Even Ralph Nader has since admitted that there is a difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Yet, unbelievably, Mr. Nader told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that he is going to run for President again this year, his third attempt to break what he calls the "two-party duopoly." Democrats, independents and even some Green Party members are apoplectic. As Howard Dean might say, " Yeeeeowarggghhhh! "

Just when the Democratic Party had successfully taken down Dr. Dean, up pops Ralph Nader like a Chucky horror-movie doll hell-bent on terrorizing the electorate. ("Hi, I'm Ralphy. Wanna play?") But what seemed like child's play in 2000 is a real-life fear factor in 2004. I only wish it were a horror movie.

To his credit, Howard Dean exited the primary race after a humiliating third-place finish in Wisconsin. With such a meteoric rise, a rabid following and a fund-raising organization other candidates only dream about, Dr. Dean certainly could have justified a third-party campaign. In fact, there had been some speculation that he might do just that. But he obviously decided against such a self-indulgent demonstration.

Without mentioning names, not only did Dr. Dean bow out of the race gracefully (and grace is not a trait usually ascribed to the former governor of Vermont), but he asked his supporters not to be swayed by quixotic candidates.

Less than a week later, Mr. Nader declared his intention to run, and Dr. Dean issued a rather milquetoast (at least for him) statement.

"Those who truly want America's leaders to stand up to the corporate special interests and build a better country for working people should recognize that, in 2004, a vote for Ralph Nader is, plain and simple, a vote to re-elect George W. Bush," Dr. Dean said. "I hope that Ralph Nader will withdraw his candidacy in the best interests of the country we hope to become."

Dr. Dean went out of his way to praise Mr. Nader and his achievements before politely asking him to reconsider. So, just as Dr. Dean has become Mr. Civility, everyone else is blowing a gasket.

Within 24 hours of his announcement, Mr. Nader was holding a press conference telling everyone to just pipe down. Repeating the rationalization he recently told Democratic Party leaders, Mr. Nader assured everyone that his candidacy will help the Democrats by bringing out people who are still angry with him for tipping the election to Mr. Bush in 2000, and they will likely vote for the Democratic nominee and maybe even some down-ticket Dems. Needless to say, this "destroy the village to save it" logic isn't terribly persuasive.

On the heels of Democratic Party denunciations come the pundits, weighing in on whether or not there will be much of a Nader effect this time around. Given the punditocracy's accuracy so far in this election cycle, the smart ones offer a caveat before making their pronunciamentos.

But conventional wisdom is shaping up like this: Democrats, who have been rudely awakened from their food coma, are plenty angry at Mr. Bush and will vote for a monkey if they think it can win.

Ralph Nader won't be able to get on the ballot in very many states-and even if he does get on a couple of ballots, very few people are going to vote for him.

Maybe, maybe not. Mr. Bush has yet to unleash his campaign and spend his mind-boggling war chest. If John Kerry is the Democratic nominee, there will be more than a few people who are shocked to learn that not only did Senator Kerry support the resolution authorizing the President to invade Iraq, he voted for the PATRIOT Act and the No Child Left Behind Act and has gotten more special-interest money than any other Senator.

So it's possible that quite a few people will buy into the "no difference" argument again. Not that they'll necessarily vote for Ralph Nader. But they'll very likely just stay home on Election Day, which would help Mr. Bush.

So, Dr. Dean, it's up to you. Negotiate to be Secretary of Health and Human Services under the next Democratic President, then set aside your newfound civility and unleash that fury at Ralph Nader.

This is your Sister Souljah moment, Dr. Dean. You should pounce on Mr. Nader and use the opportunity to remind your supporters again and again just how evil you believe the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis to be.

If anyone has credibility with potential Nader supporters, it's you. This is your real opportunity to take the country back.

Seize it.

Ah, 1984. That was when "get a haircut" and "get a job" were common rejoinders. Back then, just about anyone who got a haircut could get a job-one that actually paid the rent and bills, with a little left over to save for a rainy day. This was also before Generation X entered the labor market. For the 50 million Americans born between 1965 and 1980, the economy has been and continues to be a roller-coaster ride, with the exhilarating loop-de-loops-including the most recent optimistic reports on the economy-giving way to what appears to be a long downhill slide. The effects of economic uncertainty for this age group could reverberate all the way from Gen-X's parents to their children and beyond, as care for the elderly will increasingly be paid out of pocket, and the high cost of education is passed down to succeeding generations. Sounds like overstated doom and gloom? Maybe not.

A combination of factors have been responsible for Gen-Xers' trying past and bleak future. For starters, they were the first generation to graduate from college with enormous credit-card and student-loan debt-just as entry-level wages were dramatically dropping. And when the bubble burst in 2000, Gen-X, compared with other age groups, had the largest percentage of their assets invested in the stock market. Furthermore, as this generation now enters what are supposed to be prime earning years, a jobless recovery has set in and mid-level white-collar jobs are increasingly moving overseas. To top it all off, long-term deficits will balloon out of control as baby boomers sap the life out of Medicare and Social Security, increasing the need to raise taxes.

Downward pressure on wages in the late 80's and early 90's hit recent college graduates hard. That would be the post-matriculation years for the oldest Gen-Xers, the supposed slackers who were so apathetic they adopted "grunge" as a fashion statement-or maybe that was just defensive posturing. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the wage offers of newly hired college grads began to slide in 1985, dropped precipitously in the early 90's and hit a low in 1994. (And these figures don't even include all the people who were forced to take "McJobs.") Entry-level wages didn't rebound to their pre-1985 levels until as late as 1999.

"I graduated in 1992 from UCLA with a degree in English and computer science," said Phil Hopkins, who now lives in New York. "It was the height of the recession then." At the time, Mr. Hopkins felt lucky to have a gig testing pre-Sega/PlayStation games like Zombie Dinos from the Planet Zeltoid, even though he couldn't live on his meager salary. "Between my rent of $450 and income of $625 a month, I was eating so little that when I moved back in with my parents in Texas, I put on 30 pounds. I ran into a time of smashed expectations. Then the Internet happened, and everything seemed great."

"Great" may be a bit of an understatement. With gallows humor, Stephen Weiss, co-author of Digital Hustlers: Living Large and Falling Hard in Silicon Alley , recounted his own adventures: "I was at a late start-up called RedFilter. We were all very young. The C.E.O. was 22," he said, laughing, "I was the executive vice president." Mr. Weiss now makes ends meet as a freelance fact-checker and reporter.

"Many of the people who were pioneers [of the dot-com era] graduated in the early 1990's and were profoundly affected by a stagnant economy," continued Mr. Weiss, whose book, co-written with Casey Kait, is an oral history of the tech revolution. "By the late 90's, they were seeing their dreams realized. They were masters of their own universe until it all fell apart. It was devastating. To get to the pinnacle and get pushed off really hurts." Mr. Weiss retreated to a rental in the Catskills for a year with his girlfriend, and he still doesn't seem to have completely recovered. "There is no more Silicon Alley," he said ruefully.

Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, right? Not unless what you loved was more than your job, but the shirt on your back. According to a Washington Post article from 1999, people between the ages of 19 and 35 were the most aggressively invested in the stock market of any generation, which means they also got hit the hardest when the bubble burst.

"I lost between $60,000 and $70,000," says one Gen-X investor, who got swept up in the irrational exuberance of the time, even doing a four-month stint as a day trader. "We thought … we had discovered a money tree," said the Manhattan resident, who asked that his name not be used. "I should have been smarter and more conservative, like my parents' generation, and not doubled-down on every bet. If I had, not only would I not be in debt now, but I'd have a surplus. I quit my job in 1999 to do consulting, and I haven't had a steady paycheck since."

Despite the recent burst of good economic news, the fact is that, depending on who's counting, there are between two and three million people nationwide who haven't had a steady paycheck since the beginning of the last recession. Only 57,000 jobs were added in November, about 250,000 short of the number that need to be created every month in order for George W. Bush to avoid becoming the first President since Hoover to oversee a net loss of jobs during his administration. What's different about job loss during the most recent recession is, again, bad news for Generation X.

Past recessions have almost always hit the youngest workers (16- to 24-year-olds) the hardest, and that was certainly the case during the 1990-1991 downturn, when Gen-Xers were just entering the job market. According to the Center for Economic Policy Research, however, the most recent recession is notable in that it hit 25- to 34-year-old workers equally as hard as younger ones-exceedingly bad news for Generation X considering that this is the start of the prime earning years, when people begin building for the future: getting married, buying real estate and having kids. And it gets worse. In past recessions, most job loss was cyclical (i.e., you got rehired when things picked up). Now, according to two economists with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a whopping 79 percent of employees work in industries affected more by structural shifts-which means start brushing up on those burger-flipping skills, because the good jobs are gone permanently. This is a departure from past recessions.

One 35-year-old New York City I.T. worker said he'd been laid off three times, at one point losing a six-figure position at J.P. Morgan. "They outsourced the job to India, and I had to train the person who took my job. He makes about 10 dollars an hour."

"I graduated in 1992, so naturally I think this is one of the bigger stories of the past decade," says Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "On top of the limited labor market, people who graduated after 1990 were part of a crop of students who have huge student-loan and credit-card debt."

While 28-year-old Duy Lihn Tu's level of debt is above average, his experience is fairly typical. A graduate of Tufts University and the Columbia School of Journalism, he has $42,000 of student-loan debt and owes about $25,000 on credit cards. During the boom times, he started his own video and DVD production company-which is miraculously still afloat-but it put him further in the hole when clients started going out of business. "Believe it or not, I feel more secure having my own business," he said. "I'd rather know that I'm going to lay myself off rather than get blindsided by a boss and have security lead me out of the building." When asked about his plan for getting out of debt, Mr. Tu blithely offers the common sentiment that he's just hoping the economy picks up.

"The path you start out on is going to affect you for the rest of your life," says Tamara Draut, director of the Economic Opportunities Program at Demos, a think tank based in New York that has researched debt accumulation among the under-35 crowd. "What we're finding is, young adults are starting out at a major point of debt, which is a very unique occurrence. It's increasingly difficult for people to get a toehold-even the investor class."

Whether or not Gen-Xers are spoiled brats living beyond their means or just trying to get through a roller-coaster economy is a specious argument when it comes to the overall health of the economy. The only thing that kept the past recession from getting even worse was increased consumer spending due to easy credit and historically low interest rates. But with personal and national debt spiraling out of control, eventually the bill comes due, and it's increasingly looking like Generation X will be at the table when the check is delivered.

A certified financial planner in Silicon Valley-whose client base is mostly Gen-Xers-has seen firsthand the effects of the boom and bust. "I'm kind of like their professional mom," says Barbara Steinmetz about her clientele. "They're so intensely focused on short-term goals, they're not planning for the future. They're struggling to peddle faster and harder and end up putting all their money into consumables. They justify it by saying they're very busy."

Just as Gen-X adopted apathy as a defense against a real decline in wages and job opportunities in the early 90's, now they seem to have donned collective blinders as a defense against a highly insecure financial future. But that won't necessarily forestall the inevitable. "Everyone is going to be affected by what's happening now," says Ms. Steinmetz. "When their children are in college and their elderly parents are needing care, the resources to pay for it won't be there."

While there is considerable debate about how projected budget surpluses turned into record deficits, there is virtually no question that the U.S.'s recent reversal of fortune is unprecedented. During the prime earning years of Generation X, the deficit will likely soar beyond $3 trillion, increasing the pressure to reduce spending on social services for the elderly and raise taxes for everyone. According to The Wall Street Journal , by 2030, one of every five dollars of income-tax revenue will be sucked up by Medicare alone, while the cost of education continues to dramatically outpace inflation.

"On top of personal debt and a highly volatile job market, this is the first generation that's going to have much higher expenses when it comes to caring for the elderly," said the CEPR's Ms. Boushey. "Also, there's a drop in the fertility rate because this group is delaying childbearing, because now you need two incomes to sustain a household." Another thing the future holds for Gen-X is a host of unknowns. "There are a lot of social experiments being conducted on this cohort," said Ms. Boushey, "We don't know how it's going to play out in the long run."

For as long as gentrification has been a divisive topic, the underlying assumption has been the same: As wealthier people move into downtrodden neighborhoods, low-income people are pushed out. But does gentrification actually cause increased displacement? Lance Freeman, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University, thinks the answer is no. One of the leading academics to step on the gentrification land mine, Mr. Freeman (who happens to live in a Columbia-owned apartment just around the corner from Tiemann Place) has found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to explode the myth itself. "It's a controversial issue," he told The Observer recently, "The research results were unanticipated. But the data says what it says."

What his data says is this: Low-income people in gentrifying neighborhoods are, in fact, more likely to stay in their apartments longer than low-income people in non-gentrifying neighborhoods. Not only does gentrification not cause displacement any more than the myriad other factors that result in poor people losing or leaving their homes, says Mr. Freeman, it actually provides an incentive to stay. Think about it: Would you be inclined to leave your apartment if the neighborhood was improving?

Mr. Freeman referred to the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey in reaching his conclusion. He found that poor households living in gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City, including Harlem, were 24 percent less likely to have moved between 1991 and 1999 than poor people living in non-gentrifying communities. Even when controlling for various factors, like age, race and overcrowding, poor households were still 20 percent less likely to move from gentrifying areas than poor households living in non-gentrifying communities in New York City.

Mr. Freeman's research, which will appear in The Journal of the American Planning Association in January, indicates that rent regulation plays an important role in protecting low-income residents. Between 1996 and 1999, Mr. Freeman says, average rents for unregulated apartments in gentrifying neighborhoods (such as Harlem, Chelsea, the Lower East Side and Morningside Heights) rose by 43 percent, but average rents for rent-controlled and -stabilized apartments in those same neighborhoods rose by only 11 percent. But regulation isn't the sole factor. "Rent regulation is part of it," said Mr. Freeman. "But if the neighborhood is on the upswing, people want to stay."

Perhaps not surprisingly, activists in Harlem who have seen displacement firsthand-some narrowly escaping it themselves-find this hard to believe.

"This is crap," said James Lewis of Harlem Operation Take Back about Mr. Freeman's research. Mr. Lewis said he almost lost his own apartment when his landlord tried to convert the building from single-room occupancies to traditional apartments. After saving his home, he started HOTB to help other people in danger of losing their S.R.O.'s. "I don't know how he's getting his conclusions," he said of Mr. Freeman. "He's misinformed. You don't need to see the fire to know a building has burned."

The results do seem to fly in the face of observable reality-not just to Mr. Lewis, but probably to most people who have witnessed the migration of the bohemian bourgeoisie into what were once declining neighborhoods. When Mr. Freeman presented a short version of his research in an obscure newsletter last year, it was greeted by other academics as somewhat of a surprise. So another study is currently being conducted by researchers at Rutgers University, who are using some of the same data and are also asking questions about gentrification and displacement.

"Because the results seem somewhat counterintuitive and raise a lot of questions, they want to make sure it's right," said Mr. Freeman. "You don't usually see that in the social sciences. Who knows-maybe they're going to trash my research."

Mr. Freeman's research, however, does not stand completely alone. Conclusions similar to his were reached two years ago by Jacob Vigdor, an assistant professor at Duke University, who analyzed Boston neighborhoods.

"There's no evidence that gentrification increases residential turnover," Mr. Vigdor concurred. "The typical image people have in their minds is that people are being thrown out of their homes in gentrifying neighborhoods. But there is usually some degree of vacancy and rehabbing of buildings that weren't previously inhabitable. The thing everyone has to keep in mind is that there's turnover in all neighborhoods, and landlords harass poor tenants in all neighborhoods. What happens in gentrifying neighborhoods is that it becomes visible."

While some activists are willing to admit the research may be valid, they say it misses the bigger picture. "The bottom line is that in these neighborhoods, any vacant apartment is replaced by a completely different tenant from a completely different lifestyle," said Tom DeMott, who organizes the Tiemann Place block parties and has lived and worked in Harlem for 30 years. "That's right in your face. An old Chinese family moves out, that apartment will be rented to white kids between the age of 22 and 35."

And herein lies the confusion between gentrification and displacement. Mr. Vigdor cited studies suggesting that, over a five-year period, roughly half of all residents in typical urban communities move voluntarily. In a non-gentrifying neighborhood, the people who move out are replaced with tenants from a similar socioeconomic background. By definition, apartments that are vacated in gentrifying neighborhoods are filled with a different class of people. But that doesn't mean there's more forced displacement than in any other neighborhood. What does happen-and both Mr. Freeman and Mr. Vigdor readily acknowledge this-is that the pool of low-income apartments in gentrifying neighborhoods shrinks over time, which may be cause for serious concern. But, says Mr. Freeman, even this process isn't as dramatic as it's often portrayed.

"If you walk through [Harlem], it's clearly still a low-income neighborhood," said Mr. Freeman. "But compared to what it was 10 years ago, it seems like a big difference. People see the chain stores that opened up: Modell's, Old Navy, H&M. But they're not necessarily targeting an affluent clientele. They're serving the neighborhood. To say that Harlem is going to turn into Park Slope-that seems far-fetched."

In an effort to look beyond sheer numbers, Mr. Freeman has been conducting interviews with longtime residents of Harlem to get their impressions of how the neighborhood has changed. "People are appreciative of the improved services and like the increased diversity, but there's some resentment about the engine of change," he said. "They perceive an invisible hand that is cleaning up the neighborhood because whites have moved in. So there's some resentment about that. But overall, people seem to recognize that an entirely low-income neighborhood isn't necessarily good."

Not everyone agrees, of course. "I don't have mixed feelings about the gentrification process," insisted Mr. DeMott. "I see what it does; I see the difficulty that people face. That's my concern. I love the neighborhood. I love the people. When I see something that is steam-rolling them, I don't have mixed feelings."

Despite the hard line taken by some anti-gentrification activists, there seems to be an increasing realization of the fallacy behind the anti-gentrification stance. "We got angry when the middle class moved out," said Mr. Vigdor. "Now we're angry when the middle class is moving back in. Usually when something is bad, the opposite of that is seen as good. So there's some cognitive dissonance going on here."

Mr. Freeman agrees. "To say that it's all bad is somewhat undeserved. It's more complex than that. If you take that stance to its logical conclusion, you'd have to say that a declining neighborhood is a good thing."