BiblioVault - Books about Social policy

Making Americans Healthier

Social and Economic Policy as Health Policy

Robert F. Schoeni

Russell Sage Foundation, 2008

The United States spends billions of dollars annually on social and economic policies aimed at improving the lives of its citizens, but the health consequences associated with these policies are rarely considered. In Making Americans Healthier, a group of multidisciplinary experts shows how social and economic policies seemingly unrelated to medical well-being have dramatic consequences for the health of the American people. Most previous research concerning problems with health and healthcare in the United States has focused narrowly on issues of medical care and insurance coverage, but Making Americans Healthier demonstrates the important health consequences that policymakers overlook in traditional cost-benefit evaluations of social policy. The contributors examine six critical policy areas: civil rights, education, income support, employment, welfare, and neighborhood and housing. Among the important findings in this book, David Cutler and Adriana Lleras-Muney document the robust relationship between educational attainment and health, and estimate that the health benefits of education may exceed even the well-documented financial returns of education. Pamela Herd, James House, and Robert Schoeni discover notable health benefits associated with the Supplemental Security Income Program, which provides financial support for elderly and disabled Americans. George Kaplan, Nalini Ranjit, and Sarah Burgard document a large and unanticipated improvement in the health of African-American women following the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Making Americans Healthier presents ground-breaking evidence that the health impact of many social policies is substantial. The important findings in this book pave the way for promising new avenues for intervention and convincingly demonstrate that ultimately social and economic policy is health policy. A Volume in the National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy

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Making Institutions Work in Peru

Democracy, Development and Inequality Since 1980

Edited by John Crabtree

University of London Press, 2006

Making Modern Girls

A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos

Abosede A. George

Ohio University Press, 2014

Winner of the 2015 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize for outstanding book on African women's experiences. (African Studies Association)
Honorable Mention, New York African Studies Association Book Prize

In Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria. It draws from gender studies, generational studies, labor history, and urban history to shed new light on the complex workings of African cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the nationalist era of the 1950s.

The two major schemes at the center of this study were the modernization project of elite Lagosian women and the salvationist project of British social workers. By approaching children and youth, specifically girl hawkers, as social actors and examining the ways in which local and colonial reformers worked upon young people, the book offers a critical new perspective on the uses of African children for the production and legitimization of national and international social development initiatives.

Making Modern Girls demonstrates how oral sources can be used to uncover the social history of informal or undocumented urban workers and to track transformations in practices of childhood over the course of decades. George revises conventional accounts of the history of development work in Africa by drawing close attention to the social welfare initiatives of late colonialism and by highlighting the roles that African women reformers played in promoting sociocultural changes within their own societies.

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Mano Dura

The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador

By Sonja Wolf

University of Texas Press, 2017

In 1992, at the end of a twelve-year civil war, El Salvador was poised for a transition to democracy. Yet, after longstanding dominance by a small oligarchy that continually used violence to repress popular resistance, El Salvador’s democracy has proven to be a fragile one, as social ills (poverty chief among them) have given rise to neighborhoods where gang activity now thrives. Mano Dura examines the ways in which the ruling ARENA party used gang violence to solidify political power in the hands of the elite—culminating in draconian “iron fist” antigang policies that undermine human rights while ultimately doing little to address the roots of gang membership.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and policy analysis, Mano Dura examines the activities of three nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have advocated for more nuanced policies to eradicate gangs and the societal issues that are both a cause and an effect of gang proliferation. While other studies of street gangs have focused on relatively distant countries such as Colombia, Argentina, and Jamaica, Sonja Wolf’s research takes us to a country closer to the United States, where forced deportation has brought with it US gang culture. Charting the limited success of NGOs in influencing El Salvador’s security policies, the book brings to light key contextual aspects—including myopic media coverage and the ironic populist support for ARENA, despite the party’s protection of the elite at the expense of the greater society.

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Market Friendly or Family Friendly?

The State and Gender Inequality in Old Age

Madonna Harrington Meyer

Russell Sage Foundation, 2007

Poverty among the elderly is sharply gendered—women over sixty-five are twice as likely as men to live below the poverty line. Older women receive smaller Social Security payments and are less likely to have private pensions. They are twice as likely as men to need a caregiver and twice as likely as men to be a caregiver. Recent efforts of some in Washington to reduce and privatize social welfare programs threaten to exacerbate existing gender disparities among older Americans. They also threaten to exacerbate inequality among women by race, class, and marital status. Madonna Harrington Meyer and Pamela Herd explain these disparities and assess how proposed policy reforms would affect inequality among the aged. Market Friendly or Family Friendly? documents the cumulative disadvantages that make it so difficult for women to achieve economic and health security when they retire. Wage discrimination and occupational segregation reduce women's lifetime earnings, depressing their savings and Social Security benefits. While more women are employed today than a generation ago, they continue to shoulder a greater share of the care burden for children, the disabled, and the elderly. Moreover, as marriage rates have declined, more working mothers are raising children single-handedly. Women face higher rates of health problems due to their lower earnings and the high demands associated with unpaid care work. There are also financial consequences to these family and work patterns. Harrington Meyer and Herd contrast the impact of market friendly programs that maximize individual choice, risk, and responsibility with family friendly programs aimed at redistributing risks and resources. They evaluate popular policies on the current agenda, considering the implications for inequality. But they also evaluate less discussed policy proposals. In particular, minimum benefits for Social Security, as well as credits for raising children, would improve economic security for all, regardless of marital status. National health insurance would also reduce inequality, as would reforms to Medicare, particularly increased coverage of long term care. Just as important are policies such as universal preschool and paid family leave aimed at reducing the disadvantages women face during their working years. The gender gaps that women experience during their work and family lives culminate in income and health disparities between men and women during retirement, but the problem has received scant attention. Market Friendly or Family Friendly? is a comprehensive introduction to this issue, and a significant contribution to the debate over the future of America's entitlement programs. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology

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Miles to Go

A Personal History of Social Policy

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Harvard University Press, 1996

Has liberalism lost its way--or merely its voice? This book by one of the nation's most insightful, articulate, and powerful Democrats at last breaks the silence that has greeted the Republican Party's revolution of 1994. When voters handed Democrats their worst defeat in 100 years, New Yorkers returned Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the Senate for his fourth term. Amid the wreck of his party's control and the disarray of programs and policies he has championed for three decades, Senator Moynihan here takes stock of the politics, economics, and social problems that have brought us to this pass. With a clarity and civility far too rare in the political arena, he offers a wide-ranging meditation on the nation's social strategies for the last 60 years, as well as a vision for the years to come.

Because Senator Moynihan has long been a defender of the policies whose fortunes he follows here, Miles to Go is in a sense autobiographical, an exemplary account of the social life of the body politic. As it guides us through government's attempts to grapple with thorny problems like family disintegration, welfare, health care, deviance, and addiction, Moynihan writes of "The Coming of Age of American Social Policy." Through most of our history American social policy has dealt with issues that first arose in Europe, and essentially followed European models. Now, in a post-industrial society we face issues that first appear in the United States for which we will have to devise our own responses. Ringing with the wisdom of experience, decency, and common sense, Miles to Go asks "why liberalism cannot be taught what conservatives seem to know instinctively"--to heed the political and moral sentiments of the people and reshape itself for the coming age.

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Millennial Ecuador

Critical Essays Cultural Transformations

Norman E Whitten

University of Iowa Press, 2003

In the past decade, Ecuador has seen five indigenous uprisings, the emergence of the powerful Pachakutik political movement, and the strengthening of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador and the Association of Black Ecuadorians, all of which have contributed substantially to a new constitution proclaiming the country to be “multiethnic and multicultural.” Furthermore, January 2003 saw the inauguration of a new populist president, who immediately appointed two indigenous persons to his cabinet. In this volume, eleven critical essays plus a lengthy introduction and a timely epilogue explore the multicultural forces that have allowed Ecuador's indigenous peoples to have such dramatic effects on the nation's political structure.

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Myths about the Powerless

Contesting Social Inequalities

M. Brinton Lykes

Temple University Press, 1996