In today's academy, there is a growing movement to judge societies by the happiness (or "subjective well-being") of their people, and to formulate economic and social policy accordingly. But what these scholars mean by happiness turns out to be a shallow hedonism, and the policies they hope to implement would produce an endlessly expanding welfare state.

The West's great philosophers and religious thinkers have always insisted that justice must be at the center of political life. But because the term "justice" has been hijacked by the left for the better part of a century, we no longer quite understand what the call to justice means. It is time for conservatives to reclaim this central political idea, and to offer the public their own vision of the just society.

Efforts to help the poor in America are frequently derailed by the misguided notion that poverty is best understood through the lens of inequality. Far too often, policy­makers succumb to the argument that a widening gap between the richest and poorest Americans is the fundamental economic problem to be solved. But a serious examination of both the premises and reasoning behind this belief show that the left's obsession with the income gap risks neglecting the poor for the sake of an ill-advised ideological quest.

Today's Tea Party movement heavily emphasizes a recovery of the Constitution — including that document's constraints on popular will — as a means of restraining the left's resurgent Progressive impulses. The clash between the Tea Partiers and their critics therefore carries powerful echoes of the last great debate between Progressives and constitutionalists — exactly 100 years ago, in the battle for the soul of the Republican Party before the election of 1912.

Think tanks are enormously influential in our politics, and are becoming only more so. But recent trends — especially the emergence of more advocacy-oriented think tanks — suggest that these organizations may also be growing more political and less inclined to produce creative policy ideas. Unfortunately, this transformation is occurring just as our public institutions cry out for intelligent reform.

Each year, massive federal programs disburse billions of dollars with no real sense of whether they achieve their goals. New programs are created based on vague and ill-informed projections of their future effects, and bureaucrats in Washington are expected to know far more than any small group of technocrats ever really could. New information technologies can help us close such knowledge gaps — but only if lawmakers allow these innovations to shape and enhance our politics.

One of the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis was the need for more effective capital requirements on large banks. If such regulations are poorly designed, however, higher capital requirements can lead to a disastrous credit crunch. By pursuing a balanced approach — one that harnesses the power of markets rather than stifling it — policymakers can both effectively regulate banks' risk-taking and avoid undermining economic growth.

Most Americans now realize that a college degree is essential to upward economic mobility, but for many young people it is a crucial credential that remains out of reach. This situation — intense demand combined with a shortage of affordable supply — cannot last. Much as upstarts and new technologies revolutionized telecommunications and consumer electronics, sweeping changes are about to transform the business model of American higher education.

Politicians, journalists, and commentators on the left argue that most Americans have been exposed to grave economic peril in recent decades — with exploding risks of job and income loss, of bankruptcy, of debt, and of being left without health care threatening the broad middle class well before the recent recession. An honest look at the data, however, shows this popular narrative to be vastly exaggerated — and a major obstacle to fixing America's real economic troubles.

For as long as the culture of business has been an integral part of American life, it has also been frowned upon by America's literary class. Our leading authors and playwrights have portrayed corporations large and small — and the people who run them — as heartless, soulless agents of greed. These caricatures have shaped our implicit understanding of the business world, but they have revealed at least as much about the moral failings of America's intellectual elite.

To most, the term "school vouchers" connotes poor students given a ticket out of failing inner-city schools. But in a growing number of states, school vouchers are designed to serve a different group of children — those with disabilities. Special-education vouchers are allowing disabled students to attend the schools that best meet their needs, are saving cash-strapped states millions of dollars, and are helping to improve the quality of education that public schools provide to all of their students. They offer an excellent template for reform.

Round after round of education reform has failed in recent decades, and one major reason is our anachronistic and deeply flawed system for organizing and operating public schools. Only by understanding what ails that system, and how it might be improved, can we restore sanity and efficiency to American public education.

Closing the academic-performance gaps between students of different incomes and races has become the foremost preoccupation of education reformers. This is a worthy and important aim, but it also carries great costs — shortchanging many children, narrowing the scope of schooling, undermining American competitiveness, and hindering the broader cause of education reform.

The dire predicament of Social Security and Medicare has lawmakers searching desperately for ways to cut costs. One prominent option is means-testing, by which poor seniors would receive more benefits and rich seniors would receive less. This approach could save a great deal of money — but it also runs the risk of discouraging saving and work. Policymakers can avoid these downsides if they understand how incentives shape behavior.

The economic crisis of 2008 revealed the weaknesses of the Federal Reserve's approach to monetary policy. That approach, centered on setting a target for inflation, is simply taken for granted as the way the Fed does business. But the Fed could far better ensure stable growth by setting a different target: one based on nominal gross domestic product.

Today's debates about the danger of inflation focus on whether the Federal Reserve can be trusted to manage interest rates and the money supply. But they overlook a crucial danger: Our enormous federal deficits and debt could easily produce a run on the dollar that would yield nearly unstoppable fiscal inflation. The good news is that such a crisis can still be averted — but only if policymakers move swiftly to get our finances under control.

From financial regulation to health-care entitlements, many of today's domestic-policy disputes boil down to one key question: the proper role of competition in our national life. Despite the rumblings of some critics, this is fitting — because the principle of competition, which the founders understood to be essential, underlies America's constitutional system and political order.

Ten years after September 11th, America still struggles to understand the place of Muslims in our society. Between the complacency of media, academic, and government elites, and the alarms raised by populists and zealous journalists, most of the country is simply confused. Only a better understanding of America's Muslims — and particularly of their key organizations and leaders — can help us see both the real dangers and real promise in the evolution of America's Muslim community.

Our efforts to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks revealed a troubling lack of consensus about the meaning of that day's events. From New York to Washington to Cambridge, opinion-makers and government leaders have managed to turn what should be an occasion for unity into a national disgrace.

American society has often drawn on the strengths of diverse local communities. But in recent decades — as a result of the information revolution, globalization, and the emergence of a service-based economy — the character of those communities has changed, and we are only beginning to come to grips with how those changes will transform American life.