Is Information Technology Creating a Productivity Boom?
Every issue explores cutting-edge developments in technology, medicine, education, climate change, and much more. Articles provide in-depth analyses of science and technology’s impact on public policy, the economy, and society—bringing today’s best minds to bear on tomorrow’s most critical topics.
Editor's Journal
Something Old, Something New
First, I want to welcome back the National Academy of Engineering as a sponsor of Issues. NAE was an original sponsor and supported the magazine for more than a decade. During a… Read More
From the Hill
From the Hill – Summer 1998
Space station woes infuriate Congress Cost and schedule overruns for the international space station program are increasingly exasperating members of Congress, even those who have fought long and hard to support the… Read More
Perspectives
Making Guns Safer
Children are killing children by gunfire. These deaths are occurring in homes, on the streets, and in schools. When possible solutions to this problem are discussed, conversation most often focuses on the… Read More
Features
Toward a Global Science
In the early 1990s, the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government published a series of reports emphasizing the need for a greatly increased role for science and scientists in international affairs.… Read MoreShaping a Smarter Environmental Policy for Farming
In the summer of 1997, Maryland Governor Parris Glendening suddenly closed two major rivers to fishing and swimming, after reports of people becoming ill from contact with the water. Tests uncovered outbreaks… Read MoreResolving the Paradox of Environmental Protection
The next big breakthrough in environmental management is likely to be a series of small breakthroughs. Capitol Hill may be paralyzed by a substantive and political impasse, but throughout the United States,… Read MoreComputers Can Accelerate Productivity Growth
Conventional wisdom argues that rapid change in information technology over the past 20 years represents a paradigm shift, one perhaps as important as that caused by the electric dynamo near the turn… Read MoreSaving Medicare
For the past generation, ensuring access to health care and financial security for older Americans and their families under the Medicare program has been an important social commitment. The elderly are healthier… Read MoreNo Productivity Boom for Workers
America’s love affair with the new technologies of the Information Age has never been more intense, but nagging questions remain about whether this passion is delivering on its promise to accelerate growth… Read More
Book Reviews
Bioethics for Everyone
Arthur Caplan is the Babe Ruth of medical ethics. He looks like the Babe—a healthy, affable, stout man, who enjoys life, and is universally liked. Like the Babe, he is prodigiously productive,… Read More
Love Canal revisited
From August 1978 to May 1980, the nondescript industrial city of Niagara Falls, New York, named for one of the world’s great scenic wonders, acquired a perverse new identity as the site… Read More