November Issue PDF
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What It Will Take
Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power by Thomas B. Edsall (Basic Books, 320 pages, $26.00) The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement, and How You Can Fight Back by Jacob S. Hacker (Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $26.00) …
Outsourcing: Bigger Than You Thought
The great conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke, who probably would not have been a reader of The American Prospect, once observed, “You can never plan the future by the past.” But when it comes to preparing the American workforce for the jobs of the future, we may be doing just that. For about a quarter-century,…
The New Open Society
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass Sunstein (Oxford University Press, 288 pages, $25.00) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler (Yale University Press, 520 pages, $40.00) Internet utopianism can seem so 1998. The future was silicon in the late Clinton years,…
No Justice, No Growth
On the morning of June 22, 1995, to the total astonishment of the people working and walking on Hollywood Boulevard — the sales clerks of a hundred shlock emporiums, the stoners, the runaways, and the crowds of ever-bewildered tourists who had trekked to the heart of Hollywood in search of glamour only to find one…
We Answer to the Name of Liberals
As right-wing politicians and pundits call us stooges for Osama bin Laden, Tony Judt charges, in a widely discussed and heatedly debated essay in the London Review of Books, that American liberals — without distinction — have “acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy.” Both claims are nonsense on stilts. Clearly this is a moment…
A Republic, If We Can Build It
Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches by Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal (MIT Press, 240 pages, $35.00) L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement by Ruth Milkman (Russell Sage Foundation, 264 pages, $24.95) In the face of pronounced income and…
Bodymore, Murdaland
“It’s Baltimore, gentlemen. The gods will not save you.” — The police commissioner to his commanders on The Wire The Baltimore Police Department’s 2005 annual report is crammed with statistics that tell a story. Violent crime is down in every category measured by the department. The city witnessed 269 murders in 2005, or seven…
Sour Mashed
It took about three years of helping to turn Afghanistan into a failed state before Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the Republican from Tennessee, experienced his first moment of clarity. “A political solution is how it’s all going to be solved,” Frist told reporters at a U.S. military installation in the country on a visit…
Who Glossed China?
After the economist Nicholas Lardy visited China in the mid-1980s, he came away distinctly skeptical. While Chinese leaders were gearing up for a huge export drive, Lardy predicted “a marked slowing in China’s trade expansion in the years ahead.” In particular he questioned Beijing’s reported plan to boost total Chinese trade (imports plus exports) to…
The Road to Good Jobs
America needs more good jobs at good wages. The combination of deregulation, global low-wage competition, and the attack on unions has reduced the supply of reliable jobs with decent wages, benefits, and career prospects. This shift comes at a time when other social supports have been cut. Any serious student of this subject knows two…
Map Quest
I was intrigued to read in early October about the sale at auction, for nearly $4 million, of a map. It wasn’t, naturally, just any map: It was the first atlas of the world ever printed, from 1477, based on the cartographic calculations of Claudius Ptolemaeus, the chap we call Ptolemy, who lived in Roman…
Pyongyang Boomerang
Republican government during the past six years has been a study in dissipation. No, I’m not referring to the Mark Foley scandal. I mean the dissipation of American power and influence in the world — the latest consequence of which is North Korea’s explosion of a nuclear weapon. Rather than deterring Pyongyang from going nuclear,…
What Lies Beneath
Joern Skov Nielsen surely qualifies as one of the more obscure government ministers in the world. Head of Greenland’s Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum, he operates out of an office in Nuuk, capital of Greenland, a semiautonomous region of Denmark with fewer than 60,000 people living on a landmass that covers more than 800,000 square…
How Capitalism Works Now
The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences by Louis Uchitelle (Alfred A. Knopf, 283 pages, $25.95) All Together Now: Common Sense For a Fair Economy by Jared Bernstein (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 154 pages, $12.00) America Back on Track by Senator Edward M. Kennedy (Viking, 210 pages, $24.95) When it comes…
Where the Boys Are
Remember Title IX, the federal legislation that guarantees equality by sex in education? It was passed in 1972, on the heels of racial integration, and with a rather similar rationale: Separate was not deemed to be equal either in law or in educational outcomes. By 1995, only three sex-segregated public schools remained. Fast forward to…
Human Failings
The crowning disgrace of this country’s five-year experiment with one-party Republican rule was surely the passage of a bill on September 29 that sanctioned abusive treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror,” banned habeas corpus claims for those identified as “enemy combatants,” and allowed the president to place that designation on anyone, including U.S.…
Getting Serious About Good Jobs
How to generate more good jobs for Americans? Conventionally, policy-makers and economists give great weight to two strategies — education and economic development. Presumably, a better educated workforce will command higher pay. And economic development will generate more jobs, one hopes good jobs. But there are limits to what these two approaches can accomplish, given…
War in Iraq, 2003-??
Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, is an odd place to discover the possible fate of Iraq. But the fort, a 90-year-old Army base in the midst of suburbia, plays host to the Army’s communications command, which has quite a lot invested in that country’s future. For the moment, the United States has 140,000 troops stationed in…
