American politics are on the wrong track, and everybody knows it. The federal government is mired in perpetual budget paralysis. Congressional approval ratings are the stuff of comedy punch lines. Fox News is also a 24-hour-a-day joke that just happens not to be very funny. Politicians are very careful never to say anything in public; saying something can only get you in trouble. And policies that could shape the life chances of millions of Americans for generations to come are formulated on the basis of focus group testing of three-second sound-bites. That is sheer madness. We can and should do better.

I am not a politician, a political activist, or a policy analyst. The last time I held political office it was as Imperator of my high school Latin club. I rarely sign petitions and to my shame I have never walked in a protest march. It should go without saying that I have never been shocked with a TASER™ electroshock device, pepper sprayed, arrested, or imprisoned for expressing my beliefs. I know people who have, and I look up to them as heroes in the fight for justice. I am not a hero.

I am a professional sociologist and social statistician. My other books have titles like Methods for Quantitative Macro-Comparative Research and Latent Variables and Factor Analysis. This book is different, because things have become so bad that I felt an obligation to do something to help make them better. The United States is making a mess of its social, economic, and political policies. With an election coming up in 2016—a Presidential election that is wide-open for candidates from both major parties—I felt it was important that social science have a say. The country should be moving forward, not backward, and social science has the potential to help guide progress toward a better and brighter future.

As my family and friends know all too well, at the personal level I am one of the most conservative people on the planet. I was born on October 5, 1969, and for the most part I haven’t changed since. I grew up in a highly commercialized but relatively benign corporate America.