Wildavsky Forum Series – serie

The Western cultural consensus based on the ideas of free markets and individualism has led many social scientists to consider poverty as a personal experience, a deprivation of material things, and a failure of just distribution. Mary Douglas and Steven Ney find this dominant tradition of social thought about poverty and well-being to be full of contradictions. They argue that the root cause is the impoverished idea of the human person inherited through two centuries of intellectual history, and that two principles, the idea of the solipsist self and the idea of objectivity, cause most of the contradictions. Douglas and Ney state that Economic Man, from its semitechnical niche in eighteenth-century economic theory, has taken over the realms of psychology, consumption, public assistance, political science, and philosophy. They say that by distorting the statistical data presented for policy analysis, the ideas of the solipsist self and objectivity indeed often protect a political bias. The authors propose to correct this by revising the current model of the person.Taking cultural bias into account and giving full play to political dissent, they restore the 'persons' who have been missing from the social science debates. Drawing from anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology, the authors set forth a fundamental critique of the social sciences. Their book will find a wide audience among social scientists and will also interest anyone engaged in current discussions of poverty. This book is a copublication with the Russell Sage Foundation.

In a work that will significantly influence the political discussion with respect to race and class politics, one of the country's most influential sociologists focuses on the rising inequality in American society and the need for a progressive, multiracial political coalition to combat it. The culmination of decades of distinguished scholarship, "The Bridge over the Racial Divide" brilliantly demonstrates how political power is disproportionately concentrated among the most advantaged segments of society and how the monetary, trade, and tax policies of recent years have deepened this power imbalance. Developing his earlier views on race in contemporary society, William Julius Wilson gives a simple, straightforward, and crucially important diagnosis of the problem of rising social inequality in the United States and details a set of recommendations for dealing with it. Wilson argues that as long as middle- and working-class groups are fragmented along racial lines, they will fail to see how their combined efforts could change the political imbalance and thus promote policies that reflect their interests.He shows how a vision of American society that highlights racial differences rather than commonalities makes it difficult for Americans to see the need and appreciate the potential for mutual political support across racial lines. Multiracial political cooperation could be enhanced if we can persuade groups to focus more on the interests they hold in common, including overcoming stagnating and declining real incomes that relate to changes in the global economy, Wilson argues. He advocates a cross-race, class-based alliance of working-and middle-class Americans to pursue policies that will deal with the eroding strength of the nation's equalizing institutions, including public education, unions, and political structures that promote the interests of ordinary families. He also advocates a reconstructed 'affirmative opportunity' program that benefits African Americans without antagonizing whites. Using theoretical arguments and case studies, Wilson examines how a broad-based political constituency can be created, sustained, and energized.Bold, provocative, and thoughtful, "The Bridge over the Racial Divide" is an essential resource in considering some of the most pressing issues facing the American public today. This book is a copublication with the Russell Sage Foundation.

"Do you know if you are going to heaven?" Shortly after being appointed the first Director of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives--the "faith czar"--John J. DiIulio Jr. was asked this question. Suddenly DiIulio, a Catholic Democrat who pioneered programs for inner-city children, was acutely aware that he was no longer a private citizen who might have humored the television evangelist standing before him. Now he was, as he recalls in his introduction--"responsible for assisting the president in faithfully upholding the Constitution ...and faithfully acting in the public interest without regard to religious identities." Using his brief tenure in the George W. Bush administration as a springboard, this lively, informative, and entertaining book leaps into the ongoing debate over whether as a nation America is Christian or secular and to what degree church-state separation is compelled by the Constitution. Avoiding political pieties, DiIulio makes an impassioned case for a middle way. Written by a leading political scholar, Godly Republic offers a fast-paced, faith-inspired, and fact-based approach to enhancing America's civic future for one and all.

In "Bounded Rationality and Politics", Jonathan Bendor considers two schools of behavioral economics - the first guided by Tversky and Kahneman's work on heuristics and biases, which focuses on the mistakes people make in judgment and choice; the second as described by Gerd Gigerenzer's program on fast and frugal heuristics, which emphasizes the effectiveness of simple rules of thumb. Finding each of these radically incomplete, Bendor's illuminating analysis proposes Herbert Simon's pathbreaking work on bounded rationality as a way to reconcile the inconsistencies between the two camps. Bendor shows that Simon's theory turns on the interplay between the cognitive constraints of decision makers and the complexity of their tasks.

In "Bounded Rationality and Politics", Jonathan Bendor considers two schools of behavioral economics - the first guided by Tversky and Kahneman's work on heuristics and biases, which focuses on the mistakes people make in judgment and choice; the second as described by Gerd Gigerenzer's program on fast and frugal heuristics, which emphasizes the effectiveness of simple rules of thumb. Finding each of these radically incomplete, Bendor's illuminating analysis proposes Herbert Simon's pathbreaking work on bounded rationality as a way to reconcile the inconsistencies between the two camps. Bendor shows that Simon's theory turns on the interplay between the cognitive constraints of decision makers and the complexity of their tasks.

Rebecca M. Blank offers the first comprehensive analysis of an economic trend that has been reshaping the United States over the past three decades: rapidly rising income inequality. In clear language, she provides an overview of how and why the level and distribution of income and wealth has changed since 1979, sets this situation within its historical context, and investigates the forces that are driving it. Among other factors, Blank looks closely at changes within families, including women's increasing participation in the work force. The book includes some surprising findings - for example, that per-person income has risen sharply among almost all social groups, even as income has become more unequally distributed. Looking toward the future, Blank suggests that while rising inequality will likely be with us for many decades to come, it is not an inevitable outcome. Her book considers what can be done to address this trend, and also explores the question: why should we be concerned about this phenomenon?

This book looks at the way we tax the poor in the United States, particularly in the American South, where poor families are often subject to income taxes, and where regressive sales taxes apply even to food for home consumption. Katherine S. Newman and Rourke L. O'Brien argue that these policies contribute in unrecognized ways to poverty-related problems like obesity, early mortality, the high school dropout rates, teen pregnancy, and crime. They show how, decades before California's passage of Proposition 13, many southern states implemented legislation that makes it almost impossible to raise property or corporate taxes, a pattern now growing in the western states. "Taxing the Poor" demonstrates how sales taxes intended to replace the missing revenue - taxes that at first glance appear fair - actually punish the poor and exacerbate the very conditions that drove them into poverty in the first place.

With a timely new foreword by Robert Frank, this groundbreaking book explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today. Although middle-income families don't earn much more than they did several decades ago, they are buying bigger cars, houses, and appliances. To pay for them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off "expenditure cascades" that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class. Writing in lively prose for a general audience, Frank employs up-to-date economic data and examples drawn from everyday life to shed light on reigning models of consumer behavior. He also suggests reforms that could mitigate the costs of inequality. Falling Behind compels us to rethink how and why we live our economic lives the way we do.

In the United States, the soaring cost of health care has become an economic drag and a political flashpoint. Moreover, although the country's medical spending is higher than that of any other nation, health outcomes are no better than elsewhere, and in some cases are even worse. In The Quality Cure, renowned health care economist and former Obama advisor David Cutler offers an accessible and incisive account of the issues and their causes, as well as a road map for the future of health care reform--one that shows how information technology, realigned payment systems, and value-focused organizations together have the power to resolve this seemingly intractable problem and transform the US health care system into one that is affordable, efficient, and effective.

How well can democratic decision making incorporate the knowledge and expertise generated by public policy analysts? This book examines the historical development of policy analysis, as well as its use in legislative and regulatory bodies and in the federal executive branch. The essays show that policy-analytic expertise effectively improves governmental services only when it complements democratic decision making. When successful, policy analysis fosters valuable new ideas, better use of evidence, and greater transparency in decision processes.