The Entrepreneurial Edge: Can America Keep It?

Spring 2010

The Entrepreneurial Edge: Can America Keep It?

The Entrepreneurial Edge: Can America Keep It? Cover Image

If you wish to purchase a print issue, please contact Suzanne Napper

For 30 years, the United States has ridden a spectacular wave of technology-based entrepreneurship. Now, with economic lethargy at home and rising challenges abroad, can the wave be sustained?

Table of Contents

In Essence

THE SOURCE: “Growing Up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy” by Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo, in The NBER Digest, Jan. 2010.

THE SOURCES: “Beyond GDP: The Quest for a Measure of Social Welfare” by Marc Fleurbaey, in The Journal of Economic Literature, Dec. 2009, and “Measuring Quality of Life” by Renee Courtois, in Region Focus, Summer 2009.

THE SOURCE: “Grow Up: How to Fix the Peace Corps” by Robert L. Strauss, in The American Interest, Jan.–Feb. 2010.

THE SOURCES: “Failed State” by William Voegeli, in Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2009, and “California in Crisis” by Donald Cohen and Peter Dreier, in The American Prospect, Feb. 1, 2010.

THE SOURCE: “The Curse of One-Party Government” by Jonathan Rauch, in National Journal, Feb. 6, 2010.

THE SOURCE: “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?” by Tony Judt, in The New York Review of Books, Dec. 17, 2009.

THE SOURCE: “Genetic Testing for Alzheimer’s and Long- Term Care Insurance” by Donald H. Taylor Jr., Robert M. Cook-Deegan, Susan Hiraki, J. Scott Roberts, Dan G. Blazer, and Robert C. Green, in Health Affairs, Jan. 2010.

THE SOURCE: “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence” by Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert A. Bjork, in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Dec. 2008.

THE SOURCE: “Down and Out in Chicago” by T. M. Luhrmann, in Raritan, Winter 2010.

THE SOURCE: “Online Information Sources of Political Blogs” by Mark Leccese, in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Autumn 2009.

“The Future of Blame” by James Q. Wilson, in National Affairs, Winter 2010.

The Islamic world has long resisted the concept of a printed Qur'an.

THE SOURCE: “The Naked Truth” by Nina G. Jablonski, in Scientific American, Feb. 2010.

THE SOURCE: “Sculptors of the American Renaissance: Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French” by James F. Cooper, in American Arts Quarterly, Fall 2009.

THE SOURCE: “Translators Struggle to Prove Their Academic Bona Fides” by Jennifer Howard, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 17, 2010.

THE SOURCE: “The Lost Community? Public Housing and Social Capital in Santiago de Chile, 1985–2001” by Manuel Tironi, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Dec. 2009.

Book Reviews

FROM ETERNITY TO HERE:
The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.
By Sean Carroll.
Dutton. 438 pp. $26.95

Putting Theory to the Test  Image

WHAT DARWIN GOT WRONG.
By Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 264 pp. $26

Celebrity Jane  Image

JANE’S FAME:
How Jane Austen Conquered the World.
By Claire Harman.
Henry Holt. 277 pp. $26

A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED:
Thirty-Three Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen.
Edited by Susannah Carson.
Random House. 295 pp. $25

Matchmakers  Image

MORE PERFECT UNIONS:
The American Search for Marital Bliss.
By Rebecca L. Davis.
Harvard Univ. Press. 317 pp. $29.95

THE ROUTES OF MAN:
How Roads Are Changing the World, and the Way We Live Today.
By Ted Conover.
Knopf. 333 pp. $26.95

Agents for Change  Image

PARADISE BENEATH HER FEET:
How Women Are Transforming the Middle East.
By Isobel Coleman.
Random House. 309 pp. $26

ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY:
The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism.
By Julian E. Zelizer.
Basic. 583 pp. $35

Garden Cities  Image

PUBLIC PRODUCE:
The New Urban Agriculture.
By Darrin Nordahl.
Island Press. 177 pp. $30

Man on the Run  Image

FLIGHT FROM MONTICELLO:
Thomas Jefferson at War.
By Michael Kranish.
Oxford Univ. Press. 388 pp. $27.95

THE ARSENIC CENTURY:
How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work, and Play.
By James C. Whorton.
Oxford Univ. Press. 464 pp. $29.95

Morgan’s End  Image

A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY:
A New Life of E. M. Forster.
By Wendy Moffat.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 416 pp. $32.50

HISTORICAL THESAURUS OF THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY.
Edited by Chistian Key, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irene Wotherspoon.
Oxford Univ. Pres. 3,892 pp. $395

FIRST WE READ, THEN WE WRITE:
Emerson on the Creative Process.
By Robert D. Richardson.
Univ. of Iowa Press. 101 pp. $19.95

Jesus College  Image

SEEING THE LIGHT:
Religious Colleges in Twenty-First-Century America.
By Samuel Schuman.
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 326 pp. $50

Essays

When rights are at issue, Americans instinctively turn to the courts. It is an undemocratic habit that they have exported, along with the underlying institutions, with dismaying success.

James Grant

As the years go by and his first editions gain in value, a once starry-eyed book collector is faced with questions beyond price.

Jeffrey Scheuer

A century and a half after the first state seceded from the Union,a lively debate over what caused the Civil War continues.

Christopher Clausen

Two decades after Solidarity’s triumph, Poland is leveraging its geography and aid dollars to pay forward the support its struggling democratic movement received from abroad.

Andrew Curry

Big business gets the headlines, but thousands of upstart companies do most of the heavy lifting in the American economy.

Carl Schramm & Robert E. Litan

Even when big business was incontestibly king, entrepreneurial forces drove the American economy and powered its periodic renewals. Today, there are worrisome signs that the game is up.

Margaret B. W. Graham

For all of China’s economic achievements, the heyday of its entrepreneurs lies more than 20 years in the past. Renewing that era’s rural capitalism would yield more balanced growth and go a long way toward reducing today’s trade tensions.

Yasheng Huang

Critics have tried to explain away the West’s centuries-long economic domination of the globe; they would do better to study its lessons.

David S. Landes

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