"The twenty-first century was never supposed to look like this. The second half of the twentieth century was a self-conscious advertisement for the wonderful twenty-first, when America would lead the rest of the world into an affluent, peaceful technological Utopia. Scientists, futurologists and visionaries promised a future without hunger or want, without fear of illness or pain or even death, where the human race would spread its genius out to the stars, and science would bring Utopia to earth. In the twenty-first century, we were promised a leisure society of short work weeks and long vacations, pollution-free transportation, an end to world food shortages, population problems, nationalism and war. The twenty-first century was held out as the glittering prize for surviving the tribulations of the twentieth. Now we have arrived in the second decade of this twenty-first-century paradise. How does it look so far? It looks like hell."