Twenty Years Ago In The Economist

Europe was fussing with its missiles.

The main reason for bringing cruise and Pershing-2 missiles to Europe was to prevent Russia getting a decisive lead in nuclear weapons between the short-range battlefield sort and the intercontinental monsters. It has worked. Imagine that, ten years ago, when NATO first talked of deploying its new missiles, Russia had suddenly said that, well, on second thoughts, it was cancelling its SS-20 programme, scrapping its older SS-4s, and, come to think of it, dismantling its monopoly of slightly smaller missiles too.

Imagine that? In 1977 no one could imagine that.

America undertook new research into poverty:

Those surveys, says America's latest best-selling sociologist, "reveal with striking clarity that the requirements for getting out of poverty in the United States are so minimal that it takes a mutually reinforcing cluster of behaviours" to remain poor. An American's chance of staying poor is less than ½% if he or she does the following three things: (a) completes high school; (b) gets and stays married; (c) stays employed, even if initially only at the minimum wage.

So why don't they? It took Mr Murray another seven years to answer that.

In other news Pope John Paul wanted to beatify Sister Theresia Benedicta, a Catholic nun who died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.

The idea that Edith Stein is a martyr for the Catholic faith has upset many Jews. They argue that she was killed in Auschwitz not in odio fidei (out of hatred for her faith), but because she was Jewish. If she was a martyr, she was a Jewish martyr, like the millions of other Jews who perished under Hitler.

Coincidentally Books and Arts led off with a lengthy review of The Jews of Silence by Elie Wiesel and included on the next page a capsule review of A History of the Jews, by the historian Paul Johnson, a Roman Catholic.

An excellent book, by the way, which I just read last year.