Poverty spending and the poverty gap

This paper examines two questions basic to welfare policy: (1) whether the amount of poverty-related transfers is sufficient to fill the poverty gap, and (2) which families actually get benefits and how much of their income deficit is filled by those benefits. Transfers are sufficient: the post-Social Security poverty gap is $74 billion while poverty-related programs total $198 billion. Further, 86% of current income-conditioned benefits go to the pretransfer poor and 89% of those are used to alleviate poverty (fill the poverty gap). Thus, if a substantial fraction of total Federal and State expenditures on poverty-related programs could be targeted more toward the poor, the poverty gap can be eliminated. The current programs, however, would have to be changed substantially to achieve the necessary retargeting.     

CRIME AND PERSONALITY REVISITED

The present study explored the effects of MMPI response sets on relatonships between crime and personality in self-report studies. The MMPI-168 and a 21-item delinquent behavior questionnaire were administered to 1680 high school students. The Psychopathic Deviate, Schizophrenia, and Hypomania scales of the MMPI-168 were correlated with delinquent behaviors, with and without control for the L, F, and K scales of the MMPI-168, considered separately and simultaneously. Controlling for F eliminated some relationships and significantly diminished the magnitude of others, while control for L and K had no significant effect. Studies of this nature that fail to control for the F type of response set may produee largely illusory results.     

The Cost of Terrorism: The Relationship Between International Terrorism and Democratic Governance

After Al Qaeda's destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, many democracies reacted to the event, and to international terrorism in general, by passing laws restricting civil liberties and political rights, raising questions about the balance between security and liberty. Such laws have produced alarms among civil libertarians, worldwide. Are the alarms justified? In this article we analyze the relationship between the yearly number of international terrorist attacks in 24 countries from 1968–2003 and (a) measures of civil liberties and political rights as provided by Freedom House, and (b) levels of democracy as measured in the Polity IV scales. We take the number of international terrorist events, by country, from data provided by the Memorial Institute of the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp. Our analysis indicates that there is, generally, no relationship between the number of international terrorist events and the levels of civil rights, political rights, or democracy as measured by the Freedom House and Polity IV indicators. When there is a statistically significant relationship, it is negative, opposite to what is predicted by the tradeoff hypothesis.     

Military First Doctrine Is Behind North Korea Adventurism

The recurrent crises emanating from North Korea, and the response to them, is testing US‐China relations and drawing the new boundaries of power in East Asia. The head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the former South Korean national security advisor address this development.     

Notes on contributors

The question of the linkage of democratic forms of government with the incidence of terrorist violence is explored. Distinguishing between the presence of terrorist groups in a nation and violent terrorist events, and using multiple indicators of democratic development, evidence is presented clearly linking democracy with the presence of terrorist groups. Terrorist groups are less likely to be found in non‐democratic settings than in democratic ones.