Volume 15, Issue 1 (1999)

When you receive this issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy, we should be crossing the threshold from millennium mania to millennium madness. The former has concerned itself almost exclusively with the etiquette of millennium rites, where one ought to be on the occasion itself — embracing the starlit grandeur of the ancient pyramids, as if to remind ourselves that some things preceded the outgoing millennium and even exceeded the achievements of our own: in the silence of a Tibetan monastery to contemplate in serenity the philosophical implications of the momentous transition and reflect perhaps on the meaning of life itself, the imponderables of the seamlessness of eternity, the indivisibility of a universe that continues to confound our attempts to unravel its mysteries, or, as members of the less esoteric masses, part of worldwide revelries linked by satellite feeds that promise little more than massive hangovers on the first day of the new millennium.

This issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy covers a range of public policy subjects, all pertinent to the direction federal- and state-level government will take in the coming decades.