Recent years have seen an explosion of male joblessness and a steep decline in men’s life prospects that have disrupted the “romantic market” in ways that narrow a marriage-minded woman’s options. Yet, this state of affairs also presents an opportunity: as the economy evolves, it’s time to embrace new ideas about romance and family—and to acknowledge the end of “traditional” marriage as society’s highest ideal.

That's a broad view from Kate Bolick's recent cover story in The Atlantic, 'All the Single Ladies' which Andrew Geller elaborated on when he spoke with her this morning.

Pew Research marriage report (12/11) (PDF)

Gentrification in Portland: A Special Program

As Portland becomes a destination for young creatives to find homes and work, minority communities are being "gentrified out" of the city. North and Northeast Portland have lost people of color as housing costs in those areas have increased.

Host Jennifer Kemp interviews local black community leaders Clifford Walker of the Oregon Commission for Black Affairs and Oregon State Representative Lew Frederick, whose district includes North and Northeast Portland,   about the causes of gentrification and whether it is a normal part of the evolution is a normal part of the evolution of a city.

Host Michelle Schroeder Fletcher interviews Thomas Ferguson, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, about the significance of the failure of the Congressional budgetary Super Committee and what it bodes for the future.

Ferguson says, "Read the fine print on the 'crisis' in Social Security and you discover that even critics, such as Peter Orszag (President Obama’s former OMB chief), admit that under their pessimistic assumptions Social Security payments might rise by all of one percent of GDP by 2050! Social Security is obviously a non-problem, especially in the middle of the Great Recession.

"Health care and military are different. Both are industries in which true competition is rare. In both, the policy challenge is to face down oligopolies protected by powerful lobbies. Congress could, for example, save trillions of dollars in the long run by allowing the government to bargain down pharmaceutical prices, junking 'fee for service' pricing, requiring a single, integrated system for billing and reporting, banning obvious conflicts of interests such physicians owning shares in testing companies, and requiring serious cost comparisons of what treatments really work.

"But these steps, like seriously rethinking American military strategy, don't seem to be on the agenda of a Congress that openly sells leadership and committee posts to the highest bidders and luxuriates in insider stock trades."

Ferguson’s study, coauthored with Robert Johnson, of U.S. deficit and budgetary problems, is available here in PDF: http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/other_publication_types/magazine___journal_articles/ferguson_johnson.pdf

His recent studies of Congress and money have appeared in the Financial Times -- http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7ead8528-b7af-11e0-8523-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1e9oKoy7f -- and the Washington Spectator http://www.washingtonspectator.org/articles/20111015postedprices.cfm .

They  discuss "Decade of Fear," which has been described as a journalistic memoir. Shephard conducted hundreds of interviews worldwide and wove them together to describe the decade since 2001 and looked at how the West’s “solutions” for terrorism only served to exacerbate the problem. Temporarily banned from Guantanamo for her reporting she has interviewed leaders and common people from the cities and the border territories of Pakistan. She has repeatedly gone to Mogadishu, in embattled Somalia to tell the story of this war devastated country. She reported from the streets of Yemen covering the future Nobel Laureate Tawakkol Karman.