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The Porter Prescription
Michael Porter, management consultant extraordinaire, has now brought his theory of competitive advantage to the inner city. Bold new ideas -- or an old elixir in a new bottle?
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State of the Debate: Dolly and Madison
The cloning debate has highlighted moral questions that are likely only to become even more difficult as biotechnology advances: What should be the line between permissible and impermissible genetic interventions? Is our bedrock belief in human equality about to break down?
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Of Our Time: My Dinner with Bill
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The Broken Engine of Progressive Politics
The gears of the American change machine -- presidents, parties, and social movements -- no longer work together. A new view of America's major political transformations, from Jefferson and Jackson down to the current disarray of progressive forces.
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Morning in Miami
It's not only the pope who believes the U.S. should lift its embargo. A growing number of Cuban Americans think the old hard-line strategy to oust Castro just isn't working.
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A Liberal Tax Revolt
Liberals ought to start playing offense on taxes. Progressive tax policy can be good politics.
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Reform Beyond the Beltway
While Congress is deadlocked, real campaign finance reform is moving ahead in the states.
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Behind the Numbers: The Great Surplus Debate
Three views of what to do with the budget surplus.
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Below the Beltway: The Irresponsible Elites
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When Should Kids Go to Jail?
For nearly a century, childhood has been a mitigating condition in the eyes of the criminal law. Now that legislators want to try more children as adults, we need to be careful about throwing the baby out with the jail key.
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Unchecked and Unbalanced
Kenneth Starr's behavior as independent counsel follows a pattern set in other investigations: the problem lies in the incentives and unchecked power of the office.
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How Low Can You Go? Made of Sterner Stuff
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Old Party, New Energy
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Party Decline
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The Buses Don't Stop Here Anymore
All over the country, public transit systems are losing ridership. As Chicago's story makes clear, the real source of the problem is the sprawling and balkanized shape of America's metropolises.
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Why Liberalism Fled the City ... And How It Might Come Back
The strongholds of municipal liberalism are gone; the coalition of immigrants, unionists, poor people, and neighborhoods has been replaced by alliances between tough-on-crime Republican mayors and organized business. But the seeds of a revival are there.
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Essay: The God of the Digerati
Wired magazine says with new technology we'll all be like gods and should get good at it. That apparently means feeling no restraint -- if something looks good, do it, buy it, invent it, become it. Where have we heard this before?
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Labor's Stake in the WTO
Before the WTO was founded in 1995, labor supporters lobbied hard against it. But now, the WTO may be the last, best hope for arresting global erosion of labor rights.
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March of Folly:
Supposedly, NAFTA will lead to increased movement of goods and services between Mexico and the United States -- but not to more movement of people. That, however, reflects a fundamentally mistaken view of migration. A better understanding should reframe our entire immigration policy.
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The Wrong Enemy
Some liberals worry that trade with low-wage countries will depress American wages. But globalization not only helps lift Third World people out of poverty; it also benefits American consumers and workers. Instead of pursuing protectionism, domestic policies should assure that the benefits of trade are equitably shared.
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Of Our Time: Globalism Bites Back
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Devil in the Details
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Behind the Numbers: The Real Electorate
New census data about who voted in 1996 paint a very different picture than did the initial reports from exit polls.
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The IMF and The Asian Flu
The International Monetary Fund casts itself as valiant superhero, swooping in to rescue troubled countries from self-inflicted financial disaster. In fact, the demands for austerity it has recently imposed on fundamentally sound economies in Asia and elsewhere have made their problems much worse.
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State of the Debate: The Other American Dilemma
Anthony Lukas's last book is a powerful tale of what used to be "class warfare" in America -- and a lesson about why so many people have had a hard time telling that story.
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Controversy: Should Buckley Be Overturned?
Continuing the debate from "Watch What You Wish For: The Perils of Reversing Buckley v. Valeo," by Alan B. Morrison (January-February 1998)
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New Page, Old Lesson
A few years ago educational standards and national testing seemed on their way. But the push for standards has set off predictable reactions from different quarters. Ironically, testing now may be downgraded in importance.
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Are U.S. Students Behind?
The conventional wisdom is that American students perform woefully compared to their foreign peers. Not so: America's kids stack up far better than the critics allow. But there is much to learn from experience abroad about improving our schools.
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How Low Can You Go?
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Of Our Time: The Loophole We Can't Close
There may be no way to limit spending that is both constitutional and effective.
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Can Cities Escape Political Isolation?
As federal funding dwindles, we need new economic arrangements and political coalitions to unite city and suburb.
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Screening a La Carte
Instead of a single TV rating system, why not let the PTA and the Christian Coalition -- and anyone else -- create their own?
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Apologists Without Remorse
Most leftists have accepted that the Soviet Union was an evil empire after all. Such contrition is conspicuously absent, however, from conservatives who defended apartheid.
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Of Our Time: Rescuing Democracy From "Speech"
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Will Free Speech Get Tangled in the Net?
When the Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act, cyberlibertarians breathed a sigh of relief. But keeping government out of the censorship business may not be enough to assure freedom online -- censorship may now be privatized.
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Harder Than Soft Money
The explosion of issue advocacy -- money spent by individuals and independent groups to support political causes -- threatens to make even an outright ban on "soft" money irrelevant. Worse, much of what passes for "issue advocacy" is really covert campaign financing. Still worse, it can't be regulated.
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Watch What You Wish For
In pursuit of campaign finance reform, many seek to reverse the precedent established by the Supreme Court in 1975, protecting campaign expenditures as free speech. But if the Court's ruling is overturned, the general protections of the First Amendment might be severely narrowed.
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Essay: A Multicultural Nationalism?
Cross-national group loyalties can neither be wished away or erased. Yet the idea of the American nation is worth defending against multicultural attack. Herewith some ground rules for a culturally diverse nation.
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Below the Beltway: Activist Trouble
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Shoot the Messenger
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State of the Debate: The Chicago Acid Bath
A skeptical inquiry into the work of Richard Epstein and Richard Posner.
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Behind the Numbers: When States Spend More
Surprisingly, even without federal mandates, the states have both increased and equalized school outlays. There is a political lesson here -- about coalition building and grassroots activism.
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Why States Can Do More
It used to be that leaving states to their own devices meant rampant pollution, as each state relaxed regulation standards to attract business. No longer.
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Controversy: The Virtues of Humiliation
Continuing the debate from "The Shaming Sham," by Carl F. Horowitz (March-April 1997).
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State of the Debate: Work and the Moral Woman
Women today are buffeted by the demands of family, career, and feminism. Are these demands sometimes morally incompatible?
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Metropolis Unbound
Traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, water and air pollution, social segregation -- these are the everyday costs in suburb and city alike of the geographic expansion of cities. But North America also offers alternative models and policies that show us what cities and neighborhoods could become.
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Unholy Alliance
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Can the Churches Save the Cities?
"Faith-based activism" is very much in vogue, and some church-run programs may be effective at alleviating urban ills. But funding these programs with government money raises troubling constitutional issues. Is there a reasonable middle ground?
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The Disenfranchised
Thirteen states deny the franchise to ex-felons who have already paid their debt to society. These laws are all too reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.
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Can Liberals Tell a Credible Story?
If Democrats want to be more than bit players in the Reagan movie, the liberal story needs new characters, new images, and stronger language about opportunity, wealth, and inequality.
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An Emerging Democratic Majority
The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats are now merely the reflecting "moon" of American politics and Republicans the "sun." But demographic and voting data suggest the Democrats could create a new majority without sacrificing progressive concerns.
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State of the Debate: The Libertarian Conceit
Political excess in the twentieth century gives libertarianism understandable appeal. But caveat emptor; the path from Isaiah Berlin does not lead to Charles Murray.
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Devil in the Details
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Of Our Time: The Missing Options
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Democratic Possibilities
Emphasizing work and family could revitalize the Democratic Party. But only if progressives seize the moment.
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Controversy: Can't We Grow Faster?
Continuing the debate from "The Speed Limit," by Alan S. Blinder, and "Why We Can Grow Faster," by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison (September-October 1997).
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How Low Can You Go?
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Behind the Numbers: Polluted Data
In one case after another, both corporate lobbyists and academics have overestimated the costs of environmental regulation. Herewith the surprising explanation of why they've been consistently wrong.
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Long Live Community
"Bowling alone" may not only be hazardous to the body politic. It may also be dangerous for the body. Why social cohesion has survival value.
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The New Urban Gamble
Does the Carnival City model--with its casinos, stadiums, and convention centers--promise to revitalize cities? Or is it a misguided use of public investment?
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The Mythology of Centrism
Pundits have misinterpreted Tony Blair's and Bill Clinton's victories as centrism triumphant. But voters chose leaders committed to stopping Thatcherism and Reaganism and restoring broad prosperity.
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Essay: Labor and the Intellectuals
Despite reciprocal indifference, labor unions and liberal intellectuals can still enliven one another.
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An Invisible Community
Everyone seems to agree that public housing has no redeeming value -- everyone, that is, but the tenants.
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Below the Beltway: The China Hawks
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Devil in the Details
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Controversy: Family Trouble
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State of the Debate: The Moral Meanings of Work
How should we think about work -- as just a necessary burden that we'd like to cut to a minimum or as the organizing focus of our lives? A number of new books about work, culture, and family suggest that we need to work for more than bread alone.
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Grassroots Medicine
The federal government has agreed to study the medicinal use of marijuana. But there's already lots of evidence that the administration seems to be doing its best to ignore.
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The Speed Limit
It would be nice if the Dodgers returned to Brooklyn and if the economy grew faster than 2.3 percent. But neither of these things is in the offing.
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Why We Can Grow Faster
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Of Our Time: Wayne's World
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Behind the Numbers: The End of Unemployment?
A higher percentage of Americans are working than at any time since World War II. But policy-makers could wreck a dawning era of high employment.
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State of the Debate: Dr. Business
A new book by a Harvard Business School professor who wants to reorganize medicine into "focused factories" shows just how scary the medical-industrial complex might become.
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The Martian Plan
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The Neglected Remedy
Scattershot regulation of drive-through deliveries and other abuses isn't the only way to respond to the rise of managed care. There is another option: Giving consumers more of a say.
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Test the Limit
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