Category: Political Science

Returning home from Paris, I am reminded of David Frum’s recent and insightful column on trans-Atlantic relations.

Bruce Bartlett says yes.

Switzerland continues to have more guns and less crime.  Here is a charming portrait by Stephen Halbrook of a Swiss shooting competition for boys and girls.

The greatest shooting festival in the world
for youngsters takes place every year in Zurich, Switzerland. Imagine
thousands of boys and girls shooting military service rifle over three
days amid an enormous fair with ferris wheels and wild rides of all
kinds. You’re at the Knabenschiessen (boys’ shooting contest).

This girl, one of 1,585 who competed, being coached in sharpshooting with the Assault Rifle 90, the Swiss service rifle.

Held since the year 1657, the competition traditionally has been both a
sport and a way of encouraging marksmanship in a country where every
male serves in the militia army. Today, girls compete along side the
boys. In fact, girls are now winning the competition.

It’s
September 13, 2004. In the U.S. on this date, the Clinton fake “assault
weapon” ban sunsets. In Zurich, some 5,631 teens – 4,046 boys and 1,585
girls, aged 13-17 – have finished firing the Swiss service rifle, and
it’s time for the shootoff.

That
rifle is the SIG Strumgeweher (assault rifle) model 1990 (Stgw 90), a
selective fire, 5.6 mm rifle with folding skeleton stock, bayonet lug,
bipod, and grenade launcher. The Stgw 90 is a real assault rifle in
that it is fully automatic, although that feature is disabled during
the competition. Every Swiss man, on reaching age 20, is issued one to
keep at home. Imagine all those teenagers firing this real assault
rifle while their moms and dads look on with approval, anxiously
awaiting the scores.

Over the last 20 years, public pension funds have grown nearly sevenfold – to more than $2 trillion nationwide, outpacing private-sector fund growth by more than one-third and making them tremendously powerful in boardrooms across the country.

Why do they want to meddle? Because they can. Although private-sector fund managers focus on picking lucrative investments – because that’s how they get paid – public fund trustees have different incentives. Sure, they want funds to perform well. But if they don’t, they know that taxpayers will make up the shortfall. So they’re free to pursue political objectives.

Public funds first discovered their political strength in the mid-1980s, when they successfully pressured companies with business in South Africa to lobby against apartheid or to withdraw from that nation. For years, activist pension funds focused on broad-brush issues like apartheid. They didn’t meddle with corporate management.

But the public funds have taken the corporate scandals of the Enron era as a license to step up their interference with corporate boards. "The age of investor complacency must be replaced by a new era of investor democracy," said Phil Angelides, California treasurer and a member of the board of CalPERS, the state’s main pension fund.

Read more here.  Tomorrow I will consider the more general question of whether we should trust our federal government to invest social security funds in private equities.

58,000 major incidents of social unrest took place in China in 2003 — an average of roughly 160 a day and 15 percent more than the year before.

Read more here and here; you will find the estimate here.  I have yet to read a compelling interpretation of this development, but I am seeing an increasing number of related stories popping up in the newspapers.

The speed with which Republicans have forgotten their "core values," as David Brooks put it after the vote on the DeLay rule, has been shocking. Earlier this year, a Boston Globe article made a few comparisons between the 1993-94 Congress that Newt Gingrich ousted and the one now ending. The Republican Congress added 3,407 pork barrel projects to appropriation bills in conference committee, compared to 47 for 1994, the last year Democrats held both houses. The Republican Congress allowed only 28 percent of the bills on the floor to be amended, "barely more than half of what Democrats allowed in their last session in power in 1993-94." The number of nonappropriations bills "open to revision has dropped to 15 percent."

Read the whole thing, but please note I don’t think a contemporary Democrat majority would be any better.

Addendum: Alex said it best.

Of course not.  The New York Times reports on new survey research by Dan Klein on the voting behavior of academics.  Anthropologists are comfortable living with cannibals in South America but they vote Democrat 30 to 1.   Economists are among the least "biased", they vote Democrat to Republican at about 3 to 1. 

This reminds me of the great Adlai Stevenson line.  A supporter once called out, "Governor Stevenson, all thinking people
are for you!" And Adlai Stevenson answered, "That’s not enough. I need
a majority."

Addendum: Thanks to Vicki White for directing me to the correct quote which I had earlier misattributed.

A non-nuclear method of increasing the national self-esteem of the large (either population-wise or economically) non-nuclear countries could do a lot of good.

That is from Matt Yglesias.

The tax code will grow more complicated, not simpler, because the complexity of the tax code is a major factor in creating public resentment of the tax system which, again, is key to gaining political support for lowering the top rates.

There is more, read the whole post, entitled "Big Government Conservatism is Here to Stay."

The Indian magazine The Week (Nov.7 issue) polled 1,274 people in ten cities, and found that Indira Gandhi remains a political idol. 

69 percent of the people wish they could vote for her today.

54 percent believe that she would go to war with Pakistan over Kashmir.

47 percent approve of "The Emergency," her suspension of civil liberties; only 38 percent oppose it.

67 percent believe that the Nehru-Gandhi family should be in politics.

Indira’s two greatest achievements are seen as victory in the 1971 Indo-Pak war and nationalizing the banking system.

Here is my previous post entitled "Are Indian Voters Irrational?"

My question: Does Karl Rove understand Indian politics better than we think?

Political scientist Robert Putnam made news a few years ago with Bowling Alone, where Putnam claimed that American community has been in decline. Putnam’s book draws its title from the following passage:

Whether or not bowling beats balloting in the eyes of most Americans, bowling teams illustrate yet another vanishing form of social capital… league bowling, by requiring regular participation with a diverse set of acquaintances, represented a form of sustained social capital that is not matched by the occasional pickup game.

Tim Hallett, a colleague of mine, his dissertation advisor Gary Alan Fine and graduate student Mike Sauder decided to see if people really bowled alone. They recently published a summary of their findings in the magazine Society. Fine, Hallett and Sauder write: “As occasional bowlers – although not in leagues – we asked a simple question: Do Americans really bowl alone, and what, if anything, does it mean?”

To answer that question, they went bowling and observed over 800 bowlers at six Chicago area bowling alleys. What did they find? Less than 1% of the people seen bowling actually bowled alone. In interviews, only 13% said they had bowled alone during the past year. What about those loners? Were the solo bowlers introverted and anti-social? To the contrary, 12 out of 22 interviewees who admitted to bowling alone did so to practice so they could do well in bowling leagues. In other words, bowling alone correlates with being in a bowling league.

To be fair, Putnam himself admitted bowling might be social. But he seems to have underestimated the social side of modern bowling. A lot of bowling alleys throw parties and turn their lanes into disco style social clubs. It is also common for all kinds of clubs and groups to socialize at bowling alleys. So maybe bowling leagues are on the decline, but Americans don’t bowl alone.