Ideas in Development

Bill Schweke

A Mastery of Ecosystem Conservation: The Nature Conservancy Shows the Way

Set to begin working on it’s now community-approved “green” economic development endeavor on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) faced two challenges.  The first might be called the “Alice Rivlin Gauntlet.” On one occasion, Brookings economist Rivlin met with some Conservancy staff and said something along these lines:

The journey takes a turn toward the perilous: The nature conservancy’s experiment with compatible development

The Eastern Shore is home to about 45,000 people.  Many are poor.  John Hall and his staff had helped to create the Northampton Housing Trust, which eventually morphed into a CDC.  And in December 1993, the Jedi and other staff formed a for-profit company to create jobs on the Shore called the Virginia Eastern Shore Corporation (VESC).

I do not want to imply that all is rosy in my recent articles regarding regulation.  Since the Reagan Presidency, the Law and Economics movement and the Public Choice school have dominated the intellectual argument regarding pollution prevention and control, worker safety, and consumer rights and, in tandem with increasing numbers of conservative judges have pushed regulatory law and practice in unprogressive, laissez faire directions.

Manufacturing Modernization Programs Could Point the Way

Many economic development projects and programs actually cause harm to the environment.  This is no surprise to anyone who pays attention to growth’s effects on the local landscape or knows anything at all about the threats climate change may pose to the Earth and its denizens. 

Sadly, the Bush Administration has not advanced the causes of renewable energy, habitat protection, energy efficiency and so forth.  Furthermore, most environmentalists would claim environmental policy has suffered in the last seven years. 

A recent issue of the New Yorker (July 9 and 16, 2007) featured an excellent review of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Politics, a new book by a George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan.  Penned by the always thoughtful and literate Louis Menand, the review evaluates Caplan’s argument that “increasing voting participation is a bad thing.”  Why? 

Why Democratic Institutions are Necessary

My last article was a short tirade about a George Mason economist, who recently authored a book lambasting democratic governments. A lot of his facts were right: contemporary and past democracies have never been utopias where each citizen possessed deep technical understanding of the political issues of his time. No election will likely be settled by one citizen's vote. It is hard to imagine any society with complete political equality among the citizenry. Even hunting and gathering tribes have a pecking order. But, despite these caveats, democracy can be the best polity available. (Of course, you must be ready for—witness the case of Iraq—a nation that is not there yet.) This article will pursue this argument. I will begin by citing the testimony of another practitioner of the dismal science. (Economists don’t all share the same precise models, theories and prescriptions. In spite of its plentiful math, economics is not dispassionate social physics, animated by universal, trans-historical scientific laws.)

A Book Review

The recent book by Sandra Burud and Marie Tumolo, Leveraging The New Human Capital: Adaptive Strategies, Results Achieved, and Stories of Transformation, is a terrific achievement.  The work includes excellent overview essays by big thinkers, such as Peter Senge, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Robert Reich, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter.  The essays cover the following topics: the importance of relational capital, the new leadership and the need for a better balance between work and family, along with in-depth case studies of DuPont, Baxter International, SAS, and FIN.  The cumulative impact of these articles is quite persuasive, making a strong case that changing demographics and technology, the widespread emergence of the “knowledge worker”, globalization, faster product cycles and increased work hours are driving changes in human capital strategies.   This book confirms that people increasingly drive business success, but also that today’s workers have a dual focus—family and work—and strive to achieve a good balance between the two.

A Capsule History of the United States

Everybody knows that old saying, “nothing is more certain than death and taxes.”  It’s also hard to escape from “debt and taxes.”  In fact, you could write a political history of America by focusing on debt.  There are so many examples.

Barrington Moore, Jr. was “old school.”  Professor Moore went to private schools as a youth, graduated from Yale, and never fought for tenure at Harvard because he lived on inherited wealth.  He spent half of each year sailing, taught only two classes per year, and required anybody wanting to take one of his courses to first demonstrate that they could write decent prose. Dedicated to seeking the truth wherever it took him, he was an intellectual’s intellectual, knew Greek, Latin and German and was conversant in the fields of history, sociology and political science.  He was an expert on the Soviet Union, revolution and totalitarianism, as well as a moralist and political theorist.  Although left-of-center, politically, he never was a fan of Communism.  Yet he tried very hard in his work to see things from a Communist point of view.

The Floor is Open for Debate

In a recent court decision in the case of Summers v. State Street, distinguished Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner raised some eyebrows and set fire to the employee ownership community and their advocates by comments he made in reference to the effectiveness and viability of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). In his decision, Posner states:

The time may have come to rethink the concept of an ESOP, a seemingly inefficient method of wealth accumulation by employees because of the under-diversification to which it conduces… The tax advantages of the form do not represent a social benefit, but merely a shift of tax burdens to other taxpayers.