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Debate in California about the funding cuts for higher education has become quite perplexing, partly because some of the parties are not thinking very clearly about it, partly because the question is fairly complicated, partly because the politics of California budgeting have become so pathological. In response to relentless nagging from David Schutz (well, he [...]
Archive for the ‘Policy Analysis’ Category
November 25th, 2009
Category: California Politics, Education policy, Policy Analysis, Policy briefs, Political Science, Politics and Leadership
October 16th, 2009
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Crime Control, Policy Analysis, Politics and Leadership, Prisons and penal policy, Reviews
Want law enforcement that’s really tough on Mexicans? Try Mexico’s. Only seven years until accused there are presumed innocent, and meanwhile the cops aren’t afraid to do what’s needed to get the job done. Like lie under oath.
Roberto and Layda are students in my shop (Roberto is my PhD advisee), and I am over-the-top [...]
May 31st, 2009
Although carbon offsets have been much maligned, they are a useful complement to policies that penalize carbon emissions.
April 11th, 2009
Category: Crime Control, Policy Analysis
Kidnappers and pirates do it for money, in particular for a payment of ransom. Blackbeard wanted the stuff in the ships he seized, but today’s pirates cannot practically sell a cargo of almost anything, nor the ship itself, and the crews’ watches and cellphones don’t amount to anything in this business. (A piracy enterprise in [...]
January 16th, 2009
Category: Policy Analysis
The Economist was wrong, but there are probably better unused ideas for aircraft safety.
December 19th, 2008
Want an easy, politically powerful, and incredibly effective stimulus initiative? How about eradicating malaria?
December 17th, 2008
Now that a group of economists, including well-known Marxists Martin Feldstein and Larry Lindsey, have recommended that the stimulus package reach in the neighborhood of $1 trillion (with a “t”) dollars, a few questions come to mind:
Who will run it? Conceivably, the stimulus “package” could actually be a series of discrete pieces, but there is [...]
September 29th, 2008
The bailout bill provides next to nothing to understand the causes.
September 20th, 2008
Category: Policy Analysis
Why don’t we promote emergency generators when the safety precautions can be listed in a few sentences? Because that’s too much.
August 25th, 2008
Governments around the world have enacted a variety of requirements to reduce the global warming (GW) effect of its vehicle fuel mix. This is already complicated because some of the GW effect of the biofuels that looked like good plays a year ago results from land use changes hard to measure but probably very [...]
