Summaries of Important Research
Edited By Iain Murray
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Hungry for the Truth
Melissa Pardue, Robert Rector, and Kirk Johnston, "Mayors' Claims of Growing Hunger Are Once Again Exaggerated," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, December 16, 2004 (www.heritage.org)
On December 14, the United States Conference of Mayors released the latest in a series of annual reports, issued since 1986, on hunger and homelessness in America. The mayors measure hunger by the number of people using food banks or soup kitchens. The Heritage Foundation critique of the report points out that the mayors' claims of dramatic increases do not give the number of people using the resources, but instead simply assert in-creased use. Melissa Pardue, Robert Rector, and Kirk Johnston believe this is inaccurate and exaggerated for three reasons.
First, the mayors' statements reflect an implausible rate of growth. An average annual increase of 16 percent since 1986, as the mayors claim, indicates that the number of those receiving emergency food aid doubles every four years or so. That would mean 15 times as many people receiving food aid in 2004 as in 1986. Not plausible.
Second, the numbers are contradicted by U.S. Census Bureau data, which show only a small increase in the use of food banks and soup kitchens between 1995 and 2003. The mayors claim that usage has increased by 150 percent in the same time.
The mayors' numbers are also contradicted by reports from Second Harvest, the largest supplier to food banks in the nation. Second Harvest reports an increase in charitable food use of only 9 percent during a period when the mayors suggest an increase of 100 percent (1997 to 2001).
In addition, the authors point to the USDA's surveys of household food security. These find that food shortages affecting children declined from a total of 917,000 in 1997 to 420,000 in 2003. Even these surveys, however, probably overestimate hunger, as most episodes are fleeting and reflect only instances of families not being able to buy all the food they want.
Helping Attentive Moms
Neil Gilbert, "What Do Women Really Want?" The Public Interest, Winter 2005 (thepublicinterest.com)
University of California at Berkeley professor Neil Gilbert takes a look at the recent spate of articles indicating that growing numbers of women are "opting out of the rat race" to look after their children. He suggests the data show this to be a real but small phenomenon. The more dramatic trend is working women deferring or opting out of having children.
Gilbert segments women of childbearing age into four different groups. At one end is the "traditionalist," who has three or more children and holds little or no paid employment. At the other end is the "postmodernist," who has no children and devotes herself entirely to her career. In the middle are the "neo-traditionalists," who average two children and place home and family above work, and the "modernists," who typically have a single child and devote considerable time and energy to their career.
These four groups respectively make up 29 percent, 18 percent, 35 percent, and 17 percent of American females age 40 or more. The last three groups have grown considerably at the expense of the first, which represented 59 percent of women as recently as 1976. The modernist group alone has grown 90 percent since that time.
Gilbert reviews the effect of government "family supports" on these four broad choices. In Europe, where such policies are generally stronger than in the U.S., women have opted for smaller families nonetheless. In Sweden, for example, the tax burden required to pay for state child-care subsidies of $12,000 per child is so great that mothers are forced to work, as the average family cannot get by on the salary of one earner.
These policies are actually not so much "family friendly" as "employment friendly," as they tend to increase the labor force while decreasing family size and restricting options for women. Genuine family friendly policies would reflect all of a woman's choices. Norway and Finland, for example, have adopted a policy of direct payments to stay-at-home moms.
Direct benefits are not the only kinds of family friendly policies. Gilbert also suggests awarding educational tuition or technical training to women for each year spent at home with young children --analogous to veterans' benefits. "In shaping the moral and physical stock of future citizens, the homemaker's contribution to national well-being is obviously quite different from, but no less important than, that of veterans," Gilbert argues.
"By recognizing this contribution, the family social-credit scheme would elevate the sagging status of domestic activities and childrearing functions, as well as reinforce the thinning fabric of informal social support networks."
POLITICS
Healthy Religion
James Q. Wilson, "America Passes the Religious Test," AEI on the Issues, December 2004 (aei.org)
In this brief essay, James Q. Wilson, chairman of AEI's Council of Academic Advisers, refutes those, especially in Europe, who have suggested that the prominence of a "moral values" vote in America's last Presidential election indicates that the U.S. is turning into a religious tyranny.
Wilson points out that moral issues were only one factor in the election, and that "there is not a shred of evidence that the winning candidate waged a moral crusade." As he says, "Both candidates made it plain that, though religion was important to them...neither wanted to impose his beliefs on others."
Religion has played a powerful and positive role in American history. The struggle against slavery, for instance, was first and foremost a moral crusade. The post-Civil War Reconstruction that followed "was deeply molded by a moral commitment to individual freedom." More recently, the civil rights movement was "an effort to redefine the relationship between the races that was inspired by evangelical teachings about the dignity of the individual before God." The current pro-life movement, Wilson notes, has similar religious roots.
The key to faith's constructive role in America, Wilson says, is the Constitution's disdain for state religion. America has religious freedom precisely because it has countless sects, rather than one overarching, tyrannical faith, he concludes.
While modernization has led to secularization in Europe, it has not done so in the United States. And Africa and Latin America follow us in managing to combine modernization with enduring faith.
ECONOMICS AND REGULATION
Guns Don't Kill People...
National Research Council, Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review, National Academies Press, 2004 (books.nap.edu)
A panel assembled by the National Research Council (which many assumed would be predisposed to find a connection between gun ownership and violence) has been unable to find evidence to support such a contention. Nor can it find data that gun control policies reduce violence.
As University of Maryland professor Charles Wellford, the panel chairman, told the press, "There is no credible evidence that the more than 80 gun-violence prevention programs reviewed by the committee had any effect on children's or teen's attitudes, knowledge, or behavior regarding firearms."
While the panel found there was an association between gun availability and gun suicide, the research did not show a cause-and-effect relationship between the two.
The panel concluded that even if the data had showed a causal connection between firearms and lethal violence, violence reduction programs would be difficult to develop because many factors other than gun use influence violence levels. "The intent of the people involved, the nature of their interactions and relationships, their access to firearms, and the level of law enforcement are critical in explaining when and why firearm violence occurs,"
said Wellford.
On the question of how "right-to-carry" handgun laws affect crime rates, the panel reported it "found no credible evidence that such policies either decrease or increase violent crime." A dissenting addendum from James Q. Wilson on this subject concludes that right-to-carry laws "impose no costs but may confer benefits." He points out that the panel's criticisms of the work of AEI scholar John Lott, who first provided data that suggest right-to-carry laws reduce crime and especially murder, are overblown.
The panel in fact confirmed Lott's findings in relation to murder, and admitted that the work of Lott's critics had not been subject to the same close analysis as his own.
Wilson suggests that the allegation that Lott's work produces weaker results when the data are updated to recent years demonstrates that the effect of right-to-carry laws is greater when crime rates are rising than when they are falling.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Rethinking Military Bases
Thomas Donnelly, "Rebasing, Revisited," AEI National Security Outlook, December 2004 (aei.org)
Location, location, location, is the mantra AEI's Thomas Donnelly urges the Pentagon to adopt when it looks at how its forces should be deployed in the future. Since the time of Andrew Jackson, the U.S. has been following the same strategy in expanding military bases. "When one war ends," Donnelly writes, "the United States fortifies the furthest reaches of the final front lines and, when the next war begins, it builds new facilities to support still farther-flung operations." The challenge today is to think more clearly about the relative value of new and old facilities.
The Middle East, the front line in the war on terror, requires a "network or web of mutually supporting facilities that will serve three purposes: express the American long-term commitment to political change in the region, enable the deployment of forces to points of crisis, and sustain an expanding set of partnerships and alliances with friendly--and better yet, free--governments." Middle Eastern bases will effectively replace German bases.
Interestingly, Donnelly thinks the Far East and Indian Ocean represent a greater challenge than the Middle East. The voluntary surrender of our Filipino bases in the early 1990s meant that when China threatened Taiwan in 1995 and '96, it learned that "in a crisis, it would be two weeks before U.S. forces could influence the situation." On top of this, we must cope with continued Japanese and especially Korean resentment at the presence of U.S. troops. The problem has been somewhat offset by better relations with China, now a "partner in good standing in the war on terror." But Donnelly concludes, "Taiwan is...nonetheless the national fulcrum around which U.S. forces in the Pacific should be positioned."
Bases on American soil also present sticky dilemmas. The Clinton administration derailed the base-closure process, which had finally gotten around Congressional turf wars, so local logrolling is often more influential than practical factors in determining where fighting units are located. Moreover, America's new forward bases in the Middle East will not accommodate the families of troops as our previous Western European bases did, so military families will more often stay in America while their loved ones in the service are put in rotations abroad. "The pattern of Army and Air Force troop rotations is now more like traditional Navy and Marine Corps duty," Donnelly notes.
Finally, there are significant costs associated with military expansion. If the Army increases its strength by 30,000 soldiers per year, that will mean $2.5 billion annually in extra infrastructure costs. With all of these challenges, getting the right pieces in place to support our global military will be a long-term effort.
Science and Environment
Baptists and Bootleggers
Urs Brandt and Gert Svendsen, "Fighting Windmills: The Coalition of Industrialists and Environmentalists in the Climate Change Issue," International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, Volume 4, 2004 (environmental-expert.com)
In 1983, Clemson University economist Bruce Yandle pointed out that Prohibition was supported by an odd alliance of "Baptists," who wanted alcohol banned on moral grounds, and "Bootleggers," who knew they would make a killing under the ban. Such unlikely coalitions have been seen in many other areas of government regulation. It is common today, for instance, to see alliances between "Baptist" environmentalist groups and "Bootlegging" industrialists. Economists Urs Brandt and Gert Svendsen report that this alliance is prominent in the promotion of wind-based energy, both in the U.S. and the E.U.
In America, the researchers rue that federal environmental regulations preferred by Greens and status-quo corporations working together often require "command-and-control enforcement of technology or specification standards, rather than calling for performance standards or using emissions taxes or other economic incentives to reduce environmental harm." This method can improve the environment, but in the process may damage economic growth unduly, and freeze out business competitors and technological innovations.
In Europe, the coalition of environmentalists and big industrialists prevented the E.U. from dropping out of the Kyoto Protocol even when its deficiencies became clear. Lobbying by environmental purists and companies selling equipment likely to come into high demand overcame prudence.
Exposing who benefits from proposed environmental policies is a precondition for good decision-making, Brandt and Svendsen maintain. And they warn that this will often not be easy. "Fighting the potentially strong coalition of industrialists and environmentalists to achieve improvements in environmental policy might be just as hard as fighting windmills."
