Word: 80s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There is no reason to expect that is different at Harvard. One reason frats became such centers in the '80s was the rise of the drinking age, which forced alcohol-soaked parties to "private" institutions. It happened everywhere else, and it happened at Harvard. (It happens here at Harvard: The recent surge in nationally affiliated frats on campus is more of the same.) And as long as the drinking age stays high and the public continues to pressure bastions of (white) male privilege, so will the rush to the clubs...
...Kosovo Albanians started agitating for the status of a republic. The Serbs feared that the next step would be secession, then union with Albania, and many fled. In the late '80s Milosevic fanned the patriotic paranoia of the remaining Serbs there and put the province under direct and extremely repressive rule from Belgrade...
...problem with this panegyric is all the lumpy and inconvenient facts, such as the crumbling U.S. infrastructure and the declining competitiveness of American corporations, that Bartley tries to dismiss. Did the budget deficit swell menacingly in the '80s, for example? No problem! Japan and Germany had lots of red ink too, and "advanced" economists doubt that deficits even matter. Did the plight of the poor worsen? Not really, Bartley argues. The data for low-income households overstate the extent of poverty by counting many retired people -- who often own their own homes and have plenty of capital -- along with college...
Bartley's main error is his narrow focus on a few pet theories and prescriptions and the inevitable special pleading this entails. "The moral of the Seven Fat Years is that economic growth counts," he writes. But the rising tide of '80s-style growth failed to lift all boats as advertised: the rich got bigger yachts, the middle class foundered, and many of the poor went under. The task for the 1990s will be to move beyond the excesses and inequities of the debt decade rather than strive to return to a Golden Age that never existed...
Finally, the 1988 reforms are based on a workfare approach -- education, training, job search -- that produced only modest improvements in employment and earnings when tried by various states during the '80s. The chances of large-scale gains are especially dim at a time when more than 7% of all U.S. workers are jobless. "If you are going to have a workfare program in a slack economy, the whole program will collapse," says William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an expert on poverty. "People will get training for employment, but if there aren't jobs...