Our mistaken tendency to pit liberty against virtue blinds us to how easily we can rethink liberty and virtue in a way that steps outside the confines of the culture war.
For there are two well known problems with the way that the Census counts household income (and there are many of these sorts of traps in official US statistics: the pit that is the official poverty measure deserves a book all to itself).
After September 11, when those of us who worked in that lower-Manhattan neighborhood returned to our offices, one unforgettable memory was the pit called Ground Zero.