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• Whether or not you hear it said tomorrow night, the State of the Union depends on the state of the middle class, says Michael Lind in the Atlantic Monthly's annual special section on domestic problems and solutions. The most tenable and common dream of Americans is to reside in the middle class, not the upper class—it is a dream of comfort, not a dream of wealth (or at least it might be, in a world without greed). The demographic dominance of the middle class has long been one of America's defining peculiarities, coming on the heels of yawning disparity between poor and rich throughout world history. But lest we forget, this dominance is fragile, since the middle class was "artificially created by government-sponsored social engineering," Lind says. Now, the disappearance of high-paying middle-class jobs and the rise of low-paying service jobs is sucking the life out of the middle class. This trend may eventually divide the nation into a quasi-feudal setup "in which most Americans provide personal services for the rich few." Lind vastly overstates this possibility, and then resorts to redistribution as his prescription. He is more convincing in articulating the problem than the solution, but even that may be more than the fine-tuned rhetoric of President Bush's speech, and the Democrats' response, will accomplish.

Also in the Atlantic's roundup: The costs and causes of social rage; low-income students' tuition crisis; and Francis Fukuyama on nation-building
Earlier:The real state of the union from last year's Atlantic

• Friedrich Hayek is known—when he is remembered at all—for his post-World War II book The Road to Serfdom, which warned of the dangers of centralized economic control. It was received as reactionary; then it became conventional wisdom. But Hayek was more than an economist, says Virginia Postrel in the Boston Globe's Ideas section. He made connections between money and ideas, between information and culture, and had prescient insights into cognitive science and information theory. Postrel's otherwise useful tribute focuses too much on economics—despite ignoring the important question of whether today's multinational corporate conglomerates represent the economic diversity Hayek considered inherent to the free market. Full story
• Speaking of the problems with the private sector, let's give Halliburton a fair trial, says James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. "No serious person believes that the United States launched a war for Halliburton," he says, although that company's ties to the White House and its bidless receipt of a contract to work in postwar Iraq stir the imaginations of conspiracy theorists. What's truly worrisome is less sinister,  Surowiecki says—not conspiracy but the pervasive privatization of daily maintenance of the military. "The military once ran its own mess halls, handled its own communications, and maintained its own weapons systems. No longer." The rise of outsourcing and distrust of bureaucracy crept into the Pentagon, to the point where one-half of national defense work is now done by private contractors. But outsourcing and efficiency don't always go together, Surowiecki says. "Effective as outsourcing can be, doing things in-house is often easier and quicker." Full story

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