Independent Review articles from September 2006

Independent Review archives from September 2006

When fair is not just and just is not fair.(Viewpoint essay)
September 22, 2006... The dramatis personae animating this article are two ideas that exert an immense influence on human affairs but whose names are too often taken in vain. They are justice and fairness. Both, especially the latter, are employed freely to convey a...

Government and science: a dangerous liaison?(Viewpoint essay)
September 22, 2006... With the rise of the modern state, science has become increasingly subject to government intervention in its funding and direction. This tendency's underlying driving force has been the growth of government itself. The governmental impetus to...

Did the United States create democracy in Germany?
September 22, 2006... Do we know how to promote democracy in a troubled land? Do we have a set of policies and practices that administrators can take off the shelf, as it were, and apply in a reasonably straightforward fashion to produce a lasting democracy? ...

Direct-to-consumer advertising and the demise of the ideal model of health care.
September 22, 2006... In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have begun to market expensive new drugs directly to consumers via television ads. These new drugs target some of our most common medical problems, such as allergies, heartburn, erectile dysfunction,...

Texas treasury notes and the election of 1844.
September 22, 2006... But suppose we [the Liberty Party] had all voted for Mr. Clay--suppose him elected and Texas kept out--where would have been the Liberty Party? Scattered among the slaveholders and their allies, without having accomplished anything. ...

The condition of women in developing and developed countries.
September 22, 2006... In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women achieved significant progress in the economically progressive areas dominated by Western culture, including North America, Europe, and Australia. In developing areas dominated by non-Western...

Collapse? The "dismal" science doesn't think so: economists' views of the future.(FUTUROLOGY)(Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... In the best-seller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Jared Diamond confronts the reader with stories of the collapse and even extinction of past societies. He claims ultimately to be a "cautious optimist" (521) about the...

Should we have acted thirty years ago to prevent global climate change?(REFLECTIONS)(Viewpoint essay)
September 22, 2006... Global climate change is a major public-policy issue in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Although debate continues about the extent to which the global climate will change, sufficient agreement exists among policymakers worldwide...

Free parking versus free markets.(The High Cost of Free Parking)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Donald Shoup is a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a doctorate in economics from Yale. He has spent several decades researching parking, a subject on which he has long been known as the...

Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Why is Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley? Why isn't it in Cleveland or Miami? And why is there "a" Silicon Valley? Why are computer firms, like film studios, clustered in a few places, rather than scattered everywhere, like accountants? Why are...

Understanding Institutional Diversity.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Understanding Institutional Diversity By Elinor Ostrom Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. 384. $60.00 cloth; $27.95 paperback. Perhaps no other social scientist is more closely associated with the study of...

Understanding the Process of Economic Change.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Understanding the Process of Economic Change By Douglass C. North Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 187. $29.95 cloth. The new institutional economics is the research program whose representatives...

Choice and Competition in American Education.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Choice and Competition in American Education Edited by Paul Peterson Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Pp. vii, 274. $21.95 paperback. Paul Peterson's Choice and Competition in American Education, a collection of...

Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution By Alan Dawley Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. x, 409. $49.50 cloth, $22.95 paperback. At the end of his "Four Freedoms" speech in...