Society articles from March 1997

Society archives from March 1997

The myth of increasing inequality.
March 1, 1997... Writing in the Winter 1997 issue of The Public Interest, John C. Weicher reports that American society as a whole has gotten richer, rich and poor alike, more or less evenly. Survey data from 1992 have recently been made available by the...

Nonvoters are no more alienated than voters.
March 1, 1997... A recent poll casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that people who do not vote are more alienated about the state of American politics than those who do. The survey, by the League of Women Voters, found that nonvoters are no more alienated...

Welfare, work, and children.
March 1, 1997... As state and federal lawmakers seek to overhaul welfare and move more people into jobs, a respected child advocacy organization reported that the number of children living in poverty while their parents work has sharply increased over the last...

The ideology of the religious right.
March 1, 1997... The religious right political movement has considerable opportunity for future growth because many of its prime potential constituents, politically conservative evangelicals, are unfamiliar with the movement and unaware of some of its leaders...

The social side of information networking.
March 1, 1997... Americans are a sociable people, and among the world's most technology-loving cultures. Just look at the enthusiasm with which we embraced the telephone, at least as soon as we began to see it as a social tool, not just a source for business...

Ideology, partisanship, and the new political continuum.
March 1, 1997... Journalists, pollsters, and pundits use categories of political analysis that they do not always clearly define and whose meanings are ambiguous. To make sense of the political rhetoric even the informed public must struggle hard. A single news...

Who counts? The politics of censustaking.
March 1, 1997... In the good old days, it seems, the census was about counting the population, tabulating the data and and reporting the results to Congress and the public. The U.S. Bureau of the Census was a rather sleepy federal agency housed in Suitland,...

How sampling will help defeat the undercount.
March 1, 1997... Once again, looking toward the year 2000, the great challenge for the census is to overcome the problem of the differential undercount, that is, the tendency for the census to miss African Americans, Hispanic people, and Native Americans much...

Is the undercount a demographic problem?
March 1, 1997... There is an apocryphal story about the staffer from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who, in testifying before a congressional committee regarding the budget for the Census Bureau in anticipation of a decennial census, proclaimed that the census...

The U.S. census and congressional apportionment.
March 1, 1997... On December 31, 2000, the secretary of commerce is required by law to deliver to the president of the United States the April 1, 2000, total population counts for each of the fifty states of the United States. The president is required then to...

The case for census tradition.
March 1, 1997... Anyone can improve the census - for instance by adding one person to the counted population of New York. Adding a thousand persons would improve it more. Adding a million would make it worse. So why not use a sample, to find the best...

Cuba's drug transit traffic.
March 1, 1997... Cuba occupies a favored strategic position from a drug trafficking perspective. The island lies only ninety miles south of Key West, Florida, on a direct flight path between Colombia's Caribbean coast and the Southeastern United States. Cuba's...

Losing giants. (death of sociologists E. Digly Baltzell, Robert Nisbet and Anselm Strauss)(Obituary)
March 1, 1997... Recently SOCIETY published notices of the passing of three intellectual giants of sociology: E. Digby Baltzell, Robert A. Nisbet, and Anselm L. Strauss. These men were personal friends as well as academic figures of the highest quality. They...

Reviewers and reviewing.
March 1, 1997... Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books involves constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever. George Orwell, in an essay written from the heart. It ought to go without saying, but...

The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions.
March 1, 1997... Most of those engaged in the serious study of race today do so from either the "hermeneutical" or the "race-realist" perspective. At one extreme, those I have termed "hermeneuticists" approach race as an epiphenomenon, a mere social...

The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America.
March 1, 1997... Most of those engaged in the serious study of race today do so from either the "hermeneutical" or the "race-realist" perspective. At one extreme, those I have termed "hermeneuticists" approach race as an epiphenomenon, a mere social...

Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice, and Genocide.
March 1, 1997... Most of those engaged in the serious study of race today do so from either the "hermeneutical" or the "race-realist" perspective. At one extreme, those I have termed "hermeneuticists" approach race as an epiphenomenon, a mere social...

The Mismeasure of Man: Revised and Expanded Edition.
March 1, 1997... Most of those engaged in the serious study of race today do so from either the "hermeneutical" or the "race-realist" perspective. At one extreme, those I have termed "hermeneuticists" approach race as an epiphenomenon, a mere social...

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism.
March 1, 1997... Most of those engaged in the serious study of race today do so from either the "hermeneutical" or the "race-realist" perspective. At one extreme, those I have termed "hermeneuticists" approach race as an epiphenomenon, a mere social...

The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science.
March 1, 1997... Most of those engaged in the serious study of race today do so from either the "hermeneutical" or the "race-realist" perspective. At one extreme, those I have termed "hermeneuticists" approach race as an epiphenomenon, a mere social...

The Science and Politics of Racial Research.
March 1, 1997... Most of those engaged in the serious study of race today do so from either the "hermeneutical" or the "race-realist" perspective. At one extreme, those I have termed "hermeneuticists" approach race as an epiphenomenon, a mere social...

Crime in the Public Mind.
March 1, 1997... Reviewed by Walter Berns Americans believe criminals should be punished severely, and Kathlyn Taylor Gaubatz wants to know why: "Despite the enormous complexity and intractability of the problem of crime, the vast majority of Americans agree...

After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist.
March 1, 1997... Reviewed by Melford E. Spiro A new book by Clifford Geertz is an event. For if Claude Levi-Strauss was the most prominent anthropologist of the 1950s and 1960s, then arguably Geertz acquired that status in the 1970s and 1980s; moreover, like...

Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919-1990.
March 1, 1997... Reviewed by Freddie C. Colston This book sheds some light on a largely unexplored aspect of the black experience in America: the nature and extent of Communist influence in the black struggle for racial justice. Professor Hutchison examines...

Mexico: From Montezuma to NAFTA, Chiapas, and Beyond.
March 1, 1997... Reviewed by Pamela S. Falk Pancho Villa was "a horse trader and thief...cruel toward his enemies and generous with his friends. A brutal and vulgar figure, Villa became a folk hero to some and an opportunistic bandit to others" writes Dr....

Bordering on Chaos: Guerillas, Stockbrokers, Politicians, and Mexico's Road to Prosperity.
March 1, 1997... Reviewed by Pamela S. Falk Pancho Villa was "a horse trader and thief...cruel toward his enemies and generous with his friends. A brutal and vulgar figure, Villa became a folk hero to some and an opportunistic bandit to others" writes Dr....