Top
The New American Reality presents a compelling portrait of today's America. Taking as his starting point the past four censuses, Farley offers a definitive analysis of life in the United States in the 1990s, a country strikingly different from what it was forty years ago.
The social trends that have so transformed the nation were kindled in the 1960s, a watershed decade for American civil rights. The New American Reality describes the activism, federal policies, and legal victories that eliminated overt racism and sexual discrimination. But along with open doors came new challenges: divorce and out-of-wedlock births grew commonplace, increasing women's chances of falling into poverty; residential segregation, inadequate schooling, and a high ratio of female-headed families severely impaired the economic progress of African Americans; and a new wave of immigration rapidly altered the nation's ethnic composition. In the 1970s, global economic restructuring shifted the nation's dominant industry from manufacturing to services, and a new emphasis on technology and cost cutting created demand for more sophisticated skills in the workplace. The economic recovery of the 1980s offered little to remedy the stagnant and declining wages of the middle class, although the well educated and highly skilled fared well. As a result, income inequality became a defining feature of economic life and a growing source of unease for many Americans.
The New American Reality also reports the good news about America; our lives are longer and healthier, the elderly are better off than ever before, consumer spending power has increased, and minorities and women have many more opportunities. In this way, The New American Reality challenges those who contend that we are a country in decline. The reality, Farley argues, is far more complex: we are a country in the midst of dramatic change, some of it negative but much of it positive. Understanding that change - and making sense of the information we have about it - will be crucial to the economic and social vitality of America in the twenty-first century.
