Is the great and final crash of capitalism at last at hand? Well, as Lyndon Johnson’s legendary job aspirant answered the school board member who inquired about his views on cosmology, I can teach it round or flat. Let’s try …
The current inflation-recession is a crisis of the capitalist system. At first glance, this proposition may seem absurd. It is all but universally agreed, Left, Right, and Center, that two of the most important causes of our present dismal plight …
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Volume I (parts I-II). Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row. 660 pp. In his review of The Gulag Archipelago–by far the most …
The Bureaucratization of the World, by Henry Jacoby. Translated by Eveline Kanes. Berkeley: University of California Press. 241 pp. A good book on bureaucracy is yet to be written, and it is unfortunate that, despite the virtues of this essay, …
The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880- 1970, by Stephan Thernstrom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 345 pp. For more than a decade Stephan Thernstrom has been studying patterns of social mobility among American workers in the …
The French Left has seemed strangely silent since its defeat–which was so nearly a victory–in the election of May 1974. Perhaps it had first to overcome its disappointment at having missed out by so narrow a margin. But the new …
Although it has received considerable attention, Robert Heilbroner’s most recent book may easily be lost in the glut d social commentary-filed away as this year’s most stylish doomsday tract. This would be a shame if I am correct in regarding …
Income distribution in the United States has remained virtually unchanged for onequarter of a century. According to government figures, the poorest 20 percent of all families received 5 percent of the cash income in 1947 and they receive the same …
Last December at the meetings of the American Economic Association, there was a major address by MIT’s generally admired theorist of economic growth, Robert M. Solow. He chose for his title, “The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics,” …
Messali Hadj, father of the Algerian nationalist movement and one-time charismatic leader of the Algerian people—in Algeria itself, but particularly among those Algerians who had gone to work in France during the colonialist days—died in France on June 3, 1974, …
No one ever looks at the enforced return of an escaped convict from the economic point of view. No, it is always the usual outburst of fear, indignation, thirst for vengeance. An individual may have spent five, ten, even fifteen …
If there is unprecedented concern with sex roles today, it is in large part because of the revival of feminism. The women’s liberation movement has launched a drive for social change that promises to alter some of the fundamental values …
Some 55,000 people in the federal government now earn at least part of their pay by practicing intellectual birth control as they stamp “confidential” on stacks of documents. And 3,000 superior civil servants are active abortionists of ideas, stamping “top …
What happened on Yom Kippur 1973, and is happening today, is not the result of a single or frequent mistake but of a process that began a long time before that day. Over the years, Israeli policy—in this term I …
The overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship was front-page news throughout the Western world. But in Greece, as in Spain, it was almost the only front-page news for many days after it happened. Under the rigid press censorship Greek newspapers could …
