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One pillar of the Democratic platform this election is universal pre-K, lauded by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and followers as a necessary improvement to an "embarrassment" of an early childhood education system and necessary to ensure every child has "the chance to live up to his or her God-given potential" - not to mention get parents of young children back into the workforce. While the GOP platform included no such commitment, many early contenders in the race as state governors had accepted federal funds for early childhood education.

But what exactly is the research landscape of early childhood education? Is there any evidence that federally funded pre-K will be a magic salve for families across the country? And more generally, what does government need to do, and what can government do, to make sure children are well cared for in their most vulnerable years?

Katharine Stevens joined me to discuss all this. She leads the American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) early-childhood program. She founded and led Teachers for Tomorrow, one of the first urban teacher-residency programs in the United States, out of New York City's lowest-performing schools. She began her career in public education as a preschool teacher in New Haven, Connecticut, and St. Louis, Missouri. Ms. Stevens has a Ph.D. in education policy from Columbia University, a M.Ed. from Teachers College, an MBA from Columbia Business School, and a B.A. in US history from the University of Chicago.

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We heard a lot this election cycle, from the Democrats especially, about making college education affordable if not free. And it seems the media is full of stories of students graduating with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and in this economy, no clear job path to allow them to pay it off. Meanwhile, public university tuitions are rising to unprecedented levels, levels on par with their private counterparts, while private institutions around the country are going belly up. How do we fix this?

Jason Delisle is a resident fellow at AEI where he studies higher education financing with an emphasis on student loan programs. He started out on Capitol Hill, working for Representative Thomas Petri and then the Senate Committee on the Budget. Before joining AEI, he was the director of the Federal Education Budget Project at New America.

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Is America coming apart? Some days, it certainly seems so. Take the tumultuous 2016 election cycle, and add to it Brexit, fears over globalization and automation, a reaction on the left against Wall Street and the big banks, and a million other news items, and you have a brew that smells of a spoiling American — maybe even Western — economic, social, political, and cultural order. If America and the West are being exposed for their divisions between mainstream and elite, between those disenchanted by the 21st century and those eager to embrace it, we will need to pull some seriously innovative public policy and cultural levers to fix the situation. Will something like the universal basic income do the trick? What are we not thinking of that could?

Few are better poised to answer these questions than award-winning intellectual Dr. Charles Murray, who seemed to prophecy many 2016 phenomena in his 2012 book Coming Apart:The State of White America, 1960-2010.

 Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, co-author of the 1994 New York Times bestseller "The Bell Curve" and author of, among other works, 2006's "In Our Hands" (2006), "Coming Apart", and "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission". "In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State" came out in a revised edition last month.

Dr. Murray has Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in history from Harvard University. He is a 2016 winner of the Bradley Prize and he is also a fantastic person to follow on Twitter.

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It is one thing to talk about how robots will change economics, or how they might take our jobs. But how will they change our human society? What will it be like to live with robots, who may be vastly superior to us intellectually if not also in other ways? What can we predict?

Robin Hanson has a new book out just to this effect, called The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, available on Amazon.

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. Previous to that, he spent years as a researcher in artificial intelligence for both NASA and Lockheed's AI Center. He has a PhD from Caltech, and degrees in physics and the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago, and in physics from UC Irvine. He has too many writings to count, both popular and academic, and has a popular blog,Overcoming Bias. The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth is his second book, and he has another one coming next year with Kevin Simler titled Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.

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