Is Trillion the New Billion?

Not so long ago, $1 billion seemed worth worrying about - as Everett Dirksen, the late senator from Illinois, was supposed to have said, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Today, another trillion-dollar commitment by the Federal Reserve makes headlines for only a day or two, and a projected federal budget deficit exceeding$1 trillion is widely viewed with equanimity. Are we courting disaster in this indifference to inconceivably large sums? Or have the extraordinary challenges faced by the economy today fundamentally altered the arithmetic of government finance? The answer is yes - and yes.Other Topics

The Economics of Allowing More Domestic Oil Drilling

The recent sharp increase in the price of oil has generated renewed interest in U.S. oil exploration and development. This paper examines the likely impact of developing new energy resources on oil and gasoline prices. In addition, we use a benefit-cost framework to analyze the impact of allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the portions of the Outer Continental Shelf that are currently closed to development. We find that development of ANWR and off-limits OCS is likely to have only a modest impact on future world (and thus domestic) oil prices—on the order of one percent. Therefore, we believe that the impact of opening the new resource areas on current prices would be modest as well. Our benefit-cost analysis of developing offlimits OCS suggests that the benefits are very likely to exceed the costs. We are less confident in the case of ANWR, but still believe that the expected benefits of development are likely to exceed the costs.We suggest an alternative way of framing the issue of resource development that may give both policy makers and the public a better sense of the tradeoffs involved.

Stimulate Car Buyers, Not Car Makers.

Should Uncle Sam do whatever is necessary to prevent General Motors, Ford and Chrysler from bankruptcy? If these were normal times, we suspect that most mainstream economists (and many mainstream legislators) would be inclined to let their stockholders, creditors and unions suffer the consequences of decades of myopic decisions. But with financial markets still in turmoil and the economy on the cusp of a nasty recession, these are hardly normal times.Technology and Industry

Felony Murder and Capital Punishment: an Examination of the Deterrence Question

A proper test of the deterrent effect of the death penalty must consider capital homicides. However, the criterion variable in most investigations has been total homicides—most of which bear no legal or theoretical relationship to capital punishment. To address this fundamental data problem, this investigation used Federal Bureau of Investigation data for 1976–1987 to examine the relationship between capital punishment and felony murder, the most common type of capital homicide. We conducted time series analyses of monthly felony murder rates, the frequency of executions, and the amount and type of television coverage of executions over the period. The analyses revealed occasional departures (for vehicle theft and narcotics killings) from the null hypotheses. However, on balance, and in line with the vast majority of capital punishment studies, this investigation found no consistent evidence that executions and the television coverage they receive are associated significantly with rates for total, index, or different types of felony murder

Modeling the transfer of land and water from agricultural to urban uses in the Middle Rio Grande Basin, New Mexico.

Social and ecological scientists emphasize that effective natural resource management depends in part on understanding the dynamic relationship between the physical and non-physical process associated with resource consumption. In this case, the physical processes include hydrological, climatological and ecological dynamics, and the non-physical process include social, economic and cultural dynamics among humans who do the resource consumption. This project represents a case study aimed at modeling coupled social and physical processes in a single decision support system. In central New Mexico, individual land use decisions over the past five decades have resulted in the gradual transformation of the Middle Rio Grande Valley from a primarily rural agricultural landscape to a largely urban one. In the arid southwestern U.S., the aggregate impact of individual decisions about land use is uniquely important to understand, because scarce hydrological resources will likely limit the viability of resulting growth and development trajectories. This decision support tool is intended to help planners in the area look forward in their efforts to create a collectively defined 'desired' social landscape in the Middle Rio Grande. Our research question explored the ways in which socio-cultural values impact decisions regarding that landscape and associated land use. Because of the constraints hydrological resources place on land use, we first assumed that water use, as embodied in water rights, was a reasonable surrogate for land use. We thought that modeling the movement of water rights over time and across water source types (surface and ground) would provide planners with insight into the possibilities for certain types of decisions regarding social landscapes, and the impact those same decisions would have on those landscapes. We found that water rights transfer data in New Mexico is too incomplete and inaccurate to use as the basis for the model. Furthermore, because of its lack of accuracy and completeness, water rights ownership was a poor indicator of water and land usage habits and patterns. We also found that commitment among users in the Middle Rio Grande Valley is to an agricultural lifestyle, not to a community or place. This commitment is conditioned primarily by generational cohort and past experience. If conditions warrant, many would be willing to practice the lifestyle elsewhere. A related finding was that sometimes the pressure to sell was not the putative price of the land, but the taxes on the land. These taxes were, in turn, a function of the level of urbanization of the neighborhood. This urbanization impacted the quality of the agricultural lifestyle. The project also yielded some valuable lessons regarding the model development process. A facilitative and collaborative style (rather than a top-down, directive style) was most productive with the inter-disciplinary , inter-institutional team that worked on the project. This allowed for the emergence of a process model which combined small, discipline- and/or task-specific subgroups with larger, integrating team meetings. The project objective was to develop a model that could be used to run test scenarios in which we explored the potential impact of different policy options. We achieved that objective, although not with the level of success or modeling fidelity which we had hoped for. This report only describes very superficially the results of test scenarios, since more complete analysis of scenarios would require more time and effort. Our greatest obstacle in the successful completion of the project was that required data were sparse, of poor quality, or completely nonexistent. Moreover, we found no similar modeling or research efforts taking place at either the state or local level. This leads to a key finding of this project: that state and local policy decisions regarding land use, development, urbanization, and water resource allocation are being made with minimal data and without the benefit of economic or social policy analysis

How To

https://works.swarthmore.edu/alum-books/2485/thumbnail.jp

The Best, Encore

https://works.swarthmore.edu/alum-books/2484/thumbnail.jp

A New Economic View Of American History

https://works.swarthmore.edu/alum-books/4627/thumbnail.jp