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The Rust Belt was once the crown of American manufacturing, a symbol of the country’s economic prowess. But now it is named for what it has become: a deteriorating stretch of industrial cities left behind by a post-industrial world. In Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City, Adam A. Millsap turns his focus to his hometown, an archetypal Rust Belt city, to examine its history and discuss its future.
Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Millsap’s book explores the economic background of the region made famous by J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. From early twentieth-century optimism, through the Great Depression and post-WWII manufacturing decline, to Dayton now, with its labor-force problems and opioid crisis, Millsap tracks the underlying forces driving the city’s trajectory. Race relations, interstates, suburbanization, climate, crime, geography, and government policies all come into play as Millsap develops a picture of the city, past and present. By examining the past, Millsap proposes a plan for the future, claiming that there is hope for Dayton to thrive again. And if Dayton can rise from its industrial ashes, then perhaps the Rust Belt can shed its stigma and once again become the backbone of American innovation.
 

After war, many countries, such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Iraq, the transition to a democratic market economy extremely difficult. This failure to thrive, Dead Ends of Transition demonstrates, is often the result of national reliance on foreign aid. Rentier states, the contributors to this study argue, have few incentives to respond to the needs of their societies. Taking a closer look at the policies of rentier economies, this book further identifies new ways in which these countries and their international partners could work together to ease the critical transition to democracy.

Many of today's new democracies are constrained by institutional forms designed by previous authoritarian rulers. In this timely and provocative study, Delia M. Boylan traces the emergence of these vestigial governance structures to strategic behavior by outgoing elites seeking to protect their interests from the vicissitudes of democratic rule.

One important outgrowth of this political insulation strategy--and the empirical centerpiece of Boylan's analysis--is the existence of new, highly independent central banks in countries throughout the developing world. This represents a striking transformation, for not only does central bank autonomy remove a key aspect of economic decision making from democratic control; in practice it has also kept many of the would-be expansionist governments that hold power today from overturning the neoliberal policies favored by authoritarian predecessors.

To illustrate these points, Defusing Democracy takes a fresh look at two transitional polities in Latin America--Chile and Mexico--where variation in the proximity of the democratic "threat" correspondingly yielded different levels of central bank autonomy.

Boylan concludes by extending her analysis to institutional contexts beyond Latin America and to insulation strategies other than central bank autonomy. Defusing Democracy will be of interest to anyone--political scientists, economists, and policymakers alike--concerned about the genesis and consolidation of democracy around the globe.

Delia M. Boylan is Assistant Professor, Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago.