TCS Daily : November 2007 Archives
Giuliani: Reversion to the Mean?
On Wednesday night Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani got booed during the CNN/You-Tube debate. The boos came during an acrimonious exchange on the immigration question with Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. Or, more correctly, the boos came aft
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Why Putin Does It? Because He Can
Vladimir Putin does not want to win the upcoming Duma Parliamentary elections. He does not want to win big. He wants an overwhelming victory. He wants to annihilate the opposition. And Putin probably will get what he wants. Furthermore,...
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Ban the Ban?
The Supreme Court recently announced it will hear the Washington, D.C. handgun ban case. Handgun bans exist in only half a dozen U.S. cities, because while gun control is sometimes popular, gun prohibition is not. In 1976, the District of...
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The Logic of Torture
During the past few years, in the wake of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, much has been written about torture, almost none of it, regrettably, philosophically edifying. May I help? Three Types of Question The most important thing to...
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What's Wrong With Home Ownership?
What's wrong with home ownership? Not much, if you ask me. But don't take my word for it: I am a new first-time homeowner. Others, however, would beg to differ. In December's Atlantic Monthly, Clive Crook takes a hatchet...
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Government and Health Care: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Suppose that instead of looking at health care policy as a means to push an ideology or score political points, we examine it from a pragmatic American vantage point. What works? What does not work? What backfires? Those are the...
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How Huck Can Win
Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is a former Baptist minister with a hick name, who has received the enthusiastic endorsement of such luminaries as pro wrestler Ric "Nature Boy" Flair and karate expert turned actor Chuck Norris. Huckabee is opposed...
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Mush Man: Pakistan and the Illusion of Force
During his eight-year rule, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has not been able to deliver the promise he made after staging his bloodless coup in 1999 -- order and stability. He has delivered a pro-Western regime and collaborated with American and...
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Why Geoengineering's Time Is Coming
Geoengineering solutions to global warming are receiving ever more attention, and for good reason. Science reported that top U.S. climate scientists gathered at Harvard recently to explore ways geoengineering might lower the global temperature. Mimicking the natura
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In Search of a Dollar Policy
Among the few constants in life seems to be the US Administration's tired and stale dollar policy. For over the past thirteen years, every time that the dollar has weakened unduly, the US Treasury Secretary has been rolled out...
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The World Is Round: How to Think About Foreign Investment in the US
The "world is flat" as an image for globalization is 180o askew. The essence of the contemporary world is its circularity, its roundness, as in "what goes around comes around." This recognition of rotundity provides the necessary context for...
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The World Is Round: How to Think About Foreign Investment in the US
The "world is flat" as an image for globalization is 180o askew. The essence of the contemporary world is its circularity, its roundness, as in "what goes around comes around." This recognition of rotundity provides the necessary context for...
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Paul Krugman, Your Doctor Is Calling
N. Gregory Mankiw fired the opening salvo on misinterpreted health care statistics when the New York Times published his op-ed entitled Beyond Those Health Care Numbers. Paul Krugman, also writing for the Times fired back with Health Care Excuses.&n;
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The World Is Round: Globalization and Foreing Investment
The "world is flat" as an image for globalization is 180o askew. The essence of the contemporary world is its circularity, its roundness, as in "what goes around comes around." This recognition of rotundity provides the necessary context for...
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Race, IQ and Education
It (g) permeates nearly all complex tasks, and this is allegedly why IQ scores are so highly correlated with all other complex cognitive tests, such as the SATs, Civil Service exams, Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Batteries, and the GREs. The...
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Why You Should Oppose 'Economic Development'
Economic development seems quite the fashionable occupation in many state and municipal circles these days, and why not? Who can argue with efforts by the government to bring in new business, to facilitate job creation, and bolster the tax...
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Fat and Happy: The Weight Story No One Wants to Talk About
It's been a tough time the last little while for the fatties among us -- which is supposedly most of us. According to the just released report from the American Institute for Cancer Research being fat and eating certain foods...
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The Frivolous iSuit
California resident Timothy Smith has sued Apple and AT&T over the iPhone, accusing them of illegal monopolistic behavior. The iPhone is locked to the AT&T cell network and Apple is accused of writing software rendering hacked iPhones inoperable. If we...
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Sick and deadly disease control programs
If an accident kills wildlife or people, punishment is meted out and restitution made. A host of regulators, lawyers, judges, activists, journalists and politicians help bring the wrongdoers to justice. But when it comes to policies and programs that sicken...
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Presidents, Politics, and Creating Wealth
Most people intuitively understand that wealth is created by private businesses competing for customers — not by the government. Could a presidential candidate win in 2008 by demonstrating a genuine commitment to competition and consumer choice? That candidate coul
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Lame Ducks, Lame Hawks?
It was not so many years ago that another "lame duck" president, facing a hostile Congress and a United Nations Security Council veto, launched an air war. In March of 1999, President Bill Clinton had 22 months remaining in his...
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Understanding Zoe's Arc
On Oct. 25, nine French citizens, seven Spaniards and a Belgian were arrested after the French charity Zoe's Arc tried to airlift 103 children out of eastern Chad, near the border with Sudan, claiming they were orphans from Darfur. The...
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Is Inequality a Useful Measure of Prosperity?
Debates about income inequality continue to come to the forefront. Dani Rodrik recently claimed on his blog that market fundamentalists view "recent trends in wealth and income inequality through pink eye glasses." Similarly, Paul Krugman has written an entire book
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Countering Oil Rogues: Target the Price or Volume?
"Oil rogues," fattened by gluttonous revenues, are again tormenting the United States. The global price of crude oil now exceeds $90 per barrel, surpassing on an inflation-adjusted basis the price recorded in the early 1980s after the chaos caused...
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A Bitter Dutch Treat
When the Dutch turned against Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Member of Parliament tipped to become prime minister of Holland one day, it was as surprising and fierce as a riptide. Threatened with assassination by the killer of Theo van...
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Loving Corrections
During every correction, I encourage investors to avoid the destructive inertia that results from trying to determine: how low can we go; how long will this last? Investors who add to their portfolios during downturns invariably experience higher Market Values...
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Pakistan Bourgeois Breakthrough
These days Pakistan's dictator Pervez Musharraf may well be thinking in the manner of Shakespeare's character Dick the Butcher, who uttered the famous line in Henry IV, Part 2, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."...
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'I Wish My American Friends Who Fret About Mexican Immigrants Could Be Here with Me...
ANENECUILCO, Mexico -- I wish my American friends who fret about Mexican immigrants could be here with me. Listening to Emiliano Zapata, a laborer who happens to be the grandson and namesake of the legendary Mexican revolutionary, they perhaps would...
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The U.S. Economy: What Does it Mean for Politicians?
Just when the news is fully saturated with the idea that the U.S. economy is on the brink of a recession caused by the bursting of the sub-prime lending bubble, we get some surprising news last week: The U.S. economy...
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The Wrong Path to Sub-Prime Reform
Barney Frank's recently introduced mortgage reform bill demonstrates yet again Congress' penchant for indulging in regulatory over-reaction to crises without addressing their underlying causes. Sadly, it als
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Children, Say 'Thank You for Smoking'
The Democratic Congress and President Bush continue to battle over whether SCHIP, the government-sponsored health care program for children, should focus on covering most uninsured children or just children in low-income families. Regardless of the focus of the fin
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Let Them Eat Laptops
Mass production will soon begin on the XO, the "$100 laptop" that MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte believes will change the world. Behind the dream of empowering children through technology, however, lies a reality more complicated and far less idealistic. Profess
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The Free Clinic Movement
Warren County, Virginia, at the confluence of the North and South Forks of the Shenandoah River has neither the rolling hills of horse country nor the fertile plains of the Shenandoah Valley. Of its 36,000 citizens, an estimated 6,000...
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Proliferation of Climate Scepticism in Europe
Climate scepticism has now gained a firm foothold in various European countries. In Denmark Bjørn Lomborg stands out as the single most important sceptical environmentalist, defying the political correctness which is such a characteristic feature of his home count
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The Lie About Where Che Lies
Thousands of Cubans and foreigners have been flocking to a mausoleum in central Cuba to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death. For 10 years, the Cuban government has been telling the world that the body inside the mausoleum...
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After Saffron: A Tale of Technology
"Ultimately it comes down to the resilience, the determination, and the bravery of the people who have been marching." Those words come from British Ambassador Mark Canning during the recent protest marches in Burma. As the monks marched past...
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Cali Cupcake Cops
I tried. I really tried. But it took all of a few days with the kids back in school before I ran into the new "policy" that finally pushed me over the edge. Look, school is hard, starting with no...
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A Modern Day Erie Canal
One hundred and eighty-two years ago this month, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton boarded the Seneca Chief and traveled 500 miles from Buffalo to New York City to mark the opening of the Erie Canal. It was the beginning...
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Green Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
There is little more annoying for a policy analyst than when two types of wrong-headedness conspire to undermine his case. Such is the case for policies driven by the pursuit of a pesticide free -- or at least pesticide...
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