Three decades of anti-poverty policy have shed much light on the best strategies for helping families.
Features
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Damaged Goods: Before Reinventing Government, Clinton Needs to Repair It
T he debris of Reaganism is scattered across Bill Clinton’s domestic agenda: Environmentalism may be slow to take hold at the Interior Department because friends of industry have “burrowed in” to the bureaucracy. Sound industrial policy will call for better information than the Commerce Department and Federal Trade Commission have to offer. Crafting welfare reform […]
Posted inAmerica and the World
Beyond Shock Therapy: Why Eastern Europe’s Recovery Starts in Washington
Laissez faire was planned. —Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation,1944 T he collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe demonstrated the failure of a command economy. The subsequent crash in output and employment induced by “shock therapy” has suggested the limits of laissez faire. Rather than replace the excesses of communism with excesses of capitalism, it is […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Crediting the Voters: A New Beginning for Campaign Finance
W hen Americans register to vote, they should be issued a credit card by a special public company– call it the Patriot card and color it red, white, and blue. This card will become the basis of campaign finance. Suppose each voter’s card were automatically credited with a $10 balance for the 1996 presidential election. […]
Posted inHousing and Transportation
The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life
If we want prosperity, we might begin by working to restore the fabric of community.
Posted inHealth and Social Policy
Coming Unfringed: The Unraveling of Job-Based Entitlements
Health care, pensions, and other forms of social income should be rights of citizenship, not perks of increasingly unreliable jobs.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Who’s Bashing Tyson?
L aura D’Andrea Tyson’s appointment to chair the Council of Economic Advisers received savage treatment from some of her professional colleagues. According to Peter Passell of the New York Times, “jaws dropped” in academe at the announcement. Passell went on to describe Tyson as “trendy” and a “polemicist.” And the addition of Princeton’s Alan Blinder […]
Posted inBooks
Can Economists Save Economics?
Economics is what economists do. –Jacob Viner T he trouble with Professor Viner’s delicate evasion is that economists no longer agree about what they do, or even whether it is all worth doing. Critics outside the profession long faulted economists for a host of sins: their deductive method, their formalism, their over-reliance on arcane algebra, […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Saving Disgrace? More on Savings
F red Block and Robert Heilbroner, in “The Myth of a Savings Shortage” (TAP, Spring 1992), want to persuade us that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is no scarcity of savings in the U.S. economy today. They say that the present national savings rate is as high as ever; that it plays no depressing […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Liberals and Public Investment: Recovering a Lost Legacy
T he emerging debate over the efficacy of public investment– a debate the Clinton administration seems certain to accelerate– has a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with the history of the 1930s and 1940s. Among the staples of economic discourse then were warnings that the United States was suffering from what many called “economic maturity” […]