The Public Interest articles from January 2001

The Public Interest archives from January 2001

How to cure health care.(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2001... SINCE the end of World War II, the provision of medical care in the United States and other advanced countries has displayed three major features: first, rapid advance in the science of medicine; second, large increases in spending, both in...

Politics in a Brave New World.
January 1, 2001... BY all accounts, we are on the cusp of a great technological revolution or revolutions. In the last several months, Time, Newsweek, Wired, the New York Times Magazine, even the stuffy, high-brow Partisan Review have run cover stories on the...

Does federalism have a future?
January 1, 2001... THE current consensus among savants of American federalism is that, at long last, power is shifting back to the states. The Gold War, which gave Washington politicians a national-security pretext for immersing themselves in local tasks like...

Crime, punishment, and prevention.
January 1, 2001... OVER the last decade, a remarkable change has occurred in the U.S. criminal justice system. Traditionally devoted to the punishment of past crime, it has begun to focus as well on the prevention of future crime by incarceration and control of...

My time in the Peace Corps.
January 1, 2001... WHEN President Kennedy created the Peace Corps in the early 1960s, he appealed to the idealism and patriotism of American youth--promising them an opportunity to change the world through volunteerism. But beyond such altruism, the Peace Corps...

Are nonprofit CEOs overpaid?
January 1, 2001... THE nonprofit sector has acquired a black eye in recent years. Financial scandals at the United Way, NAACP, Adelphi University, and the Baptist and Presbyterian Churches have shaken public confidence in the stewardship of charitable...

Moynihan's legacy.
January 1, 2001... As the new century begins, the career of the man whom the Almanac of American Politics calls "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson" comes to a close. Retiring in 2001...

Lincoln's America.
January 1, 2001... JOHN Patrick Diggins doesn't fit neatly into the usual categories. He is pungently impatient with successive waves of academic radicalism--"Frankfurt School Marxism," "post-modernism," "civic republicanism," "multiculturalism," and...

High-tech conundrums.
January 1, 2001... MONEY doesn't wear a three-piece suit anymore, Dinesh D'Souza reports in his new book The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence, [+] The young Silicon Valley entrepreneur is more likely to don a pair of khakis and a...

Why Congress matters.
January 1, 2001... IN the interest of full disclosure, I must reveal that David R. Mayhew's America's Congress [+] opens with a quotation from my writing and goes on to include generous praise, of the sort journalists are not used to receiving from academics, for...

The art we deserve.
January 1, 2001... LYNNE Munson's heartfelt description of the decline of "the fine arts," as they were once known, makes grim reading. In Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance, [+] she traces the appearance since the mid 1960s of what might collectively be...

Can compassionate conservatism govern?
January 1, 2001... WHAT does it mean to govern in a conservative manner? Even to pose this question is to challenge the core libertarian presuppositions underlying conservative political rhetoric over the past two decades. For a generation now, conservatives have...