New Books In Public Policy

Is there such a thing as too much choice? In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less – How the Culture of Abundance Robs Us of Satisfaction (Harper Perennial, 2005), author Barry Schwartz answers with a resounding yes. Though some choice is healthy and necessary, Barry argues that in modern society, we are overwhelmed with them, leading us to feel dissatisfied and sometimes even unable to make a decision at all. The dominant view that the market will provide and enable people to get that they want in life is illusory, as human beings are not as rational as we think we are, and our subjective experience of an event does not always correlate with how objectively “good” it is. In this podcast, Barry also talks about how some people, who he calls maximizers, end up suffering more from the overabundance of choices in our society, for these people always strive to make the very best decision in order to have the very best. This leads to paralysis, overanalyzing, and ultimately, to overall dissatisfaction. What make

What happens in our brains when we do things that feel good, such as drinking a glass of wine, exercising, or gambling? How and why do we become addicted to certain foods, chemicals and behaviors? David Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, explains these phenomena in his latest book, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good (Viking, 2011).   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the time we are children, we are encouraged to see our lives as in large measure aimed at finding a spouse. In popular media, the unmarried adult is seen as suspicious, unhealthy, and pitiable. At the same time, marriage is portrayed as necessary for a healthy and flourishing adult life. And we often see the event of a wedding to have a morally transforming power over the individuals who get married. But with only a little bit of reflection, our popular conception of the meaning and significance of marriage begins to look problematic. Is marriage really so different from other kinds of interpersonal relations that it should be accorded such a central place in our popular views about adulthood? Are those who happen to never fall in love and so never get married really doomed to an inferior or morally impoverished kind of life? And when one considers the significant social and legal benefits, rights, and privileges that accrue to individuals in virtue of their being married the standard picture seems all t

In her new book, The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare (Regnery Publishing, 2012), Sally C. Pipes, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Pacific Research Institute, argues that the Obama health care law will make our health care system worse and provides a step-by-step plan for how to dismantle and replace it. She also proposes an alternative, free market-based reform that will bring down costs, expand coverage, and support innovation in life-saving drugs and technology. In our interview, we talked about her vision for the future of health care, the rise of new conservative health experts, and how the Canadian health system failed her own mother in a time of great need. Read all about it, and more, in Pipes’ detailed new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lynn Stout‘s pathbreaking book Cultivating Conscience:How Good Laws Make Good People (Princeton University Press, 2010) represents a much-needed update to the discipline of law and economics. Using current social science and discarding threadbare premises, it develops new methods for theorizing and deploying law in its real-life context — starting from the simple observation that, as a matter of scientific fact, people are often remarkably and demonstrably unselfish. In updating her own field of study, Prof. Stout found herself, unexpectedly, calling into question one of its most cherished axioms. Scholars of law and economics had always begun with the assumption that people were “rationally selfish.” Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book Nudge called into question the first term of that formula; Prof. Stout, holder of an endowed chair in Corporate and Securities Law at UCLA, now challenges the second.On the evidence of this book, it seems more than possible that her insights will prove more significant in the long run.

In her new book The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For (Ivan R. Dee, 2011), Naomi Schaefer Riley, former Wall Street Journal editor and affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, critically examines the tenure system. She believes “tenure . . . is eroding American education from the inside out” and places too much emphasis on research and not enough on teaching. In our interview, we talked about why tenure does not help students get a better education, why faculty donations went 8:1 in favor of Barack Obama in the 2008 election, and how much the government spends to subsidize academic articles. Read all about it, and more, in Riley’s provocative new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2011), David Feith, Chairman of the Civic Education Initiative and assistant editor at The Wall Street Journal, worked with some of America’s top education experts to address the problem of widespread civic illiteracy. Feith assembled 23 different educational experts, including a former Education Secretary, Supreme Court Justice, and two Senators, to address the question of how to improve civic education in the U.S. The result is a thorough analysis of civic illiteracy and its causes, as well as a host of suggestions for how to fix the problem. In our interview, we talked about how Feith came up with the idea to promote civic education in his college dorm room, whether U.S. schools have the capacity to impart the type of education necessary to do the job, and what the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements can tell us about the state of civic education in America.  Read all about it, and more, in Feith’s eye-

In his new book, A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next (Regnery Publishing, 2011), David Horowitz, long ago editor of Ramparts magazine and creator of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, takes a thoughtful look at humanity’s quest to find meaning in life. Horowitz uses the works of Marcus Aurelius and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as his own experiences, to try to measure the sum of a man’s accomplishments. In our interview, we talked about Horowitz’s journey from left to right, the state of the universities, and whether things are getting better or worse in America. Read all about it, and more, in Horowitz’s bracing new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new bookActing White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), former White House aide Ron Christie recounts the history of the pejorative term “acting white.” He traces its lineage from the present day through the Black Power movement back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, unraveling a fascinating history in the process. In our interview, we talked about Ron’s experiences as an African-American Republican, his ambitious vow to eradicate the term “acting white,” and his hopes for the future of America’s African-American community. Read all about it, and more, in Christie’s thought-provoking new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a “pre-war building” is. First and foremost, it’s better than a “post-war building.” Why, you might ask, is that so? Well part of the reason has to do with wartime and post-war “urban renewal,” that is, the process by which the Washington, big city governments, big city banks, and big city developers came together to clear “slums” and erect modern (really “modernist”) apartment blocks and complexes of apartment blocks. Think “the projects” (or, more generally, “public housing“). In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the New York City Housing Authority supervised the construction of a lot of them. Today roughly 500,000 New Yorkers live in them. And many of them, I would guess, probably wish they lived in “pre-war buildings.” Sandy Zipp does a wonderful job of telling the story of this re-making of New York in his fascinating book Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford UP, 2010). Along the way, myths are busted

In his new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011), Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at Wheaton College, discusses the state of reading in the United States. Where some would argue that there are too few people doing the wrong kind of reading, Jacobs argues the contrary. He believes that literature is flourishing, pointing to the existence of enormous booksellers like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, as well as the influence of Oprah’s Book Club as evidence. In our interview, we talked about why our reading muscles have weakened over time, the importance of reading at whim, and the wondrous reading silence of children immersed in books.  Read all about it, and more, in Jacob’s thought-provoking new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Colleges and universities have a reputation for being radical places where tenured radicals teach radical ideas. Don’t believe it. Consider this: the set of academic departments that one finds in most “colleges of liberal arts and sciences”–history, chemistry, sociology, physics, and so on–has remained remarkably stable for many decades. How, exactly, is that “radical?” Yet as Mikaila Lemonik Arthur shows in her enlightening book Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education (Ashgate, 2011), some curricular changes have occurred, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. When I went to college in the 1980s, interdisciplinary minors and majors such as Women’s’ Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Queer Studies (the three cases Lemonik Arthur analyses) were in their infancy. Now the first is nearly ubiquitous, the second is growing rapidly, and the third is gaining steam. How did these new “identity studies” disciplines succeed in finding a place at the already-full academic table desp

The students in my undergraduate class on gender, sexuality, and human rights are a pretty tough bunch. They know they’re in for some unpleasant topics: sex trafficking, domestic violence, mass rape in wartime. But when I have them read Amartya Sen’s classic article on the effects of son preference – that stops them in their tracks. A hundred million girls and women simply missing from the planet due to sex-selective abortion, infanticide, and neglect of daughters. You can almost see the chill go through the room. Thanks to Mara Hvistendahl, I now need to revise that number upward. 160 million girls and women are missing in Asia alone, she writes in her new book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (Public Affairs, 2011). And the effects are grim. These include sex trafficking and sale of brides to meet the demands of the “surplus men” who can’t find mates in their own communities, and they include high rates of violence in societies with a large number

In his new book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV (Broadside Books, 2011), Ben Shapiro, who is the youngest person ever to get a nationally syndicated column in the U.S., details the story of how television executives use the medium to spread political propaganda. Shapiro interviewed over one hundred prominent media figures, from the writer of House to the former president of ABC Entertainment and NBC, to get a sense of the political agendas driving those who produce scripted TV. In our interview, we talked about how politics makes shows dated, the conservative cast members of the A-Team, and why he won’t watch Glee. Read all about it, and more, in Shapiro’s revealing new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life(Times Books, 2011), Elaine Sciolino, Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, explores the role of seduction in the French way of life. Sciolino argues that seduction plays an integral role not only in romantic and personal relationships in France, but also in business transactions, intellectual debates, and political campaigns. In our interview, we talked about Jacques Chirac’s hand-kissing technique, how everyone in France knew about Dominique Strauss Kahn’s aggressive seduction techniques before most Americans had ever heard of him, and the romantic benefits of being lead groundskeeper at Versailles.Lisez tout et plus dans le nouveau livre charmant de Sciolino. (Read all about it and more in Sciolino’s charming new book). Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, History of the Future: The Shape of the World to Come Is Visible Today (Lexington Books, 2011), Max Singer, Senior Fellow and co-founder of the Hudson Institute, argues that the human race is undergoing an enormous transition, from an agrarian, violent past to a wealthy and peaceful future. Singer believes that all countries are on parallel paths to becoming modern states, albeit at different points in the process. As such, he tries to predict the future of the majority of countries that are still making this transitioning by examining the experiences of countries that have already completed the transition. In our interview, we talked about the rise of China, why Churchill thought that scuttling the British Navy would immediately end the British Empire, and how freedom is the key element to creating economic powerhouses. Read all about it, and more, in Singer’s wide-ranging new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about yo

Marriage is at the center of some of our fiercest political debates. Here are some recent developments regarding marriage in the United States. Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced that it would no longer defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). A few weeks ago, New York became the largest state to allow same-sex marriage, joining five other states, the District of Columbia, and the Coquille and Suquamish Indian tribes in Oregon. The Senate Judiciary Committee has recently started to consider a bill that would grant federal benefits to same-sex married couples. But to what extent should the state be involved at all in regulating or recognizing marriage? In her recent book, Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce (Princeton University Press, 2010), Tamara Metz argues for the “disestablishment” of marriage. Marriage, Metz argues, like religion, should be separated from the state. She further claims that the liberal state should only be in the business of l

One hallmark of important art, in any medium, is a thoughtful relation with artistic precursors. Every artist reckons with heroes and rivals, influences and nemeses, and the old work becomes a part of the new. In Adam Bradley’s seminal monograph on hip-hop lyrics, Book of Rhymes, legendary MC Mos Def describes his desire to participate in posterity: “I wanted it to be something that was durable. You can listen to all these Jimi records and Miles records and Curtis Mayfield records; I wanted to be able to add something to that conversation.” In the last thirty years, technology has transformed the conversation between past and present musicians: it is now possible to quote a previous work not only note for note, but byte for byte. The turntable and the sampler are the hip-hop artist’s quintessential instruments. The culture of hip-hop bricolage, coupled with intense commercial pressures in the recording industry and an inevitable proliferation of rip-off artists, has created difficult challenges for copyright

In his new book, A Vulcan's Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) Dov Zakheim, former chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense, describes his time as a Vulcan, one of the elite group of eight foreign policy experts who advised President Bush's presidential campaign, most of whom later served in the Bush administration. Zakheim brings an insider's perspective to the Department of Defense's management of the War on Terror, and is not afraid to call out people who were not up to the job. In our interview, we talked about why it's so hard to get rid of Pentagon weapon systems, what "snowflakes" are, and why so many former Bush Pentagon officials have written books. It's all there, and more, in Zakheim's eye-opening new book. Please become a fan of "New Books in Public Policy" on Facebook, if you haven't already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!

In their new book Search and Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google (Telescope Books, 2011), Scott Cleland, President of Precursor LLC, and Ira Brodsky, founder of Datacomm Research, aim to expose the unethical internet behemoth they believe to be hiding behind the motto “Don’t be Evil.” Cleland and Brodsky believe that Google has a hidden political agenda, and is attempting to shape the world to match this agenda by controlling your information, as well as who has access to that information. In our interview, we talked about how terrorists have used Google, why “Don’t be Evil” is an unimpressive goal, and the ways individuals can de-Googlify, if they so choose. Read all about it, and more, in Cleland and Brodsky’s troubling new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices