Articles 2024
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The Peters Principles: An Interview with Tom Peters
The management guru as playground director and defender of open societies.
Reason, October 1997
Tom Peters dots his articles with exclamation points, ellipses, and WORDS IN ALL CAPS. He tends toward sweeping, barely supported statements ("Women are smarter than men," he generalized in Forbes ASAP) and uses the word revolution a lot. His official bio describes him as a "gadfly, curmudgeon, champion of bold failures, prince of disorder, maestro of zest, professional loudmouth (as a speaker he's `a spitter,' according to the cartoon strip Dilbert), corporate cheerleader, lover of markets, capitalist pig...and card-carrying member of the ACLU."
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"National Greatness" or Conservative Malaise?
The Wall Street Journal, September 25, 1997
The first International Conservative Congress gathers this weekend in Washington, and gloom and doom dominate the agenda. From an opening session on "Why Conservatism Is Failing" to discussions of "Diagnoses of Defeat" and "Examining Our Crises," the assembled intellectuals, office holders, and policy wonks appear dedicated to the proposition that life in America and around the world is bad and getting worse.
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Resilience vs. Anticipation
The West is resilient and can roll with the shocks. The East copes through anticipation, the static planning that assumes perfect foresight.
Forbes ASAP, August 24, 1997
Everybody has theories about what makes Silicon Valley special, and most of the theories are right: It's the density, the competition, the constant chatter about business plans over tables at Il Fornaio in Palo Alto. It's the universities, Stanford and Berkeley, world-class research institutions that nonetheless nurture the practical. It's the money, the greatest concentration of venture capital the world has ever seen. It's the diversity, the immigrants from everywhere, the best and most brilliant spilling out of Oracle's food pavilions to eat burgers, curry, and sushi in the California sun.
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Capital Cynics
Who do they think they're fooling?
Reason, August/September 1997
Washingtonians are down in the dumps. It was bad enough when the rest of the country just didn't like them: At least the anger of 1994 produced the New Republican Congress and the resultant buzz. Washington was the place to be, a city of high drama whose denizens got zillion-dollar book advances and mingled with fashion models in the pages of George. Its think tanks became rich, its pundits famous
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Fatalist Attraction
The dubious case against fooling Mother Nature.
Reason, July 1997
Twenty years ago, the bookstore in which I was working closed for a few hours while we all went to the funeral of one of our colleagues. Herbie was a delightful guy, well liked by everyone. He died in his 20s--a ripe old age back then for someone with cystic fibrosis. In keeping with the family's wishes, we all contributed money in his memory to support research on the disease. In those days, the best hope was that scientists would develop a prenatal test that would identify fetuses likely to have C.F., allowing them to be aborted. The thought made us uncomfortable. "Would you really want Herbie never to be?" said my boss
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A Need for the Dreaded Gatekeeper
Forbes ASAP, June 01, 1997
Regular readers of this magazine have surely concluded that the secret to understanding information technology lies in learning laws named after guys whose last names begin with M. So to the laws of Moore and Metcalfe, I would add a third and more fundamental one: Marvell's law.
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Monstrous Hybrids
Understanding the Clinton scandals.
Reason, June 1997
In our December 1992 book issue, REASON asked a number of writers to answer the question, "What should the president read?" by recommending three books for the incoming chief executive. At the time contributors had to make their choices, no one knew who the president would be. Suggestions ranged from In Pursuit to The Little Red Hen
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No Class
Bill Clinton's education-as-entitlement programs.
Reason, May 1997
It's not surprising that Bill Clinton has decided to become the education president. Southern governors always emphasize education, hoping to drag their states up a few economic notches and prove they're on the side of civilization; hence, the South has produced such secretaries of education as former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander and former South Carolina Gov. Dick Riley. Clinton follows in this tradition, hailing from a state in which a mere 13.4 percent of the population had college degrees or better as of 1990 (an even worse showing than Mississippi). He knows education is important because he grew up in and later governed a place where it was relatively rare
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Their Own Worst Enemies
Forbes ASAP, April 06, 1997
Should cyberspace be free to evolve its own institutions and ideas because it is new and different from everything that has gone before? Or should it be free because, in fact, cyberspace is very much like the rest of human culture?
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Laissez Fear
Left and right agree: the market is their enemy.
Reason, April 1997
The backlash has begun. Political itellectuals of all sorts are lining up to bash libertarians in general and markets in particular.