 Well, in my new narrative history of the United States, Land of Promise, an economic history of the United States, I look at the interaction between waves of technology driven economic change in America since the very earliest years of the Republic in the 1790s and their relationship with waves of political change. I argue that great transformations of the economy by technological innovation, be it the steam engine, the internal combustion engine electricity, or more recently, transistors, computers in the internet, produce transformations of the way we live and do business. And this means that regulatory systems, laws, and often political institutions lag behind by generation or so until they're modernized in what often is a very cataclysmic, accelerated period of reform, such as the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the New Deal in World War II. One of my arguments is that the United States now is on the verge of another transformation of politics and institutions in order to catch up with an economy which is racing ahead of our somewhat anachronistic and antiquated political order, largely because the transformation of the economy by the Information Technology Revolution, which was rooted in the 1930s in World War II, but only really began transforming one economic sector after another in the 1980s and 1990s, that transformation is reaching its peak. However, our regulatory systems, our welfare state, and much of the way we govern the economy is still rooted in the New Deal period, which was a response to the last wave of technological innovation that of the so-called Second Industrial Revolution based on electricity, automobiles, and aviation. History doesn't have easily laid out answers to our contemporary questions. It has suggestions at most. Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And I think by looking at how earlier generations of American policymakers responded to the challenges created by earlier waves of technological innovation, that will give us some ideas of how to respond to the increasing misalignment of a political system that was last refurbished during the New Deal era and the Civil Rights Revolution half a century ago and are increasingly a high-tech global economy. Let me give you a couple of examples of this kind of misalignment between the economy and our political system. When our laws governing corporations were last revised, it was during the New Deal era when banking and manufacturing were almost entirely national. Now, of course, we have global finance and transnational production taking place on many continents, but both our national systems of regulation and global systems have not really caught up to the challenge of this. Another example of misalignment between our institutions and our technology-transformed economy has to do with unemployment benefits. The present unemployment benefits system was designed essentially to help off laid-off industrial workers during recessions on the assumption that there would be a rapid recovery and they would be hired again. What we've seen in the last couple of recessions is that the periods of unemployment last longer and longer. And during that time, because of the rapid pace of technology-driven change, sometimes the industry from which they were laid off is not there for the laid-off workers to return to. So we really need to seriously rethink the role of conventional unemployment insurance for a world in which the typical unemployed worker is not a Detroit factory worker who in effect is temporarily on leave during a short-term business downturn. There's a hunger in the country for a narrative that will describe where we are in history and where we go from here. And I hope Land of Promise can address some of that need. Unfortunately, the conventional narratives tend to be those formed in the last cycle so that a lot of the debate essentially is unchanged from New Deal liberals who simply focused on more regulation or expansions of social insurance. However worthwhile that might be, it doesn't address the fundamental questions of the mismatch between national institutions and this tech-driven global economy. At the same time, the emphasis on small businesses by conservatives but also by many centrists and progressives tends to reflect a kind of old nostalgic vision of the US economy based on small farms and self-employed business executives and merchants of a kind that really has not existed since the first and second industrial revolutions and is not likely to come back in the near future. So there's always a tension between a clear-eyed analysis of what's going on in the world and nostalgia for earlier eras of American economics and society and nostalgia sells politically, which is one reason why the great innovators in American politics, including Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt in these earlier periods of transformation and modernization, they tended to portray their innovations as a restoration of a golden past rather than what they actually were which was improvising to come up with a new system for new circumstances.