Paul Starr
Princeton University
The information revolution has its origins, not just in technological or economic developments, but in particular political conditions: limits on government control and active promotion of communications, knowledge, and education. The United States now enjoys comparative advantage in information thanks both to the founding institutions established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and to the expansion of public investment in science, technology, and education during World War II and the Cold War. The choices America made in the past help to explain why it has dominated the information industries and ought to inform the choices we confront today.
Paul Starr is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize in American History. He is also coeditor of The American Prospect--a liberal magazine about American politics and society, public policy, and ideas--which he founded in 1990 with columnist Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich. Recently, through The American Prospect, he has helped to organize the Electronic Policy Network and to create its new "virtual" publication, Idea Central. Professor Starr's most recent book is The Logic of Health-Care Reform (1994). During 1993 he worked at the White House on President Clinton's health plan. He is currently working on a book on the politics of the information age.