The Public Interest articles from March 1999

The Public Interest archives from March 1999

Still the land of opportunity?
March 22, 1999... America is known as "the land of opportunity." But whether it deserves this reputation has received too little attention. Instead, we seem mesmerized by data on the distribution of incomes which show that incomes are less evenly distributed...

Thinking about parent and child.
March 22, 1999... At one time, a child's behavior was thought to be mainly, if not entirely, the result of how his parents behaved. Nice parents produced nice children, bad parents produced bad children. The pioneering study of delinquents written by Sheldon and...

How to save our shrinking cities.
March 22, 1999... The first half of the twentieth century saw the widespread emergence of large cities in the United States. In 1900, there were only six cities with more than half a million inhabitants; only 50 years later, there were 17 such cities. Much of...

"The Shape of the River": the case for racial preferences.(book by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok on consideration of race in college admissions)
March 22, 1999... It rarely happens that answers to contested political questions can be found in a relevant body of data and empirical analysis. Certainly, a scarcity of data has long afflicted the debate over preferences for African-American students in...

California after racial preferences.(college admissions based on race)
March 22, 1999... In his 1995 opinion in Miller v. Johnson, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy observed that "at the heart of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection lies the simple command that the Government must treat citizens as individuals, not...

Doing it right: job training and education.
March 22, 1999... There has of late been much hand wringing over what to do about the emerging new labor market, in which the real wages of high-skilled, well-educated workers have increased, while the real wages of low-skilled and poorly educated workers have...

Debating WIC.(response to Douglas J. Besharov et al, The Public Interest, no. 134, Winter 1999)(Women, Infants and Children nutrition program)
March 22, 1999... In their critical review of the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program ("Is WIC As Good As They Say," The Public Interest, No. 134, Winter 1999), Douglas J. Besharov and Peter Germanis conclude that WIC is less effective than...

A reply.(response to article by Leighton Ku, in this issue, p. 108)
March 22, 1999... In his response to our article, Leighton Ku, a careful researcher and a self-described advocate of the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, demonstrates what is so sadly wrong about the public-policy debate these days: Eager to defend or...

A Dream Deferred, the Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America.
March 22, 1999... Racism is the original sin of American society, and no matter how a millenarian society centered on equality attempts to ameliorate it or, better still, eradicate it, it remains, a baffling and ugly fact. Slavery, the Missouri Compromise, John...

Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason.
March 22, 1999... If anyone ought to understand the unintended consequences of multicultural education, it is Ruth Sherman. The young and idealistic Sherman was assigned a third-grade class at Public School 75 in the Bushwick section of New York, a school with...

Privatizing Social Security.
March 22, 1999... Just the right mix of piecemeal reforms could enable Social Security to teeter along the edge of financial catastrophe all through the next century without ever quite going broke. Every two or three decades, Congress would need to cobble...

The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning.
March 22, 1999... Alain Desrosieres, Administrator of France's Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques, had the attractive idea of combining a history of the mathematical development of statistics with a history of their use by governments....