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Provides strategies and approaches for integrating natural capital into environmental statistics.

While the importance of natural resources and the contributions of the environment to welfare are apparent, traditional national income and wealth accounting practices do not measure or value environmental public goods. This volume examines the conceptual and empirical basis for integrating natural capital—forests, oceans, and air—into the economic and environmental statistics that inform public policy. It offers innovative approaches to valuing nonmarket environmental goods and services, including strategies for capturing heterogeneity in measurement across types of capital, geography, and individuals.

The chapters focus on measuring productivity with adjustments for pollution damage, developing a microdata infrastructure to advance our understanding of the distribution of environmental amenities and hazards, and estimating long-run sustainable development indicators. Case studies consider coastal assets, forests, and marine ecosystems, and develop strategies for implementing specific environmental-economic accounts such as environmental activity accounts and natural capital accounts for forests and the marine economy. As national income accounting standards are updated to incorporate expanded guidance on issues related to natural capital, this timely book will help inform decisions on the measurement and treatment of climate, air, water, and other public goods.

In this provocative study, Michael Soto examines African American cultural forms through the lens of census history to tell the story of how U.S. officialdom—in particular the Census Bureau—placed persons of African descent within a shifting taxonomy of racial difference, and how African American writers and intellectuals described a far more complex situation of interracial social contact and intra-racial diversity. What we now call African American identity and the literature that gives it voice emerged out of social, cultural, and intellectual forces that fused in Harlem roughly one century ago.

Measuring the Harlem Renaissance sifts through a wide range of authors and ideas—from W. E. B. Du Bois, Rudolph Fisher, and Nella Larsen to Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, and from census history to the Great Migration—to provide a fresh take on late nineteenth—and twentieth—century literature and social thought. Soto reveals how Harlem came to be known as the “cultural capital of black America,” and how these ideas left us with unforgettable fiction and poetry.

Showcases new measurement strategies for assessing the impact of a liberal arts education on students and society. 

More than ever before, our society is questioning the meaning and value of higher education, and liberal arts education, in particular, has come under substantial scrutiny. Economic detractors characterize liberal arts education as impractical, claiming that college should prepare students for the workforce. Others object to the curriculum, portraying it as broken or misdirected. According to these critics, the liberal arts education being offered in the United States is marked by its rejection of core intellectual and ideological commitments.

In The Liberal Arts Advantage, a wide range of scholars argue for how and why a liberal arts education uniquely develops skill sets and expertise needed for individuals and society to thrive in the twenty-first century. The contributors address foundational questions about what liberal arts education is, how it has been conceptualized in the past, and what we can learn from its societal and professional impacts. They present compelling, unique research and new methodological tools for assessing the outcomes of liberal arts graduates. Offering grounded and well-founded arguments in favor of our education system, The Liberal Arts Advantage persuasively explains why educational leaders should reinvest in liberal arts education.