S. William Green, in The Journal of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies (Summer 19861, Air-port Road, White Plains, N.Y. 10604.
"Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." So goes the official motto of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
Like many Americans, Representative Green (D.-N.Y.) frets that the USPS is not as "swift" as it ought to be, despite the efficiencies that followed the Postal...
123 per- cent, compared with 70 percent for other government employees at the same level; a 1982 General-Accounting Office study found that even USPS custodians earned more than double the hourly wages of their private enterprise counterparts. Only in recent months has the Postal Service begun to turn a profit, after record losses of $251 million in 1985; pros- pects for improved service do not seem bright.
Privatization is Green's solution-specifically, allowing private firms to compete in those...
Tom Clark, one of his Democratic appointees. Clark sided with a 1952 majority ruling that Truman's nationalization of steel mills to head off a strike during the Ko- rean War was unconstitutional.
"Packing the Supreme Court simply can't be done," Truman lamented. "I've tried and it won't work."
That 1787 The Electoral College at Philadelphia: The Evolution of an Ad Hoc Congress for the Selec-
Anachronism tion of a President" Shlomo Slonim, in The Journal of American...
granting to them electoral votes equivalent in number to their congressional delega- tions. And, in the event that no presidential candidate won a majority outright, -the decision would fall to the House, where the advantage would go to the most populous states.
Though it was a "Rube Goldberg" device, Slonim says, the college did succeed in reconciling the nationalists and the federalists among the con- vention delegates. Doubts about the result would emerge later, as when Benjamin Harrison...
concludes, is the discovery that "human rights and strategic interests turn out to be consistent far more often than many Americans expect."
Brothers .in S "Success Story: Blacks in the Amy" Charles
C. Moskos, in The Atlantic (May 1986), 8 Ar-lington St., Boston, Mass. 02116.
Once a racial tinderbox, the U.S. armed forces now boast a degree of integration unmatched in civilian society.
So says Moskos, a sociologist at Northwestern. In his opinion, "there is
no question...
executive order in 1948. Throughout the 1950s, integration proceeded apace, especially during the Korean War, when blacks and whites fought in the same Army combat units for the first time. Then came the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, which heightened racial tensions among troops and highlighted remaining anomalies, notably a paucity of commis- sioned blacks. (As late as 1972, only one in 25 Army officers was black, compared with one in 10 today.) Seeing the need for intervention...
the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) reduces the incentives to Egyptian fanners to harvest their own grains. AID projects also tend to siphon off Egypt's top talent, as well as to favor the use of American-made (rather than locally manufactured) machinery and materials. Such facts have led to charges that the United States-creating "production disin- centives" and cultivating dependency-is guilty of exploiting Egypt for its own economic ends.
Weinbaum rejects that notion,...
Edward
L. Morse, in Foreign Affairs(Spring 1986), 58 East 68th St., ~ew
York, N.Y. 10021.
As oil prices plummeted, from a record high of $40 per barrel in 1980-81
to less than $12 per barrel this past winter, American motorists-and
Washington economists-celebrated the good news.
But Morse, managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, sees trouble not far down the road.
For nearly a century the oil market has experienced major price fluc- tuations, cycling from boom to bust and back...
Paul L. Burgess,
Jerry L. Kingston, and Robert D. St. Louis, in
Industrial & Labor Relations Review (April
1986), ComeU University, Ithaca, N.Y. 14851-0952.
Stories about "vacations" funded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits are as common as those about welfare-financed Cadillacs.
But are they true?
Yes, suggest Burgess, Kingston, and St. Louis, all economic research- ers at Arizona State University. Many UI recipients have no intention of getting a job until their weekly checks...
William J. Baumol, in The American Economic Review (May 19861, 1313 21st Avenue So., Ste. 809, Nashville, Tenn. 37212-2786.
As masterpiece paintings command ever-higher sums at Manhattan auc- tions, art investment has come to look like a sure-fire way to show off and make a profit.
But Baumol, a Princeton economist, argues that big price tags do not necessarily mean big profits from paintings.
Drawing mainly on Gerald Reitlinger's three-volume compilation of art sales data (The Economics of Taste:...