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Character and culture.

Article Excerpt
IN The Public Interest's twentieth anniversary issue, an essay appeared suggesting that Americans were increasingly concerned about the question of character. After many years of worrying about economic cycles, industrial management, and the negative income tax, we were beginning to be troubled by problems that seemed to arise out of a failure of character: poor school achievement, rising welfare rolls, a tolerance for deficits, and predatory crime.

I think it is time to take account of what has happened about these matters in the last 20 years. Since I wrote that article, I take some personal responsibility for reckoning up the score. We have done pretty well in some areas, not so well in others, and the verdict is not yet in regarding the remainder. Welfare rolls are down dramatically, and many private and public schools that take testing and achievement seriously have improved student performance. Much more can be done with respect to schooling, but the political problems that bar more progress have not begun to yield. Many rank-and-file Democrats, such as black Americans, benefit greatly from vouchers and are often the first to sign up for them, but Democratic leaders oppose vouchers. By contrast, though many Republican leaders favor vouchers, most rank-and-file Republicans have voted against them when the issue has been put on the ballot in their states.

Fiscal deficits are about as bad as ever, but now it is the Democrats rather than the Republicans who complain the most about this issue. The central problem is that there are only two ways of reducing deficits, and each is favored by a different party. We can cut them by either reducing spending or raising revenue. Usually the Republicans have said that we should cut spending and Democrats that we should tax more, but now matters are more complicated. Republicans, especially Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have either increased government spending or at best left it untouched, preferring instead to increase revenue by stimulating economic growth by means of lower taxes and less regulation. In the late 1980s, this strategy worked; today, it may work, but no one really knows. The Democrats have changed the least on this matter, favoring either raising taxes (always on "the rich," as if there are enough truly rich people to fund most of the federal government) or cutting spending on things they do not like, such as the war on terror and the reconstruction in Iraq.

Crime rates are down sharply, a decline that began in the early 1980s and is continuing today. Whether measured by victim surveys taken by the Census Bureau or by police data gathered by the FBI, the rates of most serious crimes, and especially of homicide, are significantly lower than they were in 1981. Our gain has not been matched by many other industrial democracies. When measured by police data, the burglary rate rose for the last two decades in Australia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, and rose for most of that time in England before it began to fall in the early 1990s. Sweden has about the same burglary rate today that it had 20 years ago. When measured by victim surveys, the burglary rate followed pretty much the same pattern, though the increase in Australia and the Netherlands was a bit less. Apparently, we did something right by comparison to other countries.

The smallest "platoon"

In 1985, I wrote that the problems of welfare use, crime rates, and school achievement reflected a defect of character. One might well have concluded from this argument that the gains we have witnessed in these areas must have resulted from...

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