Americans claim a strong attachment to the work ethic and regularly profess support for government policies to promote employment. Why, then, have employment policies gained only a tenuous foothold in the USA? To answer this question, Margaret Weir highlights two related elements: the power of ideas in policy-making and the politics of interest formation. Rather than seeing policy as a straightforward outcome of public preferences, she shows how ideas frame problems and how interests form around possibilities created by the interplay of ideas and politics.