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wished to see passed. Baldwin is correct in noting that the President is in- clined to resist protectionist measures. However, when the bill is a mixed bag (as was the Trade Act of 1974) a legislator’s “yes” vote may be intended to support its protectionist provisions or, alternatively, intended to prevent the more protectionist outcomes that might occur if the bill was turned away. Precisely this kind of dilemma faces the Senate, now that the House has passed H.R. 4800. Baldwin’s analysis of Congress is flawed by having as the dependent variable a vote that is not easily categorized.

The analysis of presidential decision-making in ITC import relief cases and in the Tokyo round tariff cuts are particularly insightful. As an indicator of how far the political economy of import policy still has to go, Baldwin’s main conclusion leaves us with many questions. While short-run interest theories do not explain U.S. trade policy at all, the modified models explain only a small portion of the policy outcomes. Baldwin writes, “It seems impossible at this stage of empirical testing to determine more precisely the explanatory power of the different models. To do so, it is necessary to find economic variables that delineate the models more sharply and thereby reduce the overlaps that now exist.” Yet the variables used in these models as proxies for behavior do not truly reflect the nature of political and economic behav- ior in the real world. Thus, as the author wraps up the fourth chapter, he has achieved his purpose of making attractive further economic research into the field of the political economy of import policy. The models need refining, but at least they do show a glimpse of the interactions of politics and economics in the policy world. Perhaps more importantly, Baldwin shows through his use of statistical regressions that the legitimacy of young international econ- omists today will not be undermined by pursuing these topics of research.

STUART K. TUCKER is a Fellow at the Overseas Development Council, a pri- vate, public policy institute in Washington, DC.

MANPOWER

Michael A. Bailin and Marc R. Freedman

National Service: What Would I t Mean?, by Richard Danzig and Peter Szan- ton. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1 9 8 6 , 3 0 6 ~ ~ . Price: $30.00

The words “national service” conjure up the vision of an army of American youth, dedicating a year of their lives to addressing the nation’s greatest unmet needs-helping the elderly, tutoring young children, protecting the wilderness, and at the same time getting, in the words of William James, “the childishness knocked out of them . . . to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.”’ That visionary army would solve America’s social, environmental and employment problems and, simulta- neously, reduce the alienation of its youth.

It is this ideal of national service, embodied in James’ 1910 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” that likely inspired 65 percent of the respondents to a Gallup poll in 1984 to favor a year of national service for all young Americans in return for educational benefits. That year and again in 1985, a bill to establish an American Conservation Corps, patterned after FDR’s Ci- vilian Conservation Corps, generated enthusiastic support from conserva-

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tives and liberals and passed both houses of Congress overwhelmingly before being vetoed by President Reagan. It is clear, however, that James, the pub- lic, and Congress, at least, were considering an ideal. The ideal remains to be translated into operational elements-and each one of those elements is controversial.

With the youth cohort expected to decline sharply through 1992, it is cer- tainly time to begin to examine what national service might actually look like in practice. Should an All Volunteer Force be insufficient to sustain the necessary military manpower, national service would likely be proposed as one vehicle for mitigating the inequities of the draft.

In “National Service: What Would It Mean?,” Richard Danzig and Peter Szanton have made an enormous contribution to future exploration. The comprehensiveness and rigor of their study has taken national service out of the realm of the ideal, where its vagueness serves only to maintain a broad political constituency, and made it a concrete subject for careful analysis.

After examining the societal, personal, and military aspects of national service, Danzig and Szanton force us to look hard at its implications. Their device for doing so is the presentation of four plausible models for national service, designed to bring into sharp relief the key constitutional, political, social, economic and logistic issues surrounding the concept. Briefly, these models are:

School-Based Service: 240 hours of service during the school year or the summer would be a prerequisite for high school graduation. Draft-Based Service: A military draft for 18 year olds would require two years of service in the armed forces or a civilian alternative. Voluntary Service: The current range of such volunteer programs as Peace Corps, VISTA, and state and local youth service and conservation corps would be expanded to include 180,000 individuals in volunteer efforts.

9 Universal Service: One year of military or civilian service would be mandatory for all United States citizens. The year might be served at any age, though individuals would be assessed a 5 percent federal income surtax each year until service was rendered.

The authors describe these models in detail, skillfully weighing their so- cial, personal, and economic benefits and costs. They examine the variations to shed light on some basic considerations: should service be mandatory or voluntary; should it include just men of draft age, or everyone of all ages; which services could be performed by whom; should the main benefits ac- crue to the servers or those served; should national service be designed for the disadvantaged or for everyone; to what extent should it be centrally or locally planned or managed; what would be the effects of each model on public services, the military, the labor market and participants; what would be the public costs and consequences of each?

Having defined the issues-with a richness and specificity unusual in such analyses-the authors draw conclusions that address the most common con- tentions of proponents and critics of national service. Danzig and Szanton find all four of their models of national service to be constitutionally permis- sible, politically plausible, and capable of performing many tasks that now go undone. But they also conclude that service is likely to meet the needs of only some youth, only partially and at high cost; that it is a poor solution to reducing youth unemployment; that it would provide little in the way of

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benefits to the military; and that implementation would be difficult and at a cost not offset by the value of the work done.

For advocates of national service, the weight of their findings is discourag- ing. However, among these conclusions is an important qualification. Danzig and Szanton acknowledge that some of national service’s most important potential benefits defy economic analysis. Persistent questions remain to be resolved: Would national service provide a sense of citizenship earned rather than simply received, producing individuals who value the country more highly? What would be the effect of opening up to citizen participation and scrutiny the large bureaucratic institutions now obscured from public view? Would national service create a pool of human resources that could enlarge such services as day care, conservation or assistance to the aged? Would it stimulate voluntarism generally? It is precisely around these more elusive issues, which Danzig and Szanton frame but cannot resolve, that national service’s vast and tantalizing potential resides.

Despite the unavailability of this knowledge, national service should not be removed from consideration as public policy for two quite different reasons. First and pragmatically, whatever its impact on the nation’s social and envi- ronmental needs and on the needs of American youth, national service may very well become policy simply because it could help make a military draft politically possible. Second-and speculatively-there remains that close correspondence between national service’s elusive areas of promise and many of this society’s most serious, and thus far intractable, problems. For these divergent but equally compelling reasons, we would do well to heed Danzig and Szanton’s call for continued, careful examination of the elements of national service.

MICHAEL A. BAILIN is President of PubliclPrivate Ventures, Philadelphia. MARC R. FREEDMAN is a Program OfFcer at PubliclPrivate Ventures, Philadel- phia.

NOTES

1. James, W. “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in The Moral Equivalent of War and Other Essays and Selections from Some Problems of Philosophy, edited b y John K. Roth, pp. 3-16. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971.

DEFENSE

Derek Leebaert

Toward a More Effective Defense: Report o f the Defense Organization Project, Barry M. Blechman and William J. Lynn, Editors. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1985, 247pp. Price: $24.95 cloth.

Security Commitments and Capabilities: Elements of an American Global Strat- egy, Uri Ra’anan and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Editors. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1985, 204pp. Price: $32.50 cloth.

The objective of foreign policy is to bring into balance the state’s commit- ments with its capabilities, while holding a comfortable surplus of power in reserve. And the fundamental defense policy lesson of the last generation is