Dalton Conley has a new book.

Conley makes a prescient analysis of how technology and free markets have transformed American life, comparing the mid-20th century American with the present-day incarnation.

These are two very different animals -- one compartmentalized and motivated by the traditional American ethos of success, and the other a psychological hybrid of impulses connected to work, pleasure, materialism and consumption. The results of this brilliant and, at times, chilling comparison, are manifest not only on these pages but in real life.

Cheap and easy credit, he writes, has been a major reason why the United States recently dipped into negative savings for the first time since the great depression. Conley examines how, technology has altered how Americans earn and spend money, playing out the behaviors characteristic of late capitalism, or simply an evolving economic system that, by attaching a price to virtually everything from child rearing to dating, has helped devalue people, the work they do and the material goods they desire.

A sociological mirror, this book is equal parts cautionary tale, exercise in contemporary anthropology and a spiritual and emotional audit of the 21st century American.

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