Thomas E. Cavanagh, in Political Science Quarterly (Winter 1982/83), 2852 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10025-0148.
During the 1970s, a crop of eager newcomers dramatically overhauled the US. House of Representatives. The result, says Cavanagh, a Joint Center for Political Studies researcher, has been "institutional chaos."
Earlier, between 1863 and 1963, the House had become increasingly institutionalized: The average tenure of members rose from 1.75 to 5.65 terms; the proportion of freshmen...

Leonard
The Bureaucracy Reed, in Harper's (Nov. 1982), Subscrip- tion Service Dept., P.O. BOX 2620, BOU~-
Wins Again der, Colo. 80321.
President Jimmy Carter's 1978 Civil Service Reform Act was hailed as a
major overhaul of the federal bureaucracy. But Reed, a Washington
Monthly contributing editor, says the reforms have changed little.
The U.S. Civil Service, established under the 1883 Pendleton Act, has become an increasingly secure haven even for incompetent employees. In 1974, the Supreme...

Nathaniel Beck,
and the Fed in American .lourna~ of Political science
(Aug. 19821, University of Texas Press,
P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Tex. 78712.
The Federal Reserve Board is often accused of manipulating U.S. mone- tary policy to aid Presidents' re-election bids. Beck, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, disputes the charge.
Critics of the Fed, led Yale's Edward Tufte and Fortune magazine's Sanford Rose, focus on increases in the money supply that stimulated...

a major shift in monetary policy. But there was little change at the Fed when Demo- crat Jimmy Carter replaced Ford. Even the post-Nixon shift was af- fected the need to adapt to outside economic conditions: the 1973 abandonment of fixed international exchange rates and the 1973-74 OPEC oil price hikes.
Indeed, looking back to long-term money supply growth rates since the 1950s, Beck finds no partisan pattern in Fed policy. The highest growth rate occurred under Lyndon Johnson, followed by Kennedy,...

confusing executive and legislative authorities, Congress's veto power has diminished the government's accountability to the public.

FOREIGN POLICY &DEFENSE
Hope for Poland? "Crisis in Poland" Richard Spieiman,
in Foreign Policy (Winter 1982/83), P.O.
Box 984, Farmingdale, N.Y. 11737.
When Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in Po- land and suppressed the Solidarity trade union movement in December 1981, the Reagan administration responded with trade sanctions and...

Wen- IS Victory dell John Coats, Jr., in Journal of
Obsolete? Contemporary Studies (Summer 1982),
Transaction Periodicals Consortium,
Dept. 541, Rutgers University, New
Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
To antinuclear activists, the United States appears to face a stark choice between peace and nuclear apocalypse. Coats, a Kenyon politi- cal scientist, contends that this view is a logical outcome of misguided
U.S. policies since the early 1960s, when Washington abandoned the idea of achieving victory,...

ensuring that neither side could win. The chief goal of U.S. policy-makers became avoiding any move that might disturb the nu- clear "balance of terror."
Moreover, the "ideology of arms control" was soon extended to con- ventional warfare, Coats says. To win the land war in Indochina, for example, would have invited Soviet or Chinese intervention, it was thought; field commanders were ordered instead to kill as many of the enemy as possible in South Vietnam to bring Hanoi to...

wide margins on the importance of the
U.S. commitment to NATO and on the need at times to support foreign dictators. But "influentials" were twice as likely to support U.S. arms sales abroad; 64 percent of the public favored strong U.S. efforts to contain communism, while only 45 percent of the leaders did.
The authors also found the public more "chauvinistic" than its lead- ers. More than 88 percent of the public but only 26 percent of the leadership group believed America's...

increasing the incentive to strike first, such weapons destabilize the military balance and are a particular threat to NATO, whose defense lines are long and relatively lightly defended.
1990, Brown argues, conventional weapons will be even more deadly. NATO leaders will have to rethink their strategy and con-template talks with Moscow to defuse the high-tech threat.

ECONOMICS, LABOR &BUSINESS
"What to Do About the U.S.-Japan Eco-
Japan's Edge nomic Conflict" by C. Fred Bergsten, in...

Bill Keller, in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report
Bouncing Back? (AU~.28 & Sept. 4, 1982), 1414 22nd st. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037.
The decades-long decline in organized labor's strength continues, but union leaders today are beginning to revitalize their organizations.
Keller, a Congressional Quarterly reporter, notes that news is grim on the membership front: In 1945, unions represented one-third of all U.S. workers; today, fewer than 25 percent. And while membership rolls grew...

the labor group in
decades.
n merational M Washington, RC.
ability to attract and keep more union members. John Dunlop, U.S. Secretary of Labor during the Ford administration, told Keller, "There is no modern industrial society that doesn't have a strong labor move- ment, and I don't think we're going to be the exception."
man Drugs "The Orphan Drug Game" Judith Ran-
dal, in Science 82 (Sept. 1982), P.O. Box
10790, Des Moines, Iowa 50340.
Americans eagerly await the...

Earl V. Anderson, in Chemical& Mile Island Engineering News (Sept. 20, 1982), 1155 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C.20036.
The future of nuclear power seems dim. But Anderson, senior editor of Chemical & Engineering News, says it is far too early to count it out.
The prospects for nuclear power looked most promising during the 1960s and early '70s when a seven percent annual rate of increase in demand for electricity prompted utility companies to order 218 new nuclear plants. But then growth...

Barbara Lerner, in The Public Lag Behind Interest (Fall 1982), Subscription Dept.,
20th & Northampton Sts., Easton, Pa. 18042.
"If the quality of schooling could be assessed . . . resource allocation alone, America would lead the world," notes Lerner, an attorney and psychologist. In fact, U .S. students suffer an embarrassing education gap in comparison with students in other nations.
The United States spends more on education than any other country-7.7 percent of gross national...

yielded only one solid correlation with high achievement: larger homework assignments. (Another finding: The more parents help with homework, the lower their children's achievement.) And other studies show that homework levels, at least between 1960 and 1970, declined in the United States.
Lerner concludes that U.S. educators and parents do not demand enough of children. Since the advent of "open education" during the 1960s, she contends, standards for everything from school attendance...

Louisiana Slate University Press.
had successfully preserved the old order. In fact, says Heyrman, charity itself had been transformed from a natural obligation that bound society together to a token of "noblesse oblige" that widened the psychological gap between rich and poor.
"The Standardization of Time: ASetting the Sociohistorical Pers~ective" bv Eviatar World's Clocks Zerubavel, in American Journal of Sociol-
ogy (July 1982), P.O.Box 37005, Chicago,
111.60637.
The...

the West that they have set their clocks according to European time," declared, "It's a nightmare."
Yet, Zerubavel notes, such exceptions show that the way we organize time promotes interdependence and rationalism. The real nightmare would be a world fragmented different standards of time.
Defending "Welfare Dependency: Fact or ~yth" by
Richard D. Coe, in Challenge (Sept.-Oct. Welfare 1982), 80 Business Park Dr., Armonk, N.Y. 10504.
Rising federal social welfare outlays...

Stanley Rothman and S. Businessmen Robert Lichter, in The Public Interest (Fall 1982), Subscription Dept., 20th & North-
Little love is lost between America's top journalists and business execu- tives. This conflict should surprise no one, say Rothman and Lichter, political scientists at Smith College and George Washington University, respectively. Not only are the two groups at odds on social and political issues, but each views the other as the most powerful group in America.
The differences...

Georee Gerbner and Nancv Sienorielli. in Census ~merican Demographics (0ct.1982) P.O.
Box 68, Ithaca, N.Y. 14850.
Americans watch an average of over four hours of television daily, one-third of it during prime time. They see a world of adventure, melo- drama, and fantasy. Gerbner and Signorielli, of the University of Penn- sylvania's School of Communications, add that even the population of these shows is a poor reflection of reality.
In an analysis of some 14,000 characters appearing in 878...

men. Tele- vision women tended to be disproportionately young-one-third were in their twenties-and their marital status was left unclear in only 12 percent of the cases. Women also tended to age faster on television. More than 90 percent of the women over age 65 were portrayed as "elderly," the authors say, compared to 77 percent of over-65 males. While a majority of the real world's working women are married, on television they were not, and they were employed in traditional female jobs-nurses,...

devious means.
Such a change embodies risks, even if accompanied new safe- guards, Levinson concedes. But government must stop undermining "our individual privacy and ability to trust one another."
"Putting Cruelty First" by Judith N.Dilemma for Shklar, in Daedalus (Summer 1982), Liberals? American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
1172 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, Mass. 02134.
While religious moralists condemn cruelty, they rank it well below such sins as the rejection of God...

armies in the name of God or a Machiavellian ruler-left Montaigne and Montesquieu with few solutions. Montaigne served briefly as mayor of Bordeaux and, Shklar says, "did as little as possible, a policy that he defended as the least harmful course."
Montesquieu, somewhat more hopeful, believed politics and morals could be kept separate. It was possible, he thought, to change social behavior through laws, as the English had done, without altering in- dividual morals. But even he joined...

the results. Many subjects agree: 84 percent of Milgram's former subjects had no regrets over the 1963 experiment. But critics such as psychologist Thomas Murray con- tend that, even if deception causes no obvious damage, it "does wrong to the person it deprives of free choice."
But deception's proponents, like Princeton's John M. Darley, claim that "psychologists have an ethical responsibility to do research about processes that are socially important . ..which means that sometimes...

Paul D. Buisseret, in Scien-
tific American (Aug. 1982), 415 Madison
Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017.
Allergy victims often curse the pollen, cats, or other allergens that trig-
ger their suffering. But according to Buisseret, a Louisiana State Uni-
versity medical professor, allergies are better blamed on malfunctions
in the body's immune system.
White blood cells called T or B lymphocytes begin the biochemical
process that ends in sneezing, sniffles, or itching. The cells mistakenly
react...

Richard A. Kerr, in Science 6, 1982), 1515 Massachusetts Ave.

for Rainmakers (AU~.
N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.
Weather-modification specialists have been trying for 35 years to seed clouds to produce rain, achieving only one documented success. Now that researchers have overcome many earlier problems, writes Kerr, a Science staff writer, they face damaging federal budget cutbacks.
A General Electric scientist named Vincent Schaefer discovered accident in 1946 that a piece of dry ice placed in...

15 percent in the target area. The second group of experiments confirmed the first, boosting rainfall 13 percent with only a 2.8 percent probability that the change was due to chance.
The Israelis succeeded by employing sound statistical techniques and good insights into cloud behavior-they estimated that cloudtop tem- peratures should be between -15�and -20�° for seeding to work. But luck is still a factor in such experiments. A 1979-80 U.S. Bureau of Reclamation test...

an average of 20 percent.
Indeed, Washington already has effective energy conservation pro- grams in place-tax credits for energy-saving investments, grants to schools and other institutions for "retrofittingw-though the Reagan administration wants to curtail some. The authors estimate that in 1980, federal conservation outlays of $1 billion yielded as much as $10 billion in energy savings.
Now is the time to expand such efforts, they urge, not end them.
The Killer Bee "Killer Bees:...

John R. Stilgoe, in The

Were Pretty Journal of American Studies (Apr. 1982),
Cambridge University Press, 32 East 57th
St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
In 1912, the English writer Arnold Bennett described "one of the finest and most poetical views" he had ever seen. It was Toledo, Ohio's "misty brown river flanked a jungle of dark reddish and yellow chimneys and furnaces that covered it with shifting canopies of white steam and smoke."
Bennett was not alone in his admiration f...

Annie Dillard, in The Massa-
of Fiction chusetts Review (Spring 1982), Memorial
Hall, Univ. of Mass.. Amherst. Mass.
Writers often lament the fact that serious literature seldom makes the best-seller lists, and that the marketplace plays such a large role in setting standards for their craft. But Dillard, herself a novelist, finds a "certain grim felicity" in the audience's control over fiction.
Fiction's large public distinguishes it from all the other contempo- rary arts. Today's...

Annie Dillard, in The Massa-
of Fiction chusetts Review (Spring 1982), Memorial
Hall, Univ. of Mass.. Amherst. Mass.
Writers often lament the fact that serious literature seldom makes the best-seller lists, and that the marketplace plays such a large role in setting standards for their craft. But Dillard, herself a novelist, finds a "certain grim felicity" in the audience's control over fiction.
Fiction's large public distinguishes it from all the other contempo- rary arts. Today's...

Martha Brill Olcott, in World Politics Muslims (~uly1982), 3175 Princeton Pike, Law-
renceville, N J. 08648.
Because the Soviet Union is home to some 40 million Muslims, many specialists argue that Moscow has reason to fear the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. But Olcott, a Colgate University political scientist, believes that the Kremlin sees the religious revival as an opportunity, not a problem.
In recent years, Moscow and its Muslim minority have reached a kind of accommodation. In part...

Juan M. in Costa Rica Del Aguila, in Journal of Interamerican
Studies and World Affairs (Aug. 1982), Box
24-8134, Univ. of Miami, Coral Gables,
Fla. 33124.
Alone among Central American nations, Costa Rica has managed to avert civil strife and to sustain democratic institutions. Today, how- ever, mounting economic woes imperil its long social peace.
Costa Rica enjoys the highest per capita gross domestic product ($1,311) of any nation in the region and has a growing middle class. Ninety percent...

Andrew
Boyd, in The Economist (Aug. 28, 1982), 515 Abbott Dr., Broomall, Pa. 19008.
Twenty years ago, Finland was a wintry country known chiefly for two exports: wood products and the workers it sent to other Scandinavian countries. Today, having turned to its advantage both its climate and its geography-its proximity to the Soviet Union-Finland has joined the front ranks of Europe's industrialized nations.
Neighboring Russia has always loomed large in the Finnish view of the world. The retirement...

Norriss S. Hetherington, in The
Middle East Journal (Summer 1982), 1761
N St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
When the Ayatollah Khomeini unseated the Shah of Iran in 1979, it seemed that Iranians had rejected their former leader's Western-style modernization goals. Actually, says Hetherington, a University of Cali- fornia research associate, it was the inefficiency and slowness of the Shah's program that turned his people against him.
The Iranian standard of living rose sharply after the first...

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by Stephen J. Pyne
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654 pp. $35

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383 pp. $17 SO

by Michael Pertschuk
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119 pp. $8.95

by Wolfgang Hildesheimer
trans. by Marion Faber
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edited and with an introduction
by Susan Sontag
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