Saving the Mail
How to Solve the Problems of the U.S. Postal Service

  • Title:

    Saving the Mail
  • Format:

    Paperback
  • Paperback Price:

    20.00
  • Paperback ISBN:

    0-8447-4180-9
  • Paperback Dimensions:

    6'' x 9''
  • 152 Paperback pages
  • Buy the Book

View the book summary, press release, and key points.

Rick Geddes has produced the first intensive analysis of the U.S. Postal Service since the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970--just as the federal giant faces the scrutiny of a presidential commission on its long-term viability and President Bush has announced his intention to privatize 800,000 federal jobs.

Although the 1970 act set in motion the most entensive reorganization of a federal agency, almost no rigorous empirical assessment of the act's effects on the Postal Service has been undertaken--until now.

Technological developments in communications, the author contends, make postal reform inevitable. The USPS is unlikely to remain viable for long in its present form.

The author explores USPS structure and performance measures, discounts standard arguments about postal monopolies and duties, and cites the organizational reform of similar industries and experience of other governments that restructured their postal service. He details a two-step reform process, including a public offering of shares featuring employee stock ownership, with concurrent regulation reform, and then the introduction of competition. [more...]

The AEI Evaluative Studies series aims to promote greater understanding and continuing review of major activities of the federal government. Each study focuses on a government program or policy in operation by examining its purposes, administration, costs, and effectiveness and then recommends practical reform for improved performance.

Rick Geddes joined the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University in the autumn of 2002 and is an adjunct scholar AEI.

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About the Author

 

R. Richard
Geddes
  • Rick Geddes is associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. His research fields include private infrastructure investment through public-private partnerships, postal service policy, corporate governance, women's property rights, and antitrust policy. He is a Research Associate at the Mineta Transportation Institute, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Australian National University in Canberra in the fall of 2009, and a Visiting Researcher at the Australian Government's Productivity Commission in the spring of 2010. His research focused on Australian public-private partnerships in both positions. Geddes teaches courses at Cornell on corporate governance and the regulation of industry.

    In addition to his teaching and research at Cornell, Geddes served as a commissioner on the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, which submitted its report to Congress in January 2008. He has held positions as a senior staff economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Visiting Faculty Fellow at Yale Law School, and National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

    In 2008, Geddes received the Kappa Omicron Nu/Human Ecology Alumni Association Student Advising Award. His published work has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, the Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy, and Managerial and Decision Economics, among others.

  • Email: rrg24@cornell.edu
  • Assistant Info

    Name: Brad Wassink
    Phone: 202-862-7197
    Email: brad.wassink@aei.org

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