A Sick Society
IT MIGHT JUST AS WELL be called “America’s Social Sickness,” but the book I have just published is called America’s Social Health, with the subtitle Putting Social Issues Back on the Public Agenda. The implication is that we might do something about our sick society if the facts were drummed into our heads by a periodic social report. The authors, Marque-Luisa Miringoff and Sandra Opdyke, carry on the work started by the late Marc Miringoff, founder of the Institute for Innovation in Social Policy. They have assembled in one book the damning information that every social scientist should be able to recite in his or her sleep. They start with an “Index of Social Health of the United States, 1970–2005,” based on sixteen components as follows: