Book Description
Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than sevenfold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought.
Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting "tough on crime" with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime.
The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men's lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.
Customer Reviews:
Thorough Statistics, Excellent Readability, and an Indictment of 1980's Correction Policy.......2007-04-24
Bruce Western has stepped into the realm of public sociology, I feel, with this excellent book. This is a well-written, thoroughly researched, book that is accessible to scholars and others alike. Even though the book teems with tables, figures, and analysis, Western presents them without relying on the reader to interpret regression coefficients for meaningfulness, yet also appends many of the chapters with methodological clarifications just for those kinds of people.
Western presents what is essentially a political book without a political tone. The data speak for themselves, and it is very difficult to think that, after all the work put into this, that he incorrectly attributes so little of the decrease in crime trends to the prison boom (and the absurdity of the cost/benefit for its effect on the decrease). It does seem, however, that he echoes the racial claims of Loic Wacquant in the final chapter, but that's only for a brief moment.
Western also excellently argues and shows off the immense disconnect between crime rates and corrections policy; although only a portion of one chapter, this is a significant point to make. If our policies do not reflect what criminals are actually doing, well, why are we doing it?
My only concern with this book involves Western's "all or nothing" approach to showing the economic/social cost of the prison boom. His analyses show the wage gap, parental gap, and other penalties suffered during and after release by prisoners. He astutely points out the selection bias in unemployment and wage estimates in minority populations due to leaving out the far-more-likely-to-be-incarcerated blacks. However, his analysis in later sections, where he shows the change if none of these people were in prison (to prove the selection bias argument), is one based outside of reality. First, there will never be nobody in prison; second, his own data show that prisoners are of a different background than nonprisoners (such as the "dropping out" of the bottom that artificially raises the mean wage for blacks), so it's hard to estimate where they would fit in among family and work if they were released. Many of them would remain unemployed as well. I understand that this is some of his point, but the difficulty lies in the picture painted, where we exist in a world where the prison boom did happen, Western argues what we would look like if none of the prison boom happened, and the real effect of that is somewhere in between. He is unfoundedly optimistic about the work and family choices (and chances) in these sections of the book. It doesn't change his argument about the problems of the prison boom, however. It merely muddles the otherwise fantastic clarity of his book.
This is a book that can appeal to all sorts of scholars, researchers, policy analysts, and even those who merely wonder what direction out prison policies have taken us. An excellent, excellent work.
Book Description
Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit over the last fifty years has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Thomas Sugrue explains how Detroit and many other once prosperous industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Probing beneath the veneer of 1950s prosperity and social consensus, Sugrue traces the rise of a new ghetto, solidified by changes in the urban economy and labor market and by racial and class segregation.
In this provocative revision of postwar American history, Sugrue finds cities already fiercely divided by race and devastated by the exodus of industries. He focuses on urban neighborhoods, where white working-class homeowners mobilized to prevent integration as blacks tried to move out of the crumbling and overcrowded inner city. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II.
In a new preface, Sugrue discusses the ongoing legacies of the postwar transformation of urban America and engages recent scholars who have joined in the reassessment of postwar urban, political, social, and African American history.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent history of urban decline.......2007-07-18
This was required reading for a graduate course in American history.
Thomas J. Sugrue attempts to prove that resistance to the civil rights movement had much deeper roots than the white backlash of the 1960s and 1970s. The author contends that resistance to the civil rights actually emerged as opposition to the New Deal coalition. Urban, anti-liberal, northern whites, as well as corporate leaders, unionists and politicians limited the possibilities of reform. Sugure maintains that northern urban white workers initially were the "backbone" of the New Deal coalition. And they found a common cause as the New Deal unified varied constituents in America. Yet, Sugure argues that underneath the seeming unity of the new coalition, were unresolved questions of racial identities. These unresolved issues began to fester, and were then exacerbated by liberal policies, specifically, public housing. And it is here that Sugure places the ''white rebellion" against the New Deal and liberalism, in the urban north.
From the 1940s until the 1960s, Detroit's racial geography changed dramatically. Sugure refers to Detroit as a "magnet' for African Americans after World War II, due to the lure of the defense and
automobile industries. When increasing numbers of African Americans began to search for housing in the predominantly white sections of the Detroit, racial tensions began to increase. Post World War II was described at "dark ages of Detroit." Riots and white flight occurred, coupled with a decline in the Detroit's post war economy. As layoffs mounted, and a national housing shortage, white homeowners feared foreclosure on their homes, as the economic ability to own home became increasingly precarious.
Sugure claims that race and housing became inseparable in the minds of white Detroiters. Basically, he contends that white homeowners feared that the influx of blacks would ruin their fragile economic security. Familiar racial fears and myths emerged; blacks were associated with crime and vice. White Detroiters even cited Jim Crow as a model for "successful race relations." In response to the "black invasion" and their increased economic stability, working class whites began to form neighborhood associations. Essentially, these associations were political organizations aimed at stymieing black constituents from moving into white neighborhoods. Sugure contends that these associations espoused the notions of values, protection, achievement and tradition, and were aimed at paternalistically protecting the neighborhood from vice-ridden blacks. They also served to foster a sense of "whiteness" among members (silent majority etc). These organizations corresponded with public officials and real estate agents (who played to both black and whites) to block African Americans from certain neighborhoods in various ways, including violence and intimidation.
By examining this, I believe the author uncovered a very prominent theme in American history and politics. What should be the level of government assistance in a capitalistic society? In this specific case, should the government have supplied urban housing for its poorer constituents, or should it have upheld the rights of privacy and association of its more affluent constituents? The affluent white constituents criticized the government when it tried to "force people" (blacks) down their throats," they cried for their freedoms of privacy and association, yet they called on that same "tyrannical" government to aid them in blocking the settlement of African Americans in their neighborhoods. Sugrue hits on this contradiction but does not pursue it. Which constituents should the government help and when should it help them? When is the government infringing on the rights on its citizens, and when is it fighting to uphold their rights? A fine line is drawn and illustrated by the struggle in post war Detroit.
I think the author is extremely misleading when he discusses the "black invasion" of Detroit. He presents blacks as a stifling, crime-ridden, vice infested monolith. I understand the aim of the article was to examine the position of the urban white class, but nonetheless, the quotes the author uses to describe migrating blacks is extremely derogatory, and in some cases, the author makes the white backlash almost seem justified. The black race is not a monolithic entity, no race is. I believe Sugrue should have at least written a few sentences dispelling the notion of the "black invasion" as a monolithic entity.
In summation, Sugure challenges the historian to probe deeper when trying to locate the backlash to the civil rights movement and liberalism. Instead of just viewing it narrowly as southern whites, Sugure contends that resistance developed among a very unlikely group, a group which initially formed the "backbone" of the New Deal coalition. Yet, as the housing shortage pressed, old racial tensions flared up and urban, working class whites banned together to resist liberalism and the "black invasion" in the 1940s and 1950s, a generation prior to the civil rights movement.
Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history, civil rights history.
Bad thesis but a story that still needs to be looked at.......2006-12-17
Sugrue takes a look at one of the crisis to hit not only Detroit but the rest of the country in his book on race and inequality. While there have been a lot of disturbing factors that have occurred during urban renewal Sugrue takes his text a little far. His flagrant bashing of urban planning gets old after the first two chapters and the book tends to drag on. This is an important issue that bears further studying but hopefully it will be done in a more academic way. This book does have all the information you need to start studying the subject and is a good way to begin looking at urban renewal.
How a Frightening Economic Powerhouse Became Just Plain Frightening.......2006-08-29
In 2005, Detroit looks more like a city awaiting reconstruction after a series of aerial bomber raids than the dynamo of manufacturing it was at the close of the Second World War. The combinations of white flight, race riots, massive deindustrialization by the automotive industry and the industries attached to it coupled with chronic unemployment and discrimination and racism in nearly every facet of life did a great a deal to make Detroit the wasteland it is today.
Thomas J. Sugrue's short study of Detroit, from the late 1930's through the 1970's is an attempt to understand the structure of Detroit's decline in racial, political, economic, and sometimes spatial terms. Through analysis of all these factors, Sugrue creates a cogent explanation of why so many formerly industrial cities of the United States are increasingly poorer, blacker, and more hopeless about their future with every passing year.
Sugrue sees the problems of Detroit stemming from a multiplicity of conscious and unconscious decisions made on the part of local and national government officials, corporate boards, union leadership, neighborhood associations, and self-interested individuals in day to day life. This is nothing new in the study of post-war urban and industrial decline. What is new, and rather eye opening, is that Sugrue traces the beginnings of Detroit's economic woes to be nearly co-terminus with the war and not after the disastrous riot of 1967. This analysis is incredibly important for understanding how a massive black underclass with only minimal connections to the job market came into existence, and expanded, in the 1950's.
By a combination of discrimination and bad luck, a large number of black workers missed out on the relatively high paying automotive jobs that allowed huge numbers of white blue collar workers to aspire to home ownership and middle class respectability. For a small number of black workers who were able to find auto jobs immediately before or during the war some measure of job security and the upward mobility. This was not the situation of most black workers though. Without the benefits of seniority, most often confined to jobs that were made redundant by automation or plant movements and closure, black workers were most likely to be the victims of the vagaries of Detroit's labor market. The vast body of black workers most often found themselves getting the hot end of the economic poker.
Sugrue's analysis of race and the meaning of postwar liberalism is the most succinct and cogent portion of the work. One of the great conundrums post-war Detroit politics with overwhelming presence of the militant and fighting union UAW-CIO could not prevent housing segregation from becoming so thoroughly entrenched. In recounting the wartime and post war fights over public housing, Sugrue points to the dual identities that white male union members had as rank and filers and bread winning home owners tenuously holding onto newly won middle class status and their own whiteness.
The part of Roman Catholic identity is something Sugrue finds to be very important to the territorial fights that occurred in residential Detroit, as well as the grass roots neighborhood organizing which occurred in white neighborhoods--both factors he identifies as being woefully under analyzed. Through Sugrue's descriptions of neighborhood attempts to stop racial turn over, or the pernicious practice of "block busting" by opportunistic real estate agents, the reader is privy to seeing grass roots mass mobilization which would have most likely have formally adopted segregation if there had been legal means to do so. The housing battles of the forties and fifties were a grim precursor of white working class abandonment of the city proper and savage and complicated forms of inequalities that plague the rust belt today.
One of the most interesting portions of Sugrue's work is his analysis of how the automotive industry, in line with a great many other industries the country over, left the cities in the Northeast, Middle Atlantic and Midwest portions of the country--cities whose advantages laid in their location vis-à-vis lakes, rivers, or railway hubs. In line with Cold War planning which expected major metropolitan areas to be first strike targets by the Soviets, and because of the massive highway system built during the Eisenhower administration, it became possible for industry to disperse over greater distances than ever before. Facing the prospect of negotiating with militant unions in urban areas with powerful allies in public offices at every, much of the auto industry was more than happy to relocate to areas where unions were either weak or simply not organized--after 1947 the Taft-Hartley act made this much simpler as even Southern states with strong union presence enacted "right to work" legislation.
Mixing national security rationales with a great deal of pecuniary interest, Sugrue recounts how huge sections of the automotive industry simply left Detroit without the slightest concern for what their departure would mean for the future of the city. Sugure shows how the UAW and other Detroit area unions were possibly lost a golden opportunity to redefine corporate responsibility when they did not oppose shareholder and corporate prerogatives about the free movement of property anywhere they pleased. Although any union would have had a difficult time attempting to halt the movement of corporate property from one area of the country, no international union gave their support to stopping what the militant members of Detroit's UAW Local 600 called the "Runaway Shop," and we call deindustrialization. Some restrictions on the free flow of corporate property may have insured that Detroit's colossal unemployment of the late twentieth century would not be so colossal and seemingly intractable.
The Origin of the Urban Crisis is possibly the most solid book on why so many areas of the United States sit in utter ruin today. The analysis of Detroit he gives can be extended de-industrialized cities in every region of the country with their largely black and poor inner cities and their outlying more prosperous suburbs.
a grad student.......2005-11-30
Sugrue's thesis in this book is that endemic racism (along with economic decline) is responsible for Detroit being largely Black, poor and greatly in decline. He's a revisionist historian who wants to refute older narratives that Detroit is corrupt (because all the city governments after 1967 have been run by Democrats and Blacks). Instead he attempts to refute that by showing the deeply ingrained racism in the community.
Sugrue's attempt at political polemics is bad history. He fails to mention the obvious: Detroit is over-taxed and run by incompetent, corrupt politicians. It's public unions have caused government workers to be some of the highest paid in the country with little to show for it. This is thanks to former-Mayor Young who instituted an arbitration law. To pay for this, the city's taxes are exorbitant which pushes businesses further out. Because of this, Detroit never found other businesses to take the place of the declining auto-industry which has inflated pay for its jobs in the first place.
Of the past three mayors, two have been highly corrupt. Archer who was mayor in the '90s, after a distinguished career in the state Supreme Court, tried to reform the city but was kicked out of office. Young and the current mayor, Kilpatrick, are very corrupt. Just do a google news search of "Kwame Kilpatrick" and "corrupt" and you'll see the various scandals that have plagued him. Other than stealing city funds for himself and his family he turned down a $200,000,000 private gift to the city for charter schools because the teacher's unions were against it. Young, mayor in the '70s and '80s, made room for a GM plant by confiscating private land through eminent domain. Few could understand why he buldozed tax producing land when he could have given over acres of abandoned property, except that the residents of that neighborhood voted overwhelmingly against him.
Yes, white people with means fled Detroit for the suburbs. But Sugrue glosses over that fact that middle class Black residents left as soon as the could too. Southfield, a surburb township, is overwhelming Black and middle class, populated by those who couldn't stand the crime and corruption of Detroit.
Far from being an example of a typical post-industrial American City, Detroit is the exception. It should be held up as a prime example of how not to run a city. That being said, unless you've been assigned this book, don't read it. Sugrue gives excuses and vague general reasons (aka racism) for Detroit's decline when the real problems are staring him in the face
Well researched, well written.......2004-01-03
The Detroit metropolitan area today is arguably the most racially segregated region in the United States, with a primarily African-American, largely abandoned and dilapidated urban center surrounded by layers of primarily white, affluent suburbs. This book is essential reading for anyone who lives in southeast Michigan as well as other cities that have similar histories of industrialization, urban decline and concentrated poverty such as Cleveland, Gary, Philadelphia, and South Chicago.
Thomas Sugrue provides a thoughtful, well-researched, and fascinating analysis of systematic racial inequality in Detroit during the post World War II automotive industry boom of the 1940s through deindustrialization and "white flight", and ending with the catastrophic race riots of 1967. Sugrue avoids the current, common oversimplifications of blaming Detroit's urban crisis on the '67 riots or Mayor Colman Young by weaving together a complex story of human behaviors, fears, and incentive structures backed by data, references, and personal accounts: "By the time Young was inaugurated, the forces of economic decay and racial animosity were far too powerful for a single elected official to stem."
Sugrue's analysis provides insight to understand major groups of stakeholders and their interactions: Workers flocked from the southern states to Detroit seeking relatively high-paying automotive jobs. In the free market, resulting housing shortages allowed landlords to divide properties into tiny apartments and charge premium prices, protecting their investments by being selective in their choice of "low risk" white tenants. Bankers also preferred "low risk" clients, resulting in unequal access to funds. White home owners, wanting to protect their families and financial investment, resisted neighborhood integration to avoid declining property values and perceived dangers. Real estate agents capitalized on fears of mixed neighborhoods by buying property from fleeing whites at junk prices and selling immediately to blacks at premium prices. Labor unions protected seniority, which unequally benefited whites, and tended to compromise on racial issues in order to gain bargaining ground. Store owners avoided hiring black workers, wishing to avoid offending or frightening mostly white, mostly female, customers. Suburban tax incentives and new technology made large, flat assembly plants more efficient than the old multi-story plants. This drove automakers away from Detroit, where the rail and riverside real estate was largely developed, and contributed to unemployment and race and class polarization.
Racial inequality in Detroit stems from complex social systems of incentives and categorical isolation caused by systematic inequality in access to employment, housing, networking and other resources. Recognizing the complexity of this social system helps the reader understand how individuals who fail to actively oppose racism actually support it, and why official "race-blind" policies fail to stop the polarization caused by chain-reactions of systematic, historic, self-reinforcing racial inequalities and the ruthless self-interest of capitalist culture.
Book Description
In this book, Bonilla-Silva explores with systematic interview data the nature and components of post-civil rights racial ideology. Specifically, he documents the existence of a new suave and apparently non-racial racial ideology he labels color-blind racism. He suggests this ideology, anchored on the decontextualized, ahistorical, and abstract extension of liberalism to racial matters, has become the organizational matrix whites use to explain and account for racial matters in America.
Customer Reviews:
Book was in great condition!.......2007-03-10
New book, for a reasonable price. Book was in perfect condition--brand new!! Only complaint was that it took a while to arrive, but I was very satisfied when it finally came.
Valid points.......2006-08-26
After reading some of the reviews for this book, I was looking forward to reading it.
The data for this book come primarily from surveys of 627 college students, and 400 adults from the Detroit area and much of the book includes the verbatim responses of the survey participants. Although the author states that rhetorical incoherence is part of all natural speech, to read most of these answers is mind boggling. Not one person seems to be able to express themselves in a clear sentence without `um, I don't know, you know, I guess, it's like, you know'. It got so annoying, I ended up reading only the author's `Conclusion' at the end of each chapter.
The book contains valid points and I don't mean to diminish the author's effort, but summarizing the survey answers in a clear way could have made this book easier to read and more effective.
Intresting but deeply lacking.......2006-04-23
This book is well horrible for what is claims to be trying to do. It was req. reading for my sociology class and let me just say, i have never hated reading so much before. Bonilla-Silva while presenting a intresting and no doubt helpfull view of racism in modern America, he is one sided and his claims are hypocritical to no end. By the end of the book i felt like i had read 182 pages of "all white people are racist becasue they want the benifits." There is no counter arguements and his sources are rather unconvincing since they are nothing more then like minded authors.
A great book!.......2006-01-21
As the author Bonilla-Silva emphasizes repeatedly, this book does not intend to blame whites for being racist. This books attempts to illustrate how whites and blacks are constructed and positioned differently in relation to the past history of slavery and the newer form of racial ideology which supports the white privilege in the age of color blindness. I couldn't agree more with many of the arguments he has made throughout the book. I think this can make a great textbook for college courses.
For white readers, the argument that the racism continues to influence racial minorities' lives may not be convincing because, as Bonilla-Silva notes, they tend to subscribe the notion that racism is a thing of the past. I wish he had provided more "empirical" and "social scientific" evidence of how color-blind racism continues to have a negative impact on the lives of people of color today to make his argument much more convincing. (Just accept the blacks' personal testomony that "racism is still pervasive and affect us" may make this book sound like one-sided).
If open to understanding the minority perspective.......2005-08-11
This book may annoy, irritate, and even infuriate some, but if any of these emotions arise, you might ask yourself "why do I feel so defensive?"...and I promise, you will gather a bit of enlightment. The book portrays the perspective of minority peoples in a way that will open your eyes. It IS one-sided, but not because the author is a "racist", rather, he feels (it's in his Author's Note) that enough books are written ABOUT minorities from a "white perspective" view of the world, so he thought he would write a book that showed a distinct minority perspective on "white" culture. It is not meant to arise aggression, it is written to give realizations and enhance communications between the races.
Book Description
World Poverty provides a general summary of world poverty at the beginning of the 21st century, then an introduction to modern world system theory and its attempts to explain world poverty and inequality. Separate chapters contain an overview of poverty in Africa, Latin America, and then Asia. Remaining chapters offer explanations for why some countries in the world (mostly in Asia) have become richer and reduced the ranks of their poor through ties with the global economy while others have not. Kerbo provides extensive evidence for why the nature of the state in developing countries is the most important factor in stagnation or even economic development with poverty reduction. But, in contrast to previous research and new statements by the World Bank, he has created a model attempting to explain why and how some countries have “good governance” and others do not. The book concludes with what we now know about world poverty and what does and does not work to reduce it.
Customer Reviews:
A Great Textbook.......2007-08-11
This was my textbook for my class in Sociology. However this book teaches about some history of the countries and how come they are or are not poor. This book discusses the inequities of the different aspects of each country. The book is timeless and should be read by all especially in our economy of now. I think it would also make a good economics book.
Average customer rating:
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The Politics of Racial Inequality: A Systematic Comparative Macro-Analysis from the Colonial Period to 1970 (Contributions in Ethnic Studies)
J. Owens Smith
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press
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ASIN: 0313257310 |
Book Description
This work covers new ground by presenting a systematic, comparative macro-analysis of the historical experiences of thirteen race and ethnic groups, with emphasis on their economic and political ties to government. It starts with the colonial period (Anglo-Saxons, French, and Scots-Irish) and extends to 1970, which can be considered the date at which civil rights legislation began to have a significant effect.
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Who Gains From Free Trade: Export-Led Growth, Inequality and Poverty in Latin America (Routledge Studies in Development Economics)
Vos & Ganuza
Manufacturer: Routledge
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Binding: Hardcover
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Book Description
Since the late 1980s, almost all Latin American countries have gone through a process of far-reaching economic reforms, featuring in particular trade, financial and capital account liberalization. At first the reforms seemed to be working as promised and trade expanded. However, at the turn of the century, the economies have shown unstable and rather dismal growth. Some argue trade liberalization is partly to be blamed for this.
Who Gains from Free Trade examines the extent to which trade reforms have been an important source of the slowdown of economic growth, rising inequality and rising poverty as observed in many parts of the region. This volume presents an comprehensive analysis of this important topic, utilizing research based on 16 country narratives of policy reform and economic performance; rigorous general equilibrium (CGE) modelling of the economy-wide effects of trade reform for all country cases; alongside application of an innovative method of microsimulations to assess the employment and factor income distribution impact of policy reforms on poverty and inequality at the household level.
The study finds that trade liberalization and the switch to export-led growth are not the cause of the growth slowdown in Latin America. Nor are they the cause of rising poverty and inequality. If anything, the impact on growth and poverty in general has been positive, but very small. Thus, further trade opening is neither the solution to the region's economic woes, nor should we expect any disastrous implications for aggregate poverty.
Book Description
In a panoramic study that draws on diverse sources, Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson explain why and how time pressures have emerged and what we can do to alleviate them. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that all Americans are overworked, they show that time itself has become a form of social inequality that is dividing Americans in new ways--between the overworked and the underemployed, women and men, parents and non-parents. They piece together a compelling story of the increasing mismatch between our economic system and the needs of American families, sorting out important trends such as the rise of demanding jobs and the emergence of new pressures on dual earner families and single parents.
Comparing American workers with their European peers, Jacobs and Gerson also find that policies that are simultaneously family-friendly and gender equitable are not fully realized in any of the countries they examine. As a consequence, they argue that the United States needs to forge a new set of solutions that offer American workers new ways to integrate work and family life.
Customer Reviews:
The truth about why work and family conflict.......2004-12-27
Jacobs & Gerson present a clear explication of the conflict between work and family encountered by so many parents today. They review popular hypotheses (e.g. Americans work more hours than they used to), examine the relevant research, and provide sound and clearly reasoned conclusions. THE TIME
DIVIDE clarifies precisely why current workplace structures are
incompatible with the realities of family life today - and why this is especially the case for professionals, like the lawyers I coach. I applaud Jacobs and Gerson for making clear
that work/life conflict is a social policy issue of enormous
importance. They make a compelling case for the ways in which
individual choices are constrained by workplace demands and social norms. If every law firm partner read this book, would things finally change enough so that women lawyers would have a fair chance at success and leadership? Would that it were so.
Book Description
What determines whether children grow up to be rich or poor? Arguing that parental actions are some of the most important sources of wealth inequality, Casey B. Mulligan investigates the transmission of economic status from one generation to the next by constructing an economic model of parental preferences.
In Mulligan's model, parents determine the degree of their altruistic concern for their children and spend time with and resources on them accordingly—just as they might make choices about how they spend money. Mulligan tests his model against both old and new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of consumption, earnings, and wealth, including models that emphasize "financial constraints." One major prediction of Mulligan's model confirmed by the evidence is that children of wealthy parents typically spend more than they earn.
Mulligan's innovative approach can also help explain other important behavior, such as charitable giving and "corporate loyalty," and will appeal to a wide range of quantitatively oriented social scientists and sociobiologists.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting subject,original approach,accessible exposition.......2000-04-15
I recommend this book mainly for three reasons. I found the subject really exciting : is economic status of the children dependent on the choices of their parents, and if yes, how ? The approach chosen by Mulligan is very original, because, while using the full strength of the economic reasoning, he decided to endogenize parental altruism, instead of taking it as given. Finally, one very good point for non economists is that his argumentation is altogether clear, convincing and accessible. This is a very uncommon quality in the economic litterature.
Book Description
Timothy Smith argues that the French economic and social model is imploding on itself despite good intentions. Bad policies and vested interests that exploit the rhetoric of "solidarity" and the specter of globalization have prevented necessary changes from being effected. Making frequent comparisons with the U.S., U.K., Canada, Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands, Smith argues that change need not follow the inegalitarian U.S. or British paths in order to lead to a more balanced French society.
Customer Reviews:
A thoughtful and stimulating read.......2005-01-26
This is a very enlightening cross-disciplinary look at where the French welfare state finds itself today. The author does a wonderful job of harpooning the self-delusional assumptions the French make about their government's social programs. Likely, this won't be warmly received in France, but challenging the status quo is no way to win popularity contests. The United States and Canada could do with a similar treatment from this author.
From a stylistic standpoint, I think it is important to note that this is not just another dry academic tome. The text is quite lively and there are more than a few colourful turns of phrase thrown in for good measure.
Customer Reviews:
The Philosphy of Economics.......2003-06-06
The most basic idea, that one person's equality is another's inequality, is explored in detail. Sen illuminates many of the flaws in standard economic thinking, and how the philosophical underpinnings of economics guide and distort economic reasoning.
Fantastic- and I don't agree with a word of it, either!.......2001-08-01
I read this book in one sitting, and let me say it is a great book.
It is odd so few books are written on such a basic philosophical question as equality, and reading mister Sen is akin to drinking a cold glass of water for a man in a desert of political philosophy.
The prose is somewhat weak, the stye is stilted, and that oddly only seems to add to mister Sens' achievement: I never get the feeling that when I turn the next page I will be bored or watch him say something unnecessarily pedantic. The whole book is carried solely by the interesting subject at hand and mister Sens endlessly excellent commentary on it.
That having been said, I agree with none of it. I do not value equality in any way, and my politics are thoroughly aristocratic and Old Right. So perhaps the possible reader should take that into account: I have nothing but praise for mister Sens books, and this book in particular is an excellent dive. Perhaps praise from a trenchant enemy is worth more than praise from the ideologically like minded.
I will be reading it and making notes and attacks on it for a year to come, at the very least. No matter how you view equality, I advocate mister Sen without reservation. This is excellent. Please buy it.
An Excellent piece.......2000-05-03
Amartya Sen really questions the very foundations that determine of what is equality and development. It is indeed a marvellous piece of work.
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