Bad Bargain Research Articles

A Former Street Gang Leader Reinterviewed Eight Years Later

A former street gang leader restates his earlier endorsement of the economic, or differential opportunity, model of crime causation. He also maintains that most of his former associates continued in crime because of adherence to the lower-class values of toughness, autonomy, and easy money. He himself abandoned crime and has become moderately successful as an independent businessman. He believes that crime is a bad bargain in the long run, and cites the example of many of his friends who have died as a result of illicit activities. However, he maintains that the advantages of legitimate work are not evident to most urban youths, so that many of them perceive—perhaps correctly—that gang and criminal activities are sensible, at least during adolescence. This analysis suggests that improving employment opportunities for young people would draw them into legitimate work. Our informant believes that young people from his background will respond rationally to clearly attractive employment opportunities, and to information from a trusted source about the costs of crime.

Increasing the Relevance of National Evaluation to Schools: A School District's Viewpoint

they were announced, blazing audit trails, and generally making the best of an evaluator's bad bargain including retroactive deadlines, well-intentioned but illconceived objectives, long rows of constraints and restrictions, and other assorted horror stories. Sooner or later there comes a time when the evaluator, driving home one night, has a vision splendid: What if all that money and everything it could buy were a grand prize in a winner-take-all contest for the best plan to improve achievement or shed light on what works best, with whom, and under what conditions? Now I realize there is a time to dream and a time to wake up and take a hard look at the world we live in, that the most we can expect of the dream is perhaps a clue to something we have overlooked or neglected. Certainly, federal projects-1 would like to think unintentionally-have neglected the particular needs within local districts and have stressed the compliance issue. I am familiar with a perceptive paper Gary Fenstermacher wrote some months ago for the Center for the Study of Evaluation at UCLA dealing with what he called distal and proximal ends in the dilemma of trying to improve the quality of education. In a nutshell, he concluded that, with the best intentions, the federal government senses a need where school children are

The Non-Adversary Approach to Problem Solving

The adversary system is a bad bargain for every body, these authors believe, since insecurity and fear are the results. They describe an approach they found successful and recommend that teachers and students also use it.

Origins of the Cold War: The Communist Dimension

IT is surely a suggestive irony that just at the point when younger American historians had made serious intellectual headway with their reinterpretation of the cold war, fixing historical responsibility in terms of the mistakes, delusions and imperatives of United States policy, the Soviet Union aston ished friends and foes by overwhelming Czechoslovakia and turning its clock of history backwards. If the cold war has not revived, small thanks are due the Soviet leaders. Their extraor dinary nervousness, their manoeuvres to propitiate both the outgoing and incoming American Administrations, indicate very plainly how much they have feared political retaliation; this in itself is a comment on where responsibility for the cold war today should rest. That Prague should have been the vortex in 1968 as it was in 1948 of critical problems within communism is uncanny, but on deeper examination it may not be fortuitous. After all, the least credible explanation of Moscow's desperate attempt to resolve the crisis within its own system of states and parties is the one which pictures Czechoslovakia as the help less Pauline at the crossroads of Europe, about to be dishonored by West German revanchards, with agents of the CIA grinning in the background, suddenly saved by the stalwart defenders of socialist honor and morality. Today this type of argument is reserved within the communist world for its most backward members?that is, for the Soviet public and the fringes of the most insignificant and expendable communist parties. Yet argu ments of this kind had wide currency a generation ago. New Left historians would have us believe that Stalin was simply reacting to external challenge. In their view, the cold war might not have set in if small-minded American politicians had not been deter mined to reverse bad bargains, if congenital imperialists had not been mesmerized by the monopoly of atomic weapons which statesmen and scientists knew to be temporary. Since all this is so plainly a half-truth when juxtaposed to events of today, then clearly the half-truth of yesteryear will hardly explain the whole of the cold war.

Governor Winthrop's Garden Crop: The Significance of Agriculture in the Early Commerce of Massachusetts Bay

HERE is a paradox in the history of early Massachusetts-indeed, one applicable to all of New England in the first decades. It is that of an agricultural land in which the trades of the sea are dominant; a land largely devoted to crops where-if the tenor of historical writing is to be accepted-profits are made in other endeavors. On the one hand, there is the frequent description of New England's cold climate and rocky soil and the conclusion that agriculture was not an encouraging business. The New Englanders simply made a good thing of a bad bargain during the first years of settlement, building a short-term prosperity by selling their agricultural surplus to new arrivals. But when the tide of newcomers ebbed and depression broke upon them in i640, they turned to trade, shipbuilding, fish. In the words of a recent writer, they abandoned the plow the rising star of ocean commerce.' On the other hand, there is the unavoidable fact that the land dominates town and commonwealth records both before and after i640. The General Court of Massachussetts Bay regularly appointed land for new towns in the interior-away from the sea and ships. The towns themselves are always in the throes of a new distribution of land. Court records indicate farm after farm being leased, with the owner receiving agricultural products as rent; probate records show land passing from father to sons, while estate inventories list page on page of farm equipment.? Contempo-

Comedy and Tragedy in Christopher Fry

BROADWAY CRITICS SOME TIME AGO declared themselves puzzled or uncertain as to Christopher Fry's sale tragedy The Firstborn. It had not left them with that rosy glow which most of this playwright's work diffuses. When, in the autumn of 1950, his comedy The Lady's not for Burning was performed, New York showed itself quick on the up-take. Whereas, stated Time, The Cocktail Party had "sent the audience stumping out of the theatre on its knees, pricing bad bargains out of the comer of its eye, Fry's audience pranced out into the welcoming night their eyes peeled for a pretty girl to hug or a fellow being, to clap on the shoulder." Certainly The Firstborn is not in this pattern. It hasn't the bouquet and Happy Birthday touch. It is more like an Elizabethan Tchehov-a blank-verse Cherry Orchard with the death-beetle ticking.

The Soaring of Birds

MY thanks are due to Mr. R. Courtenay for the notice he has taken (NATURE, vol. xxviii. p. 28) of my letter on the Soaring of Birds (vol. xxvii. p. 592). It is a great satisfaction to me to find my general conclusion supported by his observations. As to the possibility of a soaring bird utilising a downward current of air, I stand corrected. There is no difficulty in agreeing with Mr. Courtenay that the bird, finding itself in a downward current “will descend swiftly o as to acquire the necessary impetus for a rapid escape;”—that is to say, it will seek to make the best of a bad bargain. But it is not so easy to see that the bird, in a current approaching the perpendicular, will “acquire an impetus much more than compensating for the slight loss of elevation;”—that is, will actually make a profit out of a seemingly adverse condition.

V. Letter of Sir Thomas Stanhope, of Shelford, co. Notts., to Lord Treasurer Burghley, respecting the Funeral of his Mother, Anne Lady Stanhope. Communicated by Richard Almack, Esq. F.S.A., in a Letter to Albert Way, Esq. M.A., Director

In the valuable collection of Original Letters edited by Sir Henry Ellis (Vol. II. second Series), I observe two in 1569 and 1570 from Lady Stanhope to Sir William Cecill, respecting the unhappy marriage of her daughter with Mr. afterwards Sir John Hotham of Scorborough in Yorkshire, and also Sir John's letter to Cecill, as “Master of the Wards and Lyveries,” defending himself, and in which he expatiates on the “Stanhopes eville delinge many wayes,” but with less asperity than the lady, who not only reviles him, but, in fact, the whole county of York, and says “especially in Yorkshire, where he may suborne men and women to say what he listeth to serve his devilishe purpose.” The lady had purchased the wardship of Hotham, and married him to her daughter, but it appears that after all it was a bad bargain, as she had not purchased his love.