Next Progressive Era: A Blueprint for Broad Prosperity. This item is unavailable.Next Progressive Era: A Blueprint for Broad Prosperity

Longman and Boshara, both of the think tank the New America Foundation, tackle the most worrisome of American early 21st-century problems: environmental preservation, exurbanization and car culture, the country's uneven health-care system and the debt and credit crises. They connect seemingly disparate U.S. social ills: urban sprawl, car-choked highways and the health-care crisis, for example, and they offer policy solutions from the core Progressive ideals of the early 20th century—including the practice of thrift as a road to financial independence. They note a return to yeomanry—their term for Americans' increasing rates of entrepreneurship and independent contract work to escape the wage slavery of working for a large corporation. Calling for stronger, rather than bigger government to regulate big business, they evoke Teddy Roosevelt's assertion that regulation should only give each man as good a chance as possible to develop the qualities he has in him. Despite the subtitle, this is not a lofty blueprint but an astute policy guide, communicating the urgency for reform in health care, banking and transportation without resorting to shrillness or stridency. (Apr.)
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