Trade policy has become a partisan affair in Washington. Major trade bills in Congress typically pit pro-trade Republicans backed by big business against trade-skeptic Democrats aligned with labor unions. And as the two major parties arm themselves for the 2008 general election, trade policy promises to provide one of the sharper contrasts between them.
How do many scientific disciplines estimate and report results? Practitioners estimate regression models or conduct difference-of means tests through experiments. And they report which results are significant and which are not (i.e., different from zero with 95 percent confidence). In this important book, Ziliak and McCloskey have three objectives: to remind us that such research may be mindless, unscientific, and costly; to explicate the intellectual history of significance testing and the struggles among those professors who developed sampling and statistical testing; and to illustrate the correct way to conduct research and praise those few who report their research properly.
Whatever you think of his politics or jurisprudence, Clarence Thomas is a remarkable man. Born into desperate poverty in the Jim Crow South and raised by his illiterate grandfather, he would graduate from (and be completely disillusioned by) Yale Law School while battling personal and political demons that would have felled lesser mortals many times over. Now on the Supreme Court bench for over 15 years, Justice Thomas has established himself as a force to be reckoned with, a strong voice who has accepted and transcended his unfortunate notoriety.
Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense since the end of World War II. This is the conclusion reached by Dale Herspring, a political science professor at the University of Kansas, in a new book transparently titled Rumsfeld's Wars: The Arrogance of Power. Without much effort to give the former secretary any benefit of the doubt, Herspring blames him directly for causing our military to become “demoralized” and “broken.”
“9/11 constituted an open declaration of war on the United States and … the war into which it catapulted us was nothing less than another world war.” So says Norman Podhoretz in the opening passage of this alarmist, rambling screed. The enemy is Islamofascism, a “monster with two heads, one religious and the other secular.” This scourge, Podhoretz warns darkly, may be “even more dangerous and difficult to beat” than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
One day I asked Milton Friedman a question. That question was in my mind every time we met: “Could he have achieved the same status he did in America if he had lived in Russia—not only in terms of his research, but in shaping his outlook on life and in his under-standing of freedom?” Having kept silent for a moment, he answered: “no.”
In explaining the acceleration in Indian growth, and to judge if an Indian economic miracle is on its way, it is first necessary to establish when this acceleration began, as this is still subject to controversy. Second it is necessary to identify the sources of this acceleration and to see to what extent these are the results of policy. Third, to provide some reading of the tea leaves until 2030, it is necessary to outline the current constraints on growth. But before that, the current change in Indian economic fortunes needs to be put into historical perspective. This is done in the first part of this article, followed by the next three parts, which deal with the other three broad themes outlined above. As this article is in honor of Angus Maddison, I rely wherever possible on the growth accounting method that he has made so much his own.
By and large, there are two distinct intellectual traditions in social theorizing. One is normative. It addresses how people should live or how the social order should be arranged. Much of the human rights discourse belongs to this tradition. The other tradition attempts to analyze the world as it is. Within this second tradition theories are evaluated according to criteria such as falsifiability, compatibility with known facts, explanatory power, or predictive value. If one is interested in feasibility, and if one links rights with corresponding obligations, then the separation between these intellectual traditions is regrettable. Then it makes little sense to generate long lists of human rights without knowing whether or not they ever can be implemented.
This article explores the impact of tax policy on economic growth in the states within the framework of an endogenous growth model. Regression analysis is used to estimate the impact of taxes on economic growth in the states from 1964 to 2004. The analysis reveals a significant negative impact of higher marginal tax rates on economic growth. The analysis underscores the importance of controlling for regressivity, convergence, and regional influences in isolating the effect of taxes on economic growth in the states.
Federal, state, and county governments accept the argument that occupational licensing protects consumers and improves their welfare. This argument stands in stark contrast to the apparent rent seeking that occurs with licensing. In return for gains from state-created barriers to entry, coalitions built along occupational lines support politicians (Stigler 1971: 3–21).