Summaries of Important Research

Americans’ Ties Bind

Everett Carll Ladd, The Ladd Report. Free Press, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020.

In a celebrated 1995 essay, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam warned that Americans were far less likely to join groups than in the past. Citing declines in many major organizations—labor unions, the League of Women Voters, PTAs, and bowling leagues—Putnam concluded that Americans had become far less civic-minded, a trend that would inevitably lead to a fractured and balkanized America.

Ladd, professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, disagrees. A great deal of evidence, he contends, shows Americans are now more likely to join associations and aid charities. We are less likely to bowl than in the past—but more likely to join soccer leagues. Women have shifted their allegiance from the League of Women Voters to less political groups, such as the Soroptimists and local businesswomens’ associations. And while PTA membership is declining, parents aren’t abandoning the schools; they’re more likely to create independent, locally controlled parent-teacher organizations (PTOs), which don’t have to pay hefty dues to the PTA national headquarters or follow its political lead.

Americans are also increasingly donating time to worthy causes. Polls show steady rises in the percentage of Americans who say they volunteer to help others. In 1977, for instance, 26 percent of Americans surveyed said they donated time to help the poor, the sick, and the elderly. By 1995, the percentage had more than doubled to 54 percent. Charitable donations are also rising, from $349 per person in 1970 to $524 in 1996 (measured in constant 1993 dollars).

American civic-mindedness compares favorably to that of other countries. While only 18 percent of Americans told the World Values Survey that they didn’t belong to any groups, 61 percent of the French, 64 percent of Japanese and Mexicans, and 70 percent of Spaniards lacked any group ties. In one set of surveys, 49 percent of Americans said they volunteered in the past 12 months, but only 13 percent of Germans and 19 percent of French had. And Americans said they donated an annual average of $851 to charity; the average German contribution was $120, the average French donation, $96.

One reason for these differences is religion. Americans are more likely to donate time and money to their privately funded churches than people in other countries are to aid state churches. While 51 percent of Americans told the World Values Survey they belonged to a church or religious group, only 17 percent of Spaniards, 9 percent of Norwegians, and 5 percent of Japanese said they did. And while 51 percent of Americans gave money to their churches, only 9 percent of the French voluntarily donated to their state church. Americans, Ladd insists, haven’t “given up on the demands of citizenship.”

More Bang for the Surplus Buck

Kevin A. Hassett and R. Glenn Hubbard, The Magic Mountain: A Guide to Using and Defining a Budget Surplus. AEI Press, 1150 17th Street N.W., Washington,  D.C. 20036.

Hassett and Hubbard, economists at the American Enterprise Institute, argue Congress should be cautious about how to deal with the federal budget surplus. They explore several ways it can be used:

• Reduce the federal debt. Debt reduction could help the economy by lowering interest rates, but it’s possible that with a lesser debt, Congress might be tempted to increase spending.

• Reform Social Security. Economist Martin Feldstein suggests workers over age 35 receive lump-sum “recognition bonds” from the federal government equal to the amount of Social Security they would receive when they retire. Workers could use these bonds to buy private annuities to provide pensions. But the costs of these bonds could be as much as $11 trillion–ten times more than the most optimistic budget surplus forecast.

• Cut taxes. Tax-cutting might well be the best way to use the budget surplus to stimulate the economy. That’s because the costs of paying taxes (hours spent in record-keeping, funds that aren’t available for savings or investment) are up to 40 percent over and above the tax bill. But rather than “targeted” tax cuts for some, Hassett and Hubbard argue it’s much more efficient to impose across-the-board tax reductions.

Hiding the Underclass

Charles Murray, The Underclass Revisited. AEI Press, 1150 17th Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

In the 1980s, argues American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray, “the underclass was in our face.” Busing ensured that troubled urban youth routinely vandalized suburban classrooms. The homeless clogged the nation’s central cities. Public order cracked, with cities appearing to be dominated by vandals, prostitutes, and “knots of menacing teenagers.” Rising crime rates caused many city dwellers to feel “afraid and besieged.”

One decade later, these trends have all been reversed. Busing has largely been curtailed. More strict vagrancy laws and additional shelters have dramatically reduced the number of homeless on the streets. “Zero-tolerance policing” has ensured that seemingly minor crimes such as graffiti-painting are much rarer. And by sending habitual criminals to jail, cities have ensured these crooks are behind bars instead of committing more crimes.

It’s possible, then, that a wealthy America can contain the underclass. But Murray finds two trends disturbing: First, the moral code of the ghetto is now seeping into modern culture. Far too many suburban teenagers learn from obscenity-laden rap albums and violent movies that the key to success in life is to practice “underclass ethics”—lie, cheat, and violently attack anyone who might “disrespect” you. And white illegitimacy rates are slowly rising. Currently, 22 percent of the children of non-Latino whites are illegitimate, ensuring that a substantial number of white teenagers may grow up fatherless. Given that similar illegitimacy rates ensured the destruction of the black family, we may see “accelerated and sustained growth in white crime, labor force dropout, and illegitimacy by the middle of the next decade.”

“Broad swaths of American society,” Murray writes, “are becoming more civil, more responsible, and less self-indulgent.” Yet the existence of the underclass means that a minority of amoral and violent Americans will have to be controlled if the country is to prosper. Given that in America everyone is supposed be self-reliant and independent, he asks: Is it admirable that the U.S. is now dividing into the rulers and the ruled?

A Clock With No Alarm

Jonathan Walters, “Beyond the Welfare Clock,” in Governing (April 1999), 1100 Connecticut Avenue N.W. #1300, Washington, D.C. 20036.

When Congress passed the welfare reform bill in 1996, the most controversial feature was a five-year lifetime limit on federal welfare benefits. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), called it, “the most brutal act of social policy we have known since Reconstruction.”

Three years later, welfare caseloads are dramatically plunging. But the drop, observes Governing correspondent Walters, is largely due to tougher work requirements, not to time limits; relatively few people have had their welfare checks end because time has expired. “While time limits had the hard ring of tough love when states adopted them,” he writes, “hard-liners are becoming social softies when time runs out on recipients.”

Consider Tennessee, which imposed an 18-month time limit in 1997. When the time limit expired, 5,000 recipients were threatened with an end to their checks. But the state exempted 2,800 cases because of disability or other reasons, and granted extensions to another 1,400 recipients who were still looking for work. Only 800 recipients had their checks stopped.

Faced with the tougher cases, some states are trying hard to ensure that as few people as possible are actually cut off from welfare. Arizona’s Department of Economic Security, for example, recently asked the state legislature for an additional $3 million to “launch a formal review of cases about to receive full sanction.” Tennessee, Delaware, and Montana are also launching additional reviews before welfare checks stop.

Walters predicts a similar weakening of the federal welfare time limit, now currently scheduled to take effect in 2002, particularly if the economy turns sour. One change, for example, would be to count “family-building activities” such as taking children to Scouts or after-school programs as part of the work requirement. “For very dysfunctional adults or problem-plagued families,” Walters observes, such “family-building” exercises “may be as much as government can reasonably expect.”

The Other New York Success Story

Paul E. O’Connell and Frank Straub, “Why the Jails Didn’t Explode,” in City Journal (Spring 1999), Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, New York 10017.

New York City’s success in slashing its crime rate is well known. A lesser-known but equally important reform has occurred in the city’s jails, observe criminologists O’Connell of Iona College and Straub of John Jay College.

Prior to 1994, New York City’s 35 jails were violent and anarchic. The inmates at Rikers Island, the city’s largest jail, used smuggled razors or knives to commit 176 stabbings or slashings in just two months in 1994. Gang members were allowed to wear beads or “do-rags” (bandannas) to signify who belonged to the Bloods, the Nietas, or the Latin Kings. Except for murders, crime in the jail was not punished; so inmates taunted and maimed guards with impunity.

Mayor Giuliani responded by appointing criminologist Michael Jacobson as jail commissioner in 1995. Along with his deputy, Bernard Kerik (who succeeded Jacobson in 1997), Jacobson began by ensuring that wardens had to know how many inmates were in their prisons and who the chief troublemakers were. Those who didn’t were docked pay until they started doing their jobs.

Jacobson and Kerik then implemented a computer system known as TEAMS, which tracked 90 “performance indicators,” including how many times guards used Mace and how many books were checked out of prison libraries. This constant flow of information enabled officials to determine problems and solve them. In one case, TEAMS data found a rising number of slashings at Rikers due to stolen scalpels. Inventory controls ensured no more scalpels fell into inmates’ hands.

The commissioners also cracked down on inmates’ committing crime in jail: Arrests for in-jail crimes have risen from six per month to over 100, and convicts now know that burning a mattress or assaulting a guard can result in their sentences being extended. In addition, all inmates caught with weapons must wear a red ID card at all times, ensuring extra searches from guards.

As a result of these changes, inmate violence fell by 90 percent in four years, even as the number of inmates rose by 20 percent. And New York City’s jails, notes assistant deputy warden Emmanuel Bailey, are no longer places “where you come to be a better criminal. These days, you might come back a better citizen.”

Savage, But Not Noble

Robert Whelan, Wild in Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-savage. Institute of Economic Affairs Environment Unit, 2 Lord North Street, London SW1P 3LB, England.

In his essay “On the Cannibals” (1580), Montaigne was the first Westerner to describe a primitive land where noble savages lived in harmony with nature. A tribe of Brazilian Indians, Montaigne claimed, had “no occupation but leisure.... Among them you hear no words for treachery, lying, cheating, avarice, envy, backbiting, or forgiveness.”

Ever since Montaigne’s day, Westerners have tried to discover a happy land where primitive peoples live lightly on the earth and so can offer moral and spiritual lessons to the decadent capitalist West. But no such tribes exist or have ever existed, argues Whalen of the Institute of Economic Affairs. And Westerners who travel to the tropics or the poles seeking spiritual salvation have usually made matters worse.

Whalen offers several examples of American Indians ravaging the earth. Western films, for instance, claim Indians used smoke signals to communicate with other tribes. But when Lewis and Clark first met Indians in the Rocky Mountains, they were appalled by the Indians’ setting trees ablaze “as after-dinner entertainment; the huge trees would explode like Roman candles in the night.” Indians were also fantastically wasteful. Crow Indian women delighted in dresses made from 700 elk teeth—extracted, two per animal, from hundreds of elk.

In more recent years, Westerners have discovered that primitive peoples caused ecological damage. Anthropologist Allyn MacLean Shearman reports that the Yuqui Indians of Bolivia routinely used slaves to climb trees to bring their masters fruit. From Western influence, the Yuqui decided that slavery was wrong—so they decided to cut down the fruit trees instead, since “only slaves climb trees.” The result: “Some species of fruit tree have become almost extinct around Yuqui settlements.”

Such barbaric practices are not usually improved by Western do-gooders. In the late 1980s, the rock star Sting assisted the Kayapo Indians of Brazil in their efforts to block construction of a World Bank-funded dam. Thanks to Sting’s help, the dam was stopped, and the Kayapo acquired their own 25,000-square mile reservation in the Brazilian rain forest, which they promptly logged “on a massive scale.” By 1993, Sting was so disgusted he told an Australian newspaper that Indians “are always trying to deceive you. They see the white man only as a good source of earning money, and then as a friend.”

In Canada, efforts by Greenpeace in the early 1980s stopped the Canadian Inuit seal harvest. But the Inuit were not grateful for the help of Western ecologists; they protested that their means of making a living had been taken away. The result of the seal hunt ban, according to a 1989 investigation by the Sunday Times of London, was “an epidemic of alcohol-related crimes, stabbings, domestic violence, and rape.”

Third World tribes, Whalen concludes, are no better—and often worse—than Americans or Europeans. “It would be helpful if we could drop the stereotype of the ‘noble savage,’ which must be amongst the oldest and most misleading in literature and anthropology, and just deal with the world and its peoples as they really are.”

No Race to the Bottom

Indur M. Goklany, “The Environmental Transition to Air Quality,” in Regulation (Fall 1998), Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001.

The Clean Air Amendments of 1970 made air pollution the federal responsibility of the newly created Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), after environmentalists successfully argued that if air pollution control were left to the states, they would engage in a “race to the bottom” to see which state could be the most business-friendly––by allowing the most pollution. Goklany, an Interior Department scientist, finds that the evidence belies environmentalists’ claims: The states were making steady progress in cleaning the air before the federal government stepped in.

Prior to 1970, the worst cases of air pollution were primarily due to three pollutants: particulate matter (smoke), carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. All three pollutants were in decline in the U.S. before the EPA was established. Particulate matter was the first to fall, in the late 1950s, as American homes shifted from wood and coal for heat to cleaner oil, electricity, and natural gas. In the 1960s, states began to increase environmental oversight; the number of state environmental protection offices increased from eight in 1960 to 50 by 1970. Emissions of carbon dioxide peaked in 1965 and sulfur dioxide by 1970. In addition, California regulators ensured that ozone levels in Los Angeles peaked in 1967.

Thus the only national air pollution success stories to take place after the EPA’s creation were national ozone reductions from 1975 onwards and control of nitrogen oxide production, which peaked in 1976 (Goklany notes that nitrogen oxide is the most expensive of the major pollutants to control, in part because some of the technology used to reduce carbon dioxide inadvertently increased nitrogen oxide production).

All the evidence shows states have long been engaged in a “race to the top” to see which will be the cleanest. Given this track record, Goklany suggests the best way to fight air pollution is for Washington to set national pollution-fighting goals and then devolve to the states the power to see how these goals are met.

Russia: Sick and Drunk

Nicholas Eberstadt, “Russia: Too Sick to Matter?” in Policy Review (June/July 1999), Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Avenue N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002.

A decade ago, the Soviet Union was a totalitarian superpower battling the United States for mastery of the world. Today, Russia is an enfeebled democracy barely able to send troops to Kosovo. There are many reasons for Russia’s decline, but Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute finds a previously unknown culprit: the vodka bottle.

Russians tell their statistical agencies they consume, on average, about five bottles a week, or over 250 bottles a year. And since these are self-reported statistics, it’s likely Russians drink even more. Vodka consumption ensures Russia leads the world in two categories of mortality: cardiovascular disease, and accidents and other “external” causes. Russian mortality rates for cardiovascular disease alone are equal to U.S. death rates in all categories combined. In addition, 35,000 Russians die each year of accidental alcohol poisoning. The comparable number for America–with twice Russia’s population–is 300.

As for deaths from accidents, more Russians are able to buy cars–and misuse them––and Russian mobsters also help boost their nation’s death rates. But massive vodka consumption is the primary reason so many Russians die from falls, murders, crashes, and suicides. A Russian child born in 1995 had a 1-in-4 chance of dying from an external cause; a comparable British child had a 1-in-30 chance.

About 1.8 million more Russians died in 1992-95 than would have died had mortality rates simply remained at the wretched level of Soviet Communism in 1987, rather than deteriorating further. These “extra” deaths are comparable to the number of Russians killed in the First World War. Russia’s rising mortality rate is comparable to what Germany and Japan experienced during the last two years of World War II.

Russia currently has the world’s thirteenth largest economy, roughly equal to Singapore’s. Eberstadt predicts that if Russian death rates continue to worsen, by 2015 Russia’s economy will be the world’s twentieth largest, equal to Argentina or Holland. A nation with such a relatively small economy could certainly be “a nuisance, a headache, or (if left unchecked) a predatory menace,” but the sick man of Europe and Asia will no longer be a great power. Illnesses and vodka ensure “Russia is going to be in bed for a long, long time.”

Good Money in Bad Countries

David Dollar and Lant Pritchett, Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why. World Bank/Oxford University Press, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

Much of the tens of billions spent in foreign aid over the past 50 years has been squandered. Donors have spent $2 billion building roads in Tanzania, but lack of maintenance has let them fall into ruin faster than they’ve been built. Nor have the billions spent assisting such notoriously corrupt countries as Burma, Congo, and Nigeria done anything to fight poverty or make these nations more democratic.

Why has such aid been wasted? World Bank development economists Dollar and Pritchett argue that countries with bad governments can’t be improved with foreign aid. “Efforts to ‘buy’ policy improvements in countries where there has been no movement for reform,” they write, “have typically failed.”

Three decades ago, when foreign aid was at its most popular, development economists made two faulty assumptions: They believed countries were poor simply because they lacked capital to finance economic growth (the “savings gap”) and that this capital was primarily needed to buy imported machinery (the “foreign exchange gap”). Thus economists urged foreign donors to help create heavy industry in poor countries.

If this “two-gap” theory were valid, Dollar and Pritchett calculate, foreign aid would have ensured that Zambia’s annual per capita income was now $20,000. Despite Western generosity, however, Zambia’s per capita income is only $800.

But low-income countries that have taken the necessary first steps—free trade, private property, an honest civil service—have done much better. Here donors can help make good countries better. On average, well-run Third World countries that received lots of aid (Mali, El Salvador, Honduras, Ghana, Bolivia) had an average annual economic growth rate of 3.7 percent. Well-run low-income countries that didn’t receive aid saw an average annual economic growth rate of only 2.2 percent. (Every 1 percent increase in economic growth, Dollar and Pritchett calculate, reduces poverty by 2 percent.)

Donors’ advice is as important as their checks. Nearly all developing countries have a national railway system that’s old, badly maintained, and overstaffed by underworked bureaucrats. Argentina used technical assistance from overseas donors to break up its national railways and contract out some routes to private firms. The result: Argentina’s railways became four times more productive and the government saved $600 million. Foreign advisers used Argentina’s example as a case study to help Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and some African nations improve their railways.

Foreign donors achieve more with their aid when they assist nonprofit groups instead of governments. Foreign funds have helped El Salvador dramatically improve its school system by devolving power and budgets to parent-controlled community associations called EDUCOs that can hire and fire teachers and equip and maintain schools. EDUCO schools have done so well that El Salvador’s education ministry plans to make all schools community-controlled.

By being selective, Dollar and Pritchett conclude, donors can do more good than simply handing corrupt governments more aid.