Brad Delong has an excellent review of Ben Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, which really sounds like required reading for any politician or student of international economy. I especially like his conclusion about what the structural changes currently happening in the USA are doing:

The desirability of the United States as a place in which to locate economic activity is growing rapidly: the underlying engine of technological progress is spinning faster than it has in at least a generation. I see rising working- and middle-class incomes in America during the next generation generating what is in Friedman’s terms a virtuous, not a vicious, circle.

Via Brad himself, incidentally.