New Books in Public Policy

Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich are authors of the provocative new book, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies (Rowman and Littlefield 2013). Dr. Tienken is an assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Services at Seton Hall University, and is also currently the editor of the American Association of School Administrators Journal of Scholarship and Practice and th...

What can the United States learn from Europe? One good answer, says Steven Hill, is social capitalism, a form of economic management that is responsive to markets and productive of broadly-shared prosperity. First known for his work on electoral reform in the United States, Hill began travelling through Europe in the late 90’s to study the use of proportional representation (PR) in European electi...

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” We are still fighting that war today. According to many people, we’ve lost but don’t know it. Rates of drug use in the US remain, by historical standards, high and our prisons are full of people–many of whom are hardly drug kingpins–who have violated drug laws. And, of course, it all costs a fortune. What to do? In her book The War on Dru...

All humans have an emotionally-driven sense of fairness. We get treated unfairly and we get mad. It’s no wonder, then, that our laws–and those of almost everyone else–are intended to assure that people are treated fairly. When those laws fail and we are treated unfairly, we encounter another human universal–the desire for revenge. If someone pokes you in the eye, more likely than not your first in...

History is in many respects the story of humanity’s quest for transcendence: to control life and death, time and space, loss and memory. When inventors or companies effectively tap into these needs products emerge that help define their times. The Kodak ‘Brownie’ allowed average consumers – without the knowledge of chemistry or math of a Matthew Brady – to capture powerful images. Ford’s Model T g...

A friend of mine who had just graduated from law school said “Law school is great. The trouble is that when you are done you’re a lawyer.” Steven J. Harper would, after a fashion, agree (though he would probably add that law schools are not that great). Harper’s book, The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis (Basic Books, 2013), is a stem-to-stern indictment of legal education and the legal profe...

It’s pretty common–and has long been–for people to think that the “way it used to be” is better than the way it is. This tendency to idealize an (imagined) past is particularly strong today among critics of modern civilization. Think of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, but one example of a huge modernity-bashing genre. They say, with some justice, that everything from schools, cities, and...

Every hundred years or so, the Supreme Court decides a question with truly vast economic implications. In 2012 such a decision was handed down, in a case that had the potential to affect the economy in the near term more than any court case ever had. The substance of the case, and its lasting legal implications, are the subject of Andrew Koppelman’s The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on H...

Modern liberalism is built on the principle of equality and its corollary, the principle of fairness (treating equals equally). But have we taken the one and the other too far? Are we deceiving ourselves about our ability to treat each others equally, that is, to be “fair?” In his provocative new book Against Fairness (University of Chicago, 2013), Stephen T. Asma makes the case that we have indee...

Why do we work so hard, and should we? These are the questions that Robert and Edward Skidelsky explore in their thought provoking book How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life (Other Press, 2012). Their answer to the first question is (to put it in my own words) that we don’t know any better. Our competitive capitalist culture has taught us to work hard so we can earn more. Further, it has ta...

In his compelling and fascinating account of how engineers navigated new landscapes of technology and its discontents in 1960s America, Matthew Wisnioski takes us into the personal and professional transformations of a group of thinkers and practitioners who have been both central to the history of science and technology, and conspicuously under-represented in its historiography. Between 1964 and...

In their book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (Basic Books, 2012), Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. present the following big idea: race preferences in higher education harm those preferred. Their argument is interesting in that it is not premised on the idea that racial preferences are unfair. Rather, they crunch the...

In Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy (Viking Press, 2013), John Wood presents this big idea: you can change the world if want to. The nice thing about John’s book is that he doesn’t tell you the “theory” of world-changing (though he does discuss “social entrepreneurship”), he tells you how he did using his own experience. John saw that a lot of people around...

Scott Melzer is the author of Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War (New York University Press, 2012). Scott earned his Ph. D. from the University of California, Riverside and now is an associate professor of Sociology at Albion College. His book adds to the growing list of scholarship on gun control and gun rights. Scott’s disciplinary background in Sociology contributes to a better understanding...

“Museums can be very painful sites for Native peoples,” writes Amy Lonetree, associate professor of history at UC-Santa Cruz and a citizen of the Ho Chunk Nation, “as they are intimately tied to the colonization process.” Such a contention appears incongruous to most; museums are supposed to be places of wonder and learning, after all, pillars of our democratic culture. But consider the history. F...

The mass industrial democracy that is the modern United States bears little resemblance to the simple agrarian republic that gave it birth. The market revolution is the reason for this dramatic and ironic metamorphosis. The resulting tangled frameworks of democracy and capitalism still dominate the world as it responds to the Panic of 2008. Early Americans experienced what we now call modernizatio...

It is easy to dismiss juveniles in prison as “bad seeds”, as people with which we have nothing in common, and of which we want only distance. David Chura, however, did not maintain his distance, and has been working with at-risk kids for other 40 years. His new book, I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup (Beacon Press, 2010), is a collection of stories from th...

Isaac Campos is the author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Campos is an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His book traces the intellectual history of marijuana from Europe to Mexico and the ways in which usage of the drug was portrayed – as a source of madness and violence — in the Mexican m...

Jesse Rhodes‘ book An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind (Cornell University Press, 2012). The book synthesizes nearly forty years of US political history. It tells the story of the development and passage of the No Child Left Behind law by George W. Bush. The book builds on political science theories of political entrepreneurship, institutionalism, and increme...

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 d...

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, Lea...

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...

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...

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 s...

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 researc...