Book Reviews

Hence the title of his new book, The Good News is the Bad News is Wrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 431 pp., $17.95). Wattenberg rips the conventional wisdom to shreds by constant re currence to his own profession as a demographer. He will be called a Pollyanna or a Dr. Pangloss by many, but actually he doesn't believe it is the best of all possible worlds. He merely thinks we are holding our own ground in a number of impor tant ways, and he has the demo graphic evidence to prove it. He begins with life expectancy, which, in the western nations, keeps lengthening from decade to decade. Then he shifts to the birth rate, which, in the non-Malthusian parts of the world, has been going down. (He calls it the birth dearth.) The ru mors of a Population Bomb he deems to be utter nonsense for the United States at least. The birth dearth, he says, could hurt our country, which depends on a reasonable increase in its popula tion to keep the economic system going. Fortunately, immigration to this country shows no signs of slack ening. The worries about illegal im migration do not bother Wattenberg in the slightest. Anyone with the 251 252 THE FREEMAN April gumption to get up and go can make a welcome addition to the working population so far as Ben Wattenberg is concerned.

The Baby Boom that occurred af ter World War II may have been re sponsible for many of the youthful excesses of the Sixties, but Watten berg is satisfied that the "do your own thing" idiocy of the Baby Boom ers is a phenomenon of the past. What we now have is an Adult Boom. The Young Urban Professionals, or Yuppies, are now getting married and starting households of their own. They may settle for 1.7 children per family, but the children of immi grants will make up a needed differ ence. At any rate, the Yuppies will be buying new dwelling space, both of the split level variety and condo miniums. The high mortgage rates won't stop them. The construction boom will spill over into other booms. Wattenberg doesn't necessarily ap prove of the Federal deficit, but he doesn't see it as killing prosperity in the near future if sincere efforts are made to get it under control. Employment Wattenberg thinks the bad news about unemployment is more than compensated for by the good news about employment. His own reading of the statistics here collides with anything you might learn by listen ing to the TV anchormen. The smokestack industries may not be John Chamberlain's book re views have been a regular fea ture of The Freeman since 1950.

We are doubly grateful to John and to Henry Regnery for now making available John's auto biography, A Life with the Printed Word. Copies of this re markable account of a man and his times-our times-are available at $6.00 from The Foundation for Economic Edu cation, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533. what they were, but the unemploy ment in steel and automobile towns has been mitigated by what has been happening in other towns that are often just over the horizon. Indus trial jobs stood at close to 20 million in 1970. The figure is practically the same today, but the jobs have shifted from steel factories to plants turning out computers, high-tech office equipment and robots. Meanwhile there has been a vast explosion in the service industries. There were some 600,000 new busi nesses started last year. They are what has been bringing the unem ployment figures down to some where around 7 per cent, which is close to the "frictional" margin.

Wattenberg thinks it significant that the median period of unemployment even at the depth of the recent reces sion was only 10.1 weeks. And un1985 GOOD NEWS AND BAD 253 employment compensation took care of most of that. Wattenberg thinks the teenage unemployment figures are ex tremely misleading. Kids who are still in school get listed as job-hunt ers, but it is no great tragedy if they remain unemployed in any regular sense until their school days are over. This goes for black kids as well as white. The most important thing about adolescence, says Wattenberg, is that it is soon over. Even tually the teenager will become an adult employee. Education Wattenberg does not deny that much of the hard data about our ed ucation system is bad. The averages for our SAT, or Scholastic Aptitude Tests, have been declining over a long period oftime. But this could be attributable to the fact that we now keep many more children in school for longer periods. The unintelligent take the tests along with the aca demically gifted. This brings down the average scores. But even with this concession to the egalitarians the SAT marks have recently started to go up. Wattenberg thinks we could be doing something right.

When it comes to revamping cur ricula, however, Wattenberg is all for listening to the critics who think our new standards for Excellence in Ed ucation demand a greater attention to so-called core revisions. He wants to see fewer Mickey Mouse courses. He sees no reason, however, to get rid of driver training and a few other "practical" courses. "After all," he says, "who wants to live in a country where pregnant teenagers-over drawn at the bank, unable to cook even a simple souffle-crack up the car." Wattenberg considers that our Bad News Bias keeps our politicians from making reasonable compromises with those whose prime concern is with the size of the budget. He is no libertarian, and he believes in the concept ofthe Safety Net. But his ar dor for the Welfare State has cooled rapidly over the past few years. As a neo-conservative Wattenberg finds himself at home with such figures as Irving Kristol. This means he is part of the new Fabian drift to the Right.

® INSIDE THE CRIMINAL MIND by Stanton Samenow (Times Books, 130 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011), 1984 285 pages. $15.50 cloth Reviewed by Haven Bradford Gow PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN, in his address to the International Asso ciation of Chiefs of Police, pointed out that every 30 minutes in the United States at least one person is murdered, nine women are raped, 67 people are robbed, 97 are assaulted 254 THE FREEMAN April and 389 homes are burglarized. And just as tragic is that many of these criminals are "repeat offenders." Crime casts a shadow over the lives of virtually everyone of us. We in stall burglar alarms in our homes, put anti-theft devices on our cars, avoid the New York subways, stay indoors after dark because the streets are taken over by criminals. The criminal justice system is widely distrusted and millions of Ameri cans buy hand guns for self-defense. Why this epidemic of crime?

At the core of the problem is a false view of human nature. Too many cri minologists, penologists, and even judges accept the pernicious notion that the individual person is a crea ture of his environment, shaped by social forces into whatever he hap pens to be. The criminal is corrupted by the institutions of his society and therefore is not responsible for him self and his actions. Blame attaches to the society whose product he is. It follows that the criminal is not personally answerable for his crimes; blame his slum background, his broken home, his shady compan ions, or whatever. The criminal, in short, is a "victim," who should be treated and not punished. Dr. Same now, who has spent years dealing with criminals takes a rad ically different tack: "Criminals cause crime," he writes, "not bad neighborhoods, inadequate parents, television, schools, drugs, or unemployment. Crime resides within the minds of human beings and is not caused by social conditions. Once we as a society recognize this simple fact, we shall take measures radi cally different from current ones. To be sure, we shall continue to remedy intolerable social conditions for this is worthwhile in and of itself. But we shall not expect criminals to change because of such efforts."

Dr. Same now adds that "Behavior is largely a product of thinking. Everything we do is preceded, ac companied, and followed by think ing. A train cannot fly for it is not so equipped. Similarly, as he is, a criminal is not equipped to be re sponsible. A drastic alteration must occur, and to accomplish this, a crim inal requires help. The criminal must learn to identify and then abandon thinking patterns that have guided his benavior for years. He must be taught new thinking pat terns that are self-evident and au tomatic for responsible people but are totally foreign to him. Short of this occurring, he will continue to commit crimes." To alleviate the pervasive and per sistent problem of crime, we need to have a realistic and tough-minded view of human nature, criminals and crime. Then we can develop and im plement some equally realistic and tough-minded approaches to deal with the problem. @ 1985 OTHER BOOKS 255 IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES by Richard N. Weaver (University of Chicago Press, 5801 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, III. 60637) 190 pages. $6.95 paperqack Reviewed by Tommy W Rogers THIS renowned volume stirred up a vigorous controversy when it first appeared in 1948; its title contrib uted a pregnant phrase to contem porary discourse and since the au thor's death his name heads a program to encourage young schol ars. Ideas Have Consequences is one of a handful of books to appear in the middle and late forties which breached the ranks of liberal ortho doxy and opened a way for the re surgence of the freedom philosophy which is so marked a phenomenon of the past several decades.

The "consequences" Weaver con demns are many, but they come into focus in our time in the armed camps, otherwise known as modern nations. The State now depersonal izes man, mechanizes life, collectiv izes property, and defers only to power. In his quest of the ideas which laid the groundwork for the present situation Weaver goes back as far as William of Occam who, declaring that only particular things are real, discredited general truths. With sustained argument and lofty eloquence Weaver traces the history of a ma lign set of ideas from the break-up of the Middle Ages down to the modern period. Weaver taught English at the Uni versity of Chicago, but came out of a Southern agrarian background which remained so much a part of him that he could never be comfort able with those aspects of modernity which grate harshly against what Burke referred to as "the basic inns and nesting places of human nature."

Weaver believed that liberty is most secure in a society character ized by the distributive ownership of small properties in the form of in dependent farms, local businesses, homes owned by their occupants. Widespread private ownership linked ineluctably to responsibility, provides the context in which one could become a complete person. Pri vate property makes a person inde pendent; it makes existence physi cally possible for the protester; livelihood independent of the State provides a metaphysical base, so to speak, for opponents of Leviathan. "To combat swirling forces of social collapse," he writes, "we must have some form of retrenchment, and es pecially do we need sanctuary from pagan statism ... The attack on pri vate property is but a further expres sion of the distrust of reason ... For liberty and right reason go hand in 256 THE FREEMAN hand, and it is impossible to impugn one without casting reflection on the other."

Because ideas do have conse quences, people who live according to a distorted or incomplete or fal sified picture of reality (The Great Stereopticon, Weaver called it), sooner or later meet up with such disasters as have been visited upon the twentieth century. People who walk the road to serfdom are even tually victims of omnipotent govern ment. Because of the validity of its premise and the substantive in sights of its argument, Weaver's book has an enduring message. @ Freeman binders • handsomeblue leatherlex • each binder holds twelve issues • a handyway to organize currentand past issuesof The Freeman $5.00 each Order from: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION, INC. IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 35, NO. 5 • MAY 1985 Security and FreedomA Page on Freedom, No. 19 Leonard E. Read 259 Security, not an alternative to, but an outgrowth of freedom. The Pied Piper and Our Children John K. Williams 260 Ours the task to help choose which tune to follow.