New Books In Public Policy

The law does things, writes David Ray Papke, and it says things, and if we are talking about poor Americans, especially those living in big cities, what it does and says combine to function as powerfully oppressive forces that can much more likely be counted on to do harm than good. Join us as we discuss Papke's book Containment and Condemnation: Law and the Oppression of the Urban Poor (Michigan State University Press, 2019) and learn about how law functions in the lives of poor people in the U.S. today. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back on the podcast for the second time in two years is Alex Hertel-Fernandez. You might recall his last book Politics at Work which examined the way employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy. Alex is back with his latest, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States--and the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. In State Capture, Hertel-Fernandez focuses on the development and political power of  three inter-locking interest groups: the Koch Brothers-run Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the State Policy Network (SPN). Drawing from an array of sources of data, Hertel-Fernandez shows how, since the 1970s, conservative policy entrepreneurs, large financial contributors, and major corporations built a right-wing "troika" of overlapping and inf

Debra Thompson, in her award-winning* book The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explores the complexities of the politics of the census. This book, which unpacks the census itself, leads the reader to consider how this mundane tool actually translates the abstraction of the state into a concrete entity, and, at the same time, how this tool has been and is used in contradictory ways in regard to the issue of race. Thompson, in exploring the census, contextualizes her analysis within three case studies: the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She examines these cases over the course of more than 200 years of history and data, and she traces the shifts and changes in terms of racial categorization on the census, noting the fluid nature of understandings of race as applied to the citizen body in each of these countries, and how race was made legible by the census. The Schematic State also digs into the state, how it makes use of

The so-called Urban Crisis of the 1970s continues to loom large in narratives of US urban politics and history, but what can we learn about the period from movies? In Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination (SUNY Press, 2018), Nathan Holmes burrows down into some key visual texts -- including Klute, Serpico, and the Taking of Pelham 123 -- and tells us about cities, suburbs, anxieties about modernism, identity, politics, and more. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Peter Hotez is a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the worlds poor. He is also the father of a daughter who was diagnosed with autism. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has long been disproven, but it is still a belief held onto by the anti-vaccine movement. This puts Dr. Hotez in a particularly powerful position to speak out. As the anti-vaccine movement grows and vaccine-preventable diseases continue to spread due to the misinformation spread by the movement, Dr. Hotez is on a mission to spread the truth. In the book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Dr. Hotez uses his knowledge of vaccine science and experiences as a parent of a child with autism to dispel the dangerous myths the ani-vaccine movement spread. This deeply personal and passionate book is a must read for any parent who is vaccine hesitant, parents of a child with autis

Today we are joined by Danyel Reiche, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the American University of Beirut, and the author of Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games (Routedge, 2016) In Success and Failure, Reiche provides a playbook for National Committees that want to win more medals. Reiche’s fascinating work moves beyond the macro level analysis of international sports success to offer concrete policy initiatives for the 21st century. Previous studies have shown that GDP, population size, and even political or cultural ideologies can grant some countries athletic advantages – for example geography plays a large role in determining the winners at the Winter Games – but Reiche illustrates that these factors are not the only ones that matter. Why is Germany so successful at the luge while snowy Sweden seems to unsuccessful. The key to winning medals, Reiche’s WISE formula suggests, lay in (W) investing in female athletes, (I) institutionalization of a nation’s sports management, (S)

Thanks to the efforts of activists concerned that the problem of “battered women” was being ignored -- and treated as a private, family matter rather than a broader social problem -- since the 1980s interpersonal/domestic violence has been treated as a criminal act enforced by the institutions of American criminal justice. But too seldom have we asked if this approach has actually worked. In her powerful and provocative new book, Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (University of California Press, 2018), Leigh Goodmark asks us to evaluate the effects of criminalizing domestic violence and to consider what might be gained by thinking about interpersonal violence as a problem of economics, public health, community, and human rights. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People

There’s lot of talk these days, at least in some circles on the left, of a Universal Basic Income. There’s also talk in many of the same circles of a jobs guarantee. Join us as we speak with Steven Attewell, author of People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). He tells us the history of direct job creation by government in the U.S. and the lessons to be learned from the successes and failures of such efforts throughout the 20th century. It's a fascinating, surprising, and essential history. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit meg

The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain (Princeton University Press, 2019), it only emerged after decades of different legislative responses to the problems of poverty that reflected shifting societal attitudes on the subject. As Boyer explains, welfare policy in the early 19th century primarily consisted of cash or in-kind payments provided for people living in their homes. This changed with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which replaced it with the infamous workhouse system. Though this brought down expenditures on the poor, the expectation that poverty was being reduced was belied by a series of reports at the end of the century which exposed the extent of urban poverty to a shocked nation. In response, the Liberal governments of the early 20th century passed a serie

Hidetaka Hirota is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Prior to his current position, he was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and taught at the City University of New York-City College. Dr. Hirota’s book, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2018) has received awards from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the New England American Studies Association, and the American Conference for Irish Studies, and Dr. Hirota’s book also received a special commendation for the Massachusetts Historical Society book prize. Dr. Hirota’s book focuses on state legislation policies of immigration control in New York and Massachusetts. Dr. Hirota asserts those laws come to act as a framework for subsequent federal policy. While most American Studies scholars have mostly aligned with the dominant theory th

The opioid crisis in America is considered by many to be the worst national public health crisis in the last 100 years. In his new book, The Opioid Crisis Wake Up Call: Health Care is Stealing the American Dream. Here is How We Take It Back (Health Rosetta Media, 2018), Dave Chase dives into the history and causes of the crisis and outlines a path towards fixing it. Dave takes a thoughtful look at our dysfunctional healthcare system and sees ways it can be fixed using technologies and strategies that are already in use at some organizations. He talks about ways to eliminate waste and corruption while restoring hope to the American public. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his most new book Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (NYU Press, 2018), Clarence Taylor, dean of the history of the civil rights movement in New York, looks at black resistance to police brutality in the city, and institutional efforts to hold the NYPD accountable, since the late 1930s and '40s. ​“Many people think that police brutality is a recent phenomenon,” says Taylor, professor emeritus at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of City University of New York. But, in fact, it has a long, sordid history, going back even further than the years covered in this new book. And long before the era of cellphones, black newspapers did their own investigations when men, women, and children were beaten or killed by the police. (Louis Lomax, the first African-American journalist to appear regularly on television news, commented in the early 1960s that, if not for police brutality, the black press would have "considerable blank space.") Taylor also looks a

I spoke with Professor Rodrigo Zeidan of New York University, Shanghai. He has just published Economics of Global Business (MIT Press, 2018), a great book with innovative real-world macroeconomic analyses of timely policy issues, with case studies and examples from more than fifty countries. The book is particularly suitable for use as an introduction to macroeconomics for business students. If you are looking for something accessible that covers also the most contemporary topics (inequality, climate change, migration, sustainability, austerity, financial crisis…), go and buy it. It is a beautiful book written having in mind students with no previous education in economics. It is original in its style, in the selection of themes and in the approach to policy making. The book is divided into two parts and 15 chapters. The preface starts with an amazing personal story of his infancy. After presenting analytical foundations, modeling tools, and theoretical perspectives, Economics of Global Business goes a step f

Peyote occupies a curious place in the United States and Mexico: though prohibited by law, its use remains permissible in both countries for ceremonial practices in certain religions. As Alexander S. Dawson reveals in The Peyote Effect: From the Inquisition to the War on Drugs (University of California Press, 2018), this anomalous position is nothing new, as it existed as far back as the prohibitions on the use of peyote by non-Indians imposed by the Inquisition in Mexico during the colonial period. Though this ban ended with Mexico’s independence, it was not until chemists in Germany and the United States began investigating peyote’s properties in the late 19th century that its usage spread outside of Native American communities. Fears of the drug’s psychoactive effects led to a succession of state-level U.S. bans in the early 20th century, yet these were usually fragmentary in their scope, allowing for its continued usage by Native American communities outside their jurisdictions. The broader use of peyote

Think that today's debates about the role of the Federal Reserve Bank, financial regulation, "too big to fail", etc. are new?  Think again. Who should control banks, who should regulate banks, what should banks even do--these questions have been debated since the founding of the Republic.  Replace CNBC's David Faber with Alexander Hamilton, and Joe Kernan with Thomas Jefferson (or James Madison) and the arguments about banking, moral hazard, and regulation would be largely the same, though the attire would be quite different. Kathleen Day's new book Broken Bargain: Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street (Yale University Press, 2019) provides a detailed two-century history of the give and take between government authority and financial institutions (and the individuals caught between them).  The challenges over time have changed--the absence of a single currency in the early 19th century, insufficient credit in the late 19th century, the roaring and patently stupid 1920s, and then the whole ra

Costa Rica is the only full-fledged and totally independent country to be entirely demilitarized. Its military was abolished in 1948, with the keys to the armory handed to the Department of Education. Socially, Costa Rica is a success story. Although 94th in the world for GDP, it is in the top 10 on various measurements of health and well-being. Citizens enjoy high standards of living that include universal access to healthcare, education, and pensions. In addition, the country practices sustainable resource management, such as reforestation and the development of solar and wind power, and it expects to be carbon neutral by 2020. Hunting is illegal. 25% of the landmass is parks and reserves. The government supports universal health care, especially maternal and child health. Costa Rica even has a Blue Zone, an area where people live extraordinarily long, healthy lives. To some extent, Costa Rica is simply lucky: it was largely inaccessible, and it had virtually no precious minerals, therefore it was mostly sp

Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan are authors of Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2019). Herd is a Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University; Moynihan is the inaugural McCourt Chair in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. In Administrative Burden, Herd and Moynihan show that the administrative burdens citizens regularly encounter in their interactions with government are not accidental, but the result of deliberate policy choices. With detailed descriptions of federal programs, the authors show that administrative burdens are essential to policy design. Regarding salient issues such as voter enfranchisement or abortion rights, lawmakers often use administrative burdens to limit access to rights or services they oppose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan Finn's Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating examination of how information infrastructures shape the ways that survivors and observers know and learn about disasters.  Finn uses three historical case studies – major earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989 – to reflect upon the development of private and public information services and how these succeed and fail to inform local and distant audiences about disaster realities.  Infrastructure breakdowns make visible the material bases of information systems, from telegraph to newsprint to internet, and how this materiality shapes access relative to social and geographical boundaries.  Documenting Aftermath is a very timely book, for as global warming promises more frequent catastrophes, large-scale social media and government information systems increasingly dictate how information moves.  More than ever it is necessary to question this arrangement and the oversigh

At a speech before the unveiling of the Freedman’s Monument in 1876, Fredrick Douglass stated, “You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are only at best his step-children; children by adoption, children of circumstances and necessity.” But who was Douglass referring to when he said "You are the children of Abraham Lincoln" and what did he mean? Dr. William Green investigates this statement in a case-study of four whites from Minnesota who fought hard and won rights for black Americans during and after the Civil War. By evaluating the actions of Morton Wilkinson, Thomas Montgomery, Daniel D. Merrill, and Sarah Burger Stearns, Dr. Green shows how black suffrage was earned in Minnesota, leading the so-called children of Lincoln to say, “We have done our part.” The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota, 1860–1876(University of Minnesota Press, 2018) is a fascinating, well-researched book about the limits of black opportunity in Minnesota with remarkable parall

Traditionally Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign is remembered mainly for being the first time a Catholic was nominated as the candidate for a major political party. As Robert Chiles demonstrates in his book The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal(Cornell University Press, 2018), this focus obscures Smith’s efforts to promote a progressive reform agenda during the election and the role this played in forming the “New Deal coalition” in the 1930s. Chiles traces the emergence of Smith’s progressivism to his association with the women of the settlement house movement in the 1910s, through whom he gained a greater understanding of the problems facing urban workers. As both a state legislator and as governor Smith sought to promote reforms designed to improve the lives of New Yorkers on a range of issues, from workplace safety to environmental conservation. As the nominee Smith promoted a strong progressive agenda, one that appealed to many ethnic working-class vo