The Public Interest articles from September 1993

The Public Interest archives from September 1993

Should hate be a crime. (hate crimes)
September 22, 1993... ON MAY 29, 1989, a white man, David Wyant, occupied a compsite next to Jerry White, an African-American. White complained to the park authorities that Wyant was playing his music too loudly during "quiet hours." White and his companion later...

The contraception paradox. (comparison between US, UK and Swedish teenage pregnancies)
September 22, 1993... THE DEBATE over contraception is an old one. In 1916, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was thrown in jail for offering advice and contraceptives to married women in Brooklyn. But the present controversy over giving...

The limits of monetary policy.
September 22, 1993... TWENTY-ONE YEARS AGO this fall I sat in my first economics class and listened to the conventional wisdom of the time, as set forth by the eigth edition of Paul Samuelson's classic introductory text Economics. Today tha book retains a valued...

A nation of cowards. (US)
September 22, 1993... OUR SOCIETY has reached a pinnacle of self-expression and respect for individuality rare or unmatched in history. Our entire popular culture--from fashion magazines to the cinema--positively screams the matchless worth of the individual, and...

Does money buy happiness?
September 22, 1993... TWENTY YEARS ago in this journal, Richard Easterlin argued that richer societies are no happier than poor ones. However, Easterlin argued, within any one country richer people are happier than poorer people. He explained this anomaly as...

The Europeanization of the U.S. labor market.
September 22, 1993... IN NOVEMBER 1982, the United States was at the bottom of a severe recession in which the unemployment rate hit 10.6 percent. Although 101 million people were working, 11 million were looking for work. By the end of the 1980s, 119 million were...

Bauhaus blunders: architecture and public housing. (1950s public housing estates Cabrini-Green, Chicago, Illinois, US)
September 22, 1993... CABRINI-GREEN IS a large, inner-city public housing project on Chicago's Near North Side. It attracted national attention in October of 1992, when a seven-ye -old boy walking to school with this mother was fatally shot (for no apparent reason)...

Cities, surburbs, and the urban crisis. (US)
September 22, 1993... THE RETURN OF a Democrat to the White House has led the nation's big city mayors and other advocates of urban interests to hope that the national government will once again fund a large-scale "urban policy." The reigning assumption behind this...

Commencement at McGill. (McGill University, Montreal, Canada)(Charles Krauthammer's honorary degree acceptance speech Jun 14, 1993) (Transcript)
September 22, 1993... LET ME BEGIN by saying how deeply honored I am by the honorary degree you have conferred upon me by the invitation to deliver the commencement address at a university for which I have such respect and affection. And let me apologize for...

The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass.
September 22, 1993... Is culture the culprit? THEORY IS GOLDEN. In its normative mode, it connects us to what we ought to do; in its empirical expression, it connects what we have done to the actual consequences for ourselves and for others. The Dream and...

The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda.
September 22, 1993... The Tao of community IT'S A GOOD TIME to be a communitarian. Not only is the philosophy au courant in the press and in academia, but even our president got his job partially by invoking communitarian ideals (more responsibilities,...

Political Liberalism.
September 22, 1993... Is liberalism just? BY PUBLISHING A Theory of Justice in 1971, John Rawls, nearly single-handedly, put political philosophy back on the intellectual map. Although disagreeing with most of his views, I thought Rawls' performance...