Book Review: Democracy, Culture, Catholicism: Voices from Four Continents, edited by Michael Schuck and John Crowley-Buck

A review of Democracy, Culture, Catholicism: Voices from Four Continents edited by Michael Schuck and John Crowley-Buck

Lawyers and Policymakers in Government

Schuck discusses the conflicts in policymaking that occurred between the office of the ASPE (Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation) and the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph A. Califano. Califano believed that only lawyers were fit policymakers and everyone else was a mere technician

Spin Waves in Quantum Antiferromagnets

Using a self-consistent mean-field theory for the $S=1/2$ Heisenberg antiferromagnet Kr\"uger and Schuck recently derived an analytic expression for the dispersion. It is exact in one dimension ($d=1$) and agrees well with numerical results in $d=2$. With an expansion in powers of the inverse coordination number $1/Z$ ($Z=2d$) we investigate if this expression can be {\em exact} for all $d$. The projection method of Mori-Zwanzig is used for the {\em dynamical} spin susceptibility. We find that the expression of Kr\"uger and Schuck deviates in order $1/Z^2$ from our rigorous result. Our method is generalised to arbitrary spin $S$ and to models with easy-axis anisotropy \D. It can be systematically improved to higher orders in $1/Z$. We clarify its relation to the $1/S$ expansion.Comment: 8 pages, uuencoded compressed PS-file, accepted as Euro. Phys. Lette

Affirmative Action and Higher Education: The View from Somewhere

Peter Schuck\u27s new book, Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance, offers an admirably lucid and forthright account of the advantages and disadvantages of affirmative action in the United States. Schuck argues that government-sponsored preferences should be barred except in the relatively narrow remedial situations that the courts now permit, but that affirmative action in private institutions should be allowed when it is transparent. Schuck candidly and carefully canvasses the arguments for and against his position, concluding that: [Affirmative action, although well intended, is hard to square with liberal ideals in general and the diversity ideal (properly understood) in particular. The social benefits are too small, too arbitrarily and narrowly targeted, and too widely resented to justify the costs that it imposes - its unfairness to other individuals, its propensity to corrupt and debase public discourse, its incoherent programmatic categories, and its reinforcement of the pernicious and increasingly meaningless use of race as a central principle of distributive justice rather than the other distributive principles, particularly merit, with which most Americans, white and minorities alike, strongly identify. History has not been exactly kind to Schuck\u27s treatment of affirmative action in Diversity in America. The book was written at a time when the Supreme Court was hostile to most justifications for affirmative action, with the striking exception of the holding in Bakke that allowed institutions of higher education to use affirmative action to pursue the goal of diversity. As a result Schuck naturally focused his analysis on the diversity rationale for affirmative action. But the very year in which Diversity in America was published, the Court decided Grutter v. Bollinger. Although Grutter used the vocabulary of diversity, it actually approved quite distinct justifications for affirmative action in higher education

Affirmative Action and Higher Education: The View from Somewhere

Peter Schuck\u27s new book, Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance, offers an admirably lucid and forthright account of the advantages and disadvantages of affirmative action in the United States. Schuck argues that govemment-sponsored preferences should be barred except in the relatively narrow remedial situations that the courts now permit, but that affirmative action in private institutions should be allowed when it is transparent. Schuck candidly and carefully canvasses the arguments for and against his position, concluding that: [A]ffirmative action, although well intended, is hard to square with liberal ideals in general and the diversity ideal (properly understood) in particular. The social benefits are too small, too arbitrarily and narrowly targeted, and too widely resented to justify the costs that it imposes-its unfairness to other individuals, its propensity to corrupt and debase public discourse, its incoherent programmatic categories, and its reinforcement of the pernicious and increasingly meaningless use of race as a central principle of distributive justice rather than the other distributive principles, particularly merit, with which most Americans, white and minorities alike, strongly identify

Microscopic Clustering in Light Nuclei

We review recent experimental and theoretical progress in understanding the microscopic details of clustering in light nuclei. We discuss recent experimental results on $\alpha$-conjugate systems, molecular structures in neutron-rich nuclei, and constraints for ab initio theory. We then examine nuclear clustering in a wide range of theoretical methods, including the resonating group and generator coordinate methods, antisymmetrized molecular dynamics, Tohsaki-Horiuchi-Schuck-R\"opke wave function and container model, no-core shell model methods, continuum quantum Monte Carlo, and lattice effective field theory.Comment: Accepted for publication in Review of Modern Physics, 50 pages, 28 figures, minor change to titl

Learning from Failure: A Review of Peter Schuck’s Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (Book Review)

Peter Schuck catalogs an overwhelming list of US government failures. He points to both structural problems (culture and institutions) and incentives. Despairing of cultural change, Schuck focuses on incentives. He relies on Charles Wolf ’s theory of nonmarket failures in which “internalities” replace the heavily-studied market failure from externalities (Wolf 1979). Internalities are evidence of a discord between the public goals by which a program is defended and the private goals of its administrators. What might economists contribute? We suggest that economists have neglected internalities because they take group goals as exogenously determined and we defend an alternative tradition in which group goals are endogenously determined. ( JEL A11, D72, D82

Back to Dred Scott?

This essay reviews the book, Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in American Polity, by Peter H. Schuck and Rogers M. Smith, published by Yale University Press in 1985