the marriage decline in the US and draws lessons for how the  US can reverse this trend to ensure the country’s future prosperity. Based on more than a decade of economic research, including her original work, Kearney shows that a household that includes two married parents—holding steady among upper-class adults, increasingly rare among most everyone else—functions as an economic vehicle that advantages some children over others. As these trends of marriage and class continue, the compounding effects on inequality and opportunity grow increasingly dire. Their effects include not just children’s behavioral and educational outcomes, but a surprisingly devastating effect on adult men, whose role in the workforce and society appears intractably damaged by the emerging economics of America’s new social norms. For many, the two-parent home may be an old-fashioned symbol of the idyllic American dream. But The Two-Parent Privilege makes it clear that marriage, for all its challenges and faults, may be our best path to a more equitable future. By confronting the critical role that family makeup plays in shaping children’s lives and futures, Kearney offers a critical assessment of what a decline in marriage means for an economy and a society—and what we must do to change course.

An epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world's most critical resource—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in conflict. You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything—from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market—runs on chips. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower. Now, America's edge is slipping, undermined by competitors in Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and, above all, China. Today, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more money each year importing chips than it spends importing oil, is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US. At stake is America's military superiority and economic prosperity. Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the U.S. become dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems. America's victory in the Cold War and its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power. But here, too, China is catching up, with its chip-building ambitions and military modernization going hand in hand. America has let key components of the chip-building process slip out of its grasp, contributing not only to a worldwide chip shortage but also a new Cold War with a superpower adversary that is desperate to bridge the gap. Illuminating, timely, and fascinating, Chip War shows that, to make sense of the current state of politics, economics, and technology, we must first understand the vital role played by chips.

Traces the innovative development of the monolithic integrated circuit, or silicon chip, discussing the scientists who created it, its structure and functions, the evolution of the semiconductor industry, and the vast implications of the silicon chip

Hackers: the undisputed masters of code who more than anyone are responsible for making computers widely available, splendidly useful, and fun. They are an astonishingly unique new breed of american hero, and Steven Levy has talked to the wildest brains among them to present the inside story of the computer revolution. What drove Ricky Greenblatt, Bill Gosper, and their friends to seize control of the multimillion-dollar computers at MIT in the fifties and sixties, so they could not only use them night after night but create, explore, and play on them? What drove Lee Felsenstein and his California hardware cohorts in the seventies to liberate the genie in the machine and give it to the people? What drove superstar game designer John Harris from the software company he had enriched in the Sierras in the eighties? It was a set of shared ideas and a vision they held in common – the Hacker Ethic. The Hacker Ethic was an idealistic and obsessive standard that led to weird lifestyles, to hilarious clashes with bureaucracies, and even to potential illegalities: in their urge to explore computers, hackers don’t necessarily care whose computer is being explored. But their hands-on, anti-authority Ethic, along with their technical brilliance, enabled them to triumph – as they do in scene after scene of this twenty-five-year epic of young American wizardry.