Summaries of Important Research
Edited By Iain Murray
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Schooled in Statistics
Melana Zyla Vickers, "An Empty Room of One's Own: A Critical Look at the Women's Studies Programs of North Carolina's Publicly Funded Universities," Pope Center for Higher Education Policy Inquiry, March 30, 2005 (popecenter.org)
Evidence of the damage done to the academy by political correctness continues to mount. In the latest case--a study for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy--veteran journalist Melana Zyla Vickers notes the flagging interest in "women's studies" programs at five universities in North Carolina, and gathers evidence that this decline might be due to rampant partisanship and poor scholarship.
Of the five universities studied (East Carolina University, North Carolina State University, UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Charlotte, and UNC-Greensboro), all showed a significant decline in--or a complete lack of--interest in their women's studies programs. In fact, none of the five schools have graduated more than 12 students with a degree in women's studies in a given year--and this at universities with populations ranging from 11,000 to 23,000 students.
Partisanship and lack of scholastic rigor may be part of the problem. According to Vickers, "The material taught in the women's studies programs is better described as polemical, doctri- naire, and highly selective rather than meritorious and rigorous." Professors tend to concentrate only on books and materials that enforce the "women as victims" approach and place blame on male society for these abuses. Finally, most of the assigned literature (if any literature is actually used in a course) uncritically endorses Marxist thought.
In addition, the women's studies programs at these universities are mostly, and in some cases entirely, government funded. Two out of five of the programs in the study were 100 percent taxpayer funded (UNC-Charlotte and North Carolina State University). Thus, Vickers concludes, the universities and taxpayers may want to consider some departmental revisions.
--Chelsea Stein
POLITICS
Grading the Governors
Stephen Moore and Stephen Slivinski, "Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors," Cato Institute Policy Analysis, March 1, 2005 (cato.org)
Every two years, the Cato Institute measures the fiscal performance of the nation's governors, based on 15 objective measures. Governors who cut taxes and spending generally end up receiving good grades, while those who raise both receive bad grades. The exercise confirms the theory that "states that keep taxes low and restrain spending growth have the best economic performance and thus the best long-term fiscal health."
Cato Institute fellows Stephen Moore and Stephen Slivinski award only four governors an A grade this year: Craig Benson of New Hampshire, Bill Owens of Colorado, Judy Martz of Montana, and Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. Four governors receive F grades: Bob Holden of Missouri, Bob Taft of Ohio, Edward Rendell of Pennsylvania, and James McGreevey, who recently resigned as governor of New Jersey.
On Governor Schwarzenegger's spending restraint, Moore and Slivinski comment that he "started his term in office with some much-needed budget cutting: a net of around $2.5 billion from Gray Davis's baseline spending level..." Moore and Slivinski especially praise Schwarzenegger for resisting the temptation to use tax hikes to balance the budget. In fact, "Schwarzenegger repealed the unpopular car tax hike put into place during the waning days of the disastrous Gray Davis administration, thereby providing a tax cut of more than $2 billion in 2004."
Among other governors of big states, Jeb Bush of Florida, George Pataki of New York, and Rick Perry of Texas received a B grade; Jennifer Granholm of Michigan squeaked by with a D.
ECONOMICS AND REGULATION
Mercury Madness
Ted Gayer and Robert Hahn, "Thinking Through Mercury Regulation: Some Lessons for the Design of Environmental Policy," AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, March 2005 (aei-brookings.org)
The Environmental Protection Agency has come under fire from the Government Accountability Office for not including an assessment of the benefits to human health from the reduction in consumption of methyl mercury in fish following the adoption of its proposed rule on mercury emissions. Economists Ted Gayer and Robert Hahn sought to quantify those benefits and draw lessons for environmental policy from the exercise.
Gayer and Hahn found that the health benefits don't justify the EPA's proposed restrictions. Methyl mercury is said to affect the neurological development of children born to women who eat too much fish while pregnant, so Gayer and Hahn examined the scientific literature to assess the effect of lower mercury levels on children's IQs. They found that the rule would translate into an average increase of 0.012 IQ points in children. Using willingness-to-pay estimates, the researchers find a maximum benefit to the economy of $150 million against costs of $3-5 billion. Another proposal favored by Greens would achieve slightly lower benefits at a cost of $15-21 billion.
This massive lopsidedness in the cost-benefit ratio leads Gayer and Hahn to draw several lessons for environmental policy design. "When the benefits from a policy intervention are likely to be 'small,' the probability of making things worse should be carefully considered prior to intervention." For example, the well-established health benefits of eating fish could be reduced if people avoided fish as a result of the regulations. Gayer and Hahn conclude, "As a society, we are in real danger of focusing on de minimis risks if they become salient political issues."
Regulating the Regulators
Marlo Lewis, Jr., "Reviving Regulatory Reform: Options for the President and Congress," CEI Issue Analysis, March 2005 (cei.org)
The story of regulatory reform has been one of much talk and little action, as CEI scholar Marlo Lewis describes in this in-depth look. He begins by examining the role regulation played in sabotaging the economic boom of the 1990s before addressing head-on the argument that regulatory reform is a pipe dream.
Lewis identiŞes two main types of reform--policing reforms and checks and balances reforms, defining them as follows: "Policing reforms aim via rules of rulemaking and centralized review to regulate the regulators. Checks and balances reforms seek to increase Congress's responsibility for regulatory decisions, create inter-agency competition, or foster competition between agency experts and outside experts." He concludes that both types will be needed.
Three recommendations emerge from Lewis' treatment. First, he would end the exclusive right of agencies to evaluate the costs and benefits of their own regulations; instead, their analyses would compete with independent analyses under the Office of Management and Budget. Second, Congressional approval would be required before rules could go into effect (he would restrict this initially to cases involving economic effects of $100 million or more, of which he finds only about 22 each year). Finally, he would have government investigate the feasibility of capping the costs regulators are allowed to impose annually. The potential beneŞts of such regulatory budgets, Lewis suggests, include limiting government and increasing the effectiveness of rules in advancing public welfare.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Battle in the Skies
Thomas Donnelly, "Strategy and Air Power," AEI National Security Outlook, March 2005 (aei.org)
As recently as September 10, 2001, air power was assumed to be the future for the American military. Commentators and military analysts alike pointed to the success of air power in the Gulf War and Kosovo in "paralyzing the modern state by taking out its central nervous system." As AEI scholar Thomas Donnelly points out, "It was the perfect 'end-of-history' military theory to accompany the broader 'end-of-history' ethos that captured the minds of foreign policy intellectuals in the wake of the Soviet collapse."
The war on terror, however, has severely challenged that perception. Al-Qaeda and its allies, for instance, often lack a "central nervous system" to paralyze. The war on terror "cannot help but prioritize American land forces," leading to "a relative diminution of influence for the other services." This change in priorities is reflected in the proposed defense budget for 2006, which aims cuts specifically at the Air Force's next generation F-A/22 fighter aircraft.
While the "shock and awe" element of the Iraq war was far from decisive, says Donnelly, "vastly improved coordination between precise airstrikes...and ground maneuver" has succeded. These "air cavalry" missions, however, rely on fleets of F-15s and F-16s that "are being ridden into premature old age."
The "other air force," as Donnelly terms our support fleet of tanker and cargo aircraft, is also facing problems. These craft are extremely important in the war on terror, yet "the service finds itself today with an insufficient fleet of C-17 airlifters." The C-17 program was the victim of early 1990s cost-cutting, leaving the Air Force relying primarily on 50-year-old C-130s, which are showing their age. Just as antique are the KC-135 tanker aircraft; an attempt to substitute them with modern planes under a leasing arrangement has fallen afoul of ethics requirements, leaving their replacement in limbo.
SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT
More Bureaucrats Needed?
Adam Keiper, "Science and Congress," The New Atlantis, Winter 2005 (thenewatlantis.com)
Adam Keiper, managing editor of the new conservative magazine of science and culture, The New Atlantis, looks at the history of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment from its creation in 1972 to its abolition in 1995 and asks whether a similar institute needs to be re-established. The office existed to "provide the legislative branch with adequate and timely information, independently developed, relating to the potential impact of technological applications."
The Office of Technology Assessment had a difficult existence, primarily because it was dominated by Congressional liberals. In the end, despite a period in which the Office produced many useful and in-depth studies, the widespread perception of liberal bias caused its demise. Keiper traces the beginning of demands for its abolition to the highly critical 1984 report on the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative. In 1995, Congress cut funding for the Office of Technology Assessment to zero, effectively killing it. According to Keiper, this created an "advice deficit" in Congress, with Congressmen largely getting their scientific advice from friendly or private sources.
While Keiper faithfully presents the original conservative case against the Office, he also presents a conservative case for reinstating it. A new Office of Technology Assessment would cost little and have the potential to save billions of dollars from going to wasteful projects. Keiper also argues that Congress does in fact need its own, independent source of scientific advice. "The scientific and technological enterprise is astonishingly ungoverned and unaccountable in America, and it sometimes functions with total disregard of the public interest," writes Keiper. "Restoring OTA might be a small first step toward a remedy, so long as it remains a center for independent analysis of scientific issues, not an effort to reduce all policy questions to questions that scientific expertise alone can settle."
OTHER COUNTRIES
End of the Affair?
Kieron O'Hara, After Blair: Conservatism Beyond Thatcher, Icon Books, 2005
The trials and tribulations of Britain's Conservative Party have prompted British professor Kieron O'Hara to reassess what conservatism means in Britain and offer recommendations as to where it should go in the future.
Tracing the history of conservative thought back to the ancient Greeks and the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, O'Hara examines how Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Browne helped create a recognizable form of conservatism. He then looks at how Burke, Hume, Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, and Balfour turned this line of thought into a political party, prior to an event which O'Hara clearly regards as tragic: "the invasion of the liberals," when Liberal Unionists left Gladstone's Liberal Party and joined with the Conservatives to create the Conservative and Unionist Party.
O'Hara detects two central principles and one important strategy in his examination of the principles of conservatism. The "change principle" holds that "the benefits that society brings are often not noticed by their recipients (until they have gone), and are very fragile. Change will therefore entail a risk, and the conservative point is that that risk should be weighed very carefully." The "knowledge principle," derived from Hayek but traced back to Pyrrhonism, states that "the knowledge that is relevant to the planning of a society or an economy will be distributed across that society, and furthermore at least some of it will be encoded in practices, texts or rituals so that no individual can be said to possess that knowledge him- or herself."
O'Hara suggests that when conservatives do adopt change, it is as part of a "vaccination strategy." In this strategy, "the conservative takes over the process of change, providing enough of the radicals' program to satisfy some of its voters; thereby inoculating the future against radicalism by a small injection of the virus now."
In assessing what these principles of conservatism mean today, O'Hara steps into controversial waters by suggesting that socialist institutions like the National Health Service have become so much part and parcel of society that abolishing or gutting them would violate the change principle. He is equally dismissive of free-market economics as being occasionally at odds with the change principle.
O'Hara credits many of the Tory party's recent failures to uncritical acceptance of American conservative ideas. "Conservatives from different societies will say different things.... An American conservative maintains that a written constitution is the guarantor of liberty; a British conservative claims that it would be the first step on the road to tyranny. They cannot agree, because each conservative values the benefits visible in his or her own society."
O'Hara's conclusion? "It is a very unconservative line to take to transplant political ideas, with not too much amendment, from the very different world of the USA and expect them to flourish and grow."
