Spring 1983
Poland
In Essence
Na-
omi Caiden, in P~tblic Adnzinistratio~z Re- All Seasons view (NOV.-D~C.
19821, 1120 G st. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20005.
The battles over the federal budget seem to become longer every year. The problem, says Caiden, a political scientist at the California State College at San Bernardino, is not only that "reform" is needed, but that the very idea of an annual budget is obsolete.
Originally, the annual budget, submitted the President and modi- fied on Capitol Hill, was intended...
Na-than Glazer, in The Public Interest (Winter 1983), 10 East 53rd St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
Ronald Reagan's conservative Republican administration and Fran- qois Mitterrand's Socialist government in France have at least one thing in common. Both are pushing programs of political decentraliza- tion, trying to shift more power from the national to the local level.
For both nations, says Glazer, a Harvard sociologist, the changes rep- resent a sharp departure that suggests a new direction for the...
Richard E. Cohen, in Nutior~ulJo~~rizal (Dec. 18, 1982)) 1730 M St. N.W., Wash- ington, D.C. 20036.
Political action committees (PACs) contributed about $80 million of the $300 million spent candidates during the 1982 congressional cam- paign. But, despite growing criticism of the PACs' influence, says Cohen, National Journal staff correspondent, the evidence that they "get what they pay for" is "mixed" at best.
Corporate PACs have come under the heaviest fire. Accounting of...
Congress in 1974 but struck down the Supreme Court in 1976. Other proposals meet with stiff opposition in Congress.
Also in the background is the cautionary example of the 1974 cam- paign finance reforms, which limited both PAC and individual dona- tions. In response, donors simply created more PACs: Contributions by PACs have more than doubled since 1978.
"On Meddling with the Constitution" by
Exploiting the Gary L. McDowelI, in Journal of Contern- poraiy Studies (Fall 1982),Transaction...
Stephen Peter Rosen, in
International Security (Fall 1982), The
Revisited MIT Press (Journals), 28 Carleton St.,
Cambridge, Mass. 021 42.
The doctrine of "limited war" still shapes how and why U.S. conven-
tional forces would fight in such far-off trouble-spots as the Persian
Gulf. Yet, despite the failure of this doctrine in Vietnam, the theory of
limited war has never been revised.
According to Rosen, an aide to the Secretary of Defense, Robert
Osgood and Thomas Schelling, both...
demonstrating American "resolve" through both diplomacy and force, Washington hoped to convince Hanoi that it was futile to con- tinue fighting. But "signaling" was not really a strategy at all. Wash- ington "did not define a clear military mission . . . ," Rosen says, and, until 1968, "it did not establish a clear limit to the resources to be allo- cated." Nobody had a plan to win the war.
Limited war is "strange" war, Rosen concludes. Civilian...
David C. Jones, in The New
York Times Magazine (Nov. 7, 1982), 229 the Pentagon West 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.
The Reagan administration's military build-up may be long overdue, but according to General Jones, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1978-82), a complete overhaul of the Pentagon bureaucracy is also needed to upgrade U.S. military effectiveness.
The Defense Department suffers the problems of all large organiza- tions, compounded structural flaws. The four independent...
striking compromises among themselves. The lack of a unified command also impairs military operations, Jones warns. In Vietnam, for example, each service maintained its own independent air contingent. Indeed, the two services responsible for the final air evacu- ation from Saigon in 1975each set their own "H-hours" for departure.
A greatly strengthened role for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is needed to integrate defense planning and tighten control, says Jones. The chairman's staff...
William J. Gasser and David L. Rob- erts, in Federal Reserve. Bank of New York A Mixed Bag Quarterly Review (Autumn 1982), 33 Lib-
erty St., New York, N.Y. 10045.
The prospect of defaults heavily indebted international borrowers
such as Mexico and Argentina has raised fears that the entire Third
World is on the brink of financial collapse. Actually, most overseas
debtors improved their financial positions during 1982.
According to Gasser and Roberts, both economists at the New York
Federal...
Richard Greene, in Monthly Labor Review (Sept. 1982), Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402.
Record unemployment has made creating new private sector jobs a top priority of Washington policy-makers. According to Greene, a U.S. State Department econon~ist, focusing on the role of Big Business would be ill-advised. Recent studies show that small firms create the overwhelming majority of new jobs.
In a landmark 1979 study of 5.6 million businesses between...
Richard Greene, in Monthly Labor Review (Sept. 1982), Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402.
Record unemployment has made creating new private sector jobs a top priority of Washington policy-makers. According to Greene, a U.S. State Department econon~ist, focusing on the role of Big Business would be ill-advised. Recent studies show that small firms create the overwhelming majority of new jobs.
In a landmark 1979 study of 5.6 million businesses between...
fixing the price of gold arbitrarily, Washington would undermine the faith in its unchanging value. The public might regard the gold standard as "a fair weather vessel, likely to capsize and be abandoned in the first serious storm."
"Germany's World Class Manufacturers" Learning from Joseph A. Limprecht and Robert H. West Germany Hayes, in Harvard Business Review (NQV.-
Dec. 1982), Subscription Service Dept.,
P.O. Box 3000,Woburn, Mass. 01888.
Cultural differences make it...
S~CUY~~Y Peter G. Peterson, in The Neiv York Rei~ieiv
CY~S~S
ofBooks (Dec. 2 and 161, Subscriber Ser- vice Dept., P.O. Box 940, Farrningdale,
N.Y. 11737.
Washington today is struggling to resolve a Social Security financial crisis that could plunge the system into bankruptcy 1984. Yet Peter- son, chairman of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, argues that a far more ominous long-term crisis has gone unrecognized.
Many specialists assume that payroll tax increases scheduled to take effect between now...
Corset Century" Me1 Davies, in Co~npurative Studies in Society and History (Oct. 1982), Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 2RU, England.
The sudden drop in birth rates in most Western countries during the 1870s is often attributed by scholars to the economic woes of the era. Parents kept families small to preserve their standard of living. At the same time, according to Davies, a University of Western Australia his- torian, the fad for corsets among middle-class Victorian...
attested to
the . . .ability of the husband to maintain her idleness."
Tightlacing began to die out during the 1890s, as middle-class fash-
ion began to stress the importance of exercise and recreation. then,
Davies notes, smaller families had become the norm, and couples
turned to contraception and other means to limit family size.
"The Zoning of Enterprise" by Edward C.
Zoning,Enterprise Banfield, in The Cato Jow-rial (Fall 1982), 224 Second St. S.E., Washington, D.C....
Donald F. Davis,
In Detroit, 1910 in Journal of Social Hislory (Fall 1982),
Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh,
Pa. 15213.
In the 1980s, the U.S. auto industry's woes appear to be strictly a mat- ter of markets, competition, and interest rates. According to Davis, a University of Ottawa historian, the first upheaval in Detroit was caused not economics but by the snobbery of some auto-makers.
Spurred by the success of Samuel Smith's Olds Motor Works, which paid annual dividends of 105 percent...
Deborah Shapley, in Daedalus (Fall 1982),
1172 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, Mass.
02134.
Defense issues, because of their great complexity, are among the most difficult for the media to cover. But even the best newspaper and televi- sion treatments of such topics reveal serious flaws, argues Shapley, Washington editor of Nature magazine.
Thus, CBS News's widely publicized five-part series on "The Defense of the United States," aired in June 1981, suffered from TV newsmen's need to "find...
IODICALS
PRESS & TELEVISION
"The Media and National Security" by
Covering Defense Deborah Shapley, in Daedalus (Fall 1982),
1172 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, Mass.
02134.
Defense issues, because of their great complexity, are among the most difficult for the media to cover. But even the best newspaper and televi- sion treatments of such topics reveal serious flaws, argues Shapley, Washington editor of Nature magazine.
Thus, CBS News's widely publicized five-part series on "The D...
the three major tele- vision networks, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other leading newspapers, Morris argues that journalists reported "for the most part fairly and accurately and sometimes brilliantly."
While critics argue that the U.S. media credited exaggerated esti- mates of civilian losses from dubious sources, Morris says his own care- ful examination of the record shows this to be untrue. NBC reported on June 6 that civilian casualties were "unknown"; CBS's...
the bishops would be binding on indi- vidual Catholics. And while the Vatican could make such a pronounce- ment, it has avoided doing so.
One reason, says Bar, is that "although the word of God has implica- tions for Christians in their political activities, [the Church] stands above, and in fact outside, politics." While the Vatican has stressed its desire for peace, it has addressed "all regimes without exception, thus avoiding any encouragement of unilateral initiatives."...
William Ruddick and William Wilcox, in The Hus-a Patient? tines Center Report (act. 1982), 360 Broad-
way, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. 10706.
Technological innovations during the 1970s make it possible today for surgeons to operate on fetuses in and outside the womb. They also raise potential ethical problems for physicians, parents, and society.
PERIODICALS
RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
Surgeons in at least six U.S. hospitals can now perform nine different operations on fetuses, from repairing les...
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PERIODICALS
RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
Surgeons in at least six U.S. hospitals can now perform nine different operations on fetuses, from repairing lesions to correcting nutritional problems. In one case, a fetus was removed from the uterus, treated for a urinary tract obstruction, and returned to its mother's womb.
"The fetus now begins to make serious claims for a right to nutrition, to protection, to therapy," Catholic theologian Richard McCormick ar- gued in 1982. &qu...
Percival Low-
ell, a wealthy Bostonian, to carry out the search.
A 1950 estimate the Palomar Observatory's Gerard Kuiper put
Pluto's diameter at 3,800 miles, about half that of the Earth. A 1965
experiment that measured the time Pluto took to cross a star of known
size narrowed the estimate to a maximum of 3,600 miles. When another
"occultation" took place on Easter Sunday 1980, a new measurement
technique allowed astronomers to fix the diameter at 2,500 miles-
barely larger than...
Paul Kinnucan, in Think Better High Technology (Nov.-Dec. 1982), 38 Commercial Wharf, Boston, Mass. 021 10.
During the 1960s, "smart" computers that could defeat humans in chess matches caused a short-lived sensation, but failed to meet the higher expectations of their admirers. Today, however, artificial intel- ligence (AI) is making a comeback.
The first smart computers suffered from exaggerated claims, a high failure rate, and unwieldy size. But all this has changed, thanks to the...
Michael Salt Water? Edesess, in Technology Review (Nov.-Dec. 1982), Room 10-140, Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. 02139.
In 1902, the Russian scientist A. von Kaleczinsky was surprised to find subsurface temperatures of over 185OF in Lake Medve, Transylvania (now part of Rumania). Today, researchers are capitalizing on his dis- covery to provide low-cost energy and heat in remote areas.
Salt water is the key to Lake Medve's warmth: Such "solar ponds" contain...
Gundars Rudzitis and Jeffrey Schwartz, in Envi-ronment (Oct. 1982), 4000 Albemarlc St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016.
The sizable energy and mineral resources of federal parklands make tempting targets for developers. But Rudzitis and Schwartz, geog- rapher and graduate student, respectively, at the University of Texas, warn that if development proceeds, as urged the Reagan administra- tion, the resulting air pollution alone would hasten the already serious deterioration of the parks' beauty.
Public...
Gundars Rudzitis and Jeffrey Schwartz, in Envi-ronment (Oct. 1982), 4000 Albemarlc St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016.
The sizable energy and mineral resources of federal parklands make tempting targets for developers. But Rudzitis and Schwartz, geog- rapher and graduate student, respectively, at the University of Texas, warn that if development proceeds, as urged the Reagan administra- tion, the resulting air pollution alone would hasten the already serious deterioration of the parks' beauty.
Public...
rainfall, the authors estimate, leaving a 16 billion gallon per day "deficit ."
Industry's demand for water is high-manufacturing a single glass bottle requires up to 660 gallons-but it returns most of what it uses. Farm irrigation accounts for 83 percent of the water consumed, most of it lost through seepage or evaporation. Seventeen western states ac- count for 93 percent of the irrigation water used. Because surface water is scarce in these states, they rely heavily on underground...
Dick, Long John Silver in Stevenson's Treasure Zslaizd. At the other extreme were such idealized objects of pity as Tiny Tim in Dickens's A Christinas Carol.
Such characters evoke ill audiences both fear and its companion, pity-and force them to confront their coinplex feelings about "subhu- man" beings. The evil cripples of the 19th century have their counter- parts in today's horror movies, notably in Goldfinger and other sinister folk in the James Bond movies who use their artificial...
Richard Grenier, in Commentary Plastic Sharks (Oct. 1982), American Jewish Committee, 165 East 56th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
Americans who regularly see foreign movies seem to believe that Euro- peans produce more intelligent, sensitive, and somehow "better" films than Hollywood does. Grenier, Commentary's movie critic, notes that
PERIODICALS
U.S. viewers have unrealistic notions about the international film in- dustry.
Only a tiny selection of foreign movies is distributed in t...
PERIODICALS
U.S. viewers have unrealistic notions about the international film in- dustry.
Only a tiny selection of foreign movies is distributed in this country. (Such "art films" accounted for one-half of one percent of U.S. film industry income in 1981.) Far more typical of the European cinema, Grenier says, are cops-and-robbers and adventure movies.
Indeed, across Europe, American films are most widely admired. Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford grace marquees all...
23 percent, earmarking much of the increase for oil and gas exploitation in Siberia. Investment in "non- productive" sectors-housing, service industries, schools, and hospitals-already at a postwar low (28 percent of investment) will be further curtailed. Yet the Kremlin has promised its people more con- sumer goods.
The new plan also exacerbates old difficulties: While industrial reno- vation will be concentrated in western Russia, and new energy and raw materials sources will be developed...
1978, the bureaucracy had swelled to 1.9 million souls, with another 1.3 million employed in government-owned corporations. [Egypt's 1979 population: 41 million.]
Overstaffing has reached monumental proportions: The Central Au- diting Agency, for example, has no fewer than 72 undersecretaries of state. Other "bureaupathologies," Ayubi notes, include inefficiency and poor performance. Only 15 percent of government employees regularly report to work on time. Cabinet ministers, whose tenures...
Book Reviews
by Richard F. Hamilton
Princeton, 1982
664 pp. $50 cloth,
$16.50 paper
by P. Lamartine Yates
Univ. of Ariz., 1981
291 pp. $19.95 cloth,
$8.95 paper
by John A. Armstrong
Univ. of N. C., 1982
41 1 pp. $30
by John Putnani Demos
Oxford, 1982
543 pp. $25
by Irving Abella and
Harold TI-oper
Lester & Orpen Dennys
1982
336 pp. $19.95
by Robert J. Alexander
Transaction, 1982
738 pp. $39.95
by Davis P. Calleo
Harvard, 1982
265 pp. $17.50
by Robert A. Dahl
Yale, 1982
229 pp. $18.50
by Thomas J. Peters and
Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
Harper, 1982
360 pp. $19.95
by Joseph Alsop
PrincetonIHarper, 1982
691 pp. $59.95
by Dennis E. Baron
Yale, 1982
263 pp. $19.95
by Judith Thurman
St. Martin's, 1982
495 pp. $19.95
by Peter Medawar
Oxford, 1982
351 pp. $25
By Frank
O'Connor. Vintage, 1982.
702 pp. $8.95
By Julian Jaynes. Houghton, 1982.
467 pp. $9.95
By Martin J. Wiener. Canibridge, 1982.
217 pp. $7.95
Essays
One of the most popular Wilson Quarterly essays ever (and by far the funniest) was Anders Henriksson’s brief history of Europe as told through the peculiar observations he had culled from papers written by college freshmen he had taught in Canada. As we wrote in introducing the piece in the Spring 1983 issue, paraphrasing George Santayana, “Those who forget history are condemned to mangle it.”
Lech Walesa, who had been involved in the 1970 and 1976 disturbances in Poland, Solidarity received broad support from Western labor unions -and over S185,OOO /rowthe AFL-CIO.
The Wilson QuarterlyISpriizg 1983
48
"Humanity must rejoice and glory when it considers the change in Poland." The sentiments of Britain's Edmund Burke were echoed many Western politicians during the 16-month hey- day in 1980-81 of the independent trade union Solidarity. Burke was referring to Poland's adoption...
's 13 million workers. Led by Lech Walesa, who had been involved in the 1970 and 1976 disturbances in Poland, Solidarity received broad support from Western labor unions -and over S185,OOO /rowthe AFL-CIO.
The Wilson QuarterlyISpriizg 1983
48
"Humanity must rejoice and glory when it considers the change in Poland." The sentiments of Britain's Edmund Burke were echoed by many Western politicians during the 16-month hey- day in 1980-81 of the independent trade union Solidarity. Burke...
's economy was in serious trouble. With the end of the false prosperity of the early 1970s, shortages of meat, flour, sugar, and other staples had become widespread. Indus- trial productivity was low, the rate of economic growth had fur- ther declined, and the country was burdened with a massive external debt. The agricultural sector, once one of Poland's great strengths, was in disarray.
Since the summer of 1980, the situation has only deterio- rated. Rationing is in force, and as mundane an item...
AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE
by Artur Mdzyrzecki
Fragments from a notebook.
<$> No notes, no clippings, no folders filled with manuscripts. All of that has remained in Warsaw, Marszatkowska Street, in my room piled with books. Despair and relief. To be honest, I was not capable of read- ing those pages, so densely covered with writing, that no longer interest me-and for a reason. Once again the earth had trembled under our feet, and once again one had to start from scratch.
<S> My arm i...
A literary history of Poland.
"I wish to be called a citizen of the world," wrote Desiderius Erasmus in 1522. Every country in Western Europe tried to claim as its own Erasmus of Rotterdam, the peripatetic man of letters who shunned the public spotlight in favor of a quiet study- wherever he could find it. In 1974, the University of Toronto Press launched an effort to translate into English the complete Latin works of this prodigiously productive scholar. Nine volumes of The Collected Works of Erasmus, including...
the Institute for Contemporary Studies, Harvard's James Q. Wil-son stresses that "we offer no 'magic bullet' that will produce safe streets or decent people." What Wilson and his 10 contributors do offer is some fresh thinking. They also puncture a few strong myths. We draw from their work in the essays that follow on crime trends and types of offenders, on the criminal justice sys-
tem, and on the relationship of crime to family life.
TRENDS AND TARGETS
Jan M. Chaiken and Marcia R....
Fifty years ago, crime was not regarded by the average ur- ban American as a chronic threat to his family and his property.
The wanton disorder in U.S. cities during the last half of the
19th century had steadily declined. Immigrants, impoverished
but more or less peaceable, had occupied once-dangerous hell-
holes, places like Buffalo's Canal Street or Manhattan's notori-
ous Five Points. There were still areas, of course, in both town
and country, that had a deservedly evil reputation. H...
COPING WITH JUSTICE
In 1922, Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter urged that the criminal justice system be judged not "the occasional dra- matic case but by its normal humdrum operations."
The American public has generally ignored this advice.
In their choice of television shows, tabloid newspapers, pop- ular fiction, and political rhetoric, Americans are drawn to the most fanciful, gruesome, bizarre, or self-serving portrayals of criminal justice. Public attention goes to the Juan...
Since the early 1970s, the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene, Oregon, has treated hundreds of families with "prob- lem" children, children who bite, kick, scratch, whine, lie, cheat, and steal. As might be expected nowadays, this group of psy- chologists began with the assumption that the proper way to train difficult children is to reward their good deeds and ignore their bad ones.
The idea was, of course, that eventually the children would be so wrapped up in doing good that...
as synonymous with "sin" and (as Hester Prynne could attest) a criminal justice sys- tem that emphasized the public na-ture of punishment.
The colonies also imported not a few criminals. As Samuel Walker notes in Popular Justice (Oxford, 1980, cloth & paper), after an act of Parlia- ment in 1717, Britain sent 30,000 fel- ons to the American colonies.
Walker's concise, well-written his- tory of crime and criminal justice in the United States runs through the late 1970s. He traces...
public agencies and private institutions
"America's Old Age Crisis:
Public Policy and the Two Worlds of Aging."
Basic Books, 10 E. 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022.232 pp. $16.50.
Author: Stephen Crystal
Behind Social Security and other fed- eral programs for the elderly is the un- spoken assumption that most retirees are impoverished, decrepit, and lonely. In fact, says Crystal, an official with New York City's Human Re- sources Department, such notions hold true for only a...
Speaking at China's National Sci- rather than party cadres to head sci- ence Conference in March 1978, entific institutes, and the work of re- Vice-premier Fang Yi boldly pro- search units is increasingly geared to claimed that China was "entering a China's developmental needs rather new stage of flourishing growth" in than to broad, politically motivated science and technology. (and frequently unrealistic) pro-
"The dark clouds [of the Cultural grams. Revolution] have been dispelled,"...
