New Books In Public Policy

From 1945 to the mid-1970s, the rate at which Americans went to and graduate from college rose steadily. Then, however, the rate of college going and completion stagnated. In 1980, a quarter of adult Americans had college degrees; today the figure is roughly the same. What happened? In her book Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (Basic Books, 2014), Suzanne Mettler argues that American students–and particularly those from the lower and lower-middle class–have been priced out of good higher education. Over the past several decades, college tuition has risen far faster than inflation and, of course, the ability of disadvantaged parents and students to pay for it. Mettler points out that the colleges themselves are usually blamed for the spike in tuition, and she agrees that they are to some degree at fault. But she argues that the Federal and State governments are the primary culprits: in the era of growth, they generously supported higher education; toda

Most people say “I’m sorry” a lot. After all, we make a lot of mistakes, most of them minor, so we don’t mind apologizing and expect our apologies to be accepted or at least acknowledged. But how many of our apologies are what might be called “strategic,” that is, designed to do nothing more than placate the person we have wronged and essentially exonerate ourselves? In other word, how many of our apologies are genuine? It’s a good question, but it raises another: what is a genuine apology? Does it involve an admission of guilt, remorse, a promise never to do it (whatever it is) again, compensation for the wrong?  That’s a good question too, but it, too, raises a question: how can we tell a strategic apology from a genuine one? Gnashing of teeth? Wailing? Weeping? Statements against interest? As Nick Smith points out in his insightful Justice through Apologies: Remorse, Reform, and Punishment (Cambridge University Press, 2014), we don’t usually ask any of these questions when giving and taking apologies, and

The mid-’00s saw the rise of a political movement in Europe concerned with technocratic impositions on the ideals of free culture, privacy, government transparency and other technology policy issues. Led by online file sharers and developers, the Swedish Pirate Party was thrust into the spotlight in 2006 after law enforcement shut down the popular file sharing site The Pirate Bay. In his new book, Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests (MIT Press, 2014), Patrick Burkart, an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University and currently a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki, examines the rise of the Pirate Party in Sweden, and later Germany. To do so, Burkart analyzes ideas about the colonization of Internet communities and resources using critical communications theories. In do doing, Burkart provides a foundation for the examination of the spread of Pirate parties across the globe as well as the rise of similarly aligned political movements. Learn more about your ad choic

David C. Berliner, Gene V. Glass, and associates are the authors of 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education (Teachers College Press, 2014). Dr. Berliner is Regents’ Professor of Education Emeritus at Arizona State University. Gene V Glass is a senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center and professor at the University of Colorado. The associate authors are comprised of leading Ph.D. students and candidates selected by Dr. Berliner and Dr. Class for this book. In the book, Dr. Berliner, Dr. Glass, and the other writing associates attempt to expose common myths and lies that are present in the current political and educational landscape. While grounding their writing in academic research, the authors’ wrote a book aimed to be assessable to administrators, teachers, government officials, and the common (non-academic) person. The result is an extensive and yet easy-to-read book, broken into small sections that all pack a powerful punch. The authors do

When we discuss the death penalty we usually ask two questions: 1) should the state be in the business of killing criminals?; and 2) if so, how should the state put their lives to an end? As Austin Sarat shows in his fascinating book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford University Press, 2014), these two questions are intimately related. The reason is pretty simple: if the state can’t find a legally and morally acceptable way to execute malefactors, then perhaps we need to ask seriously whether the state should be killing criminals at all. If the means cannot be found, then the end may well be unachievable. In Gruesome Spectacles, Sarat analyses hundreds of executions in an attempt to assess the degree to which we can kill criminals in legally and morally acceptable ways. What he discovers is that about three in a hundred American executions over the past century or so have gone badly wrong. Criminals who were supposed to have been put to death in a humane way were st

Earlier this spring, I drove to a small beaver pond near my home in Colorado, snapped together my fishing rod, and cast a silver lure into the pond’s crystalline waters. Within twenty minutes, I’d caught dinner: a pair of glittering rainbow trout, olive backs spattered with a constellation of black spots. The fish were gorgeous, and, roasted with oil and garlic, would prove delicious. But, having just read Douglas M. Thompson‘s The Quest for the Golden Trout: Environmental Loss and America’s Iconic Fish (University Press of New England, 2013), my enjoyment was just a tad diminished by one piece of knowledge: the fish had been stocked. Every year, government fisheries agencies around the country pour tens of millions of hatchery-raised trout into America’s rivers and lakes. These stocked fish generate vast revenues in the form of fishing licenses and gear sales, and they provide innumerable anglers pleasure and the occasional meal. But, as Thompson’s book reveals, the widespread dissemination of hatchery fish

Olivier Zunz is the author of Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton University Press 2014). The paperback addition of the book has recently been published with a new preface from the author. Zunz is Commonwealth Professor of History at the University of Virginia. The book tracks the origins of philanthropy in America as a pact between the very rich and reformers. This was a movement that began in the Northeast, but then spread to the South where the construction of schools for African American children dominated the philanthropic agenda. The book also unearths the historic legal precedents related to how nonprofit organizations are regulated today, the introduction of tax exemption, and prohibitions on lobbying. In sum, Zunz places philanthropy, big and small, into the center of a conversation about the development of American democratic practices. It is a worthy ready for those interested in American politics, the role of the US in world affairs, and the nonprofit sector. Learn more about your ad ch

Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions of scientific research, and guide us to reliable sources of information on which to base our policies and opinions. Jane Maienschein‘s new book is a model of the kind of careful, balanced, and beautifully written history of science that makes a significant contribution not just to the historiography of science, but also to the public understanding of science and its lived consequences. Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life (Harvard University Press, 2014) traces the historical transformations in the observation and observability of the earliest stages of developing life. Maienschein’s account is a focused and thoughtfully organized book that gradually reveals aspects of the history of early stages of life, carefully curating the elements of her narrative such that they collectively inform br

Why do we feel guilty–and sometimes hurt ourselves–when we harm someone? Why do we become angry–and sometimes violent–when we see other people being harmed? Why do we forgive ourselves and others after a transgression even though “the rules” say we really shouldn’t? In his fascinating book The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Judge Morris B. Hoffman attempts to answer these questions with reference to evolutionary psychology. As a working judge, Hoffman is in an excellent position to explore the dynamics of our instincts to punish and forgive. We are, he says, evolved to punish “cheaters”–ourselves and others–so as to maintain all-important bonds of trust and cooperation. But we are also evolved not to take punishment too far. When correction becomes too costly, we forgive so as to maintain social solidarity. Listen in to our fascinating discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emery Roe is the author of Making the Most of Mess: Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges (Duke UP 2014). Roe is senior associate with the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Roe’s book navigates between economics, ecology, and public policy. He challenges the notion that all messes are bad, and points to how public administrations can learn from messes and turn them into good messes. In doing so, public administrators can better design regulatory and administrative regimes to deal with future financial, environmental, and related messes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The constitution guarantees Americans freedom of religious practice and freedom from government interference in the same same. But what does religious liberty mean in practice? Does it mean that the government must permit any religious practice, even one that’s nominally illegal? Clearly not. You can’t shoot someone even if God tells you to. Does it mean, then, that religious liberty is a sort of fiction and that the government can actually closely circumscribe religious practice? Clearly not. The government can’t ban a putatively religious practice just because it’s expedient to do so. So where’s the line? In God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 2014), Marci A. Hamilton argues that it’s shifting rapidly. Traditionally, the government, congress, and courts agreed that though Americans should enjoy extensive religious freedom, that freedom did not include license to do anything the religious might like. A sensible accommodation between church

Dr. Amy Stambach is the author of Confucius and Crisis in American Universities: Culture, Capital, and Diplomacy in U.S. Public Higher Education (Routledge, 2014). Dr. Stambach is a lecturer in Comparative and International Education at University of Oxford. Dr. Stambach’s book, a part of the Education in Global Context series, offers an ethnographic look at the partnership between American universities and the Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government funded language and cultural teaching centers. Drawing on student, faculty, and administrator interviews, personal experience, and institutional document review, the author provides an in-depth insight and analysis of the often-maligned relationship between these institutions. In the book, it is argued that American universities turn to ventures such as the Confucius Institutes on the grounds that US congressional cuts to higher education can be offset by funding from China. Dr. Stambach also introduces the term “eduplomacy” in this book, which she defines

Kevin Dougherty and Vikash Reddy are the authors of Performance Funding for Higher Education: What Are the Mechanisms What Are the Impacts (Jossey-Bass, 2013). Dr. Dougherty is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Education Policy at Teachers College-Columbia University and Mr. Reddy is a Senior Research Assistant at the Community College Research Center. In their book, the authors explore past research on performance funding in higher education, a practice where state governments tie university or college budget allocation to certain indictors–like graduation rates, remedial education, or drop out rates. This kind of funding has been around since the late 70s, but has not really taken off in the national discussion, even as around 25 states have some kind of performance funding for their higher education system. Dougherty and Reddy chronicle an expansive of past research on performance funding, dating back to 1979. The book provides a sprawling landscape, yet a concise explanation, of the discourse i

  In early America, the practice of “warning out” was unique to New England, a way for the community to regulate those who might fall into poverty and need assistance from the town or province. Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) is the first book about this forgotten aspect of colonial Massachusetts life since 1911. We perambulate with him around Boston’s streets on the eve of the Revolution. Dayton and Salinger present the legal basis of the warning system and the moral, religious and humanistic motives of those who enforced it. We interview legal historian Cornelia H. Dayton of the University of Connecticut about the book she wrote with fellow historian Sharon V. Salinger, of the University of California, Irvine. They discovered his “diary,” and from there found warrants and other documents that allowed them to reconstruct his world, as well as the biographies of the sojourners, soldiers, and members of ethnic and religious minoritie

Jim Russell is a sociologist and it was his encounter with the hidden realities of his own 401(k) retirement plan that touched off his crusade to demystify for himself, and then others, just what was at stake in the options presented by private and public retirement plans. In Social Insecurity: 401(k)s and the Retirement Crisis (Beacon Press, 2014), he puts into plain language for ordinary Americans the arcane terminology used by retirement-fund managers, and uses his own real-life experiences to build an empathetic bond with anxiety-laden readers. Russell moves seamlessly between the personal and political, the present and past, the domestic and global. The holism of his sociology is Russell’s strongest suit. With admirable succinctness and clarity–this is economics for the-rest-of-us–he recounts the Chicago-school economics that spawned the right-wing privatization movement. He then situates in the emergence of neoliberalism the corporate campaign to move billions of dollars from American pension accounts

It may seem silly to ask why we seek ecstasy. We seek it, of course, because it’s ECSTASY. We are evolved to want it. It’s our brain’s way of saying “Do this again and as often as possible.” But there’s more to it than that. For one thing, there are many ways to get to ecstasy, and some of them are very harmful: cutting, starving, and, of course, drug-taking. These things may render an ecstatic state, but they will also kill you. Moreover, many of the ecstasy-inducing activities and substances are powerfully addictive. It’s fine, for example, for most people to use alcohol to feel more relaxed or even to achieve an ecstatic state. But something on the order of 10% to 15% of people cannot safely use alcohol at all without become seriously addicted. And once they do, they usually descend into a profoundly un-ecstatic nightmare that often ends in death. According to Sharon K. Farber‘s Hungry for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Brain, and the Influence of the Sixties (Aronson, 2013), our desire for ecstasy is first and for

Denise Brennan‘s second book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (Duke University Press, 2014), examines how individuals who were trafficked into forced labor go about rebuilding their lives afterward. Through her ethnography of lived experience and her analysis of immigration policy, Brennan shows that trafficking and forced labor are common byproducts of our capitalist system that relies on cheap and unregulated labor. Migration patterns are gendered, and the persons whose experiences shape this book — Maria, Elsa, and many others — are mostly women in the caregiving and sex industries. Brennan argues that U.S. policy has used anti-trafficking policy to forward a separate agenda of ending prostitution and other sex work, thereby distorting protections for female and male trafficking victims in all labor industries, and drastically limiting the number of T visas allocated since 2000. The book is one of scholarly activism: as an anthropologist, Denise Brennan combines researc

Americans are very politically divided. Democrats say we need a more powerful welfare state while Republicans say we need to maintain the free market. The struggle, we are constantly informed, is one of ideas. And that it is in the worst possible sense, for neither the Democrats nor Republicans seem interested in evidence. They don’t want the facts to get in the way of their arguments. In his remarkable book The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Benjamin Radcliff provides facts that should help both Democrats and Republicans, despite their many differences, decide how to proceed. He asks a simple, compelling question: do conservative or liberal public policies make people happier? After an extensive and sophisticated analysis of the data, he reaches an equally simple, compelling answer: liberal policies do. Radcliff is a great friend of the free market; it is obvious, he says, that capitalism is the best economic syste

The paleontologist Michael Benton describes a mass extinction event as a time when “vast swaths of the tree of life are cut short, as if by crazed, axe wielding madmen.” Elizabeth Kolbert‘s new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt, 2014), explores the five major mass extinction events that have occurred on the Earth over the last half billion years. Kolbert contrasts these Big Five, as they are known, to the sixth mass extinction event, which we are in the midst of today. This time, instead of a massive asteroid or a sudden glaciation event, humans are the culprit. Travelling with different scientists to remote ecosystems around the world, Kolbert sees evidence of the many ways humans are altering the planet – through climate change, ocean acidification, and the spread of invasive species. By the end of the century, scientists predict we will lose 20 to 50% of all living species. Kolbert also places this current extinction event in the context of human history: although the rate at w

Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (University of California Press, 2013) locates the emergence of a series of three “moral crusades” against narcotics that each accompanied a perceived crisis in collective values and political legitimacy in nineteenth and twentieth century Japan. In the first moral crisis after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, opium became a symbol of difference between Japan and an “Other” epitomized by Qing China, as Japan sought to “leave Asia” and “enter” the West. Here, Kingsberg traces a series of attempts to regulate drug use in Taiwan in the wake of Japan’s transformation into a formal empire. Between the end of WWI and Japan’s defeat in WWII, Japan saw its second moral crisis as it navigated the most protracted and intense moral crusade against narcotics in its history. The central chapters of Kingsberg’s b