A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Taking on what one former U.S. ambassador called “the last ghost of the Vietnam War,” this book examines the far-reaching impact of Agent Orange, the most infamous of the dioxin-contaminated herbicides used by American forces in Southeast Asia. Edwin A. Martini's aim is not simply to reconstruct the history of the “chemical war” but to investigate the ongoing controversy over the short- and long-term effects of weaponized defoliants on the environment of Vietnam, on the civilian population, and on the troops who fought on both sides.
Beginning in the early 1960s, when Agent Orange was first deployed in Vietnam, Martini follows the story across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, looking for answers to a host of still unresolved questions. What did chemical manufacturers and American policymakers know about the effects of dioxin on human beings, and when did they know it? How much do scientists and doctors know even today? Should the use of Agent Orange be considered a form of chemical warfare? What can, and should, be done for U.S. veterans, Vietnamese victims, and others around the world who believe they have medical problems caused by Agent Orange?
Martini draws on military records, government reports, scientific research, visits to contaminated sites, and interviews to disentangle conflicting claims and evaluate often ambiguous evidence. He shows that the impact of Agent Orange has been global in its reach affecting individuals and communities in New Zealand, Australia, Korea, and Canada as well as Vietnam and the United States. Yet for all the answers it provides, this book also reveals how much uncertainty—scientific, medical, legal, and political—continues to surround the legacy of Agent Orange.
America at Risk gathers original essays by a distinguished and bipartisan group of writers and intellectuals to address a question that matters to Americans of every political persuasion: what are some of the greatest dangers facing America today? The answers, which range from dwindling political participation to rising poverty, and religion to empire, add up to a valuable and timely portrait of a particular moment in the history of American ideas.
While the opinions are many, there is a central theme in the book: the corrosion of the liberal constitutional order that has long guided the country at home and abroad. The authors write about the demonstrably important dangers the United States faces while also breaking the usual academic boundaries: there are chapters on the family, religious polarization, immigration, and the economy, as well as on governmental and partisan issues.
America at Risk is required reading for all Americans alarmed about the future of their country.
Contributors
- Traci Burch
- James W. Ceaser
- Robert Faulkner
- Niall Ferguson
- William A. Galston
- Hugh Heclo
- Pierre Manent
- Harvey C. Mansfield
- Peter Rodriguez
- Kay Lehman Schlozman
- Susan Shell
- Peter Skerry
- James Q. Wilson
- Alan Wolfe
Robert Faulkner is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Susan Shell is Professor of Political Science at Boston College.
"America at Risk goes well beyond the usual diagnoses of issues debated in public life like immigration, war, and debt, to consider the Republic’s founding principles, and the ways in which they have been displaced by newer thoughts and habits in contemporary America. A critical book for understanding our present condition."
—Francis Fukuyama, Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
"In this penetrating book, the nation’s finest social and political thinkers from across the spectrum take a careful and no-holds-barred look at the dangers facing the American political system. The conclusions are more unsettling than reassuring---but that is because they are honest and real."
—Norm Ornstein, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
"In the midst of overwrought pundits, irate soccer moms, and outraged bloggers, it is difficult to distinguish genuine dangers from false alarms and special pleading. This book enables us to do so, in a way that helps us to actually think about, not just feel anxious about, threats to those features of American society that are worth cherishing. The authors range in ideology and expertise, but they are uniformly judicious, incisive, and informative. This is a fascinating book about issues that the political system usually ignores or exaggerates."
—Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
A systematic attempt to understand the rabbinic world through its approach to confronting uncertainty
In the history of halakhah, the treatment of uncertainty became one of the most complex fields of intense study. In his latest book, Moshe Halbertal focuses on examining the point of origin of the study of uncertainty in early rabbinic literature, including the Mishnah, Tosefta, and halakhic midrashim. Halbertal explores instructions concerning how to behave in situations of uncertainty ranging from matters of ritual purity, to lineage and marriage, to monetary law, and to the laws of forbidden foods. This examination of the rules of uncertainty introduced in early rabbinic literature reveals that these rules were not aimed at avoiding but rather at dwelling in the midst of uncertainty, thus rejecting the sectarian isolationism that sought to minimize a community’s experience of and friction with uncertainty.
Features:
- A thorough investigation of the principles concerning how to behave in cases of uncertainty
- An examination of two distinct modes for coping with uncertainty
Highlights the experiences of patients to examine how diagnostic uncertainty in cystic fibrosis has persisted despite the introduction of new technologies.
Using the critical case of cystic fibrosis (CF), Challenging Diagnosis probes the sociocultural and scientific factors that have contributed to diagnostic uncertainty in medicine while foregrounding its impact on patients and families. Though often described in medical and biology texts as a model genetic disease, making it straightforward to identify, diagnosing CF has long been fraught with challenges. As Michelle LaBonte shows, looking at CF illustrates how diagnostic uncertainty has persisted despite—and even because of—new technologies.
Drawing on her own experiences as a patient with pancreatic insufficiency, a condition often seen in people with CF, LaBonte examines shifts in CF’s screening and diagnosis, from the first comprehensive descriptions of the disease in the 1930s to contemporary genetic testing for carrier status. Today, the diagnosis of CF is no more straightforward than it was in the mid-twentieth century. Since many diagnostic technologies for CF (or their analogs) have been used throughout medicine, as LaBonte explains, these findings are broadly applicable beyond CF and demonstrate the significant harms associated with relying on test results that prioritize disease specificity over patient narratives.
In her historical analysis and her personal story, LaBonte highlights the shortcomings of a reductionist biomedical model that’s overly reliant on diagnostic technologies, a concern that’s more relevant than ever now that direct-to-consumer genetic testing and use of whole genome sequencing in newborns are increasing.
Essential to Catholic, Protestant, and even secular scholars of American religious history this is the first historiographical analysis of the work of Henry K. Rowe, James H. Nichols, Leonard J. Trinterud, H. Shelton Smith, John T. McNeill, Herbert W. Schneider, Robert T. Handy, John T. Ellis, and Jaroslav Pelikan.
Aware that every generation rewrites history, Bowden bases his investigation of major twentieth-century church historians on two questions: Why are young historians dissatisfied with earlier treatments? What leads them to believe their version is better?
Henry Warner Bowden’s extensive bibliography includes A Century of Church History: The Legacy of Philip Schaff.
Climate, God and Uncertainty brings together the philosophical approaches of pragmatism and (neo-) Kantianism in transcendental naturalism. The new approach is based on combining an expansive concept of “nature” with an emphasis on the separate ontological status of transcendental values. This book moves beyond Bruno Latour’s thought to understand what climate change means for philosophical anthropology and wider culture.
Referring mainly to works by Latour, William James, and Heinrich Rickert, this book develops a cultural philosophical approach called “transcendental naturalism.” This approach reinterprets the interface between science and politics in the context of climate change, highlighting, for instance, issues such as the religious disenchantment of nature, the scientific disbelief in a plurality of value-laden perspectives, and the disregard for non-modern worldviews in politics. In developing its argument, the book makes a methodological intervention on the sort of naturalism that guides both Latour’s work and a large part of the academic field called “science and religion.”
The Columbia River Treaty Revisited, with contributions from historians, geographers, environmental scientists, and other experts, is intended to facilitate conversation about the impending expiration. It allows the reader, through the close inspection of the Columbia River Basin, to better grasp the uncertainty of water governance. It aids efforts, already underway, to understand changes in the basin since the treaty was passed, to predict future changes, and to determine whether alteration of the treaty is ultimately advisable.
The Columbia River Treaty Revisited will appeal to those interested in water basin management–scholars, stakeholders, and residents of the Columbia River basin alike.
A Project of the Universities Consoritum on Columbia River Governance
The Universities Consortium on Columbia River Governance, with representatives from universities in the U.S. and Canada, formed to offer a nonpartisan platform to facilitate an informed, inclusive, international dialogue among key decision-makers and other interested people and organizations; to connect university research to problems faced within the basin; and to expose students to a complex water resources problem. The Consortium organized the symposium on which this volume is based.
Beginning with Lost Highway, director David Lynch “swerved” in a new direction, one in which very disorienting images of the physical world take center stage in his films. Seeking to understand this unusual emphasis in his work, noted Lynch scholar Martha Nochimson engaged Lynch in a long conversation of unprecedented openness, during which he shared his vision of the physical world as an uncertain place that masks important universal realities. He described how he derives this vision from the Holy Vedas of the Hindu religion, as well as from his layman’s fascination with modern physics.
With this deep insight, Nochimson forges a startlingly original template for analyzing Lynch’s later films—the seemingly unlikely combination of the spiritual landscape envisioned in the Holy Vedas and the material landscape evoked by quantum mechanics and relativity. In David Lynch Swerves, Nochimson navigates the complexities of Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire with uncanny skill, shedding light on the beauty of their organic compositions; their thematic critiques of the immense dangers of modern materialism; and their hopeful conceptions of human potential. She concludes with excerpts from the wide-ranging interview in which Lynch discussed his vision with her, as well as an interview with Columbia University physicist David Albert, who was one of Nochimson’s principal tutors in the discipline of quantum physics.
Institutions of higher education are often described as “ivory towers,” places of privilege where students exist in a “campus bubble,” insulated from the trials of the outside world. These metaphors reveal a widespread belief that college provides young people with stability and keeps insecurity at bay. But for many students, that’s simply not the case.
Degrees of Risk reveals how insecurity permeates every facet of college life for students at public universities. Sociologist Blake Silver dissects how these institutions play a direct role in perpetuating uncertainty, instability, individualism, and anxiety about the future. Silver examined interviews with more than one hundred students who described the risks that surrounded every decision: which major to choose, whether to take online classes, and how to find funding. He expertly identified the ways the college experience played out differently for students from different backgrounds. For students from financially secure families with knowledge of how college works, all the choices and flexibility of college felt like an adventure or a wealth of opportunities. But for many others, especially low-income, first-generation students, their personal and family circumstances meant that that flexibility felt like murkiness and precarity. In addition, he discovered that students managed insecurity in very different ways, intensifying inequality at the intersections of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other sociodemographic dimensions. Drawing from these firsthand accounts, Degrees of Risk presents a model for a better university, one that fosters success and confidence for a diverse range of students.
An Epidemic of Uncertainty advances a new framework for studying social life by emphasizing something social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures–what people know they don’t know. Taking Malawi’s ongoing AIDS epidemic as an entry point, Jenny Trinitapoli shows that despite admirable declines in new HIV infections and AIDS-related mortality, an epidemic of uncertainty persists; at any given point in time, fully half of Malawian young adults don’t know their HIV status. Reckoning with the impact of this uncertainty within the bustling trading town of Balaka, Trinitapoli argues that HIV-related uncertainty is measurable, pervasive, and impervious to biomedical solutions, with consequences that expand into multiple domains of life, including relationship stability, fertility, and health. Over the duration of a groundbreaking decade-long longitudinal study, rich survey data and poignant ethnographic vignettes vividly depict how individual lives and population patterns unfold against the backdrop of an ever-evolving epidemic. Even as HIV is transformed from a progressive, fatal disease to a chronic and manageable condition, the accompanying epidemic of uncertainty remains fundamental to understanding social life in this part of the world.
Insisting that known unknowns can and should be integrated into social-scientific models of human behavior, An Epidemic of Uncertainty treats uncertainty as an enduring aspect, a central feature, and a powerful force in everyday life.
In this controversial book, Keith Krehbiel investigates and casts doubt upon a view of Congress held by many academics, journalists, and members of the lay public: that Congress is organized primarily to facilitate logrolling or "gains from trade" between legislators. The author puts forward an alternative "informational" theory that, unlike previous formal theories, highlights institutional needs and individual incentives for acquiring policy expertise. Using games with incomplete information, Krehbiel derives a set of unique and testable predictions about the organization of legislatures -- including the composition of committees and the procedures under which legislation is considered.
Krehbiel's creative illustrations and nonmathematical presentation of formal theories make this book accessible to a diverse set of readers. The political relevance and testability of games with incomplete information will be appreciated by game theorists and economists, while the book's findings make it essential reading for political scientists who study American politics, political institutions, or democratic legislatures.
Pietruska argues that this late nineteenth-century quest for future certainty had an especially ironic consequence: it led Americans to accept uncertainty as an inescapable part of both forecasting and twentieth-century economic and cultural life. Drawing together histories of science, technology, capitalism, environment, and culture, Looking Forward explores how forecasts functioned as new forms of knowledge and risk management tools that sometimes mitigated, but at other times exacerbated, the very uncertainties they were designed to conquer. Ultimately Pietruska shows how Americans came to understand the future itself as predictable, yet still uncertain.
Between 1888 and 1909 Gustav Mahler completed nine symphonies and the orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde; his tenth symphony was left incomplete at his death in 1911. Mahler’s Symphonic World provocatively suggests that over his lifetime, the composer pursued a single vision and a single, ideal symphony that strived to capture his personal outlook on human existence. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, when all trust in firm philosophical and spiritual foundations had evaporated, Mahler’s music reflected a deep preoccupation with human suffering and transience and a search for sources of possible consolation.
In Karol Berger’s reading, each of the symphonies follows a similar trajectory, with an opening quest leading to the final unveiling of a transcendent, consolatory vision. By juxtaposing single movements—the opening Allegros, the middle movements, the Finales—across different works, Berger traces recurring plotlines and imagery and discloses the works’ multiple interrelationships as well as their cohesiveness around a central idea. Ultimately, Mahler’s Symphonic World locates Mahler’s music within the matrix of intellectual currents that defined his epoch and offers a revelatory picture of his musical way of being in the world.
In Masters of Uncertainty, Phaedra Daipha develops a new conceptual framework for the process of decision making, after spending years immersed in the life of a northeastern office of the National Weather Service. Arguing that predicting the weather will always be more craft than science, Daipha shows how forecasters have made a virtue of the unpredictability of the weather. Impressive data infrastructures and powerful computer models are still only a substitute for the real thing outside, and so forecasters also enlist improvisational collage techniques and an omnivorous appetite for information to create a locally meaningful forecast on their computer screens. Intent on capturing decision making in action, Daipha takes the reader through engrossing firsthand accounts of several forecasting episodes (hits and misses) and offers a rare fly-on-the-wall insight into the process and challenges of producing meteorological predictions come rain or come shine. Combining rich detail with lucid argument, Masters of Uncertainty advances a theory of decision making that foregrounds the pragmatic and situated nature of expert cognition and casts into new light how we make decisions in the digital age.
Organizing contributions from various anthropological subfields—including economics, business, security, humanitarianism, health, and environment—Limor Samimian-Darash and Paul Rabinow offer new tools with which to consider uncertainty, its management, and the differing modes of subjectivity appropriate to it. Taking up policies and experiences as objects of research and analysis, the essays here seek a rigorous inquiry into a sound conceptualization of uncertainty in order to better confront contemporary problems. Ultimately, they open the way for a participatory anthropology that asks crucial questions about our contemporary state.
In order to draw parallels between art, science, and culture, this publication will explore the ways that selected art works have contributed to a form of cultural pedagogy. It follows the integration of culture and science in artists’ expressions to create meaningful experiences that expose the probabilities and uncertainties equally present in the world of science.
Exploring the transformation of health care over the last several decades that has led doctors to become more attentive to treating risk than treating symptoms or curing disease, Aronowitz shows how many aspects of the health system and clinical practice are now aimed at risk reduction and risk control. He argues that this transformation has been driven in part by the pharmaceutical industry, which benefits by promoting its products to the larger percentage of the population at risk for a particular illness, rather than the smaller percentage who are actually affected by it. Meanwhile, for those suffering from chronic illness, the experience of risk and disease has been conflated by medical practitioners who focus on anticipatory treatment as much if not more than on relieving suffering caused by disease. Drawing on such controversial examples as HPV vaccines, cancer screening programs, and the cancer survivorship movement, Aronowitz argues that patients and their doctors have come to believe, perilously, that far too many medical interventions are worthwhile because they promise to control our fears and reduce uncertainty.
Risky Medicine is a timely call for a skeptical response to medicine’s obsession with risk, as well as for higher standards of evidence for risk-reducing interventions and a rebalancing of health care to restore an emphasis on the actual curing of and caring for people suffering from disease.
- We are often forced through violence to do things that do not make sense for us except to avoid retaliations, punishments, or the various evils that others might inflict on us.
- We inhabit a world that escapes our control. This involves living in uncertainty concerning the things that we might suffer and do, that is, the things that might happen to us and the results of our actions.
- We are dependent on others and collaborate with them in ways that make it impossible to fully understand the sense of our own actions and practical intentions.
Sick building syndrome embodied a politics of uncertainty that continues to characterize contemporary American environmental debates. Murphy explores the production of uncertainty by juxtaposing multiple histories, each of which explains how an expert or lay tradition made chemical exposures perceptible or imperceptible, existent or nonexistent. They show how uncertainty emerged from a complex confluence of feminist activism, office worker protests, ventilation engineering, toxicology, popular epidemiology, corporate science, and ecology. In an illuminating case study, she reflects on EPA scientists’ efforts to have their headquarters recognized as a sick building. Murphy brings all of these histories together in what is not only a thorough account of an environmental health problem but also a much deeper exploration of the relationship between history, materiality, and uncertainty.
In Speculative Communities, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou examines the ways that speculation has moved beyond financial markets to shape fundamental aspects of our social and political lives. As ordinary people make exceptional decisions, such as the American election of a populist demagogue or the British vote to leave the European Union, they are moving from time-honored and -tested practices of governance, toward the speculative promise of a new, more uncertain future. This book shows how even our methods of building community have shifted to the speculative realm as social media platforms enable and amplify our volatile wagers.
For Komporozos-Athanasiou, “to speculate” means increasingly “to connect,” to endorse the unknown pre-emptively, and often daringly, as a means of social survival. Grappling with the question of how more uncertainty can lead to its full-throated embrace rather than dissent, Speculative Communities shows how finance has become the model for society writ large. As Komporozos-Athanasiou argues, virtual marketplaces, new social media, and dating apps bring finance’s opaque infrastructures into the most intimate realms of our lives, leading to a new type of speculative imagination across economy, culture, and society.
Donald W. Katzner begins with an extensive investigation of the distinction between potential surprise and probability. He presents a modified version of Shackle's model of decision-making in ignorance and examines in considerable detail its "comparative statics" and operationality properties. The meaning of aggregation and simultaneity under these conditions is also explored, and Shackle's model is applied to the construction of models of the consumer, the firm, microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Katzner concludes with discussions of the roles of history, hysteresis, and empirical investigation in economic inquiry.
Time, Ignorance, and Uncertainty in Economic Models will be of interest to economists and others engaged in the study of uncertainty, probability, aggregation, and simultaneity. Those interested in the microeconomics of consumer and firm behavior, general equilibrium, and macroeconomics will also benefit from this book.
Donald W. Katzner is Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts.
The Life and Career Planning Model in Time to Get Real! has been utilized by individuals in early, mid and later career and life. Too many individuals let life happen to them. Control more of your life through readiness and preparation. We can help you visualize a future that you desire and a road that you can travel to get there.
Written by Alex J. Plinio, and Melissa Smith, acclaimed business leaders and life and career planning specialists, this book is filled with instructive case studies, illuminating stories, interactive exercises, and inspirational quotes enabling you to unlock those things leading to personal satisfaction and success. The Life and Career Planning Model helps you target what matters the most to you in your life while providing the impetus to move you forward in a positive direction. Whether you are 21, 41, or 61, it is now Time to Get Real!
Tauber, a leading figure in history and philosophy of science, offers a unique autobiographical overview of how science as a discipline of thought has been characterized by philosophers and historians over the past century. He frames his account through science’s – and his own personal – quest for explanatory certainty.
During the 20th century, that goal was displaced by the probabilistic epistemologies required to characterize complex systems, whether in physics, biology, economics, or the social sciences. This “triumph of uncertainty” is the inevitable outcome of irreducible chance and indeterminate causality. And beyond these epistemological limits, the interpretative faculties of the individual scientist (what Michael Polanyi called the “personal” and the “tacit”) invariably affects how data are understood. Whereas positivism had claimed radical objectivity, post-positivists have identified how a web of non-epistemic values and social forces profoundly influence the production of knowledge.
Tauber presents a case study of these claims by showing how immunology has incorporated extra-curricular social elements in its theoretical development and how these in turn have influenced interpretive problems swirling around biological identity, individuality, and cognition. The correspondence between contemporary immunology and cultural notions of selfhood are strong and striking. Just as uncertainty haunts science, so too does it hover over current constructions of personal identity, self knowledge, and moral agency. Across the chasm of uncertainty, science and selfhood speak.
In the last chapter of Walden, Henry David Thoreau proclaims a simple yet profound conviction: "Any truth is better than make- believe." Edward Galligan shares this conviction. In The Truth of Uncertainty: Beyond Ideology in Science and Literature, he argues that contemporary American critics should embrace literary truths with all of their ardent uncertainties rather than cling to the make-believe certainties of ideologies.
Postmodern critics fail to ask the truth-seeker's essential question, What does the evidence prove? and instead trust the generalizations and slogans of ideologies to guide their interpretations. Attempting to be up-to-date and profound, these critics lose sight of the literature they are supposed to explore.
The Truth of Uncertainty celebrates values commonly associated with modern, not postmodern criticism, applying them to contemporary works in a series of fresh and unusual inquiries. Galligan finds important implications for criticism in work from the physical sciences that are rarely touched on by American intellectuals, such as Gerald M. Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind and Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Likewise, he finds illumination in the works of novelists that American critics have largely ignored—Josef Skvorecky, George V. Higgins, Mary Lee Settle, Robertson Davies.
As a consequence of dealing with these "unusual" texts, Galligan presents a refreshing interpretation of a number of important concepts: language is grounded in talk; all literary criticism is subjective and tentative because reading is a highly subjective enterprise; and, most important, the world is real and any truth is indeed better than make-believe. He moves from a rejection of criticism in the service of ideology to an affirmation of criticism in the service of truthfulness.
The ideas celebrated in The Truth of Uncertainty are timeless and valuable. Galligan returns to the text and provides a penetrating critique of the state of contemporary criticism, which has abandoned truth for ideology. The result is an eloquent salute to literature itself.
Coming from diverse backgrounds—economics, law, political science, and the health care industry itself—the contributors use Arrow’s article to address a range of present-day health-policy questions. They examine everything from health insurance and technological innovation to the roles of charity, nonprofit institutions, and self-regulation in addressing medical needs. The collection concludes with a new essay by Arrow, in which he reflects on the health care markets of the new millennium. At a time when medical costs continue to rise, the ranks of the uninsured grow, and uncertainty reigns even among those with health insurance, this volume looks back at a seminal work of scholarship to provide critical guidance for the years ahead.
Contributors
Linda H. Aiken
Kenneth J. Arrow
Gloria J. Bazzoli
M. Gregg Bloche
Lawrence Casalino
Michael Chernew
Richard A. Cooper
Victor R. Fuchs
Annetine C. Gelijns
Sherry A. Glied
Deborah Haas-Wilson
Mark A. Hall
Peter J. Hammer
Clark C. Havighurst
Peter D. Jacobson
Richard Kronick
Michael L. Millenson
Jack Needleman
Richard R. Nelson
Mark V. Pauly
Mark A. Peterson
Uwe E. Reinhardt
James C. Robinson
William M. Sage
J. B. Silvers
Frank A. Sloan
Joshua Graff Zivin
Stitt's interest in these five poets is intellectual and aesthetic. As he states, “I chose these particular writers because their work continues to interest me deeply, both intellectually and formally, even after years of familiarity.” He uses his understanding of the philosophical implications inherent in modern physics, as they apply to both content and form, as the basis for his close analysis.
Stitt attends to the poets' writerly strategies so that we may discover in their poetry where “surface form” intersects and complements meaning and thus becomes, in John Berryman's terms, “deep form.” He explains what these poets say and how they say it and what relationships lie between. He also shows how humor plays a part in some of their work.
Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty traces the vital and varied roles of science through the story of three generations of the eminent Exner family, whose members included Nobel Prize–winning biologist Karl Frisch, the teachers of Freud and of physicist Erwin Schrödinger, artists of the Vienna Secession, and a leader of Vienna’s women’s movement. Training her critical eye on the Exners through the rise and fall of Austrian liberalism and into the rise of the Third Reich, Deborah R. Coen demonstrates the interdependence of the family’s scientific and domestic lives, exploring the ways in which public notions of rationality, objectivity, and autonomy were formed in the private sphere. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty presents the story of the Exners as a microcosm of the larger achievements and tragedies of Austrian political and scientific life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A damning portrait of the dire realities of retirement in the United States—and how we can fix it.
While the French went on strike in 2023 to protest the increase in the national retirement age, workers in the United States have all but given up on the notion of dignified retirement for all. Instead, Americans—whose elders face the highest risk of poverty compared to workers in peer nations—are fed feel-good stories about Walmart clerks who can finally retire because a customer raised the necessary funds through a GoFundMe campaign.
Many argue that the solution to the financial straits of American retirement is simple: people need to just work longer. Yet this call to work longer is misleading in a multitude of ways, including its endangering of the health of workers and its discrimination against people who work in lower-wage occupations. In Work, Retire, Repeat, Teresa Ghilarducci tells the stories of elders locked into jobs—not because they love to work but because they must.
But this doesn’t need to be the reality. Work, Retire, Repeat shows how relatively low-cost changes to how we finance and manage retirement will allow people to truly choose how they spend their golden years.
This is an audiobook version of this book.
A damning portrait of the dire realities of retirement in the United States—and how we can fix it.
While the French went on strike in 2023 to protest the increase in the national retirement age, workers in the United States have all but given up on the notion of dignified retirement for all. Instead, Americans—whose elders face the highest risk of poverty compared to workers in peer nations—are fed feel-good stories about Walmart clerks who can finally retire because a customer raised the necessary funds through a GoFundMe campaign.
Many argue that the solution to the financial straits of American retirement is simple: people need to just work longer. Yet this call to work longer is misleading in a multitude of ways, including its endangering of the health of workers and its discrimination against people who work in lower-wage occupations. In Work, Retire, Repeat, Teresa Ghilarducci tells the stories of elders locked into jobs—not because they love to work but because they must.
But this doesn’t need to be the reality. Work, Retire, Repeat shows how relatively low-cost changes to how we finance and manage retirement will allow people to truly choose how they spend their golden years.
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