Educational credentials are one of the most reliable tickets to a middle-class livelihood across the globe today. But as the costs of schooling rise, young people increasingly wonder whether their investment will pay off. Betting on Education: The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth follows the experiences of rural secondary school students navigating Cambodia’s semiprivatized state education system. It reveals that when students are compelled to speculate about the value of their education, the “winners” of this gamble are the ones already most securely part of the middle class. The rest are left behind. In the process, the very meaning of education is transformed, as schooling becomes less about learning and more about its potential financial returns. By situating these stories in the wider global logics of neoliberal capitalism, Betting on Education challenges readers to consider what is at stake when young people must wager so much on the promise of schooling.
A thorough reassessment of how domestic factors do and do not constrain the use of American military force abroad in the early twenty-first century.
More than two decades have passed since the September 11th terrorist attacks resuscitated debates about the “imperial presidency” within the United States. During that same time, the United States has fought costly and inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, pivoted to the Pacific to counter China, and pulled its gaze back to Europe and the Middle East in response to wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Moreover, new technologies and ways of funding and staffing wars have made the costs of war less visible to the public while polarization has increased and a new legal doctrine of presidential power has gained force.
Against this backdrop, Checking the Costs of War reassesses how domestic factors have both constrained and failed to constrain the use of military power across different contexts and over time. Richly empirical chapters explore the varying effects of different kinds of potential checks: legislative, public opinion, and bureaucratic. Collectively, chapters offer new insight into the prospects for war and peace today.
After revealing why corporate capitalism fuels an ever-increasing marketing race, Dawson provides a step-by-step account of how this behemoth works and expands. Using firsthand evidence, he explains in detail how big business marketing campaigns penetrate and profoundly affect the lives of ordinary Americans.
Dawson argues that if people are to escape the costly consumer trap set by the overclass, they will need to renew class struggle from below, inventing new institutions for democratically governing and implementing major economic decisions. A blueprint for reinventing the study and debate of the sociocultural effects of corporate marketing practices, The Consumer Trap makes big business marketing a target of direct historical and sociological scrutiny.
Drawing on years of fieldwork, Enriquez shows how forcing artists to adopt “neutral” market solutions reinforces, and generates, overlapping racial and class-based inequalities. Lacking the social and financial resources of their middle-class peers, working-class musicians find it difficult to uphold institutional goals of connecting the city’s cultural roots to global markets and consumers. Enriquez also links the artists’ situation to that of cultural and creative workers around the world. As she shows, musical sponsorship in Recife and the contemporary gig economy elsewhere employ processes that, far from being neutral, uphold governmental and corporate ideologies that produce social stratification.
Rich and vibrant, The Costs of the Gig Economy offers a rare English-language portrait of the changing musical culture in Recife.
The secret economics of maximizing college financial aid (and why it’s not as miserable as you think).
In the college admissions process, a terrifying unknown looms large: How much is this really going to cost? For prospective students and their families, there’s no easy answer. While college prices continue to rise, so do their promises of financial aid for qualified students. But who qualifies? And for how much? How can this monumental life decision be so utterly impossible to understand?
Hidden Tuition is an insider’s guide for navigating college financial aid to maximum effect and with (relatively) minimal pain. Economist and financial-aid expert Phillip B. Levine draws on his unique experience—including years of research in higher-education finance and work alongside admissions and financial-aid departments—to help readers first identify, then minimize, what they’ll actually pay for different types of colleges based on their circumstances. With expertise, clarity, and the warmth of someone who’s been through it, Levine details how students can find the hidden tuition costs in the opaque landscape of college pricing and financial aid. He explores topics that include:
Debunking common myths and offering practical guidance for both families and individual students, Hidden Tuition makes a maddeningly imperfect process more manageable—and gives students a clearer path through one of life’s biggest financial decisions towards collegiate success.
One of the most well-established relationships in the economics of aging is that between health and wealth. Yet this relationship is also changing in conjunction with a rapidly aging population as well as a broad evolution in how people live later in life.
Building on findings from earlier editions in this National Bureau of Economic Research series, Investigations in the Economics of Aging focuses on the changing financial circumstances of the elderly and the relationship of these circumstances to health and health care. Among the topics addressed are the significance of out-of-pocket health care costs, the effects of inflation on social security, and the impact of the recent financial crisis on Americans’ well-being. Encompassing new data and advances in research methodology, the developments presented in this volume will have important implications for economies worldwide.
A growing number of archaeologists are applying Geographic Information Science (GIS) technologies to their research problems and questions. Advances in GIS and its use across disciplines allows for collaboration and enables archaeologists to ask ever more sophisticated questions and develop increasingly elaborate models on numerous aspects of past human behavior. Least cost analysis (LCA) is one such avenue of inquiry. While least cost studies are not new to the social sciences in general, LCA is relatively new to archaeology; until now, there has been no systematic exploration of its use within the field.
This edited volume presents a series of case studies illustrating the intersection of archaeology and LCA modeling at the practical, methodological, and theoretical levels. Designed to be a guidebook for archaeologists interested in using LCA in their own research, it presents a wide cross-section of practical examples for both novices and experts. The contributors to the volume showcase the richness and diversity of LCA’s application to archaeological questions, demonstrate that even simple applications can be used to explore sophisticated research questions, and highlight the challenges that come with injecting geospatial technologies into the archaeological research process.
A comparative analysis of both formal and informal long-term care in ten of the world’s wealthiest countries.
Nations throughout the world are in the midst of an enormous demographic transition, with life expectancy increasing and fertility falling, leading to a rapidly aging population and critical implications for long-term care around the world. This volume documents and compares long-term care programs in ten wealthy countries.
Analyses of survey data and government statistics show that the costs of long-term care are beyond the financial means of a large fraction of the elderly population in most countries, particularly the oldest and most disabled. As a result, public systems bear most of the cost of formal long-term care, such as care in an institution or paid home care. Most countries spend more on nursing homes than on home care, but this relationship varies widely as does the mix of care needs and resources used to define eligibility for public funding. At the same time, most care is provided informally through family or unpaid caregivers. The costs of informal care, including the foregone earnings of caregivers, are estimated to account for at least one-third of all long-term care spending in every country. Thus, any estimate of the social costs of long-term care must account for the implicit costs of informal care.
Winner of the 2008 NJ Studies Academic Alliance author's award for an outstanding non-fiction work about New Jersey
In 1981, when Raymond Abbott was a twelve-year-old sixth-grader in Camden, New Jersey, poor city school districts like his spent 25 percent less per student than the state’s wealthy suburbs did. That year, Abbott became the lead plaintiff in a landmark class-action lawsuit demanding that the state provide equal funding for rich and poor schools. Over the next twenty-five years, as the non-profit law firm representing the plaintiffs won ruling after ruling from the New Jersey Supreme Court, Abbott dropped out of school, fought a cocaine addiction, and spent time in prison before turning his life around.
Raymond Abbott’s is just one of the many human stories that have too often been forgotten in the policy battles New Jersey has waged for two generations over equal funding for rich and poor schools. Other People’s Children, the first book to tell the story of this decades-long school funding battle, interweaves the public story—an account of legal and political wrangling over laws and money—with the private stories of the inner-city children who were named plaintiffs in the state’s two school funding lawsuits, Robinson v. Cahill and Abbott v. Burke. Although these cases have shaped New Jersey’s fiscal and political landscape since the 1970s, most recently in legislative arguments over tax reform, the debate has often been too abstract and technical for most citizens to understand. Written in an accessible style and based on dozens of interviews with lawyers, politicians, and the plaintiffs themselves, Other People’s Children crystallizes the arguments and clarifies the issues for general readers.
Beyond its implications for New Jersey, this book is an important contribution to the conversations taking place in all states about the nation’s responsibility for its poor, and the role of public schools in providing equal opportunities and promising upward mobility for hard-working citizens, regardless of race or class.
The first scholarly exploration of the forums, practice, and economics of functional medicine.
Physicians of the Future interrogates the hidden logics of inclusion and exclusion in functional medicine (FM), a holistic form of personalized medicine that targets chronic disease. Rosalynn Vega uncovers how, as “wounded healers,” some FM practitioners who are former chronic disease sufferers turn their illness narratives into a form of social capital, leveraging social media to relate to patients and build practices as “doctor-influencers.” Arguing that power and authority operate distinctly in FM when compared to conventional medicine, largely because FM services are paid for out of pocket by socioeconomically privileged “clients,” Vega studies how FM practitioners engage in entrepreneurship of their own while critiquing the profit motives of the existing healthcare system, pharmaceutical industry, and insurance industry. Using data culled from online support groups, conferences, docuseries, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and TED Talks, as well as her own battles with chronic illness, Vega argues that FM practices prioritize the individual while inadvertently reinscribing inequities based on race and class. Ultimately, she opens avenues of possibility for FM interlocutors wrestling with their responsibility for making functional medicine accessible to all.
“Africa is no more prone to violent conflicts than other regions. Indeed, Africa’s share of the more than 180 million people who died from conflicts and atrocities in the twentieth century is relatively modest.… This is not to underestimate the immense impact of violent conflicts on Africa; it is merely to emphasize the need for more balanced debate and commentary.”
—From the introduction by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Violent conflicts have exacted a heavy toll on Africa’s societies, polities, and economies. This book presents African scholars’ views of why conflicts start in their continent. The causes of conflict are too often examined by scholars from the countries that run the proxy wars and sell the arms to fuel them. This volume offers theoretically sophisticated, empirically grounded, and compelling analyses of the roots of African conflicts.
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