Barack Obama and Michael Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses by promising “change,” a word that has become almost comically cliché in its overuse by the candidates.

Will no one stand up for the status quo? Until very recently, on the economic front at least, things were actually going pretty well. Most people, for example, had jobs. Over the weekend, the New York Times cited a report that said fewer jobs were cut in 2007 than in any year since 2001. In fact, unemployment has been hovering at near-minimum levels for years, averaging 5.1% since 2000. The rise in December to 5% caused much consternation, but for all of last year the average was 4.6%. By comparison, the average for the decade of the 1980s was 7.1%.

Do we want a change in inflation? Inflation did edge up to 4% in November, but it is remarkable that annual price increases have been below 4% every year since 1991. By comparison, the inflation rate in 1980 was 13.6%.

Economic growth has been powerful of late — surely that’s not what should be changed. In the third quarter, real gross national product grew 4.9%, boosted by exports and personal consumption expenditures. Even the stock market, a symptom as well as a cause of prosperity, has been until late hitting all-time highs. In fact, the Federal Reserve reported last month that the net wealth of U.S. households rose to $58.6 trillion in the third quarter — an all-time record.

Another data point comes from a University of Chicago survey, which reports that 86% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs, about the same number as for the past four decades. We don’t want that to change, do we?

Apart from economics, other bright spots across the nation include lower crime rates, increasing numbers of people graduating from college, and Americans living longer.

So why is everyone hankering for change? This thirst for mutation began before the past few weeks’ cascade of troubling economic news and before the specter of recession had overshadowed the stock market.

Make no mistake, there are many Americans struggling to adjust to irreversible changes in the country’s economic landscape. The seismic shifting of the economy towards service and intellectual activities and away from manufacturing has alarmed those, especially young people, whose expectations were built on the customs of the past.

Young people want to reserve their place on the gravy train, but what do they see? They see their country losing ground to upstart nations such as India and China, and they see wealthy Arab and Asian nations buying up some of the biggest companies in America. They see illegal immigrants being given a free pass to fill out our workforce. They see oil prices heading into triple digits, enriching other nations while hurting the American consumer. They see Toyota knocking off Ford as the world’s no. 2 automaker and the dollar sinking like a stone. They are panicked that just as they enter the job market, opportunities will shrink.

These young people don’t want change; they are afraid of change. While America retools to compete in a global world, the changes taking place are indeed unnerving. The passing down of factory jobs from generation to generation is a comfort of the past. The expectation that a solid college degree will be rewarded with a solid corporate sinecure is equally outdated. Instead, young people have to seek the training required to be productive members of an intellectual society, or face forever being on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Because they lack historical perspective, and because it is hard to imagine how America can still be strong and offer opportunities while growing more slowly than others, young people, especially, are angry and blame these threats on our current leadership in the White House and in Congress.

To be sure, the current administration has come up short in some key areas. It has whiffed unforgivably on energy. It has also failed to lead us to sensible and humane immigration legislation. The efforts to broaden health care and to improve education have been inadequate.

However, the “change” being advocated by the current crop of candidates addresses few of these issues. Instead, Mr. Huckabee and John Edwards, among others, have tapped into a growing and deep vein of class competition and suspicion. They advocate policies that advance “fairness,” such as Mr. Huckabee’s 23% (actually 30%) regressive and anything-but-fair sales tax and Mr. Edwards’s plan to audit more corporations, which is unlikely to move the nation forward.

Taxes seem to be a particular rallying point. Just how unfair is the tax system? In fact, the top 1% of earners in the U.S. paid 39% of total taxes collected in 2005, up from 17% of the total in 1980. The top 10% paid 70% of all taxes in 2005, up from 49% in 1980. The effective tax rate for the bottom 50% of the nation’s earners was less than 3% in 2005, and they paid just slightly more than 3% of the total, down from 7% in 1980. (And it’s not because income is down for the bottom 50%; gross income for employees in that category more than tripled over the period, growing, however, at a slower rate than the top earners.) Globalization has created threats and opportunities. It is the role of our next president to minimize the threats and to allow our workers and our corporations to exploit the opportunities. Improving education, enlarging the visa program for skilled workers, reducing anticompetitive regulations, enacting trade agreements — these are the measures that guarantee our young people a future. Those are the changes the candidates should be talking about.

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