It will be interesting -- and by "interesting" I mean "terrifying" -- to see what the thwarting of internalized expectations does to our social fabric. It's the

It will be interesting -- and by "interesting" I mean "terrifying" -- to see what the thwarting of internalized expectations does to our social fabric. It's the same essential motivation that fueled the rise of Islamist terror groups in the Mideast: young men with education but no financial or social prospects. Obviously, these were societies with threadbare social fabric due to decades of political repression and economic mismanagement, but there's no ironclad rule that an otherwise stable country can't tip over with shocking speed. (In this, the sheer size of the US probably creates a tendency towards short-term stability, while also making it more difficult to enact long-term solutions.) The post-war economic ideal of America was a powerful albeit somewhat utopian concept -- a large number of financially-secure skilled and unskilled laborers supporting a smaller but still large upper middle-class of "symbolic manipulators" for whom a college degree served as an entrance ticket. The lure was, of course, that anyone could move up the ladder if they applied themselves, worked hard, and got an education. The post-war social compact offered stability and meritocratic advancement in exchange for sociopolitical legitimation. Stability was swept away by automation and globalization, and advancement is, for all but the most elite, tenuous at best; what, then, will we replace it with?