The Catholic Paradox
A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America By Peter Steinfels, Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $26.00 Can the Catholic Church as we know it survive in America? This is the question raised by Peter Steinfels’ tough-love letter to fellow Catholics, A People Adrift. It is no secret that…
Works on Progress
Downsizing in America: Reality, Causes, and Consequences By William J. Baumol, Alan S. Blinder and Edward N. Wolff, Russell Sage Foundation, 321 pages, $29.95 The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans and Their Families By Beth Shulman, The New Press, 255 pages, $25.95 Back in 1994, the late,…
A Pretty Business
The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness By Virginia Postrel, HarperCollins, 237 pages, $24.95 Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style joins David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise in a new kind of conservative cultural criticism. The recipe is simple: Charmingly describe a new cluster…
Culture War, Round 3077
Americans, thankfully, are not being gunned down in disputes over political correctness. But disputes over who should decide which ideas should circulate where are very much in play. In fact, a new front has opened. On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives declared incontrovertibly that, “The events and aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, have underscored…
Revolution Now (and Then)!
The Battle of Algiers is back — along with The Battle of Algiers scenario. At a time when Gillo Pontecorvo’s documentary-style account of a bloody, anti-colonialist urban uprising has been used by commentators from Tariq Ali to Zbigniew Brzezinski to describe the situation in occupied Iraq, and only months after a well-publicized screening at the…
The Last Word
To hear Democratic contenders in this final stretch before the primaries, you’d think the biggest economic question facing America is whether to repeal all or part of George W. Bush’s tax cuts. How utterly pathetic. This lets Bush frame the issue, casts Democrats as taxers and fails to put forward a positive vision of what…
Do Good and Dump W.
I. WHAT’S RIGHT WITH THIS PICTURE? LAS VEGAS — In the middle of his life, Sylvester Garcia decided he’d had enough of the cold and the heat. He’d been a welder in the copper-mining towns of New Mexico for almost a quarter of a century, but, he says, “I got tired of welding,…
Friends of Spam
It’s no secret that much of the Democratic establishment fears Howard Dean. For months, rumors have abounded that party insiders will mount some kind of last-ditch effort to deny him the nomination he seems ever closer to securing. One natural focus of such speculation has been the 715 “superdelegates,” party mandarins appointed to the Democratic…
How a Bill Becomes a Law (Revised)
Forget what you learned in Government 101 (or math class for that matter), because in Congress these days, a negative plus a negative equals a positive. And even though R’s control everything, a House “yea” plus a Senate “yea” can still equal a firm “no” when the White House horns in. A quick lesson: Our…
High-Wage America
This Prospect special report has demonstrated that America is needlessly generating a disproportionate number of low-wage jobs, and that other paths are possible. Low-wage America is a nation of hard-working people struggling to make ends meet — and a nation of politically disaffiliated and disempowered citizens. These two realities are related. As Christopher Jencks suggests…
Pathways to Good Jobs
Low-wage jobs cause stagnant living standards only when they are dead-end jobs. Deliberately designed occupational pathways can enable people to move up as they acquire more skills: Entry-level wages may be low, but people advance beyond them. A plumbing apprentice, a junior associate in a law firm, a medical intern or a news clerk at…
When the High Road Isn’t Enough
Dan St. Louis may never grace the cover of BusinessWeek magazine or dash off to board meetings in a Gulfstream jet. He works in a cramped, windowless office in a former Nickel’s department store that is now home to a branch of Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, N.C. But he is a man on…
Super Hype
It’s no secret that much of the Democratic establishment fears Howard Dean. For months, rumors have abounded that party insiders will mount some kind of last-ditch effort to deny him the nomination he seems ever closer to securing. One natural focus of such speculation has been the 715 “superdelegates,” party mandarins appointed to the Democratic…
Banking on Decent Jobs
New technologies came slowly to the banking industry, but change is now coming faster and faster. The question is, who will benefit? Consider the check, a banking mainstay introduced shortly after the Civil War. For more than a century, checks were processed by hand. When a check was received, a clerk, sometimes wearing a green…
Press One for Better Service
Something was wrong on my credit-card bill, so I placed a call to the issuing bank’s customer-service line. The computerized voice told me to press “1” for customer-service inquiries on existing accounts, then to press “3” for credit cards. Following that, I entered my account number, and then my personal-identification number. After listening to an…
Wal-Mart Nation
I. WHAT’S RIGHT WITH THIS PICTURE? LAS VEGAS — In the middle of his life, Sylvester Garcia decided he’d had enough of the cold and the heat. He’d been a welder in the copper-mining towns of New Mexico for almost a quarter of a century, but, he says, “I got tired of welding,…
The O’Connor Project
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, speaking for a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in the University of Michigan affirmative-action case, declared, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary … .” What would it take for that to become a reality? In what we might call…
A Bad Senior Moment
In a middle-of-the-night vote held open for an unprecedented three hours on Nov. 21-22, Republican leaders finally corralled enough conservatives to ram through the House of Representatives a bill restructuring Medicare and authorizing a limited prescription-drug benefit. The vote was 220-to-215. Three days later, the Senate passed the same bill by a broader margin, 54-to-44.…
And They’re Off!
Elections are invariably more messy, more contingent, than they may seem in advance, and the coming year’s Democratic presidential primaries are unlikely to prove an exception. Former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), who has fervor, volunteers and money to burn—and now, with former Vice President Al Gore’s endorsement, has begun to pick up major establishment support—could…
Is It Time to Believe?
As Democrats in Iowa and beyond prepare to start voting, we can look back and identify four distinct phases of this nascent presidential campaign: the early, we-get-to-know-them phase; the preliminary nuts-and-bolts phase, concerned with which candidate hired which professionals; the money-chase phase; and, most recently, the first winnowing phase, when observers felt they finally knew…
Higher Skills, Fewer Jobs
In the past three years, U.S manufacturers have suffered their most dramatic job losses since the Great Depression. Even with the turnaround in job creation reported this fall, manufacturing lost another 19,000 jobs in November. The sector’s low-skilled and lowest-paid workers have been especially hard hit because they engaged in repetitive work at outmoded plants.…
For a Smarter Public, Deliberation Day
It is easy to wring one’s hands, especially with a presidential campaign approaching, over the scandalous state of the public’s knowledge about politics. But is there anything practical to be done? There is, and the answer can be found in a new and promising practice called Deliberative Polling. In Deliberative Polling, a scientific, random sample…
The New Politics of Medicare
The passage of the Republican Medicare overhaul, with its new prescription-drug benefit provided wholly by private insurers, was a huge political victory for the president and an ideological triumph for conservatives. Unlike Bill Clinton 10 years ago, George W. Bush promised an extension of health coverage and has now delivered it. Conservatives, moreover, have succeeded…
Las Vegas as a Workers’ Paradise
From the archives: Why the current battle over holding Nevada caucuses in casinos? It comes down to the power of the hotel worker’s union which transformed dead-end jobs into middle-class careers.
The Low-Wage Puzzle
When America’s most recent economic boom ended in 2001, the economy was turning out $7 trillion worth of consumer goods and services a year — enough to provide every man, woman and child with almost $25,000 worth of food, housing, transportation, medical care and other things every year. If all that stuff had been divided…
The Terror Trap
The four men, veterans of a grim business, had only grim words. Former heads of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security service entrusted with fighting terrorism, they gathered to tell Israel’s largest newspaper that the Sharon government was failing completely in its war on terrorism. The problem, said Ami Ayalon, who headed the elite, secretive…
Phoenix Rising
With the 2004 electoral clock ticking amid growing public concern about U.S. casualties and chaos in Iraq, the Bush administration’s hawks are upping the ante militarily. To those familiar with the CIA’s Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America’s death squads or Israel’s official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists, the results are likely…
