Volume 15, Issue 2 (2000)

We are pleased to bring you the first issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy in the new century. We rejoice that at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, the planet did not implode, meteors did not shower us with the debris of their displeasure with us earthlings, aircraft did not fall out of the sky, catastrophic convulsions in our ecosystems did not engulf us, telecommunication systems functioned with indifferent insouciance to the inner terrors of our crippled imaginations. The world, one minute after January 1, 2000, was yawningly the same as one minute before.

Whether normalcy was the result of saturating the heavens with prayer, the whim of a Divine Hand, an unexpected counterpoise to the exponentially driven hysteria generated by obsession with Y2K compliance, or simply the universe enjoying itself at our expense are matters for conjecture. Or a Ph.D. thesis. Given the prevailing winds of political correctness, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the merits of the two.

As usual, the essays in this issue of the journal cover a broad spectrum.