While writing "Heyday," a historical novel set in the middle of the 19th century, Kurt Andersen became convinced that boom-and-bust cycles usually led to a little progress.

So "Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America" (Random House) is a surprisingly upbeat sermon from a satirist who founded Spy magazine with Graydon Carter more than 20 years ago. He now often writes for Carter's Vanity Fair, though "Reset" started life as a cover story for Time.

Andersen argues the silver lining in the economic meltdown is the chance to improve health care, education and political life. We spoke at a recent reading he gave in New York.

Q. Why are you so optimistic?

A. I've spent a lot of time in the past few years reading American history. We've had a lot of panics, a lot of bubbles, and that seems to be the way we roll as a country.

After many of them, we have as a country managed to right some wrongs and tinker with the systems that went kerflooey.

Q. Is Wall Street chastened by the financial crisis?

A. Yes and no. Obviously, to the degree tens of thousands of jobs have been lost and Wall Street has shrunk. Have they been born again in their hearts? Perhaps not.

Q. You've heard about the energy trader's $100 million bonus?

A. Not everybody has drunk the "Reset" Kool-Aid. There are plenty of people clinging to life the way it was before the crash.

Q. In this new paradigm, is there any job that's worth $100 million a year?

A. That's for the market to decide. Sure, people should be allowed to get rich. But there's a question of grace and appropriateness at moments such as this.

Issues like that are now on the table in a way they simply were not three, four, five years ago.

Q. You write, "Americans became suckers whose losses became other people's gains."

A. The casino turned out to be ubiquitous. "If I get lucky, I'm a big winner and screw the rest of the world," became the governing economic idea in America, rather than the more traditional ways of getting rich such as having a great invention or building a productive enterprise.

Politically, one of the reasons Americans were OK with the extraordinary wealth being amassed by people good at manipulating money is because they felt they were in the casino too.

Q. We were all in on it?

A. People who were not making out so well thought, "My house is doubling, tripling in value, my 401(k)s are going up. I'm making a little here at the slot machines, while those guys are making hundreds of millions at the chemin de fer table. But I'm making something, so OK."

Q. What's going to cause people to focus more on the common good?

A. I look at history and the center of gravity of what seems to be right, appropriate and good does change.

Public spiritedness is not just about altruism, but about making the system sustainable over a long period of time to prevent us from becoming a country of such inequality that at a certain point the have-nots say, "Screw you! We're taking it all!"

Q. How likely is that?

A. We've barely seen class warfare in this country, but that's not to say it couldn't happen. I take the "save capitalism from itself" position. The system is correcting itself.

Q. What's the biggest lesson from the crash?

A. Don't clap your hands and believe in magic. Even as you are being ebullient and innovative, trying to keep tethered to some version of pessimism and bearishness and reality is a good thing.

Q. You say America is like Homer Simpson, "childish, irresponsible, willfully oblivious, fat and happy." Why would he change?

A. He may not, but Bart and Lisa may. People only change because they feel they have to.