Critics have attacked the foolishness of some of todays elite thought from many angles but few have examined the realworld 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. Americas premier monument to knowledge the Smithsonian Institution portrays science as white mans 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 opinionmakers 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 upsidedown world and how it got that way. show more