Society

A Himalayan McDonald's?
Tyler Cowen, "The Fate of Culture," in Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2002 (wilsonquarterly.com)

A George Mason University economist believes that the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan would be better off if it had a McDonald's. In an article adapted from his upcoming book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures, commercial culture guru Tyler Cowen argues that globalization has many positive effects on traditional cultures. By providing new options and opportunities to individuals, globalization actually increases cultural diversity. As a result of globalized culture, the rural shepherd, for example, can become a global singing sensation without actually leaving home.

Cultures, Cowen observes, have never existed in total isolation. The synthesis of outside influences--the joining of the familiar and the foreign--has always created hybrids. The definition of cultural diversity, he argues, should not only cover the differences between cultures at the same point in time but also the changes within the a culture over time. Critics of globalization "decry the passing of cultures and implicitly hope to freeze them at particular times--as if to say that Bali reached a state of perfection in, say 1968, and should never change." Westerners who oppose globalization of cultures, in effect, want to treat other peoples as if they are residents of a "cultural theme park." While it's sad when a traditional culture fades away, it isn't fair to the residents of poor countries to insist that their cultures remain static. Through strict isolationist policies, nations like Bhutan have maintained traditional art and religion. But they have also maintained traditional problems such as poverty and malnutrition. Both they and world culture, Cowen believes, would be better off if globalization were allowed to affect their cultures.

--Elizabeth Twitchell

Let Colleges Pick Accreditors
George Leef and Roxana Burris, "Can College Accreditation Live Up to its Promise?" American Council of Trustees and Alumni, October 2002 (goacta.org)

Since the federal government began playing a major role in higher education following the end of the Second World War, nearly all American colleges and universities have been subject to regular inspections by regional accrediting organizations. While the process technically remains voluntary, students at unaccredited schools can not receive federal financial aid. A new report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) questions the value of accreditation and recommends major changes in the process. ACTA researchers George Leef and Roxana Burris complain that the existing accreditation process tends to measure input such as the number of books in an institution's library and its management practices rather than outputs such as student learning and research productivity.

Current accreditation standards, the two find, are almost entirely divorced from real educational quality and often tend to impose trendy (almost always leftist) ideas on institutions of higher education.

The two authors make three major recommendations for fixing the accreditation process:

Make it optional: The process, as it currently exists, does little good for higher education. Accreditation should not be mandatory for schools seeking to remain eligible for federal financial aid.

Involve Trustees: Trustees should not leave the accrediting process entirely to an institution's administration but, instead, should actively involve themselves in the process, including making a deliberative decision on whether to seek accreditation in the first place.

Create Competition: Currently, eight regional accreditors enjoy de facto monopolies over their respective regions of the country. By letting different organizations bid to accredit institutions, the process would become more businesslike and helpful to the institutions under review.

If these changes are made, Leef and Burris conclude, "accreditation would thus be put to the test of the market and, if it survives, it would only do so by providing colleges and universities with valuable services that are worth what they cost."

Politics

Too Much Devolution
Michael Greve, "States' Rights on Steroids," in AEI Federalist Outlook, September/October 2002 (aei.org)

Following a successful crusade to regulate the tobacco industry through a series of lawsuits, state attorneys general have turned their attention to pharmaceutical manufacturers and their fat bank accounts. AEI fellow Michael Greve believes that this new trial-lawyer-led attack could result in a heavily regulated quasi-public drug industry that does little more than produce "phony remedies for politically favored maladies and body parts." The attorneys general seek both to extract money from the companies for "unfair" marketing practices and to regulate them through litigation.

Although pharmaceutical companies, unlike tobacco manufacturers, make products which almost everyone agrees are beneficial, they prove a tempting target because there are few of them and they produce products that are very easy to transport across state lines. Manufacturers of easy-to-transport goods make more attractive targets because their distribution networks make it almost impossible for manufacturers to pass the costs from one state's litigation onto the citizens of that state alone. Consolidated industries, likewise, are much easier to sue: Suing every fast food establishment in the country would be impossible, but suing every drug company is reasonably simple. As a result, once the industry reaches a regulatory settlement with just a few states, it needs to pass the costs onto consumers all around the country. In effect, a few states can create regulations for the entire nation.

The higher costs then encourage other states to sign onto the settlement to get its benefits since they are paying the costs anyway. Greve finds this state of affairs troubling for several reasons. First, it creates complex regulatory regimes without any input from elected legislators. Second, trial lawyers--through careful selection of locations and judges--can easily bring cases in areas where they will get a sympathetic hearing. No company, on the other hand, can manage to influence the judges or attorneys general in every state in the union. Finally, companies--even within the same industry--have a very difficult time presenting a united front against parasitic trial lawyers.

As a result of this confluence of forces, Greve finds that the litigation industry puts "states rights on steroids" by allowing a few aggressive attorneys general to create a regulatory regime for the entire country. He calls on the federal courts to reassert the federal government's right to engage in national regulation.

Science and Environment

Red, Red Leaves
David Lee and Kevin Gould, "Why Leaves Turn Red," in American Scientist, November/December 2002 (americanscientist.org)

Each fall, leaves turn bright red on many trees. Despite years of research, scientists still don't know exactly why. Florida International University professor David Lee and University of Aukland (New Zealand) researcher Kevin Gould, however, believe that a red pigment called anthocyanin bears much of the responsibility.

Anthocyanin protects leaves in two ways: first, as an antioxidant, it neutralizes free radicals that wreak havoc on the life processes within leaves if left unchecked. More important, anthocyanin shields chloroplasts--intracellular structures which change sunlight into food for plants through photosynthesis--from intense heat and sunlight. Lee and Gould performed an experiment that measured the effects of harsh light on green leaves and red leaves.

Overexposure to bright light hastened the breakdown of the photosynthetic process in the green leaves. On the other hand, recovery from the shock of light occurred more quickly, and photosynthesis continued, in the red leaves--whose photosynthetic tissues were shielded by a layer of anthocyanin--even at low fall temperatures.

Several questions remain about the ecological functions and origins of anthocyanin. Most important, Lee and Gould wonder why plants would evolve to create this protective pigment for leaves that are due to fall off anyway. Lee and Gould hypothesize that anthocyanin aids in the transfer of nitrogen from the dying leaf back into the woody part of the plant. This allows the plant to grow leaves again the following spring. 

--Rachel Jurado

Business and Economics

CEOs Get Insecure
Chuck Lucier et al., "Why CEOs Fall," in Strategy+Business, Third Quarter 2002 (strategy-business.com)

The job market, three Booz Allen & Hamilton consultants argue, is beginning to treat corporate chief executive officers a lot like professional athletes. Today's CEOs are "young people with short, well-compensated careers that continue only as long as they perform at exceptional levels. "Based on the first comprehensive study of CEO succession at the world's 2,500 largest companies, the three authors find that turnover at the top of the world's largest businesses accelerated significantly during the 1990s.As recently as 1995, nearly three quarters of CEOs either died in office or retired after long careers. By 2001, more than half were fired for poor performance. (The consultants used media reports rather than official company press releases to determine why CEOs left.)

The median tenure of a big-company CEO declined from nine and a half years in 1995 to just over seven in 2001. Some of the consultants' findings buck conventional wisdom. European and Asian boards of directors actually fired CEOs more often than their American counterparts. CEOs who were eventually ousted for poor performance, likewise, outperformed their peers in the first few years of their tenure.

The fundamental reason why CEOs get fired, however, was ultimately what most corporate observers have long known: CEOs (at least those in Europe and North America) lost their jobs when they failed to boost their company's stock price. The study's authors believe that CEOs have almost no choice in the matter." They must be remarkable," they write. "Otherwise, their professional lives are short."

Other Countries

Troubled Arabia
Richard Engel, "Yemen Feels the Backlash," in Jane's Defense Weekly, October 16, 2002 (jdw.janes.com)

The government of Yemen, a small, poor state on the Arabian peninsula that has backed the U.S. in the war on terror may face threats to its existence as result of its continuing crackdown on Islamic militants. Using last October's attack on the French oil-tanker Limburg as a jumping-off point, Jane's correspondent Richard Engel reports that dissent is growing among the populace in response to the United States' increasingly assertive role in the nation's affairs. The country has been of particular interest to the U.S. since al-Qaeda attacked the warship USS Cole in 2000. Since September 11, the United States has trained Yemeni troops to fight terror; as many as 30 U.S. special forces commandos now work inside the country. A senior Yemeni official also tells Engel that an American ship is stationed off the country's coast to monitor radio signals.

The Yemeni government has also cracked down on extremist Islamic religious schools and encouraged imams to tone down their messages. Many Yemenis, however, regard Osama bin Laden as a hero and, the mostly pro-American government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh managed to win a civil war against communists largely with the assistance of radical Islamic mujahedin sympathetic to bin Laden.

Yemen's many tribes--the real source of political power in the nation--have also maintained a long tradition of resistance to central authority. The U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Edward Hull, also gives Engel an on-the-record interview in which he pledges that America will support the ruling regime in Yemen so long as the nation's hard-line anti-terror policies continue.