Evaluating the success of President Johnson's War on Poverty
Richard Burkhauser et al. | AEI Economic Policy Working Paper Series This paper evaluates progress in the War on Poverty relative to the 20 percent baseline poverty rate President Lyndon Johnson established for 1963. No existing poverty measure fully captures poverty reductions based on the standard that President Johnson set. To fill this gap, this paper develops a full-income poverty measure with thresholds set to match the 1963 official poverty rate. While the official poverty rate fell from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 12.3 percent in 2017, this full-income poverty rate based on President Johnson’s standards fell from 19.5 percent to 2.3 percent over that period. Today, almost all Americans have income above the inflation-adjusted thresholds established in the 1960s. Although expectations for minimum living standards evolve, this suggests substantial progress combating absolute poverty since the War on Poverty began.
Weigel’s Books for Christmas–2019
By George Weigel on Dec 11, 2019 03:19 pm Resist the twitterization of thought — give books for Christmas! The following titles will delight, instruct, edify (or all of the above): Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts (Viking): There seems to be no [...] Read in browser »  The Iron Lady Alone by John O. McGinnis Charles Moore has written a splendid conclusion to his life of Margaret Thatcher. Read More » The Federalist's Best Books Of 2019
mentioning Jack Goldsmith via The Federalist Another year has nearly passed, and so we present another long list of compelling book recommendations from The Federalist's staff and contributors.  2019 War on the Rocks Holiday Reading List by WOTR Staff In recent months, waves of protests have rocked first Sudan and Egypt and now Iraq and Lebanon. To understand the waves of instability buffeting the region, it is necessary to understand shifting regional debates across the Middle East. In a newly released chapter from the forthcoming book "Seven Pillars: What Really Causes Instability in the Middle East?" AEI's Michael Rubin examines notions of legitimacy in the Arab world and explores how divergences in Middle Eastern and Western concepts of legitimacy have contributed to both regional and local instability on the one hand and misguided US and European policies on the other. Read the full chapter here. Despots of the Square-Kilometer Empires by Amir Taheri • The Best Books On The Russian Revolution
mentioning Robert Service via Insider Financial Just over a century ago, on February 22, 1917 (using the Russian Julian calendar which was 13 days behind the West), began the civil protests and strikes in Petrograd that would topple Tsar Nicholas II and mark the start of the Russian Revolution. It would culminate, eight months later, with the Bolshevik coup and Lenin’s assumption of power.  You Can Trust Chinese Communists To Be Brutal Communists cited Frank Dikötter via News Max This month Red Chinese leaders celebrated the 70th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s bloody victory over nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. 
How To Be A Dictator By Frank Diktter Review - The Cult Of Personality featuring Frank Dikötter via The Guardian Charisma, a lust for power, an absence of principles … what links Mao, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and other 20th-century dictators? Frank Dikotter: Inside The Dictator's Mind interview with Frank Dikötter via ABC Radio Hoover Institution fellow Frank Dikotter discusses his book How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century. Books Of The Year mentioning Frank Dikötter via New Statesman America Our friends and contributors choose their favorite reading of 2019 'How To Be A Dictator' Review: A Poetics For Tyrants
by Tunku Varadarajan featuring Frank Dikötter via The Wall Street Journal A dictator cannot lead through oppression alone.  George Will and American power
How his conservative sensibility informs his approach to foreign policy Clifford D. May | Founder & Presiden  The Lost Art of Deterrence Education
By Curtis McGiffin, National Institute for Public Policy: "The NDS and NPR have objectively described a twenty-first century world of near-peer competition that combines Cold War-like hostility with the hasty proliferation of novel technology, while also demanding a “flexible, tailored nuclear deterrent strategy.”"  'A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream' Yuval Levin | Basic Books Now is not a time to tear down, but rather to build and rebuild by committing ourselves to the institutions around us. On War and National Interests
By Anthony Cowden, RealClearDefense: Meanwhile, somewhere in a Joint Professional Military Education (JPME) classroom… The Provocations of Camille Paglia The maverick critic and scholar has championed great art, defended free speech, and offered groundbreaking analysis of popular culture. 
HEATHER MAC DONALD A Platform of Urban Decline Democratic presidential candidates believe America is racist, yet they ignore the evidence on crime and ensure that racial disparities persist. City Talks: Jonathan Rodden On The Deep Roots Of The Urban-Rural Political Divide interview with Jonathan Rodden via Centre for Cities Hoover Institution fellow Jonathan Rodden discusses his book Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide, as well as the origins of America’s urban-rural political divide and how economic geography shapes elections – both in the USA and beyond. JOHN TIERNEY
A Renaissance Runs Through It What Pittsburgh’s latest comeback tells us about urban revitalization The Ghosts Of Past Wars Live On In A Critical Archive mentioning Hoover Institution via War on the Rocks The United States will soon deploy soldiers to Afghanistan born after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Next August will mark the 30th anniversary of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, along with the subsequent American-led military buildup leading to Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. The American military has been directly engaged in the “greater Middle East” since. For the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, the experience of war has extended longer, with this December marking the 40th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and next September the same for Iraq’s invasion of Iran. War Books: The Commander and the Staff By Nick Bono, Modern War Institute: "There are plenty of commander-centric reading lists and even more for executives operating in the private sector. The authority of command should not be understated, but the organization following the commander bears some responsibility for the effectiveness of the unit." The 2019 War on the Rocks Summer Fiction Reading List by WOTR Staff  War Books: Summer Reading List By John Amble, Modern War Institute: "One of Japan’s largest warships, the helicopter carrier Izumo, offers a glimpse of where its military is headed: For the first time, troops from a newly formed amphibious brigade of Japan’s army participated in an extended naval deployment." George Will's Guide To Conserving The Founders' Liberalism
by Peter Berkowitz via Real Clear Politics Patrick Deneen’s disdainful review last month in the Washington Post of George Will’s splendid new book, “The Conservative Sensibility,” reasserts fashionable misconceptions about liberalism, conservatism, and America. The review — and, more importantly, the book — provide an occasion to clarify the character of the conservatism that takes its bearings from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and from the ideas about human nature and freedom that undergird them.  The Economics of Religion
A new book explores how faith motivates productivity.  Promise and Waste
George Packer’s absorbing biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke 
JONATHAN CLARKE
Living to Regret A new book reveals the moral legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  ASPI Suggests
By Jack Norton, Aakriti Bachhawat & Malcolm Davis, The Strategist (ASPI): "Global thermonuclear war is ‘a strange game’. As the line from the 1983 movie War Games goes, ‘the only winning move is not to play’. But The Drive notes that the movie (one of tech geek’s favourites) also had a huge impact on US President Ronald Reagan’s thinking on cyber warfare and resulted in the first presidential directive on cybersecurity." War Books: Intelligence, Forecasting, and Modern War By Adam Maisel, Modern War Institute: "Alec Ross, The Industries of the Future - Ross served as a senior adviser to the State Department on innovation and his book envisions the generally positive effects of five key areas in technological advancement: robotics, genomics, the increased importance of big data and analytics, the rise of cryptocurrencies, and the importance of the cyber domain."  Joseph Bosco writes: This past week at the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute, Henry Kissinger’s former associates met to discuss “Kissinger on Kissinger,” an oral history by the former secretary of State. […]But the reprise of Kissinger’s diplomatic feats suffers from historical myopia. Roy asserted, for example, that “The breakthrough to China … really was a turning point in the Cold War,” inducing Moscow to enter Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.[…] In fact, however, the détente period brought heightened Cold War tensions, Soviet global advances, and a near-nuclear confrontation during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. – The Hill
|
Author of "The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature of Mass Movements."
Archives
December 2019
Categories |
||||||||||||||||||
RSS Feed