Fund-of-funds Books

This is a good follow-up piece to Sturtevant's earlier book, "The Artful Journey: Cultivating and Soliciting the Major Gift."

One thing that caught my curiosity about this book was a picture of 50 strawberry plants growing in a 4'x4' bed. I couldn't see how that was possible. But It's true. Quite a number of other vegetables can be grown in much smaller areas than I thought possible too if the soil is made rich enough to support the plants. This is a book that has to be read to be believed. Using well researched information, this book outlines in very easy steps every aspect of a system to grow all a families vegetable needs on very little ground. It's all here and now I am doing it too.

My predecessor recommended this book and let me borrow her copy. I immediately knew I needed my own copy. I hope he comes out with an updated version (as some things in this field change with the economic times) soon. BUY IT!

Now in a newly updated twelfth edition, Corporate Foundation Profiles is a solid, comprehensive, reliable resource filled with a wealth of descriptive information and facts about philanthropic foundations across America. Corporate Foundation Profiles includes extensive and detailed lists of each foundation's purpose, background, staff, extensive analysis and charts concerning its grants, contact information, and much more, Corporate Foundation Profiles is a superb, comprehensive, unparalleled reference and an essential addition to the fund raising resource information collections of non-profit organization and community library reference collections.

Relatively little attention is devoted to four important steps that should be part of any policymaking process. These steps are:

1. Identification of U.S. interests in the region;

2 Identification of the actual or potential developments in the target country most likely to serve those interests;

3. Examination of the factual realities "on the ground" within the country concerned, and;

4. Selection of the U.S. policy most likely to protect the afore-mentioned interests in the target country under the circumstances.

This monograph attempts to work through these four steps, systematically applying them to Cuba. This methodology should make a useful contribution to the effort to reconnect Cuba policy with reason rather than emotion and is applicable by anyone regardless of political opinions held and feelings toward the Cuban regime.
--- except from book's Introduction

Mandelbaum's "The Dawn of Peace in Europe" is a well-researched and articulate piece detailing the future of NATO and of American involvement in Europe. Though short, it is detailed in its analysis and provides the reader with a clear understanding of his position. In it, Mandelbaum attempts to analyse the role of NATO, and critique the directions that other have prescribed for the alliance. Mandelbaum feels that the best course of activity for the alliance is to stay as it is, and redirect its energies into "reassuring" the perpetuation of the common security order that exists in Europe. He feels that NATO is poorly equipped to pursue out-of-area missions, such as the one in Bosnia, and that expansion of NATO is a mistake because it installs victor's justice on Russia, and this justice will be remembered by the Russian people as an insult. It appears as though this analysis regarding the impact NATO expansion will have on Russia is somewhat of a knee-jerk reactions. Opinion has shown consistently that the Russian people do not care if NATo expands and do not feel that it is necessarily a threat to their security. Furthermore, many analysts including Andrei Kortunov have written their opinions on this issue and have shown that only in the most extreme case would there be a nationalist backlash against NATO expansion. Mandelbaum still views Russia as the enemy of NATO, as it was through the Cold War, and thus his view of the alliance may be somewhat dated. Despite this however, he provides the reader with a clear approach to the future of European security. Mandelbaum articulates the idea of a common security order existing in Europe now that ensures the peace without the high costs of balance of power politics and without the unrealistic tenets of world government. Whether or not a security order continues to exist, according to Mandelbaum will depend on whether or not Russia will stay peaceful and if the United States will stay in European defence mechanisms. If things reamain as is, Europe will be the bastion of peace in an all too unpeaceful world. I recommend this book for all analysts interested in European security.

Volume 14 of James M. Buchanan's Collected Works series contains his papers on taxation and on public debt finance. The papers supplement Buchanan's book-length treatments of those subjects (which are, roughly, volumes 2, 4, 8, and 9 in the series).

The papers on taxation are divided into four categories: public choice, earmarking, tax limitations, and fiscal constitutionalism. The dominant theme is the shortcomings of orthodox public finance theory, as observed from a public-choice perspective. Public finance-based tax theory tends to neglect the expenditure side of the government budget. Public finance focuses too much on outcomes, whether of justice or efficiency or economic growth, and not enough on the process by or rules under which these outcomes are obtained. And public finance theory tends to not adequately consider the political setting within which collective choices are made. In short, public finance is interested in what's best for government, while public choice is more interested in what's best for individual citizens.

Buchanan's views on public debt finance can be summarized as follows.
(i.) Public debt constitutes a burden on future generations (we do not "owe it to ourselves"). This is unfair because those future generations end up facing a financial burden that is the result of spending and borrowing decisions in which they had no participation.
(ii.) The tendency in elective majoritarian democracy becomes for government to borrow and spend rather than tax and spend, and to spend much rather than little. "The most elementary prediction from public choice theory is that in the absence of moral or constitutional constraints democracies will finance some share of current public consumption from debt issue rather than from taxation and that, in consequence, spending rates will be higher than would accrue under budget balance." (p. 471) To correct for these defects, Buchanan favors a constitutional balanced budget amendment. Along the way he also thoroughly debunks Robert J. Barro's famous interpretation of Ricardian equivalence.

Most papers in this volume are clearly academic in nature, as are Buchanan's books on the same topics. Personally, I prefer the papers over the books, since they offer the same substance in more concentrated fashion, which means you receive more bang for your buck and for your time invested reading. With this volume, it's time that is very well spent.

Dr. Gansler submits that in order to create a responsive and cost-effective defense industrial base to support the XXI force structure there must be revolutionary movement to a civil/military integration. This would mirror the cost cutting and downsizing achieved by the commercial sector in the early nineties.

However, this would entail a complete review of the defense industrial base to determine which areas should remain governmental (see GAO report [NSIAD-99-31] Army Industrial Facilities: Workforce Requirements and Related Issues Affecting Depots and Arsenals).

The only approved governmental process to privatize the defense base is OMB's A-76 process. Historically, the government agency has proven to be more cost-effective 50% of the time. Gansler's assertion would be received coldly by unions and its congressional allies.

An example of the difficulty to reach this integration is the production of a modern day cannon. The Watervliet Arsenal, (a government owned and operated facility) in Watervliet, NY is the sole producer of this commodity in the country. Instead of trying to integrate it into some sort of civilian status would it not be smarter to increase the workload and maintain the skill base.

Overall, Gansler provides decisive insight into the workings and relationships of the military/industrial complex. Obviously a must read for anyone involved with defense-related policy.

William Gregory has had a lot of experience in the aerospace industry and tells it like it was, is and probably will continue to be. An interesting and informative essay.

James M. Buchanan's The Demand and Supply of Public Goods develops a theory of public goods in response to the more traditional public-goods theory developed during the 1950s by Paul Samuelson in his famous articles in the Review of Economics and Statistics and by Richard A. Musgrave in The Theory of Public Finance. The traditional approach argues that the provision of public goods is justified as a response to market failures. Buchanan argues that just because markets may sometimes fail, it does not automatically follow that government will therefore do a better job. The process of politics is not perfect--group decisions cannot meet individual preferences as closely as can individual decisions. Furthermore, government action is costly (e.g. excess burden associated with taxation, disincentive effects). This is not to say that there should be no government intervention, but government is not the panacea that the political left makes it out to be, and we should be cognizant of its imperfections when deciding how much economic activity to organize through government rather than markets. Whereas the traditional approach focuses on market failure, Buchanan focuses on political failure, arguing that government action should be evaluated by the same criteria by which markets are deemed to have failed. In short, market failure may be a necessary condition for government action, but not a sufficient one.

The Samuelson-Musgrave approach results in a "social welfare function" (p. 128), which is equivalent to the perspective of an outsider looking in to determine what is good for society, i.e. what choices it should make in allocating its resources. This approach may seem somewhat pontificatory in nature, but this is how public finance sees its traditional function: advising governments.

Buchanan, in contrast, develops what he calls a "voluntary exchange" (p. 8) theory of public goods. It is based on the notion that insiders in society, i.e. citizens who participate in their role as taxpayers and as beneficiaries of public services, should be the ones to decide what choices are best for them when it comes to determining which and how many goods should be publicly provided, and how to tax themselves to pay for these goods. One advantage to Buchanan's approach is that the social welfare function inherently contains a normative component that is exogeneously determined (assumed, really), and which Buchanan's model does not require, making his a methodologically purer theory.

Another difference lies in the Samuelson-Musgrave definition of public goods as those that are nonexcludable and nonrivalrous: once provided, no one can be excluded from the provision of a public good, and its provision to additional taxpayer-citizens does not add to its cost. The implicit rationale is that such goods have attributes that make their provision more efficient as a public good than as a private good. In practice, however, only very few goods follow this definition perfectly. Buchanan argues instead that what matters is not so much the physical attributes of a good but how its provision is organized, i.e. whether through market organization or political organization. Thus, Buchanan's model applies to any good of which the provision is to some extent collectively organized.

The book's core methodology is a standard two-person, two-good microeconomic demand-supply model, except that one of the goods is a private good and the other is a public good. With each chapter, the initial assumptions are dropped, and the conclusions are shown to remain intact. As this description may make clear, the book has very much a microeconomics textbook feel to it (it was originally based on second-year graduate seminar lectures Buchanan gave during the 1950s). If you're a graduate student writing a thesis on public-goods theory, you'll definitely want to include this book among your research (along with the papers in volume 15 of Buchanan's Collected Works series, Externalities and Public Expenditure Theory). If you're a general-interest reader, the book may be somewhat on the abstract side, although if you've ever taken microeconomics 101 somewhere, the economics is by no means difficult to follow.