Summaries of Important Research
POLITICS
UNderachiever
Joshua Muravchik, “What Use is the U.N.?” in Commentary (April 1996), 165 East 56th Street, New York, New York 10022.
Last year the United Nations commemorated its fiftieth anniversary, but the American Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Muravchik believes that the U.N. shouldn’t celebrate—because it stands for little more than "cowardice, buck-passing, and appeasement." The U.N.’s large, cumbersome agencies mostly pay bureaucrats large sums of money to generate paperwork. Its official statement commemorating its fiftieth anniversary, for example, was written after 32 committee meetings.
When the U.N. does produce something, it’s often hypocritical. Take the Commission on Human Rights: it "invariably includes representatives of the most brutal dictatorships on earth," so that on human rights issues, "the world body has proven nothing short of a farce." While the U.N. routinely issues reports condemning alleged human rights abuses in Israel and the United States, it remains silent about the far more serious restrictions on freedom in, say, China and Saudi Arabia.
Nor has the U.N. advanced the prosperity of the Third World. In the 1950s and ’60s, U.N. development experts promoted the notion that the ghost of "dependency," could only be exorcised if emerging economies erected high tariff barriers to protect domestic businesses. By following the U.N.’s advice, these nations have "paid the price in decades of stagnation."
The U.N. has also done little to prevent war. It claims to preserve the peace and prevent aggression through "collective security," whereby members join their armies to repel aggressors. But it has only invoked the collective security provisions of its charter twice—against North Korea in 1950 and against Iraq in 1991. Both wars featured American-led coalitions, and "in both cases, America would have acted even in the absence of the U.N."
Although the U.N. may serve as a global discussion forum, the notion that the United Nations preserves world peace is an illusion. "The critical agency for securing peace in our time," Muravchik writes, "is not the U.N. but the U.S."
True and False Compassion
Clifford Orwin, “Distant Compassion: cnn and Borrioboola-Gha,” in The National
Interest (Spring 1996), 1112 16th Street
N.W. #540, Washington, D.C. 20036.
In recent years, television has played a substantial role in foreign policy. U.S. troops have gone to Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti largely because of the daily broad-cast of stories about the troubled Third World. But as Orwin of the University of Toronto notes, long-distance compassion is centuries old.
For over 200 years philosophers have observed that we are more compassionate towards our family and friends than
towards strangers. People are also moved more by stories of individual suffering than by mindless mass slaughter. Thus television, Orwin argues, leads Western forces to intervene in developing nations ineffectually. Since journalists are as eager to produce stories of maimed or murdered soldiers as they are to file reports on Third World suffering, Western forces have to provide aid while simultaneously not doing anything that might result in death or serious injury. "A skeptic might conclude that as it is on television that the evil comes to light," Orwin writes, "so that is where it must be combated; images of actual suffering are neutralized by ones of symbolic concern."
"Televised misery resembles the hydra," Orwin adds. "It persists (if sometimes with a new head) no matter how hard we attack it." One week television journalists beg us to care about the Bosnians, the next week the Chechens, as newer, fresher causes "siphon air time and humanitarian sentiment from older, tedious, and intractable ones."
How many nightly stories on war-torn countries will viewers respond to, Orwin asks, before they cease to care about the plight of people overseas? Rousseau once observed that "it is by dint of death and suffering that priests and doctors become pitiless." Might overexposed television viewers also harden their hearts to the problems of those in distant lands?
ECONOMICS
Business and Virtue
Michael Novak, “Profits With Honor,” in Policy Review (May/June 1996), Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Avenue N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002.
Debate has recently raged over the "social responsibilities" of business, but aei’s Novak believes that ethics in the business world should go deeper than simply donating money to charity or not laying off workers. "The business corporation is in its essence a moral institution," Novak writes, "and by its own internal logic and inherent moral drive, business requires moral conduct."
A businessman’s fundamental obligation, Novak argues, is to provide goods and services that people need and to make a reasonable profit. It’s only by creating new wealth that new jobs can be created; only with new wealth can the poor steadily advance. Societies where wealth creation is stagnant, and small businesses do not form, ultimately resemble those of Latin America, where "envy, leveling, and ressentiment fester and multiply." Moreover, steadily rising business wealth is the foundation of most charitable giving and
private aid to the unfortunate.
Corporations also have responsibilities to workers and society. Workers should be treated with respect, and bosses should work to help their employees excel in their jobs. The heads of corporations should also be virtuous. They should support the rule of law by not engaging in illegal activity. And to reduce envy among their workers, executives should avoid "conspicuous privilege, ostentation, and other forms of behavior." As with "other forms of justice and love," Novak remarks, "social justice begins at home." But executives should also encourage their employees to work to make the world a better place. While businesses themselves should not be welfare organizations, they should encourage workers to volunteer for activities that aid others.
America, Novak argues, needs more business leaders willing to pursue a virtuous life instead of degrading our culture. "Traditional virtues—sustained by people of business in their private and public lives—are the muscles, ligaments, and sinews of the free society," he writes. "Cut them, and you have paralyzed liberty."
Useful Cities
Edward L. Glaeser, “Why Economists Still Like Cities,” in City Journal (Spring 1996), Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, New York 10017.
Conventional wisdom posits that many American cities are as doomed as obsolete factories. But Harvard economist Glaeser argues that many cities are successfully transforming themselves into livelier and more prosperous metropolises.
In the nineteenth century, American cities became manufacturing centers because they presented large businesses with ready-made markets. But during the twentieth century, transportation costs have steadily fallen, consumer tastes have become more specialized, and manufacturers have migrated to the suburbs and the countryside, where land is cheaper and on-ramps to the interstates plentiful.
This shift of plants to the suburbs need not sap the economic vitality of cities, Glaeser argues. Cities where brainwork has displaced brawn are doing well and are gaining population. For instance, Madison, Wisconsin, home to a state university, has increased its population by 50 percent since 1960, while blue-collar Milwaukee’s population has dropped by a third. Glaeser estimates that between 1970 and 1990, every one-grade increase in the average education completed in a city ensured that the city would grow by 8 percent.
Concentrating smart people in one area, Glaeser adds, ensures that jobs and opportunities multiply. There are many more niches for specialized entrepreneurs in cities than in the country; the Manhattan Yellow Pages, for example, list one tie renovator, three sellers of nautical equipment, and one person who makes a living selling papayas. Workers also find it easier to switch jobs to a more lucrative profession in a large urban labor market. It’s much easier for a lawyer in Philadelphia to start selling real estate than it is for one in Poughkeepsie.
Nor do advances in telecommunications, Glaeser argues, necessarily lessen the cities’ competitive advantages. Faxes and e-mail make sending and getting information easier, but are no substitute for a productive business meeting. Similarly, teaching someone complex knowledge (how to install fancy software, or to demonstrate a new surgical procedure) is more easily done in person than over the phone or the computer. Nor can e-mail substitute for the unplanned exchanges of information that take place during social gatherings of professionals.
City politicians should do their part by ensuring high-quality services and by reducing the red tape that chokes innovation and growth. But they shouldn’t assume their cities are fated to decline. "The basic forces shaping the Information Age economy," Glaeser writes, "bode very well for cities."
Natural Gas and Competition
Kenneth W. Costello and Daniel J. Duann, “Turning up the Heat in the Natural Gas Industry,” in Regulation (Number 1, 1996),
Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001.
Consumers in the 1980s benefited from the gradual deregulation of natural gas. Between 1978 and 1993, controls on the sale of natural gas from the wellhead were first reduced and then eliminated. Other reforms offered local distribution companies more flexibility in choosing suppliers and provided some freedom in how these companies set their prices.
These reforms have made the natural gas industry efficient and productive. Between 1984 and 1993, the average retail price of natural gas fell by 16 percent, saving consumers over $100 billion. Productivity in pipeline and distribution companies has increased by 24 percent during this period. But Costello of the National Regulatory Research Institute
and consultant Duann suggest that more deregulation is needed.
Traditional command-and-control natural gas regulation assumed that a local distributor should be "bundled" with a particular supplier—a combination that was allegedly a "natural monopoly." While some unbundling has occurred, true competition won’t take place as long as "anachronistic pricing, obligation-to-serve, and other rules remain in place." These outdated rules, Costello and Duann say, should be scrapped. and suppliers and distributors should be unbundled as quickly as possible.
Some regulation might still be necessary to protect residential users and small businesses that can’t easily switch from one distributor to another. But there’s no reason to regulate natural gas providers who sell to large firms that can easily switch from one fuel to another in the competitive energy market. Regulation of natural gas, Costello and Duann write, should be "market accommodating and flexible." For example, instead of requiring approval for every change in prices, public utility commissions could allow firms more freedom to set prices as long as they don’t exceed a price cap.
The goal of natural gas regulation, Costello and Duann argue, is to ensure free competition while protecting consumers and small businesses against excessive price increases. "The public utility industries have changed radically," they write. "There is no reason why regulation should not also."
SOCIETY
Shaming Criminals
Dan M. Kahan, “What Do Alternative Sanctions Mean?” in The University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1996), University of Chicago Law School, 1111 East 60th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637.
Many Americans have urged longer prison sentences as a response to the increase in crime, but while jail is a suitable place for murderers, rapists, muggers, and armed robbers, it may not be the best place for nonviolent criminals. Yet polls suggest that alternative sanctions, such as fines and community service, are lowly regarded.
Why are these alternatives unpopular? University of Chicago Law School Professor Kahan argues that punishments outside prisons don’t make a criminal ashamed of his illegal deed, and so only when we put shame back into sentencing will alternatives to prison merit public approval.
Consider corporal punishment. No American court has ever declared corporal punishment unconstitutional, and as late
as 1972 Delaware allowed prisoners to be flogged. There’s even some public support for bringing back the lash: 63 percent of those surveyed in a 1994 national poll agreed that caning would effectively deter vandalism. Yet as the reaction to Singapore’s caning of Michael Fay showed, many Americans equate corporal punishment not with a just sentence, but with the brutal tyranny of repressive regimes.
Other alternatives to jail, Kahan believes, are also ineffective. Even massive fines suggest that criminals buy their way out of their sentences. Community service is a particularly ineffective form of punishment because it largely consists of deeds that would be considered admirable if they were performed voluntarily.
Alternative sanctions can only be effective if they are made shameful, Kahan insists. Making people wear bracelets saying "I Write Bad Checks," and requiring people convicted of public urination to clean city streets could be starts. Kahan also approves of "public apology rituals." In Maryland, for example, some nonviolent juvenile offenders are only released if they apologize to their victims on their hands and knees and if the judge believes that the apology is sincere. Kahan urges judges to consider carefully the message their sentences send. "What punishments say," he concludes, "is an irreducible component of what they do."
After Standards Collapse
The Dissolution of General Education: 1914-1993. National Association of Scholars, 575 Ewing Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540.
The debate continues about what college students ought to know. And it does so, argues the National Association of Scholars (nas), largely because graduation requirements are a lot more lenient than they used to be. By every criterion, post-secondary education since 1964 has been marked by a "wholesale dissolution of internal structure."
The nas assessed course requirements for B.A. degrees at 50 institutions that were ranked in a 1989 U.S. News and World Report survey as America’s "elite" colleges and universities. They obtained catalogues for these schools from 1914, 1939, 1964, and 1993, and made comparisons. During this period, students’ choices greatly expanded. The average school’s total courses increased from 304 in 1914 to over 1,000 in 1993. But as student choices rose, the number of mandatory courses steadily fell. In 1914, the number of courses schools required all students to take amounted to 36 percent of the curriculum; by 1993, only 7 percent of the courses were required.
The reduction in mandatory courses also occurred within majors and departments. In 1939, only 6 percent of courses did not require prerequisites. By 1993, 41 percent of all courses needed no introductory courses. Universities now offer such highly specialized courses as "Russian Legal Institutions Before 1700" and "Mathematical Linguistics" without requiring any introductory courses.
The nas also found that college curricula are less rigorous than they once were. In 1914, none of the schools in the nas sample offered a remedial English composition course. In 1939, one did, calling it "Sub-freshman English." Even in 1964, only three of the 50 schools offered such courses, but by 1993, 35 did. As late as 1964 none of the schools offered credit for remedial English, while 31 schools in 1993 gave credit for such courses.
A similar "dumbing down" has taken place in mathematics. In 1914, 82 percent of these colleges and universities required math courses for graduation, and all of them had math majors and non-math majors take the same courses. But by 1993, only 44 percent of schools still had any mathematics requirement, and only 6 percent of the schools required non-math majors to pass the introductory courses math majors took. Thirty-eight percent permitted the mathematics requirement to be filled by easier courses math majors could skip.
If a common core of knowledge among college graduates is lost, the nas warns, then "we are in danger of losing the common frame of cultural reference that for many generations has sustained our liberal, democratic society."
OTHER COUNTRIES
Hong Kong Builds a Welfare State
William McGurn, “Biting the Invisible Hand,” in Reason (April 1996), 3415 South Sepulveda Boulevard #400, Los Angeles, California 90034.
Hong Kong began its economic rise in the 1950s. With few natural resources, the British colony acquired a substantial talent pool of immigrants fleeing Chinese Communism. Led by John James Cowperthwaite, financial secretary of the colony during the 1960s, the British allowed these entrepreneurs to flourish with minimal government supervision. As a result, Hong Kong became an economic powerhouse, and the number of poor Hong Kong residents fell sharply.
Over the past two decades, however, welfare spending in Hong Kong has slowly increased—a "decisive philosophical shift" in the way the colony is governed, Far Eastern Economic Review’s William McGurn observes. The government now owns over half of the colony’s housing, state-run hospitals have largely crowded out private competitors, and the colony has no private universities.
Hong Kong’s welfare spending has increased substantially since Chris Patten became governor in 1992. A harsh Tory critic of Thatcherism, Patton presided over a 6 percent increase in Honk Kong’s welfare spending. Welfare currently accounts for 47 percent of the Hong Kong budget and has increased so much that even Beijing is alarmed: Chinese negotiator Chen Zou’er recently said that the colony’s welfare programs were like a Formula 1 race car out of control and likely to crash.
Opposition to Hong Kong’s welfare program is weak. The Democrats—the colony’s leading political party—are "composed mostly of teachers, social workers, and activist types who know little about business," and who want government regulation and spending to rise even faster, McGurn reports. Principled businessmen are reluctant to criticize the colonial officials for fear the Chinese will curtail or seize their investments.
The result, McGurn warns, is that no one in Hong Kong is willing to champion the market-oriented policies that made the colony such an economic dynamo. "At the very moment that [Hong Kong’s] economic system has been vindicated by history," McGurn writes, "there is not a single politician from either the business or democracy camps who gives any evidence of appreciating what really makes it tick."
Inside Japanese Minds
Everett Carll Ladd and Karlyn H. Bowman, Public Opinion in America and Japan: How We See Each Other and Ourselves. Roper Center/aei Press, 1150 17th Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
After analyzing a large number of polls from the United States and Japan, Ladd from the University of Connecticut, and Bowman, Opinion Pulse editor of tae, conclude that despite their similarities, the two nations diverge sharply on many fundamental issues. Consider the roles of men and women. Educated Japanese women express views about the role of their gender in the workforce that are roughly comparable to Americans. But in many ways, Japanese express views about women that Americans would consider reactionary. Seventy percent of those surveyed want their sons to finish university, for example, but only 35 percent want their daughters to do the same. Nineteen percent said that the ideal family is a "patriarchal household where the wife is obedient and dedicated to her husband." And another poll found that Japanese women are far more likely to do the laundry, care for sick family members, buy groceries, and choose the dinner menu in their households than are American women.
As for religion, polls consistently show the Japanese are far less devout than Americans. Twenty four percent of Japanese believe in "nothing that relates to religion," 16 percent support the power of amulets and charms, and 6 percent believe in fortunetellers. Ninety-three percent of Americans and 37 percent of Japanese believe in God (44 percent of Japanese believe in Buddha), but only 13 percent of Japanese believe in sin, compared to 86 percent of Americans.
Ladd and Bowman’s analysis shows that the Japanese distrust institutions more than Americans. Although the Japanese are slightly more confident about their legal system than Americans, they are far less confident about the police, the schools, the military, big business, and the legislature. Nor are the Japanese confident about their political system: one poll found only 35 percent of Japanese satisfied with democracy in their nation, compared to 64 percent of Americans.
However disillusioned the Japanese are with politics, they still retain great faith in the state’s ability to improve lives, while "the more individualistic American public," Ladd and Bowman report, "is less inclined to look to government." Seventy percent of Americans agree that "individuals should take more responsibility for providing for themselves," compared to only 15 percent of the Japanese. Seventy-two percent of Americans, but only 19 percent of Japanese, agree that private ownership should increase in their nations. And while 76 percent of Americans endorse competition, only 40 percent of Japanese agree. "America’s pervasive ‘non-statism’ is not being replicated in Japan," Ladd and Bowman conclude.
SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT
The Wilderness Was Never Pristine
Charles E. Kay, “Aboriginal Overkill and Native Burning: Implications for Modern Ecosystem Management,” in Western
Journal of Applied Forestry (October 1995), Society of American Foresters, 5400 Grosvenor Lane, Bethesda, Maryland 20814.
National park resource management is based on the theory that our parks should resemble the "pristine conditions" that supposedly existed before Europeans began to settle on the North American continent in the sixteenth century. Before Europeans came to America, the ortho-doxy maintains, the forests teemed with wildlife, particularly with such big animals as elk, bison, and moose. The few Native Americans present in this primordial wilderness were too poor to cause any environmental damage.
Not true, says wildlife ecologist Kay. "The idea that North America was a ‘wilderness’ untouched by the hand of man prior to 1492 is a myth," he charges. "The Americas as first seen by Europeans were not as they had been crafted by God, but as they had been created by native peoples."
If the plains and mountains of the West teemed with large animals, for example, why didn’t early explorers and trappers see them? When trapper Peter Skene Ogden killed three moose in 1825 near present-day Philipsburg, Montana, it was the first time either he or his men had seen one, even though their collective wilderness experience totaled over 200 years. Some 20 expeditions to Yellowstone between 1835 and 1872 saw only three bison in 735 days. Today, Yellowstone National Park is home to over 4,000 bison. Kay adds that explorers’ journals routinely describe how expedition horses had to be killed for food. If deer, antelope, and bighorn sheep were abundant, why didn’t explorers eat them?
Kay holds Native Americans responsible for the West’s once-poor ecological health. Until their numbers were decimated by European-borne diseases, Kay theorizes, there were as many as 100 million Native Americans in the United States. These Indians practiced "aboriginal overkill." They nearly wiped out the large animals of the West, and many tribes were forced to subsist on berries. The large animals that did survive had to flee to desolate areas, such as Idaho’s Snake River valley or the Arctic, that were out of the range of Indian hunters. Native Americans also routinely set fires, frequently causing large portions of the North American forest to burn.
Neither yesterday’s careless steward-ship nor the "hands-off or natural regulation approach" favored by today’s land managers will best maintain ecological conditions, Kay writes. That will require instead intelligent and purposeful human husbandry.
Planet + People = Bloom, not Bomb
Thomas Lambert, Defusing the "Population Bomb" with Free Markets. Center for the Study of American Business, Washington University, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, Missouri 63130.
"Of all the challenges facing us in this century," Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) recently warned, "none compares to the increasing population growth of the world." This is "hyperbole," says Thomas Lambert. Not only is there little evidence that population growth harms the environment, the rising tide of people may actually help it. Today’s anti-population advocates make the same errors made by the Reverend Thomas Malthus. In his classic 1798 Essay on Population, Malthus posited the law of diminishing returns: all other things being equal, additional workers will live on less productive lands and have fewer resources to consume, thus ensuring that as the world’s population rises, the global standard of living falls.
Malthus erred in assuming that human ingenuity would not adjust to increased population, says Lambert. Since Malthus wrote his essay, the world’s population has risen sixfold, but the world’s workers have become 80 times more productive, bringing more wealth with fewer inputs and less waste and unwanted side effects. And so the population boost "has been no problem."
There’s also a strong correlation between increased population density and rising income. Concentrating people in large urban areas increases the ability of urban residents to exchange information, thus expanding the world’s supply of knowledge, which in turn leads to advances in productivity. Increased population also allows people to specialize in increasingly productive professions.
The wealth created by increased population also ensures that developing countries can afford to pay for environmental protection. University of Chicago economist Don Coursey calculates that a country’s citizens feel wealthy enough to pay for ecological measures when their per capita gdp exceeds $5,000.
"Policymakers who really examine the data," Lambert writes, "will see that ‘overpopulation’ is a phantom threat when
markets are free."
