Results by title

Caring for Strangers explores the personal narratives, experiences and aspirations of Filipino medical workers living and working in Singapore and beyond. Today, the Philippines has become one of the largest exporters of medical workers in the world, with nursing in particular offering many the hope of a lucrative and stable career abroad. This timely volume narrates their stories in a multi-sited ethnography that follows aspiring migrants from Manila’s vibrant nursing schools, where they dream of glamorous, cosmopolitan lives abroad, to a different reality in Singapore’s multicultural hospitals and nursing homes. It also accompanies nurses’ off-duty activities in shopping malls and churches and their rich online lives, where they connect with friends and family around the world and search for future opportunities. Finally, Caring for Strangers follows them back home on a visit to a Filipino village. Mirroring migrants’ transnational lives, this book offers anthropological insights into the everyday experiences, anxieties and expectations of Filipino medical workers who care for strangers in a global Asian city. It locates their stories within wider debates on migration, labour, care, gender and citizenship, while contributing a new and distinctive perspective to the scholarship on labour migration in Asia.

Development assistance employs carrots and sticks to influence regimes and obtain particular outcomes: altered economic policies, democratization, relief of suffering from catastrophes. Wealthy nations and international agencies such as the World Bank justify development assistance on grounds of improving the global human condition. Over the last forty years, however, ethnic conflict has increased dramatically. Where does ethnic conflict fit within this set of objectives? How do the resources, policy advice, and conditions attached to aid affect ethnic conflict in countries in which donors intervene? How can assistance be deployed in ways that might moderate rather than aggravate ethnic tensions?

These issues are addressed comparatively by area specialists and participant-observers from development assistance organizations. This book is the first systematic effort to evaluate this dimension of international affairs--and to propose remedies. Case studies include Russia, Ecuador, Sri Lanka, and Kenya, with references to many other national experiences.

Cross-cutting chapters consider evolution of USAID and the World Bank's policies on displacement of people by development projects, as well as how carrots and sticks may affect ethnic dynamics, but through different mechanisms and to varying degrees depending on political dynamics and regime behaviors. They show that projects may also exacerbate ethnic conflict by reinforcing territoriality and exposing seemingly unfair allocative principles that exclude or harm some while benefiting others.

For students of international political economy, development studies, comparative politics, and ethnic conflict, this book illuminates a problem area that has long been overlooked in international affairs literature. It is essential reading for staff members and policymakers in development assistance agencies and international financial institutions.

Milton J. Esman is the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies, Emeritus, and Professor of Government, Emeritus, at Cornell University.

Ronald J. Herring is Director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell, the John S. Knight Professor of International Relations, and Professor of Government at Cornell University.

An investigation of the practice of “commoning” in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities

Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource—housing—that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them. 

In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism’s totalizing claims over life. 

H. L. Goodall’s ground-breaking study of what people do with symbols and what symbols do to people explores the lives led by people in organizations. His narratives take on the form of six detective mysteries in which the narrator figures into the plot of the intrigue and then works out its essential patterns.

In the first mystery, "Notes on a Cultural Evolution: The Remaking of a Software Company," Goodall looks at the transition of a Huntsville regional office of a Boston-based computer software company where the lives and social dramas of the participants reflect the current state of high technology. The second essay and perhaps the most insightful, "The Way the World Ends: Inside Star Wars," penetrates the various defenses of the Star Wars command office in Huntsville to discover its secrets and surprises. Goodall shows how media, technology, fear of relationships, and symbolic images of the future unite into the day-to-day operations of people who believe they are responsible for the outer limits of our nation’s defense.

"Lost in Space: The Layers of Illusion Called Adult Space Camp" illustrates how a supposedly innocent theme park invites participation in rituals and ceremonies designed to influence a future generation of taxpayers. In "Articles of Faith," Goodall enters a super mall in Huntsville, noting how shopping centers provide consumers with far more than places to purchase goods and services. "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" finds Goodall back in an academic environment, at a conference of communication scholars, where he demonstrates the difficult task of translating cultural understandings from one context to another. "The Consultant as Organizational Detective" offers the sobering message that real-life mysteries may surprise even the most accomplished sleuth. A concluding chapter, "Notes on Method," and a new autobiographical afterword round out Goodall’s penetrating look at our symbol-making culture.

The past twenty-five years have seen enormous changes in Native America. One of the most profound expressions of change has been within the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. The Nation has overcome significant hurdles to establish itself as a potent cultural and economic force highlighted by the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and Foxwoods, the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere. In Casino and Museum, John J. Bodinger de Uriarte sees these two main commercial structures of the reservation as mutually supporting industries generating both material and symbolic capital.

To some degree, both institutions offer Native representations yet create different strategies for attracting and engaging visitors. While the casino is crucial as an economic generator, the museum has an important role as the space for authentic Mashantucket Pequot images and narratives. The book’s focus is on how the casino and the museum successfully deploy different strategies to take control of the tribe’s identity, image, and cultural agency.

Photographs in the book provide a view of Mashantucket, allowing the reader to study the spaces of the book’s central arguments. They are a key methodology of the project and offer a non-textual opportunity to navigate the sites as well as one finely focused way to work through the representation and formation of the Native American photographic subject—the powerful popular imagining of Native Americans. Casino and Museum presents a unique understanding of the prodigious role that representation plays in the contemporary poetics and politics of Native America. It is essential reading for scholars of Native American studies, museum studies, cultural studies, and photography.

Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences. Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective is the first book to consider the shared global heritage of vagrancy laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied.

In this ambitious collection, vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine a vast array of phenomena, from the migration of labor to social and governmental responses to poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. The essays in Cast Out represent the best scholarship on these subjects and include discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule. By juxtaposing these histories, the authors explore vagrancy as a common response to poverty, labor dislocation, and changing social norms, as well as how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities.

Part of a growing literature on world history, Cast Out offers fresh perspectives and new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness. This book by leading scholars in the field is for policy makers, as well as for courses on poverty, homelessness, and world history.

Contributors:
Richard B. Allen
David Arnold
A. L. Beier
Andrew Burton
Vincent DiGirolamo
Andrew A. Gentes
Robert Gordon
Frank Tobias Higbie
Thomas H. Holloway
Abby Margolis
Paul Ocobock
Aminda M. Smith
Linda Woodbridge

As people cluster on the coast in increasing numbers, coastal populations become more vulnerable to severe damage from catastrophic coastal storms. The authors contented that current public policy has proved unable to cope with the growing problem, and in response they present a comprehensive analysis of coastal storm hazards, standard policy approaches, and promising new means of managing coastal growth.

Catastrophic Coastal Storms offers a solution to the policy problem by proposing a merger of hazard mitigation with development management, basing this on extensive surveys of at-risk coastal locations and case studies of post-hurricane recovery. Starting with the local level of government and proceeding to state and federal levels, the authors propose a strategy for overcoming the formidable obstacles to safeguarding the shoreline population and its structures from hurricanes and other severe storms.

At a time when countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are joining the World Trade Organization, the lack of an economically sound analysis of trade policies in the region is especially notable. This volume remedies the situation by bringing together a distinguished group of applied trade economists to provide a broad view of the state of trade in and among the region's nations. The contributors provide original empirical analyses on key reform issues, and their work reflects deep knowledge of government concerns and policies.

Part 1 sets the scene by comparing the performance of the MENA region with the rest of the world on a large number variables and indicators. Part 2 contains a number of CGE model-based analyses of trade policy reform options. Part 3 focuses on specific policy areas: standards as nontariff barriers and red tape, trade facilitation, an assessment of the impact of protecting intellectual property using partial equilibrium techniques, and a review of the existing Euro-Med agreements. Part 4 discusses how the region could benefit from WTO membership and from changing the existing regional integration schemes into arrangements that help promote a growth enhancing reform agenda.

The volume will be essential reading for economists and policymakers working in and with the MENA nations, as well as officials at the multilateral and regional institutions.

Contributors are A. Halis Akder, Benita Cox, Dean De Rosa, Hana'a Kheir El Din, Sherine El Ghoneim, Oleh Havrylyshyn, Bernard Hoekman, Denise Konan, Peter Kunzel, Will Martin, Keith Maskus, Mustapha Nabli, Thomas Rutherford, Elisabet Rutstrom, David Tarr, Subidey Togan, L. Alan Winters, Alexander Yeats, and Jamel Zarrouk.

Bernard Hoekman is an Economist with the Development Research Group's Trade team of the World Bank. Jamel Zarrouk is an Economist with the Arab Monetary Fund.

The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the most unequal income distribution of any advanced industrialized nation. While other developed countries face similar challenges from globalization and technological change, none rivals America's singularly poor record for equitably distributing the benefits and burdens of recent economic shifts. In Categorically Unequal, Douglas Massey weaves together history, political economy, and even neuropsychology to provide a comprehensive explanation of how America's culture and political system perpetuates inequalities between different segments of the population. Categorically Unequal is striking both for its theoretical originality and for the breadth of topics it covers. Massey argues that social inequalities arise from the universal human tendency to place others into social categories. In America, ethnic minorities, women, and the poor have consistently been the targets of stereotyping, and as a result, they have been exploited and discriminated against throughout the nation's history. African-Americans continue to face discrimination in markets for jobs, housing, and credit. Meanwhile, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border has discouraged Mexican migrants from leaving the United States, creating a pool of exploitable workers who lack the legal rights of citizens. Massey also shows that women's advances in the labor market have been concentrated among the affluent and well-educated, while low-skilled female workers have been relegated to occupations that offer few chances for earnings mobility. At the same time, as the wages of low-income men have fallen, more working-class women are remaining unmarried and raising children on their own. Even as minorities and women continue to face these obstacles, the progressive legacy of the New Deal has come under frontal assault. The government has passed anti-union legislation, made taxes more regressive, allowed the real value of the federal minimum wage to decline, and drastically cut social welfare spending. As a result, the income gap between the richest and poorest has dramatically widened since 1980. Massey attributes these anti-poor policies in part to the increasing segregation of neighborhoods by income, which has insulated the affluent from the social consequences of poverty, and to the disenfranchisement of the poor, as the population of immigrants, prisoners, and ex-felons swells. America's unrivaled disparities are not simply the inevitable result of globalization and technological change. As Massey shows, privileged groups have systematically exploited and excluded many of their fellow Americans. By delving into the root causes of inequality in America, Categorically Unequal provides a compelling argument for the creation of a more equitable society. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Centennial Series

People passionately disagree about the nature of the globalization process. The failure of both the 1999 and 2003 World Trade Organization's (WTO) ministerial conferences in Seattle and Cancun, respectively, have highlighted the tensions among official, international organizations like the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, nongovernmental and private sector organizations, and some developing country governments. These tensions are commonly attributed to longstanding disagreements over such issues as labor rights, environmental standards, and tariff-cutting rules. In addition, developing countries are increasingly resentful of the burdens of adjustment placed on them that they argue are not matched by commensurate commitments from developed countries.

Challenges to Globalization evaluates the arguments of pro-globalists and anti-globalists regarding issues such as globalization's relationship to democracy, its impact on the environment and on labor markets including the brain drain, sweat shop labor, wage levels, and changes in production processes, and the associated expansion of trade and its effects on prices. Baldwin, Winters, and the contributors to this volume look at multinational firms, foreign investment, and mergers and acquisitions and present surprising findings that often run counter to the claim that multinational firms primarily seek countries with low wage labor. The book closes with papers on financial opening and on the relationship between international economic policies and national economic growth rates.

The exchange rate is a crucial variable linking a nation's domestic economy to the international market. Thus choice of an exchange rate regime is a central component in the economic policy of developing countries and a key factor affecting economic growth.

Historically, most developing nations have employed strict exchange rate controls and heavy protection of domestic industry-policies now thought to be at odds with sustainable and desirable rates of economic growth. By contrast, many East Asian nations maintained exchange rate regimes designed to achieve an attractive climate for exports and an "outer-oriented" development strategy. The result has been rapid and consistent economic growth over the past few decades.

Changes in Exchange Rates in Rapidly Developing Countries explores the impact of such diverse exchange control regimes in both historical and regional contexts, focusing particular attention on East Asia. This comprehensive, carefully researched volume will surely become a standard reference for scholars and policymakers.

Do Motorola, Herman Miller, and the Donelly corporations all share a secret of business? Without a doubt, it is the ability to continually change—their "only hope for survival and success"—change based on a participatory management style, often referred to as the Scanlon Plan—identity, participation, equity, and managerial competence—these corporations have succeeded where others have failed.  
      Changing Forever builds on the forty years of research, experience, and development that have gone into the Scanlon Plan. Documenting fully the principles and processes of the Scanlon Plan, Carl Frost gives the reader a clear view of how the plan works and how it can be adapted to suit the needs of businesses large and small. The conclusions of his research are not surprising: with implementation of the four basic principles of the Scanlon Plan comes an optimal synergistic relationship between all employees and management.

After two decades of marketizing, an array of national and international actors have become concerned with growing global inequality, the failure to reduce the numbers of very poor people in the world, and a perceived global backlash against international economic institutions. This new concern with poverty reduction and the political participation of excluded groups has set the stage for a new politics of inclusion within nations and in the international arena. The essays in this volume explore what forms the new politics of inclusion can take in low- and middle-income countries. The contributors favor a polity-centered approach that focuses on the political capacities of social and state actors to negotiate large-scale collective solutions and that highlights various possible strategies to lift large numbers of people out of poverty and political subordination.

The contributors suggest there is little basis for the radical polycentrism that colors so much contemporary development thought. They focus on how the political capabilities of different societal and state actors develop over time and how their development is influenced by state action and a variety of institutional and other factors. The final chapter draws insightful conclusions about the political limitations and opportunities presented by current international discourse on poverty.

Peter P. Houtzager is a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. He has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, visiting lecturer at Stanford University, and lecturer at St. Mary's College. A political scientist with broad training in comparative politics and historical-institutional analysis, he has written extensively on the institutional roots of collective action.

Mick Moore is a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, as well as Director of the Centre for the Future State. He has been a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His professional interests include political and institutional aspects of poverty reduction and of economic policy and performance, the politics and administration of development, and good government.

Poverty declined significantly in the decade after Lyndon Johnson's 1964 declaration of "War on Poverty." Dramatically increased federal funding for education and training programs, social security benefits, other income support programs, and a growing economy reduced poverty and raised expectations that income poverty could be eliminated within a generation. Yet the official poverty rate has never fallen below its 1973 level and remains higher than the rates in many other advanced economies. In this book, editors Maria Cancian and Sheldon Danziger and leading poverty researchers assess why the War on Poverty was not won and analyze the most promising strategies to reduce poverty in the twenty-first century economy. Changing Poverty, Changing Policies documents how economic, social, demographic, and public policy changes since the early 1970s have altered who is poor and where antipoverty initiatives have kept pace or fallen behind. Part I shows that little progress has been made in reducing poverty, except among the elderly, in the last three decades. The chapters examine how changing labor market opportunities for less-educated workers have increased their risk of poverty (Rebecca Blank), and how family structure changes (Maria Cancian and Deborah Reed) and immigration have affected poverty (Steven Raphael and Eugene Smolensky). Part II assesses the ways childhood poverty influences adult outcomes. Markus Jäntti finds that poor American children are more likely to be poor adults than are children in many other industrialized countries. Part III focuses on current antipoverty policies and possible alternatives. Jane Waldfogel demonstrates that policies in other countries—such as sick leave, subsidized child care, and schedule flexibility—help low-wage parents better balance work and family responsibilities. Part IV considers how rethinking and redefining poverty might take antipoverty policies in new directions. Mary Jo Bane assesses the politics of poverty since the 1996 welfare reform act. Robert Haveman argues that income-based poverty measures should be expanded, as they have been in Europe, to include social exclusion and multiple dimensions of material hardships. Changing Poverty, Changing Policies shows that thoughtful policy reforms can reduce poverty and promote opportunities for poor workers and their families. The authors' focus on pragmatic measures that have real possibilities of being implemented in the United States not only provides vital knowledge about what works but real hope for change.

Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences: Foundations and Applications offers the most recent thinking in applying the chaos paradigm to the social sciences. The book explores the methodological techniques--and their difficulties--for determining whether chaotic processes may in fact exist in a particular instance and examines implications of chaos theory when applied specifically to political science, economics, and sociology. The contributors to the book show that no single technique can be used to diagnose and describe all chaotic processes and identify the strengths and limitations of a variety of approaches.

The essays in this volume consider the application of chaos theory to such diverse phenomena as public opinion, the behavior of states in the international arena, the development of rational economic expectations, and long waves.

Contributors include Brian J. L. Berry, Thad Brown, Kenyon B. DeGreene, Dimitrios Dendrinos, Euel Elliott, David Harvey, L. Ted Jaditz, Douglas Kiel, Heja Kim, Michael McBurnett, Michael Reed, Diana Richards, J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., and Alvin M. Saperstein.

L. Douglas Kiel and Euel W. Elliott are both Associate Professors of Government, Politics, and Political Economy, University of Texas at Dallas.

Recent law school graduates often work as temporary attorneys, but law firm layoffs and downsizing have strengthened the temporary attorney industry. Cheaper by the Hour is the first book-length account of these workers.

Drawing from participant observation and interviews, Robert A. Brooks provides a richly detailed ethnographic account of freelance attorneys in Washington, DC. He places their document review work in the larger context of the deprofessionalization of skilled labor and considers how professionals relegated to temporary jobs feel diminished, degraded, or demeaned by work that is often tedious, repetitive, and well beneath their abilities.

Brooks documents how firms break a lawyer's work into discrete components that require less skill to realize maximum profits. Moreover, he argues that information technology and efficiency demands are further stratifying the profession and creating a new underclass of lawyers who do low-end commodity work.

From its humble beginnings as a fur-trading outpost, Chicago has become one of the foremost centers of world finance and trade. With its blue-collar work ethic and an economic history that extends into virtually every segment of American industry, it certainly lives up to its moniker as the City That Works.

Drawing on the award-winning Encyclopedia of Chicago, Janice L. Reiff has compiled a unique history of work in the Windy City. Beginning with an overview of the city’s commercial development, Chicago Business and Industry considers how key industries shaped—and were shaped by—both the local and global economies. The city’s phenomenal population growth, its proximity to water, and its development of railroads made Chicago one of the most productive markets for lumber and grain throughout the nineteenth century. The region’s once-booming steel industry, on the other hand, suffered a dramatic decline in the second half of the twentieth century, when already weakened demand met with increasing international competition. Chicago Business and Industry chronicles the Chicago region’s changing fortunes from its beginning.

Reiff has compiled and updated essays from the Encyclopedia covering the city’s most historically famous—and infamous—companies, from the Union Stock Yard to Montgomery Ward to the Board of Trade. The book concludes with a historical account of labor types and issues in the city, with attention to such topics as health-care workers, unemployment, and unionization. Today, Groupon and a host of other high-tech firms have led some experts to christen Chicago the Silicon Valley of the Midwest. Reiff’s new introduction takes account of these and other recent trends.

Engaging, accessible, and packed with fascinating facts, Chicago Business and Industry invites readers into the history and diversity of work in the city, helping them understand how Chicago became Chicago.

What happens when the methods of the Chicago school of economics are applied to development problems? By collecting fifteen prime examples for this volume, David Wall has shown that these methods go a long way toward the clarification and solution of the economic problems faced by the world's underdeveloped countries. The contributors, all members of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, are Theodore Schultz, Harry G. Johnson, Arnold C. Harberger, Bert F. Hoselitz, and Larry A. Sjaastad, and D. Gale Johnson.

These Chicago economists share a common intellectual framework universally recognized in the profession and derived from three beliefs: first, that theory is of fundamental importance; second, that theory is irrelevant unless set in a definite empirical context; and third, that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the market works. Critics of the Chicago school tend to ignore the first two of these and to overlook the qualifying proviso of the third. This volume sets out to rectify that misunderstanding and to circulate more widely some of the best work produced by the Chicago school.

The essays in the opening "general" section clearly illustrate the characteristics of the Chicago school while also reflecting some well-known idiosyncrasies of four of its more prominent spokesmen. The other two sections, "Domestic Policy" and "Trade and Aid," cover topics on which Chicago authors have made a marked impact. Together, these essays will provide a basic reference book for students of the subject, illustrating one of the leading methods of analyzing economic development problems.

"There is no question that a well-defined 'Chicago School' of political economy has emerged, built largely around the work of George J. Stigler and his colleagues. Chicago Studies in Political Economy brings together the key works in this field, works that have been extremely influential among economists who study political processes. It is a collection of enormous value."—Roger G. Noll

The child care system in the United States is widely criticized, yet the underlying structural problems are difficult to pin down. In The Child Care Problem, David M. Blau sets aside the often emotional terms of the debate and applies a rigorous economic analysis to the state of the child care system in this country, arriving at a surprising diagnosis of the root of the problem. Blau approaches child care as a service that is bought and sold in markets, addressing such questions as: What kinds of child care are available? Is good care really hard to find? How do costs affect the services families choose? Why are child care workers underpaid relative to other professions? He finds that the child care market functions much better than is commonly believed. The supply of providers has kept pace with the number of mothers entering the workforce, and costs remain relatively modest. Yet most families place a relatively low value on high-quality child care, and are unwilling to pay more for better care. Blau sees this lack of demand—rather than the market's inadequate supply—as the cause of the nation's child care dilemma. The Child Care Problem also faults government welfare policies—which treat child care subsidies mainly as a means to increase employment of mothers, but set no standards regarding the quality of child care their subsidies can purchase. Blau trains an economic lens on research by child psychologists, evaluating the evidence that the day care environment has a genuine impact on early development. The failure of families and government to place a priority on improving such critical conditions for their children provides a compelling reason to advocate change. The Child Care Problem concludes with a balanced proposal for reform. Blau outlines a systematic effort to provide families of all incomes with the information they need to make more prudent decisions. And he suggests specific revisions to welfare policy, including both an allowance to defray the expenses of families with children, and a child care voucher that is worth more when used for higher quality care. The Child Care Problem provides a straightforward evaluation of the many contradictory claims about the problems with child care, and lays out a reasoned blueprint for reform which will help guide both social scientists and non-academics alike toward improving the quality of child care in this country.

Winner of the 2018 Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association​

Children and Drug Safety traces the development, use, and marketing of drugs for children in the twentieth century, a history that sits at the interface of the state, business, health care providers, parents, and children. This book illuminates the historical dimension of a clinical and policy issue with great contemporary significance—many of the drugs administered to children today have never been tested for safety and efficacy in the pediatric population.
 
Each chapter of Children and Drug Safety engages with major turning points in pediatric drug development; themes of children’s risk, rights, protection and the evolving context of childhood; child-rearing; and family life in ways freighted with nuances of race, class, and gender. Cynthia A. Connolly charts the numerous attempts by Congress, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and leading pediatric pharmacologists, scientists, clinicians, and parents to address a situation that all found untenable. 


Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 

Many working families continue to struggle in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the deepest and longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. In Children of the Great Recession, a group of leading scholars draw from a unique study of nearly 5,000 economically and ethnically diverse families in twenty cities to analyze the effects of the Great Recession on parents and young children. By exploring the discrepancies in outcomes between these families—particularly between those headed by parents with college degrees and those without—this timely book shows how the most disadvantaged families have continued to suffer as a result of the Great Recession.
 
Several contributors examine the recession’s impact on the economic well-being of families, including changes to income, poverty levels, and economic insecurity. Irwin Garfinkel and Natasha Pilkauskas find that in cities with high unemployment rates during the recession, incomes for families with a college-educated mother fell by only about 5 percent, whereas families without college degrees experienced income losses three to four times greater. Garfinkel and Pilkauskas also show that the number of non-college-educated families enrolled in federal safety net programs—including Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or food stamps)—grew rapidly in response to the Great Recession.
 
Other researchers examine how parents’ physical and emotional health, relationship stability, and parenting behavior changed over the course of the recession. Janet Currie and Valentina Duque find that while mothers and fathers across all education groups experienced more health problems as a result of the downturn, health disparities by education widened.   Daniel Schneider, Sara McLanahan and Kristin Harknett find decreases in marriage and cohabitation rates among less-educated families, and Ronald Mincy and Elia de la Cruz-Toledo show that as unemployment rates increased, nonresident fathers’ child support payments decreased. William Schneider, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and Jane Waldfogel show that fluctuations in unemployment rates negatively affected parenting quality and child well-being, particularly for families where the mother did not have a four-year college degree.
 
Although the recession affected most Americans, Children of the Great Recession reveals how vulnerable parents and children paid a higher price. The research in this volume suggests that policies that boost college access and reinforce the safety net could help protect disadvantaged families in times of economic crisis.
 

The USA is widely seen as the country at the centre of the recent economic crash. But will this be the case the next time the system goes into shock? This book analyses how the political and economic imbalances in China will exacerbate system collapse, and how this could happen much sooner than we imagine, possibly within a decade.

By looking at the big questions of class struggle, global economic imbalances, peak oil, climate change and political power play, Minqi Li argues that by the time of the next crisis, China will be at the epicentre of these contradictions.

China is the last large region, and source of cheap labour, into which capital could expand: the system is at its limits. By combining this argument with issues surrounding the planet’s ecological limits and the internal politics of the Chinese Communist Party, Li commands a narrative of China at a pivotal, and possibly apocalyptic stage.

The countries that make up Southeast Asia are seeing an incredible resurgence in their economic power. Over the past fifty years, their combined wealth has reached the same level as the United Kingdom and, taken together, they are on track to become the fifth-largest world economy. But that stability and success has drawn the attention of the second largest world economy—China. The emerging superpower is increasingly involved in Southeast Asia as part of the ongoing global realignment. As China deepens its influence across the region, the countries of Southeast Asia are negotiating spaces for themselves in order to respond to—or even challenge—China’s power.
                This is the first book to survey China’s growing role in Southeast Asia along multiple dimensions. It looks closely and skeptically at the multitude of ways that China has built connections in the region, including through trade, foreign aid, and cultural diplomacy. It incorporates examples such as the operation of Confucius Institutes in Indonesia or the promotion of the concept of guangxi.China’s Footprints in Southeast Asia raises the question of whether the Chinese efforts are helpful or disruptive and explores who it is that really stands to benefit from these relationships. The answers differ from country to country, but, as this volume suggests, the footprint of hard and soft power always leaves a lasting mark on other countries’ institutions.
 

As the world hurtles towards environmental oblivion, China is leading the charge. The nation's CO2 emissions are more than twice those of the US with a GDP just two-thirds as large. China leads the world in renewable energy yet it is building new coal-fired power plants faster than renewables. The country's lakes, rivers, and farmlands are severely polluted yet China's police state can't suppress pollution, even from its own industries.

This is the first book to explain these contradictions. Richard Smith explains how the country's bureaucratic rulers are driven by nationalist-industrialist tendencies that are even more powerful than the drive for profit under 'normal' capitalism. In their race to overtake the US they must prioritise hyper-growth over the environment, even if this ends in climate collapse and eco-suicide.

Smith contends that nothing short of drastic shutdowns and the scaling back of polluting industries, especially in China and the US, will suffice to slash greenhouse gas emissions enough to prevent climate catastrophe.

The Chinese in colonial Malaya were noted for their involvement in revenue farming, the rice trade, mining and estates, and pawnbroking. However, the Chinese presence was also significant in broader economic and social spheres, and the wealth and power of the Chinese community helped fuel the emerging colonial state and the modern transformation of Southeast Asia. In Chinese Business in the Making of a Malay State, Wu Xiao An argues persuasively that Chinese ventures owed much of their success to the flexibility and dynamism of Chinese family and economic networks, and the moral imperatives that governed relationships within the Chinese community.
 Using Penang and Kedah as a case study, Wu draws on archival sources, family histories and an examination of legal arrangements and the press to show that personal business and business networks were not bound by the territorial borders of traditional or modern states, but extended across much of Southeast Asia and into China. His demonstration of the complexity of interactions involving new migrants, sojourners and settlers, both Chinese and non-Chinese, challenges understandings of state formation and economic growth in colonial Malaya based on ethnic stereotypes and accounts of events limited by fixed political boundaries.