Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!enterpoop.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.natrev From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Into the Twenty-First Century Date: Wed, 25 Nov 92 12:17:28 EST Message-ID: Lines: 1447 Into the Twenty-First Century WANTED: A NEW IMPERIALISM It's time to stop singing those twentieth-century blues and start considering ways to secure global stability and extend prosperity. The first step: re-establish Western imperialism. PAUL JOHNSON Mr. Johnson is the author of, among many other works, Modern Times and The Birth of the Modern. MANY PEOPLE have been bitterly disappointed that the end of the cold war has not brought a new golden age of peace and increased prosperity. Looking around the world, they see approximately forty regional conflicts, some of great horror and intensity, which feed on the vast quantities of cut-price conventional weapons now available. They know there are at least thirty thousand nuclear warheads in the former Soviet Union, some of which may be unleashed on the hidden arms market by economic des- peration or corruption or both. They are appalled by the resurgence of vi- olent nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe and in former Soviet Asia, in almost every community where the end of totalitarian rule has enabled popular sentiment to express itself. A huge wave of ethnic distur- bances and territorial and oceanic disputes is also impending in eastern Asia. The threat of an ultimate catastrophe has been replaced by the re- ality and future likelihood of scores of more limited disasters. On top of this, the advanced countries are immersed in the most serious and pro- longed recession in half a century, which limits their ability to come to the aid of the sixty to seventy poor nations distressed by war, famine, or eco- nomic collapse. And Europe has just witnessed its worst currency crisis since 1931. TV news makes grim viewing today, and the assumption is made that these disturbing trends will intensify over the next decade and that the early years of the twenty-first century will be characterized by alarm and misery. I do not share this view at all, and I want to explain my reasons for looking into the future with cautious optimism. One of the most sensible precepts of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is ''Count your blessings,'' and our most important blessing is that we have survived the twentieth cen- tury, perhaps the most dangerous century in the history of humanity. We are leaving it with the international order, which first broke down in 1914 and remained fractured until the late 1980s, at least partially restored and with good prospects of a complete recovery. Looking back, one is ap- palled to think of the number of occasions when the civilized world was in real danger of extinction. I am old enough to recall at least three: 1940, when the Nazi system, the most dynamic of all the ideological Franken- stein's monsters which sought to dominate our century, had overrun con- tinental Europe and seemed poised to take over Africa and Asia too; 1945 - 46, when America seemed about to pull all its forces home, leaving the rest of the world to Stalin; and the mid 1970s, when the aftermath of Wa- tergate left the United States almost leaderless and encouraged Brezhnev and his surrogates to resume taking over the world. These were three despairing moments, and we survived all of them. In- deed, if we look at the ravages which Communist politics and economics inflicted on those areas where they were allowed full play -- the sheer de- struction of resources and environment, the obliteration of morality and truth-telling, the contempt for life, the ubiquitous corruption, the long- term poverty -- we have to count as an immeasurable blessing that Marx- ism took over only one-fifth of the world. It might have been a third, or a half, or three-quarters. Supposing it had triumphed and run the entire planet by its catastrophic system of wealth-destruction. The whole of hu- manity would have then entered a new dark age of savagery and want. We have escaped all that. Indeed we have done better. In Europe, for instance, the chief theater of the two tragic wars which engulfed our cen- tury and of the totalitarian ideologies which made it so miserable, we now have to note two encouraging facts. First, by the beginning of this decade, Europe had enjoyed its longest period without a general war in the whole of its history. Second, for the first time every single country in Western and West-Central Europe is a democracy under the rule of law -- and, de- spite all the difficulties, this pattern is spreading eastward. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Today, on both sides of the Atlantic, there are countless millions, born in the late 1940s, now middle-aged, always well educated and well nourished, who have never known what it was like to be without a vote or without redress against the state -- and who can now look forward with some confidence to an old age undisturbed by major conflict. Our forebears would have regarded this as indeed a mira- cle, a fundamental change in the condition and expectations of a huge sec- tion of humanity. Pillars of the New Wisdom WHAT WE need to do in the twenty-first century -- and we can make a start in the last years of this one -- is to make it possible for this compara- tive and unprecedented felicity to be spread progressively to the rest of the world. This is a noble aim, and the degree to which we fulfill it will determine, in turn, the solidity of the international peace we all enjoy. The First, Second, and Third World system we became accustomed to is now dead, finished. The new plateau we seek to establish is a unitary First World, in which Western standards of living and political opportu- nity are gradually extended to all humanity. That plateau will rest upon what I call the Seven Pillars of Twenty-First-Century Wisdom. The first pillar is the improvement and enlightened use of the United Nations idea. We have made a good start here, much better than anyone might have expected. The end of the cold war and the return of Russia to the civilized community of nations enabled the great-power Security Council system to function for the first time as its founders intended. We were lucky because, on the empty international stage cleared by the exit of the cold-war actors, there suddenly appeared a diabolus ex machina in the shape of Saddam Hussein. Had Saddam been a reluctant devil or a half-devil or a confused devil, he would not have served the purpose. But he was an unmitigated devil, an archetype devil almost in the mold of a Hitler, whose actions, in occupying Kuwait by unprovoked aggression and terrorizing its people, were unarguably evil. It was his sheer wickedness, and his unflinching obstinacy in pursuing it, which enabled the West, led by the United States and Britain, to bring the Security Council to ardent life, to secure its necessary authority, to assemble and deploy a mighty international coalition, including most Arab powers, and finally to use it successfully to reverse the aggression in a classic exercise in collective se- curity. None of this would have been possible during the cold war. But it is equally important to note that Desert Storm marked an immense im- provement over the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s, when acts of aggression were met only by international hand-wringing and were thus profitable, and soon imitated. The truth is, at the end of the century we have at last learned lessons about the need to use legitimate force to up- hold international order, and we are beginning to apply them. During the rest of this decade, we will be building on the foundations laid by our handling of the Kuwait invasion, and completing the process whereby an ineffectual and hypocritical General Assembly UN is trans- formed into what it was always intended to be, a realistic and forceful Se- curity Council UN. We will need to recruit a more appropriate Secretary General than the out-of-date Dr. Boutros Ghali, and to increase the cali- ber of the UN staff. Germany and Japan should be added to the Council as permanent members, and also I think India, in virtue of its population, which will peak at 1,875 million, only marginally smaller than China's will be. The permanent members, despite some remaining ideological dif- ferences, will slowly become accustomed to working together as the ''inner cabinet'' of the world community. Hitherto, the United States, as the sole superpower, has had reluctantly to take on the role of world policeman, while protesting it is doing no such thing. It will continue to provide the core of the enforcement process, but by the early years of the twenty-first century we will begin to see the Security Council emerge as the collective functioning agent of the policing system. That will be a giant step toward the realization of an international rule of law. However, and here we come to the second pillar of the new wisdom, we must also transform collective security from a reactive and negative force into a true watchdog, engaged in foreseeing and forestalling -- crime pre- vention and disaster avoidance. It was good that the world was able to reverse the Kuwait outrage. It would have been better -- and possible -- to stop it from ever happening. Crises are almost invariably dealt with more easily in their early stages. The Somaliland famine, like the Ethio- pian one which preceded it, was predictable and was in fact predicted. Countless lives and vast expense could have been saved, if a regular in- ternational operation had been mounted in the early stages, before hun- gry people began to abandon their homes and farms. In an increasingly overpopulated world, dealing with mass refugees becomes much harder, politically and financially. We have seen this also in former Yugoslavia, where the likelihood of huge movements of terrified or dispossessed people became obvious once the federation began to disintegrate. Intervention at this early stage would have saved scores of thousands of lives, prevented the destruction of much of the country's industrial wealth, infrastructure, and housing stock, and avoided the biggest European refugee problem since 1945. But the international community failed here just as conclu- sively as it succeeded in Kuwait. Why? Because there was no formal act of aggression breaching the UN charter, which does not deal with the dis- solution of member-states. What we will have to develop, and will develop in the next ten years, is international contingency-planning. Like the traditional great powers and their general staffs, the Security Council must learn to devise diplo- matic, military, and logistical plans for all foreseeable disturbances. It will set up, as it were, a global Disaster Survey, plotting the likely emer- gencies and devising ways to deal with them. It will regularly update these plans, and on their basis will regularly present to member-states the levels of force, transport, and relief supplies required to meet the con- tingencies listed. Like any other great power, the Security Council cannot be ready for everything. But it must be ready for all predictable crises, and move in swiftly when action will be most effective. UN service will become a regular part of the careers of officials and military of all the major powers and many minor ones, until the spirit and technology of col- lective security becomes an integral part of their training and experience. We will cease to think of the UN as well-meaning but contemptible, and regard it increasingly as a formidable and professional instrument of world crisis-management. The UN Charter will be amended periodically, as necessary in the light of its growing experience, and a more realistic system of finance adopted. In short, if the first pillar of wisdom is a UN reborn, the second pillar is a UN which has got itself organized as a pre- pared and positive instrument of world stability. It will need some truly great men and women to bring about this transformation, and my belief is that it will find them. Banish Illusion THE THIRD PILLAR is an extension of this positive role. We must, in the twenty-first century, banish from our thinking not only the utopian ideol- ogies that did so much harm in the twentieth, but the illusions that made their careers of destruction so easy. We cling to our belief that all peoples are ready for and can practice democracy, and maybe we shall authenti- cate it. But a related belief, that all people are ready for independence, has been proved illusory, at incalculable cost in human misery. Many so- called independent and sovereign states cannot function, and their peo- ples suffer accordingly. These include not merely quite recent creations, like Somaliland, but longer-established ones like Haiti, which goes back to the 1790s, and Liberia, which has been sovereign since the 1840s. There are at least a score of states where government cannot discharge its elementary functions of maintaining external defense, internal order, and an honest currency, and the number is likely to grow sharply. The plight of almost all Africa, after thirty years of independence, is already pitiful. It will become rapidly worse, as the peak of the population curve is reached, standards of government deteriorate still further, debt increases, finance dries up, and violence, famine, and disease fill the vacuum left by administrative collapse. A decade ago, four or five independent African states still appeared to be making progress; that number is now reduced to one or at the most two. And the one African state which has a strong First World element, the Republic of South Africa -- which sustains the economy of virtually all southern Africa -- is now in danger of joining the ranks of the casualties. We have to dismiss the illusion that the African Problem is caused pri- marily by colonialism or demographics or shortage of credit. It is caused by government: bad, incompetent, or corrupt government -- usually all three together -- or no government at all. Relief operations, forms of mili- tary intervention, as practiced by the French in Chad and elsewhere, or the Belgians in Zaire, are nothing but palliatives. And yet, the existence of inchoate states, and the violence and human degradation they breed, is a threat to stability and peace, as well as an affront to our consciences. The Versailles Treaty tried to anticipate and deal with this problem by the trustee system, which turned former colonies or provinces of the old German and Turkish empires into mandated territories, with the victori- ous powers as trustees. This system worked much better than many peo- ple have been prepared to admit in the post-1945 climate of anti-colonial- ism. There were some failures, like the British mandate in Palestine. But other territories, such as Tanganyika, Iraq, and Lebanon, enjoyed great stability and more assured growth than they have done since independence. We will, I believe, resurrect the trustee-mandate system in some form, if not with individual trusts then with collective Security Council ones. Up to now, the United Nations has never once been able to tackle an African emergency successfully because it treats symptoms, not causes, often indeed the wrong symptoms. What we shall see, I believe, will be the Security Council, using one or more advanced powers as its agents, mov- ing into the business of government, taking countries into its trusteeship for varying periods, and becoming itself an architect and exemplar of hon- est, efficient administration. If done firmly and confidently, such state- building will prove popular as well as successful, and will progressively eliminate many of the horrific problems that the present international communities try, belatedly and feebly, to solve. I foresee several levels or models of trusteeship, ranging from the provision of basic government al- most from scratch -- as is plainly needed in Somaliland now -- to the pro- vision of internal-security systems and mandatory currency and economic management. In short, the Security Council and its agents will become the last, most altruistic and positive of the imperial powers, restoring to the word colonialism the good name it once enjoyed -- in Mediterranean antiquity no less than the nineteenth century. The China Question I HAVE NO doubt that Russia, barring an internal catastrophe, will fit well into the system of Security Council intervention and acceptance of re- sponsibility. Indeed in some areas, such as the Trans-Caucasus, it may have to become a trustee itself. The real difficulty, in this as in other re- spects, remains China. It will eventually have a population not much below two billion. It is likely, by the second or third decade of the twenty- first century, to have the world's second largest GNP. And it is slowly but surely acquiring the capabilities not just of a regional great power but of a global one. Yet it is still Marxist, totalitarian, isolated, introverted, xenophobic, and, in some ways, paranoid. Thus the fourth pillar of twenty- first-century wisdom must be the redirection into positive and construc- tive channels of China's power to disrupt and menace the Far East. We should not underestimate the difficulties. Anyone who has read Harrison Salisbury's recent and remarkable double biography of Mao Tse- tung and Deng Xiaoping will be in no doubt about the savagery of the re- gime which still holds absolute power. It is Saddam Hussein multiplied by forty. Quite apart from problems like the brutalization of Tibet, which continue, there is the difficulty of transforming a system close to Stalin's into a legitimate and acceptable form of government. Yet in some ways China remains a great civilization, and perhaps it is useful to see Deng and his associates more in the roles of a Francisco Franco or Mikhail Gor- bachev, anxious to proceed progressively toward constitutionalism, than as beleaguered men upholding an outmoded dictatorship. China is moving into the world community economically, and if it can absorb Hong Kong in an intelligent and constructive manner by the end of this decade, it will become at a stroke a formidable financial power -- a ''have'' nation, with more to lose than to gain from regional instability. I believe the difficul- ties raised by China's immensity and by its regime will be overcome partly by involving its rulers more and more in the new Security Council system. Peking should be given more responsibility to share, and will act more re- sponsibly in consequence. By enmeshing China in the network of duties and privileges of great-power status, we will gradually convert her from an international anomaly in a post-cold-war world into a central pillar of the new global structure of order. War by Other Means HOWEVER, our success in doing this will be contingent on our ability to grapple with another emergent problem. We have turned our backs on a two-world system in which mighty armed blocs squared up against each other all over the planet and used satellites and surrogates in attempts to manage the uncommitted nations. This horrible system is fast dissolv- ing. But in the next ten years we shall see whether it is replaced by a gen- uine and progressive internationalism or by another divisive system. There is, as things stand, a real risk that the movement toward a free- trading world, carried on with quiet but formidable success by the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs mechanism for nearly half a century, may be halted, and that we will be divided into three giant trading blocs. The European Community, despite its current crisis over the Maas- tricht Treaty, must be accounted successful in dissolving internal Euro- pean trading barriers -- at one level the most extensive and brilliant ex- periment of its kind. Yet it is still an experiment in the sense that its ul- timate nature remains unresolved. Is the EC to be outward-looking, the prototype of a global trading community, expanding its frontiers horizon- tally by taking in more partners and, in addition, progressively lowering its tariffs to the rest of the world? Or is it to be inward-looking, a deep vertical structure, with integrated federal government and common insti- tutions, a protectionist superpower with high external tariffs -- Fortress Europe, in short? The British want the first model; the French the second, with Germany -- preoccupied by reunification -- wavering between the two. I believe that the next ten years will see a resolution of this dilemma in Britain's favor. This fall's failure of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the consequent need to re-write Maastricht suggest the Community will reject high-speed federalism and concentrate, instead, on improving its ex- isting arrangements and taking in new members, in Scandinavia and Central Europe, and eventually Eastern Europe too. It is vital that it should take this path, for much hangs on the choice. There are already signs that the world is shaping itself into three trading systems. Inspired by the EC's example, the United States has overcome the distrust of Canada to form an enlarged market, and the two have now been joined by Mexico, to constitute the largest free-trading community in the world. As we know from Europe's example, the realization of this de- sign is a long way off. But it is on track, and the long-term advantages of its accomplishment are so great that it is hard to see the American peo- ple, who hold the future of the project in their hands, missing the oppor- tunity. However, if this great North American project comes into being, it will be faced with the same choice as the EC: to become a huge unit within the global GATT system, or ''Fortress North America.'' Its choice will de- pend very much on which side wins the battle in Brussels. In turn, the choices made by the two Western groups will determine the shape taken by an emerging trading bloc in Asia. We will have to get used to a world in which, increasingly, global trends will be set on that conti- nent. The numbers will determine it. By the time Asian population growth stabilizes, six of its nations -- China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Vietnam -- will have a collective population of five and a quarter billion. Enormous markets will thus be there to absorb the growing economic dynamism of the West Pacific Rim, which will extend inward as the twenty-first century moves on. The old cold-war hatreds are being put aside there too, as witness the recent rapprochement between China and South Korea, and are being replaced by pragmatic arrange- ments. The area has all kinds of unresolved territorial disputes and un- satisfied antipathies -- but then so had Europe until recently. There can be no doubt at all that the next ten years will see the emergence of re- gional trading arrangements. An embryo grouping already exists in Southeast Asia. Japan, which rightly views the EC and NAFTA with some concern, is sure to seek local partners if only in self-defense. Thus, whether we like it or not, we are moving toward a tripartite world system of trade. This is both encouraging and dangerous. Encouraging, because big internal international markets make the creation of a single world market -- the fulfillment of the GATT dream -- inherently more likely. When customs barriers are abolished over large areas, the way is prepared for removing them everywhere. Negotiations among three par- ties are easier than among scores. But dangerous too. The French concept of the Common Agricultural Policy, which led to the current threats of a trade war, has been the source of antagonism between North America (and Australia) and Europe of a bitterness which recalls the pre-war fail- ures. If the French idea finally triumphs, it will have a knock-on effect on NAFTA and on any emerging Asian group. We would then be condemned to on-going trade wars among three gigantic systems. That is a cata- strophic prospect, both for the world economy and for world stability. His- tory shows that trade wars have a depressing tendency to erupt into fight- ing wars. At the very least, trading antagonisms would make impossible the functioning of a creative Security Council system of the kind I have described. So, much will rest on this fifth pillar of twenty-first-century wisdom -- the fashioning of trading blocs whose ultimate destiny and con- scious purpose is to merge in one global system. A free-trading system which is fair and global is as important to international well-being as col- lective security -- indeed, the two reinforce each other. It is clear from what I have said so far that these pillars of international wisdom will depend to a great extent on popular pressure and consent, and that in turn will depend on popular enlightenment. We move here to one of the gravest problems that face societies all over the world. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when democracy was developing rapidly on both sides of the Atlantic, Thomas Macaulay observed it was a race between democracy and education. If we could educate new voters fast enough we could turn the newly enfranchised masses into responsible citizens -- if not, we would end up with an empowered mob. So universal suffrage depended on universal education. The proposition remains broadly true, and certainly we have got to ed- ucate the new billions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But we are sad- der and wiser than in Macaulay's optimistic day. We know that to will and enact universal education is not enough. We have done that. No other so- ciety in human history has placed such a strong and consistent emphasis on education at all levels as the United States has from its very inception. But there has been a failure somewhere. Prodigious amounts of money are not producing educated people in sufficient numbers. What happened in Los Angeles this June suggests that in Southern California, one of the richest societies on earth, the race is in danger of being lost. Again, the Soviet Union, with all its faults, placed huge emphasis on education. No other country ever produced graduates in such huge numbers, particularly in technical fields like engineering. But here again there has been a fail- ure, and a more catastrophic one. The effort put into education not only bore bitter fruit in terms of the nation's capability to provide reasonable living standards for its people -- it did not even produce enlightenment. Racial and ethnic prejudices, the dark forces of the human spirit, appear to be as powerful in the components of the former Soviet Union as ever. All over Eastern Europe, and increasingly in Western Europe, mobs of young people, who have been right through the universal-education mill, are ranging through the complete gamut of primitive and irrational be- havior -- racism, ethnic triumphalism, xenophobia, hatred of refugees. There is a universal complaint in Europe and North America that the young emerge from high school (and often from university) with only toler- able literacy, unable to write their own language well, ignorant of other languages, knowing little of their country's history, literature, and culture -- fitter candidates for a mob than for a citizenry. The consciousness of this educational failure is so general and profound that we will see, over the next decade, intensive efforts to make it good. They are already starting in various countries, including my own. And they have to succeed, because many of the developments I foresee -- espe- cially the introduction of a positive system of international law and the spread of a pattern of world free trade -- are contingent on the existence and approval of an educated electorate. The next ten years must see, and I believe will see, the beginnings of a true cultural revolution, in which we make our schools and colleges more efficient so that they turn out young people not just touched by education, as at present, but permeated, penetrated by it, with the basis of a lifetime's knowledge and skills. I think we shall have to be humble in achieving this, and look to the East for example and method. The Hidden Resource EDUCATION is closely related to the last pillar of wisdom -- making the fullest use of our resources. We have made huge strides recently in learn- ing, for instance, how to exploit mineral resources such as oil and gold, in the most efficient manner -- one reason why we have so much of both. We are beginning to treat our planet with respect, to the profit of all. The next ten years will see a rapid acceleration of these trends as we marry moral- ity to proficiency. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the world is going to be a much more affluent place. But inanimate resources, im- portant though they are, are not the raw material of the higher wisdom. The most vital development of the next ten years will be the improvement in the use of our human resources. What strikes me most, when I watch TV clips of skeleton-thin victims of famine in East Africa, is not just the misery they are plainly enduring, but the profligate waste of their energies and talents -- a waste to them- selves and to all of us, to the world. The brains, the creativity and imag- ination, the sensibilities and taste of perhaps two-thirds of humanity are underused, in many millions of cases completely thrown away. All we use, at best, is their muscle-power, itself an anomaly in a world with a growing surplus of energy. As Thomas Gray, deploring the waste of human genius, put it in his ''Elegy in a Country Churchyard'': Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark, unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. The next ten years will see this squandering much diminished, as we find our Nobel Prize - winners coming increasingly from thrusting, vigorous countries like Malaysia, Korea, Chile, Turkey, and Singapore, and as the old sleeping giants, China and India, come fully awake. There is much gloom and doom-prediction in the world today, as I suppose is natural in a prolonged recession, and anxiety lest the end of the cold war and the disappearance of the Communist threat have brought more problems than benefits. Away with such faint-heartedness! We have survived a terrible century. That is something. We have learned many of its most important lessons. That is more. We are now poised on the verge of a great adven- ture in international political and economic coming-together, which can turn the twenty-first century into the period when the first global society is forged. The next ten years will see whether this is likely to happen or not. They are going to be invigorating, exciting years, and I am looking forward to them with relish. ******************************************************************** Shattering the Glass Ceiling STILL SEEKING A GLASS SLIPPER There are reasons, good, bad, and neutral, why there are fewer women than men at the top of American institutions. But women who want to shatter the 'glass ceiling' had better do it the old-fashioned way. GEORGE GILDER Mr. Gilder's latest book is Life after Television (Norton). This article is adapted from a speech for the Eagle Forum, headed by Phyllis Schlafly. LEAN BACK in your chair and look up -- the ceiling is opaque, isn't it? At least it is for most of us mere men. I would like to play for the Celtics, run the software division at IBM, write eighty best-sellers like Agatha Christie, be elected to the Senate like Barbara Mikulski, summon God and make Him come like Leanne Payne. I would like to be able to debate, write numberless books, and lead national movements to victory, as Phyl- lis Schlafly does, while raising five children. I ogle upward at these para- gons and am baffled. I do not have the slightest idea how they do it. The ceiling is not glass. Actually, I think the problem is that for the feminists, the ceiling is a mirror. They look up at the pinnacles of the economy and see themselves in power. The fact is that in a competitive economy, nearly all high-level jobs demand singular gifts, special experience, high ambition, bold will- ingness to take risks. For a particular slot, there is usually not a broad selection of people available. Often, judging from my experience with small high-technology businesses, there is no one available of either sex. Headhunters earn thousands of dollars by delivering one suitable head. And each year, these high-tech firms account for a larger share of total U.S. employment. Men too sometimes find themselves beneath a glass ceiling -- shut out of a job for which they are sure they're qualified. But they have to smash the ceiling the old-fashioned way: by leaving the company and starting their own business. These are the facts of life in enterprise. You don't get to be boss because of credentials or good behavior. You don't zoom to the top in a glass slip- per. You get to the top by devoting your life to the pursuit. And at the summit the slopes are slippery. Most of the time there is no glass floor to catch you if you fall. The new way, if you're a woman or an approved minority, is to call a lawyer, as did Barbara Sogg. She wanted to run the American Airlines LaGuardia Office. But she was ''stubborn and uncooperative,'' according to her superiors, and she had had heart surgery. And she lacked a degree in engineering. Just the sort of person you want in control at the airport. Passed over in favor of a male engineer, she sued. An affirmative-action triple threat, she charged discrimination on the basis of sex, age, and dis- ability, and won a total of $7 million. Wow. There's a woman who can cut it in modern-day America. She told the New York Times that she hoped the verdict would ''shatter the glass ceiling that has kept women from many of the top jobs in large corporations.'' Rule of the Worst OF COURSE, in some circles frequented by feminists, the ceiling is indeed transparent. On university campuses, in soft subjects, the worst rule. It is similar in government. With the appropriate norming and other skews, credentials often can prevail. But in the dreaded private sector, outside of a few plush monopolies, performance is nearly everything. When you are competing with the Japanese, there is literally no room for bias of any sort -- including affirmative action. And though many people do not want to face it, it is the heavily patriarchal societies of Japan and other Asian countries that we will be competing against more and more in most businesses. Yet the women continue to complain and sue. They want to be allotted positions at the top. They want to ride up in a glass slipper. What is going on here? Russell Kirk explained the problem in The Con- servative Mind: ''[Our] people have come to look upon society, vaguely, as a homogeneous mass of identical individuals, with indistinguishable abili- ties and needs, whose happiness may be secured by direction from above, through legislation or some manner of public instruction.'' He is right. The problem is the sociological view: the belief in a society of monads that are all to be treated as human beings. But I have never met a human being, and I hope I never do. In this world, there are only men and women; and they are very different from one another. Vive la difference. Different but Equal? BUT IF men and women are different, there is no reason on earth to ex- pect them to show up in comparable numbers in high-ranking jobs. There is no reason to believe that the male advantage in executive roles is an effect of discrimination. In fact, the differences between men and women overwhelmingly favor men in the positions beyond the glass ceiling. Although there are many contrary claims and myths, anthropologists have yet to document a society in which men do not dominate the ''top'' jobs and do not tend to rule in male - female relations. As Steven Goldberg has demonstrated in The Inevitability of Patriarchy, and as even Margaret Mead admitted, there has never existed a documented matriarchy. In other words, the glass ceiling is not a cultural peculiarity of the United States, reversible by legislation. All societies ever studied have a glass ceiling. Ellen Goodman was grousing about the effects of this fact of life as seen in the Democratic presidential primaries. Although every one of the Dem- ocratic candidates supported every conceivable form of affirmative action and civil-rights litigation, there were no women candidates. Mrs. Goodman asked why Madeleine Kunin, the former governor of Vermont, was not running for President. Mrs. Kunin replied with the rat-race argument: ''As politics becomes more and more of a bruising game, a lot of women who aren't inclined to that kind of hostility and competitiveness are put off even further. ''Sometimes,'' she added, ''there is also a level of exhaustion among women. So many . . . have come so far and each step has been such a struggle. When it's time to step in the ring, they say, 'Hey, I've gone as far as I can go.''' Juliet B. Schor, a Harvard economist, put the feminist argument in more general terms in a recent book, highly acclaimed, which maintains that the problem with the U.S. economy is that Americans work too hard. She protests -- how like a feminist! -- that one ought to get these top-of- the-line jobs on flextime, with a lot of vacations and leisure. She does not comprehend that for nearly all the men above the glass ceiling, onerous work is their life, indispensable to support their families and crucial to the success of the economy. These disdained workaholics make it possible for Juliet Schor to pursue a leisurely tenured career in Cambridge. The winners of the jobs beyond the looking glass are precisely the com- petitors who push on when ordinary men and women flag. They are com- petitors for whom the so-called rat race is the focus of their lives. For many reasons, men are overwhelmingly more inclined to an obsessive and successful focus on career than women are. Some of the reasons are biological. The evidence is overwhelming that men and women are genetically dissimilar in ways well beyond the obvi- ous physical differences. Feminist psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin sum it up in The Psychology of Sex Differences: ''1) Males are more aggressive than females in all human societies for which evi- dence is available. 2) The sex differences are found early in life, at a time when there is no evidence that differential socialization pressures have been brought to bear by adults to 'shape' aggression differently in the two sexes. 3) Similar sex differences are found in man and subhuman pri- mates. 4) Aggression is related to levels of sex hormones, and can be changed by experimental administrations of these hormones.'' Virtually all feminists who have considered the evidence now acknowl- edge these differences. But they rarely concede the obvious result: The sex that is the more competitive will tend to win more competitions. Feminists contend that the male edge in aggressiveness is irrelevant in the modern work place, where soft skills are allegedly becoming more im- portant. The fact is, however, that from finance to economics, from tech- nology to market research, high-level employment is more and more ori- ented toward mathematical reasoning. This means that men will increas- ingly hold the top jobs, because they are overwhelmingly more likely to excel in math. In a study of 9,927 exceptional students by researchers at Johns Hop- kins, the mathematical portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test was ad- ministered on six different occasions between 1972 and 1979 to seventh- and eighth-graders with equal preparation. The researchers found 32.5 per cent more boys than girls scoring high in math, though the girls in the sample exceeded the average in their sex by a greater margin than the boys did. Overall, 7.8 per cent of the boys, but only 1.7 per cent of the girls, scored over 600 out of the 800 possible points, and all the scores over 760 were by boys. This difference is not peculiar to America. In recent in- ternational tests of math and science skills, boys decisively outperformed girls in math in all the 13 countries participating. Better, Best FEMINISTS say these differences are not important. They may accept the fact that most men are more competitive, aggressive, technically oriented, and physically strong than most women. But they point out correctly that many women excel most men in all these characteristics. Although only 4 out of 350 chess grandmasters are women, the youngest one of all time is Judit Polgar, a Hungarian girl in a family which has produced one of the other female grandmasters as well. Nonetheless, the fact that many women are more aggressive or techni- cally adept than most men is irrelevant to the glass-ceiling debate, which necessarily focuses not on averages but on exceptions. Competing for top jobs, women will not face average men. Women will have to excel the men whose aptitudes have led them to specialize in the particular task at hand. It does not help women chess players or wrestlers or commodity traders or microchip entrepreneurs that they might be better at these ac- tivities than me. Or better than millions of other men, including most of the men reading this article. What matters is whether they are willing and able to compete near the top male level in their field. Reinforcing the biological differences are equally powerful cultural and psychological differences. Quite simply, men are dependent on earning money for their sexual role in the world. In general, without earning money, a man cannot win a woman or marry her. Although feminists claim that all this is changing, the fact is that leading feminists show no inclination to marry flower children. Gloria Steinem pursued her self-es- teem with real-estate tycoons. Indeed, the more money a woman earns, the bigger the gap between her income and the larger income of her hus- band. Marriageable women usually demand that their men outearn them. The sexual and marital prospects of a woman, on the other hand, are little affected by her earning power. Unlike the man, the woman has op- tions. She can drop out of the rat race any time she wants without jeo- pardizing her prospects for marriage. This difference alone would be enough to explain the different numbers of men and women beyond the glass ceiling. But marriageability is just the beginning of it. After marriage, the woman has a deep biological in- stinct to have children and to care for them and has a deeply respectable role as mother. On the other hand, many surveys show that a man who stays home and cares for the children wins the respect neither of his wife nor of other men. According to the sociological data, couples who switch roles for any extended period are ''extremely unhappy and prone to divorce.'' In competing for glass-ceiling work, even rising female education and credentials do not countervail these overwhelming social forces. A study by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin -- a liberal group financed largely by the government -- demonstrates a drastic difference between the sexes in the use of what they call ''earnings capacity.'' Earnings capacity is defined in terms of age, education, creden- tials, experience, location, physical health, alleged discrimination, and other determinants of potential earnings. The study shows that married men of working age use 87 per cent of their earnings capacity, while com- parable married women use only 33 per cent. Although the differences are much smaller for singles, the same pattern applies. The men devote more of their energies to their careers -- though, because women have more cre- dentials and are healthier, single women who work full time on average outearn single men. For the glass-ceiling debate, however, the key point is that men with the most earnings capacity exploit it most effectively, working longer hours and more resourcefully the more education and credentials they possess. By contrast, the more education and credentials a married woman possesses, the less likely she is to work full time all year at a highly demanding and remunerative job. While the earnings-capacity util- ization of married men rises from 64 to 84 per cent from the bottom to the top tenth of earnings capacity, the earnings-capacity utilization of mar- ried women drops nearly one-third, from 35 to 24 per cent, or to a level about one-quarter that of their husbands. (These figures were based on data from the 1970s, but later statistics confirm the pattern.) Women, that is, may seek education and credentials in order to work less rather than to work more. Female physicians, for example, see 38 per cent fewer patients on average than male physicians; female lawyers see fewer cli- ents than male lawyers; female professors write fewer books and research papers than male professors. This is in no way culpable. It springs from an entirely commendable de- sire on the part of women to gain more time with their families. The re- sult, however, is overwhelming. The very women who would be best pre- pared to pierce the glass ceiling shy from the effort. The fact that more men than women succeed, therefore, is not difficult to explain. What needs to be explained is the pervasive bitterness and resentment shown by many women at these obvious manifestations of the facts of life. The Great Alibi THE REASON, though, is clear when you think about it. All the estab- lished institutions in society today -- in education, politics, the media, and the professions -- tell women that they should be doing better in the job market. They know that they neither can nor want to make the efforts and sacrifices that men routinely make in order to reach the top echelons. But rather than admitting that feminism overall is a profoundly wrong- headed and unnatural theory of life, many women prefer to denounce the society. Rather than conceding that they are less apt for workplace suc- cess, many women prefer to blame discrimination. In any workplace competition, discrimination is the great alibi for fail- ure. We all tend to use it when we can. Conservatives talk about a huge conspiracy against them in the marketplace. Liberals talk about an estab- lishment conspiracy against them. But only the 70 per cent or so of the U.S. population now covered as victims under civil-rights laws can actu- ally sue. Conservatives sometimes get this stuff wrong. The problem of glass-ceil- ing legislation isn't quotas; it's blackmail. No small business can afford to contest a lawsuit and few large ones want to. It's just too much time and distraction for the key personnel, the ones above the ceiling. I have seen it many times. Unless the amounts demanded are huge -- in which case you go bankrupt -- what you have to do if someone sues is to pay her off, regardless of the facts of the case. You just cannot continue to function as a business while undergoing a discovery process in a discrimination or, even worse, a sexual-harassment suit. The new Civil Rights Act is not a quota bill so much as a protection racket. For, in addition to feminists, there is one minority that benefits greatly from such laws, one group that has mostly pierced the glass ceiling al- ready. That group is, of course, lawyers. Unlike the lower-class clientele involved in many discrimination suits, the glass-ceiling concept focuses on deep pockets: the richest and best-po- sitioned Americans, who can afford to pay lawyers and who work in firms which can sustain lucrative settlements. The concern is not with bias; it is with finance. But when the law itself becomes an object of entrepre- neurial manipulation, the entire economy suffers. This is the real mean- ing and portent of the glass-ceiling de-bate. ******************************************************************** Repealing the Eighties DEBT, LIES, AND REAGANOMICS There's nothing frivolous about the effort to debunk Reaganomics. And almost nothing true. BENJAMIN ZYCHER Mr. Zycher is vice president for research at the Milken Institute for Job and Capital Formation in Santa Monica, California, and is also a visiting professor of economics at UCLA. 'AMOUNTAIN of debt!'' ''A house of cards!'' ''A foundation of quicksand!'' ''We're stealing from our children!'' Such are some of the simplistic notions used widely in efforts to deny the explosion of real economic growth atten- dant upon Ronald Reagan's Presidency. The ongoing myth-making has as its central features the arguments that the public debt acquired during the 1980s laid the foundation for future economic weakness, and that the Reagan economic policies encouraged the accumulation of private debt for unproductive purposes. With respect to the public debt, the narrow myths are 1) that the reduc- tion in marginal tax rates yielded record deficits, and 2) that the deficits were used politically to constrain social spending. The larger myth is 3) that the deficits were in some (undefined) sense far too large and therefore economically destructive. Let us consider these myths one by one. 1) Tax receipts from FY 1950 through FY 1977 averaged about 18.6 per cent of GDP; for FY 1982 - 89 (the Reagan budget years), the comparable figure was over 18.7 per cent. The budget years of the Carter Adminis- tration (FY 1978 - 81) are the real aberration: tax receipts averaged al- most 19.4 per cent of GDP, largely because of the effects of inflation. Dur- ing FY 1950 - 77, tax receipts in constant dollars grew at an annual rate of 3.8 per cent; for the Carter budget years, the comparable figure was al- most 4.5 per cent. For the Reagan budget years, real tax receipts grew at about 3.1 per cent annually, but that rate was affected crucially by the recession ending in the fourth quarter of 1982. For FY 1983 - 89, tax re- ceipts grew annually at 5 per cent. The Reagan tax policies, in short, yielded revenue performance that did not diverge sharply from that of most of the postwar period. The real story is on the spending side of the budget. For FY 1950 - 77, outlays averaged about 19.7 per cent of GDP; for FY 1982 - 89, the figure was about 23.2 per cent, reflecting the rise in outlays for defense and net interest. During the Carter budget years, outlays averaged ''only'' about 21.8 per cent of GDP.Therefore, the growth in the federal budget deficit during Reagan's tenure was the result of the growth in outlays as a proportion of GDP. 2) According to the ''12 years of neglect'' school of thought, all these in- creased outlays went to defense, while the deficit was used as an excuse to slash social spending. With respect to this argument, the table on page 42 presents data on federal spending on poverty programs before and dur- ing the Reagan Administration. The programs subsumed in the table in- clude Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Medicaid, Food Stamps, Social Services Block Grants, Head Start, various housing subsidies, the Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition program, low-income energy assistance, and others. Total transfers (cash and non-cash assistance) grew at an annual rate of about 1.6 per cent -- again, in real terms -- during FY 1982 - 89. Although that growth was less rapid than in some earlier periods, depending upon the choice of starting and ending years, it hardly provides evidence sup- porting the assertion that the deficits were used to cut social spending. Unless we accept the notion that the Reagan deficits were close to some size limit in terms of political acceptability, the deficits may well have en- couraged income-transfer programs because the spending accrued to the benefit of current voters, while the future taxes needed to pay the (inter- est on the) debt will be borne by future voters. 3) Answering the question whether the Reagan deficits were in some sense ''too large'' requires that we invoke a fundamental principle of pub- lic finance: Efficiency in government spending is furthered when the costs of government programs are borne by the beneficiaries. To the extent that this principle is incorporated into tax/expenditure policy, voters have in- centives to demand neither too much nor too little government spending. In the context of the choice between current taxation and debt for fed- eral finance, a useful assumption is that the burden of current taxation is borne by current taxpayers/voters, while the burden of debt -- or of the future taxes needed to pay the interest and principal -- is borne primarily by future taxpayers/voters. In short, current taxation ought to be used to pay for government spending yielding benefits solely or primarily for cur- rent taxpayers/voters, while debt ought to be used to finance spending the main benefits of which accrue in the future. Therefore, as a first approxi- mation, debt used to finance investment (capital formation) is crudely ef- ficient if the investments themselves yield a social return sufficiently high to justify their cost, an issue to which I return below. Borrow and Spend FOR NOW, let us examine the relationship between the amount of federal borrowing and the amount of federal capital expenditures during FY 1982 - 89. The table on page 43 shows total federal capital investment outlays compared with the federal budget deficit. As a crude approximation, the increasing deficits in the Reagan Presidency were correlated with the in- crease in total federal capital investment, and in particular with the in- vestment growth in military capital. Indeed, the increase in the debt share of GDP matched almost exactly the increase in the defense share of GDP. Let us assume for the moment that federal investment spending is ''effi- cient'' or correct in the sense that the spending earns for society a return, whether explicit or implicit, at least equal to the marginal before-tax re- turn in the corporate sector. Over the period 1982 - 89, deficit spending was larger than total capital spending for five of the eight years; the re- verse was true in the other three years, and the total net excess of deficit spending over federal capital formation was about $226.7 billion, an aver- age of about $28.3 billion per year. In the strict sense of the efficient choice of instruments for finance of federal spending, therefore, the defi- cits were too large by about $28.3 billion per year, a figure that is trivial in the context of an economy that grew from $4.4 trillion to $5.7 trillion (in 1991 dollars). There are three different reasons to believe that the deficits were too large during the Reagan Presidency, but they raise an issue -- the optimal amount of total federal spending -- distinct from the choice between cur- rent taxation and debt finance. First, no one can believe that all federal investment yields a return for society sufficiently high to justify the spending; to put it differently, the Federal Government is too big, and many of the resources used for federal investment would be more produc- tive if returned to the private sector. (The before-tax return to investment in the corporate sector is the approximate minimum social cost of federal spending.) Second, the cost to the economy of supplying a dollar of re- sources to the Federal Government is far more than a dollar; the true eco- nomic cost of spending financed through borrowing is the budget cost plus the marginal inefficiency cost engendered by the tax system. The most complete estimate of that cost is that of Jim Payne, director of Lytton Re- search and Analysis. He judges the marginal cost of a dollar of federal rev- enue to be $1.65. Thus, federal investment spending is efficient only if the marginal return to a dollar of investment is at least $1.65. Third, much of federal spending has little to do with functions inappro- priate for the private sector or for states and localities. In other words, much federal activity should be undertaken at the state/local level, or not by government at all. The conventional view that the Reagan deficits were ''too large'' implic- itly must be based upon a view that the spending consumed resources that would have been more productive in the private sector. After all, substitu- tion of current taxation for debt would not have changed the productivity of the spending, and if the spending was worthwhile for society if financed through taxation, then it was worthwhile also if financed by borrowing. Ironically, most of those arguing that the Reagan deficits were harmful argue also that federal domestic spending ought to increase. Therefore, the fundamental issue in the deficit debate is (or ought to be) the size of the federal budget: Is it in the government sector or the private sector that resources on the margin are most productive socially? Private Debt THE MYTHS surrounding the accumulation of private-sector debt during the Reagan Presidency represent the ultimate in analytic absurdity. Rea- ganite economic policies have been blamed for growing consumer debt used to finance frivolous consumption, for growing business debt unre- lated or harmful to real economic performance, and for essentially useless financial games financed with ''junk bonds'' that yielded only unemploy- ment for many workers. Consumer installment debt grew from $455 billion (1991 dollars) at the end of 1982 to $774 billion at the end of 1989. Over the same period, per- sonal-consumption expenditures on durable goods grew from $319 billion to $516 billion. Thus, the ratio of installment debt to consumer-durables expenditures rose slightly. Even under the (weak) assumption that the trend was in some sense undesirable, it is absurd to blame it on Mr. Re- agan. Consumer debt is encouraged by high inflation, which reduces real interest costs, and by high marginal tax rates, which reduce after-tax in- terest costs. Indeed, the combination of high inflation and high marginal tax rates at the end of the Carter Administration yielded negative real, after-tax interest rates for many consumers. In this context, the disinfla- tion and reduction of marginal tax rates under Reagan raised real, after- tax consumer interest rates, and thus discouraged consumer debt. As for business debt, the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act reduced sig- nificantly the multiple taxation of saving and investment, and thus yielded an investment boom (although the 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Re- sponsibility Act and the 1986 Tax Reform Act reversed the earlier law in substantial part). Accordingly, fixed nonresidential investment grew from $508 billion (1991 dollars) in 1982 to $635 billion in 1989. Expenditures for new plant and equipment grew from $455 billion in 1982 to $548 bil- lion in 1989. Since it was eminently sensible for businesses to finance this strong investment growth with debt, external-credit-market borrowing (for the nonfarm, nonfinancial corporate sector) grew as well over much of the same period, from $71 billion (1991 dollars) in 1982 to $153 billion in 1986; this borrowing actually fell to under $46 billion by 1989. Whether it was financed from external borrowing, retained earnings, or other sources, those arguing that the investment boom under Reagan was ''unproductive'' must explain the economic growth that accompanied it; and they must justify as well the implicit argument that they know better than the capital market the most socially productive investment sectors during the Reagan Presidency. Neither argument is likely to be forthcom- ing soon in any convincing form. In no realm is there greater myth-making and confusion than in that surrounding the growth of high-yield (''junk'') finance, economic restruc- turing, and attendant employment effects during the Reagan era. Those years brought massive economic shifts in terms of reduced inflation, lower real energy prices, and the technological revolution. The upshot of such changes in important economic paramenters must be, and always has been, the decline of many established sectors and the growth of others, some of which are new to the economic scene. Moreover, the 1960s, for reasons understood imperfectly, had been char- acterized by a wave of corporate mergers across business lines. This was justified at the time in terms of financial diversification, but such diversi- fication can be accomplished far more easily with the simple purchase of equity than through actual conglomeration. In any event, there were good reasons to believe that the earlier merger wave had led by the 1980s to inefficient management of the conglomerates; accordingly, it was unsurpr- ising that the market for corporate control would move to break up the firms, and thus increase shareholder wealth. That trend was accompanied by the emergence of new industries in the late 1970s and early 1980s and by the creation of many new firms during the Reagan economic boom. It is large, established firms that tend to be classified as ''investment-grade'' by such rating agencies as Standard & Poor's; smaller firms and newer firms tend to be rated as ''non-invest- ment-grade.'' Until the emergence of high-yield bonds in the late 1970s, non-investment-grade firms had had to rely upon bank loans for capital, but such loans usually were short-term debts, and so were subject to fluc- tuations in interest rates and other financial-market parameters. By reducing the risks of interest-rate fluctuations substantially -- that is, by increasing certainty with respect to the cost of debt finance -- the rise of high-yield bonds in the late 1970s brought a substantial reduction in the real cost of debt finance capital for non-investment-grade firms. That inherent advantage of high-yield securities resulted in rapid growth in the use of these instruments. From about $2.1 billion (in 1991 dollars) in 1977, issues of high-yield securities grew to $54.6 billion in 1986. Since labor and capital are complementary inputs, it is unsurprising that the growth in the use of high-yield securities by non-investment- grade firms was accompanied by a dramatic expansion in employment by those firms. While employment in the Fortune 1000 fell by about 2 million during 1977 - 1986, employment in non-investment-grade firms grew by 17.3 million. In the decade (1968 - 78) before the widespread use of high- yield securities, total employment among non-investment-grade firms grew on average by 1.3 million per year. For the Fortune 1000 the figure was 383,000. The figure for non-investment-grade firms increased to 2.4 million per year during 1982 - 89 even as total employment fell in the For- tune 1000 by 769,000 annually. In short, the Reagan economic boom carried with it a dramatic increase in employment, much of it owing to ''junk'' bonds. Real-Life Laboratory THE EMOTIVE nature of the term ''debt'' is tailor-made for those inter- ested in diverting attention from the pro-market policies of Ronald Re- agan and the resulting economic prosperity. The plain reality is that the late 1970s on the one hand and the early and mid-1980s on the other pro- vide as close to a controlled experiment in the effects of divergent eco- nomic policies as modern democracy is ever likely to engender. For those interested in the advancement of human welfare, the myths about the Re- agan years are as damaging as they are dishonest. ******************************************************************** FEDERAL INCOME TRANSFERS TO THE POOR (Billions of 1991 Dollars) Cash Non-Cash Year Assistance Assistance Total 1965 47.8 15.6 63.4 1966 44.1 21.7 65.8 1967 41.2 26.0 67.2 1968 44.0 31.5 75.5 1969 45.5 34.3 79.8 1970 46.8 38.6 85.4 1971 54.9 50.1 105.0 1972 59.7 66.4 126.1 1973 48.4 63.8 112.2 1974 51.3 66.9 118.2 1975 54.7 80.0 134.7 1976 57.8 93.6 151.4 1977 53.5 96.7 150.2 1978 49.8 85.0 134.8 1979 40.7 104.9 145.6 1980 42.7 109.8 152.5 1981 40.1 114.5 154.6 1982 36.2 103.8 140.0 1983 35.2 108.2 143.4 1984 34.5 107.3 141.8 1985 34.1 127.3 161.4 1986 34.5 112.8 147.3 1987 33.6 112.9 146.5 1988 34.3 118.2 152.5 1989 33.4 123.0 156.4 1990 32.0 129.9 161.9 1991 34.3 145.8 180.1 Source: Fiscal Year 1993 Budget of the United States Government ******************************************************************** FEDERAL CAPITAL INVESTMENT OUTLAYS AND DEFICIT SPENDING (Billions of 1991 Dollars) Capital Investment Total Total Budget Year Defense Non-Defense Total Deficit Difference 1980 76.4 76.9 153.3 121.7 - 31.6 1981 82.1 76.3 158.4 118.2 - 40.2 1982 89.7 64.4 154.1 178.9 24.8 1983 100.2 59.4 159.6 277.1 117.5 1984 111.9 61.9 173.8 237.7 63.9 1985 125.6 65.4 191.0 262.8 71.8 1986 137.2 63.7 200.9 265.9 65.0 1987 145.6 63.5 209.1 175.3 - 33.8 1988 141.2 68.1 209.3 175.3 - 34.0 1989 144.1 70.4 214.5 166.0 - 48.5 1990 137.6 70.7 208.3 228.6 20.3 1991 133.4 78.0 211.4 266.9 55.5 1992e 124.2 83.2 207.4 385.0 177.6 Source: Fiscal Year 1993 Budget of the United States Government e=estimated ******************************************************************** Media Watch WHOSE CHOICE? School choice has its natural opponents. Hint: they're not black parents. JOHN J. MILLER Mr. Miller is an associate of the Center for the New American Community. IF YOU harbor even the slightest doubt about media bias, examine the case of the report on school choice issued by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Although a final version of the study will not become available until later this year, its promoters released draft copies and executive summaries to the press on October 26 -- eight days before the election and just in time to help discredit an issue touted by President Bush, and to defeat a Colorado ballot initiative which would have created the nation's broadest school-choice program. The New York Times splattered a story on the Carnegie study across its front page (''Research Questions Effectiveness of Most School-Choice Pro- grams''), and the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many other newspapers gave it respectful coverage. Granted, the Carnegie study is by no means solely responsible for what happened in the presidential election or even in Colorado, but the non-critical promotion of this document points to the enormous power of the opponents of school choice. The report is so obviously biased and flawed that one hardly knows where to begin -- so let's take the first two sentences: ''The decade-long struggle to reform American education seems suddenly to hang on a single word: 'choice.' Just a generation ago, freedom of choice was the rallying cry of those who clung to their self-proclaimed right to attend single-race schools.'' Nice association. Critics of school choice like to allege that a voucher plan would lead to increased racial stratification, with suburbanites using vouchers to help send their children to all-white enclaves. Inner-city parents, meanwhile, are supposedly left with cheap and pre-dominantly black private schools and an already rotten public-school system. No real evidence reinforces this accusation. Black Americans, indeed, are among the strongest boosters of choice -- 88 per cent approve of a pri- vate-school voucher plan, according to a recent survey conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. The tale of Polly Wil- liams, the radical black Wisconsin state representative, and her battle to implement a choice program for Milwaukee youngsters is now widely fa- miliar. In fact, vouchers would encourage a racial commingling that does not occur in our present neighborhood-based public schools. A walk through the hallways of urban parochial schools will reveal some of the most diverse student populations in the country. Moreover, many voucher programs are means-tested for low- and middle-income families, and most choice plans include non-discrimination clauses. Parents who cannot oth- erwise afford to remove their children from the public-school system would ultimately gain the most. Despite all this, the Carnegie report shamelessly tosses off its allegations of racism. The aspect of the report which has garnered the most attention is the claim that most Americans do not favor voucher programs. According to Carnegie, 62 per cent oppose them. This directly contradicts a wealth of polling data. For over twenty years, Gallup has asked this question: ''In some nations, the government allots a certain amount of money for each child's education. The parents can then send the child to any public, pa- rochial, or private school they choose. This is called the 'voucher system.' Would you like to see such an idea adopted in this country?'' Over the course of two decades, support for the voucher system has slowly risen, reaching 70 per cent this year. A Harris poll recently conducted for Busi- ness Week showed 69 per cent support for a means-tested private-school- choice program. An Associated Press survey found 63 per cent approval for President Bush's ''G.I. Bill for Children,'' which would provide $500 mil- lion to fund several school-choice demonstration sites. Unlike these sur- veys, however, the Carnegie report restricted its questions to parents with children in public schools, ignoring everyone else. Another highly publicized Carnegie poll claims that 82 per cent of Americans would rather support existing public schools than try a market approach. But what the survey question asked was whether respondents more closely identified with Mr. Smith, who would give ''every school the resources needed to achieve excellence,'' or with Mr. Jones, who would ''let schools compete with each other for students.'' Tendentiously, the ques- tion posits an either/or situation: one can have either widespread educa- tional improvement or a market system in which certain schools will im- prove and others will shut down. The possibility that competition will cause general improvement is not allowed. The deeper one delves into the report, the worse it looks. Joe Nathan, an education expert at the University of Minnesota, counted 64 ''misstate- ments, serious omissions, and major distortions'' in chapter four, which fo- cuses on statewide public-school programs like the one Nathan helped cre- ate in Minnesota. For example, the report suggests that school choice has not dramatically increased the number of Minnesota's college-level ad- vanced-placement courses -- the number of schools offering such classes, it says, has risen only from 125 to 147 since 1989. There are three prob- lems with this analysis. First, the report uses the wrong base-year: the law which spurred much of this change was implemented in 1985, not 1989. Second, the number of actual AP classes -- as opposed to the number of schools scheduling them -- has more than doubled since the 1984 - 5 academic year. Third, the report does not mention the 46 schools which now provide over 130 classes worth college credit through the University of Minnesota. The report goes on to claim that most people who take advantage of choice do so because of convenience rather than academics -- for example, to attend a school closer to home. The report neglects to mention that Minnesota's choice program made possible cross-district transfers that re- duced some commutes from 14 miles to only a few blocks. When students have to travel long distances each morning and evening, everything suffers -- academics, extra-curricular activities, parental contact with teachers. To call such transfers a matter of ''convenience'' is extremely misleading. (And, again, opposed to previously established data. A report issued by the Washington-based Policy Studies Associates in October, for instance, found that among Minnesota parents taking advantage of school choice, academic concerns had more influence than matters of convenience.) The report also critiques a Milwaukee program which it repeatedly calls ''the nation's only private-school-choice plan.'' Yet the nation actually has several private-school-choice plans. Milwaukee, in fact, has two: the pub- licly funded one Carnegie refers to, and a much larger, privately funded program. An admission of this is buried in the 118-page document, but Carnegie thinks it can dismiss everything not paid for by taxpayers. Yet as Michael Heise, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, says, ''The source of the dollar is not terribly important'': what matters is how the program works. And, although specific data on student achievement are not yet available, the private-school-choice programs in Indianapolis, Mil- waukee, and San Antonio -- all larger than the one analyzed by Carnegie -- are extremely popular among parents. The report's most serious offense, however, is propagating the notion that enough choice programs have been around long enough to warrant a study which boldly proclaims them a sham. This assessment, at best, is remarkably premature. Nevertheless, the report will accomplish its pri- mary political goals and serve as an easy reference point over the next several years (the next showdown: June 1994 in California) for lazy jour- nalists and commentators who don't want to find out exactly what's at stake in this debate. ******************************************************************** Using Magic WHAT CHILDREN SHOULDN'T KNOW In explaining how to avoid AIDS, Magic Johnson and Linda Ellerbee tell kids much that isn't so. MARGARET LIU McCONNELL Mrs. McConnell lives in New York city and has written for Commentary. AT THE outset, A Conversation with Magic seems the kind of show any parent would welcome. What a relief that Nickelodeon, home of Lassie and The Little Koala, came up with this ''special edition'' -- produced dur- ing the months Earvin ''Magic'' Johnson spent as a ''spokesman for the AIDS virus'' -- to teach children about AIDS! And what better person than Magic to answer whatever questions a group of ordinary children might have on this difficult subject? Magic is adamantly heterosexual and has a religious grounding that allows him to talk easily about God. He was called a hero by President Bush and had been appointed to the National Commission on AIDS. Johnson had been championed for the appointment by AIDS activists ostensibly because of his potential to reach city teenagers. But it was his appeal to more general audiences that was of most use to those intent on convincing the public that we are all at risk. In the video's opening moments, settled comfortably amidst a dozen children, with producer Linda Ellerbee practically at his feet, Magic talks of God giving him strength and about his love for his wife and their baby- on-the-way. He conveys a natural respect for the children's innocence with his gentle, delicate manner. No wonder the video was so well received at its debut in March. After playing on Nickelodeon to high praise from the press, it was distributed to PBS stations across the country, which were equally enthusiastic. But the show is not as sweet, or as safe, as it seems. Linda Ellerbee starts by telling parents that their children will be seeing an ''unscripted, unrehearsed conversation'' between a group of kids and Magic Johnson. In fact, because of her various interventions, the program assaults its young audience with frank discussion of sexual intercourse as though AIDS must claim childhood itself as its victim. Consider the condom demonstration. Miss Ellerbee takes the children through a series of Socratic questions during which it emerges that ''pretty much'' the only ways one can get the virus are needle sharing, as a baby born to an HIV-infected mother, and from ''unprotected sex.'' Which leads to the obvious question from a very thoughtful little girl about what exactly ''protected'' sex is. In response, Miss Ellerbee thrusts second and third fingers into the air and draws a condom down over them: LE: . . . You roll it down the penis and that protects the man when his penis is inside the woman's vagina. It protects him during sex. And it pro- tects her. It's not 100 per cent. The only 100 per cent way to protect your- self for safe sex [sic] is to not have sex. MJ: That's right. [He seems uncomfortable, clearing his throat several times.] . . . The safest sex is no sex and until you're married or something you should be thinking about not having sex. LE: . . . nobody is saying, Hey kids, now you know how to wear a con- dom you should rush right out and have sex. The truth is you shouldn't. . . . What we're saying is that there's going to come a day, when you grow up some, and you may -- if you choose to have sex then, then you should know you're not immortal. This is all spoken very sweetly, particularly Miss Ellerbee's homey locu- tion, ''There's going to come a day, when you grow up some.'' The trouble is, the ''some'' is left entirely up to the children to decide. A good many adolescent boys would begin having sex the moment their hormones kick in. This obsession of young men is an age-old phenomenon, and its coun- terpart has been the age-old obsession of parents with ensuring their daughters' safety. The condom theory would have it that a simple sheath of latex will change sexual intercourse into something no more consequen- tial than a game of ping-pong. But disease and pregnancy are not all one becomes vulnerable to through sexual activity. Girls especially are vulnerable to exploitation, to being hurt emotionally, to losing self-esteem before even having had the chance to build a sense of self. Now comes Linda Ellerbee telling children, ''Remember you have a right to know the answers. You can ask your par- ents. You can ask the school nurse. You can call information and ask for the state department of health.'' But this offhand rejection of parents' primary responsibility -- and right -- to instruct their own children in such matters is not the only harm this video does. At a critical point, Linda Ellerbee makes a major error: If you practice unsafe sex, you may get HIV, doesn't matter who you are. If you share dirty needles, you may get HIV, doesn't matter who you are. Any action that allows blood from one person to get inside another per- son's body can transmit the virus. It's not what group, it's what behavior. The children are then treated to a rap video by Scar. Are these children to conclude that sex is some kind of bloody fracas? Miss Ellerbee's statement is true but incomplete: the virus also travels in semen and vaginal fluids, and this is how it would most likely be passed during sexual intercourse. But the children can't fill in the missing information themselves: that HIV-infected white blood cells found in blood, semen, and vaginal fluids can be absorbed into the body through cuts or through mucous mem- branes, the spongy cells that line, inter alia, the mouth, the vagina, the opening at the tip of the penis, and the rectum, and which in the rectum are thin and prone to fissures. Do we really want to get into all this with eight- to twelve-year-olds? Of course not. But without this information it cannot be understood just what the condom is doing, or why gay males are a high-risk group. The condom must seem to young children a magical shield. It's tempting to accept the proposition that, because children will prob- ably start having sex earlier, we should simply give them condoms and hope they'll be ''safe.'' But a better way to keep children safe is for parents to maintain high expectations of their children's capacity for self-control, to give them access to information at appropriate ages, and to impress upon them that now more than ever it is better to wait. It is possible to teach teenagers in detail about how the HIV virus is spread, without giv- ing them the sense that all of society expects them to start having sex be- fore they finish school. Death Sentence THE emotional climax of the video is the revelation that two of the chil- dren in the group are HIV positive. Shaking, hardly able to look up, hardly able to get her breath, she's so very scared, a lovely girl of about eleven reveals her secret to the world. Pressed by Miss Ellerbee to talk about her feelings, she says she's afraid her friends won't play with her any more or hold her hand. Next, a little girl who looks no more than six pleads, ''I want people to know we're just normal people,'' then breaks down, wiping tears away with the back of a chubby hand. The cameras focus in on the little girl crying while Magic tries to comfort her. The essential lie of the program is that because there are children who are HIV positive we must teach all children to protect themselves. But no quantity of condoms would have kept Rachel or Hydella ''safe.'' They were not exposed to the virus through unprotected sex. The producers of the show might argue that this was not their intention at all. But why then, in this ''unscripted, unrehearsed conversation,'' is this heartbreaking catharsis immediately followed by this taped question over which the producers have total control: ''Magic, what message would you give to people who think, 'This could never happen to me'?'' Well, my message to them, that it can happen to you and I'm a prime ex- ample of that . . . it happened because I had unprotected sex. Children who are not born to HIV-positive mothers and who have not had blood transfusions are not at any significant risk for HIV until they be- come sexually active. Drilling into children the idea that they are at risk must only drill into them the idea that we fully expect them to become sexually active. To use the suffering of two very scared children who are going to die, in order to instill in other children the idea that they have the ''right'' to autonomy from their parents, is surely one of the lowest points the liberal media have yet achieved. 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