The Atlantic | March 2003 | Primary Sources |

Contents | March 2003

The Atlantic Monthly | March 2003

Primary Sources

Selections from recent reports, studies, and other documents. This month: Who's the most partisan newspaper columnist of them all? follow-up at Three Mile Island; Uzbek love; the term paper goes extinct

Foreign Affairs

The Cost of War

Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, estimated the cost of the war to preserve the Union to be a thirteenth of what it eventually was. John Maynard Keynes's famous Economic Consequences of the Peace failed to predict the Great Depression looming in the aftermath of World War I. In a report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, William Nordhaus, a professor of economics at Yale, cites these monuments of faulty economic forecasting. He nevertheless proceeds to give the clearest and most thorough prediction yet written of the economic consequences of war with Iraq. Nordhaus's high-range estimate for the cost of a war itself is $140 billion, around 1.5 percent of U.S. GDP—about half of what the United States spent during the Mexican or the Spanish-American War, and far less than expenditures during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. But peacekeeping, reconstruction, and nation-building could cost more than a hundred billion dollars. Is it plausible that Congress would appropriate this postwar-reconstruction money, Nordhaus asks, when the annual U.S. foreign-aid budget for the entire world is only $15 billion? The accompanying tables alone—of the cost per capita in dollars and in lives, of each of America's major wars—make the chapter worth a look. (Nordhaus's contribution is one of three articles in the academy's report.)

—"War With Iraq: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives" (www.amacad.org/publications/monographs/War_with_Iraq.pdf)

Lions Don't Pay

Kenya recently held successful democratic elections for only the second time in its history, giving rise to the (faint) hope that it can now deal with the findings of a national study on urban bribery. The study, conducted by Transparency International, found a society in which bribery is a way of life. It estimated that Kenyan city dwellers pay an average of sixteen bribes a month, making their total cost of living 31 percent more than it would be in a bribe-free society. Police officers were found to demand bribes more frequently than any other Kenyans (accounting for 40 percent of the total), but employees of the Ministry of Public Works were found to demand the largest bribes. (The Immigration Department, the Ministry of Lands, and the Nairobi City Council were also found to be highly corrupt.) The most bribe-free institution was perceived to be the Central Bank of Kenya, followed by the Kenya Wildlife Service.

—"Corruption in Kenya" (www.tikenya.org)

The Nation

Follow the (Stupid) Money

Late last year New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who has become the scourge of Wall Street because of his attacks on financial-industry shenanigans, went into the lion's den—a dinner at which awards were given to institutional investor "all-stars"—and proceeded to beard away.

The message being broadcast to individual investors by linking the awards to stock picking is deceptively simple: follow the 'smart' ... money and act on these recommendations. That message is simply deceptive. It implies that tonight's awards measure the performance of the buy, sell and hold recommendations offered. In fact, tonight's awards do no such thing ... At the request of my office, a company by the name of Investars has analyzed the recommendations of more than four hundred past and present institutional investor all-star analysts in 51 industries ... The results are in, and they're telling. In many instances, those named to the all-star team are turning in lackluster performances. The advice of analysts not chosen would very often have been more profitable to individual investors than the advice of all-star team members ... When measured by the performance of their stock recommendations, only one of the more than 100 members of the 2000 and 2001 first team all-stars included in their study ranked first in their sector ... More than 40% of this year's first team all-stars did not perform as well as the average analyst for their sector. The same is true of the 2000 and 2001 first team all-stars whose performance was reviewed.

—"Speeches of New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer" (www.oag.state.ny.us/press/statements/nov12_inst.html)

Three Mile Island, Twenty Years On

From Atlantic Unbound:

Flashbacks: "Living With Fallout" (March 28, 1999)
What happens when people are exposed to nuclear radiation? Three articles from the 1970s through the 1990s consider the health and policy implications. On March 28, 1979, an accident in a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant, in Pennsylvania, caused radioactive isotopes to be released into the environment, arousing widespread fears of contamination. The next few years made hits of such nuclear-nightmare films as The China Syndrome and Silkwood. Meanwhile, researchers at the Pennsylvania Department of Health began compiling a comprehensive health registry and monitoring the long-term health of nearly everyone who lived in the area of exposure around Three Mile Island. Now, more than twenty years after the event, Environmental Health Perspectives has just published a report concluding that although future illnesses may yet be traced to radiation exposure in 1979, after twenty years of follow-up study there is "no consistent evidence that radioactivity released during the nuclear accident has had a significant impact on the overall mortality experience of these residents."

—"Long Term Follow-Up of the Residents of the Three Mile Island Accident Area: 1979-1998"(ehpnet1.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2003/5662/abstract.pdf)

Society

The Other CPI

What national newspaper has the most partisan op-ed page? Conservatives would say it's The New York Times. Liberals would say it's The Wall Street Journal. According to the recently released Combined Partisanship Index (let's call it CPI) for 2002, which systematically tracks columnists' political comments, the liberals are correct: the conservative-leaning Journal easily outpartisaned the liberal-leaning Times. (The Washington Post, though it boasted some of the most partisan individual columnists, had a low partisan ranking, because of its "greater ideological diversity and a large number of centrist and international affairs columnists.") But the most partisan columnist—by a long shot—is a liberal, the Times's Paul Krugman, who scored an 82 (out of 100) on the CPI. In ninety-nine columns last year Krugman made ninety-three positive comments about Democrats but only forty-two positive comments about Republicans. It was his negative comments, however, that made him the runaway winner: twenty-one about the Democrats, 759 about the Republicans. (A CPI score of zero would mean that all political references in a column over the course of a year were exactly balanced between the parties; a CPI score of 100 would mean that all references favored, or disparaged, only one party.) Krugman was followed by Collin Levey (57 on the CPI), Claudia Rosett (46), and Robert L. Bartley (37), all of The Wall Street Journal, and Michael Kelly (34), of The Washington Post.

—"The Absurdity of Partisanship" (www.lyinginponds.com)

Term (Paper) Limits

If 95 percent of high school teachers surveyed believe that writing a research term paper is "important" or "very important," then why have only 19 percent of them ever assigned a paper of more than 5,000 words, and only 38 percent ever assigned one of more than 3,000 words? Because it simply takes too long to grade them. According to a new study by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis, 66 percent of teachers polled spend at least half an hour per paper, with 37 percent spending at least an hour, and 18 percent spending two hours or more. Let's do the math. Some teachers have five classes of thirty students each. Assigning a twenty-page paper to each student would mean that the beleaguered teacher has to read 3,000 pages—and, based on the estimates of how much time it takes to evaluate one paper, spend seventy-five to 300 hours grading—while teaching classes, creating tests, and attending faculty meetings. One teacher explained to researchers that grading papers "just takes up my free time after school ... messes up my fishing time."

—"History Research Paper Study" (www.tcr.org/historytcr.pdf)

The Next "Special Relationship"?

Yet another survey showing that the world thinks the United States is overweening and arrogant? Well, yes: the first Pew Global Attitudes Project does report that since 2000 "favorability" ratings for the United States have fallen in nineteen of the twenty-seven countries where the survey was conducted that year, and that pockets of "true dislike, if not hatred" of this country are concentrated in the Middle East and Central Asia. The good news is that in thirty-five of the forty-two countries surveyed in 2002, people continue to have an overall view of the United States that is, at least, somewhat favorable, and few people interviewed say they would like to see a second superpower rise to challenge us. Perhaps the most alarming finding is that a majority of respondents in Lebanon and Ivory Coast, and sizable minorities in Nigeria, Bangladesh, Jordan, Pakistan, and at least five other countries, say they believe that suicide bombing in defense of Islam is justifiable. The most surprising finding is how beloved America has become in Uzbekistan, which has a significant Muslim population and where the United States has recently established military bases. If the survey is accurate, we are loved more by the Uzbeks than by just about anyone else in the world (only the Filipinos, oddly, love us more): favorable ratings for the United States outweigh unfavorable ratings by nearly 8 to 1 there, and more than a third of Uzbeks view us "very favorably."

—"What the World Thinks in 2002"
(people-press.org/reports/display.php3? ReportID=165)

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