The Public Interest articles from June 1997

The Public Interest archives from June 1997

Moist eyes - from Rousseau to Clinton. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Bill Clinton)
June 22, 1997... Readers of The Public Interest know that ideas have consequences, sometimes long delayed ones. Even so, the notion of a link between Rousseau and Clinton may seem tenuous. Except, perhaps, to a certain kind of codger, who would snort that the two...

IQ and economic success. (intelligence quotient)
June 22, 1997... In The Bell Curve, the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I described an emerging class society in which the intellectually blessed become ever more rich and powerful and the intellectually deficient find it harder and harder to cope. We proposed...

The prescience of Myrdal. (Swedish economist and public servant Gunnar Myrdal)
June 22, 1997... An American Dilemma Gunnar Myrdal called the problem of race in his classic 1944 book, recently re-issued with a new introduction by Myrdal's daughter, Sissela Bok. "Dilemma" was, in fact, never quite the right word. Myrdal saw not a difficult...

The culture of secrecy. (a vast system of secrecy developed within the American government)
June 22, 1997... It is a half century since the foreign intelligence system of the United States was established by the National Security Act of 1947. It is 80 years since the Espionage Act of 1917 established the present legal regime dealing with subversive...

Replacing the nursing home.
June 22, 1997... The term "nursing home" hardly fits the American institution that houses 1.7 million feeble old people. First, no one who lives in a nursing home could possibly confuse it with a home. Sharing a bedroom 'with a sick stranger, being served...

A conservative case for regulation.
June 22, 1997... Nothing upsets a conservative quite so much as the threat of "regulation" - or at least, of economic regulation (social regulation being something that various subsets of conservatives find attractive). Conservatives, after all, are brought up...

Computers: good for education?
June 22, 1997... President Clinton has shown a penchant for cosmetic educational reform. Neither a stalwart against the most questionable reforms implemented in recent memory nor an advocate for a totally newfangled educational system, he has chosen to stick with...

Equality, growth, and the myopic society.
June 22, 1997... Some years ago, in his widely discussed Social Limits to Growth, Fred Hirsch claimed that "economic equality has been a compulsive political idea of the twentieth century." Taking, as he did, such a century-long perspective, who can possibly...

The Repeal of Reticence.
June 22, 1997... Larry Flynt and Robert Mapplethorpe may represent merely the most recent stop along the path our culture has traveled for well over a century. Though it is difficult to imagine, there may be worse yet to come. But then only a few years back it...

Public Morality and Liberal Society.
June 22, 1997... In 1790-91, Supreme Court Justice James Wilson delivered a series of lectures on the law at what was to become the University of Pennsylvania and before an audience that included President George Washington, Vice President John Adams, and a...