Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, where they toiled in segregated units and received little formal training. Leveraging novel variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, we document the pioneering role...

Some central questions in the natural and social sciences can’t be answered by controlled laboratory experiments, often considered to be the hallmark of the scientific method. This impossibility holds for any science concerned with the past. In addition, many manipulative experiments, while...

It is found that the “Theory of Moves” is adequate in a Cold War scenario, with functionally equal participants, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The destabilization of normal incentive systems, under power and information asymmetry, is what prevents an equilibrium from being reached, as...

The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In...

The US Government is the largest purchaser of goods and services in the WORLD spending over $400 Billion annually. This figure does not take into consideration the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act/Stimulus Funding. The government purchases everything from products to services...

In the midst of growing public wariness about large-scale foreign interventions, the Obama administration has decided to arm the Syrian rebels. Those who call for increasing the scope of U.S. aid to the Syrian rebels argue that (1) arming the rebels is the cheapest way to halt a humanitarian...

Of all the functions of government, or the State, national defense is generally considered to be the most essential. Ideally, national defense should be a service provided by government to the people. The service entails protection from aggressors outside the State’s jurisdiction, usually...

The process of assigning property rights to land in the American Great Plains resulted in farms that were too small to be economically viable. These farms were prime contributors to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The path dependence resulting from the initial assignment of property rights on the...

The UK’s recent exit from the European Union has sparked new interest in secession and has generated debate on the right to secede. The majority of people in the United States are either dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied with their federal government. The problem is that there is no...