Political Booknotes Reviews

...Adam Yarmolinsky is the Regents Professor of Public Policy in the University of Maryland system and a founding board member of Independent Sector...

...He has since taken orthodox doomsayer positions on nearly every ecological issue, becoming something of a darling of the establishment left foundation set, in part because of his Oxford affiliation and his fashionable British accent...

...But from the standpoint of simple atmospheric chemistry, it's hard to believe all the carbon dioxide people are putting into the air won't eventually do something...

...economy...

...It therefore may constitutionally determine what is to be said...

...Lansing Lamont's take on the subject is one of the most pessimistic—and one of the most illuminating...

...Almost all Canadians live in a narrow strip adjacent to the U.S...

...Canada's demographics are startling: The country is composed of nearly seven million square miles—but there are only 28 million people, or an average of just four people per square mile...

...Yet this trend creates worrisome problems for the future: Increasing dependence on government funding threatens the independence of what is often referred to as the independent sector...

...And is an expanding human population happy news...

...eventually the remaining Canadian provinces coalesce into regional groupings whose economic ties to the United States are stronger than their political ties to Ottawa...

...But I don't know of any more serious comprehensive treatment of this set of serious problems...

...Norton, $21 By Gregg Easterbrook Recently, Stanley Fish, a prominent left-wing academician who believes that political correctness is good for you, and Dinesh D'Souza, a prominent right-wing analyst who believes acade-mia has become a thought-police state, began doing little two-man shows, appearing jointly at college campuses to denounce each other with polite magniloquence...

...Simon is best known as a defender of human population growth, having argued in The Ultimate Resource and other works that more people not only represent no lasting problem for the planet, but that an ever-expanding human population is a blessing because the more people there are alive, the more minds are available to solve the world's problems...

...For instance, he offhandedly dismisses the prospect of global warming as a non-issue, as it jeopardizes his contention that "almost every" trend is positive...

...And charities as a group have more fundamental problems, to which this report makes at least passing reference...

...You can't cover so large a subject analytically in 33 pages plus a wraparound press release, especially when much of the space is devoted to studio photographs of the talking heads...

...That sounds great, but Knodell doesn't tell us how to do it...

...extinctions in the postwar era...

...They could remedy that ignorance quite painlessly by reading this book...

...Every schoolchild knows that the U.S.-Canadian border is the longest undefended frontier in the world...

...On the whole, although it is difficult to evolve a consensus theme from the book, there are at least scattered suggestions of a return to economic isolationism...

...In these and other important areas, Myers exaggerates the case for gloom...

...Instead only about 200 actual extinctions have been documented worldwide in this century...

...Still another area of recent research, too briefly summarized in the report, is the work of Charles Clotfelter and of Julian Wolpert, analyzing who benefits from charity...

...Unfortunately, it does so in abbreviated and often superficial fashion...

...At the end of World War II, Japan's gross domestic product was only one-eleventh the size of America's...

...The Clinton Administration has dedicated itself to unabashed mercantilist policy of pushing exports as the main engine of growth for the U.S...

...Lamont goes on to discuss each of these factors—"the country's bedrock incompatibilities"—and show how they are rooted in the country's history, economy, and geography...

...The highest documented actual figure for the U.S...

...This is as good a place as any to begin...

...But I'm not convinced they have shown us how to get there...

...Salamon notes that only 27 percent of human service providers report targeting their services primarily to the poor...

...Norton & Co., $25 By Charles W. Bailey People have been predicting the collapse of Canada for decades, and in recent years the forecasts have grown ever bleaker...

...the rise of its new trade and economic dependency under the American Colossus...

...Breakup: The Coining End of Canada and the Stakes for America Lansing Lamont W.W...

...For example, R.A...

...Global warming is unlikely to be the immediate hyper-threat that Myers and others suggest...

...Clotfelter points out that public hospitals tend to serve more poor people than do voluntary hospitals, and private colleges tend to serve a wealthier clientele than public institutions (although this balance is shifting...

...Lamont labels that "the longest undefended cliche in Canadian-American relations...

...Myers and Simon both have important things to say, but both often succumb to the temptation of trying to make their views all-encompassing by dismissing every point on the other side...

...For all that, the reader will find striking similarities with U.S...

...Anyone who has walked through the slums of Jakarta, Karachi, Kinshasa, Manila, and numerous other places where the current ecological and social systems cannot support those already alive will find it hard to believe that each new cry of birth in these places is a cause for celebration...

...Yet, I don't believe the situation is hopeless, as do the authors of a new work, Understanding American Economic Decline, co-edited by Michael A. Bernstein, an historian-economist from the University of California at San Diego, and David Adler, a television programming manager...

...Thus, they conclude American industries must pay wages that match those paid in competing countries...

...Both scholars find that there is relatively little redistribution of wealth involved...

...Another troubling development is Congress' decision last year to make permanent a three percent floor on itemized deductions, including the charitable deduction, for high-income taxpayers...

...The Clinton Administration reversed the gag rule policy, but the Court has removed the First Amendment protection against future administrations, at least until the court changes its mind, or confines the ruling to the facts of the Rust case...

...Understanding American Economic Decline Michael A. Bernstein and David Adler, eds...

...State attorneys general, who are responsible for the oversight of charities, have not yet begun to exercise that responsibility in many states, or are just beginning to do so...

...Who Guards the Guardians...

...I know the authors of Understanding American Economic Decline share that goal...

...As Myers is right to call attention to species extinction and other problems that industrialists would rather not talk about, Simon calls attention to a fact that for some reason gives the left the willies: namely, that bringing life into the world is a good thing...

...Myers says that right now human action causes the loss of "at least 30,000 species every year," a numbing 82 extinctions per day...

...At the three percent level, the floor doesn't significantly reduce the availability of the charitable deduction...

...The regulation of philanthropy is necessarily a series of compromises between guiding the charitable impulse and giving scope to the charitable imagination...

...Japan, and to some extent Germany, have emerged as a major competitor, catching up with America in productivity and living standards...

...Yet even adjusting for unknown species, the observed extinction figure is astronomically lower than Myers' estimate...

...and successive waves of immigrants...

...Bernstein sets the tone of the book at the start: 'Today, many [economic experts] fear that the American economy is weak and failing, destined to be a second-echelon participant in a new 21st century world economic order...

...Charities have traditionally provided a haven for the eccentric who proposes the abolition of slavery or suffrage for women, and too vigorous a house-cleaning may sweep out the eccentric along with the private advantage seeker...

...Blecker, a Washington economist associated with Clyde Prestowitz's Economic Policy Institute, calls for "pressure" on China and Japan to open up their markets...

...the second half is a "scenario for the future," the author's speculation on what is still to come...

...Charles W. Bailey is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Washington Monthly...

...Lamont, a former newsmagazine correspondent and later director of Canadian affairs at the Americas Society, has written a book that is half history and half docudrama: The first half is a concise account of the first 300 years of Canadian history...

...Scarcity or Abundance ? does not do justice to either's work, and contains such eminently dispensable filler as transcripts of audience questions, one of which begins, "I've listened very carefully to both of you and in your arguments I think you make very different assumptions...

...Wolpert finds that charities tend to serve their own communities, and "generosity is...generally higher where affluence is greater...

...Charities would be required to send copies of the tax returns that justify their tax exemptions (the famous Form 990) to anyone who asks, instead of making the return available only to someone curious enough to visit their offices...

...But in spite of exhortations by the Oversight Committee, enforcement will still depend on overstretched staffs both in the Service and in the states—a situation unlikely to change while federal and state tax-collectors focus their attention where the dollars are: delinquent taxpayers, rather than on the exempt folk...

...Human population growth isn't necessarily one of them...

...Many trends in environmental affairs are, as Simon asserts, positive...

...Myers first gained the public eye with his 1979 book The Sinking Ark, which posits that species extinction is running rampant...

...Though in principle the Earth may someday sustain a vastly greater human population than at present, with material security for all and a high standard of ecological cleanliness, that's someday, not today...

...A "credible threat," he suggests, would be to erect "trade barriers in some cases where cooperation is not forthcoming...

...Gregg Easterbrook, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of the forthcoming book A Moment on the Earth...

...A traditional bulwark against government interference has been removed by the recent Supreme Court decision in the Rust decision (the "gag rule" decision) in which the Court allowed the Bush Administration to forbid physicians working for Planned Parenthood in a federally supported pre-natal counseling program to advise patients of the existence of abortion counseling services...

...One remedy proposed in the report would be to make it easier for private watchdogs to pursue charities in the courts, but this idea makes me a bit nervous...

...Galbraith and Calmon say, wisely, that the United States cannot maintain an export advantage in all industries at once...

...For every public-spirited challenge to a fat-cat foundation overpaying its trustees, I can see a Capital Legal Foundation given more latitude to harass Planned Parenthood or the NAACP Inc...

...But most Americans know almost nothing else about Canada...

...For example, Jane Knodell calls for "the creation of alternative financial institutions to provide long-term development finance, reform of the Federal Reserve, and/or bank regulatory reform...

...Cambridge University Press, $49.95 By Hobart Rowen America, it is said, has been in an economic decline for perhaps two decades...

...Myers, an English environmentalist and a leading doom-sayer, believes environmental affairs to be so unswervingly bleak that, among other things, "global warming will mean no more winters at all in Britain" because colder weather in the United Kingdom has already "been forever eliminated by human agency...

...conversely, there were no cases of rising wages in the face of falling export sales...

...But it now appears that some time after the beginning of the new century, Japan's GDP will be two-thirds the size of ours...

...Among the most innovative essays in the book—and one that departs a bit from the overall defeatist thesis—is by James K. Galbraith and Paulo Du Pin Calmon on "Industry, Trade, and Wages...

...Hie New Age of Nonprofit Accountability The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, $25 By Adam Yarmolinsky Outrage may be the most readily available emotion to those who contemplate the public scene today, and the world of philanthropy provides at least its share of occasions, as this report on nonprofit accountability demonstrates...

...the emergence of a militant Quebec in the 1960s...

...But like Myers, Simon often goes overboard in the interests of not facing the flaws in his own arguments...

...The numbers he uses are, however, hard to swallow...

...The system of federal and state laws governing charitable organizations has been singularly ineffective in anticipating outrage...

...its effects will be absorbed by deductions for mortgage and taxes...

...That's the route to global peace...

...Simon, an American economist and a leading cornucopian, believes the environment and a range of other issues are peachy keen, and his "central premise" is that "almost every economic and social change or trend points in a positive direction...

...The correctives suggested in this book are difficult to nail down...

...My view remains that the decline in America's relative economic power is regrettable only if one believes, in a macho way, that the United States always has to be first in everything...

...But as Congress almost inevitably raises the floor to four and five and six percent (as happened long ago with the medical expense deduction) studies have shown that charitable contributions will fall, and charities' independence of the government dole will be further reduced...

...The United States has six percent of the world's land area, so based on the 1.5 million figure, one could roughly estimate 90,000 U.S...

...Hobart Rowen is the economics columnist for The Washington Post...

...Five-sixths of this activity is financed by government grants and contracts, and by fees for services, accounting for the large increase in charitable spending, while charitable giving has been increasing slowly (but steadily) over the years...

...In this book Myers and Simon do a better job of being civil than of forming fully persuasive arguments for their positions...

...But for the moment the thoughts of hundreds of millions of new children to be bom in impoverished nations will be confined to ignorance and deprivation...

...It makes more sense to me to believe that in an interdependent world, America will and should inevitably share power with Japan, Germany, and others...

...What these reforms don't address is the set of problems raised by fundrais-ing practices of some charities— encouraged by professional fundraisers—where a large proportion of funds raised go for administrative and fundraising expenses...

...border...

...The reporting form itself would be redesigned to make it more user-friendly to the inquiring layman, and the IRS, instead of being required to conceal information about disciplinary actions, as it is now, would be required to publish these actions to all the world, while the reporting form itself would carry information about penalty taxes paid...

...The debate on how this came to pass has been explored in countless books and articles...

...One can disagree with Lamont's predictions—everyone who follows events in Canada has his own version—but you can't argue with his estimate of the present situation: Canada's never robust psyche had been buffeted over the last four decades by the nation's final severance of its umbilical ties to Britain and the Empire...

...But if there are really 30,000 extinctions per year, about 1.5 million species would have vanished in the postwar era...

...That the majority of the nation's half-million charities operate honestly, openly, and too often with painfully inadequate resources does not appease public indignation, perhaps because more is expected of them than of other institutions...

...That is amply high to demonstrate that species extinctions are a serious issue requiring new conservation initiatives...

...The Internal Revenue Service should be able to rescind unfair transactions (such as sweetheart payments for office rent and salaries above the market for executives) and levy fines against individuals who receive or pay excessive or unfair compensation for goods or services...

...Galbraith and Calmon view the NAFTA trade treaty "with contingent optimism," which sets them apart from some of their co-authors...

...They found no example among major industries that wages fall when their companies prosper in world and domestic markets...

...It might seem odd to schedule joint appearances with someone whose positions you claim to detest, but at least Fish and D'Souza are mutually civil, which is more than can be said for many other literary antagonists...

...only seven percent of the country's land area is fully settled...

...A Justice Department official testified in a Senate hearing after the decision that "In a sense, when the government funds a certain view, the government itself is speaking...

...The federal tax authorities can and do penalize foundation officers for abuses of trust, but the only weapon available to the feds against public charities is the blunderbuss of revocation of tax exemption, which hits the recipients of charitable bounty...

...The policy lesson for government, as Galbraith and Calmon read it, is to support the trade potential only for the most successful industries...

...Since there are surely many species yet to enter any taxonomic catalogue, some extinctions may well have gone by unnoticed...

...These changes, which are working their way through the legislative process, would make charities more law-abiding and more responsive to the general public...

...I have argued in the pages of The Washington Post, and in my book Self-inflicted Wounds—From LBJ's Guns & Butter to Reagan's Voodoo Economics, that American mistakes at the highest levels of government, corporate, and labor power are responsible for this unhappy result...

...With an approach they identify as "largely outside the focus of mainstream economic theory," the authors raise questions that are timely as a backdrop to the current debate over President Clinton's economic policy...

...The report raises all the legitimate current regulatory issues, as well as a few foolish ones...

...Then, too, the government has been shifting responsibility for the operation of social welfare programs to the charities, so that social welfare expenditures by charities (excluding K-12 education, pensions and veterans' benefits) are 20 percent greater than direct federal spending, and almost as much as total government operations, federal, state, and local, in this area...

...The occasions range from outright scandal (United Way, Marine Corps Toys for Tots, Covenant House) to exploitation of well-meaning charities by professional fundraisers (the United Cancer Council case, now in federal courts) to consistent failure to make regular public disclosure (how many foundations publish annual reports...

...Lamont's is a grim prediction: Quebec's separatists will win their long struggle to take the French-speaking province out of the Canadian confederation and make it a sovereign state...

...Simon is right that thoughts are what human existence is all about, and the more people, the more thoughts...

...Fund...

...The situation may be about to change as a result of a legislative proposal worked out between the Oversight Subcommittee of Ways and Means, the Treasury, and representatives of organized charity...

...Galbraith, a former Congressional aide now at the University of Texas, and Calmon, a teacher at the University of Brasilia, say that "we remain agnostic on whether the American economy overall is or is not 'in decline.' Rather, we see weak sectors getting weaker, strong sectors getting stronger, and a range of problems as a result of the increasing gap between the two...

...This is followed by a brief outburst of violence...

...They find a close and strong link between industrial performance, trade, and wages...

...Myers is correct in thinking that species extinction numbers are among the most damaging ecological impacts caused by people—perhaps the worst, given that, unlike pollution or ozone depletion, extinction is irreversible...

...politics today: a lack of strong leadership, a pervasive public disillusion with politics, mushrooming public debt, a revival of populism...

...In Scarcity or Abundance?, the antagonists Norman Myers and Julian Simon join this vogue, this volume being the transcript of a joint appearance the two made at Columbia University in 1992...

...for that period, however, is 14, with an inferential case that perhaps 100 additional little-known species fell extinct...

...who changed the ethnic mix of large urban centers like Toronto and Vancouver, threatening to marginalize Canada's once-ruling WASPs...