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Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

The articles in this issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy reflect aspects of the changing world order as it continues to adjust to the digital age.

Introduction, Philip Hart

Trotter Review

We are pleased to share with our readers this issue of the Trotter Review. The events of September 11, 2001, will forever reshape our world as we know it. In addition to the far-reaching effects of this tragedy, it has revealed our general lack of knowledge about Islam and places in the world where religion and faith shape governmental and civic engagement. In crisis often comes opportunity. This opportunity to learn more about other religions and cultural pluralism is positive. It underscores the continuing importance of education and learning in today's world. So I think it particularly appropriate that …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

We are pleased to bring you the first issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy in the new century. We rejoice that at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, the planet did not implode, meteors did not shower us with the debris of their displeasure with us earthlings, aircraft did not fall out of the sky, catastrophic convulsions in our ecosystems did not engulf us, telecommunication systems functioned with indifferent insouciance to the inner terrors of our crippled imaginations. The world, one minute after January 1, 2000, was yawningly the same as one minute before.

Whether …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

When you receive this issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy, we should be crossing the threshold from millennium mania to millennium madness. The former has concerned itself almost exclusively with the etiquette of millennium rites, where one ought to be on the occasion itself — embracing the starlit grandeur of the ancient pyramids, as if to remind ourselves that some things preceded the outgoing millennium and even exceeded the achievements of our own: in the silence of a Tibetan monastery to contemplate in serenity the philosophical implications of the momentous transition and reflect perhaps on the …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

In a paraphrase of Yogi Berra's immortal words, we came to a fork in the road and we took it. Which is all in the way of introducing this issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy. The articles featured here, while spanning a very broad spectrum of public policy, have several unifying themes. They are all case studies in one way or another of the incompetence that is an essential feature of the public policy process in a democratic culture, of the constraints in the way of making change, no matter how obviously desirable or in the …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

These two issues of the Journal focus exclusively on the Latino community in the United States, which is the fastest-growing minority in the country. It is a development that poses profound questions regarding the course this country will take into the twenty-first century and the way in which it will define itself. It will sever the almost metaphysical distinctions between the melting pot and multiculturalism, opposites on a philosophical curve that are as much self-created as self-evident.

Three areas of Latino experience are examined in this volume — the impact of immigration policies, employment and income opportunities, and the degree …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

In this special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy, we explore some of the more perennial but nonetheless substantive issues involved in the ongoing debate about the shape educational reform should take from different points of view, and seek that most sought-after and elusive alchemist, common ground.

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

This issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy is an eclectic mix. Its range and diversity, however, illuminate one of the less considered aspects of public policy: the fact that policy itself, despite the efforts of policy theorists, and on occasion policymakers and practitioners, to invest it with the trappings of rational, scientific method, rarely if ever is defined in politically or culturally neutral terms. The pretense that this is not so suggests that there exists some set of objective criteria that are impervious to either political or cultural dictates. In reality, of course, nothing could be further …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

This issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy was conceived during the hot, slow days of early August when Saddam Hussein's marauding armies swallowed Kuwait. Contributors made revisions to their manuscripts while President George Bush committed the United States to protecting Saudi Arabia's oligarchy (read "oil for the West"), requiring a military buildup in the harsh sands that was larger than anything of its kind since World War II. The admen in the Pentagon came up with the catchy little logo Desert Shield. Repeated calls by the coalition of nations, led by the United States, for Saddam Hussein's …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

"Of all the difficulties facing the historian in his task of understanding and discussing the past, none can be greater than that of emphatically recreating the popular 'mood' defining any particular event or period," writes Paul Kennedy. This issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy is about mood and politics and how synergistic interplay of the two in recent years reflects both the national and local psyche.

Editor's Note, Dawn-Marie Driscoll

New England Journal of Public Policy

This issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy had many beginnings and, like most efforts in which a theme is slowly resolved, probably should not have an ending.

The discussion of this theme started several years ago when a group of senior Boston businesswomen talked about the need and value of meeting on a semi-regular basis. Their purpose would be to focus discussions on a narrow but important issue — the economic advancement of women.

The criteria for these informal meetings quickly fell into place. All the women who comprised the group would be drawn from within the …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

Decades beget catchwords to describe them, but the 1980s may defy our best efforts to capture them in one pithy phrase. For a time it appeared that the "me generation" would suffice, but this was essentially an introspective generalization drawing on a parochial perspective: America preoccupied with America rather than with the broader world beyond its borders.

Perhaps the explosion of the Challenger on that bright Tuesday morning in January 1986 has much to do with our self-doubt, with our realization that while we might still regard ourselves as being first among equals, we were no longer preeminent. For the …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

In the domain of public policy, there often appears to be an inverse relationship between our ability to identify and define, sometimes with great specificity, the scale and dimensions of the problems we face and our capacity to address them. One reason for this state of affairs is that our major public policy dilemmas are interconnected — attention to one would require attention to many — and without the threat of catastrophic crisis, no action or piecemeal action is invariably preferred to comprehensive action.

But there is at least one other important factor at work: the question of who are …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

For months on end we were subjected to the rituals of irrelevance: to posturing as patriotism, incoherence as eloquence, innuendo as nuance, character assassination as candor, sound-bites as substance, carefully memorized one-liners as expressions of spontaneity, self-righteousness as self-deprecation. Misstatement, outright fabrication, deliberate falsehood, and conscious distortion were spewed out by spin-masters, merchants of manipulation, propagandists, pollsters, shysters of the slick and technicians of the fast fix, all in the name of the democratic process. Nor were the two presidential candidates, Michael Dukakis and George Bush, themselves immune to the malaise, proving themselves extraordinarily adept time and again at not …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

On occasion, the New England Journal of Public Policy will devote an entire issue to consideration of a public policy matter of major importance. The AIDS epidemic is such a matter, with a likely impact of overwhelming consequence well into the twenty-first century. The epidemic raises fundamental questions regarding the nature of individual freedom, our responsibilities to others, the always delicate balance between private rights and the public interest, and society's obligation to its "out" groups — whose members it has stigmatized, discriminated against, ridiculed, and treated as less than full and equal citizens. Indeed, it requires us to ask …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

In the public domain, ideas undergird the specific policy decisions that elected officials and administrators make in order to achieve the shared goals their communities and constituencies articulate. Ideas are the pistons that drive the engines of change. The study of change, moreover, is a study of our ambivalence toward it. On the one hand, we embrace it with some assumption of its inevitable desirability, equating it with progress, with our aspirations for social improvement, with our propensity for wanting society to be better off, though what "better off" means often remains unclear and inchoate. Public figures routinely offer us …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

Less than ten years ago, the Sun Belt states were the focus of the kind of excessive attention we have come to associate with our propensity to assign cause, time, place, and date to account for little-understood social phenomena. The decline of the Northeast was virtually irreversible, according to the new wisdom, the rise of the West and Southwest obviously inevitable. Change had more to do with "the mysterious hand of Providence" or the caprice of oil sheiks than with policy — we prefer being comforted, it seems, to being informed.

Explanations of our condition that reinforce our perceived beliefs …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

In recent years, New England has done itself proud. The chronic post-World War II decline in its manufacturing sector has been replaced by what for the present at least continues to be a record growth in services directly and indirectly related to high technology and a continuing competitiveness in high technology itself. As a result, the region leads the nation in growth in per capita income and enjoys the lowest level of unemployment in the country as well. Self-congratulation, however, is too often a prescription for complacency, and complacency inhibits the kind of searching inquiry which assumes that economic miracles …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

Today much of public policy debate takes place in a social vacuum. This is so in part because policy issues are often rather arbitrarily assigned to particular and seemingly unconnected disciplines that put a premium on maintaining their separate baronies of intellectual hegemony, and in part because of our too-pervasive propensity to compartmentalize in order to simplify. One of the aims of the New England Journal of Public Policy is to invade, as it were, these baronies, to liberate the policy issues held hostage there and release them into a broader, more human context, one that accentuates the idea of …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

Central to the evolution of public policy, since all subsequent processes flow from it, is the question of problem identification — or, more broadly, the question of definition. The importance of definition derives not only from the need to address the "right" problem but from the often greater need not to address the "wrong" one, since the subsequent misallocation of resources can alter the nature of the problem itself. More is not always better, whether in reference to federal largesse, nuclear power generating capacity, or the length of the school day. In fact, as the articles in this issue of …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

Over the years, public policy issues have proliferated, and with proliferation has come the inevitable specialization. The result: fragmentation of effort and problems of communication not only between those who make policy and those who implement it, but between practitioners in general and the academic and research disciplines that complement them. Public policy constituencies have created their own languages, but too often the result is a confusion of tongues rather than a profusion of ideas.

The New England Journal of Public Policy is designed to create a profusion of ideas by providing a medium for practitioners, policy analysts, and academics …