public agencies and private institutions
"Choosing Elites."
Basic Books, 10 East 53rd St., New York. N.Y. 10022.267 pp. $19.95. Author: Robert Klitparcl
At Harvard, 7.1 percent of all incoming freshmen are black. If the admissions committee were to choose students only on the basis of their Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores, that figure wo~ild fall to 1.1 percent.
So reports Klitgaard, former special as- sistant to Harvard president Derek Bok, in a statistics-laden study of the...
Charles McC. Mathias, Jr., in Annals (July 1986), 3937 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104.
Congressional campaigns may well be America's newest growth industry. Even after adjusting for inflation, between 1974 and 1984 the average cost of running for a House or Senate seat more than doubled.
Indeed, two years ago, House and Senate candidates collectively spent more than $374 million, much of it on television advertising.
To Mathias, U.S. senator (R.-Md.) and chairman of the Senate Com- mittee...
strict ceilings on overall spending and on their own personal campaign contributions.
Public financing would free politicians from many fundraising chores, says Mathias. It would also "level the playing field."
"Federalism and Competing Values in the Rea-
to the States gan Administration" Timothy J. Codan, in Publius (Winter 1986), Temple Univ., Philadel-phia, Pa. 19122.
"My administration is committed-heart and soul-to the broad principles of American federalism,"...
Robert L. Dudley and Craig R. Ducat, in The Western Political Quarterly (June 1986), 258 Orson Spencer Hall, Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112.
During the past decade, a conservative reaction to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society has taken hold in political Washington. The judiciary has not been immune, contend Dudley and Ducat, political scientists at George Mason and Northern Illinois universities, respectively.
Under Chief Justice Warren Burger (1969-86), the U.S. Supreme Court produced...
Eliot A. Cohen, in The New Republic (Sept. 1, 1986), 1220 19th
St. N.W., washington, D.C. 20036.
Republican or Democrat, hawk or dove, nearly everyone in political Wash- ington agrees that the costly U.S. armed forces need an overhaul.
The botched 1980 rescue mission in Iran and lackluster military co- ordination during the 1984 U.S. invasion of Grenada, among other things, have "convinced many observers that something is profoundly wrong," writes Cohen, who teaches at the U.S. Naval...
Helen Suzrnan, in The New York Times Mag- azine (Aug. 3, 1986), 229 West 43rd St., New York. N.Y. 10036; "The Costs of Disinvest-ment" Gavin ReUy, in Foreign Policy (Surn-mer 1986), 11Dupont Circle N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036.
Racial violence continues to plague South Africa, claiming the lives of more than 150 blacks each month. In 1985 alone, nearly 19,000 blacks were arrested for protests. At issue is apartheid, the system of racial segrega- tion enforced by President P. W. Botha's...
Pretoria and the black African--National Congress (ANC); to release black leader Nelson Mandela from prison; to remove the military from black townships; to legalize the ANC and the Pan African Congress (a black political organi- zation); and to ban detentions without trials.
Western supporters of sanctions, Suzman says, often forget that 20 percent of South Africa's white electorate has already voted against apart- heid. Nor do they realize that, if the Botha government falls, the next regime,...
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...