Book Review

This volume appears at first blush to fall into a freshet of recent writings on the limits of our capacity for effective social engineering. Among these writings are Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, James Q. Wilson's Thinking About Crime, and James S. Coleman's qualifying affidavit in the Boston School case and subsequent articles. Upon full reading, however, Professor Glazer's attack is seen to be directed more at the dubious moral mandate for group statistical preferences than at their evidently doubtful impact on the social problems at which they have been aimed.