This is an early access edition of You Would Choose Now: Measuring America’s Progress Toward Fairness and Tolerance. This book is an exploration of this question:
If you could choose any time to be born -- and you did not know who you would be -- when would you choose?
I will present data from long-running national surveys about public opinion. We’ll see that in the last 50-60 years, people have generally become more tolerant and fair. And those attitudes are reflected in expanding civil rights and protections. On the balance of evidence, I think you would choose now -- but we’ll see if you agree.
This book is a work in progress. I am publishing the first two chapters in September 2026. I hope to add one chapter each month -- at that pace I’ll have a complete draft in early 2027. And then I’m waiting for data from two surveys that are going on now: the General Social Survey (GSS) and the American National Election Studies (ANES). When those datasets are available, I will re-run the analysis, generate updated figures, and revise the text to reflect the latest findings.
During this development process, the book is available for sale on LeanPub -- a publishing platform that encourages authors to publish early. Three editions are available:
The first chapter is available as a free sample.
If you sign up -- that is, provide an email address and give me permission to send you announcements -- you get the Community Edition, which includes the second chapter as well.
And if you buy the book, you get the current Early Access edition and all subsequent updates, including the final version when it’s published.
All of these are electronic editions in PDF and EPUB. The final version will also be available in full color print, but that will be a separate purchase.
Feedback {.unnumbered}¶
One of the benefits of the early access schedule (I hope) is a chance to get feedback from readers.
If you want to communicate with me and other readers, you can join the book’s forum on LeanPub.
If you find an error or want to make a suggestion, please use the book’s online issue tracker.
You can also connect with me on social media: I’m on Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and X.
If you are excited about this project, I hope you will help spread the word.
Design and visualization {.unnumbered}¶
I will continue to refine the interior design and data visualizations. I welcome suggestions for improving appearance and readability.
Since I am designing the book myself, I have a chance to fix two issues that bother me in many books I read:
All figures are embedded in the text -- they don’t float to the next page (or the page after that). As a reader, you don’t have to jump back and forth between the figures and text.
I distinguish footnotes and endnotes: symbols indicate comments that appear at the bottom of the page, and numbers indicate sources that appear at the end of each chapter.
I hope these features improve the reading experience.