Description
Book SynopsisCritics have attacked the foolishness of some of today's elite thought from many angles, but few have examined the real-world consequences of those ideas. In The Burden of Bad Ideas, Heather Mac Donald reports on their disastrous effects throughout our society. At a Brooklyn high school, students perfect their graffiti skills for academic credit. An Ivy League law professor urges blacks to steal from their employers. Washington bureaucrats regard theft by drug addicts as evidence of disability, thereby justifying benefits. Public health officials argue that racism and sexism cause women to get AIDS. America's premier monument to knowledge, the Smithsonian Institution, portrays science as white man's religion. Such absurdities, Ms. Mac Donald argues, grow out of a powerful set of ideas that have governed our public policy for decades, the product of university faculties and a professional elite who are convinced that America is a deeply unjust society. And while these beliefs have damaged the nation as a whole, she observes, they have hit the poor especially hard. Her reports trace the transformation of influential opinion-makers (such as the New York Times) and large philanthropic foundations from confident advocates of individual responsibility, opportunity, and learning into apologists for the welfare state. In a series of closely reported stories from the streets of New York to the seats of intellectual power, The Burden of Bad Ideas reveals an upside-down world and how it got that way.
Trade ReviewIf there were any justice in the world, Mac Donald would be knee-deep in Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards for her pioneering work. -- David Brooks * The Weekly Standard *
A startlingly valuable book, whether you lean left or right. -- Michael Pakenham * Baltimore Sun *
Spirited, stimulating, eloquent...The Burden of Bad Ideas is social, cultural, and political criticism of the first order. -- Jonathan Yardley * The Review of Higher Education *
Among discussions of urban malaise, where so much hot air has been recycled, this book has the freshness of a stiff, changing breeze. -- Allen D. Boyer * The New York Times *
Insightful, articulate, provocative, and most importantly, valid. -- Richard Lamm * The Wall Street Journal *
Mac Donald is the indispensable journalist...if you question that characterization, you havenít read her work. -- George Will, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Table of ContentsPart 1 Introduction vii Part 2 The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse 3 Part 3 Behind the Hundred Neediest Cases 25 Part 4 Public Health Quackery 43 Part 5 Law School Humbug 61 Part 6 Why Johnny's Teacher Can't Teach 82 Part 7 An F for Hip-Hop 101 103 Part 8 Revisionist Lust: The Smithsonian Today 117 Part 9 Homeless Advocates in Outer Space 144 Part 10 Compassion Gone Mad 155 Part 11 Welfare's Next Vietnam 173 Part 12 Foster Care's Underworld 194 Part 13 Diallo Truth, Diallo Falsehood 209 Part 14 Index 235
