Starr, Paul 1949-

(Paul Elliot Starr)

PERSONAL: Born May 12, 1949, in New York, NY; son of Saul (a pediatrician) and Sarah Marion (a schoolteacher; maiden name, Buzen) Starr; married Sandra Lurie Stein (an epidemiologist and health policy researcher), April 12, 1982 (died, 1998); married Ann Baynes Coiro, June 9, 2000; children: (first marriage) four, (stepchildren) three. Education: Columbia University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1970; Harvard University, Ph.D., 1978.

ADDRESSES: Home—177 Prospect Ave., Princeton, NJ 08540. Office—Department of Sociology, 124 Wallace Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. Agent—W. Colston Leigh, 1000 Herrontown Rd., Princeton, NJ 08540. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Sociologist, educator, and writer. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, assistant professor of sociology, 1978–83, associate professor of sociology, 1983–85; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, professor of sociology, beginning 1985, then professor of sociology and public affairs and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs; cofounder and coeditor of American Prospect, 1990–. Project director for Center for Study of Responsive Law, 1971–72; member of Institute for Advanced Study, 1984–85; adviser on healthy policy to the White House, 1993; president of the Sandra Starr Foundation; director of the Century Institute, 1999–2003.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellow in Law, Science, and Medicine, Yale Law School, 1974–75; Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 1975–78; Guggenheim fellow, 1981–82; C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems, 1983; Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Bancroft Prize in American history and diplomacy, Columbia University, and James A. Hamilton Hospital Administrators' Book Award, American College of Healthcare Executives, all 1984, all for The Social Transformation of American Medicine; honorary doctorate in humane letters, State University of New York, 1986; Goldsmith Book Prize, 2005, for The Creation of the Media.

WRITINGS:

(With Jerry Avorn and others) Up against the Ivy Wall, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1968.

(Editor, with Immanuel Wallerstein) The University Crisis Reader, Volume I: The Liberal University under Attack, Volume II: Confrontation and Counterattack, Random House (New York, NY), 1971.

(With James F. Henry and Raymond P. Bonner) The Discarded Army: Veterans after Vietnam, introduction by Ralph Nader, Charterhouse (New York, NY), 1974.

The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1982.

(With Marc Bendick) Privatization/Project on the Federal Social Role, National Conference on Social Welfare (Washington, DC), 1985.

(Editor, with William Alonso, and contributor) The Politics of Numbers, Russell Sage (New York, NY), 1987.

The Logic of Health-Care Reform, Whittle Direct Books (Knoxville, TN), 1992, revised and expanded edition published as The Logic of Health-Care Reform: Why and How the President's Plan Will Work, Whittle Direct Books/ Penguin (New York, NY), 1994.

The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to numerous books, including Co-ops, Communes, and Collectives: Social Experiments from the 1960s and 1970s, edited by John Case and Rosemary Taylor, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1979; The End of an Illusion: The Future of Health Policy in Western Industrialized Nations, edited by Jean de Kar-vasdoue and others, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1985; Antipoverty Policies: What Works, What Doesn't, edited by Sheldon Danziger and Daniel Weinberg, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1986; The Changing Boundaries of the Political, edited by Charles Maier, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1987; Prospects for Privatization, edited by Steve H. Hanke, Academy of Political Science (New York, NY), 1987; and Social Security: Beyond the Rhetoric of Crisis, edited by Theodore Marmor and Jerry Mashaw, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1988. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including American Journal of Public Health, Daedalus, Journal of Social History, New Republic, New York Times Book Review, Public Interest, and Yale Law and Policy Review.

SIDELIGHTS: During the Vietnam War sociologist Paul Starr oversaw a study for Ralph Nader examining the lot of Vietnam veterans in American society. His findings were published in 1974 as The Discarded Army: Veterans after Vietnam, a report that reveals how the federal government—and particularly the Veterans Administration—has shortchanged the Vietnam veteran. Returning from a conflict that most Americans would sooner forget, its warriors have also been relegated to the shadows. Besides a lack of national consciousness acknowledging their service and sacrifices, Vietnam veterans have had to contend with neglect in Veterans Administration hospitals already busy with soldiers from earlier wars, an absence of social programs to help reintegrate them into the economy (as with World War II), and a G.I. Bill that grants them less for training and education than veterans before them. Noting that the book is as much about "the nation they returned to" as the Vietnam soldiers themselves, Gordon Burnside reflected in the New York Times Book Review: "The Vietnam war wasn't popular and neither is the Vietnam vet." Burnside continued: "Consequently, there has been little pressure to do right by our ex-G.I.'s." The reviewer also noted that "Paul Starr and his colleagues in the Nader task force hope to create some of that missing public pressure with the publication of this study." Reviewing the report for the Washington Post Book World, William C. Woods decided that although "all Nader studies have a fiercely partisan air … Paul Starr's meticulous study of the truncated options of veterans after Vietnam will have to stand as a stunning new indictment." Woods added: "The list—convincingly documented by this book—goes on and on."

Several years later Starr produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the American medical profession, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Looking at two hundred years of cultural, economic, and political forces that have created the "status and authority of the medical profession" in our society, the book "is an attempt to account for transformations in the social and economic structure of American medicine," Starr wrote in a letter to Commentary. Medical practice began as a penurious, disorganized, and little-respected profession in America, but after scientific breakthroughs like anesthesia, bacteriology, and x-rays, as well as economic and cultural changes, the populace began to perceive physicians as legitimate experts whose specialized skills deserved recognition and compensation.

During the mid-nineteenth century, doctors joined together to form the American Medical Association, a powerful consortium that established medical and ethical standards and protected the interests of physicians. When health insurance emerged, the medical profession insisted that it follow the physicians' fee-for-service arrangements, quashing alternate programs like health care cooperatives with vigorous lobbying and public campaigns. The result, some critics claim, has been an alarming escalation in medical expenditures and a slow shift in power from physicians to corporate concerns attracted to the huge profit potential in health care. Jim Miller noted in Newsweek that "the greatest threat to professional sovereignty of doctors has come not from 'creeping socialism' (as it used to be called), but from impersonal corporations" whose pursuit of profitability may compromise patient care. "The physician's dominance of medical care, not balanced by consumer representation or social accountability, may have caused some of our problems in the past," observed physician H. Jack Geiger in the New York Times Book Review, "but the newly emerging alternatives may create much worse ones."

Predicting a turbulent decade ahead, Starr writes in his book that "medical care in America now appears to be in the early stages of a major transformation in its institutional structure, comparable to the rise of professional sovereignty at the opening of the twentieth century." He adds: "The organizational culture of medicine used to be dominated by ideals of professionalism and voluntarism, which softened the underlying acquisitive activity. The restraint exercised by those ideals now grows weaker." While pointing out that "the failure to rationalize medical services under public control meant that sooner or later they would be rationalized under private control," Starr nonetheless believes that "a trend is not necessarily fate" and that the future of U.S. medicine "depends on choices Americans have still to make."

Declared by some reviewers to be the definitive history of the medical profession in America, The Social Transformation of American Medicine was roundly praised for its detail and scholarship, its masterful historical synthesis, and its provocative sociological analysis. Writing in Science, Ronald L. Numbers remarked that Starr is "blessed with a knack for detecting patterns where others have seen only confusion"; a critic for the Virginia Quarterly Review commented: "One of the great values of this broad and comprehensive work is that it examines the various roads not taken." Discussing the volume in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Robert Dawidoff expressed like admiration, determining that "Starr unravels a complex of expectations, claims and power relations that puts the familiar into the sudden unfamiliar light of the newly discovered." The reviewer added: "Starr's history of the American medical establishment helps the reader to think individually and clearly about a subject shrouded in mysterious authority."

Criticisms of The Social Transformation of American Medicine claimed the book focused almost exclusively on the external forces that shaped medical practice. "Other determinants of physician behavior—medicallegal issues, medical ethics, new technology, and patient-family expectations—are not fully discussed," reported physician Fred Rosenfelt in the Los Angeles Times. This assessment was reiterated by New York Review of Books critic Arnold S. Relman, who wrote: "Starr's history concentrated mainly on economic and political forces, as if moral considerations, such as a doctor's commitment to his patient's interests, count for very little." Relman found the study "largely the story of a special-interest group seeking to gain an economic monopoly"—an overemphasis of "the dark side of the profession's motives" that explains events "too narrowly."

Nonetheless, most critics pronounced Starr's social history indispensable—essential reading for an American public facing tough decisions about the future of its medical care, and a cautionary reminder to physicians of the ethical foundations that originally earned their profession the public mandate that corporate health care now threatens to take away. "With authority, facility, and an intellectual passion uncompromised by emotionalism … [Starr] presents his material fairly and conscientiously supports his conclusions with lucid arguments and an elegant use of his research," decided David Black in the Washington Post Book World. "Throughout the book, he keeps the main line of his thought clear without sacrificing detail or complexity." Black continued: "It is thoroughly accessible to anyone." Deeming The Social Transformation of American Medicine "a monumental achievement," Geiger noted that Starr "has written a book that is laced with wit and irony and graced with style. For all its scholarship it is intensely relevant. It should have a greater impact on our understanding of health care problems and on the solutions we finally support than all the health care crisis books of the past twenty years."

Starr once told CA that his chief concerns are "public policy and public philosophy. For several years I have been writing about choices between public and private control that we face in a variety of institutional spheres, such as education, social insurance, and telecommunications. Much of what I've written deals with the movements toward privatization and deregulation over the last decade. More generally, my interest has been the history and predicament of liberalism. These are the subjects of the books I am now working on. Along with Robert Reich and Robert Kuttner, I am now trying to launch a forthrightly liberal public policy journal to be called The New Century and to be addressed not to specialists but to opinion leaders and the educated public."

Starr and his colleagues founded the journal, but the title was changed to American Prospect. The author has continued to teach and write, following up on his interest in health care in the United States with his book The Logic of Health-Care Reform and pursuing another current topic in The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. In The Creation of the Media, the author examines the close relationship between public opinion and media communication over the years. Starting with Colonial America, Starr continues on through the nineteenth century when the United States actively supported communications via various efforts, including the establishment of the U.S. Post Office. Americans also played an important part in other communications developments during that time, including the radio and the telephone. The author pays particular attention to the development and role of journalism in the United States.

Writing in the Public Opinion Quarterly, Leo Bogart commented: "No serious student of public opinion should fail to read and learn from Paul Starr's new book." Bogart also remarked favorably on the author's ability to "skillfully [scour] the vast literature on individual media to create a masterful synthesis enriched by astute interpretation." In a review in the Political Science Quarterly, James T. Hamilton thought that Starr "has written the definitive history of how political choices have shaped the formation of the media," covering a wide range of communication mediums, including newspapers, television, radio, motion pictures, and telephones. Hamilton commented: "The breadth of the historical analysis in the book is inspiring."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Starr, Paul, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1983.

PERIODICALS

America, May 28, 1983, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 424.

American Historical Review, April, 1984, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 532.

American Journal of Sociology, July, 1984, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 197.

Commentary, January, 1986, Florence A. Ruderman, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 43; May, 1986, letter from the author.

Commonweal, November 30, 1984, William F. May, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 663.

Contemporary Sociology, January, 1984.

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, July, 2005, Martin H. Levinson, review of The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, p. 337.

Journal of American History, September, 1983, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 433.

Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1983, Fred Rosenfelt, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 6.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 23, 1983, Robert Dawidoff, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 6.

New Republic, February 21, 1983, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 32.

Newsweek, March 14, 1983, Jim Miller, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 71.

New York Review of Books, March 29, 1984, Arnold S. Relman, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine.

New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1974, Gordon Burnside, review of The Discarded Army: Veterans after Vietnam, p. 20; January 9, 1983, H. Jack Geiger, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine.

Political Science Quarterly, winter, 1983–84, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 708; summer, 2005, James T. Hamilton, review of The Creation of the Media, p. 322.

Public Opinion Quarterly, fall, 2005, Leo Bogart, review of The Creation of the Media, p. 479.

Science, February 18, 1983, Ronald L. Numbers, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine; May 10, 1985, Constance Holden, "Sociology stir at Harvard," p. 692.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1984, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine.

Washington Post Book World, February 10, 1974, William C. Woods, review of The Discarded Army; February 13, 1983, David Black, review of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, p. 4.