Yet, the United States is the world leader and likely to remain there for decades. It has the greatest soft power in the world by far. The United States still receives far more immigrants each year (1 million) than any other country in the world. The United States leads the world in high technology (Silicon Valley), finance and business (Wall Street), the movies (Hollywood) and higher education (17 of the top 20 universities in the world in Shanghai’s Jaotong University survey). The United States has a First World trade profile (massive exports of consumer and technology goods and imports of natural resources).

Rather than spending everything they earn, the rich have multiple streams of income and put their money to work. The sooner you start investing the better, says Michael Katchen, who manages hundreds of millions of dollars for millennials. So rather than living above your means, find ways to save more and then invest that money to take advantage of compound interest.

This is the supposed consternation that many raise about how democracy feeds the terrorists. This boils down to an argument that our very liberties allow the terrorist to exploit our societies, and we are thus at their mercy or must revert to authoritarian means. This canard is absurd, and always has been.

When you start forgetting the special days like an anniversary or you cannot even have time for a little romance.

The structural-functional approach to religion has its roots in Emile Durkheim’s work on religion. Durkheim argued that religion is, in a sense, the celebration and even (self-) worship of human society. Given this approach, Durkheim proposed that religion has three major functions in society: it provides social cohesion to help maintain social solidarity through shared rituals and beliefs, social control to enforce religious-based morals and norms to help maintain conformity and control in society, and it offers meaning and purpose to answer any existential questions. Further, Durkheim placed himself in the positivist tradition, meaning that he thought of his study of society as dispassionate and scientific. He was deeply interested in the problem of what held complex modern societies together. Religion, he argued, was an expression of social cohesion.

Education is important but it is more important to experience what you do

When most of us think about what makes us happy, we tend to focus on the “things” in life that we crave or long to own. These things may be concrete consumables or they may be intangible resources, such as “time,” “inner peace,” or “true love.”