"The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America"

Summary: "The gross financial inequalities recently enumerated by Thomas 
Piketty are not the only worrisome signs that our economic system has 
gone dangerously awry, for that system has also been corrupting our 
nation's character in ways that are even more destructive to our way of 
life. This co-opting of the American experiment by and for strictly 
monetary motives has been a gradual story, and the one that David 
Bosworth powerfully narrates in /The Demise of Virtue in Virtual 
America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession/, his sweeping history 
of the forces driving ethical, political, and economic change over the 
last sixty years. Here, Bosworth traces how the commercialization of 
both public spaces and electronic information has created a new and 
enclosed American place. Chapter by chapter, he shows how the 
materialist values of this Virtual America have suffused our everyday 
lives, tainting alike the themes of our narratives, the planks of our 
parties, the practice of medicine, the profession of art, and the most 
intimate aspects of our personal lives, including our beliefs about God, 
marriage, and childcare. From Ronald Reagan and Disneyland to 
psychopharmacology and "prosperity theology," from the phony 
conservatism of Wall Street to the faux rebellion of "transgressive" 
art, Bosworth's alternative story of American life since 1950 
relentlessly challenges today's dominant narratives-narratives that, as 
he reveals, made both the calamitous invasion of Iraq and the economic 
collapse of 2008 all too likely."