Best Events of 2003

According to Forrester Research, nearly 4,000 white-collar jobs are leaving the U.S. a week for low-cost locales. McKinsey & Co. forecast the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined lose 600,000 of these jobs a year. In the late 1990s, science and engineering accounted for 5% of U.S. undergraduate degrees; in China, they accounted for 73%. Intel Chairman Andy Grove recently posed the question, "Do we have the national will to take productive action? When the problem becomes… more

Copies of the Fall 2003 World Policy Journal will be distributed to attendees.

This event launched the November 2003 edition of the Washington Monthly.

 

Despite advances in the field, the mechanics of drawing the national poverty line have not been significantly altered for forty years. Each September the Census Bureau releases its official calculation of the national poverty line and enumeration of the poor, intended to reflect the extent of economic hardship in the United States. The once-useful metric has, unfortunately, not worn well. Today the official poverty measure provides an incomplete and inaccurate representation of the poor.

This panel featured two pioneers of the… more

Clever Girl is the definitive biography of a conflicted American woman and her controversial legacy. Set against the backdrop of the political drama that defined mid-twentieth century America, it explores the spy case whose explosive domestic and foreign policy repercussions have been debated for decades but not fully revealed.

Lauren Kessler is the author of ten books, among them the Los Angeles Times bestseller The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes and Stubborn… more

New America's Jacob Hacker and Laurie Rubiner discuss the political battle over public and private social benefits.

 

Noah Feldman, Former Senior Advisor for Constitutional Law, Office of Reconstruction & Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq; Author, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy; and Professor of Law, New York University

 

The steadily rising number of uninsured Americans and the highest premium increases in a decade are placing healthcare reform back atop the domestic policy agenda. Although a broad array of constituencies is converging around the goal of covering the uninsured, there remains surprisingly little agreement on how to reach that goal.

This Capitol Hill event will explore how a system of mandatory insurance -- combined with means-tested public subsidies -- could provide fully portable coverage to all Americans,… more

Please join us as Bruce Stokes and Mary McIntosh discuss current attitudes toward the United States based on a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. They will discuss what bounce internationially and domestically, if any, the Bush Administration received as a result of the Iraq War, attitudes around the world toward the challenges ahead including the war on terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian situation, Iran, Syria and North Korea, the global public's view of American unilateralism and the future… more

 Anthony Everitt Author,"Cicero: The LIfe and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician Visiting Profesor, Nottingham Trent University and City University

Americans are gaining weight at an epidemic rate. The prevalence of obesity among adults increased 15-27 percent between 1980 and 1999. This can be traced, in part, to many marketing tactics used by fast-food and other restaurant chains including the increase in portion sizes and numerous technological advances which are designed to make our lives as easy and entertaining as possible -- without ever having to leave our favorite chair. Recently, fast food restaurants have faced lawsuits… more

On June 2 the FCC is expected to issue rules on media ownership with long-term and fundamental consequences for our culture, economy, and democracy. These rules cover the ownership of local radio and television broadcasters, national broadcast networks, and newspapers. The senators, FCC commissioners, and panelists discussed their various concerns about the media consolidation that would ensue following release of the FCC's expected rules.

 Michael Lind Whitehead Senior Fellow, New America Foundation and Author of What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President

Statistician Bjorn Lomborg has been severely and widely criticized by environmental groups, the media and even by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty for his controversial theories on the state of the environment. The relentless attacks on Lomborg are instructive because they demonstrate the refusal of conventional science to embrace research or data that doesn't support the worst-case environmental scenarios.

Please join us as Bjorn Lomborg reflects on the research having brought him to these conclusions and the controversy they… more