Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files II
I n their search for new ideas, intellectuals and policymakers across the political spectrum have recently become enchanted with the concept of social capital. Liberals and conservatives alike now celebrate social capital as the key to success in a myriad of domestic issues-from public education, aging, and mental health to the battle against inner-city crime…
The Job Ghetto
Competition in the inner city even for fast-food jobs is so great that welfare recipients will have trouble getting them.
Of Our Time: The Loophole We Can’t Close
There may be no way to limit spending that is both constitutional and effective.
Cracking Down
Commentary on “The House That Crack Built”
Ethnodrama and Reality
Commentary on “The House That Crack Built”
Of Our Time: Cyberpower and Freedom
In politics and the public imagination, computers have gone from symbolizing our vulnerability to embodying our possibilities. In their early days during the 1950s and 1960s, computers seemed destined to increase the power of government and big corporations, and the great worry was how to protect privacy and individual freedom. Then the advent of the…
Eyes on the Street: Community Policing in Chicago
It’s now the favorite remedy for urban crime, but a visit to the front lines in Chicago suggests how hard it is to make community policing work.
The Big Bash Theory
Mira Nair’s new comic melodrama Monsoon Wedding opens with a shot of a frowning man trying to prop up a traditional Indian marigold bower, then flits straight to his agitated cordless-phone conversation with a clownish “event manager.” As we soon learn, the frowning man is Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah), a well-to-do New Delhi suburbanite, and…
Congress on drugs; Roe v. Bush.
Congress on Drugs The Democrats have a terrific issue in prescription-drug coverage, but their caution on budgetary politics and deference to the pharmaceutical industry could blow their advantage. President George Bush says he supports drug coverage, but his budget allows only stripped-down coverage for the poor and near-poor. The catch: They first have to spend…
Putting profits over patriotism.
In a recent article in The New York Times, David Cay Johnston details how some sleazy American companies are reincorporating in Bermuda and other countries in order to avoid taxes. Insurance companies led the way a few years ago; and when Congress failed to take action, other patriotically challenged corporations followed suit. The ploy entails…
Between Iraq and a hard place.
There are three good reasons why the United States should worry about Iraq: oil, weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein. Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the Mideast, and what its government does with them vitally affects the world economy. As for weapons, Iraq already possesses chemical and biological weapons and could soon…
Secrets and lies.
Assuming that the late former Enron vice Chairman Cliff Baxter died by his own hand and not the hands of others who feared he might testify against them, you might blame Baxter’s suicide on guilt, shame, or fear of financial ruin. Linda Lay, wife of former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, blames the media: “Cliff was…
Uncooking the Books
Financial accounting has one quite simple goal: to give investors and other outsiders an honest report on a company’s performance and management’s stewardship. Accurate accounting (“transparency”) is something that we Americans preach to other nations as an essential precondition for successful capitalism. In practice, of course, it’s enormously difficult to reduce to a handful of…
Film Business
Work is the dirty secret of contemporary life — to judge by the movies, at any rate. Although work is where people experience roughly half their waking hours over the course of four or five decades, working life is not considered glamorous or electric enough to hold the attention of audiences. Filmgoers, after all, treat…
Saddam’s Real Opponents
Three years ago, the influential journal Foreign Affairs published an article on Iraq entitled “The Rollback Fantasy.” It was a typically long and sober piece, challenging the thinking of those who were arguing for a United States role in toppling Iraq’s ruler, Saddam Hussein. But unfortunately, the article contained its own odd piece of fantasy:…
With Victories Like These….
What a cruel twist of fate: campaign finance reform that benefits Republicans and big money. The Shays-Meehan bill is back-to-the-future reform: legislation that takes us back to just before 1980, when there was no “soft money” but still a huge imbalance in the influence of the big contributors over the rest of the population. Under…
Customized to California?
He’s been called the harbinger of a “New Republicanism,” a West Coast Michael Bloomberg who can customize the GOP for a Democratic California much as Bloomberg has for a Democratic New York. But for all the hype and hope that’s been invested in Richard Riordan, the former Los Angeles mayor who’s trying to eke out…
Regulating Power
Ignored in the scandal about Enron’s off-the-books deals is the fact that Enron’s core businesses–trading and selling energy–made little economic sense. Starting in the early 1990s, Enron claimed it could make electricity generation more efficient through a system to trade more electric power than regulated utilities. To that end, the company urged the Federal Energy…
Securing Pensions II
Enron’s collapse–and the terrible losses suffered by Enron workers–has created the political space for a real conversation about how employers have chosen to finance their employees’ retirement. That debate is centered on the fact that millions of Americans hold 401(k) plans that are overinvested in the stock of their employer, which puts them at risk…
Securing Pensions I
The Enron scandal seems like a heaven-sent opportunity to reform the business excesses of our recent Gilded Age. But the fetish of markets retains a powerful grip on the American political psyche. Already, corporate lobbyists, elevating stock-market gambling to the level of a fundamental human right, are undercutting modest efforts to prevent future abuses of…
Organizing People
The Enron supermarket of corporate crime, fraud, and abuse has engendered its own media frenzy and congressional investigative momentum to document the wrongdoing and the harm to innocents; it will likely also stimulate civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions. The question that remains is whether federal and state governments will enact anything beyond Band-Aid reforms–whether they…
Not the People’s Choice
The true significance of the disputed 2000 election has thus far escaped public attention. This was an election that elevated the popular-vote loser to the American presidency. But that astounding fact has been obscured: first by the flood of electoral complaints about deceptive ballots, hanging chads, and so on in Florida; then by the political…
Comment: The Road to Enron
For the past quarter-century, America has been deregulating capitalism in expectation of a more dynamic and efficient economy. In fact, average economic growth since 1976 has slightly lagged that of the previous quarter-century, when capitalism was more highly regulated. But there has been a much more serious set of consequences–widening inequality, the dismantling of public…
Literature: Kennedy’s Quidditas
There’s a law that says you can’t write about William Kennedy without invoking William Faulkner or James Joyce, or both, the idea being that if a novelist returns to a place in a number of works over time he is not so much writing books as re-creating history into myth or some such. Fine. Granting…
The American Way of Power
Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World By Walter Russell Mead. Alfred A. Knopf, 374 pages, $30.00 This book begins with a bang and ends with a kvetch. “The United States has had a remarkably successful history in international relations,” Walter Russell Mead proclaims in his opening pages. That such a…
Good Schools, Good Citizens
Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society Edited by Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti. Yale University Press, 358 pages, $35.00 The contentious debate over whether public funds should support private schools revolves around a central paradox: Most Americans believe that private schools do a somewhat better job of promoting academic achievement than public schools,…
Living with Oswald
Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy By Thomas Mallon. Pantheon, 224 pages, $22.00 Why did Mrs. Ruth Paine of Irving, Texas, make the notation “LHO purchase of rifle” on the March 1963 page of her Hallmark pocket calendar? Soon enough, everyone would find out that LHO was Lee Harvey Oswald. But…
Networks
Benching Bush’s Nominees What do you think of a judge who’s published fewer than 10 percent of his opinions? You might think that he’s hiding something because his record reflects an unsuitable judicial temperament or extreme views on such subjects as race and reproductive choice. And according to those leading the opposition to the nomination…
Pulp Culture: History, Hard-Boiled
“I followed … with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties. The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster.” With these…
Comment: Second Thoughts
When the World Trade Center was attacked, some progressives went, almost reflexively, into antiwar mode. Most, however, supported military action, because the incineration of innocents in the heart of Manhattan was so appalling; because the Taliban regime was so brutal; and–somewhat less nobly–because dissent in a time of national outrage courted political isolation. After nearly…
Outside Shot
During the winter of his junior year at tiny Albion College in Michigan, Dolph Grundman saw his basketball coach make an unusual decision: One of the team’s seldom-used forwards asked if he could skip a game at nearby Olivet College to study for an exam. Few middle-school coaches, let alone college coaches, would have said…
Deal Breakers
Jews remain one of the most liberal groups in American society. And although concern about Israel’s security has pushed some of them to the right, the majority have supported the peace process, including the efforts of President Clinton late in his term to bring about an agreement with the Palestinians. During and since those years,…
A Theologian for These Times?
With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology By Stanley Hauerwas. Brazos Press, 249 pages, $22.99 There was once a time when American Protestanttheologians were a vital part of the national civic debate. In recent decades,however, theologians have steered their discipline toward a quest for academicrespectability, choosing narrow specialization over efforts…
Costs a Bundle and Can’t Fly
For the past decade, numerous career military officers and defense analysts–whose politics run the gamut from left to right–have held that U.S. combat in the twenty-first century probably won’t mean grand, conventional battles with large standing armies. And September 11 suggests that these experts are right: Rather than a “rogue state” raining down ballistic missiles…
A Plan for Peace
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is surely the most protracted international dispute since the end of the Second World War. Today, however, it is easy to forget that over the past 25 years, various important and encouraging advances have occurred in the political process between Israel and its neighbors: peace with Egypt; peace with Jordan; the withdrawal…
Tabloids: Elvis is Dead
One depends upon a tabloid like The National Enquirer, whether surreptitiously in the supermarket checkout line, or luxuriantly and unapologetically over a nice bowl of soup, to be sleazy in its journalistic style, juicy in its revelations, skewering in its attitudes toward celebrities’ privileges, and worshipful toward their diets, addictions, recoveries, charitable activities, and alien…
Sectual Discrimination
Rebecca and David Corneau of Attleboro, Massachusetts, are Christian fundamentalists who belong to a small sect called The Body. Like Christian Scientists, they reject modern medical care in accordance with their religious beliefs. Unlike Christian Scientists, they are being deprived of all rights to raise a family. In the fall of 1999 — after their…
Beat the Press
It’s safe to say that Bob Woodward doesn’t have much trouble getting his calls to the White House returned. If Woodward’s latest opus for The Washington Post — an interminable eight-parter titled “10 Days in September” co-reported with Dan Balz — is any measure, the Bush administration practically gave Woodward a key to the Oval…
What Happened to Art?
The Invention of Art: A Cultural History By Larry Shiner. University of Chicago Press, 382 pages, $35.00 The Invisible Masterpiece By Hans Belting. Translated by Helen Atkins. University of Chicago Press, 480 pages, $45.00 How the mighty have fallen. From such soul-vaulting achievements as Michelangelo’s David, marble buttocks and glowering determination fit to shake the…
One for Oil
Until this February, I had no idea that we had an “assistant secretary of energy for fossil energy,” although it turns out there’s been one for decades. What does an ASOEFFE do? The current and ninth occupant of this position, Carl Michael Smith, helpfully provided a job description in a January 30 speech to the…
The Old New Thing
Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold By John Cassidy. HarperCollins, 320 pages, $25.95 About two years ago, a journalist I know interviewed the five founders of a new dot-com for an article in a prominent business magazine. Despite not having any income from this business, or any customers, or even any system for getting customers,…
Snatching Defeat
The United States scored a great military and diplomatic victory in Afghanistan. It drove out a hostile regime. It dealt a serious, though not fatal, blow to the al-Qaeda terrorist network and assembled a coalition against radical Islam that stretched from North Africa to East Asia. But the Bush administration now appears poised to snatch…
The Democrats’ Energy Problem
It is not much more than a year since the 2000 presidential election was finally decided, but it seems like an eternity. The Republicans have now accomplished what they were unable to achieve at the polls: They have gained decisive control of the national debate and virtually locked their agenda in place for years to…
Shooting Dumas’s Dog
There is poetry — or a good rhyme, at least — in the fact that Disney’s new adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s 1845 novel The Count of Monte Cristo was written by a man better known as a producer and creator of TV game shows. Jay Wolpert has labored for decades in game-show land: Double Dare,…
The Still-Industrial City
In Chicago, like most other big cities in America, manufacturing was once the core of the urban economy — until recent decades, when most of it moved out to suburban areas and beyond. But while much smaller today, manufacturing still makes a vital contribution that cities should work hard to maintain.
State of the Debate: The Color of the Law
Race and crime commingle dangerously in the American psyche. Now that crime rates are declining, might color-blind justice finally be achievable?
Rwanda, Kosovo, and the Limits of Justice
The experience of genocide has forever altered our understanding of criminality. Should it change our approach to justice?
The Judicial Vigilantes
Tom Delay and other social conservatives are on the warpath against liberal judges, and would like nothing better than to impeach the lot of them. While impeachments are improbable, conservatives’ strategy is having a dangerous impact.
Games Prosecutors Play
Ken Starr was no exception. Over the last 30 years, abetted by the Supreme Court, prosecutors have acquired fearsome power in the form of largely untrammeled authority and a bag of sneaky tricks.
State of the Debate: The White Rage
Why has extremist violence exploded on the right? A historical look at the evolution of populist rage.
State of the Debate: The Case Against “Civility”
Can’t we all just get along? Not when “civility” is just a genteel way to mask the inevitable tensions and antagonisms of democratic society.
Back to Class
Are Americans really just unrealistic whiners?
Controversy: The Virtues of Humiliation
Continuing the debate from “The Shaming Sham,” by Carl F. Horowitz (March-April 1997).
The Sexual Counterrevolution
The sexual revolution brought excess as well as progress. In the aftermath of AIDS, a new puritanism threatens to repeal both.
State of the Debate: Back to Boys’ School
Tender anecdotes about elite all-boys’ schools have ignited efforts to expand single-sex education to Americans from all backgrounds. But there’s another side of the story.
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?
The Antifeminist Seduction
In a curious, back-handed compliment, conservatives have appropriated feminist language in arguing that feminism itself is the cause of women’s problems today.
The Feminism Gap
“Feminists Don’t Know What to Think,” declared U.S. News & World Report in late September. Pointed editorials in the Atlanta Constitution and the New York Daily News condemned “Feminism’s Double Standard” and “Silent Feminists’ Shame.” Maureen Dowd even proclaimed in her New York Times column that feminists had committed “mass suicide” by failing to condemn…
The Care Equation
Women used to do all the unpaid work of caring for the kids of aging parents. Although career barriers have fallen, women won’t have real equal opportunity until America recognizes its crisis of caring.
Below the Beltway
I n a recent address to the Catholic Press Association, Bob Dole sketched out a culturally conservative agenda on social issues. But when it came to welfare, Dole, at one point, portrayed teenage mothers with rare charity: “We are just beginning to recognize that perhaps half of the fathers of [their] babies are grown men,…
Will Class Trump Gender?: The New Assault on Feminism
“Goodbye, feminism,” say some critics who insist that women can prosper as rugged individualists. Funny thing, the new antifeminists sound a lot like the old laissez-faire conservatives.
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?
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.
Can Cities Escape Political Isolation?
As federal funding dwindles, we need new economic arrangements and political coalitions to unite city and suburb.
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.
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.
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?
Below the Beltway: Whistling Past the Trade Deficit
S oon after he was nominated to be Secretary of Commerce, Bill Daley called in several prominent trade experts to brief him. What, he asked them, was the most important thing he should know? Claude Barfield from the American Enterprise Institute was quick to reply, “You should understand that the trade deficit doesn’t matter.” Barfield’s…
The Real China Question
How to admit China and other former communist countries into the world trading club–without destroying the international economic system in the process.
Breaching the Great Wall
China’s neomercantalism harms America’s economic interests. A mutually beneficial relationship will take more assertive trade policies.
State of the Debate: Peddling Krugman
Paul Krugman criticizes supporters of government activism as nothing but policy peddlers and economic illiterates, but describes himself as a liberal. What is MIT’s prodigy really up to?
What Japan Teaches Us Now
Japan’s economic crisis is a case study in the long-term costs of protecting inefficient industries. Yet it also shows how the pressures for protectionism become irresistible without a strong safety net and policies to aid displaced workers.
Essay: Web of Paradox
The language of our emerging digital culture suggests adventure, daring, and unprecedented novelty, while we sit comfortably at our desks, alone, communing with our computer screens. Are we being taken in by our own metaphors?
Children in the Digital Age
There’s trouble in Cyber City, and pornography is the least of it.
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?
Screening Out Sex
When the Supreme Court overturned the Communications Decency Act, it was a triumph for civil liberties. Now new forms of censorship threaten to cut off young people’s legitimate access to sexual information in cyberspace.
Computer Clubhouses in the Inner City: Access Is Not Enough
A new kind of learning community shows how children from any neighborhood can become “technologically fluent.”
Computing Our Way to Educational Reform
The new technology may not only make progressive educational ideas more appealing; it may also help them work.
Multimedia and Multiple Intelligences
New multimedia technology could do a lot for children if educators recognize diverse intelligences that schools traditionally haven’t favored.
Seeing Through Computers
Computer literacy used to mean knowing how computers worked; now it means just knowing how to work with them. What we need are new critical reading skills for the emerging electronic culture.
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?
Will Libraries Survive?
Rumors of the death of the brick-and-mortar library have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, the digital age has transformed the nature of data storage. But the public library will be a chief agent in providing access to digital information.
Darwin’s Truth, Jefferson’s Vision
When scientists on the left began attacking sociobiology, liberals nodded their heads. But take another look. The supposed contradiction between Darwinian reasoning and liberal political philosophy was based on a misunderstanding of both.
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?
The Biggest Deal: Lobbying to Take Social Security Private
Privatizing Social Security would create an enormous financial bonanza. So guess who’s spending millions to change public perceptions and national policy.
Social Security on the Table
Must we destroy Social Security in order to save it?
Still With Us
Social Security is our most successful antipoverty program, but large numbers of the elderly are still poor—and Social Security could be part of the solution.
The Chile Con
Advocates of privatizing Social Security point to Chile. But take a closer look at who’s really benefiting from the Chilean system.
Two Cheers for Clinton’s Social Security Plan
Think Social Security should invest in the stock market? Take a closer look.
Of Our Time: My Dinner with Bill
P ersonally, it doesn’t bother me at all that Bill Gates’s net worth ($46 billion) is larger than the combined net worth of the bottom 40 percent of American households ($37.8 billion, excluding their cars). Several years ago I had dinner with Bill Gates and about a dozen other people at a nicely appointed home…
The Great Social Security Scare
Advocates of privatization are using the financial stress of the baby boomers’ retirement to undo the advances that Social Security has brought. Relieving the financial pressures, however, has become a phony excuse for privatization.
Behind the Numbers: The Privateers’ Free Lunch
The flawed mathematical assumption behind privatizing Social Security.
Is There a Social Security Crisis?
E conomist-bashing has long been a popular pastime among intellectuals right and left. Economists themselves, however, are not supposed to bash back. So when I decided to break that rule, I fully expected retribution. Surprisingly, until now all of the really personal attacks on me have come from the right, from the likes of Alan…
A Secure System
A former commissioner of Social Security explains how to save it.
Rampant Bull
Are liberals failing to rise in defense of their greatest legacy? As calls for privatizing Social Security grow louder, the time has come for a bold new defense of universal social insurance.
Fighting the Establishment (Clause)
The Rutherford Institute portrays itself as merely interested in defending the rights of religious Americans. A closer look reveals a more sweeping and questionable agenda.
Unholy Alliance
I t is easier to believe that God is in heaven and all’s right with the world than it is to imagine an irreverent politician questioning whether there is a God in heaven or any benefit to prayer. Even political theorists and commentators, right and left, are apt to shrink from criticizing religious belief or…
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?
State of the Debate: Defining Democracy Down
Must the Catholic Church admit women as priests? Must families with children or pets be allowed to live in every homeowners’ association? These questions are even more complicated than they first appear.
Is God a Republican?: Why Politics Is Dangerous for Religion
The Christian Coalition has made a dangerous gamble by associating faith with the Republican Party. If God blesses us only as Republicans or Democrats, both politics and religion are in trouble.
The Corrosive Politics of Virtue
Decrying moral failure is an old American tradition that goes back to the Puritans. But the moral diagnosis is wrong — and it brings pernicious political consequences.
The Tocqueville Files: The Other Civic America
Despite fears of civic decline, the United States remains the country with the highest rate of volunteering. The explanation may be America’s web of religious affiliations.
Is God a Republican?: Why Politics Is Dangerous for Religion
The Christian Coalition has made a dangerous gamble by associating faith with the Republican Party. If God blesses us only as Republicans or Democrats, both politics and religion are in trouble.
On the Politics of Virtue
THE LIBERAL VIRTUES Stephen Teles T he welfare state and the advocates of “virtue” have few friends in common. Those on the right want to save virtue from the welfare state, while those on the left want to protect the welfare state from the rhetoric of virtue. An exemplar of the latter tendency is James…
Prisoner Proliferation
When most of us think of convicts at work, we picture them banging out license plates or digging ditches. Those images, however, are now far too limited to encompass the great range of jobs that America’s prison workforce is performing. If you book a flight on TWA, you’ll likely be talking to a prisoner at…
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.
Captive Labor
The old prison labor was chain gangs and license plates. The new prison labor is contracts with corporate America to employ inmates at less-than-minimum wage.
Straight From the Sixties: What Conservatives Owe the Decade They Hate
Apocalyptic intemperateness, paranoia, a loathing of compromise, a demonization of the enemy — where have we run into this before?
Wither the Democrats
The Democrats still haven’t found a way to tap America’s discontent. Some new political books suggest how they can.
Restoration Fever
Most of us like to think that our views represent the innermost beliefs of the majority of our fellow citizens. Recent polls may show a ridiculous preference for a position we despise, our candidates may lose at election time, and the radio may broadcast music or talk that we abhor. But we know that all…
Who Deserted the Democrats in 1994?
Analysts have pronounced 1994 an ideological election because the economy was growing overall. But look who was swinging Republican.
The Populist Road to Hell: Term Limits in California
It sounded like a good idea, but if California is any indication, term limits are a recipe for political chaos and increased special interest influence.
Fight Smoke with Fire
Why taking on Big Tobacco in the name of children’s health is a winning issue for Democrats.
Of Our Time: After Solidarity
T he American Republic has long had a set of public and non-profit institutions that enrich our democracy by demonstrating that society is more than a mere market. The most expansive and explicit of these began in the New Deal, such as Social Security and later Medicare. However, public and communal institutions have a venerable…
Liberty, Community, and the National Idea
Is a renewed emphasis on the value of community the answer to our political woes? Not if it’s defined in purely local terms.
Of Our Time: A Pile of Vetoes
M idway through this first year of Republican legislative hegemony, President Clinton has seemingly risen, once again, from the political dead. One cannot yet say the same for the Democratic Party or the cause of liberalism. The Republicans are still very much in charge, with an agenda more stridently radical and more dominant than anything…
Goldwater’s Glitter
Conservatives hail Barry Goldwater as a forerunner; liberals appreciate his belated moderation. But Goldwater wasn’t the paragon a new biography makes him out to be.
Rewarding Work: Feasible Antipoverty Policy
A higher minimum wage and the earned income tax credit fit like puzzle pieces, each compensating for the other’s flaws. Together they are our best bet to fight poverty.
Of Our Time: Fearful Symmetry
T he 1994 election, more than any in recent memory, “nationalized” politics. That is, the Republicans ran on a coherent ideology and program; Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America became the manifesto. Even though the actual swing in the popular vote was small, it was consistent across the country–enough to give Republicans control of both houses…
Backfire on Campus
In their efforts to enforce multiculturalism, university administrators have unwittingly created a new breeding ground for conservative rebellion.
Come the Devolution
You say you want a devolution? Then pay very close attention to the details, most of which stick the states with more liabilities — and fewer resources.
Who Won the Cold War?
Is it high time for liberals to apologize to the anticommunist right, which correctly gauged the red menace from the start? Sorry, the credit belongs to a brave band of liberal cold warriors beginning with George Kennan.
Return of the Native
Isolationism is rising among Republicans along with antigovernment fervor. Is Bob Dole — as Newt Gingrich says — another Bob Taft?
After the Republican Surge
On the heels of a major conservative surge, Republicans have overplayed their political hand and created an opportunity the Democrats can seize.
Back from the Dead: Neoprogressivism in the ’90s
The conservative revolution turned out to be less than a mandate. Can the various factions that call themselves progressive get behind a common vision?
Between a Swing and a Lock
T o their credit, the Republican leaders in Congress have had a highly strategic view of the uses of policy in consolidating political power. Newt Gingrich and his colleagues set themselves a clear agenda and they have stuck to it, conscious that their first priority, more important than any single piece of legislation, has been…
How Low Can You Go? Shoot Now, Think Later
Shoot Now, Think Later Conservatives everywhere are trying to outdo each other. Cut off welfare after two years? Make that just 60 days in some states. End social benefits to illegal immigrants? Make that legal immigrants too. Add the death penalty for some federal crimes? Why not for more? Revolutions often set off this kind…
The Smoldering Electorate
Three books about American politics help illuminate the deep frustration of voters — and suggest how much of a change Democrats must undertake to reach them.
From Purity to Politics
Under repressive totalitarian regimes, the absolute moral rectitude of Eastern European intellectuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik was heroic. Ten years after the fall of the Wall, what happens when the reality of democratic politics calls for quotidian pragmatism and petty compromise?
Hearings Loss
It has been a long time since congressional hearings investigated real corporate and government abuses or serious social problems. But since 1994, the situation has gotten far worse: the oversight machinery is used for partisan purposes or simply left to rot.
State of the Debate: Lessons of Right-Wing Philanthropy
It is well known that the conservative movement has for years enjoyed a decided financial advantage on the battleground of ideas — they have far more corporate and foundation support than liberals. But conservatives don’t just have more money; they spend it better, too.
What Russia Teaches Us Now
Metastasizing organized crime, massive tax evasion, unregulated sales of missiles–the people of Russia and the world now have more to fear from the breakdown of the Russian state than from its power. Why liberty itself depends on competent government.
Rorschach Politics
Sometimes political ideology is in the eye of the beholder. That’s one of the secrets of the prime minister’s striking success.
Of Our Time: The Bankers’ Regime
Democracy has turned upside down, of late. At this writing, the nation is mesmerized by Oval Sex and related scandal. Elected representatives in Washington are talking about little else. The presidency is under siege. Cable television and talk radio savor every titillating detail. Meanwhile, the larger events now rocking the world are being addressed by…
Clinton’s Darkness At Noon
Bill Clinton has likened his Starr Chamber travails to those of Rubashov, the protagonist of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. The comparison is more apt than he knows.
The Devil in Devolution
Turning power back to the states has gained wide support. But there’s a reason for national decisions: One state’s solution may aggravate another state’s problems.
How Low Can You Go?
Gambling on the Presidency T he College of Business Administration at the University of Iowa runs the Iowa Electronic Market, a futures market on this year’s presidential election. Anyone can buy a contract on President Clinton, the yet-to-be-designated Republican candidate, or someone else. It’s a winner-take-all market: Contracts on the winner pay off at $1…
Up From Bipartisanship
Support for center-right bipartisan government is both misleading and dangerous. It fails to address the problems of the economically stressed, gives them no reason to vote, and could render the Democrats irrelevant.
Can new Labour Dance the Clinton?
F or the first time in 18 years, Britain, barring some cataclysm, will soon elect a left-of-center government. Starting with their name and extending to a wide range of policy and rhetorical stances, Tony Blair’s New Labour Party has much in common with Bill Clinton’s New Democrats. Even before the recent changes in the Democratic…
Green Herring
Is the Green Party the worst threat to progressive politics since Reagan or its best hope since the New Deal?
How Low Can You Go?
SENSE AND SENSATIONALISM Throughout the scandals of recent years, the public has seemed a lot more sober than the reporters. Take the Dick Morris affair. You have to work yourself into a state of extreme delusionary rectitude to be shocked by a relationship between a political consultant and a prostitute. Indeed, when I first heard…
The Big Tilt
It’s not just how many take part in politics; it’s who. Inequality is more pronounced in America than in other democracies, and it’s growing.
How Low Can You Go?
THE UPSIDE OF UNEMPLOYMENT Our last issue described PaineWebber’s “happiness index” for bonds, which goes up when unemployment increases. But unemployment, we’ve now learned, can prolong your life too. Our impeccable source is a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research: “Are Recessions Good for Your Health?” by Christopher Rohm (NBER Working Paper…
Gore Or Bradley
Bill Bradley bailed out on some of the big political battles of the 1990s. Is that what’s behind the former New Jersey senator’s surprising strength?
K Street Gore
One important way to judge what a presidential candidate might do if elected is to look at his record while in office-his publicly announced positions and his skill in commanding loyalty, wielding authority, and winning public support. But it is also important to look at the networks of campaign contributors, lobbyists, political organizations, and policy…
Of Our Time: The Clinton Presidency, Take Three
B ill Clinton’s first term effectively lasted two years, until the disastrous midterm elections of 1994. Then came the two-year Clinton-Gingrich government of national disharmony, ending in the President’s miraculous revival. Now we have the third Clinton presidency, the second Gingrich Congress, and a gathering storm of investigations that may well dominate national politics for…
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.
The Storm Amid the Calm
The Framers of the Constitution, as we remember from our civics lessons, sought to design a government so well checked and balanced that it would resist the unruly passions of the multitude. During the impeachment of President Clinton by the House of Representatives, it was impossible not to feel that those expectations had been inverted.…
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.
Exhuming McCarthy
By encouraging Joe McCarthy and his red baiting tactics in the 1950s, conservatives embarrassed themselves. Emboldened by new evidence, they’re going to embarrass themselves again.
The Successor Generation
If the profusion of legacy candidates this election season is any indication, having a political pedigree can do wonders for your electoral chances. As we hurtle toward the possibility of the first all second-generation presidential race, it’s time to ask: Do dynastic advantages trample democratic fairness?
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.
The New Map of American Politics
The Pacific coast is becoming more Democratic, the Mountain States more Republican—and the South is back up for grabs. Migration is changing America’s electoral geography, and Democrats may yet come out the winners.
How Low Can You Go?
HAPPINESS IS . . . According to The Economist, PaineWebber has created an index of “happiness” for bonds that goes up when unemployment rises. If others would only follow this example and strike a blow against hypocrisy, we could have a series of more accurate social indicators: an index of happiness for hospitals that jumps…
Associations Without Members
Civic America has changed. The local forms of participation have faded, and new national advocacy organizations relying on direct mail fundraising have mushroomed. While there are some benefits to the new forms of advocacy, the shift has hurt our shared sense of democratic citizenship.
Lynne Cheney, Policy Assassin
Her role is simple but important: produce a steady supply of screeds for major media outlets claiming that our culture has been commandeered by the left. But there is often less to Lynne Cheney’s work than meets the eye.
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.
The Moynihan Enigma
Why the Senate’s intellectual giant is a strangely ineffective lawmaker.
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.
Below the Beltway: New Labor, New Democrats — New Alliance?
Washington, D.C. On April 27, Al From, the president of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and Will Marshall, the president of the DLC’s Progressive Policy Institute, had lunch with John Swee ney, the president, and Steve Rosenthal, the political director, of the AFL-CIO. These four people had met but had never talked amicably or seriously…
Of Our Time: Constraining Capital, Liberating Politics
If, as widely predicted, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) wins the German election in September, there will be center-left governments simultaneously in every major European nation for the first time in history — in London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. Of the 15 nations of the European Union, no fewer than 13 will be governed by…
George W.’s Compassion
George W. Bush can cut taxes and speak Spanish, too. But is compassionate conservatism anything more than Gingrichism with a human face?
Where Have You Gone, Nelson Rockefeller?
Impeachment may have hurt conservatives, but it also revealed just how weak GOP moderates are. The plight of northern Republicans isn’t just temporary; it’s structural.
Elephantiasis
Republicans spent a generation bludgeoning Democrats with those dreaded “wedge issues.” Maybe it’s time to give the GOP some of its own medicine.
The Campus Anti-Sweatshop Movement
The campus anti-sweatshop movement is the first since the campaign against apartheid. Even better, it’s closely linked to the labor movement—and it’s beginning to bear fruit.
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.
Essay: Labor and the Intellectuals
Despite reciprocal indifference, labor unions and liberal intellectuals can still enliven one another.
Dear Brother Sweeney: An Open Letter to Labor’s New Leader
Get out of Washington, hire the idealistic young, and turn Labor back into a movement.
Toward a More Perfect Union: New Labor’s Hard Road
The labor movement has new life, but faces immense obstacles. Here’s what it can accomplish.
You’re Being Robbed
A few simple ideas on how to revive labor and liberalism.
Yes, Union
Labor’s message to liberals: Rumors of our irrelevance have been much exaggerated.
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.
Global Villagers: The Rise of Transnational Communities
A new breed of immigrant community is breaking down national borders and confounding traditional notions of citizenship.
Housing Policy’s Moment of Truth
In Washington these days, HUD is about as popular as mosquitoes. But there’s a way to make housing more affordable without the old bureaucracy.
An Invisible Community
Everyone seems to agree that public housing has no redeeming value — everyone, that is, but the tenants.
Smoking Guns
Even after Littleton, gun control advocates have been stymied in Congress, where the lobbying presence of the NRA is just too strong. But litigation against gun manufacturers, borrowed from the playbook of the anti-tobacco crusaders, may prove the real route to gun control.
Political Snipers
The National Rifle Association knew its stance on assault weapons was unpopular, so in 1994 it went underground, took advantage of loopholes in the campaign finance laws, and waged a stealth campaign to unseat Democrats in vulnerable districts.
Of Our Time: Globalism Bites Back
T he Asian financial crisis is a practical rebuttal to the naive internationalism that is America’s foreign economic policy. Naive globalism includes these precepts: The freest possible movement of goods and services maximizes economic efficiency, hence human well-being. If free competition is good nationally, it is even better globally. With a few basic ground rules,…
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.
Who Governs Globalism?
For at least a generation the U.S. has propped up the global economy by absorbing the world’s surplus of goods. That’s not good for the U.S. or its trading partners.
Special Report: The Crime Debate
T he city of Inglewood, population 140,000, lies in the southwest corner of the Los Angeles sprawl. It has the features of almost every other L.A. suburb-long commercial strips of burger shacks and auto body shops, low-rise neighborhoods of motel-style apartment complexes and tiny homes with tiny lawns. The city map is dominated by large…
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.
Taking Liberties: The New Assault on Freedom
Freedom is falling out of fashion all across the political spectrum, and new moves by Congress and the courts threaten basic liberties.
Is Violent Speech a Right?
Advocacy of illegal violence to kill people is not necessarily constitutionally protected speech.
Of Our Time: Rules That Liberate
R ecently, I participated in a new television program called Debates, Debates, in which two teams have an hour to argue an issue of the day. The proposition under debate that day was whether trade sanctions should ever be used to advance human rights. For the opposition, the team captain was Eugene Rotberg, former vice…
Of Our Time: The Age of Trespass
[T]he system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944 [A] government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take everything you have.…
Of Our Time: Rescuing Democracy From “Speech”
T he several pillars of political democracy each seem inviolable first principles, but they exist in necessary tension with one another. Viewing any one principle in isolation, we too easily conclude that it is the indispensable element-the trump. For example, democracy entails both liberty and equality. But neither ideal can be taken to its logical…
Below the Beltway: The China Hawks
S ince the end of the Cold War, the main challenge to those who favor a “constructive engagement” with China has come from human rights advocates and labor leaders. But in the last year, a new opposition voice has been heard, arguing for a return to the containment strategy used against the Soviet Union. This…
After Genocide
The fate of one town, Brcko, almost derailed the Dayton Accords. Now Brcko’s reconstruction has become one of the most daunting ventures in peacekeeping ever attempted by the United States.
The Choice in Kosovo
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans have been uncertain about the purposes that ought to guide our foreign policy, particularly our use of military power. Now that anticommunism no longer serves as an overarching cause, should we follow the dictates of national interest narrowly understood, or do democratic values and commitments to human…
Secrets and Lies
Critics from the right often condemned the old liberal foreign policy establishment for an excess of secrecy. Now the right has a new elitist establishment of its own.
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.
A Liberal Tax Revolt
Liberals ought to start playing offense on taxes. Progressive tax policy can be good politics.
Orbit of Influence: Spy Finance and the Black Budget
America’s huge budget for electronic reconnaissance might have come in for scrutiny after the Cold War. But the few in Congress who are supposed to watch over the world of spy finance are also big beneficiaries of it.
Why Boomers Don’t Spell Bust
We could afford the dependent baby boomer generation once–during its childhood. We can do it again when the boomers retire.
Of Our Time: The Missing Options
H ow the national debate is framed, and what options are put before the public, can be more important ultimately than the immediate choices made. The framing defines the breadth of the nation’s ambition, and thus either raises or lowers expectations, fires or depresses imaginations, ignites or deflates political movements. A future generation pondering the…
Can’t Touch This?: The Pentagon’s Budget Fortress
Defense experts with impeccable conservative credentials say we could cut the Pentagon budget without endangering our security. So why is no one listening?
The Balanced Budget Trap
Absolute budget balance has become orthodoxy; a constitutional amendment to enforce it may pass Congress even if Democrats win the elections. But look at the costs.
The Big Chill
Has the right’s campaign to “defund the left” intimidated large foundations? In fact, tax-exempt organizations of all kinds have far more latitude to promote social change than many of them realize.
Mississippi Waltz
While the House Republican leadership imploded after the 1998 elections, the Senate majority leader kept a low profile. Despite his reputation as a conservative ideologue, Trent Lott is a big-money pragmatist—some would say an opportunist.
Can a Charity Tax Credit Help the Poor?
Despite the lowest unemployment rate ever reported in Ohio, a record number of Franklin County residents turned to food pantries for assistance in 1997, 11 percent more than the year before. With more than 2,000 households requiring at least a month’s worth of food–an unprecedented level of chronic need–food banks scrambled to raise the funds…
Social Change One on One: The New Mentoring Movement
The evidence is in: Mentoring kids from single-parent families has dramatic benefits. So why aren’t we doing more of it?
Delivering for Young Families: The Resonance of the GI Bill
The problem isn’t that old folks get too much money from government — it’s that young families get too little. Recalling the GI Bill and the politics of generational solidarity.
Does Liberalism Cause Sex?
Conservatives say liberalized access to contraceptives and sex education in the schools have led to more unprotected teen sex and teen births. But let’s look at the evidence.
Controversy: Family Trouble
Continuing the debate from “Family Feud,” July-August 1997 and “Family Values: The Sequel,” May-June 1997. BARBARA DAFOE WHITEHEAD I n a review essay that purports to include my book, The Divorce Culture, Arlene Skolnick ignores what the book actually says. Instead, she falsely ascribes to me things I have never written. Let me begin with…
State of the Debate: Family Values: The Sequel
The Institute for America Values has helped define recent debate about the family. But its writers have the facts wrong–the policies they encourage could actually make children’s lives worse.
Children’s Crusade
They’re at it again — conservatives are masquerading as the patrons of the young. Before you buy it, think carefully about how much kids and young adults depend upon activist government.
Family Feud
A reply to “Family Values, The Sequel,” May-June 1997.
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.
Democratic Possibilities
Emphasizing work and family could revitalize the Democratic Party. But only if progressives seize the moment.
Controversy: Why Did Clinton Win?
Will Marshall and Mark Penn debate Robert L. Borosage and Stanley B. Greenberg.
Controversy: Clean Elections Continued
O ne might have thought (or at least hoped) that the revelations of scandalous fundraising practices in the 1996 campaign would improve prospects for enacting much-needed reforms, much as tales of the outrageous behavior by the Committee to Reelect the President provided the impetus for the last major rewrite of campaign finance law in 1974.…
Damage Report
T he past two years have humbled both liberals and conservatives-or should have. The 1992 election, liberals hoped, would set in motion a new cycle of progressivism. It didn’t. After the 1994 election, the new conservative leaders of Congress expected to stage a revolution. They didn’t. First President Clinton failed to secure the bolder aspects…
Ballot Blocks
Poor people are typically democracy’s missing persons. But the patterns of low-income voting show what really motivates the voters on election day.
Of Our Time: A Liberal Dunkirk?
H as the Clinton presidency been a grave setback for liberalism? Or a necessary, if wrenching, re-centering? We have debated this question in our pages, and historians will long argue the issue. One must await the results of the 1996 election to provide a more complete answer. However, here is a look at both sides…
Take the Initiative, Please: Referendum Madness in California
Ballot initiatives were supposed to make government more responsive to the people. In California, a series of referenda has had just the opposite effect.
Dead Center
The centrist politics of the election produced a shrunken electorate and mandate. Are there fresh sources of progressive energy at the grass roots?
Voting Rights in Jeopardy
There is a real danger that the protections of the Voting Rights Act will be rolled back. That will be an invitation to invent dirty tricks to minimize black political influence.
Motor Voter or Motivated Voter?
The Motor Voter law was supposed to dramatically increase turnout and give marginalized groups more voice in politics. Unfortunately, getting these groups to register doesn’t do any good if you don’t give them reason to vote.
Clean Elections, How To
Public frustration with political influence peddling hasn’t been this high since Watergate, and thanks to Maine we finally have an example of how to do reform right.
The Turnout Imperative
Low voter participation favors conservatives. If liberals want to avoid a reprise of 1994 in 1998, they have to make turnout a top priority — and fortunately some are already hard at work.
Drift or Mandate?: The 1996 Elections
The voters’ decision in November will determine whether the late 1990s usher in America’s “fourth Republic.”
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.
One Pill Makes You Larger
The development of human growth hormone and antidepressants like Prozac has already begun to blur the line between “treating” an illness and “enhancing” an otherwise already healthy person, making it difficult for insurance companies to know how and what to pay for.
Popping Contributions
Last year conservatives tried and failed to destroy the effectiveness of food and drug regulation. Now they say they want only modest FDA reforms. Watch out.
State of the Debate: Tough Guys
William Bennett, John DiIulio, and John Walters say it’s time liberals faced the hard facts about crime. Maybe they should heed their own advice.
Arresting Developments
In a variety of ways, police now serve private organizations, not just mixing missions but putting the coercive power of the state in unaccountable hands.
Policing the Police
Where is the line between effective crime control and violation of civil liberties?
Wild Pitch: ‘Three Strikes, You’re Out’ and Other Bad Calls on Crime
Gut-level intuition is driving the country toward depserate and ineffective measures.
Special Report: The Crime Debate:
W hat’s behind the declines in violent crime? The question prompts lively discussion among people coming at a huge social issue from different angles: Some point to random demographic changes, others cite lock-’em-up prison policies; still others, most recently, point to more astute policing. This debate is not exactly a replay of the old argument…
Passions of Crime
Getting tough on crime has always been popular. Now there’s also big money in it. Crime policy today is a study in irrational passions and rational interests.
Of our Time: Democracy v. Dollar
D emocracy, many people have said, is a matter of faith, but why, dear Lord, must our faith be tested so often? Lately, the role of money in political campaigns has been mocking our civic creed. “Here the people rule,” we are taught, and we would like to think so. But if the voters (and…
Reform Gets Rolling
With campaign finance reform stalled in Washington, the real work of cleaning up American politics has shifted to the states. Look at what’s happened in Vermont, Massachusetts, and—of all places—Arizona.
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.
Below the Beltway: Goo-Goos Versus Populists
S ince the election, almost every group in town has been meeting to develop a position on campaign finance reform. The Brookings Institution’s Tom Mann has organized a working group that holds luncheons and has its own web page (www.brookings.edu/gs/campaign/home.htm). Organizations from Common Cause to Citizen Action are holding meetings of what they call the…
Senator Dole’s Greatest Harvest
How long-cultivated interests help advance the Majority Leader’s political fortunes — and circumvent campaign finance limits.
Reform Beyond the Beltway
While Congress is deadlocked, real campaign finance reform is moving ahead in the states.
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.
Social Compact, Version 2.0
Responsible companies promise to uphold higher values. Yet the new economy makes it harder than ever for companies to take on a broader social role — that’s why we invented government.
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
UNSOLVED MYSTERIESThe Tocqueville Files “What If Civic Life Didn’t Die?” by Michael Schudson”Unravelling From Above,” by Theda Skocpol”Couch-Potato Democracy?” by Richard M. Valelly Robert Putnam Responds
Saving Their Assets: How to Stop Plunder at Blue Cross and Other Nonprofits
Huge nonprofit corporations are now being converted to for-profit companies, to the immense benefit of corporate insiders. But they can’t take charitable assets with them. A victory in California shows what the public should insist upon.
Nice Work If You Can Get It: The Software Industry as a Model for Tomorrow’s Jobs
Some high-tech firms are redefining the relationship between employer and employee.
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files II
UNSOLVED MYSTERIESThe Tocqueville Files II “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” by William A. Galston”The Downside of Social Capital,” by Alejandro Portes and Patricia Landolt
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
Robert Putnam Responds
The Strange Disappearance of Civic America
A year ago the author set off a national debate with his article, “Bowling Alone,” which reported a pervasive decline in voluntary association and mutual trust among Americans. Now he sifts through the plausible explanations.
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
If only folks would turn off the TV and start attending PTA meetings, America’s future could be as bright as its civically engaged past. This diagnosis is taking shape in foundation-sponsored gatherings and among highbrow columnists. Privileged men and women–who spend most of their waking hours in their offices, on jet airplanes, and in front…
The Great Carjacking
Public outrage about auto insurance costs — which almost derailed Christine Todd Whitman’s re-election in New Jersey — is symptomatic of a deeper problem that reforms typically fail to confront.
The Fleece Police
I t’s Wednesday night on the NBC Nightly News-time for yet another installment of “The Fleecing of America,” the weekly series on government waste. Tonight’s episode stars a job training program in Puerto Rico, designed to move seasonal farm workers off welfare and into better-paying, permanent work. “Nothing wrong with that, right?” Tom Brokaw asks.…
Power Play
The deregulation of the electric utility industry has been billed as a boon for consumers, because competition is supposed to lower prices. But utility companies are using the opportunity to pass the cost of abandoned nuclear reactors to customers. Big business may save, but consumers will pay more and the environment may suffer.
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files II
Bowling Alone” was published in January 1995. Seldom has a thesis moved so quickly from scholarly obscurity to conventional wisdom. By January 1996 the Washington Post was featuring a six-part series of front-page articles on the decline of trust, and Beltway pundits had learned the vocabulary of social capital. While the debate over the accuracy…
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.
Rooting the Home Team
All over America, owners are demanding extravagant subsidies and tax breaks for new stadiums. If communities want to keep their teams, there’s often a cheaper solution than giving way to these demands. Follow the example of Green Bay.
The Aging Opportunity: America’s Elderly as a Civic Resource
The aging of American society is almost always seen as a problem, but the elderly may be our only growing natural resource — provided we create new ways to mobilize their civic energies.
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
Robert Putnam’s important and disturbing work on civic participation (“The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” TAP, Winter 1996) has led him to conclude that television is the culprit behind civic decline. But lest we be too disturbed, we ought to consider carefully whether the data adequately measure participation and justify his conclusions and whether his…
The Starbucks Solution: Can Voluntary Codes Raise Global Living Standards
Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and Levi Strauss say they will do the right thing all over the world. That’s better than if they made no commitment, but it may not be much.
Of Our Time: Taking Care of Business
Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. -Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom I n a market economy, as Charles E. Lindblom reminded us in Politics and Markets,…
Rising Tides, Sinking Wages
The economy has grown, productivity is up, profits are soaring. There’s just one problem: Americans’ standard of living.
Of Economists and Liberals
A reply to Robert Kuttner, “Peddling Krugman,” September-October 1996.
Delusions of Charity
Conservatives say that if we reduce government spending on the poor, charity will fill the gap. The evidence shows they’re wrong.
Shoeless Joe Stiglitz
World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz didn’t set out to become a thorn in the administration’s side. But by being the odd man out in Clinton’s international economic policymaking apparatus, he has managed to have a very constructive effect.
Bull Market Keynesianism
What if the reasonable growth, low unemployment, and low inflation of the last few years are in fact the vindication of Keynesian theory about consumption spending? And what if this spending has been driven not by government but by the stock market run-up? And what if the stock market collapses?
Why Americans Go Broke
America’s high bankruptcy rates suggest the recent economic boom is less than it appears. Changing bankruptcy law, which is what Republicans in Congress are threatening to do, won’t help.
The Clash of the Samuel Huntingtons
It’s one of the fundamental dilemmas of foreign policy: Should American democracy be for export? Samuel P. Huntington makes a powerful case — for both sides.
The Crusade That’s Killing Prosperity
The Federal Reserve’s crusade against the ghost of inflation has driven unemployment much higher than the official numbers suggest. It’s not technology that’s keeping down wages — it’s the policy of America’s politically insulated central bank.
Controversy: The Rhetoric of “Corporate Welfare”
Since Robert Reich coined the phrase several years ago, “corporate welfare” has become a rhetorical target for progressives. Activists argue that government subsidies to private businesses amount to giveaways, which sometimes even promote harmful activity. These critics have established “corporate welfare” in the lexicon of both liberal and conservative politics: a recent computer search turned…
Behind the Numbers: The Misdiagnosis of Eurosclerosis
Champions of the U.S. economic system say that Europe’s generous social protections cause high unemployment. But it’s the global economy that’s driving up joblessness in Europe–just as it increases income inequality in the United States.
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.
The Economics of Despair
Young adults today earn half of what they would have made 20 years ago. Herewith an explanation, and a prescription, by three labor economists.
Forty Acres and a Sheepskin
Redistributing income has always been difficult politics, but recent books propose a host of wealth-building ideas that may have some purchase even in today’s free market political environment.
Of Our Time: Wayne’s World
O ur text, fittingly enough, is the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. At the top of the page for June 3 is an essay by Wayne Angell, the former governor of the Federal Reserve. “Over the past 15 years stock prices in the U.S. have risen at a 15 percent annual rate,” he…
Overworked and Underemployed
A t least since the 1980s people have said that they work “too hard”-that they are spending too much time on the job, with too little left for family, chores, or leisure. In 1991 this frustration became conventional wisdom thanks to Juliet Schor’s best-seller, The Overworked American, which demonstrated that Americans worked an average of…
Why We Can Grow Faster
F rom the early-nineteenth-century introduction of steam power through the dawning of the age of the microchip in the post-World War II era, real economic growth in America averaged 3.8 percent per year. That meant economic output doubled roughly every 19 years. Then after the 1970s, growth collapsed. During the 1980s, growth averaged just 2.7…
Not Just the Economy, Stupid
J eff Faux and his Economic Policy Institute have consistently shed light on the dark recesses of the American economy–exposing the decline of wages that accompanied the Reagan and Clinton booms and debunking the promise of an export boom with Mexico. I agree with his criticism of Clinton’s trade policies. But I don’t feel the…
How We Lost the Peace Dividend
After every previous war, we sent troops home and cut defense spending. The Col War is over, but real spending still runs 85 percent of the Cold War average.
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.
The New China Lobby
Who bought American indulgence of China? Surprise–multinational corporations that fly the U.S. flag.
How Low Can You Go?
How to Zero Out the Debt J . Fife Symington III, the Republican governor of Arizona, is so conservative that he has sought to abolish the state’s Depart ment of Education. But, poor fellow, he’s broke, as the Economist recently reported. When he was elected in 1991, Symington said he was worth $10 million. Three…
The Ideologically Invested
W hen President Clinton announced his economic plan in 1993, Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley had no doubt about what would happen. Clinton’s proposals, he predicted in a column in February 1993, would “cripple” the economy. While the plan was debated, this absolute certainty about its effects pervaded the Journal’s discussion on both its…
How the Pie is Sliced: America’s Growing Concentration of Wealth
When a rising tide lifts only a few boats.
Behind the Numbers: The Great Surplus Debate
Three views of what to do with the budget surplus.
Investor Illiteracy
The great bull market of the 1990s has generated euphoria in millions of inexperienced investors and laid the groundwork for privatization of Social Security. But extensive poll data suggest that investor expectations are grossly unrealistic.
Regressive Recovery
If California’s present is the nation’s future, then the Golden State’s split-level prosperity is an ominous social indicator.
Cooked to Order
When two economists showed that a higher minimum wage would have little adverse effect on jobs, did the fast food industry try to spike the data and poison their reputations?
The Inflated Case Against the CPI
A consensus seemingly has emerged that the consumer price index exaggerates inflation. But before we change the numbers, we had better look closely at the arguments. They don’t hold up.
Behind the Numbers: Capital’s Gain
Contrary to the conventional view among economists, the shares of national income going to capital and labor have shifted. Capital’s gain has been labor’s loss.
The Flat Taxers’ Flat Distortions
Several leading Republicans now claim that a flat tax can lower most taxpayers’ burden, close loopholes, and avoid revenue shortfalls. Wrong on all counts.
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).
Of Our Time: Surplus Worship
There are two great fiscal legacies of American liberalism since Franklin Roosevelt. One is the invention and broad public acceptance of social insurance-notably Social Security, unemployment compensation, and Medicare. The other is the use of public spending, both to increase human and physical productivity over the long term and for macroeconomic stimulus during recessions. There…
The Surrender of Economic Policy
As long as the big choices in macroeconomic policy are off the table, other efforts to raise living standards will not make much difference.
Solidarity Ever?
Has the new economy overtaken unions?
A Fast Track for Labor
Saying no to trade agreements won’t stop trade. Labor’s advocates need to support realistic proposals for modifying NAFTA and other pacts.
Behind the Numbers: Spin Cycle
Supply-siders point to economic growth during the 1980s as a vindication of Reaganomics. But adjusting for the business cycle shows that the real rate of productivity growth has been the same over the past three decades.
We Are All Third Wayers Now
The Third Way doesn’t have to be market conservatism in centrist clothing.
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.
Private Heroism and Public Purpose
Working- and middle-class voters remain economically anxious. But in the absence of a convincing narrative that connects to their lives, many are concluding from their condition that the only remedy is rugged individualism.
The Future of Black Representation
Good riddance to racial gerrymandering. The Supreme Court’s ruling against race as the predominant factor in districting is good news for blacks and Democrats.
Moving From the ‘Hood: The Mixed Success of Integrating Suburbia
In theory, dispersing the poor to better suburban schools, jobs, and housing was a bipartisan alternative to housing projects and ghetto unemployment. But, surprise, nobody wanted them in the neighborhood.
Affirmative Actions’ California Afterlife
The debate about affirmative action at the University of California isn’t over yet.
Is He a Soul Man?
As Democrats’ most loyal constituency, blacks have rallied around the President during his political crisis, even (some argue) going so far as to confer on him honorary black status. Maybe blacks are selling their political capital too cheaply.
The Indelible Color Line: The Persistence of Housing Discrimination
Overt racism and active discrimination have decreased significantly over the last 30 years. So how come acute urban segregation persists? We need to look at our mortgage and insurance practices.
Color-Blind Affirmative Action
If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, is social science the last resort of a losing cause? We may not know the answer for some time, but there’s no question that some of the heaviest hitters in the fight to preserve race preferences in college admissions are now desperately trying to convert the…
Affirming Opportunity
How do we reconcile multiracial coalition politics with special opportunities for minorities? In place of racial preferences, we need more imaginative conceptions of talent and merit.
Are Black Diplomas Worth Less?
Relative to whites, minorities have made impressive gains in education attainment. Why are they still falling behind economically?
Muddy Waters
New data show just how successful affirmative action programs have been at elite colleges and universities. Too bad those data might not have much relevance for the current debate over preferences in higher education.
When Preferences Disappear
Proposition 209 signals the end of gender and racial favoritism in California, but it may also be the beginning of affirmative action by other means.
Uneasy Preferences
What will become of our ideal of truly equal opportunity if black progress remains chronically dependent on programs of racial categories and quotas?
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.
Affirmative Action at Berkeley
We continue the debate on affirmative action in response to Karen Paget’s “Diversity at Berkeley: Demogoguery or Demography” (TAP, Spring 1992) and Paul Starr’s “Civil Reconstruction: What to Do Without Affirmative Action” (TAP, Winter 1992) ADMISSIONS OMISSIONS BY LEWIS R. JONES T he University of California at Berkeley is one of the most selective large…
The Diversity Defense
A pluralist, diverse society doesn’t depend on racial quotas at elite institutions. To pretend otherwise abuses the idea of merit and relies on tortured social science.
State of the Debate: Quayle Hunting
Dan and Marilyn Quayle send–uh, try to send–a message on family values.
State of the Debate: Indelible Colors
A book by two political theorists argues that new, cultural definitions of race can be as insidious as the old, biological ones.
State of the Debate: Who’s Afraid of Michael Jordan?
There’s no denying that blacks dominate basketball and other professional sports. But have whites rationalized black physical prowess only by equating it with mental deficiency?
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.
Below the Beltway: Activist Trouble
Washington, D.C. I n the last year, Greenpeace and Citizen Action, two important national left-of-center organizations, have fallen on hard times. This summer, Greenpeace USA closed down all of its field offices, eliminated its canvassing operation, and slashed its staff from 400 to 65. Several of Citizen Action’s state affiliates have either disbanded or severed…
Shoot the Messenger
T he Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) is probably one of the least known victims of federal downsizing, but the effect of its elimination at the end of September 1996 was significant. Without the ACIR, local, state, and federal officials have less contact with each other, and there is a shortage of data about…
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.
Below the Beltway: The Irresponsible Elites
Washington, D.C., March 5, 1998 A s I write, the Monica Lewinsky affair-or perhaps episode is a better term-is far from resolved, but it is possible to draw certain conclusions about the role of the press. The most important is that the barrier separating the elite media from the print and television tabloids-the Washington Post…
State of the Debate: The Rise and Fall of Racialized Liberalism
Liberalism took a fateful turn in the 1960s by redefining reform in racial terms. Two new books on urban politics sometimes overstate their case against recent liberal policies, but they help clarify what went wrong.
Global Warming and the Big Shill
Because Vice President Al Gore is an ardent environmentalist, the Clinton White House has placed a high priority on getting an international global warming treaty. One member of the National Security Council is assigned to oversee the treaty that the United States and other industrialized nations agreed to in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997. And…
Deregulation Run Riot
After winning control of Congress in November 1994, the Republican leadership, working closely with business lobbyists and policy groups, launched an ambitious effort to roll back a century of reform legislation-from the food and drug laws of the Progressive Era to the New Deal’s Social Security Act to the workplace and environmental regulation of the…
Paralysis by Analysis: How Conservatives Plan to Kill Popular Regulation
Simply revoking laws that protect clean water, air, or food wouldn’t be popular, so Congress is passing procedural changes that sound neutral but bias the outcome in favor of corporate interests.
The Community Is Their Textbook: Maryland’s Experiment with Mandatory Service for Students
At its best, service learning enriches both students and their communities. But creating good programs isn’t easy.
Backfire on Campus
In their efforts to enforce multiculturalism, university administrators have unwittingly created new breeding grounds for conservative rebellion.
Should Journalists Do Community Service?
T he Philadelphia Inquirer should not have been embarrassed last May when the Wall Street Journal uncovered a scandal in a Philadelphia charity. Even Pulitzer magnets like the Inky sometimes miss big stories right under their noses. But this was no ordinary case of being scooped by out-of-town competition. The foundation that the Journal exposed…
Do Ask, Do Tell: Freak Talk on TV
Daytime television has become a “freak show,” but it’s also an opportunity (and not an entirely bad one) for gays and others with nonconforming lives to talk directly with the public.
Cosmopolitics
G eorge Washington famously disdained faction. In his farewell address, he warned the nation against the “baneful effects of the spirit of party.” This dislike for partisanship may be the only connection between Washington and his namesake, the magazine George. Editor John F. Kennedy, Jr. describes George as post-partisan, an effort to engage more people…
Toxic Cash: How Lobbyists Poisoned the EPA
Despite some eleventh-hour heroics by environmentalists, the Republican Congress has been offering lots of goodies to industry polluters — thanks largely to the corporate lobbyists who wrote much of the legislation.
Orwell’s Poor and Ours
Orwell depicted the poor unsentimentally, but with compassion and economic realism. Today’s conservative critics, who blame poverty on an absence of values, do neither.
The Ultimate Self-Referral: Health Care Reform, AMA-Style
Why did the American Medical Association support Newt Gingrich’s proposals on Medicare? Not for the reasons the media suggested.
Animal House Meets Church Lady
One moment it’s frat-boy humor; the next, it’s the old verities. Limbaugh, P.J. O’Rourke, and other comedians of the right love to have it both ways.
How the West Is Won: Astroturf Lobbying and the “Wise Use” Movement
How corporate developers have used grassroots organizing to disguise their attack on environmental protection — and how activists in one state stopped them.
We’ll Talk About That: Can Liberals Do Radio?
Liberals do movies, rock and roll, talk TV, even local talk radio. So why no liberal Rush?
Storylines: Get Me Rewrite
A very long time ago, when I was the manager of a listener-supported radio station, we were planning our annual on-air fundraising drive. “The only thing we have to sell,” one staffer said earnestly, “is our integrity.” A wise guy replied, “What do you think we can get for it?” Thanks to the poisonous blend…
Connecting with E.M. Forster
A futuristic fantasy from early in this century offers us a hellish version of life on the Internet.
“F” Is for Fizzle: The Faltering School Privatization Movement
Entrepreneurs promised they could rescue public schools and turn a profit too. Reality intruded.
Welfare Reform as I Knew It: When Bad Things Happen to Good Policies
“I’ll look forward to reading your book on why it failed this time,” Senator Moynihan told me on my first visit as cochair of the Clinton working group on welfare reform. Herewith, the first installment.
Was Welfare Reform Worthwhile?
T here is no question that David Ellwood, the Clinton administration’s chief welfare intellectual, has been on a rough ride. But the political lessons he draws are less than useful (see “Welfare Reform As I Knew It,” May-June 1996). To discuss lessons, we need some agreement about what happened. Ellwood thinks more has been accomplished…
Controversy: Charters and Choice
Joe Nathan Rosa Parks-yes, that Rosa Parks-recently applied to open a charter school in Detroit. That’s one of many things omitted in Richard Rothstein’s critique of the charter public school movement [“Charter Conundrum,” TAP, July-August 1998]. As a researcher, a former teacher in inner-city public schools, and a former PTA president whose three children attend…
Starting Small, Thinking Big
Society needs to help the very young, long before formal schooling begins, or the battle for the next generation will be lost.
The Other Edmund Wilson
Today there is no shortage of writing about literature or of literature about writing. But there used to be writing that was about both.
Conceding Success
Several recent studies show that two major undertakings of progressive government — environmental regulation and public education — have been far more successful than widely believed.
Welfare as We Might Know It
Why I resigned in protest over President Clinton’s signing of welfare reform–and what can still be done to repair it.
The Shaming Sham
Conservatives, and even a few liberals, insist that moral shaming isn’t as bad as government censorship. Don’t believe them, warns a conservative writer.
Bedside Manna
Marcus Welby was a myth; doctors have always cared about money. But the for-profit managed care industry makes no pretense: It’s offering physicians money to make decisions that are plainly not in the interests of patients.
A Global Warning
Less developed countries are spewing dangerous emissions that will lead to global warming. But it will take money to change that–money that the wealthier, more developed nations are reluctant to spend.
The Hidden Paradox of Welfare Reform
If former welfare beneficiaries can get jobs, they’ll be better off, right? Not necessarily. Because their costs will be higher, particularly for child care and health care, they may earn more yet do worse.
Storylines: Scandals for Dummies
O n the first Sunday in March, the Washington Post published an investigative piece highlighting Vice President Al Gore’s central role in the Democratic Party fundraising operation. The article, by Bob Woodward, chronicled how Gore called donors one by one, hitting them up for money in a manner so direct even one veteran fundraiser called…
Lingo Jingo
The story told by the English-only movement is nonsense from beginning to end. No language was ever less in need of official protection.
How She Got a Job
Everyone who participates in this innovative welfare-to-work program finds steady employment. Too bad it’s precisely the kind of effort that the new federal welfare law discourages.
The Martian Plan
N ewt Gingrich thinks Americans need a new frontier to explore. He also believes in paying bounties to promote public objectives. Hence the proposal prepared at his invitation by space entrepreneur Robert Zubrin for a federal bounty of $20 billion payable to the first private organization that puts someone on Mars and brings that man…
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.
Choice Options
Conservatives ask, “Are you for or against school choice?” The question should be, “What kind of choice are you for?” Americans’ historical experience can help answer that question.
The Prosecutorial State
Ken Starr is the least of it.
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.
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.
How Low Can You Go? Made of Sterner Stuff
MADE OF STERNER STUFF The Lewinsky investigation has put me to reflecting about the many opportunities for rectitude that were missed in our past. Americans have now been told, all too late, about the illicit sexual behavior of presidents from Thomas Jefferson to JFK. Just think of how much better informed and more righteous the…
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
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.
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.
State of the Debate: The Chicago Acid Bath
A skeptical inquiry into the work of Richard Epstein and Richard Posner.
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.
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.
How Low Can You Go?
PASS THE MALICE Five mistakes in a single sentence must be some kind of recordfor America’s greatest newspaper. On August 17, in an articleabout the new White House roles of Sidney Blumenthal and PaulBegala (“Clinton Looks for Inspiration From the Left”),the New York Times quoted the New Republic as saying about Blumenthal, “A beat is…
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.
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.
Care and Trembling
As provision of care for the sick and the elderly moves from the domestic sphere to the public realm and the market, caregivers often find themselves in the role of bedside bureaucrats.
Rush from Judgment
We used to expect reporters and editors to place events in their proper context. Post-O.J., post-Diana, and soon (we hope) post-Monica, perhaps it’s time to ask: What happened to news judgment?
Recasting the Stones
In our multicultural society, traditional monuments may no longer possess the unifying power they once did. Some projects by contemporary artists suggest a way around this conundrum.
The Power Elite Now
Power in America today looks far different from the picture that C. Wright Mills painted nearly half a century ago.
If Wishing Only Made it So
Two recent movies, Patch Adams and Life Is Beautiful, each claim to reveal the relation between fantasy and politics. One succeeds magnificently; the other is a fraud.
End of the Second Chance?
Where the get-tough movement in education gets it wrong.
Can Medicare Survive Its Saviors?
Turning Medicare into a voucher program would make it a dwindling basis of security in old age.
The Pollution Dividend
The sky isn’t falling. But it is filling—and emission rights are worth millions. Will we give those rights away, or use them to create a new source of public wealth?
The Trouble With Teletubbies
Jerry Falwell was right: the Teletubbies are insidious, but not because they’re insinuating dubious ideas into the minds of one-year olds. The program is the culmination of PBS’s long drift toward commercialization.
Can TV Improve Us?
We’ve heard it for years: television is bad for us. Maybe instead of fighting against it, we should be trying to make it better. Some public health groups have had surprising success in using television for positive ends.
Art: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Account Executive
Economic impact studies can demonstrate a return on public investments in the arts. This is a handy tool for arts advocates, but also a dangerous one that reduces art to commercial calculus.
Bad Apples
Juliet Ellery was a terrible teacher. But she couldn’t be fired. How can we get rid of bad teachers without hurting unions?
Behind the Numbers: The Treadmill Economy
Even before the swooning of the Dow, the current economic expansion was less robust than it appeared. Is this a new economy? Or just people working harder to stay in place?
Essay: Look at Me! Leave Me Alone!
Which is stronger, the craving for publicity or the desire for privacy? The Truman Show demonstrates how tightly married these impulses are.
Rape of the Appalachians
Strip mining is carving up broad swaths of West Virginia’s hillsides and valleys. Are we willing to pay higher energy prices to stop it?
Sovereign Myopia
American values of internationalism, the rule of law, and human rights are finally being enshrined in a permanent world court. So why is the United States leading the charge against it?
How Low Can You Go?
YOUR NAME HERE As public broadcasting has long shown, there is a thin line between philanthropy and advertising that is well on its way to being completely erased. Consider the recent proliferation of corporate logos on endowed professorships, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Stanford has a Yahoo! chair of information systems technology;…
America’s Next Achievement Test
Despite significant improvement in recent decades, blacks still score consistently lower than whites on tests of academic performance. But recent studies show that the gap is not genetic in origin and suggest how it can be closed.
The Myth of the Supermayor
A new breed of supermayor is supposed to be revitalizing the nation’s cities. So let’s visit the city and mayor often held up these days as a model for America.
Storylines: Tough Chat
A few years ago, people who thought liberals were too squeamish in public debate wondered how they could make it in the aggressive and strident forum of talk radio. [See Tom DeVries, “We’ll Talk About That: Can Liberals Do Radio?” TAP, March-April 1996.] Today the same question has come up about another rough-and-tumble medium: political…
Le Sueur-Henderson: Minnesota New Country School
I n 1993, an innovative group of parents and teachers received permission to create the Minnesota New Country School. Despite its early success, the school has demonstrated how even the most successful charter schools are unlikely to improve a state’s educational system. Opened in 1994, the school is located in the small town of Le…
Essay: Age of Irony
Taking irony seriously may seem like missing the point. Today’s ironic sensibility is never serious. But the old masters of irony had serious fun cutting through cant and pretension.
Sacramento: Bowling Green Elementary
T he schools in the southern section of Sacramento City are generally among the district’s worst. The neighborhood is one of the city’s poorest and many of its students come from a burgeoning immigrant population that often does not speak English at home. But something surprising is happening at Bowling Green Elementary, the district’s only…
Boston: Renaissance Charter School
Boston’s Renaissance Charter School initially foundered when it apparently attempted to discourage the enrollment of disabled children (although the school’s Edison Project sponsor has always insisted that these efforts violated its policies). This year Renaissance reformed its special education program in an attempt to bring it more in line with Edison’s own stated ideals and…
Charter Conundrum
In exchange for autonomy from school districts, charter schools promise to achieve measurable progress in children’s performance. But the movement is based on a dubious premise.
How Low Can You Go? Viagravated Assault
VIAGRAVATED ASSAULT Early demand for Viagra, the new potency pill from Pfizer, has been so enormous that it has caused worries about an unexpected rise in health care expenses. Newspapers have reported the weekly sales of Viagra the way they earlier reported the gross for Titanic. In April one urologist was quoted by the Washington…
The Strange Disappearance of Civic America
A more extended version of this article, complete with references, appears in the Winter 1995 issue of PS, a publication of the American Political Science Association. This work, originally delivered as the inaugural Ithiel de Sola Pool Lecture, builds on Putnam’s earlier articles, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy (January 1995) and…
Test the Limit
I t has been amusing to watch the natural rate of unemployment come down. Two years ago, the community of respectable economists held-though with exceptions including Robert Eisner of Northwestern, Ray Fair at Yale, Harvard’s James Medoff, and myself-that 6 percent unemployment was as low as the economy could go without triggering inflation. This meant,…
Old Party, New Energy
I n the mid-1970s, the founding fathers of the New Right almost walked away from the Republican Party. Sickened by Watergate and angry at what they perceived as the Republican Party’s moderation, Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, and Paul Weyrich strove to bring together the disparate conservative forces spawned by Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign into…
Party Decline
A lthough the Republic’s Founders dreaded the divisiveness of “faction,” political parties have proved essential to the promise of American democracy. Parties bridge the structural bias against government activism in the constitutional separation of powers and allow ordinary citizens who lack economic influence to aggregate political power. Hence, a strong party system is more crucial…
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
Couch-Potato Democracy?
Postcript to The Choice In Kosovo
When I wrote “The Choice In Kosovo” in early May, the failure of the United States and NATO to make a credible threat of a ground invasion seemed likely to result in a diplomatic settlement that fell far short of the legitimate aims of the war. A month later, these concerns have only partially been…
Controversy: The Black-White Test Score Gap
Claude M. Steele Some people who would like very much to right racial inequality will not like the idea, proposed by Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, that reducing the black-white test score gap could be a prime target of public policy. African Americans have been hammered by this test score gap for decades. Focusing on…
Hoop Schemes?
A White House congratulatory ceremony for a championship sports team is usually just a big, friendly photo opportunity, filled with the platitudes and gift exchanges typical of such an apolitical celebration. But in 1991, when the National Basketball Association (NBA) champion Chicago Bulls paid a visit to George Bush, Craig Hodges, then a backup guard…
Special Report: The Crime Debate
I n places as diverse as Anchorage and El Paso, Nassau County and New Orleans, get-tough prosecutors are promising to ban plea bargaining. Too many criminals get off easy, they insist; take away plea bargains, and more will get the punishments they deserve. But these officials may want to consider what happened in the Bronx…
Follow Through
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An Emerging Democratic Majority
The 1994 election devastated the self-confidence of the Democratic Party, and 1996 only partially restored it. After narrowly escaping the “Republican revolution,” many Democrats have lowered their expectations and become resigned to the prospect of center-right government. And now President Clinton’s budget and tax deal with the Republicans in Congress has left his own party without…
The Limits of Markets
The claim that the freest market produces the best economic and social outcome is the centerpiece of the conservative political resurgence. But without government intervention, the market can destroy a lot of things–including itself.
Constitutional Amendmentitis
The rash of amendments being proposed by Republicans has profound — and dangerous — implications for our system of government.
Health Reform, Meet Tax Reform
The current tax treatment of health benefits makes no sense. A feasible strategy for health reform should now put tax reform at its center. But which kind?
Sex, Lies, and The Scarlet Letter
O nce when I was about nine, I wandered into my aunt’s kitchen during Thanksgiving to find all the grown-up women whispering, hugging, and crying. When they explained to me what was going on (Auntie Cookie had just found out she was going to have another baby and they were crying from happiness), they confirmed…
Perrier in the Newsroom
There was a day not far distant, you know, just before World War II, when nearly all of us news people, although perhaps white collar by profession, earned blue-collar salaries. We were part of the “common people.” We suffered the same budgetary restraints, the same bureaucratic indignities, waited in the same lines, suffered the same…
State of the Debate: The Sale of a Generation
Generation X is a hot marketing concept, used as a hook to sell everything from condoms to cars. Can right-wingers use it to sell their ideas?
Who Owns the Future?
They claim to be riding a wave of historical change. The wave is global in its reach and unstoppable in its force. Those who get in the way are representatives of an old, obsolete order; they may put up a fight, but they will be beaten in the inevitable transformation. So Newt Gingrich and other…
A New Conversation: How to Rebuild the Democratic Party
Let’s face it: The Democratic Party got into some bad relationships. It doesn’t need a new message so much as a whole new conversation with the American people.
Clinton’s Not-So-Good Deeds
Richard Rothstein may be right that Clinton is the best liberals can hope for in our present institutional environment (“Friends of Bill?” TAP, Winter 1995, Number 20), but many who have fallen away from Clinton feel that he failed to test the potential of liberalism and populism, and in so doing contributed decisively to the…
Liberalism’s Third Crisis
This isn’t the first time liberals have faced reverses and needed to reframe their ideas.
Hidden Kingdom: Disney’s Political Blueprint
Walt Disney dubbed one of his attractions the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), but the name might better describe his design for private government.
Abandoned Surgery: Business and the Failure of Health Reform
Business once seemed a potential ally in national health reform. Then it turned around and became instrumental in reform’s defeat. The inside story of what happened and why.
The Contract and the Consumer
The conservatives haven’t made “tort reform” a crusade to stop a flood of products liability litigation. There is no such flood. This is a straight payoff to their benefactors.
Gingrich’s Time Bomb: The Consequences of the Contract
Did anyone read the fine print? The Contract with America has been devilishly constructed with provisions that will set off a fiscal — and social — explosion years from now.
Our NAIRU Limit: The Governing Myth of Economic Policy
It’s now a familiar story: The Fed raises interest rates to slow the economy. But new research suggests that we are needlessly sacrificing prosperity on the altar of false economic assumptions.
Behind the Numbers: Class Dismissed?
The Democrats have hinged their political strategy upon the empirically shaky notion that most Americans consider themselves middle class. The consequences are not just rhetorical.
What Happened to Health Care Reform?
Republicans killed it. The White House strategy misfired. Reformers couldn’t unite. The center failed. And the moment was lost.
Do Poor Women Have a Right to Bear Children?
The current movement to reform welfare implies an uncomfortable thought: Perhaps poor women don’t have the right to bear children. Are we really prepared to say that?
The New School Wars: How Outcome-Based Education Blew Up
It seemed like a conservative idea; then progressive educators got hold of it. Now a firestorm has erupted that could jeopardize the effort to raise national curriculum standards.
The Inequality Express
While the trend toward greater inequality is no longer in doubt, recent work in the social sciences suggests a number of possible explanations. We can now begin to sort them out.
Cracking Open the IQ Box
The Bell Curve has given genetic determinism new currency, but the science on which it rests is even less persuasive today than it was a century ago.
Up From 1994
S ince Franklin Roosevelt, the central liberal credo has been the use of government to benefit ordinary people. That premise is now battered–fiscally, politically, ideologically. In 1994, swing voters rejected both the concept and the party of government. The 1994 midterm election is not yet the epochal realignment that prefigures a new governing coalition and…
Friends of Bill? Why Liberals Should Let Up on Clinton
In Clinton’s first two years, myopic liberals complained about his compromises and disparaged his accomplishments. Now there will be fewer accomplishments and bigger compromises. Insisting on purity could only make things worse.
Who Killed Campaign Finance Reform? (and How To Revive It)
On October 17, The American Prospect cosponsored a conference on campaign finance reform at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Only weeks earlier, reform legislation had died in Congress. Participants in the conference included representatives of public interest organizations and both Democrats and Republicans; the conference received financial support from the Arca, Schumann, and Joyce Foundations,…
Bank Failure: The Financial Marginalization of the Poor
In poor areas across the country, banks have been replaced with check-cashers and pawn shops. While both liberals and conservatives extol the virtues of savings, the recent trend encourages just the opposite.
Incredible News
The rise of infotainment and tabloid TV news reflects popular acceptance of the summons to turn news into play — which people are willing to do when they have given up on public life.
Diary of the American Nightmare
T he Book of Revelations does not say whether the apocalypse will be televised. But if it is, WSVN in Miami will not have to interrupt its regular programming. It’s July 18 — the day of a visit by President Clinton to Miami — and WSVN, the nation’s most notorious tabloid station, is leading its…
How Money Votes: An Oklahoma Story
Bill Brewster, junior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, works hard on behalf of the money that elected him. Unfortunately, he is emblematic of a system that skews politics away from the people.
Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?
Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.
The People Vs. the Parties
Could either party nominate a full-menu libertarian or populist? Our national political logjam explains why artifice has become endemic.
The Disengaged
David Hackett Fischer’s new book, Paul Revere’s Ride, is a cautionary tale for Democrats who expect their heroes to produce results overnight. The story of Paul Revere has come down to us as a tale of individual daring. In our national memory, he rides through the night single-handedly spreading the alarm about the redcoats to…
Reviving Community Development
Critics have called for abandoning the struggle for community development just as some of the most promising initiatives are being launched.
What I Really Say about Balancing the Budget
However you look at it, America is failing to prepare for its economic future. Each decade our savings performance worsens, and each decade so do our prospects for higher living standards. During the 1960s, U.S. net national savings averaged 8.1 percent of GDP. During the 1980s, that rate fell by half (to 3.9 percent). Thus…
Voting Rites: Why We Need a New Concept of Citizenship
In the primal act of citizenship, we face the ballot alone, face to face with our own ignorance.
Is The American Economic Model the Answer?
The financial elites that favor the “American” model — deregulation, weak unions, and a minimalist welfare state — ask the wrong question: how to compete against countries with lower wages and living standards.
Whose Confirmation Mess?
Who really politicized the Supreme Court? All it took to end the bloody confirmation battles were a few middle-of-the-road nominees.
The Undertow
As the 1990s began, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. argued that America was due for a new era of affirmative government in keeping with the cycle of liberal and conservative periods that runs through our history. Uncannily, Bill Clinton’s election came right on schedule, roughly 90 years after Theodore Roosevelt became president, 60 years after Franklin Roosevelt,…
Can We Keep Guns away from Kids?
The Brady Bill was a modest beginning. But if we want to stop youth violence, we need to crack down on the black markets for firearms.
Divided Families, Whole Children
Listening to the children of divorce can help us understand how to mend the damage of marital discord and family breakup.
The False Messiah: Pete Peterson’s Revelations Are Not Gospel
Virtually without challenge, Pete Peterson claims to be a champion of the middle class. But his proposals would actually cut taxes for the rich and benefits for middle-income people.
The New Crusade for the Old Family
A new wave of family restorationists says that the evidence on families is in and that the remedies are clear. Their case doesn’t hold up.
Self-Fulfilling Prophets: Inflated Zeal at the Federal Reserve
Greenspan’s rate increases needlessly threaten to abort the recovery. A more accountable central bank is long overdue.
The Consequences of Single Motherhood
Children of single-parent families suffer measurable harm. But the problems of the family are far more complex than the popular debate often suggests.
Instant Replay: Three Strikes Was the Right Call
Instant Replay Three Strikes Was the Right Call John J. DiIulio, Jr. Jerome H. Skolnick’s essay on crime policy (“Wild Pitch: `Three Strikes, You’re Out’ And Other Bad Calls on Crime,” Spring 1994), omitted some important facts and ignored several valid arguments. Echoing the anti-incarceration consensus within criminology, Skolnick asserts that life without parole for…
Seismic Stimulus: The California Quake’s Creative Destruction
The earth literally had to move to jolt Congress into passing a stiumulus package — and to lift California out of recession.
The New Dialectic
Modern economic life crosses national boundaries to form a web of intricate association that retards aggressive and regressive nationalism. Trade, investment, enterprise, technology, communications, and travel are today relentlessly transnational. Yet this same globalism undermines the capacity of the nation-state to stabilize its economy. From this paradox comes the first of the dialectics of our…
The Skills Myth
Almost everyone seems to believe that workers are losing income because they lack the proper skills. But there’s a better explanation: they’ve lost bargaining power.
Orphans of Separatism: The Painful Politics of Transracial Adoption
Liberals’ misguided efforts to respect race may harm children — and deepen racial intolerance.
Talent and the Winner-Take-All Society
Rising inequality reflects the growing importance of winner-take-all markets.
Seductions of Sim: Policy as a Simulation Game
For those who always thought public policy was a game anyone could play, it finally is. But beware of what the game assumes.
What’s Trust Got to Do With It?
Everything. Cynicism is crippling our capacity to deal with public problems.
Pork and the Public Interest
How conservatives read their own cynicism into public life.
Happy Returns: How the Working Poor Got Tax Relief
Left and right agree on one way to spell relief: EITC. But how much relief?
Making the Poor Count
The poverty line came from a woman with a passion and a memory.
The Global Hiring Hall: Why We Need Worldwide Labor Standards
Years ago we decided to banish child labor within our borders. Will such standards now be extended to the global economy — or abandoned entirely?
The Predators’ Accomplice: How High Theory Abetted Speculative Excess
The prosecutor builds a case against academic apologists for the casino economy.
Imagesbusters, the Sequel
Can’t we fight televised mayhem and the real thing too?
Secret Justice: When National Security Trumps Citizen Rights
A series of recent court decisions upholds star-chamber proceedings.
Health Care: Reformers’ Rounds
Organizing Reform James A. Morone In the high drama of winning health reform, a crucial matter is being pushed aside–who is going to make the system work? The fate of health reform turns on effective, sensible administration. Ignoring the issue now will produce chaos when the reforms are implemented. The president’s Health Security Plan gives…
Only Connect
The New York Times Book (sic) Review for March 6, 1994 ran a feature piece reviewing a CD-ROM. “Microsoft Art Gallery,” an interactive digitized catalog of Britain’s National Gallery collection, won a rave. Just point and click, and you can pull up paintings by artist, period, or genre; you can also get spoken critical commentaries…
Spheres of Affluence
The fantasy of free trade still commands broad allegiance despite mounting evidence that it’s not optimal for either economic growth or national interest.
The Evasion of Politics
Jeff Faux’s “The Myth of the New Democrats” (TAP, Fall 1993) is illuminating–but in unintentional ways. It highlights the unresolved tension in The American Prospect’s editorial persona: though dedicated to rethinking old liberal assumptions, the magazine often shies from conclusions that defy liberal orthodoxy. TAP thus oscillates between earnest stabs at policy innovation and purse-lipped…
Friend or Faux?
Jeff Faux’s “The Myth of the New Democrats” (TAP, Fall 1993) is illuminating–but in unintentional ways. It highlights the unresolved tension in The American Prospect’s editorial persona: though dedicated to rethinking old liberal assumptions, the magazine often shies from conclusions that defy liberal orthodoxy. TAP thus oscillates between earnest stabs at policy innovation and purse-lipped…
Citizen Keynes
Skidelsky’s dazzling biography gets Keynes the man just right, and his economics somewhat wrong.
Altered States
The globalized economy disarms the nation-state. We need a blend of familiar Keynesian insights and new institutions.
Voters in the Crosshairs
New technologies were supposed to enable campaigns to reach more voters. Instead, they ended up fragmenting and alienating much of the electorate.
Ad Missions
Insurance companies aren’t just selling policies. They’re selling ideology too.
Depressing Our Way to Recovery
Deficit obsession is a sure recipe for sluggish growth.
Keynes, Einstein, and Scientific Revolution
Economics follows the wrong model of physics. Keynes appreciated that jobs, savings, and growth are all relative.
Back by Popular Demand
With mass unemployment again afflicting the world, it’s time to rediscover Keynes — the real Keynes.
The Joys of Recession
Economics as a subject matter and, in its more than slightly fragile way, as a science, has two notable features. There is a plausible characteristic of the economy, well supported by both analysis and experience, that gets relatively little mention. And there is a related aspect of the economic system that is wholly proscribed in…
Government Lite
Two cheers for the Gore Report. The vice president is good on repairing the means, oddly silent on the ends.
System Crash
Supposedly, a knowledge economy produces competitiveness and secure jobs. IBM employees in upstate New York learned otherwise.
Can Markets Govern?
Let’s have responsive government, but in the end a citizen cannot be reduced to a consumer.
Back to the Future
During the postwar boom, it seemed that mass unemployment had been cured forever. A mixed economy–based on activist government, deficit spending, public investment, strong trade-unionism, a welfare state, and a warfare state–kept the industrial West on a high-growth path. Living standards rose steadily. Satisfied voters returned to office politicians who believed in this model. Not…
Delivering Health Reform
Can the Clintons find the votes for health care reform without wrecking the logic of universal coverage, cost-control, and managed competition?
Imagebusters
Revulsion against television violence offers cheap indignation. Unfortunately, imagebusting does little about the deeper sources of our violent society.
Hispanic USA
We are witnessing the Hispanization of the United States, not the Americanization of Hispanics.
Separatist But Equal?
Detroit’s all-black academies are neither as bad as the critics claim nor as uplifting as their defenders insist. Considering the alternatives, they are worth a try.
The Gender Gap Mystique
Women are newly influential in politics, but those who court the gender gap on the cheap will not succeed. Women’s interests, issues, and voting preferences are every bit as complex as men’s — and demand equal respect.
Lani Guinier’s Constitution
Guinier’s critics were only half right. She is a political radical–but no quota queen. As a constitutionalist, she was neither separatist nor undemocratic. She would have gotten along nicely with James Madison.
The Left’s Obsessive Opposition
My liberal friends are being too hard on Bill Clinton. His mandate and congressional majority are wafer thin, and he’s doing well with what he has. Would you rather have George Bush?
The Myth of the New Democrat
There isn’t much new or Democratic about the New Democrats. They preach the same brand of conservative politics that has run this country into the ground.
The New Immigration and the Old Civil Rights
The new immigration infuses America with new minority groups. This spells trouble for the old strategies of black uplift. New coalitions will require new concepts of disadvantage, affirmative action, and desert.
Going South
NAFTA defenders say Mexico can’t lure high-wage jobs away, but they are already heading across the border — and the treaty will only make matters worse.
The Coming Budget Battle
T he passage of President Clinton’s budget, marked by its one-half trillion in deficit reduction, is already restoring respect for the administration. Clinton will be tempted to move on to other issues. The urgent need to make good on health care reform and the generally sour nature of budget discussions will add to this impulse.…
Blood Knots
Our society and our laws have an outrageous biological bias. The author’s own odyssey suggests why adoption is a much-scorned but often superior alternative to reproductive heroics.
Money Talks, Reform Walks
Last time around, campaign finance reform failed because it lacked public financing. Twenty years later, Congress seems determined to make the same mistake.
Forecasting Follies
Using models to predict presidential elections can be fun. Too bad they don’t work.
Market, State, and Dystopia
A dystopia is a utopia in reverse. The post-1980 era is likely to be remembered as a free market dystopia–a headlong compulsion to throw away the mixed economy that was built on the ruins of depression and world war in favor of a marketized society. This compulsion has been ground into the lenses of the…
Ending Welfare Reform as We Know It
Liberals who embrace welfare reform have conceded too much of the argument to the right. The main problem is not lazy, shiftless welfare mothers; it’s the collapse of the lower middle-class economy.
Affirmative Action and the Rhetoric of Reaction
Beyond “quota queens.”
Imprisoners’ Dilemma
Low-level drug dealers will keep appearing, no matter how many jails we build.
The Rhetoric of Reform
How to thwart reactionary rhetoric.
Can Clinton Govern?
Can Clinton Govern?: Richard E. Neustadt On the Shoals, Nearing the Rocks: Walter Dean Burnham Two Views from Pennsylvania Ave.: Walter F. Mondale The 1994 Solution: James MacGregor Burns In Search of a Governing Party: Richard M. Valelly Give the Man a Chance: Jim Wright CAN CLINTON GOVERN? R ichard E. N eustadt T he…
Beyond McPopulism
Can Clinton Put People First?
Models of Labor Law Reform
A guide for the perplexed.
But Where Are the Jobs?
Here’s one more course-correction for Clinton. Otherwise, look for more low-wage jobs.
The Feeble Strength of One
Suing the boss seems smart, but the company has home-court advantage.
Do Europeans Do It Better?
We can learn a lot from European labor policy, but beware naive Sweden-envy.
Solidaritas at Harvard
Meet the Harvard of the labor movement, a model of the new unionism.
Employee Voice in Competitive Markets
The new global economy demands new models of worker regulation.
Up Against the Wall Street Journal
O n March 11, 1993, the Wall Street Journal published a long editorial-page article called “The Industrial Policy Hoax.” It was by Karl Zinsmeister, a scholar associated with the American Enterprise Institute who in the past had written mainly about U.S. social policy. The article, which was a summary version of a much longer essay…
The House That Crack Built: The Inmates of Clark County Jail
T here’s a lot of talk about Crack these days but not much about the house that Crack lives in. So we the inmates of the Clark County Jail will take you on a tour of the Crack House himself. So come on up here on the porch of this old house, it sure ain’t…
The Other Drug War
Universal health care reform demands that we finally control skyrocketing drug prices.
A Constitutional Litmus Test
Justice may be blind, but in appointing justices Clinton needs to be far-sighted.
The Political Court
After a decade of court-packing, now is no time to pretend the courts are apolitical.
Detoxifying the Debate
A s an art form, caricature is fun. The caricature of ideas, however, does not have the same appeal. And when the caricaturists seek to arouse fears and anxieties by distorting unfamiliar ideas into misshapen and threatening images of insidious evil and betrayal, they do public debate and even their own case a great disservice.…
When Patients Go To Market: The Workings of Managed Competition
A fter a generation of deadlock, there is finally a broad consensus that the health system is broken, and a rare political opportunity to fix it. The present system manages to be simultaneously inflationalry, arbitrary, cumbersome for providers, and unreliable for consumers. But despite the opportunity for reform, we are on the verge of a…
Mangled Competition
Despite a once-in-a-generation opportunity, the Clintons are poised to slam the door on single payer national health insurance and embrace a corporate welfare approach with the oxymoronic name: “Managed Competition.” Managed Competition would: Use tax penalties to push all but the wealthy into stripped down, basic group health plans. Deprive most patients of the right…
The Myth of Public School Failure
Public schools are actually performing remarkably well. What they need is not radical reform but more support.
Privatization in Eastern Europe: The Tunnel at the End of the Light
I n the former Soviet empire, the collapse of Communism created an opportunity for the victims of one failed utopian ideology to find another. The evaporating Soviet system left an ideological vacuum that was quickly filled as legions of Western advisers arrived to help translate the goals of political democracy and a market economy into…
What Works: Applying What We Already Know About Successful Social Policy
Three decades of anti-poverty policy have shed much light on the best strategies for helping families.
Damaged Goods: Before Reinventing Government, Clinton Needs to Repair It
T he debris of Reaganism is scattered across Bill Clinton’s domestic agenda: Environmentalism may be slow to take hold at the Interior Department because friends of industry have “burrowed in” to the bureaucracy. Sound industrial policy will call for better information than the Commerce Department and Federal Trade Commission have to offer. Crafting welfare reform…
Beyond Shock Therapy: Why Eastern Europe’s Recovery Starts in Washington
Laissez faire was planned. –Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation,1944 T he collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe demonstrated the failure of a command economy. The subsequent crash in output and employment induced by “shock therapy” has suggested the limits of laissez faire. Rather than replace the excesses of communism with excesses of capitalism, it is…
The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life
If we want prosperity, we might begin by working to restore the fabric of community.
Crediting the Voters: A New Beginning for Campaign Finance
W hen Americans register to vote, they should be issued a credit card by a special public company– call it the Patriot card and color it red, white, and blue. This card will become the basis of campaign finance. Suppose each voter’s card were automatically credited with a $10 balance for the 1996 presidential election.…
Coming Unfringed: The Unraveling of Job-Based Entitlements
Health care, pensions, and other forms of social income should be rights of citizenship, not perks of increasingly unreliable jobs.
Can Economists Save Economics?
Economics is what economists do. –Jacob Viner T he trouble with Professor Viner’s delicate evasion is that economists no longer agree about what they do, or even whether it is all worth doing. Critics outside the profession long faulted economists for a host of sins: their deductive method, their formalism, their over-reliance on arcane algebra,…
Saving Disgrace? More on Savings
F red Block and Robert Heilbroner, in “The Myth of a Savings Shortage” (TAP, Spring 1992), want to persuade us that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is no scarcity of savings in the U.S. economy today. They say that the present national savings rate is as high as ever; that it plays no depressing…
Cities in the New Global Economy
A lthough it has been eerily absent from the Clinton administration’s otherwise ambitious economic program, an urban economic crisis persists in America. As the economy continues to globalize, it helps to think of the urban economic question as having two parts: Do large central-city economies have competitive functions that will enable them to prosper, or…
Who’s Bashing Tyson?
L aura D’Andrea Tyson’s appointment to chair the Council of Economic Advisers received savage treatment from some of her professional colleagues. According to Peter Passell of the New York Times, “jaws dropped” in academe at the announcement. Passell went on to describe Tyson as “trendy” and a “polemicist.” And the addition of Princeton’s Alan Blinder…
Saving Disgrace? More on Savings
F red Block and Robert Heilbroner, in “The Myth of a Savings Shortage” (TAP, Spring 1992), want to persuade us that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is no scarcity of savings in the U.S. economy today. They say that the present national savings rate is as high as ever; that it plays no depressing…
Liberals and Public Investment: Recovering a Lost Legacy
T he emerging debate over the efficacy of public investment– a debate the Clinton administration seems certain to accelerate– has a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with the history of the 1930s and 1940s. Among the staples of economic discourse then were warnings that the United States was suffering from what many called “economic maturity”…
Race, Liberalism, Affirmative Action (III)
We continue the debate on the future of affirmative action in response to Paul Starr’s “Civil Reconstruction: What to Do Without Affirmative Action,” TAP, No.9. Winter 1992. D iscussion of the candidacies of Pat Buchanan and David Duke, even of the Los Angeles riots, have faded. But they should remain troubling. They are part of…
Healthy Compromise: Universal Coverage and Managed Competition Under a Cap
A promising strategy emerges to break the impasse.
Kinder, Gentler Canada
America could use some northern exposure.
An Alliance at Risk: The Disability Movement and Health Care Reform
They should be on the same side.
The Great School Sell-Off
Vouchers would auction off our future.
Coalition or Collision? Medicare and Health Reform
Budget realities could divide old friends.
Continental Drift: NAFTA and Its Aftershocks
The trade problem is much bigger than the treaty.
The Politics of Repudiation 1992: Edging Toward Upheaval
Not a major realignment, but ominous rumblings.
A Collective Bargain: Negotiating Human Capitalism
A new deal for labor policy.
The Global Money Trap: Can Clinton Master the Markets?
If not, he will be their slave.
Stealing First: The Rehnquist Court Gags on Free Speech
Clinton’s appointees need to rescue the Bill of Rights.
Winning With Tax Reform: The Connecticut Story
I n October of 1991, 40,000 furious citizens massed in Hartford at the State Capitol, protesting Connecticut’s new income tax, cursing and spitting on Governor Lowell Weicker, and threatening legislators with political extinction. One month later, Democrats in New Jersey were routed by an irate electorate in retribution for the passage of changes in the…
Avoiding a Fiscal Dunkirk
A more progressive tax code is an essential part of any new economic plan.
Rebuilding the Nonmarket Economy
Some things are too important to be sold.
Whose Body Politic?
The boundaries between public and private are murkier than ever.
Talk of the Tube: How To Get Teledemocracy Right
If we are realistic and appropriately modest, television can enhance democratic deliberation.
Can We Put a Time Limit on Welfare?
Clinton’s proposal for a two-year limit on AFDC payments would be the most far-reaching welfare reform since 1935. But if the goal is to make welfare mothers self-sufficient, it won’t be cheap.
The Limits of Teledemocracy
Some uses of the electronic media could enrich politics. Most recent proposals, however, are video games at best and Bonapartism at worst.
Investing on the Frontier: How the U.S. Can Reclaim High-Tech Leadership
Why we need a civilian technology policy.
Passion, Memory, and Politics, 1992
F rom its founding nearly three years ago, The American Prospect has sought to help reconstruct a plausible and persuasive liberalism. This issue’s cluster of articles concerned with a public investment strategy for economic growth exemplifies that purpose: substantive, detailed thinking about how to solve the nation’s problems, rather than symbolic gestures. Yet, as this…
Conversion Then and Now
Turning swords into plowshares requires a plan.
Divided They Govern
Divided government isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
Memo on Presidential Transition
A presidential scholar’s still–timely confidential transition memo to candidate John Kennedy, dated September 15, 1960.
Conversion to Competitiveness: Making the Most of the National Labs
If they didn’t exist, we’d have to build them.
Accounting the Future
Why we need a capital budget.
Shopping for Innovation: Government as Smart Consumer
The way the government buys can push industry ahead.
The Pork Barrel Objection
It’s a problem, but there are ways to minimize it.
The Way We Won: America’s Economic Breakthrough During World War II
High growth needn’t require a war.
The Faster Track: Should We Build a High-Speed Rail System?
A solution to traffic jams breaks the investment jam.
Where Private Investment Fails
The key problem is our capital markets.
The Rich, the Right, and the Facts: Deconstructing the Income Distribution Debate
Deconstructing the Income Distribution Debate
The Moral Equivalent of War Production
Restoration of robust growth is the paramount challenge facing the nation, the most significant issue of the 1992 election, and the first task that will face a new administration. Indeed, all other important public questions are being held hostage to a sick economy that depresses aspiration, increases unemployment, de pletes revenue, and makes public remediation…
The Economic Stakes
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The Strong Case for Gun Control
While abhorring violence, Americans genuinely believe that gun control laws cannot reduce violent crime because criminals will not give up their guns. But some new research shows that gun control, properly designed, can be effective as well as consti
Life After Tight Money
The conservative experiment with tight money has failed. Popular monetary prescriptions—low interest rates and a more accountable Federal Reserve—are steps in the right direction. But they must go hand in hand with structural reforms to get the econo
Race, Liberalism, and Affirmative Action (II)
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The Deadly Marathon
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Is the Strike Dead?
The workers who lost the 1892 Homestead Strike would find the situation today all too familiar: employers using strike replacements to destroy labor’s most potent weapon.
Hidden Complications: Why Health Care Competition Needs Regulation
The market cure for health care’s maladies would be no simple matter. In fact, the great irony of market reform is that it requires skill in regulation. Yet market reformers tend to deny the competence of government, undermining the very confidence t
Race, Liberalism, and Affirmative Action (II)
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The Quest for Community (Again)
Somewhere between the capitalist’s market and the citizen’s state lies the lost land of community, sought after by humane conservatives, liberals, and social democrats alike. Herewith a modest progressive agenda for repairing some of the damage moder
From “Projects” to Communities: How to Redeem Public Housing
Saving public housing will require more than bootstrap lectures and selling off units to tenants. To transform housing projects into safe communities requires a new balance of rights and responsibilities—and real resources.
Feminism and Caregiving
Career-minded feminists intent on devaluing caregiving should instead be doing its opposite—increasing its currency among men and women.
Talking Past Each Other: Black and White Languages of Race
Blacks and whites do not just disagree about the prevalence of racism; they have different understandings of what racism is. Bridging the gap requires a new look at the language of race and ethnicity in America.
Race, Liberalism, and Affirmative Action (II):
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Race, Liberalism, and Affirmative Action (II)
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Quiet Success: Where Managed School Integration Works
Despite a skeptical Supreme Court and a growing separatist movement, many communities across the country are showing that a flexible approach to busing is still the best way to integrate schools.
The Wreckage of Airline Deregulation
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The Wreckage of Airline Deregulation
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The Wreckage of Airline Deregulation
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Liberalism, Socialism, and Democracy
What, if anything, can be usefully salvaged from the socialist tradition, now that communism lies in final disgrace? Paul Starr argued in these pages last fall that four developments — the implosion of communism, the collapse of efforts to reform communism from within, the failure of socialism in the Third World, and the shift of…
The Myth of a Savings Shortage
A precipitous decline in saving during the 1980s? A closer look shows it isn’t so.
Social Support for Self-Reliance: The Politics of Making Work Pay
Millions of the working poor earn less than the minimum needed for self-sufficiency. Enabling these families to achieve security is good policy—and smart politics.
Why the States Can’t Solve the Health Care Crisis
One of the enduring metaphors of American federalism is that states serve as laboratories for the federal government. States are the basement tinkerers that generate ideas to solve big national problems. They are the crucibles for testing the safety and efficacy of new ideas before the whole country adopts them. State leaders, the argument goes,…
Race, Liberalism, and Affirmative Action
In our Winter issue, Paul Starr argued that because the Supreme Court, with its changed membership, is now likely to overturn earlier decisions upholding affirmative action, liberals need to find “a new road to equal opportunity in America.” He urged a two-pronged approach: policies to expand opportunity and security for low- to middle-income Americans of…
States First: The Other Path to National Health Reform
As a state legislator in Massachusetts since 1985, I have seen the best and worst of state health policy-making. In 1988 the Massachusetts Legislature approved a measure intended to guarantee health insurance to all 600,000 uninsured state residents. The early steps under the law, covering students, the unemployed, and disabled adults and children, were preludes…
A Lost Political Generation?
Meet the twenty-something generation: socially idealistic, politically cynical, economically worried, and longing for a leader worthy of respect.
Bringing Fathers Back In: The Child Support Assurance Strategy
Holding absent fathers financially accountable, while providing a minimum assured benefit for child support, could reduce child poverty significantly and help millions of single mothers move out of dependency.
Rehnquist’s Road to Serfdom: The Ominous Message of -Rust v. Sullivan-
An Orwellian Supreme Court decision creates a false choice between social benefits and individual rights.
Democratizing the Data Banks: Getting Government Online
The federal government’s databases may soon be only an inexpensive telephone call away.
Race, Liberalism, and Affirmative Action
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Diversity at Berkeley: Demagoguery or Demography?
The case for Cal’s admissions policy, designed to mirror the state’s population.
The Great Environmental Awakening
Conservatives called environmentalism elitist and inconsistent with old American values. But look who’s green now.
Flexibility Trap: The Proliferation of Marginal Jobs
Temporary and part-time jobs may be penny-wise for employers, but pound-foolish for the economy.
The Pressure Elite: Inside the Narrow World of Advocacy Group Politics
Today’s advocacy groups are remotely democratic—all too remotely.
The Limits of Legalization
Advocates of legalization confuse the effects of criminalizing drugs with the effects of social deprivation. They’re also blithely unrealistic about the impact of legalization on drug consumption and its social costs.
More Like Them?
The Japanese economic system violates many of the basic principles of the Adam Smithian economics. Instead of crying “foul”, maybe we need to learn how and why Japan’s model works.
Civil Reconstruction: What to Do Without Affirmative Action
The time is approaching when we will have no alternative but to find a new road to equal opportunity in America. With the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court now will likely have a black justice among the majority when it votes to overturn Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the 1978…
Invisible Woman
When Clarence Thomas called the Senate hearings a “high-tech lynching,” he turned his confirmation into a race-loyalty test for blacks. Once again, the concerns of black women were obscured.
Race, Gender and the Supreme Court
In a parody of affirmative action, the Senate failed to assess seriously Clarence Thomas’s fitness for the Supreme Court. Casualties include blacks, women, Democrads, and the Court’s own moral authority.
Confessions of an Airline Deregulator
They were sure deregulation would unleash fierce competition, produce better service, and result in lower prices. Five of six assumptions turned out to be wrong.
Gangs in the Post-Industrial Ghetto
Though hardly a new phenomenon, gangs of poor youth are once again in the news and movies. There is one new factor: the vanishing prospect of industrial jobs that lead out of poverty.
Is There a Democratic Economics?
The real issue is not the current downturn, but the fifteen-year decline in living standards. That should be the focus of a reframed debate—and different remedies.
Dealing with Legalization
What would happen if we legalized hard drugs? Here are six different plans for what to do after the end of drug prohibition—and why one of them makes the most sense.
Can Democracy Save Chicago’s Schools?
With much fanfare, Chicago has moved to decentralize control of what some have called the worst public school system in America. But reform has been financially and politically crippled from the start.
Suite Greed
But for the fact that Democrats are now drinking from the same campaign-finance trough as Republicans, the scandal of executive salaries would be a major issue in the 1992 campaign. The scandal has been growing for years, of course, even before the Reagan-Bush greed decade. In 1960, the chief executive of one of America’s 100…
Domestic Urges, Foreign Obsessions
Constructive engagement with the post-Cold War world requires both a stronger America and clearer global goals. Domestic reconstruction must be a priority—but beware isolationism.
Electoral Detox: A Twelve-Step Cure for Donor Dependency
“Hi, I’m Congressman Bob, and I’ve got a problem. I’m hooked on campaign contributions.” That should be the first step.
The Liberal Idea
Textbooks tell us that a great gap separates classical from modern liberalism—James Madison from Franklin D. Roosevelt. Some conservatives say modern liberals betrayed the earlier tradition, and some progressives agree. But the continuities are funda
The Kindest Cut
Of three tax relief plans on the congressional table, only one significantly benefits middle-class families.
The Great Bargain
The next president of the United States either will lead the world into an era of unprecedented peace and growth, in which virtually all nations are knitted together into a seamless economic web, or will watch the world fragment into three trading blocs of advanced and rapidly developing nations, and a fourth vast territory –…
The Myth of the Coming Labor Shortage
According to the Department of Labor, the demand for higher skills is rising rapidly, while the “quality” of America’s workforce is declining. Neither assertion is true, but the mythology is steering policymakers in the wrong direction, away from eff
From Crisis to Working Majority
Reports of the death of the Democrats are greatly exaggerated. Three new books, despite their author’s pessimism, suggest how to reconstruct the party’s middle-class foundations.
The Rehabilitation of the Asylum
The shift of mentally ill patients out of institutions has not worked out the way supporters of deinstitutionalization wanted. But is the remedy a return to the asylum? Some neoconservatives think so.
Liberalism After Socialism
Some have long wanted to blend socialism and liberalism in a “third way”; that idea is now in ruins. But the alternative to a socialist liberalism need not be conservative. There is a liberalism that is serious, realistic, and where necessary even ra
Shock Absorber: Stabilizing World Oil
In the wake of the Gulf War, now is the moment to create a new framework for oil—and for international economic security.
After Conservatism
After a decade of conservative rule, a fair tally of claims and achievements yields a mixed picture. The major conservative strength remains foreign policy, where the right takes credit for the collapse of global communism as a military force and of Marxism as an ideal. Liberals are correct to respond that the policy of containment…
A New Picture of The American Economy
What really ails the American economy? Many economists blame stalled productivity—without understanding it. A new analysis suggests that prosperity depends on success in key industries significant in international trade.
Priming the Pump: Paying for Clean Water in the 1990s
Federal standards for clean water have been rising; federal money for clean water has slowed to a trickle. So, many communities are facing fiscal nightmares, and you may be facing astronomical rate increases.
The Flawed Vision: Deregulation and Public Choice
The theory of “public choice” tells us that the public cannot make intelligent choices about government. But deregulation is as much a choice as activism.
The Pragmatic Road Toward National Health Insurance
The politically plausible path to universal coverage is an approach that builds on employer-provided health coverage, caps costs, and stringently regulates insurers.
The Private Use of Public Life
Last December, a public interest group called the Center for Public Integrity published a unique analysis of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), titled “America’s Frontline Trade Officials.”* The center used a wide variety of government documents, newsletters, press clips, directories, and other sources to piece together the career paths of mid-level and…
The Fractured Family
Some observers are celebrating post-modern families as a positive break from the traditional form. Others are calling for a restoration. Are those our only choices?
Ideas, Yes; Assaults, No
The First Amendment protects the exchange of ideas, not verbal assaults.
The Remedy is More Speech
Slurs against groups may be painful, but suppressing speech is not the answer.
Democratic Engagement:Bringing Populism and Liberalism Together
Long wary of each other, populism and liberalism could benefit from each other’s strengths.
Civility and Its Discontents
You are a college president facing a student accused of scrawling racial epithets on campus. Should you expel him?
Why America Will Adopt Comprehensive Health Care Reform
As costs rise and incremental reforms fail, the chances increase for a comprehensive, single-payer system of national health insurance.
Constitutional Mischief: What’s Wrong with Term Limitations
How to fill legislatures with the old, the rich, and the bought.
The Middle Class and National Health Reform
With the recent flurry of proposals for universal health insurance, including a new plan submitted on June 5 by Majority Leader George Mitchell on behalf of the Senate Democratic leadership, a struggle that began three-quarters of a century ago in the United States entered another phase. Four times — in the Progressive Era, during the…
The Limits of Indignation
Three widely discussed works are helping to heat up the debate about race again. But the limits of a politics of racial conscience should be all too apparent.
Why Save the Banks? The Ambivalent Liberal’s Guide to Reform
Liberals may find it difficult to muster sympathy for bankers, but there are compelling reasons to strengthen banking. Reforms should help restore the banks’ profitability, while coupling new powers with stronger supervision to curb abuses.
Unhealthy Rations
Oregon’s plan to ration care of the poor has won favorable reviews around the country. But take a closer look.
The Uneasy Case for a National Law on Abortion
Congressional action may be the one way to preserve the right to abortion nationwide. But for advocates of choice, enacting legislation will mean making some strategic compromises.
The Fire This Time
Up against the smoldering violence and passions of the inner city, the journalist, the novelist, and the sociologist skilled in field work give us three very different perspectives on race and urban life today.
Racism and Race-Conscious Remedies
An exchange on whether American social and economic policy should emphasize special programs for blacks and other racial minorities or a more universal approach aimed equally at disadvantaged whites.
Citizen Kawasaki: Race, Unions, and the Japanese Employer in America
Some economists have hailed the new model of management and employee relations that Japanese corporations practice at home and are allegedly bringing to America. The story of Kawasaki isn’t so encouraging.
The Reconstruction of Rights
Too many Americans today think of rights solely as limiting their obligations to others and responsibilities as citizens. But rights, rightly understood, flourish only when democracy flourishes, too.
Can the European “Social Market” Survive 1992?
What will happen to Europe’s high labor and environmental standards as the European Community creates its single continental market? The example of European regulatory federalism, bolstered by stronger political parties and trade unions, may be instr
Collateral Gains
Even before the jubilation in Kuwait City died down — indeed, even before the Gulf War ended in a decisive allied victory — many who warned that the war would go badly were warning that the war’s aftermath would go badly. That is a safe prediction. No one has ever won a nickel betting on…
Delectable Materialism: Were the Critics of Consumer Culture Wrong All Along?
It takes an immigrant, or a Soviet visitor, to celebrate the culture of consumerism. Why, as a nation, are we so eager for material improvement, yet so skeptical of materialism?
Dubious Conceptions: The Controversy Over Teen Pregnancy
Reports of “babies having babies” have set off alarms of a teen pregnancy epidemic. But the link between poverty and single parenthood is more complex than is often alleged.
Can Business Beat Bureaucracy?
Attacks on bureaucracy have typically come from outside the corporate world; now they are coming from inside it. Are the business critics and reformers serious? Is American business really undergoing an internal transformation?
Racism and Race-Conscious Remedies
An exchange on whether American social and economic policy should emphasize special programs for blacks and other racial minorities or a more universal approach aimed equally at disadvantaged whites.
Racism and Race-Conscious Remedies
An exchange on whether American social and economic policy should emphasize special programs for blacks and other racial minorities or a more universal approach aimed equally at disadvantaged whites.
The Cultural Enemy Within
In the past year, the opinion has gained currency, particularly in conservative circles, that the great ideological battles of our time are shifting to the terrain of culture. The controversies over free speech and the arts; multiculturalism and education; the relevance of gender, race, and class to the study of the humanities and society; the…
Starting Right: What We Owe Children Under Three
Although America has begun to make significant commitments to improve the lives of children, we still have done little for the under-threes. Other countries reap broad social benefits from coherent family policies. Why can’t we?
The New Industrial Culture: Journeys Toward Collaboration
The competitiveness of the U.S. economy depends on changes inside firms, particularly their willingness to take risks in reshaping four key relationships. Competitiveness, it turns out, depends on new kinds of collaboration.
Small Children, Small Pay: Why Child Care Pays So Little
Child care is expensive, yet those who provide it are poorly paid. Solving the dilemma may call for a Solomonic choice.
The Elusive Promise of Vaccines
Children are not getting vaccines now available, much less a new generation of vaccines that the biomedical revolution has put within our reach.
They Are Not Us: Why American Ownership Still Matters
You don’t have to be a Japan-basher to want American-based firms to thrive. As long as separate nation-states do business by different rules, it isn’t One World yet.
Up From Humanism
Some may feel that “stronger”, “deeper” forms of environmentalism must be better. But watch out. Our great ecological awakening has led to some deeply anti-human philosophies.
Congress Without Cohabitation: The Democrats’ Morning-After
The budget rebellion in October seemingly ended Congress’s long night of unholy cohabitation with the Reagan and Bush administrations. But can the Democrats really get out of bed?
The Reaganites and the Renegade
Conservative Republican strategists are hopping mad at Kevin Phillips. For years, they have embraced (with much success) the notion outlined by Phillips in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, that middle-class voters could be wooed by running against the poor. But now, Phillips seems to have deserted his erstwhile allies. In his latest book,…
Rejoinder: Who Do We Think They Are?
Ever since I argued in the Harvard Business Review last year that we should pay less attention to corporate nationality and more attention to whether our nation’s work force was gaining the skills and competences it needed to compete, I’ve had the curious sense of being shoved — quite against my will — to the…
Is Violent Crime Increasing?
News reports of an all-time record crime wave have set off a panic that America is out of control. What are the real facts?
The Growth Puzzle
Here are two books with drastically different stories about growth and productivity in the American economy. The more persuasive of the two hasn’t got the attention it deserves.
Remaking Regulation
Regulation of the air, the water, and the workplace has made things much better. But we could achieve even better results by regulating with incentives.
Fetal Risks, Women’s Rights: Showdown at Johnson Controls
For the first time, women are gaining entry to “good” jobs in manufacturing. But some companies, like battery-maker Johnson Controls, say that because of potential fetal health risks, no fertile women need apply. Should the Supreme Court let that pol
The Great Immigration Debate
Congress is once again rewriting the immigration laws. How wide, and to whom, should we open that Golden Door? What goals should our national immigration policy serve?
The Conservative Crackup
Conservative intellectuals are now facing some of their toughest adversaries ever—each other.
The Greening of the Tax System
Would an environmentalist kill two birds with one stone? Not ordinarily. But taxes on pollution and waste can discourage environmentally harmful activities and produce revenues for environmentally beneficial programs.
Blackboard Jingle
It seems as if every conference I attend on the subject of American competitiveness (and there are many — the competitiveness industry is surely one of America’s most competitive) begins or ends with a speech by a prominent chief executive of a large American corporation about business’s stake in improving the quality of the American…
Choice Ironies: Open Enrollment in Minnesota
Supporters and critics of school choice throughout the nation have predicted a big shock to the educational system if parents were given a say in selecting their children’s schools. Minnesota’s experience with school choice, the first statewide progr
Beyond the Guns of August
At this writing, American and Iraqi forces still face each other warily across the Saudi sands. Sooner or later, Iraq will likely have to reverse course. But beyond the question of how and when the immediate military crisis will be resolved, the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait has given momentum to the development of a post-Cold…
Dubious Crusade: The Push for Agricultural Laissez Faire
The Bush administration is pushing an international agreement to do away with agricultural subsidies. But we have never practiced—for good reason—the policies we are preaching to others.
Getting Prisons Straight
In the 1970s prison rehabilitation seemed destined for the conservatives’ trophy case of failed social programs. Now the evidence looks better: Some programs have beneficial effects on both the prisoners and the prisons.
Canada’s Health Insurance and Ours: The Real Lessons, the Big Choices
Contrary to a well-financed campaign by the AMA, Canada’s record in health care is exemplary. But is a Canadian model feasible in the U.S.?
The Poverty of Neoliberalism
In the late 1970s, a group of one-time liberals began describing themselves as neoliberals. ‘We criticize liberalism,” Charles Peters, editor of the neoliberal Washington Monthly, wrote in 1983, “not to destroy it but to renew it by freeing it from its myths, from its old automatic responses…” Neoliberals often join conservatives in lambasting public programs,…
The Renewal of the Public Sector
The preoccupation with scandal has only aggravated the bureaucratic character of public services. A new “paradigm” for public service needs to emphasize quality of service, flexibility, and receptiveness to innovation–not just probity.
The Great S&L Clearance
During the past decade, the public dialogue surrounding the federal government’s regulation of the financial system has been shallow and morally smug and, above all, blind to the emerging realities of deep disorder. Despite the pattern of recurring financial crises, most commentators have clung to the comforting bromides of laissez faire taught by the Reagan…
Can Government Work?
Many Americans are convinced that there are no public solutions to national problems. Or if there are, that Congress could not enact them in rational form, and that we cannot afford the cost. Overcoming that pervasive skepticism demands a new era of
East Asia’s Challenge—to Standard Economics
The conventional wisdom these days is that government intervention impedes development. Why, then, have Korea and Taiwan grown so fast?
Who Will Represent Labor Now?
As labor unions see their role diminish, others attempt to take their place as the employees’ representatives. Will it be lawyers, government regulators, or “human resource managers” in the executive suites? Or will the employees gain some direct rep
Generational Alliance: Social Security as a Bank for Education and Training
The solvency of Social Security ultimately depends on economic prosperity, and economic prosperity on productivity and education. College costs, however, are becoming prohibitive, and technical training is weak. Investing part of the Social Security
Should We Compromise on Abortion?
Many commentators are saying that “extremists on both sides” in the abortion debate need to compromise. But a close analysis of current proposals shows that even “moderate” restrictions impose real harm on many women.
An Uneasy Marriage in the House of Labor
Activists in the labor movement often find themselves at odds with the labor bureaucracy. Can business unionists learn to love labor organizers?
Sustainable Social Policy: Fighting Poverty Without Poverty Programs
The history of social policy has a clear lesson. Programs that benefit all citizens do more to reduce poverty than programs targeted to the poor. So a new strategy for gamily security makes more sense than another War on Poverty.
Up From the Bedside: A Co-op for Home Care Workers
Rick Surpin wanted to create jobs for the poor by creating enterprises for them. In the process, he created a better model of home health care, too.
The Grand Inquisitor
Robert Bork bids us to be faithful to the Founders and reject heretics who read theory into the law. But, like the Grand Inquisitor, he inwardly betrays his cause.
Citizen Organizing: Many Movements, No Majority
Citizen politics aims to spur a democratic resurgence at the grassroots. But as other forms of democratic participation decline, can citizen organizing make a difference?
Constitutional Politics and the Conservative Court
A leading scholar in constitutional law examines the future path of the Supreme Court. The Court’s right turn is nothing to celebrate, but liberals should welcome the return of issues to the political arena.
Affordable Housing: Lessons from Canada
How Canada manages to build scandal-free nonprofit housing
Atlas Unburdened: America’s Economic Interests in a New World Era
In 1944 Western statesmen redesigned the global economic order. The end of the Cold War and the new economic realities of the 1990s call for an equally far-sighted reconstruction and clear grasp of America’s interests.
Feminism and Democracy
Models drawn from women’s experience and feminist thought now put one of the most enduring themes of democratic theory—and hottest topics of current controversy—into a different light (and a different voice).
The Liberal Opportunity
The startling collapse of communism, not with a bang (except in Romania) but a whimper, presents the democratic world with a new array of challenges. For the United States, an age of military competition with the Soviet Union is coming to an end. In its place looms a new age of economic competition. The chief…
Race-Neutral Policies and the Democratic Coalition
Race-neutral programs offer the best way to help the truly disadvantaged and to win back the truly disenchanted.
Environmental Risk and the World Economy
When countries trade goods, they also trade environmental and health risks. Why we need a new international framework to preserve both the public’s health and the world’s commerce.
Escaping the Fiscal Trap
As the 1990s begin, peace and prosperity are in abundance but so are poverty, drugs, poor schools, contaminated air and water, deteriorating roads, and a host of other problems. Although few believe that such problems can be solved with money alone, money is surely needed. Its lack has become an excuse for doing nothing or…
Reconstructing a Democratic Vision
A political pollster and strategist suggests how the Democrats can reclaim the middle class without moving right.
An Outward-Looking Economic Nationalism
Yes to open trade; no to laissez-faire domestic policies.
Vanishing Voters
In 1990 and 1992, the eligible nonvoters will likely outnumber the voters in national elections. A political scientist sorts out the different explanations of the long turnout decline—and what might be done to reverse it.
The Real Welfare Problem
A new study documents that in major cities, a welfare check barely pays rent and utilities.
AIDS and the Moral Economy of Insurance
AIDS is only one of many conditions that new diagnostics tests predict. But what is the purpose of insurance if people who might get sick are judged unacceptable risks?
A World Unlocked
“We make our vision, and hold it ready for any amendment that experience suggests. It is not a fixed picture, a row of shiny ideals which we can exhibit to mankind and say: Achieve these or be damned. All we can do is to search the world as we find it, extricate the forces that…
