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Canada geese shouldn't be present in such numbers - and they nearly weren't. Thanks to overhunting and habitat loss, their numbers were dangerously low by the 1950s. But better environmental laws helped reverse the decline, and the geese learned to adapt to and eventually thrive in man-made environments. Ponds in public parks, people to feed them, nicely mowed yards and golf courses - Canada geese found a home in America's expanding suburbs, even in such hot spots as Arizona, Florida and South Carolina...
...spin this into a case for reduced regulation--regulators are likely to mess up, so why bother? But it can also point toward an approach based not so much on discretion as on rules, the simpler the better. I first encountered this argument last fall in the work of left-leaning blogger Matthew Yglesias--he advocated "crude measures" like the old ban on interstate banking. Lately, though, I've been hearing similar suggestions from those of a conservative, University of Chicago bent. "When you give a lot of discretion to regulators, they don't use the tools that are given...
...tuning their risk-weighted capital rules, in some cases using the supposedly sophisticated risk models developed by banks themselves. The result was ratios of debt to capital that topped 35 to 1 at some investment banks. Oops! A simpler, cruder standard (say, 10 to 1) surely would have worked better...
...idea of our annual making of America issue is to use history to help explain the challenges of the moment. No historical figure does that better than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is not a new idea, of course--we did a cover image of President Obama in the guise of F.D.R. back in November. But this week, we dive deeply into F.D.R.'s Administration and discuss what the new President can learn from how F.D.R. dealt with both the Depression and a gathering international storm. As former President Bill Clinton writes in his insightful back-page essay, "Roosevelt...
...Edith Ronne, 89, became the first U.S. woman to set foot in Antarctica. Her Norwegian-born husband Finn, a former U.S. Navy captain, asked her to join the expedition so that Edith--who had better English skills--could pen his newspaper dispatches...