IODICALS
FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE
the go-ahead on weapons systems before working out the mechanical bugs. American taxpayers, for example, spent $2 billion on the Army's flawed DIVAD anti-aircraft gun before it was cancelled. Once weapons projects are under way, the DOD's 233 key program managers must answer to "a Ã?Â¥variet of staff advocates," who insist on more competition in bidding, or on awarding more subcontracts to minority-owned businesses, etc. The result: N...
Lynn E. Browne, in New England
Economic Review (July-Aug. 1986), ~ederal
Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston, Mass. 02106.
One of the traditional yardsticks of economic strength is manufacturing.
Throughout most of this century, the United States boasted robust manufacturing industries (e.g., steel, motor vehicles). They consistently employed roughly 25 percent of the labor force-until 1969, when con- traction set in. 1985, the number of workers who actually produced something tangible had sunk to...
12 percent between 1960 and 1980 (versus only nine percent in the United States). Such growth tends to correlate closely with increases in gross national product per capita. Even within the United States, the poorer Southern states have smaller-than-average service sectors.
Furthermore, adds Browne, service firms do contribute to economic progress. They enable other businesses to cut costs "contracting out" for specialized work, and increase demand for manufactured products (e.g., communications...
Timothy J. Naftali and Peter O'Hagan, in SAISReview (Summer-Fall 1986), 1740 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036.
Trade between bordering nations is hardly uncommon, but Canada's de- pendence on the United States does border on the extreme. In 1960, Canada sold 55.8 percent of its exports (ranging from wood products to machine parts) down south. Today that figure is 78.8 percent.
Yet while the 25 million Canadians benefit hugely from proximity to the U.S. market, many of them have...
Related Deaths in the Home" Arthur L.
Kellermann, M.D., M.P.H., and Donald T. Reay,
M.D., in The New England Journal of Medicine
(June 12, 1986), 10 Shattuck St., Boston, Mass.
02254.
There are 120 million privately owned firearms in the United States, and they are present in roughly half of all homes. A large percentage of these weapons are kept for the expressed purpose of self-defense.
How safe are gun owners? Kellerman, a physician at the University of Tennessee, and Reay, the chief...
ington, suggest that the owners themselves, and their relatives and friends, have reason to fear the weapons.
In predominantly urban (92 percent) and white (88.4 percent) King County (1980 pop. 1,270,000), which includes Seattle, the authors exam- ined the records of- the 743 gunshot deaths that occurred between 1978 and 1983. Most (53.6 percent) of the killings took place in the home where the gun was kept. Of these 398 fatalities, 333 were suicides (83.7 per- cent), 50 were homicides (12.6...
the year 2000. Fully 88 percent of veterans aged 65 and over are covered Medicare or a private health plan. But one-third of the 12 percent who are not covered require long- term care for chronic illnesses not unique to veterans.
The Reagan administration proposes that only senior veterans living on less than $15,000 a year get VA help with nonservice disabilities. Levinsky has another idea: Washington should simply extend Medicare benefits to any elderly veterans not otherwise covered.
? "The...
Jacqueline S. Wie, in ~obnalof Social History (summer 1986), Car-negie-MeUon Univ., Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213.
'Cleanliness is next to godliness," advised John Wesley, the 18th-century Methodist. Wesley notwithstanding, notes Wilkie, a sociologist at Central Michigan University, regular bathing was a rarity for the average Arneri- can as recently as a century ago.
During the early 19th century, indoor plumbing was next to nonexis- tent. Although a few hotels (Boston's Tremont House, New York...
Gerhard
Wettig, in Aussen Politik (No. 2, 1986), 7000
Stuttgart-Hohenheirn, Schloss, West Germany.
As the long history of U.S.-Soviet
talks on arms control makes clear, the
negotiation of curbs on weaponry is a tortuous business. So, too, is the work of journalists who report on the maneuverings of the superpowers.
Wettig, a historian at the Federal Institute for Eastern and Interna- tional Studies in Cologne, West Germany, takes Wes...
IODICALS
PRESS & TELEVISION
"adamancy" for the lack of arms control progress, while the Soviet Union,
playing on "the biases of Western media people," has escaped its fair share
of bad press for the stalemate.
. Wettig's case in point is the abortive Intermediate Nuclear Forces
(INF) negotiations-in Geneva between 1981 and 1983, notably the render-
ing of "key events" in the talks in Deadly Gambits, the 1984 book by
Time's Washington bureau chief, Strobe T...