Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Next Threshold: Higher Skills And The New England Economy, John C. Hoy

New England Journal of Public Policy

The history of the New England regional economy — its attenuated post-World War II decline and subsequent aggressive renewal — reveals an intensifying relationship between economic resurgence, the supply and continuing demand for professional manpower, and the results of academic research and development. The New England region has "outproduced" the rest of the nation in supplying professionally trained men and women, a leading factor not fully appreciated by those describing the region's robust economic health in the decade since Neal Peirce wrote The New England States. New England's "oversupply" in professional fields has given the high-tech and sophisticated services …

Poverty Amid Renewed Affluence: The Poor Of New England At Mid-Decade, Andrew M. Sum, Paul E. Harrington, William B. Goedicke, Robert Vinson

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article examines the problem of poverty in New England during the current period of economic prosperity. Major trends in the size and composition of the poor population within the region are analyzed. Striking changes in the relative incidence of poverty have occurred among families in New England. As the economy has moved toward full employment, poverty rates among husband-wife families in the region have fallen sharply. In contrast, female-headed families in New England have not benefited substantially from recent rapid increases in employment opportunities. The result has been a persistent trend toward the feminization of poverty in New England. …

The Reclamation Of Boston Harbor: A Scientist's Perspective, Gordon T. Wallace Jr.

New England Journal of Public Policy

A major effort, costing in the neighborhood of $2 billion, is under way to restore the environmental quality of Boston Harbor. While Boston Harbor is unquestionably one of the most polluted urban estuaries in the world, it is also one of the least understood with respect to the basic physics, chemistry, and biology involved. This information is essential for the purpose of identifying processes that control the transport, effect, and fate of contaminants entering the estuary. Failure to obtain this information may lead to continued inappropriate and unnecessarily expensive solutions to a complex environmental problem. An effective solution will require …

Demographic Trends In Boston: Some Implications For Municipal Services, Margaret O'Brien

New England Journal of Public Policy

The City of Boston is gaining in population during the 1980s, after several decades of loss. During the current decade and beyond, population trends will bring increases in the number of children, adults between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four, and those aged seventy-five and over, along with declines among the older teenagers and college-age population, the more mature adults, and the younger elderly. A recent analysis of the income distribution indicates that while there were more well-to-do residents in Boston in 1985 than there were in 1980, there were also more poor and near poor. Average family income has …

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 …

Managing Change: Reflections On Innovation In The Public Sector, Ira A. Jackson, Jane P. O'Hern

New England Journal of Public Policy

In January 1983, when Governor Michael S. Dukakis appointed Ira Jackson as commissioner of revenue, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was facing an estimated $300 million deficit. The state was also suffering from a severe loss of public confidence in the integrity of its tax administration. His first and most urgent priority being the restoration of that confidence, Commissioner Jackson implemented a three-part strategy to improve voluntary compliance with the tax laws: raising the stakes for evaders, treating honest taxpayers as customers rather than victims, and changing public attitudes about tax evasion. Productivity gains and innovative procedures at the Department of …

Imagining Boston: The City As Image And Experience, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

I want to discuss community and imagery, social division and literary unity, Boston poetry and prose. In most issues of NEJPP I will focus upon those recent books that fire our imaginations and help us shape our sense of local and regional place. In this issue, however, I want to look back at the tradition of imagery that resonates in Boston's history. Old ideas of Boston are quickly being buried under layers of architectural and cultural renewal. While the suburbs become more urbanized and the commuter roads more clogged, downtown Boston is in the midst of the greatest building boom …

De Facto New Federalism And New England: A Discussion, Kenneth Curtis, Chester Atkins, Richard Licht, David Walker, Roger Porter

New England Journal of Public Policy

Using John Shannons paper as a broad frame of reference (see previous article), a panel discussion titled "The Changing Nature of FederalI State Relations: The Fiscal Impact on New England" took place on 18 November 1985 at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. The discussion was sponsored by the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs and was presented in a roundtable forum. The members of the panel were Kenneth Curtis, former governor of Maine; Chester Atkins, member of Congress from the Massachusetts Fifth Congressional District; Richard Licht, lieutenant governor of Rhode Island; David Walker, professor of political science at …

War Stories--Defense Spending And The Growth Of The Massachusetts Economy, David L. Warsh

New England Journal of Public Policy

The defense industry has been an integral part of the Massachusetts economy since colonial days, and the Watertown Arsenal and Springfield rifle are virtually synonymous with the capital-intensive arms business of the nineteenth century. But after World War II, here as elsewhere, defense production became far more deeply embedded in the state 's division of labor, with the result that today it is hard to tell what is of military origin and what is not: the minicomputer and software industries, in their entirety, are properly viewed as a spin-off from the Cold War and the space race, for example. The …

Rhode Island: The Defeat Of The Greenhouse Compact, Ira Magaziner

New England Journal of Public Policy

Rhode Island has not shared equally in New England's economic resurgence of recent years. A major reevaluation of the state's economic malaise in 1982-84 resulted in a $250 million program called the Greenhouse Compact to improve business in the state. Initially supported in polls by a two-to-one margin, the Compact was defeated overwhelmingly when it went to a statewide referendum. The timing of the referendum and mistakes in the public relations strategy and in the structure of the Compact all played a role in the outcome, but post-election polls showed that defeat, based on a massive shift of undecided voters, …

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 …

De Facto New Federalism: Phase Ii?, John Shannon

New England Journal of Public Policy

1985 marked year seven for de facto new federalism, the fiscal decentralization process nudged along by strong public support for the Reagan administration's conservative policies and growing fiscal stringency at the federal level. New federalism is most dramatically illustrated by the national government retreat along the entire state-local aid front — a kind of "sorting out" — as an increasing share of the federal budget goes to strictly national government programs. The mounting public concern about massive federal deficits will quicken the federal pullback on the state-local aid front. The only question is whether it will be a ragged retreat …

Regionalism: The Next Step, Ian Menzies

New England Journal of Public Policy

Although the New England states have, over the years, been regionally cooperative, they have not formally advanced the process since the establishment of the New England Governors' Conference in 1937. There is still no regional government in New England; no body politic that can enact regionwide laws; no organization authorized to perform regionwide planning, or with the power to regulate or direct growth and development or manage natural resources. There isn't even a public forum or assembly where such issues can be discussed. This article reviews the history of regionalism in New England and proposes that the six states develop …

Boston School Desegregation: The Fallowness Of Common Ground, Robert A. Dentler

New England Journal of Public Policy

This essay scrutinizes the book by J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, to assess whether it presents a valid and reliable account of the issues, people, and events it chronicles. The substantive core of the book is shown to be the politics of Boston public school desegregation. The parts played by the three families in this event are dramatically portrayed but cannot be corroborated and are not interpreted. The parts played by five major policy leaders, when tested against other evidence, are found to be distorted, questionable legends woven in …

Getting Power Back: Court Restoration Of Executive Authority In Boston City Government, Marcy M. Murninghan

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article chronicles some of the events that occurred when a state and a federal court attempted to disengage from active jurisdiction over two Boston public systems: the public schools and the Boston Housing Authority (BHA). It makes three proposals which, if enacted, would help to keep the courts out of day-to-day management of municipal operations. It also makes some generalizations about the court-agency interplay which are relevant to the postremedial phase of institutional reform litigation. The author uses the term restorative law to describe this court-controlled process of returning power to the executive branch.

Urban Public Services: What The Future Holds, Robert Morris

New England Journal of Public Policy

Health and welfare are usually considered secondary or peripheral concerns of modern society. The article considers how questions about the provision of social welfare are imbedded in the economic, social, moral, and political fabric of contemporary America and New England. Underlying trends of economic, social, and attitudinal change are outlined, and implications for the future are considered. The article also considers the role of universities in equipping the next generation of citizens to cope more effectively with the complex issues that are forcing a restructuring of urban services.

Teaching--From Occupation To Profession: A Response, Robert S. Peterkin

New England Journal of Public Policy

Educational reform must go beyond a restructuring of the teaching occupation. A realistic approach would include strengthening the principalship, reestablishing the primacy of education as the focus of public schools, improving the physical plant, increasing parental participation in the decision-making process, and aligning schools with the external communities — especially the business and university communities.

Book Reviews: The Endangered Metropolis, Richard A. Hogarty

New England Journal of Public Policy

Reviews of books by Anne Whiston Spirn, Jane Jacobs, George Gallup, Jr., Gary Gappert, and Richard V. Knight.

What all of these books have in common is the futuristic glimpse they give us into urban life in the twenty-first century. In approaching such a milestone, one can be either an optimist or a pessimist. These authors present a balanced mixture; they bring tidings of good news and bad news. As one of them aptly puts it: "In the present lies not only the nightmare of what the city will become if current trends continue, but also the dream of what …

Teaching--From Occupation To Profession: The Sine Qua Non Of Educational Reform, Bernard R. Gifford

New England Journal of Public Policy

Many problems have been blamed for the crisis in public education. This article argues that the teaching occupation as it currently exists is one problem whose solution promises to yield significant consequences in terms of pupil learning. That solution, according to the author, is to restructure the teaching occupation to bring about a greater appreciation of and respect for teaching as a high-level activity that supports self-evaluative behavior — a professional consciousness that encourages teachers to see themselves as evolving practitioners capable of learning from errors, rather than as nonreflective paraprofessionals armed with a set of error-proof teaching methods applicable …

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 …

Fiscal Paternalism And New England Cities: A Policy For The Year 2000, Mark S. Ferber, Elizabeth A. Ferber

New England Journal of Public Policy

The following commentary explores the future of urban public finance by focusing on the fiscal ills of New England's major cities. The impact of general revenue sharing, categorical grants, federal tax policy, state aid, and own-source city revenues is assessed in light of a city's ability to support itself. The authors conclude that a pattern of "fiscal paternalism" — the past and present policies for annual financial assistance to narrow the expenditure-revenue budget gap — must be altered if cities are to enter the twenty-first century as fiscally stable governments capable of providing the necessary services for a varied constituency.

Dismal Science Meets Dismal Subject: The (Mal)Practice Of Nuclear Power Economics, Charles Komanoff

New England Journal of Public Policy

Electric utilities, reactor designers and builders, and the federal government have badly underestimated the costs of new nuclear power plants over the past fifteen years. Although not all of the increases were readily predictable, particularly those caused by rapid general inflation, nuclear advocates failed to foresee most of the sixfold growth in real costs resulting from new reactors' greater complexity, scope, and regulatory surveillance.

This review recounts the methods used by nuclear power proponents to convince policymakers, the public, and themselves that new nuclear plants would be competitive with other energy sources, long after conclusive contrary evidence was available. It …

The New England Economic Revitalization And Future Research Priorities, James M. Howell

New England Journal of Public Policy

New England's recent economic revitalization is largely attributed to the region's success in technological innovation and adaptation. This capacity to supplant older, maturing technologies with new technologies — a willingness to continually shed the old to make room for the new — has been a characteristic of New England since the early nineteenth century. At that time, as today, the critical factors in the process of technological development were the presence of investment capital, skilled labor, entrepreneurs, and, above all, preeminent colleges and universities that foster unconventional thinking and risk-taking. While the region's economy should continue to benefit from these …

Seabrook: A Case Study In Mismanagement, Irvin C. Bupp

New England Journal of Public Policy

The Seabrook nuclear power plant construction project is an unqualified financial disaster. It simultaneously threatens its chief owner, the Public Service Co. of New Hampshire (PSNH) with bankruptcy and the company's electricity customers with huge rate increases. The fifteen-year history of the project is reviewed to identify "what went wrong?"

The review suggests that the basic problem has been mismanagement by both PSNH and by government regulators. A three-year regulatory imbroglio over the environmental effects of the plant's cooling system was extremely costly in the mid-1970s.

By the time this problem was belatedly resolved, the project had begun to outstrip …

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 …

The Demography Of New England: Policy Issues For The Balance Of This Century, George S. Masnick

New England Journal of Public Policy

New England's rapidly aging population, its traditionally low fertility rate, and the fact that net migration from other regions and abroad should continue to be close to zero means that only very slow population growth will characterize the region for the balance of this century. Nevertheless, New England's demographic metabolism is exceptionally dynamic: (1) the numbers of different age groups are growing at very different rates; (2) a redistribution of population is occurring from the southern to northern tier states; (3) within each state population is dispersing into non-metropolitan areas; and (4) metropolitan areas, both central and suburban, are quickly …

Public Education In Boston, Joseph M. Cronin

New England Journal of Public Policy

Historically, Boston schools have been a source of pride and educational innovation, yet they have also been fraught with problems that are typical of urban education. Both the success achieved and the problems encountered in Boston schools bear analysis. In looking at such areas as overall quality of education, funding, and compliance with federal guidelines, specific recommendations for the future of public education in Boston can be offered. In addition, the impact of Boston's success or failure in implementing new ideas through the school committee and the mayor is not limited to the city itself. This article' s outlining of …