New Books In Public Policy

A provocative chronicle of how US public health has strayed from its liberal roots. The Covid-19 response was a crucible of politics and public health—a volatile combination that produced predictably bad results. As scientific expertise became entangled with political motivations, the public-health establishment found itself mired in political encampment. It was, as Sandro Galea argues, a crisis of liberalism: a retreat from the principles of free speech, open debate, and the pursuit of knowledge through reasoned inquiry that should inform the work of public health. Across fifty essays, Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time (U Chicago Press, 2023) chronicles how public health became enmeshed in the insidious social trends that accelerated under Covid-19. Galea challenges this intellectual drift towards intolerance and absolutism while showing how similar regressions from reason undermined social progress during earlier eras. Within Reason builds an incisive case for a return to critical

In recent years, government agencies around the world have been forced to consider the role of competition law and policy in addressing various crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial collapse. There is no easy formula that a competition agency can apply to determine the appropriate response to a crisis; indeed, there is substantial debate about the issue. One common criticism of competition law and policy is that usually it is too inflexible to deal with a crisis, prohibiting an adequate response to economic and industrial shocks.  Bruce Wardhaugh's Competition Law in Crisis: The Antitrust Response to Economic Shocks (Cambridge UP, 2022) challenges this notion by examining competition responses to crises past and present. With an analysis that spans the response of UK and EU competition authorities to the economic and commercial fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and potential responses to the climate crisis, Professor Wardhaugh argues that relaxing competitio

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of busines

An eye-opening look at how all American workers, even the highly educated and experienced, are vulnerable to the stigma of unemployment. After receiving a PhD in mathematics from MIT, Larry spent three decades working at prestigious companies in the tech industry. Initially he was not worried when he lost his job as part of a large layoff, but the prolonged unemployment that followed decimated his finances and nearly ended his marriage. Larry's story is not an anomaly. The majority of American workers experience unemployment, and millions get trapped in devastating long-term unemployment, including experienced workers with advanced degrees from top universities. How is it possible for even highly successful careers to suddenly go off the rails? In The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed (Oxford UP, 2024), Ofer Sharone explains how the stigma of unemployment can render past educational and professional achievements irrelevant, and how it leaves all American workers vulnerable t

Political Scientists Patricia Strach (The University at Albany, State University of New York) and Kathleen S. Sullivan (Ohio University) have written a fascinating and important exploration of trash. More precisely, this is a complex examination and analysis of the development of our municipal sanitation processes and structures, highlighting intersecting policy areas, urban and local politics, and racial, gender, and class politics. The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929 (Cornell UP, 2023) has it all: corruption, gender and racial hierarchies, blame defection, rejection of expertise, case studies across a host of different cities around the country, and the collection of, the disposal of, and the innovations of garbage. Strach and Sullivan examine this multidimensional policy issue from an American political development perspective when the issue really took root in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century. At this point, urban areas saw demographic

Governments and consumers expect internet platform companies to regulate their users to prevent fraud, stop misinformation, and avoid violence. Yet, so far, they've failed to do so. The inability of platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon to govern their users has led to stolen elections, refused vaccines, counterfeit N95s in a pandemic, and even genocide. Such failures stem from these companies' inability to manage the complexity of their userbases, products, and their own incentives under the eyes of internal and external constituencies.  In The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms (Cambridge UP, 2023), Paul Gowder argues that countries should adapt the institutional tools developed in political science for platform governance to democratize major platforms. Democratic institutions allow knowledgeable actors to freely share and apply their understanding of the problems they face while leaders more readily recruit third parties to help manage their decision-making capacity.  This book is also av

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources--union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories--Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and their labor activism.  While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle's Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) demonstrates that female industrial workers across the count

The United States has more guns than people and more gun violence than any Western democracy. Scholars in diverse fields interrogate why 21st century Americans support gun ownership and valorize vigilantism even as they fear gun violence. Many question how the NRA – National Rifle Association – has successfully lobbied for radical gun laws that most Americans don’t support.  In Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Alexandra Filindra highlights political culture. She argues that the NRA depends upon political narratives that can be traced back to the American Revolution. Rather than focus on the constitution, Lockean liberalism, rule of law, or individual rights, she argues that the American Revolution depended upon classical republican ideals – especially the martial virtue of the citizen-soldier – that became foundational to American democracy. American gun culture fuses the republican citizen-soldier with White male supremacy to create wh

We've known for decades that climate change is an existential crisis. For just as long, we've seen the complete failure of our institutions to rise to the challenge. Governments have struggled to meet even modest goals. Fossil fuel interests maintain a stranglehold on political and economic power. Even though we have seen growing concern from everyday people, civil society has succeeded only in pressuring decision makers to adopt watered-down policies. All the while, the climate crisis worsens. Is there any hope of achieving the systemic change we need? In Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action (Columbia UP, 2024), Dana R. Fisher argues that there is a realistic path forward for climate action—but only through mass mobilization that responds to the growing severity and frequency of disastrous events. She assesses the current state of affairs and shows why public policy and private-sector efforts have been ineffective. Spurred by this lack of progress, climate activism has become increasingly

Before you left your house this morning, chances are that you used products and consumed goods that were produced by modern slavery. From the coffee you drink, to the clothes and shoes that you wear, to the phone that you use, modern slavery is a pervasive global problem that encroaches into the daily lives of all of us.  In Addressing Modern Slavery (UNSW Press, 2019), Professor Justine Nolan and Associate Professor Martijn Boersma provide a comprehensive and accessible account of the role of businesses, governments and consumers in the proliferation of modern slavery. They address both the gaps in protection of workers in the global supply chain, and what more can be done to protect the dignity and human rights who are denied the chance to earn a decent living. In today's conversation, we spoke about the emergence of corporate social conscience, the work that laws can do, the role that civil society can play, and a need for better enforcement mechanisms which will adequately address modern slavery. This is

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including "broken windows" theory and "stop and frisk" policy. Police officers worked to preserve urban order by controlling vice, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and the "disorderly" establishments that officials believed housed these activities. This mode of policing was central to La Guardia's influential vision of urban governance, but it was met with resistance from the Black New Yorkers, youth, and working-class women it primarily targeted. The mobilization for World War II introduced new opportunities for the NYPD to intensify policing and criminalize these groups with federal support. In the 1930s these communities were framed as pe

Since the last-but-one financial crisis abated and governments responded to better times by clawing back their stimulus packages, a once-obscure economic philosophy has been gaining a growing following on the left. But, following the extraordinary policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic, even some conservative commentators and policy makers are showing an interest in Modern Monetary Theory or MMT. Not so fast, warns Gerald Epstein in his What's Wrong with Modern Money Theory? A Policy Critique (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). While this progressive economist welcomes any resistance to austerian economics and the policy rethink that the new theory is triggering, he warns against MMT's seductive appeal and its significant practical shortcomings. Gerald Epstein co-directs the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Tim Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors (FT Group) in London.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/

Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed upscale consumer for more than four decades. Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so. The damning indictment of the mainstream media that flows through No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell UP, 2019) is a wakeup call about the critical role of the media in telling news stories about labor unions, workers, and working-class readers. As Martin charts the decline of labor reporting from the late 1960s onwards, he reveals the shift in news coverage as the mainstream media abandoned labor in favor of consumer and business interests. When newspapers, especially, wrote off working-class readers as useless for their business model, the American worker became invisible. In No Longer Newsworthy, Martin co

Social networks existed and shaped our lives long before Silicon Valley startups made them virtual. For over two decades economist Matthew O. Jackson, a professor at Stanford University, has studied how the shape of networks and our positions within them can affect us. In this interview, he explains how network structures can create poverty traps, exacerbate financial crises, and contribute to political polarization. He also explains how a new awareness of the role of networks has been used to improve financial regulation, promote public health knowledge, and guide vaccination strategy. Jackson also discusses how he first began to study networks, previously neglected by economists, and how economists can both learn from and contribute to the exciting cross-disciplinary dialogue among researchers from sociology, math, physics, and other fields. Professor Jackson's website provides free access to the chapter on contagion, of particular interest in this time of pandemic. For those who want to learn even more tha

There are numerous political debates about education policy today, but some of the most heated surround vouchers, charter schools, and other questions about public funding and oversight of private schools. Though many of these questions feel new, they, in fact, have a long history. Public vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America (Oxford University Press, 2018) examines that history, tracing early debates about school choice. Robert N. Gross, a history teacher and assistant academic dean at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, explains how public schools developed with their promoters intending them to be a new monopoly in education. Then, in the late 19th century, Catholic immigrants sought to set up private schools, leading to an era of conflict and compromise between public and private school policy. Gross shows how and why regulation become an important tool for both sides in those conflicts. Further, the book shows how schools were thought of as a public utility and become a key par

Who do you turn to at the brink of the apocalypse? What might help us to mitigate the financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural collapse for which we may be heading? Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat (Routledge, 2023) proposes an unlikely hero in this narrative. Robert Janes’ text explores the implications of societal collapse from a multidisciplinary perspective and considers the potential museums have to contribute to the reimagining and transitioning of a new society with the threat of collapse. Arguing that societal collapse is underway, but that total collapse is not inevitable, Janes maintains that museums are well-positioned to mitigate and adapt to the disruptions of societal collapse. As institutions of the commons, belonging to and affecting the public at large, he contends that museums are both responsible and capable of contributing to the durability and well-being of individuals, families, and communities, and enhancing societal resilience in the face of critical

Scholars Stephen Engel and Timothy Lyle have a new book that dives into the thinking around power, political and cultural progress, and the LGBTQ+ communities in the United States. This book is fascinating and important in examining not only policy developments around rights and full citizenship for members of the LGBTQ+ communities, but also how these discussions and dialogues shape thinking about access to rights and dimensions of full citizenship. The overarching title of the book, Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ Lives (NYU Press, 2021), gets to the heart of the rhetoric in the debate, specifically this concept of “dignity” and how dignity has become a particularly thorny component of defining out political, legal, and civil rights for the LGBTQ+ community.  Both Engel and Lyle note that they found the term dignity very clearly associated with the legal reasoning in judicial opinions around LGBTQ+ rights, that it was a celebrated status, and that while it was more commonly used i

A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.  Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day. The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international proportions.  In Justice for Animals (Simon & Schuster, 2023), one of the world’s most influential philosophers and humanists Martha C. Nussbaum provides a revolutionary approach to animal rights, ethics, and law. From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flour

How social scientists' disagreements about their key words and distinctions have been misconceived, and what to do about it Social scientists do research on a variety of topics--gender, capitalism, populism, and race and ethnicity, among others. They make descriptive and explanatory claims about empathy, intelligence, neoliberalism, and power. They advise policymakers on diversity, digitalization, work, and religion. And yet, as Gabriel Abend points out in Words and Distinctions for the Common Good: Practical Reason in the Logic of Social Science (Princeton UP, 2023), they can't agree on what these things are and how to identify them. How to tell if something is a religion or a cult or a sect? What is empathy? What makes this society a capitalist one? Disputes of this sort arise again and again in the social sciences. Abend argues that these disagreements have been doubly misconceived. First, they conflate two questions: how a social science community should use its most important words, and what distinctions

Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from all sort of backgrounds will definitely want to hear more about. Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin Americans countries, Briggs tells us how taking of children has been used as a strategy to terrorize communities that demand social justice and change. This book, timely as no other, asks readers to question the narrative that portrays taking children as something that is done in the benefit of the child, and instead to see it as a strategy that seeks to control and dominate communities that are deem dangerous to the social order. As Prof. Briggs tells us by the end of the interview, in this summer of racial reckoning the BLM movement has asked to eliminate the foster care system for this has been another vehicle for the poli