Word: moynihan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...passed over for the staff of the prestigious Law Review, but became editor of the school's issue-oriented newspaper. One of his articles was "American Cars: Designed for Death." After graduation, he pursued his growing interest in highway safety while working as an aide to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary of Labor, and he later expanded his law-school article into Unsafe at Any Speed. The book, published in 1965, was dedicated to a friend who had been crippled in an auto accident. It is a shocking indictment of the auto industry, engineering groups, governmental agencies...
There is little agreement on the best way to restructure local government, and Moynihan vacillates accordingly. The metropolitan sprawl, he recognizes, has made it "difficult to collect power in one place." This leads him at first to espouse annexing the suburbs. Later on, he opts for community control and decentralization. Soon he is also stressing the responsibility of the states, and, in a final dizzy burst, ends up praising the sensibleness of county government. Instead of conserving political energies, Moynihan seems to suggest that reformers pursue all these goals simultaneously...
...THIRD and last tenet of the national urban policy concerns "institutional naivete," particularly as practiced by the federal government. The bureaucrats, according to Moynihan, have been neglecting the secondary consequences of their programs. This neglect has caused "sharp imbalances in the ecology of urban areas." Building highways, for example, may also depopulate the countryside, redistribute employment opportunities, or fill up the slums...
This carelessness has a deeper explanation than "naivete," but it is one that Moynihan ignores. It is often in the self-interest of government agencies to ignore the secondary consequences of their decisions. It facilitates both their survival and expansion. In the real world there exists little rational planning. The most critical decisions result haphazardly, for they must be ratified at a number of unrelated levels: Congress, the state legislature, and city council. The New Federalism, which Moynihan is advocating, will encourage more neglect by increasing the strength at each level...
...Moynihan's manifesto for a national urban policy is articulate, well documented, but ultimately divisive. It will not rouse the Administration to action: it will not rouse Congress to action; at most it will rouse a few social scientists to speculation. But it deserves a measure of appreciation. It takes a brazen man to outline policy- and national policy, at that- on problems of such complexity that their prolonged study can induce paralysis...