Public discourse

The paradox of persistent poverty in an affluent society is another troubling issue calling for explanation. Reductionist theories are convenient people are simply driven - and limited - by their genes. This again is a time-worn idea. Eugenicists, for example, had explained pauperism as in the blood . In retrospect, it is easy to see the fallacies in such formulations, but similar beliefs have re-emerged in public discourse, appearing in a preoccupation with what makes people different. 

Decision-makers have sometimes found presentations of comparative risk information a useful aid to the public discourse on risk acceptance. We referred in an earlier section, for example, to the OSHA s use of statistics on the risks of job-related accidents to support decisions... 

The situation may be illustrated well by the development of the public discourse on hydropower in Switzerland over the past few years. As 60% of Swiss electricity generation stems from hydropower, its environmental impacts have time and again raised political debates over the past 50 years. More recently, the liberalization of electricity markets has opened up new windows of opportunity for the development of new approaches of mitigation. One example of an integrative concept was developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in the late 1990s. It has been implemented in the currently operating eco-label for sustainably produced electricity in Switzerland (naturemade star). 

The public discourse about hydropower in Switzerland went through a number of quite clearly demarcated phases. In the first phase, which started between 1880 and 1914, the electrical utopia based on white coal sparked a national consensus to develop alpine hydropower plants [10]. However, due to technical limitations, the majority of currently running large-scale hydropower plants in the Swiss Alps was constructed in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result of this rapid expansion, almost all major streams in the Alpine region are now impacted by hydropower plants and their operation [6]. 

It is not strange in this light that Boyle took issue with the doctrine of chemical principles and elements given in French textbooks. They offered not only the most public discourse of chemistry but also the most clearly stated body of knowledge on the practical operations of chemistry. In a way, it offered a model for the philosophical chemistry Boyle wished to found, combining systematic philosophy with the analytic, experimental knowledge. The fact that Boyle took these French textbooks seriously is itself a measure of their success in the seventeenth-century culture of chemistry. To Boyle s disappointment, however, they merely handed out... 

In economics, Gresham s law holds that when two types of currency circulate and one is intrinsically more valuable (say, gold instead of silver, despite an equivalent face value) people hoard the good money and make purchases with the bad. Soon only the bad money remains in circulation. Similarly, people with extreme views can drive moderates, who want to avoid the reputational devaluation of being mistaken as zealots, out of a conversation. In effect, the moderates "hoard" their opinions hence, the public discourse on some issues (perhaps abortion, for example) can be more polarized than is the actual distribution of public opinion.181... 

Decision-makers have sometimes found presentations of comparative risk information a useful aid to the public discourse on risk acceptance. We referred in the last section, for example, to OSHA s use of statistics on the risks of job-related accidents to support decisions on risk reduction goals for workplace carcinogens. The agency noted that lifetime risks of death from injuries suffered in what most people perceive to be safe occupations do not go below about 1 per 1000. Data of these types were helpful in explaining why the agency settled on carcinogen risk levels in this range as sufficiently low to provide a safe work environment. 

As an argument brought to the agora of American public discourse, Man in a Chemical World was extremely bold. Its nationalism lit well with the concerns of many scientists, particularly the leadership of the ACS, that the U.S. needed to establish strong industries and train American... 

This revisionist trend also permeated the Johnson administration s public discourse on China, which increasingly emphasized China s weakening position and thus coalesced around the theme of Troubled Modernizer. In a late 1967 interview, Johnson expressed the hope that the Chinese leaders would learn from their failures in Africa, Latin America, and Asia and move toward a better understanding and a more moderate approach to their neighbors.Chinese militancy was really a source of weakness Rusk often reminded the public that China s militant stance had isolated it even within the international communist community, and that it now appeared to be a major issue of contention within China itself, in its great agony over the directions of policy and the identity of leadership. 4 At... 

A combination of primary and secondary sources are used here to analyze Nixon s private and public discourse on China from 1952 to 1971. Note, however, that documentary sources for the period when he was out of office, from 1961 to 1968, were remarkably... 

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