The Public Interest articles from March 1995

The Public Interest archives from March 1995

Assimilation's quiet tide.
March 22, 1995... Assimilation has become America's dirty little secret. Although once the subject of avid discussion and debate, the idea has fallen into disrepute, replaced by the slogans of multiculturalism. At best, assimilation is considered of dubious...

Educational outcomes do matter.
March 22, 1995... Prescribing learning results that all American students must master - a project known as outcome-based education (OBE) - has become the subject of one of the nation's fiercest education battles. Though initially a conservative idea for improving...

Recycling: myths and realities.
March 22, 1995... A week before the 1994 elections, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani received a piece of very good news from the New York City Department of Sanitation, perhaps the last good news he was to receive for quite some time. The department reported that the market...

The politics of public pension funds.
March 22, 1995... In most large U.S. corporations, the owners are passive investors who do not run the business. This creates an agency problem, allowing the managers to operate the business for their own ends, not the shareholders'. In the 1980s, corporate...

Premodern advice for the postmodern young.
March 22, 1995... A graduation-day address at a university like my own (Harvard), where last spring University of Pennsylvania law professor Lani Guinier and Vice President Al Gore were featured speakers, has a familiar theme. In late twentieth-century America,...

Mainstreaming Kwanzaa.
March 22, 1995... Ralph Kennedy, a manager at IBM who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has celebrated the African-American holiday Kwanzaa since 1974. When he started, he says, "there was a great deal of active discussion going on about the tendency or lack of...

Crime.
March 22, 1995... For over two decades, James Q. Wilson - whom Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot recently called "the best social scientist in America" - has been teaching us how to think about crime and justice. In Crime,(*) Wilson has joined forces with...

Hollywood Censored.
March 22, 1995... Hollywood Censored,(*) we are told on the book's dust jacket, "examines how hundreds of films - Mae West comedies, serious dramas, and films with a social message - were censored and often edited to promote a conservative political agenda during...

No Harm: Ethical Principles for a Free Market.
March 22, 1995... In the Long March toward the New Deal and a planned economy, Leo Nebbia became an early, celebrated casualty. The state of New York, in advance of the New Deal, had fixed the price of milk at nine cents a quart as part of a scheme of social...

Dictatorship of Virtue.
March 22, 1995... Is there anything more boring than the debate about political correctness? As if the trinity of race, class, and gender hadn't become tedious enough, now denouncing political correctness has become encrusted with its own cliches. At the moment, a...

Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900-1933.
March 22, 1995... As a sequel to his well-respected Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (1977), Morton Keller has launched an even more ambitious three-volume study covering the first third of this century. The goal of these books is...

The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government.
March 22, 1995... Deliberative democracy is moving to the forefront of political theory. This revival of Madisonian doctrine is a welcome response to current degradations of liberty and self-government. There is nothing new about debased politics or degraded...

The Empire of Fashion.
March 22, 1995... Just as Tocqueville studied America over one hundred fifty years ago in order to discover lessons from which his fellow countrymen might profit, so we Americans today might return the compliment by looking to French political philosophers for...

A Nation Under Lawyers.
March 22, 1995... One of the most unfortunate legacies of the American experience in the middle part of this century is the degree to which expectations have been inflated with regard to government's ability to resolve complicated social conflicts. As executive...

Unhealthy Charities: Hazardous to Your Health and Wealth.
March 22, 1995... Charity is never a simple matter, as James T. Bennett and Thomas J. DiLorenzo demonstrate in Unhealthy Charities: Hazardous to Your Health and Wealth.(*) The authors look at the practices of health charities by examining in detail the operations...

In Defense of Elitism.
March 22, 1995... A recent and welcome addition to the burgeoning anti-"political correctness" canon is In Defense of Elitism,(*) by Time magazine culture critic William Henry, III, who died this past June. Henry has written an intelligent, persuasive book, in...