This book presents a careful analysis of pension data collected by the Health and Retirement Study, a unique survey of people over the age of fifty conducted by the University of Michigan for the National Institute on Aging. The authors studied pensions as they evolve over individuals’ work lives and into retirement: how pension coverage and plans change over a lifetime, how many pensions workers have by the time they retire and what these pensions are worth, what pensions contribute to individual retirement incomes, and how trends and policy changes affect retirement plans.

The book focuses on the major features of pensions, including plan type and participation, ages of eligibility for retirement, values of different pension types, how pension values are influenced by retirement age, how plans are settled when a worker leaves a firm, how well people understand their pensions, the importance of pensions in retirement saving and as a share of household wealth, and the vulnerability of the retirement age population to the current financial crisis.

This book provides readers with an invaluable look at the crucial but ever-changing role of pensions in supporting retirees.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented higher education with an unprecedented challenge: How could institutions continue the basic work of teaching and research while maintaining safe environments for their faculty, staff, and students? In The Pivot, Robert J. Bliwise traces Duke University’s response to the pandemic to show how higher education broadly met that challenge head-on. Bliwise interviews people across the campus: from bus drivers and vaccine researchers to student activists, dining hall managers, and professors in areas from English to ecology. He explores the shift to teaching online and the reshaping of research programs; how surveillance testing and reconfiguring residence halls and dining sites helped limit the virus spread on campus; the efforts to promote student well-being and to sustain extracurricular programs; and what the surge in COVID-19 cases meant for the university health system. Bliwise also shows how broad cultural conversations surrounding the 2020 presidential election, climate change, free speech on campus, and systemic racism unfolded in this changed campus environment. Although the pandemic put remarkable pressures on the campus community, Bliwise demonstrates that it ultimately reaffirmed the importance of the campus experience in all its richness and complexity.

This book presents a broad overview of the planning profession, and discusses many of the major problems encountered in urbanism and planning. The essays discuss topics that include education, the urban community, the place of planning in governmental hierarchy, and its relationship to urban political dynamics.

In this ethnographic study, the author examines the policies and practices of family planning programs in Egypt to see how an elitist, Western-informed state attempts to create obliging citizens. The state sees voluntary compliance with the law for the common good as the cornerstone of modernity. Family planning programs are a training ground for the construction of self-disciplined individuals, and thus a rewarding area of study for the fate of social programs in developing countries.

Through a careful examination of state-endorsed family planning practices in urban and rural contexts, the author shows us the pervasive, high-pressure persuasion of women, who are encouraged to think as individual decision makers of their immediate families and their national interests. But what of the other forces at work in these women’s lives, binding them to their extended families and to their religious identities? And what of the laws that allow for polygamy and discriminate against women in marriage, inheritance, and as part of the workforce?

These forces operate against the received wisdom of the state. Is the Muslim community thought to end at the borders of Egypt? What about local constructions of masculinity when the state appeals to wives to decide for themselves? How does widespread labor migration to foreign countries affect attitudes toward family planning? How is female contraception viewed by the Islamic Brotherhood and other modern Muslim groups?

This book questions much that we have taken for granted and gives us grounds for reexamining our assumptions about family planning and the individual and state in developing countries such as Egypt.

In Planning the Home Front, Sarah Jo Peterson offers readers a portrait of the American people—industrialists and labor leaders, federal officials and municipal leaders, social reformers, industrial workers, and their families—that lays bare the foundations of community, the high costs of racism, and the tangled process of negotiation between New Deal visionaries and wartime planners. By tying the history of suburbanization to that of the home front, Peterson uncovers how the United States planned and built industrial regions in the pursuit of war, setting the stage for the suburban explosion that would change the American landscape when the war was won.

In this companion volume to his 2012 book Oregon Plans: The Making of an Unquiet Land-Use Revolution, Sy Adler offers readers a deep analysis of planning Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary. Required by one of Oregon’s nineteen statewide planning goals, a boundary in the Portland metropolitan area was intended to separate urban land and land that would be urbanized from commercially productive farmland. After adopting the goals, approving the Portland growth boundary in 1979 was the most significant decision the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission has ever made, and, more broadly, is a significant milestone in American land-use planning.
 
Planning the Portland Urban Growth Boundary primarily covers the 1970s. Innovative regional planning institutions were established in response to concerns about sprawl, but planners working for those institutions had to confront the reality that various plans being developed and implemented by city and county governments in metro Portland would instead allow sprawl to continue. Regional planners labeled these as “Trend City” plans, and sought to transform them during the 1970s and thereafter.
 
Adler discusses the dynamics of these partially successful efforts and the conflicts that characterized the development of the Portland UGB during the 1970s—between different levels of government, and between public, private, and civic sector advocates. When the regional UGB is periodically reviewed, these conflicts continue, as debates about values and technical issues related to forecasting future amounts of population, economic activity, and the availability of land for urban development over a twenty-year period roil the boundary planning process.
 
Planning the Portland Urban Growth Boundary is an authoritative history and an indispensable resource for anyone actively involved in urban and regional planning—from neighborhood associations and elected officials to organizations working on land use and development issues throughout the state.
 

"Journalist Mike Greenberg is appalled by what had happened to his home town, San Antonio, Texas. In response, he has written a readable and useful book . . . . which is full of practical suggestions for improving his own and other communities. . . . Planners, architects, and city officials should read this practical and hopeful book." --Planning In this lively and insightful book, Mike Greenberg argues that the purpose of cities and neighborhoods is to foster economic, social, and intellectual exchange, the process that underlies the creation of value. He seeks to show how the detailed geography of the city can either inhibit or encourage such exchanges and thus profoundly affect the lives of the people who live there. Cities filled an important evolutionary niche, historically, because they were the places--in contrast to rural areas or villages--where exchange occurred with greatest efficiency, where value was created most spectacularly, and thus where the wealth was. But it wasn't just the fact of concentration, but the how of it, that made cities efficient producers of value and circulators of wealth. The Poetics of Cities is concerned with the context of contemporary cities and suburban rings, where development dynamics--guided by the needs of the automobile and by reformist planning concepts that went awry--create environments that are increasingly hostile to exchange and thus threaten to inhibit the economic development that made them possible in the first place. The city of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America was in some ways a remarkably sophisticated technology for fostering exchange and cementing community. Taking examples mostly from his hometown, San Antonio, Texas, Greenberg examines certain features of those cities--their sidewalk systems, their scale and setbacks, the rhythms of their streetscapes, the structure of their neighborhoods--and shows why they worked so well, and why they cannot be arbitrarily tossed aside without doing damage to the urban economy. He then offers some practical planning strategies and regulatory ideas to help cities retain what is useful from their traditional forms while at the same time accommodating modernity. Engagingly written, The Poetics of Cities will make fascinating reading for architects, urban planner, neighborhood activists, city officials, real estate developers, and anyone interested in the quality of urban life in America. Mike Greenberg is Senior Critic of the San Antonio Express-News. He is the author of Synthesis: Craftsmanship, Architecture, Design and was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.

As the electric power industry faces the challenges of climate change, technological disruption, new market imperatives, and changing policies, a renowned energy expert offers a roadmap to the future of this essential sector.

As the damaging and costly impacts of climate change increase, the rapid development of sustainable energy has taken on great urgency. The electricity industry has responded with necessary but wrenching shifts toward renewables, even as it faces unprecedented challenges and disruption brought on by new technologies, new competitors, and policy changes. The result is a collision course between a grid that must provide abundant, secure, flexible, and affordable power, and an industry facing enormous demands for power and rapid, systemic change.

The fashionable solution is to think small: smart buildings, small-scale renewables, and locally distributed green energy. But Peter Fox-Penner makes clear that these will not be enough to meet our increasing needs for electricity. He points instead to the indispensability of large power systems, battery storage, and scalable carbon-free power technologies, along with the grids and markets that will integrate them. The electric power industry and its regulators will have to provide all of these, even as they grapple with changing business models for local electric utilities, political instability, and technological change. Power after Carbon makes sense of all the moving parts, providing actionable recommendations for anyone involved with or relying on the electric power system.

A CounterPunch Best Book of the Year
A Lone Star Policy Institute Recommended Book

“If you care, as I do, about disrupting the perverse politics of criminal justice, there is no better place to start than Prisoners of Politics.”
—James Forman, Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The social consequences of this fact—recycling people who commit crimes through an overwhelmed system and creating a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens—are devastating. A leading criminal justice reformer who has successfully rewritten sentencing guidelines, Rachel Barkow argues that we would be safer, and have fewer people in prison, if we relied more on expertise and evidence and worried less about being “tough on crime.” A groundbreaking work that is transforming our national conversation on crime and punishment, Prisoners of Politics shows how problematic it is to base criminal justice policy on the whims of the electorate and argues for an overdue shift that could upend our prison problem and make America a more equitable society.

“A critically important exploration of the political dynamics that have made us one of the most punitive societies in human history. A must-read by one of our most thoughtful scholars of crime and punishment.”
—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy

“Barkow’s analysis suggests that it is not enough to slash police budgets if we want to ensure lasting reform. We also need to find ways to insulate the process from political winds.”
—David Cole, New York Review of Books

“A cogent and provocative argument about how to achieve true institutional reform and fix our broken system.”
—Emily Bazelon, author of Charged