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American Dream

Daniel talks with Robert Samuelson, author of "The Good Life And Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945-1995" (Times Books). Samuelson says the current pessimism that many Americans feel is related to a post-World War Two optimism. He says we've turned the so-called "American Dream" into a fantasy of a Utopian Society in which there are no social or economic problems. But, he says, we cannot expect to solve our problems once and for all - that we'll always need to deal with them.

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