The Public Interest articles from January 1999

The Public Interest archives from January 1999

Student performance: males versus females.
January 1, 1999... Women's advocacy groups have waged an intense media campaign to promote the idea that "schools shortchange girls." Their goal has been to convince the public that women are "victims" of an unfair educational system and that they deserve special...

Is WIC as good as they say?(Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children)
January 1, 1999... WIC WORKS, perhaps better than any other government program in existence," Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman recently declared. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan agreed: "The WIC Program results in significant Medicaid...

What remains of toleration?
January 1, 1999... In 1776 Thomas Jefferson set down in his journal what he thought of John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration. He began by noting that Locke sweepingly denied toleration to those who entertain opinions contrary to the moral rules necessary for...

The fallacies of no-fault addiction.
January 1, 1999... On November 20, 1995, more than one hundred substance-abuse experts gathered in Chantilly, Virginia for a meeting organized by the government's top research agency on drug abuse. One topic for discussion was whether the agency, the National...

A liberal country, after all.
January 1, 1999... Most "classics" in political science do not age well. Perhaps that is only to say that most works hailed as "classic" in their time are not actually classic. But some do receive tenure. First published in 1955, Louis Hartz's The Liberal...

Untangling the trade deficit.
January 1, 1999... The competition for most misunderstood economic statistic is hard-fought, but there is a clear winner: the trade deficit. No other number is interpreted so differently by professional economists and the general public. Common reactions to the...

Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders.
January 1, 1999... If life becomes difficult or confused, a visit to a psychiatrist or psychologist may seem in order, largely because we assume these professionals operate like other doctors. By listening to a description of symptoms, asking astute questions,...

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.
January 1, 1999... In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America,(*) Richard Rorty shows that his heart is in the right place, which as anatomists know is on the left. He further shows that the intellectual Left today is in the wrong...

Community Policing, Chicago Style.
January 1, 1999... Community policing" and "broken-windows" policing both suggest new neighborhood-based approaches to crime control. For most observers, they are so similar as to be synonymous. In fact, however, as two recent books suggest, there are, for all...

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
January 1, 1999... Since it first arrived three centuries ago, the modern state has relentlessly sought to increase both its knowledge and power. It has defined borders, assigned surnames, applied science to nature, determined standard units of measurement, and...