REVIEWS
Berman, Paul & Seeger, Murray & Reich, Robert B. & Koháková, Zuzana & Walzer, Judith B. & Lindblom, Charles E. & Gordon, Alex
LOSING GROUND: AMERICAN SOCIAL POLICY 1950-1980, by Charles Murray. New York: Basic Books. 324 pp. $23.95. Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 is a fierce polemic...
...286 pp...
...For however much we wish to disagree with Murray and find holes in his premises, there surely is some truth to the notion that many of these interventions have signaled to impoverished people—particularly young black males—that there is little point in trying to escape from a life of welfare and crime...
...Had the government done less for the poor, poverty would have been worse...
...New York: Praeger, 1980...
...While supposedly being above the fray, the doctors played political hardball...
...The Washington Post's man explores in great detail the lives of a few important Soviet citizens who have challenged the political system and paid 250 horrible penalties for their apostasy...
...Again, the case has never been made...
...An expert witness to this barbarity is Dr...
...Progressive defenders of poverty programs, like conservative critics, spend too much time arguing over the programs' merits, and too little worrying about how they should be designed and administered...
...The story of Nikitin is particularly important since he has received much less attention in the Western press than some other dissidents...
...For those readers who wish a theoretical explanation of Kuttner's empirical observations, the bargain is the key concept...
...The risk of losing Teddy as a character is greater still, for Brown does not flinch from his faults nor the way in which his illusions about political life determine his reluctance to face the world as it is...
...During this growth, solo physicians began to worry about the rapid growth of special group health-care plans, such as the Health Insurance Plan of New York (HIP) and Kaiser-Permanente on the West Coast...
...Jessie, on the other hand, is rooted in her present life, committed to its responsibilities and limits...
...For many years organized medicine has frequently used its political clout against the day-to-day interests of patients in the real world...
...To cite but one example, there is now convincing evidence that a ghetto child who begins school at age three or four has a far better chance of growing up to be a motivated, independent citizen than a child who begins school at the age of five...
...Brown's view is implicitly antiromantic, and in some sense anti-ideological, but not of necessity inimical to politics...
...Murray's argument comes in three parts...
...My uncle must have got it mixed up...
...We might be tempted to dismiss the conflict as merely a domestic banality...
...The reader hopes there is a connection between these views—that it is possible to undertake the long-term struggle, that "long quiet time and unflamboyant action," even as one realizes the tensions between the public and the private parts of history...
...There is nothing particularly surprising about this result...
...Brecht was an authentic Communist, but always with an eye toward expedience...
...This concept is now in shock...
...The most significant payoff of this crazy-quilt technique is the way it allows Skvorecky to coax forth the multiple meanings of events, experiences, human acts...
...He remembers now he once "burned with delight" for skinny Nadia whose black eyes glittered with tuberculosis, how he seduced her with the help of jam tarts, and how blithely he committed sabotage to impress her...
...Smi-ricky's footnote: "In the end they took fortyeight hostages, among them my own father...
...Like Trotsky, he couldn't help believing that Marxism was his birthright, that he himself personified its values and ideas, that all rivals and critics were pretenders and fakes...
...The bottom fifth of all American families has continued to get about 6 percent of all total personal income every year over the past 20...
...Instead, he jotted an autobiographical sketch and gave a long interview to a couple of his students...
...here they "established buffers between the providers of health care and the federal bureaucracy...
...Prema was silent...
...So the fifth one doesn't belong there...
...The vast social struggle pitted the feudal past against the Communist future in Central and Eastern Europe, and the doomed social class rooted in the past was the Jewish intelligentsia...
...Researchers who tracked the lives of 123 impoverished black children in Ypsilanti, Michigan, over the past 15 years discovered a clear pattern...
...For the left to dismiss this book is to allow it to dominate mainstream discussion for years to come...
...While half-educated doctors were turned out, many unlicensed physicians also practiced...
...Readers of the London Times were deprived for six years of the kind of fresh reportage that American readers were getting from Moscow...
...He adds that the profit-making hospitals will undoubtedly oppose any national health program that might threaten to "end private reimbursement...
...So the only answer is to scrap it all...
...His books are full of grotesque kowtowings to authority...
...Welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) created welfare dependency because they discouraged poor people from getting married and holding steady jobs...
...Because it was easier to get along without a job, it was easier to walk away from a job and thereby accumulate a record as an unreliable employee...
...the investor-owned chain operated 35.1 percent, and public hospital systems (excluding federal systems) 7.3 percent...
...We begin at the University of Toronto in the early 1970s...
...He points out that profit-making hospitals "are not interested in treating those who cannot pay...
...Some countries do much better than others in reconciling the two...
...Loyalty was an aspect even of his philosophical work, since one of his main themes was an insistence on Marxism as a total vision of life, requiring no external additives...
...As for the U.S., Other nations have managed to combine broader welfare protections with higher rates of savings and investment and more rapid growth, by blending different ingredients into a superior social bargain...
...Fifteen...
...There have been novels by both blacks and whites about the South and the social conditions that provided the grounds for the movement, but except for Alice Walker's attempts at mythmaking in Meridian, the movement has not been expressed through the imagination of writers who lived through it...
...For that very reason: the ideologies of Judaism had no influence whatever on my spiritual development...
...and many wives entered the work force to help maintain family incomes (and aspirations) as their husbands' real 238 incomes sank...
...For all we know, it is no more than a sophisticated old-wives' tale...
...IN ITS WAY the novel is a difficult one, but not because of anything it tries to say...
...Through Nikitin, Klose is able to tell more about how Russian workers really struggle for their daily wages than most reporters have...
...350 pp...
...THIS NOVEL has everything to recommend it: Skvorecky's crystal-clear prose, his unerring ear for the vernacular, plus a successful experiment in structure-without-a-structure...
...Murray's explanation is equally suspect...
...Teddy Carll, a native Mississippian, and Jessie Singer, a "red-diaper baby" from New York, meet and marry in the movement...
...And much of the rest of America is anxious to assuage its collective guilt about cutting back welfare programs in order to pay for Reagan's military buildup and his tax cuts for the middle class and well-to-do...
...Their advantages in income and wealth, which they must at least sometimes feel are vulnerable to attack in a world increasingly given to egalitarian causes and ideologies, are sanctioned by the trade-off doctrine...
...And yet, it is here that the real work will be—must be—undertaken to improve the system incrementally...
...On a lesser scale, it's an operation that we all engage in, all the time, to save psychic wear and tear...
...But you could escape the private, apparently: Teddy could by vanishing...
...Permissive educational reforms made it more difficult for teachers to keep order in the schools...
...Twenty...
...because those contacts didn't happen to include Zinoviev or Bukharin...
...Into this "civil" (yet uncivil) war comes a family crisis as well as some political and natural disasters...
...Yet the grimness and horror are punctuated by irreverent moments like the scene in which one of Danny's friends is caught by the Gestapo with a suitcase full of contraband pork...
...This is not the first time that America's middle class has been adept at channeling to itself funds ostensibly earmarked for the less fortunate...
...And, along the way, repeal every bit of legislation and reverse every court decision that requires or awards differential treatment according to race...
...The specter of corporate control of medicine now clearly is haunting the doctors, with a consequent loss of autonomy...
...In this connection, I think with wicked relish of a scene from the novel in which a middleaged Czech lady emigree, faced with a literary work not in the mold of what she encountered at school, wails, "I don't understand and I don't want to understand...
...But Brown succeeds, I think, because of her powerful grasp of these lives and her imaginative reconstruction of the political wilderness in which they wander...
...There's a hint that perhaps the family took pride in what a good Communist their son had become...
...Quite apart from the weaknesses in his data and analysis, Murray premises his arguments on a unidimensional view of social relationships...
...In the second part of the book Murray offers an explanation...
...Nonetheless, it may offend some people...
...They were also able to shape much of the Medicare establishment's policies and payments...
...In the last winter of the war, the inhabitants of Kostelec, a small town in the Bohemian mountains, suffer food shortages, forced labor, and fear of Gestapo reprisals...
...But the movement as a movement did not sustain itself, and the dream of an integrated America in which all would be equal disappeared as a unifying political goal...
...Many will not survive the war...
...The conflict between the Carlls—albeit a clear difference of political opinion—replicates a familiar construction of the "division of labor" in such conflicts: men are linked to abstraction and action, 244 women to ordinary realities and the demands of personal life...
...Hence it is impossible to assign aid to a category of needy people without creating perverse incentives for others to join the category...
...A society that can hold out to its poorest citizens the genuine prospect of full membership will succeed in bringing most of them along...
...RECORD OF A LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, by Georg Lukacs...
...As of 1946, only about 600,000 workers were covered by union health plans...
...If AFDC beneficiaries had to enroll their children in day care or Head Start and simultaneously enroll themselves in a training program or work at a public service job, few if any perverse incentives would result...
...He doesn't mention in Record of a Life that the Blum Theses also regarded social democracy as "a mainstay of fascism...
...By the end of 1954, this had risen to 12 million workers and 17 million dependents...
...His immense arrogance is visible in that remark about the purity of his Marxism...
...In 1981, the chains owned or managed hospitals with 121,741 beds, up 68 percent over the total of 72,282 beds held five years earlier...
...At the same time, liberal society was destroying all the status rewards of hard work and achievement among the poor...
...RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS: INSIDE THE CLOSED SOCIETY, by Kevin Klose...
...Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 is a fierce polemic about the failure of Great Society liberalism to improve the lot of America's poor...
...but since the actual development was none too appealing, neither, ultimately, is Lukacs, not even when he presents himself in the best possible light...
...Was the reality that young activists faced later on too complex and difficult for them to handle in life and in art...
...Danny's world is grim...
...by 1981, the same company, Hospital Corporation of America, owned or managed more than 300 hospitals, with 43,000 beds...
...Lukacs's autobiographical sketch makes a point of denying the significance of his Jewish background: "Of pure Jewish family...
...These he has thoughtfully assembled...
...represent a powerful force resisting public accountability and participation...
...THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS, by Josef §kvo reeky...
...After Teddy reads it, he responds: Do you know what Helen's always made me want to do...
...Proponents of various isms may bridle—may, indeed, foam at the mouth—as they encounter some aspects of reality that they have had to deny energetically in order to keep their particular equation functioning...
...He seems to have judged other writers less by how astute they were than by how thoroughly they remained within the system...
...He could therefore explore the basic challenges that the mythical "Soviet man and woman" face in trying to meet their economic quotas at work, caring for their health, and enjoying what little leisure they have...
...Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson...
...He insists he was never afflicted with neurosis...
...They disliked the idea of corporations supplying medical treatment for their employees through "company physicians," a policy that directly hit the doctor's pocketbook...
...If carefully designed, some reductions in inequality might even raise it...
...251...
...His father was a selfmade banker, against whom Lukacs rebelled by becoming a Communist—yet not so angrily as to make his father turn against him...
...The return to Hungary after the war made life no more secure...
...Because it was easier for others to get away with crime, it was easier to obtain drugs...
...From his perspective, Jessie's view is finally too hard on him and too determined to do right in each small instance...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...6, 1978...
...Having previously lived for a year in the dreary provincial capital of Minsk as a teacher of English, Binyon was better prepared to face the oddities of Russian life than most Westerners...
...If the line of causation ran in the opposite direction from what Murray suggests, we would need another explanation for why poverty appears to have increased after the late 1960s...
...How SHOULD POVERTY PROGRAMS BE DESIGNED and run...
...Yet the quality of the colleges of the period was deplorable...
...For some people, their minds were long ago simply set by repeated assurances that the trade-off is a rock-bottom social-scientific proposition, a modern analytical successor to the biblical "The poor ye have always with you...
...Brown is painstaking with the subject and fearless, even ruthlessly so, with the conflict between her two main characters...
...Other worlds are interwoven among them: the stultifyingly "hopeful" dawn in postwar Czechoslovakia, the wacky, dangerous, desperate-sad world of the Czech exiles in Toronto, and Prague literary life during the Dubcek Spring...
...In real terms, median family income in 1980 was no higher than it was in 1969...
...It is the most fruitful set of programmatic ideas I have seen...
...Laws changed, as did political organizations, and blacks began to determine their own political course...
...It is clear that all that has been broken in understanding and sympathy between the Carlls is unlikely to be mended...
...THE DIFFERENT ways in which Teddy and Jessie respond to the reality of the 1980s defines them as characters and shapes the central conflict of the novel...
...They hold that both nearequality or complete equality, if either can be imagined, can confidently be declared to be in conflict with efficiency...
...There is Smiricky himself in his several incarnations, the middle-aged professor and the adolescent Danny...
...When Danny discovers him, Prema is hiding in his room, trying ineffectually to treat a nasty burn with Nivea...
...There it takes on the character of those axiomatic beliefs that divide competent from incompetent economists...
...New York: W W. Norton...
...It was easier to get away with crime...
...Take Danny's brief, inept career in sabotage, a plan for disarming the Messerschmidts that is a bit of adolescent folly conceived largely in order to impress a girl...
...They settle in Mississippi, to live their lives, to work, raise children, and try to "keep the faith...
...Teddy tries to escape into sporadic, futile, and sometimes dangerous political activities and into nostalgic self-indulgence, thereby widening the rift in the family...
...There are two reasons...
...In an argument about black activism with a friend (a black woman lawyer who continues the struggle in her daily job), Teddy is accused of not being able to adapt to the long struggle, the beginning: "Of something you can't deal with, Teddy love...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company...
...Brown again takes risks here—this time artistic and psychological ones—not only with the interior monologue of the diary itself, its repetitiveness and desperate confusions, but with her effort to reproduce the texture of early adolescence and its capacity for extremes of self-dramatization...
...Until this time, physicians had been able to believe they were independent practitioners, masters of their own fate...
...In 1760, the first licensure law requiring prospective examination of physicians was passed in New York City...
...The struggle between their views—between heroic ideals and dreams on one side and events of ordinary existence on the other—provides the substance of the novel...
...as the fleet of fire engines expanded, the number of fires increased...
...No sooner do we catch on to the meaning of the action at hand, breathe a sigh of relief, and settle back to enjoy the rest of the story, than Skvorecky breaks off the action and offers a new scene...
...But he is patently wrong...
...But this view ignores what is perhaps the most powerful of social incentives: the desire for membership—the need to belong, to be respected and accepted, to contribute and have one's contributions appreciated...
...They are quite different...
...Rosellen Brown's novel tries to assess this retreat and its consequences (with some over-the-shoulder glances at the movement itself) and to confront what happens to political activists when the dust settles...
...A peculiar psychological portrait emerges from Lukacs's account of these events...
...17.95...
...Georg Lukacs wanted to write his autobiography shortly before he died in 1971, but his health wouldn't permit it...
...Certainly not there," said Lenecek unhappily...
...Prospects for any immediate national health program are dim...
...A former hero, he cannot tolerate the indistinctness of the present...
...For there were, of course, a great many "Blums" in Eastern and Central Europe— intellectuals emerging from Jewish backgrounds who helped articulate the ideas of the Communist future and who played major roles in bringing that future to pass, and who then discovered that it offered them as little place in society as the feudal past had once offered...
...Lukacs was, of course, also an expedient man...
...If Murray's data are questionable and his logic is suspect, then the third part of this argument, in which he recommends that we abolish the welfare state, surely is invalid...
...Two of my colleagues at Harvard, David Ellwood and Lawrence Summers, recently examined the data on cash assistance to the nonelderly poor and found very little real increase between 1970 and 1980— from $13.5 billion to $18.9 billion (in constant 1980 dollars), which translates into just $93 per nonelderly poor person over the entire decade...
...Their power was recognized even by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, in 1943, told a key Senate committee chairman: "We can't go up against the state medical societies, we just can't do it...
...But no one can say it lacks dramatic events...
...Freudianism, as he says, had no appeal to him...
...They must be typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...The extra $93 per poor person distributed over the decade in cash assistance would not dramatically alter this outcome...
...One of them, Istvan Etirsi, has combined these materials with earlier interviews and presented the results as Record of a Life...
...He bases his assertion on hypotheses about the impossibility of creating categories of beneficiaries that do not directly induce others into the same dependent state...
...249 LIFE IN RUSSIA, by Michael Binyon...
...CIVIL WARS, by Rosellen Brown...
...the "system" drove you to it...
...A hoary rule of social science holds that correlations—even if present—do not imply causation...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Although quietly put, the argument and evidence repeatedly jolt—how could we have, one must ask, so steadily misread the world around us...
...Before then, the output of the average American worker was increasing about 3 percent each year...
...He told the New Left Review, in an interview included in the book, that he "always thought the worst form of socialism was better to live in than the best form of capitalism...
...Even so, he spent two months under Soviet arrest during his Moscow exile...
...Many well-off people presumably feel good in their belief in "the big trade-off...
...He believed in Stalinism sincerely...
...Anatoli Koryagin, a psychiatrist who rejected the official diagnosis of Nikitin's alleged mental illness and was sent to prison camp for this and other "crimes...
...An explanation of the man's character and behavior must come from somewhere else—perhaps from The Historical Novel, which he wrote in Moscow...
...It would be a mistake for those on the left to ignore this book...
...There's a wealthy Canadian entrepreneur of culture, a Russian poet and his inarticulate interpreter, there are aged Czech legionnaires who fought in the First World War, an American Nazi, a priest turned state security agent, a Canadian professor who belatedly discovers Dada...
...They fought continually against compulsory medical insurance, as that goal began to be debated more frequently in the country...
...His first chapter is a strikingly original diagnosis of how economists think about income distribution...
...follow...
...Totalitarian regimes engage in this sort of tinkering consciously, for political gain, and on a scale approaching delusional thinking...
...The new entrants lacked the skills necessary to be highly productive...
...She cannot yearn for a past when the present demands her attention, and she views with skepticism the possibilities for a radical politics of the kind they once knew...
...He counsels that any social transfer inevitably increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer in the first place...
...The other is Joseph Caren's Equality, Moral Incentives, and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), which examines the theoretical possibility of using the incentives of a market system without any income differentials, a possibility largely dismissed in economics as no more promising than perpetual motion...
...To be sure, loyalty led to some asinine judgments...
...Despite these important contributions to our full knowledge of Soviet society, Klose's book is weak in historical research...
...He goes on to say: As it turns out, there is one set of economic bargains in the industrial countries with strong labor and social democratic roots and quite a different set in countries where labor movements are weak or divided and business ideologies are dominant...
...The Chernenko regime has now taken direct legal action against Yelena Bonner, effectively cutting all communication from Sakharov to the outside world...
...and from this plausible intuition many people, including many economists, have jumped—an enormous jump—to the conclusion that the less the economic differential, the less the effort...
...So says the man who called himself "Blum...
...as welfare programs burgeoned, so did urban crime, illegitimacy, and the number of families permanently dependent on welfare...
...do not work, and we will make sure that your existence is so uncomfortable that any job will be preferable to it...
...Meanwhile, the physicians had campaigned vigorously against public treatment of the sick, requirements for reporting cases of tuberculosis and venereal disease, and efforts of public health authorities to create health centers for preventive, curative medical services...
...Characteristically, Jessie deals with these two children, trying to make them part of the family (the Carlls have two children of their own), trying to understand—though not always effectively— the reality of their loss...
...Of a long quiet time and unflamboyant action and behind-the-scenes tinkering, and that isn't visible enough for you...
...For that reason alone it's a remarkable book...
...Even if it is assumed that federal spending on the poor increased over the same period that poverty grew, there is no reason to suppose that the former caused the latter...
...Naturally the book is jumpy and fragmentary...
...Where once reporters' books on Russia suffered rejection or were relegated to remainder shelves if published, detente, however brief, launched a flood of books about Russia by reporters...
...By the time he was 45 years old, the Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky had survived a dizzying succession of political systems: Masaryk's democratic republic, the Nazi protectorate, the postwar social democratic republic, Stalinist rule after the 1948 coup, the humanist socialism of Dubcek's Spring, and finally, in the weeks before his exile in 1969, Soviet occupation...
...He contends that everything grew worse because the poverty programs made them worse...
...As a result real wages began to level off...
...It will surprise many conservatives and neoclassical economists to learn that positive-sum gains tend to be 241 statistically superior in societies where labor and business operate more as equals and where egalitarian values are better entrenched...
...This story is graphic evidence of the particularly sadistic form of living death the KGB has developed for dissidents in its "special" psychiatric clinics...
...Smiricky's experiences in the vastly different worlds of Canadian academia after Vietnam and Czechoslovakia during the Second World War contribute two major strands to the novel...
...Unemployment insurance, workmen's compensation, Social Security disability, and Medicare for the disabled together cost $56 billion in 1980, up from $25 billion a decade before...
...In this work he discussed epic heroes in the novels of Walter Scott...
...Prema still said nothing...
...For those many liberals and liberal/radicals who have been searching for the new program that they believe will someday take the place of a now largely exhausted tradition begun with the New Deal, look here...
...Murray's arguments are tightly drawn...
...DANNY'S STORY—the adventures of the adolescent Smiricky—makes the point that human experience is far more complex and contradictory than we can bear, cognitively or emotionally...
...Skvorecky jolts us out of this reductionist complacency and forces us to ransom abandoned meanings...
...In 1980, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that the arrival of a new medical-industrial complex was "the most important health-care development of the day...
...This act of heroism comes out of far more disinterested motives than did Danny's and is far more effective in hurting the German war effort...
...So as the average American family's income leveled off in the 1970s, the income of the poor also could be expected to level off...
...The Guardian, competitor of the Times, compensated for having no resident correspondent in Moscow by making liberal use of reports from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times...
...Medical schools, good, bad, and indifferent, grew rapidly...
...It's daunting to discover that until the year of his death, Lukacs persisted in believing that something about the purge trials must have been legitimate...
...The daughter's memories and reflections on the strange world she has entered (as she is nearing a breakdown and a suicide attempt) are interpolated in the text of the novel as her diary...
...A five-legged pig...
...Each criticized the other...
...Indeed, the real value of AFDC benefits (the only cash assistance program for the nonelderly, nondisabled poor) has fallen sharply since 1976...
...To have set the argument of the novel in this mold was a risk...
...When the new revolution was overthrown he tried defecting to Yugoslavia, which he later regretted...
...While expressing a healthy dislike for Louis, Klose misses some of the more nefarious aspects of his activities...
...You guessed it: the same people who are always at the end of the queue—the poor, mostly black, mostly inner-city...
...Lukacs played the part of vanguard intellectual with absolute certainty of conviction...
...And Danny's love, Nadia, is dying painfully from tuberculosis and malnutrition...
...Paper $7.95...
...the American Hospital Association, in another survey, counted 245 multihospital systems with 301,894 beds...
...Six months of clandestine meetings and fear and trembling followed, with Lukacs convinced that Kun planned to get him conveniently martyred...
...In the first place, once you start you won't have any choice, as Skvorecky is a most seductive storyteller...
...The American physician has been portrayed, in turn, as snake-oil healer, charlatan, kindly old country doctor, and venerated high priest of the art of healing...
...Poverty increased— or, more accurately, the plight of the nonelderly poor stopped improving—because the queue lengthened...
...How can one, after all, be expected to struggle to become an adult and construct a life, with only a past to imitate and nothing but disappointments in the present...
...Would they also say the more the differential, the more the effort...
...In the operation of Medicare, the national administration sought the cooperation of the hospitals and the doctors...
...TRACING THE DEVELOPMENT of American hospitals, Starr presents the growth of the private sector for 246 acute treatment, and a public sector for chronic care...
...And who was at the end of the queue...
...What the novel does not offer us—granted Jessie's critical view of Teddy's politics— is any direct sense of what a more authentic politics might be like and where, in this case, the civil rights movement might have gone in the '70s...
...Fifty...
...There was nothing petty about his highest aspirations...
...That's a diabolical thing to say but I want to pinch her till she screams...
...Railroads and mines were among the first companies to appoint company doctors...
...19.95...
...In the first part he contends that precisely as the federal government's cash outlays for the needy increased between 1950 and 1980, a steadily greater number of Americans became impoverished...
...Paradoxically, some of the measures against which it battled have later proved to be a bonanza for the physician...
...All these changes in the incentives pointed in the same direction," Murray writes, It was easier to get along without a job...
...But over the ensuing 15 years, the neighborhood becomes all black except for themselves, and their erstwhile comrades in integration make it abundantly clear that they are not wanted: "heavy breathers" call in the night, someone puts skewers in their son's bicycle tires and sugar in their gas tank...
...THAT RESEARCH AND THOUGHTFUL ANALYSIS on hypothetical circumstances are possible, even though economists wholly neglect them, is evident in recent studies, appearing in a variety of journals, of the political scientist and psychologist Robert E. Lane—see, for example, his "Waiting for Lefty" in Theory and Society (vol...
...Murray asserts that there is no way to avoid the trap of perverse incentives...
...From exile, he was ordered back to Hungary by Bela Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Communists, to take charge of underground agitation...
...And the commissar for education tells us that he voted to execute two men at a Central Committee meeting...
...So much talent, so much courage—in the service of so much evil, so much cowardice...
...She's a child and you're not a child," she snaps, "You're responsible for your thoughts and actions in a way she just isn't prepared to be...
...The iron grip on economic thought of the conventional doctrine positing conflict between justice and growth, as Kuttner puts the issue in his title, was once more demonstrated in the late Arthur Okun's widely read Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade-Off The book was a contest, Kuttner nicely observes, between Okun's "egalitarian instincts as a citizen and his inegalitarian training as a professional economist...
...By the late 1960s productivity improvements averaged about 2 percent a year...
...Unequal societies tend to resist such positive-sum bargains, for their leaders have a material and ideological stake in perpetuating inequalities...
...All the more wondrous then that the novel unrolls smoothly, gracefully, with the sensual impact of a gorgeous film, the separate scenes piling up relentlessly into a complex and subtle structure...
...What "bargain...
...The social mechanisms that make possible a reconciliation between equality and efficiency he examines in detail in chapters on capital, on savings, labor, trade, taxes, and social welfare...
...It was easier for a man to have a baby without being responsible for it, for a woman to have a baby without having a husband...
...What, then, holds up this edifice of belief...
...and surely these people were as much influenced by their background as any other social class...
...WE NOW HAVE BEFORE US two new books...
...In such societies, equity-enhancing social bargains are shunned—not because they would harm growth but because they would transform relationships of privilege and power...
...Starr predicts that more doctors will go into group practice, more hospitals will come under the mantle of multihospital systems, and more insurance companies will be directly involved in health maintenance organizations (HMOs...
...Klose also explains why she is so important a political figure in her own right...
...The examinations were easy, partly because professors were paid by a student only if he passed...
...The same perverse correlation crops up when Murray looks at poverty programs in detail: as Labor Department work and training programs grew, so did unemployment among the poor...
...During the war with Romania, he served as political commissar in the army and ordered eight of his own men executed in a public square...
...CAREFULLY DISSECTED, Murray's three-part argument has several analytic weaknesses...
...The potential profits of such chains provided a fascinating lure...
...In 1970, the largest for-profit system controlled 23 hospitals...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Starr also sees the development of a corporate sector in health care as "likely to aggravate inequalities in access to health care...
...The one exception is Le Monde's correspondent Michel Tatu, whose brilliant Power in the Kremlin was published in 1967...
...It will make up part of the new conventional wisdom about the nature of poverty...
...Despite a few moments of very real terror, Danny's scheme comes to nothing...
...Murray's logic suffers from a similar difficulty...
...From the start Brown chooses sides so that the battle is not an equal one...
...In 1956 the democratic impulse came again to the forefront...
...Just what does he mean...
...In the face of such indifference, Prema can't quite help striking a self-congratulatory pose, and then the doctor lets him have it: "How many do you think they'll take, eh...
...The boy attempts to argue that his suitcase contains only a single pig legally slaughtered by an uncle in the country...
...Daniel Smiricky, a Czech writer in exile, is teaching English literature to a motley crew of ignorant undergraduates, including an American draft dodger and a19-year-old Scandinavian goddess whom Smiricky contemplates seducing...
...The lost time that he goes in search of is lost not because it has been forgotten, but because it has been tampered with—thematized, simplified, reduced to fit comfortable formulas and catchy slogans...
...The rise and current status of the profession and the health-care structure are described in detail in Paul Starr's critical appraisal, The Social Transformation of American Medicine...
...He came back but ten didn't...
...In Sweden and Austria, a bargain is explicit in the form of a resolution by representatives of business, labor, and government, of issues about wages, employment, productivity, and prices...
...There are some hints...
...419 pp...
...In America's early days, not all those practicing medicine had formal training...
...The Czech foreman in the Messerschmidt factory discovers the parts Danny has tampered with and the damage is repaired before the German authorities find out...
...Get rid of the entire federal-income and welfaresupport structure for working-aged persons, including AFDC, Medicaid, Food Stamps, subsidized housing, and the rest...
...The children's mother was at best a conventional Southern conservative totally opposed to Teddy's political beliefs and involvements...
...and in fact Kuttner makes explicit the main line of prescription he would like to see the U.S...
...The urge to rebel and the urge to remain obedient evidently pulled at him with equal strength...
...But while he believed in Stalinism insincerely, above all he believed in it sincerely...
...because he was fortunate enough to have lost the factional struggle against Kun in the Hungarian Communist movement (it was Kun who got executed...
...Political dissidents and activitsts of the Jewish emigration movement were buried under police repression during Binyon's tenure...
...The AMA and the state medical societies consistently protected their own interests...
...He moved to Moscow, where the danger facing prominent Communists was hardly less severe...
...However, Binyon admits that he avoided writing about the political dissidents because their concerns "are not the issues that are changing Soviet society...
...Murray's argument does not support the proposition that we abolish welfare, of course...
...In Danny's world, the meaning of human acts is equally shifting and contradictory...
...There were fewer people in the program in 1980 (before the Reagan budget cuts) than in 1972, despite a dramatic increase in the number of people living in single-parent families...
...George Gilder, Milton Friedman, and various mouthpieces of the Heritage Foundation have been warning for years of the corrosive effects of the welfare state upon the incentives for the poor to work and maintain families...
...Such an argument sheds little light on what kinds of incentives would move people in the event of substantial structural change in economic or 240 social organization, change of a character that would alter not only the pattern of incentives but the inclinations of people to respond...
...New York: Pantheon Books...
...His empirical findings alone let in fresh air...
...What do you mean 'mixed up...
...As he puts it: Egalitarian societies have an interest in devising social bargains that reconcile equality with economic performance...
...He was forced to renounce these Theses but says in Record of a Life that privately he never did change his position...
...He may have been influenced by the experience of his predecessor, David Bonavia, who was expelled by Soviet authorities in 1972 for writing extensively about the new wave of dissidence...
...q cially the press...
...Doctors also inveighed against the "corporate practice of medicine...
...but above all, he believed in it insincerely...
...THE ECONOMIC ILLUSION: FALSE CHOICES BETWEEN PROSPERITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE, by Robert Kuttner...
...Murray discusses and dismisses several alternative hypotheses, but there is one he doesn't fully grapple with...
...At base, it is an argument to the effect that people brought up in market or capitalist societies and taught a set of expectations consonant with such societies seem to need the reward patterns of those societies to keep them moving...
...Again, I think the risk pays off...
...514 pp...
...278 pp...
...Surely, there are many ways in which poverty programs could be conditioned upon affirmative obligations designed to reduce welfare dependency rather than increase it...
...There is Irene, and there are Nadia and Marie and a dozen other girls whom Smiricky has pursued or been pursued by...
...He also notes the early discrimination against Catholic and Jewish physicians in elite private hospitals...
...The illogic of the conventional line of belief is clear: it contemplates a drastically different future in which the incentive system is altered without simultaneously contemplating the effect or direction of possible changes in dispositions that so drastic a change would bring about...
...This is because real benefit levels shrank by close to 25 percent...
...Meanwhile obedient loyalty made him a good Communist indeed, 242 no matter how hard his comrades tried to get him killed...
...Most of the worker health plans expanded by companies during World War II were controlled by management...
...As a result," says Starr, "the administration of Medicare was lodged in the private insurance systems originally extended to suit provider interests...
...The theses of the students were "generally unoriginal and occasionally barely literate...
...And it's true that the arrogant self-certainty gives his life a trace of something majestic...
...During his tenure, Binyon wrote a steady stream of features on daily life in the Soviet Union that stood out in the dull pages of the Times...
...His conclusion: fire engines cause fires...
...He said it as though it were a pleasant surprise...
...One survey in 1980 found 176 systems owning or managing 294,199 hospital beds...
...The neighbors want the house for "one of their own...
...If differentials can be so great as to interfere with efficiency, how can these true believers know that the differentials we see about us today are not too great...
...He finds humor in unexpected places...
...She is able to be particularly attentive, as Jessie herself is, to the children in the novel and captures their perspectives...
...She was going to bring them all pain...
...Search the Record of a Life, and you will find no great display of introspection or personal analysis...
...IN THE 1930s, partly because of the influence of the Depression, the physicians' control of the hospitals began to be challenged by administrators...
...Thank you for your kind cooperation...
...The book shows that Lukacs went further in these ways than even a figure like Bertolt Brecht...
...If Kuttner is largely diagnostic rather than prescriptive, diagnoses nevertheless imply or point to possible prescriptions...
...The Lukacs we see in Record of a Life is such a man...
...No, sir...
...A Scottian hero is a man, usually from a doomed social class rooted in the past, who gets caught in a vast social struggle and therefore reflects all the great historical currents of his time...
...Starr warns that the "corporate health services industry will...
...But it does suggest that we rethink how welfare is provided, and how society— through its welfare programs, affirmative action programs, and the police and educational services—indirectly confers status and responsibility within a community...
...In 1919 he joined the Communist revolution in Hungary, which established what must be the most culturally distinguished dictatorship in modern times (dictatorship is Lukacs's own term for the regime...
...He does say that in the factional struggles of the middle '20s he sided with Stalin against Zinoviev, whom he particularly hated, and also against Trotsky...
...Each fresh juxtaposition sets all that has come before in a slightly different context, so that patterns of meaning coalesce, volatilize, and blossom into new patterns...
...the other is by Kevin Klose, who covered the same beat for the Washington Post from 1977 to 1981...
...The issue of heroism takes on a different aspect as we meet another young saboteur, Prema, Danny's friend who has managed to blow up a German gasoline dump single-handedly...
...All those fluttering, failing hearts, trying only to sustain one body at a time...
...Causation may have run in the opposite direction, like the fires and the fire engines: the poverty programs might have come as a response to growing poverty...
...Meanwhile, unions bargained for health-care provisions in their contracts...
...and for many of them their professional folktales seem to satisfy...
...Binyon delves deeply into two facets of Soviet life that have prime importance: the overburdened role of women, and the odd, rebellious behavior of youth...
...I recall also the four days I spent reading the novel, during which time I snapped at several people—we all indulge in our share of denial...
...A society that cannot make such a commitment will fail to...
...It is the politics of revolutionary gestures, inappropriate and outworn, that Brown is radically critical of...
...What about benefits that are expressly conditioned upon work and sacrifice, such as the various "work fare" experiments now in effect...
...This seemingly haphazard juxtaposition of events, scenes, moods, and characters could have— should have—produced a hash of disjointed fragments...
...No resident correspondent in Moscow knows enough of how the Central Committee and the Politburo work to write with authority as a Kremlinologist, and to do so readably...
...What Klose has to say about the Bonners is particularly important because Sakharov's own battle with Soviet authority has blocked from outside view the poignant history of these women...
...No, not as a broad generalization, for they know that too much differential can weaken morale, create disruptive social antagonisms, even immediately and directly undercut the incentives of those at the economic bottom, for whom the grossness of the differentials makes their own positions seem hopeless...
...In practice, redistributive measures take more of a toll on economic efficiency when they are carried out grudgingly, in the inhospitable climate of business supremacy and social conflict...
...One is David Schweickart's Capitalism or Worker Control...
...included, the bargain is more implicit than explicit...
...These worlds are peopled by a large cast...
...The movement's elite troops retreated or disbanded, not knowing where or how to start new battles...
...Klose acknowledges substantial assistance from another former Moscow correspondent, David Satter, an American who reported for the Financial Times of London...
...For many years, the American Medical Association, the chief organization of the physicians, controlled the number of medical schools, and thus could keep a rein on the number of doctors produced...
...His most recent novel, The Engineer of Human Souls, is something of a guided tour through the chaos of 20th-century European political history...
...Certainly, the movement changed the face of America...
...But the novel can also be read as a provocative, illuminating document in the study of human memory...
...He explores alternative hypotheses...
...He also points out that in 18th-century England the physicians "stood only at the margins of the gentry class, struggling for the patronage of the rich in the hope of acquiring enough wealth to buy an estate and a title...
...she's voiceless like a little cutout doll or something, and all I can think to do is hit her or pull her hair or make her react somehow...
...Most important of these cases are those of Alexei Nikitin, who attempted to form a true workers' trade union, and of Yelena Bonner, wife of Andrei Sakharov, and Ruf Bonner, her mother...
...New York: Knopf...
...Jessie recoils from Teddy's view of Helen and his focus on himself...
...Give poor parents 237 educational vouchers with which they can shop for their children's schools...
...A tension between rebellion and loyalty characterized Lukacs's politics, too...
...Skvorecky has communicated with force and precision the wrenching dislocation suffered by a whole generation of Central European exiled writers and intellectuals...
...The book's chief weakness, however, is in the meager political analysis Binyon attempts...
...But it is the concept of a bargain that Kuttner uses to unify his findings about national differences in the reconciliation of equality and efficiency...
...commit crimes, and we will put you in jail...
...And where does it belong...
...Repeatedly he shows that conflicts between equality and efficiency are the consequences of poor policy design rather than inevitabilities...
...Expedience was surely as useful as a bad apartment in helping him to survive...
...How TO EXPLAIN such a man...
...Why, then, read such a challenging, sometimes painful, always demanding book...
...And as competition for jobs increased, unemployment among poor minorities— the least competitive—could be expected to rise...
...The dramatic increases in social spending that took place between 1970 and 1980 were primarily in social insurance programs whose benefits went overwhelmingly to the middle class...
...That is, if Scott had ever written about farmers versus cowboys, the hero would have been an Indian...
...But one may conclude that, like all paradoxical statements, this particular paradox is untrue...
...IN KUTTNER'S BOOK, the reconsideration of conventional thinking on equality and efficiency is given a further push by the pragmatic concreteness of his analysis and abundant empirical evidence...
...Starr documents the rapid growth of profit-making chains...
...The action of the novel appears through Jessie's acute and painful perceptions of the present and unsparing analysis of that heroic past from which Teddy cannot extricate himself...
...This disruption in what had been the most stable of political systems was a new phenomenon and deserves more attention than Binyon gives it...
...When Helen is lost in the natural disaster of the story (a spring flood that nearly drowns the new, white suburb into which they've finally moved), her diary is found...
...Because it was easier to get along without a job, it was easier to ignore education...
...Lecherous thoughts of his student Irene set the middle-aged Smiricky drifting back into the past, to Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and to Nadia, a poor village girl with whom he worked at forced labor in a Messerschmidt factory...
...The left-wing dictatorship was overthrown and he had to hide in an upstairs loft while police searched the apartment...
...In addition, advances in medical research and science contributed to better diagnosis and treatment and helped to elevate the doctor to an honored position in society...
...An indication of the low esteem in which the profession was held in America, even in 1869, was a comment in a professional journal: "In all of our American colleges, medicine has ever been, and is now, the most despised of all the professions which liberally educated men are expected to enter...
...While attention began to be focused on hospital charges and doctor fees, a new development has appeared, the growth of hospital chain corporations...
...And what about benefits that are really investments in the future capacities of poor people to take care of themselves...
...Obviously, differential economic rewards stimulate effort...
...17.50...
...There have been outstanding individuals in the profession, but the implications of the Hippocratic oath have not always controlled doctors' behavior...
...in the second, it will leave you a person of larger understanding, both wiser and more gentle...
...By the mid-1970s they were down to 1 percent...
...After the late 1960s, it was assumed that if you were poor and dependent on a combination of welfare and crime, you were not to blame...
...WHAT DO THESE DEVELOPMENTS MEAN for American patients...
...To cope with this, the American public will have to exert greater efforts to protect its health care than it has yet managed to do...
...It will often be cited...
...He came to Marxism from anarcho-syndicalism, and ever after his political ideas contained a faintly libertarian or democratic streak...
...We only know that the solution, in her terms, has to be reached without denying the ties that bind us to the real world and our perceptions of it...
...It is worth noting that he did much of his research at Columbia University...
...Her task, as she has charted it for herself, is an unenviable one, for the downward progression— from heightened consciousness and moral excitement to the routines of daily life—is inevitable and might be dampening...
...He assumes that the most important incentives that a society can hold out to its poorest members are negative ones: "Do not study, and we will throw you out of school...
...Then a move began to develop formal standards...
...She's one of those empty Southern girls I grew up with...
...Careful reading of every available publication, street observations, and the relatively few conversations a foreigner can arrange with Soviet citizens provide more information than many journalists anticipate when they first arrive in Moscow...
...Similarly, as Jessie reflects on her own on the question of public and private life, she thinks: It was time that did it all, they floated in it, in its solution, and everything disintegrated slowly as if it were water...
...That can't be right, sir," said Lenecek...
...America's growing class of young, moderately affluent, professional and technical workers have shown increasing responsiveness to any arguments tending to legitimate their self-absorption...
...As just noted, economists do not seriously study that question...
...Some economists acknowledge the possibility— even probability—that cautious moves in the direction of equality might not reduce efficiency...
...Simultaneously, 20 million postwar baby boomers entered the work force, along with 5 million middle-aged women...
...Many of those have been reedited for Life in Russia...
...Curiously, the fundamental conflict between equality and efficiency has never been demonstrated—or even near-demonstrated...
...Liberal criminal-law reforms during the era reduced risks attendant on committing crimes...
...15.95...
...The AMA mobilized its forces in the early fight against Medicare, but when it became a part of Social Security, physicians discovered that the Medicare payments provided a substantial part of their income...
...Their father, as revealed through his daughter's memories, was a fanatical racist and a brutally destructive man...
...There was public time—at a sufficient distance it was called history—and there was private time that beat like a small hot heart inside the body of that history...
...On the other hand, if you were poor and managed to escape from welfare and crime, you deserved no praise, for you were merely benefiting from racial quotas and other special programs designed to lift you out of poverty...
...Even the civil rights movement, so full of public images of fellowship and actual accomplishment, has not yet provided us with art reflecting that political experience...
...He has rewritten material from other readily available sources, and the book is therefore deficient in original content...
...This is not a favored or common subject in recent fiction...
...The family crisis is precipitated by a tragic accident: Teddy's sister and brother-in-law die in an automobile crash and their two children (Helen 13, O'Neill 8) become the Carlls' responsibility as "next of kin...
...It is simply the kind of fiction that relies on the cumulative weight and effect of ordinary detail, meticulously observed, with great psychological precision...
...He continued siding with Stalin right through the purge trials...
...24.95...
...And again he managed to survive, this time through what he believed were four pieces of good luck: because he had useful contacts high in party circles...
...Lukacs was a man of action, indeed a man of violence, though it seems odd to say this...
...American politics, difficult in any case for novelists to get a handle on, has seemed especially elusive in its more radical forms...
...When the Gestapo officer forces him to lay out the parts on a table, a chillingly hilarious scene ensues as the boy struggles to shuffle the body parts around to hide the extraneous legs and hams...
...The medical societies found themselves contending with the medical schools...
...You couldn't escape the public part, you were in it and it in you—like DDT in an apple, maybe, part of each cell as it grew...
...His "Blum Theses" in the late 1920s (Blum was his movement pseudonym) advocated democracy within the Communist movement as the correct form for Communist dictatorship over the rest of society...
...The first part, in which Murray tries to correlate federal spending on the poor with a rise in poverty, rests upon some questionable assumptions about what categories of aid really have gone to the poor...
...Teddy yearns for the political past, the ideas and the passion that swept him into action...
...Well, a pig has only four legs, sir...
...Nor, in the intellectual tradition of economic theory, has it been seriously investigated...
...He boasts at one point that his own Marxism was entirely pure, with no bourgeois alloy...
...The very quality of live experience, after all, is its 248 complexity and ambiguity, its contradictions and multi-facetedness...
...For it is far more than a polemic...
...Implementation is a messy and difficult subject, lying far below the lofty ideological plane on which broad propositions about the "American system" are sounded...
...IF BINYON TOOK a macrojournalistic approach to Soviet society, Kevin Klose took the micro alternative...
...He preferred exile in Hollywood to exile in Moscow...
...In recent years, two unusual theoretical studies challenge conventional thinking, insofar as these resistances permit the challenge to be recognized...
...And yet, in certain aspects I found this last section to be the most intriguing, for it touches on issues of program design and administration that are rarely raised explicitly...
...In philosophical matters, too, he never stopped citing Stalin's inspirational role, long after the practical advantages of bowing to the Soviet dictator had ended...
...This handy trick is not to be despised...
...But then for black Americans—as for all of us—it didn't change it nearly enough, leaving a society still fractured by racial inequality...
...Lukacs kept a low profile, as wisdom dictated, but in 1956 he rejoined the government almost in a replay of 1919, this time as commissar for culture...
...Now, in a brutally changing world where vast corporations assume new power, he may be forced to say good-bye to his old independence...
...During World War II, the total enrollment in group hospital plans jumped from less than 7 million to about 26 million...
...Edited by Istvan Eersi, translated by Rodney Livingstone...
...BartOk, Kodaly, and Dohnanyi were the commissars for music...
...Because it was easier to get away with crime, it was easier to support a drug habit...
...And back he went into Soviet internment (in a prison that happened to be Dracula's Transylvanian castle, a fact unrecorded in Record of a Life...
...But they go on to say that any moves that approach equality at all closely will clearly reduce efficiency...
...once we reduce some bit of experience to a single unequivocal meaning, we can file it away and cease living it...
...One is by Michael Binyon, who wrote from Moscow for the London Times from 1978 to 1982...
...Starr, a Harvard sociologist, presents a portrait both of medicine's early struggles in the United States and its situation today...
...In 1980, the nonprofit hospital organizations operated 57.6 percent of the beds in multihospital systems...
...His assignment covered an eccentric period in Soviet history—the rapid turnover at the top following the deaths of both Brezhnev and Andropov...
...and because his Moscow apartment was unenviable...
...There will be a temptation, particularly for readers of this journal, to dismiss the book out of hand as the work of yet another apologist for the current retrograde drift of American politics...
...In the final scene of the novel, after they find Helen and the family is ostensibly reunited, Jessie thinks of her own feelings: "Damn...
...Danny fetches the doctor, a young man who seems oddly unimpressed by the act...
...Blue Cross held threequarters of the market...
...His writing is lucid...
...Instead, rely on local voluntary services and unemployment insurance to pick up the real hardship cases...
...The two sets of data—the productivity slowdown and the army of new entrants—are partly related, of course...
...Still, his survey of the human side of Soviet life is among the best in recent books out of Moscow...
...In some other countries, the U.S...
...But what the solution to the problem is245 the problem of reconciling political struggles with the intensity of personal life and its perspective on history—is not part of the story that Brown has written...
...204 pp...
...With the considerable in-fighting among physicians and physicians' groups, together with the glaring deficiencies of many shoddy medical schools, the doctor's reputation was not a shining one...
...In 1980 the second largest chain, Humana, had 92 hospitals and $1.4 billion in revenues...
...If this critical view is sometimes disturbing, it is also convincing...
...The themes of the book are grimly familiar...
...There is, obviously, a market for them...
...THE SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN MEDICINE, by Paul Starr...
...Can they really know that inequality of income and wealth is not today an obstruction to efficiency...
...Skvorecky abandons chronological narrative for a crazy quilt of scenes and events from four decades and several continents tumbled upon each other...
...He hated the West with a passion...
...Thus Blue Cross was chosen as intermediary, both for Part A and Part B of Medicare...
...The third part of Murray's argument is a prescription for what to do about poverty in America: Nothing...
...As with a hero from Scott, each 243 element of Lukacs's personality reflected another aspect of the actual development of social forces over the course of his life...
...They face unsettling changes in the coun247 try's health-care structure, a change in the relationship with the doctor and the hospital, and the frightening shadow of ever-higher medical costs for diagnosis and treatment...
...Charles Murray's elegant but flawed book should be taken as a challenge to make America's poverty programs the first step toward such an American ideal...
...In short, it makes a strong case...
...Examining the U.S., Britain, West Germany, Japan, Austria, and Sweden, he finds that movement toward equality in hard fact has promoted rather than obstructed growth...
...Yet it's hard to overestimate the faintness of this streak...
...576 pp...
...Those who were given one to two years of high-quality preschool education stayed in school longer, had better earnings prospects, were 239 less involved in crime, and got pregnant less often than their peers who began school later...
...16.95 In Civil Wars, Rosellen Brown has created a remarkable personal view of the long-term effect of the 1960s civil rights movement on two of its participants...
...Binyon approaches his subject as a reporter who knows that most of his information about the Soviet Union will come from official sources, espeRe: Letters • Dissent welcomes letters, but we must ask that they be kept to about 500 words...
...I want to pinch her arm when she's sitting there picking at her food the way she does...
...He became commissar for education...
...Klose does offer a new look at one of the more notorious Moscow characters, Victor Louis, the KGB specialist in disinformation...
...Beginning in about 1965, American productivity started to slow down...
...Did disillusion set in too quickly, once the first milestones of progress had been passed...
...This time it was Imre Nagy who got executed...
...No society, they believe, can go far down the road toward distributive justice without losing incentives and the other efficiencies sustainable only through inequality...
...He remained sure that Zinoviev and company really were in some fashion traitors...
...They so believe because the efficiency-equality conflict is an early lesson in elementary courses in economics, repeated in increasingly ritualistic declamation at progressively higher levels of training in economics...
...as federal money poured into education for the disadvantaged, their test scores declined...
...And the easier it is to get into that category—the smaller the sacrifice required to join—the more perverse the result will be...
...Evangelical soldiers of the New Right have long been equating permissiveness with moral decay...
...The American Medical Association fought fiercely against health-insurance measures submitted in the 1935 Social Security Act, and to this day it has been successful in preventing a national health insurance system...
...However, after the famous Flexner study in 1912, which thoroughly exposed the schools, many of them closed, and new standards improved the medical education system...
...The saboteur has suffered for his deed, too...
...London: Verso (distributed by Schocken...
...The Carlls mean to hold fast to their political faith and experience, deciding to stay in Mississippi and live in a newly integrated neighborhood...
...His wealthy family hired an army officer to drive him out of the country, with Lukacs disguised as the chauffeur—only since he couldn't drive, he feigned an injury and the officer took the wheel...
...The book is peppered with charts, and it contains a long appendix brimming with figures and references...
...The point was, there is a lot of new competition for jobs and income...
...This signals a return to a two-care system—one for the poor, the other for the affluent...
...In effect, he asks us to set the old doctrinal and ideological debate aside and simply look at the facts...
...he would never have followed Brecht's example...
...Clergymen, for example, frequently combined medicine and religion in their services to the congregation...
...VVith few exceptions—among them Robert Kuttner, whose book I here applaud—everyone who has been taught that remarkable mixture of cognitive crippling and liberating illumination called economic theory "knows" that equality and efficiency are at odds with each other...
...He marshals data carefully...
...It must be reached through a more complete sense of responsibility to who we are and what we see, rather than by turning away from those basic facts of life to a series of abstractions and artifices...
...He reports as fact many personal conversations and incidents that he could not have witnessed, the way he writes knowingly about Sakharov without having met the man...
...Meanwhile, some public officials used municipal hospitals to reward their faithful ward heelers with jobs...
...and that it needs to be made—unless economists are willing to stop generalizing on the issue—is hardly recognized...
...LUKACS SPENT MUCH OF HIS LIFE a hairbreadth away from his own execution...
...It saves us anguish and makes it possible for us to go on getting out of bed each morning...
...The Gestapo officer enjoys the boy's discomfort enormously: "Ein fiinfbeiniges Schwein...
...Having read many of Satter's excellent reports, and the frequent references to him here, one wonders what Satter's book would be like...
...It points toward realism and authenticity as the indispensable core of any movement for social change...
...And how many of those won't come back...
...The crucial motive to liquidate Comrade Lukacs didn't exist...
...But since his position was essentially false, since in fact Communism was intent on crushing such aspirations, his life also looks tawdry and pathetic...
...One is reminded of the apocryphal researcher who discovered that the number of fires in a certain municipality over a ten-year period was directly related to the number of fire engines the city owned...
Vol. 32 • April 1985 • No. 2
