BEN WATTENBERG: Over the course of the century, American women had been gradually moving into the workforce. At the height of World War II, Norman Rockwell captured the spirit of America's working women with this robust take on an American icon, Rosie the Riveter. After the war, Rosie the Riveter, Sally the Secretary and many others went back home. But soon women would return to work in larger numbers than ever before, and America would never be the same.

ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS: I think the war-time experience had an impact on women. It raised expectations of what life could be like. It made it possible for them to imagine dual roles both inside the home and outside the home. It made it possible for them to imagine the kind of economic independence that was less possible before the war.

BEN WATTENBERG: Most middle-class women in the 1950s and early 1960s were living comfortable lives, certainly by most any previous measurable standards, certainly in America's thriving suburbs. But not everyone was fully satisfied with this leafy suburban utopia. One housewife tapped into the unease about what she called "the problem that has no name."

Betty Friedan was born in Peoria, Illinois in 1921 and attended Smith College. Friedan became a liberal activist and later married and moved to the suburbs to raise a family. A working mother, Friedan wrote freelance articles for women's magazines, extolling the typical 1950s family. To mark the 15th reunion of her fellow Smith graduates, Friedan conducted a survey of their attitudes and accomplishments. Some 200 of her classmates responded.

BETTY FRIEDAN (Author, The Feminine Mystique): The questionnaire was quite interesting, and it raised more questions than it answered. But it showed that with all the education, American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife, but they also managed to enlarge it.

BEN WATTENBERG: The survey, along with Friedan's interviews of suburban women, eventually became the basis for her book, "The Feminine Mystique." Friedan criticized how she felt society discouraged women from making careers away from home and family. Friedan called suburban homes "comfortable concentration camps."

BETTY FRIEDAN (From The Feminine Mystique): It is urgent to understand how the very condition of being a housewife can create a sense of emptiness, non-existence, nothingness in women. For women of ability in America today, I am convinced there is something about the housewife state that is dangerous.

BEN WATTENBERG: Although there has been some criticism of what Friedan's survey actually found, her critique struck a chord. "The Feminine Mystique" sold nearly 3 million copies in its first three years in print. Its publication is often regarded as the beginning of the modern women's movement.

WILLIAM CHAFE (Duke University): When this book comes, it comes at exactly the right moment to, in some ways, start a grass fire across suburban America in which women say, "I recognize myself there. I'm one of those people who's not that happy."

BETTY FRIEDAN: The first step in the revolution is consciousness. And I did the consciousness with "The Feminist Mystique."

BEN WATTENBERG: Let's take a look at the lay of the land before and after the modern women's movement. The role of women had been changing quite dramatically throughout the century. But after the new round of activism that began in the mid-1960s, many of those trends continued, and some went into overdrive. The percentage of women on college campuses, though lower than that for men, had been increasing from 1900 to 1940. World War II temporarily halted this progress, but by 1965 the trend resumed its rise. By the 1980s, more women than men were earning college degrees.

And what was happening to these better-educated women? Most went into the workplace. The percentage of married women in the labor force had been steadily increasing for the entire century. After the turbulence of World War II subsided, that rate kept on soaring, reaching 36 percent in 1965 and 61 percent in 1998, although many women worked part-time.

The proportion of professional women has skyrocketed -- doctors, lawyers, engineers up big. Earnings for women working full-time year-round, as compared to men, took off around 1980, climbing from about 60 percent to almost 75 percent in 1997. When gender and wages are further corrected for work experience, education and time on job, the earnings gap shrinks far further, very close to equality.

In 1960, almost 70 years after Frederick Jackson Turner noted the closing of the old frontier, President John F. Kennedy sounded the trumpet for a new frontier. Things seemed fine. The post-war American economy was growing strong and steady. The old pattern of boom and bust had softened. But things were about to change. Murphy's Law was in the saddle: If it can go wrong it will go wrong, at the worst possible time. Soon Americans faced grave problems -- cultural, social and economic.

Growth of the gross domestic product is one measure of America's economic health. And during the first half of the 20th century, it had swung wildly, indicating a painful pattern of economic boom and bust. From mid-century on, that line would stabilize at positive levels. But in the early 1960s, clearly not everyone was sharing in the good times.

A young writer named Michael Harrington challenged the notion of post-war affluence. In his 1962 book, "The Other America," Harrington estimated, and perhaps overestimated, that 25 percent of the country, between 40 million and 50 million people, lived in poverty, invisible to their more prosperous fellow citizens. The book influenced what came to be called the War on Poverty.

PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Let this session of Congress be known as the session, which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.

BEN WATTENBERG: But it was not to be an easy war, and there was more to poverty than just a lack of money. In 1965, a young academic in the Johnson administration began a serious study of how culture and economics were intertwined. Daniel Patrick Moynihan examined the data and wrote, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." The report, published by the Department of Labor, used data to focus attention on the problems of black families.

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN: These are accurate statistics, most of them government statistics. Most of them are available if you dig through those Census volumes. The issue is, what are we going to do about these facts?

BEN WATTENBERG: Scouring the Labor Department's statistics, Moynihan found, unsurprisingly, that when unemployment went up, more people went on welfare, and vice-versa. This correlation seemed to be set in stone. But Moynihan noticed that something was changing.

SENATOR DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN (D-NY): In 1963, that correlation had disappeared. Suddenly the unemployment for minorities, as well as everybody else, was going down, and the dependency rate, if you want to put it that way, was going up. Now, what was this all about?

BEN WATTENBERG: According to Moynihan, "at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family."

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN: It seems to me that there are a great many Negro Americans, perhaps half the population is securely in the middle class, doing very well, taking care of itself, needing no help from anybody, thank you very much. But the slums are also filling up with a lower-class people, unemployed, ill-educated, ill-housed, for whom the cycle of no jobs and bad education and bad housing just reproduces itself and takes its most pregnant personal form in the great tragedy of the family lives of these men and women and of their children.

GLENN LOURY (Boston University): The Moynihan report takes up the question of what would be necessary to bring African-Americans into a status of equal opportunity in American society and argues that a major impediment would be that the family structure among blacks was weaker and was becoming a major problem.

BEN WATTENBERG: Out-of-wedlock births among blacks had gone up from 17 percent in 1950 to 26 percent in 1965. By 1970, that figure would reach 39 percent. More children were being raised without the presence of fathers.

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN: At any given moment, two-thirds of the Negro families are husband-and-wife families. But over the lifetime, only about a little more than a third of Negro children come of 18 having lived all their lives in such a family. And that hurts people. That deprives them of opportunities. Not to have a father, not to have a mother, you've lost something that helps you in life. And so this process feeds back into the cycle.

BEN WATTENBERG: For Moynihan, the issue was more than just one of dry social science. From the age of 9, he had been raised in a single-parent home.

JAMES Q. WILSON (UCLA): It was his view, a man who grew up in a female-headed single-parent family, quite sensitive to this issue, that without an intact family, the problems of manhood, of establishing true manliness among some black Americans, would prove to be very difficult, possibly insoluble.

BEN WATTENBERG: Moynihan's argument convinced his boss, President Lyndon Johnson.

PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Perhaps most important, its influence, radiating to every part of life, is the breakdown of the Negro family structure. And when the family collapses, it is the children that are usually damaged.

BEN WATTENBERG: The Moynihan report stirred the pot. Was the erosion of the black family the consequence of a culture that was broken or of discrimination or of an economy that could not produce enough good jobs?

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA (George Mason University): What Moynihan did was to notice that perhaps the family itself ought to be addressed as an explicit issue for social policy and not simply the economic issue of having enough jobs and opportunities.

BEN WATTENBERG: Opportunities had been growing for blacks during the 1960s. Civil rights legislation killed Jim Crow. The black poverty rate declined, and the black middle class grew. To many civil rights leaders, Moynihan's views were heresy.

GLENN LOURY: We had the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had been enacted, a great victory for the civil rights movement. We had the Voting Rights Act of 1965, bringing African-Americans fully into the body politic. Now along comes someone who says, "Yes, hold on, but wait just a minute. Have you noticed these social trends?"

JAMES Q. WILSON: Now, the reaction, of course, was "Moynihan is blaming the victim." The inundation of criticism of him in the early 1960s was ferocious.

BAYARD RUSTIN (Civil Rights Activist): The interesting thing is that if one considers the Moynihan report about the breakdown of the Negro community, one needs to look back to the Irish and to the Italian experience, which is really simple, that as the heads of families were permitted by this society to have economic independence, all of the so-called defects of crime, illegitimacy and the like disappeared.

BEN WATTENBERG: Another key study of the time looked at the importance of the family, this time in relation to education. Sociologist James Coleman's report was called "Equality of Educational Opportunity." It had been mandated by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to study the effects of school segregation.

CHRISTOPHER JENCKS (Harvard University): Coleman had two big expectations when he did his report. He thought he was going to find that the schools that black children attended got far less adequate resources than the schools that white children attended, and he thought that he was going to find that the resources that schools got made a big difference to students' achievement.

BEN WATTENBERG: To test these theories, Coleman and his researchers surveyed over 600,000 students and 4,000 schools. It was one of the largest social science projects ever undertaken. Working day and night on a tight deadline, holed up in a hotel room, Coleman and his team crunched the numbers.

CHRISTOPHER JENCKS: This was really a mammoth undertaking. The number of social scientists, some living today, who could claim to have ever written a major piece of work in three months is extremely small. In fact, it may be zero other than Jim Coleman.

BEN WATTENBERG: By looking at the numbers, Coleman ended up challenging conventional wisdom as well as his own previous views.

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN: Early one evening, there was a reception at the Harvard Faculty Club, and Seymour Martin Lipsett, the incomparable Marty Lipsett, walks in, sees me, comes over and says, "You know what Coleman's finding, don't you?" I said, "No." He said, "It's all family."

BEN WATTENBERG: The Coleman report pointed to the family as the most important indicator by far of how a child would perform at school. And since the Moynihan and Coleman reports were published, the American family, black and white, continued to change, but not necessarily for the better.

CHRISTOPHER JENCKS: I think today most social scientists would agree with Moynihan's view that single-parent families really have adverse effects on children and that this contributed to the problems of African-American communities in the 1960s and since, but also now there are the problems of Latino and white and other communities.

BEN WATTENBERG: Not only did black out-of-wedlock birth rates skyrocket, but so did white rates. In fact, by 1999, the white illegitimacy rate was equal to the black rate when the Moynihan report was written. And black out-of-wedlock births reached almost 70 percent.

But there is some good news. The teenage birth rate is down. This may well lead to lower out-of-wedlock birth rates in the future.

GLENN LOURY: If we ask the question today of how the Moynihan report looks, now we look back 35 years later, I'd have to say it's looking pretty good. A fairly prescient piece of social forecasting would, I think, have to be a fair-minded person's judgment. I wish I could produce the document that would look as good 35 years from now.

BEN WATTENBERG: Out-of-wedlock births were not the only problem. Social scientist Francis Fukuyama has called the phenomenon "the great disruption."

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: I think that in many ways, a lot of the problems that occurred during the great disruption were the result of a much too expansive sense of individual entitlement and, you know, almost total absence of responsibility for your spouse, for your children, for your neighbor, country, all of the communities in which we're embedded.

BEN WATTENBERG: And we can measure that disruption. Here's just a sample. The nature of the family was changing. In the 1960s, divorce rates spiked. Once it was rare and called "living in sin." The number of men and women living together without the benefit of marriage went up six-fold between 1960 and 1970, and then another six-fold between 1970 and 1998. Today, about half of all those getting married have lived in a cohabiting relationship.

A third disruption concerned drugs. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the use of marijuana increased by over 400 percent; mind-altering hallucinogens by over 800 percent; cocaine, 2300 percent.

The worst part of the great disruption was crime. Pat Moynihan warned that if more children grew up without the presence of fathers, the result would be social chaos, including crime. Crime rates soared, and crime and punishment became one of the most important issues in American life.

BEN WATTENBERG: During the 1960s, decline and decay intensified in many cities. A series of urban riots put an exclamation point on a general feeling of disorder. Many streets and parks became threatening places. Americans - whites and blacks - fled the inner city for the suburbs. Between 1950 and 1990, Chicago lost 23 percent of its population; Washington, 24 percent; Detroit, 44 percent; Cleveland, 45 percent; St. Louis lost 54 percent of its population. And all this happened while the total American population was growing by 64 percent.

Surveying this urban landscape, California-born political scientist James Q. Wilson focused his attention on the effects of crime. Wilson received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1959 and later taught at Harvard and UCLA.

JAMES Q. WILSON: Between 1963 and the early 1970s, the rate of violent crime more or less tripled in the United States. By violent crime, I mean murder, manslaughter and robbery. So we had a tripling of the crime rate at a time when the country was, by and large, prosperous, in which the unemployment rates even among African-American adolescents was quite low.

BEN WATTENBERG: It was getting harder to arrest, prosecute, convict and incarcerate criminals. Remarkably, even though crime was up, the number of people being sent to prison went down by 12 percent between 1960 and 1970. Americans were outraged and wanted solutions.

JAMES Q. WILSON: One of the things we looked at is whether, if the probability of going to prison for a crime is higher in one state than another state, will the crime rate in the state where the probability of prison is higher be less than the crime rate in the state where the probability of prison is lower, other things being equal. And we learned that the answer seemed to be yes.

CHRISTOPHER JENCKS: I think James Q. Wilson's biggest impact on the study of crime was to make the argument that it was legitimate and appropriate to think about punishing criminals. Among academics, the emphasis had for a long, long time been very heavily on trying to either deter crime, on the one hand, and to rehabilitate criminals so that they wouldn't commit more crimes, on the other hand.

BEN WATTENBERG: Jim Wilson made the scholarly case for what most people sensed: Putting more criminals in jail will lower the crime rate. Over time, the climate of opinion changed. Politicians began passing tougher laws. Judges handed out longer sentences. The prison population climbed dramatically. Crime rates declined, dropping more than 30 percent during the 1990s. It's a blessing with a down side.

ELLIOTT CURRIE (Author, Crime & Punishment in America ): You can't take as many people, particularly young men, and increasingly young women, as we have taken them from some communities in our society, particularly urban communities, particularly inner-city communities, you can't put that many people in prison for that long without having dramatic impacts on the whole way of life in those cities and on the way in which children are raised, for example, or not raised.

BEN WATTENBERG: Still, increased incarceration keeps thugs off the street. The good economy and new drug rehab programs also cut crime. And Jim Wilson had another good idea.

CHRISTOPHER JENCKS: James Q. Wilson and George Kelling developed this argument called the broken windows theory, which was that if you go into a neighborhood and you see a lot of broken windows, it tells you that nobody around here cares, that nobody's looking out for the neighborhood, that if you go break some more windows, nobody's going to do anything about it, and in some broader sense, anything goes.

JAMES Q. WILSON: It's the level of disorder that counts as much as crime. And therefore, we urge the police to pay as much attention to public order, the elimination of public disorder, by getting rid of prostitutes and gangs on street corners, by painting out the graffiti, by making people feel comfortable around their homes, that this would do a lot for people, and possibly -- this was the theory -- actually drive down the crime rate.

BEN WATTENBERG: Police departments across the country adopted the broken windows theory. The most famous example: New York City. Subways, city parks and other public spaces were no longer places to avoid. Crime rates declined. Most strikingly, the city's homicide rate dropped like a stone.

JAMES Q. WILSON: As it's later turned out, the research that has been done so far suggests that if you do these things, in fact, the crime rate does come down, because good people are on the streets and bad people find it hard to take advantage of them. The ability to measure the crime rate permits you to test theories, to test competing arguments, to see who is correct.

BEN WATTENBERG: In the 1970s, weak economic growth, mounting unemployment rates and rising inflation combined to create something new: Stagflation. OPEC made matters worse. The gas crunch forced Americans to sit in long lines at the pump, fuming for fumes.

But changes were underway that would lead America out of its economic malaise. Case in point: Airlines. Through the 1970s, the industry was heavily regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board, which fixed prices and limited the entry of new airlines into the system. With competition thus strangled, consumers paid high prices and planes flew half-empty.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it is broke, enter Alfred Kahn, a popular economics professor from Cornell University. In 1977, Jimmy Carter named Kahn the new head of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Fred Kahn told one airline official, "I really don't know one plane from the other. To me, they're all marginal costs with wings."

ALFRED E. KAHN (Chairman, Civil Aeronautics Board, 1977-78): If I new what was the most efficient configuration of routes in the airline system, then I could continue to regulate. But since I can't tell you whether it's going to be a Delta kind of operation or it's going to be more like the Eastern shuttle, which is just back and forth, or Southwest Airlines, which was then just back and forth between Houston and Dallas, does it make sense to leave it to an ignorant person like me to tell airlines how they can best configure their routes?

BEN WATTENBERG: Kahn began to clear the thicket of airline regulations. Though free-market conservatives had long supported deregulation, they now had some unlikely allies.

ALFRED E. KAHN: Senator Kennedy, an old-time liberal, found himself working with the National Association of Manufacturers. It was an eye-opener that you could be an old-time liberal and, consistently with that, be in favor of competition and that that would be beneficial to the public.

BEN WATTENBERG: In 1978, Congress passed the Airline Deregulation Act, putting the Civil Aeronautics Board out of business. The new law allowed airlines to compete in the setting of fares and routes, which also encouraged new companies to enter the market. Fred Kahn had deregulated himself out of a job and showed how deregulation could help the average consumer. Since 1978, the price of the average fare has declined nearly 40 percent after adjusting for inflation. In that same period, the number of airline passenger miles flown has nearly tripled.

CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH (President, American Enterprise Institute): It not only lowered prices, but it made it possible for airlines to experiment with new innovations and types of services that hugely expanded the market, so that millions of people who had never traveled by airline before now do so routinely.

ALFRED E. KAHN: We had an explosion in the amount of air travel. It has meant, you may put it in the favorable way, the democratization of air travel. You may put it in an unfavorable way, from a patrician's standpoint. I mean, I had a complaint from a former student of mine, who is very well-to-do, about the hippie who was sitting next to him, unshaven, and he claimed he smelled. And I wrote back and said, "Well, I'm waiting to hear whether there are any complaints coming from the hippie."

BEN WATTENBERG: That's the liberty of mobility, democratization by deregulation. Success with airlines led to deregulation of trucking, natural gas, electric power, telecommunications, banking, railroads, deregulation of old industries and non-regulation of new ones, like computers and the Internet, helped spur economic efficiency and growth. It provided savings for the average consumer. It set in motion what would come to be known as the new economy. Yet before that was to happen, there was one other economic problem to be solved, a big one.

In the 1970s, inflation eroded the value of the dollar. A dollar in 1970 would be worth only 47 cents just 10 years later. Since incomes rarely keep up with inflation, many people became poorer just standing still.

ALFRED E. KAHN: There is something demoralizing to a country, to its people, to find that even though they get pay raises once a year, then to find for the next 364 days that the value of their money is going down and down and down. It creates a divisiveness among classes, a tendency to cast blame on villains, on profiteers, or on evil labor unions. It's divisive of society. It also promotes a feeling, sort of justifiable, that this society is out of control.

BEN WATTENBERG: In 1978, President Carter appointed Fred Kahn to the job of so-called inflation czar, but without a czar's power. Inflation continued to rise. During a tour of a Boston food market in 1979, Kahn summed up his feelings.

ALFRED E. KAHN: Principally, disappointment that prices have taken off so badly. It's a consolation to feel that it isn't really my fault.

And ultimately, the only way of inserting the necessary discipline is monetary restraint. And I remember Paul Volcker saying to me, he said, "Fred, that program is simply not working. I'm the only one in town who has the weapon that can be used, and sooner or later I'm going to have to use it."

BEN WATTENBERG: In 1979, President Carter had appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Fed. Volcker, a dedicated public servant, had been a Federal Reserve economist, a Nixon Treasury official, and president of the New York Fed. At 6'7", Volcker was a giant in the world of greenbacks. But jolly he wasn't.

PAUL VOLCKER (Former Federal Reserve Chairman, 1979-1987): Inflation is thought of as a cruel and maybe the cruelest tax, because it hits in an unexpected way, in an unplanned way, and it hits the people on a fixed income hardest. And there's quite a lot of evidence, contrary to some earlier thinking, that it hits poorer people more than richer people.

BEN WATTENBERG: Difficult times call for difficult actions. So as they say on Wall Street, Volcker slammed on the brakes.

PAUL VOLCKER: We'll take the emphasis off of interest rates and put the emphasis on the growth in the money supply, which is at the root cause of inflation; too much money chasing too few goods in the old proverbial way of putting the inflationary process. So we'll attack the too-much-money part of the equation and we will stop permitting supply from increasing as rapidly as it was.

BEN WATTENBERG: So Volcker's Fed sold bonds. Less money in circulation pushed interest rates up to 19 percent in 1981. That plunged America into its deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

PAUL VOLCKER: I would get asked the question a lot about "How can you conduct a policy that appears to throw people out of work, anyway?" But I also felt that in the long run, there wasn't any question that the economy was going to operate better in the context of price stability.

BEN WATTENBERG: The recession was painful, but inflation declined from its high of 13.5 percent in 1980 to 1.9 percent in 1986, and remained low and fairly level throughout the 1990s. Since 1983, America has produced positive economic growth in 67 out of 71 quarters. This prosperous economy helped set the stock market on a vigorous bull run.

Since 1981, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has increased from 875 to more than 10,000. New investors poured into the hot market, encouraged by the advent of IRAs, Keoughs and 401(k)s. By the end of the century, America had become a nation of owners. A majority of Americans, 52 percent, owned stocks. Call it what you will -- super-capitalism or Marxism turned on its head. Somewhat suddenly, everyday people owned a large part of the means of production.

What does everyday life look like in this new economy? For that, we return to Middletown.

What a handsome young man. Back in 1982, I visited Muncie to examine how the city had changed. I returned in 1999 to get a flavor of what was going on at the end of the century. But flavor is no match for data. So "The First Measured Century" commissioned a team of veteran sociologists to work on a new Middletown study.

As the Lynds had 75 years earlier, our researchers surveyed Muncie high school students and housewives.

TEACHER: Understand that the information will be of value in helping educators, social scientists and people interested in the community to understand the changing needs and problems which we face.

BEN WATTENBERG: Theodore Caplow headed the team. Howard Barr was the chief of field research.

HOWARD BARR: So it may well be that this time the message will be some continuity and some significant change.

BEN WATTENBERG: Poring through the data, we found that plenty had changed, beginning with the nature of the economy itself. Muncie had always been a factory town, but by the 1970s, as in much of the industrial heartland, that was changing with both a vengeance and a silver lining. In 1982, Muncie's unemployment rate had soared to 18 percent.

THEODORE CAPLOW: What was happening was that the heavy industry, sort of basic manufacturing industry on which Middletown had always depended, was being phased out. A number of the local plants never recovered. Some of them staggered on for some years. The Ball Glass Jar Company moved away. Indiana Wire & Steel and the packing houses shut down. Delco reduced its workforce and eventually shut down.

BEN WATTENBERG: America was changing, and so was Muncie. What replaced jars and cars? Ball State University and Ball Memorial Hospital, the two largest employers in Muncie in the year 2000. In the new Muncie, unemployment declined to 3 percent.

HOWARD BAHR: The Muncie of 1999 is no longer a blue-collar community. It's no longer primarily an industrial community. It's a college town. It's a town where service industry, as in the rest of America, has grown to become one of the major sources of income.

BEN WATTENBERG: What else has changed in Muncie? The structure of the family, just as in the rest of America. In 1924, the Lynds found that nearly all Muncie children grew up with both natural parents. By 1977, that number dropped to 68 percent and kept falling.

HOWARD BAHR: In 1999, only half of the Middletown high school students could report that they lived in an intact family. One-fifth, 18 percent, lived with mom alone. Another fifth lived in stepparent families.

BEN WATTENBERG: As in the rest of America, more women in Muncie are working. So it comes as little surprise that women there spend less time keeping house. In 1924, 87 percent of married women in Muncie averaged four or more hours a day of housework. That figure had dropped to 43 percent in 1977, and by 1999, all the way down to 14 percent.

THEODORE CAPLOW: Doing the laundry for a family might consume two and a half woman days in 1924. The same is true of cooking, food preparation, cleaning. In all respects, housework has been drastically simplified, and that is why women are now able, at the same time that they are effectively compelled, to join the labor force.

BEN WATTENBERG: Women are spending more time at the job and less time doing housework. But does all this add up to an erosion of the family?

THEODORE CAPLOW: One of the results that looks paradoxical here, because everybody knows about the great pressure that women have in reconciling their work role and their roles as wives and mothers, we find that they spend more time with their children, and so do fathers, than they did in 1977, and much more time than they did in 1924.

BEN WATTENBERG: The Lynds found that 45 percent of Muncie mothers spent more than two hours a day with their children. By 1977, that number had risen to 65 percent. And our researchers found that in 1999, it had gone up to 71 percent.

Regarding religion in Muncie, our research found both continuity and change. Some data show that the importance of religion has declined.

HOWARD BAHR: The Lynds gave a list of a dozen or so characteristics and asked parents to pick the ones that they thought were most important. And the ones that came up in 1924 were that their children be good churchgoers, that they have religion, and that they learn strict obedience. By '99, the characteristics that parents in Middletown are most keen to impart to their children, even though obedience would help them, are that the kids be tolerant and that they be independent.

BEN WATTENBERG: Still, religious faith continued to play a strong role in family life.

HOWARD BAHR: You have those indications of continuity in religious belief. You have the church attendance, which, if anything, is a little higher in '77 and the '90s than it is in 1924.

BEN WATTENBERG: Let's listen to some responses to an open-ended

survey question: "What do you think about when you're in trouble? Where do you turn to?"

WOMAN: I go to church because I want my children to know there is a God. I'm a true believer of God, but I don't go often enough to church. I go to church because it's an important influence for us and the children. We need anchors in life. It's a very comfortable, friendly congregation, a great minister.

BEN WATTENBERG: Middletown is social science at a micro-level. The U.S. Census is macro, very macro. It is taken every 10 years and counts all Americans. This machine, the first mechanical calculator, was invented for use in the Census of 1890. Its inventor, Herman Holoritt, a Census employee, later helped create a little startup, IBM. Today the modern descendants of this device are pumping detailed data into the bloodstream of American life. It is hard to imagine how the nation could manage itself without such measurements.

KEN PREWITT (Director, Census Bureau): I think the rudiments of democratic accountability, not just democratic governance, but democratic accountability, depend upon a healthy, vibrant, high-quality national statistical system. How in the world can you govern a complicated industrial economy without decent information by those people who have to write the laws and administer the laws and the programs?

BEN WATTENBERG: Ken Prewitt has spent much of his career gathering and examining data. His biggest task as a social scientist came as director of Census 2000, the keystone document in America's statistical system. What does the Census tell us about America at the dawn of the 21st century? Here's a grab bag.

Fewer men are working past age 65, helping trigger a boom in retirement housing and travel. Life expectancy for both men and women at age 60 has gone up substantially.

DANIEL YANKELOVICH (Pollster): One of the most extraordinary changes in demography and people living longer that has been overlooked is not only are people living longer physically, but they're retaining their vitality for a longer period of time. Today's 79-year-old person is the equivalent of a 65-year-old person earlier in the century.

BEN WATTENBERG: Income inequality has been a controversial issue at the end of the century. On its face, it appears that the wealthiest 5 percent of families not only earned more money than the bottom 40 percent, but that recently their share of income rose dramatically before leveling off. But there is more to the story. There has been a stunning rise in the average income of middle-class Americans over the century. Moreover, the fruits of modernization have been shared across the board. Most Americans, regardless of income, get the same pharmaceuticals, watch the same movies and videos, have the same mode of personal transportation, and share the same Internet.

CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH: By any measures, whether we're looking at money income or broader measures of good health, the wealth that people have accumulated, how much money they spend, how they spend their time, there has been a spectacular equalization of real-life circumstances over the past century.

One of the reasons that redistribution has receded from our politics is that the material necessities of life, and even things that were, until fairly recently, considered the material luxuries of life, have become so ubiquitous.

BEN WATTENBERG: The South grew most economically. In 1900, southerners earned about half the national average. By century end, correcting for cost of living, the South caught up to the rest of the country. One hero: Air conditioning, now universal in the South. And, of course, America grew from 76 million people in 1900 to 275 million in 2000; grown and become more diverse, due mostly to the Immigration Act of 1965.

ALAN KRAUT: In 1965, there was a sea change in American immigration law. The country abandoned the national origins quota system and adopted a system which stressed family reunification, the admission of immigrants who offered something to the United States professionally or in terms of badly-needed skills. We no longer wanted to restrict immigration from particular countries the way we had in the earlier period.

KEN PREWITT: Now it's not Europe. Now it is the rest of the world. It is Southeast Asia, the Far East. It is a new diaspora from Africa. It's Somalia, the Eritreans, the Ethiopians, Senegalese. It is, of course, a huge movement from Latin America.

BEN WATTENBERG: Between 1900 and 1930, 98 percent of all immigrants came from Europe. Between 1965 and 1995, it was 15 percent. The effects of this change are apparent. Asian-Americans have increased from .2 percent of the population in 1950 to 4 percent in 2000. The Hispanic population went up from 3 percent to 11 percent. The black proportion of the population grew moderately, from 10 percent to 13 percent.

Back in 1950, 88 percent of Americans were classified as non-Hispanic whites. The 2000 Census shows that figure at about 70 percent. And the Census Bureau projects that this so-called Anglo population will make up 53 percent by 2050. In 1982, pollsters asked whether specific immigrant groups have been good or bad for America. Most respondents thought English immigrants had been a good influence. But look at this: Italians, Jews and Poles, once scorned, also had very high approval ratings. And what do Americans think of more recent immigrants? The same 1982 poll showed dramatically less approval. Yet by 1997, positive images of Haitian, Vietnamese, Korean and Mexican immigrants had climbed substantially.

RITA SIMON (American University): The American public tends to look at immigration with rose-colored glasses turned backwards. By that I mean that they tend to see immigrants who arrived earlier, whenever earlier happened to be, as those who make positive contributions to this country, as those who have helped build this country, settled the land and so forth. And immigrants who are coming now -- and the now could have been 50 years ago; it could be today -- as immigrants who are not likely to make positive contributions and whose admittance should be severely limited.

BEN WATTENBERG: So is the old melting pot still simmering? It is demographically. Among Asian-Americans, 64 percent marry outside their ethnic group. Among Hispanic-Americans, 37 percent marry outside their ethnic group. The African-American rate is much lower but rising from 3 percent in 1980 to 8.8 percent in 1998, and higher for younger persons. If these rates of intermarriage continue to grow, racial and ethnic classifications will likely have less meaning in the future.

KEN PREWITT: It's called sometimes the Tiger Woods phenomenon. Tiger Woods, after all, would presumably check four boxes -- Asian, Native American Indian, white and black, because he sees himself coming from all four of those racial traditions, and he has said so. So he would be four categories.

BEN WATTENBERG: Intermarriage and assimilation can often be painful and resisted. But remember what Israel Zangwell wrote: "America is God's crucible, the great melting pot. God is making the American." It seems to be happening.

KEN PREWITT: So we now are creating a country, the first country in world history, which literally has to represent all of the world, which is to say, it's not just Protestant, Catholic and Jewish. It's now Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim, along with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. It's not just four or five languages. It's 150 languages. We have the challenge and the opportunity to create the first country in world history which literally is a reflection of the entire world. If we do that well, it will be an enormous accomplishment.

BEN WATTENBERG: America is indeed becoming the first universal nation. I think it will work out well. And measurably, liberty has been extended in a most exceptional land. Deep in their bones, despite the media drumbeat of crisis and scandal, Americans know this to be true. In 1999, pollsters were in the field asking this question: Is America a unique country that stands for something special in the world? By 84 percent to 13 percent, Americans said yes. Another poll asked, "Why was America successful during the 20th century?" The top three responses: Our Constitution, free elections and the free enterprise system.

What next? Living in liberty doesn't mean there are no problems, only that we have imperfect ways of dealing with problems. With the social science tools developed in the century just past, we can better measure what's happening and why it's happening. This bolsters the American tradition of liberty, allowing us to better respond and adapt to change imperfectly. It's not everything, but if you look around the world, it's not nothing either. It's about as good as it gets. I encourage you to take a look at the numbers for yourself on the Web and in reference books. Shape them, sculpt them, massage them as you will. Let me know what you find out.

For "The First Measured Century" and for Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg.