New Books in Public Policy

Who deserves public assistance from the government? This age-old question has been revived by policymakers, pundits, and activists following the massive economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anne Whitesell takes up this timely debate, showing us how our welfare system, in its current state, fails the people it is designed to serve. From debates over stimulus check eligibility to the uncertain future of unemployment benefits, Living Off the Government?: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfare (NYU Press, 2024) tackles it all. Examining welfare rules across eight different states, as well as 19,000 state and local interest groups, Whitesell shows how we determine who is—and who isn't—deserving of government assistance. She explores racial and gender stereotypes surrounding welfare recipients, particularly Black women and mothers; how different groups take advantage of these harmful stereotypes to push their own political agendas; and how the interests and needs of welfare recipients are inadequately represented as a result. Living Off the Government? highlights how harmful stereotypes about the race, gender, and class of welfare recipients filter into our highly polarized political arena to shape public policy. Whitesell calls out a system that she believes serves special interests and not the interests of low-income Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This is episode two Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.This episode looks at shifting landscape of economic thinking within the Democratic Party. First, historian Lily Geismer, author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, tells us the story of how the Democrats became captured by the Clintonian ‘Third Way.’ The Third Way argued that economic policy should move away from the sunset industries, like the unionized industrial labour that typically made the Democratic base, and move towards the sunrise industries of tech and finance.Then, the Biden team came to see this thinking as precipitating the rise of Trumpism. So free-wheeling trade and industrial policy is out, and the Clinton-era neoliberal consensus just is not a consensus anymore–some even claim neoliberalism is dead. Bidenomics replaced it, whatever that is. Yet, Bidenomics was a political dud, and now it looks like it might be on the way out. Where is the US’ economic policy thinking going on November 5th, and beyond? We try to figure that out, with the help of political economist Mark Blyth, author of the forthcoming Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

"Climate change is the biggest crisis of humankind. We can’t watch other people drive our future right against the wall.”This is a quote by Luisa Neubauer – the most famous German climate activist. As global climate change forecasts become more drastic and fear is spreading, young activists, like Luisa and Alexander, are taking the floor. Both are young, full of courage and zest for action, they want to infect us with their strength to oppose climate change and to take responsibility for the future of our planet. What does the future hold? When it comes to the climate, the predictions are pretty precise by now. And just as frightening. In this book, Luisa Neubauer, the best-known German climate activist, and the sociologist Alexander Repenning create the history of our future. For humankind is at a crossroads. If we don’t change course now, we’ll eliminate ourselves. Politicians, entrepreneurs, citizens, everyone must take action. But how? One thing is undisputed: There is no planet B. Everyone must inform and organize oneself to save the future. Neubauer and Repenning present solutions that are ready to be implemented and must finally be put into practice. But they also demonstrate the attitude with which we must deal with this exceptional situation: undaunted but level-headed. And unyielding towards those who determine our future. Because the last chance for a positive end to the climate crisis is NOW.Luisa Neubauer became known through the Fridays for Future movement in Germany. She is one of the main organizers of the weekly large demonstrations and has been committed to climate protection since before FFF. She is also a member of the Alliance 90/The Greens party the Green Youth.Alexander Repenning a sociologist who has supported the FFF movement from the beginning. He is also involved in other organizations, such as the Right Livelihood Foundation. He is committed to bringing science and politics back into harmony.Cody Bio: Cody Skahan is a graduate of the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow, and current PhD student at the University of Oxford as a recipient of a Grand Union ESRC doctoral training partnership. His work focuses on the interactions of youth, Indigenous Peoples, and others in the Arctic in regard to environmentalism, particularly in consideration to their diverse and interrelated sociotechnical imaginaries. Cody co-hosts a social theory and anthropology podcast with two of his friends called Un/livable Cultures available wherever you get podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today’s interconnected landscape of high-frequency trading and cryptocurrency, the story of finance has always taken place on an international stage. Finance is one of the most globalized and networked of human activities, and one of the most important social technologies ever invented.Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money (Yale University Press, 2024) by Dr. Dariusz Wójcik is the first visually based book dedicated to finance and uses graphics and maps to bring the complex and abstract world of finance down to earth, showing how geography is fundamental for understanding finance, and vice versa. It illuminates the people—including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes—who have shaped our thinking about global finance; brings to life the ways that place-specific histories, laws, regulations, and institutions influence finance; shows how finance relates to innovation, globalization, and environmental change; and details how finance plays a key part in drawing the landscape of uneven development, inequality, and instability.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. In Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It (Duke UP, 2024), Lennard J. Davis labels this genre “poornography”: distorted narratives of poverty written by and for the middle and upper classes. Davis shows how poornography creates harmful and dangerous stereotypes that build barriers to social justice and change. To remedy this, Davis argues, poor people should write realistic depictions of themselves, but because of representational inequality they cannot. Given the obstacles to the poor accessing the means of publication, Davis suggests that the work should, at least for now, be done by “transclass” writers who were once poor and who can accurately represent poverty without relying on stereotypes and clichés. Only then can the lived experience of poverty be more fully realized. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can't get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, "Sick Woman Theory", became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism--a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies--we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom (Zando-Hillman Grad Books, 2024) expands upon Hedva's paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal--from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America's byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness--relying on and fueling ableism--to the detriment of us all.With the insight of Anne Boyer's The Undying and Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva's debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Hedva is the author of the essay collection How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, published September 2024, by Hillman Grad Books. They are also the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell, as well as Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; in Los Angeles at JOAN, HRLA, in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, and the LA Architecture and Design Museum; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Performance Space New York; Buk-Seoul Museum of Art and Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea; the 14th Shanghai Biennial; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich; Modern Art Oxford; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano; the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, Rewire, and Creepy Teepee Festivals. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, Spike, Die Zeit, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast’s new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page.On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It’s a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.’ Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It’s a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up.Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Teaching, training, and gathering online has become a global norm since 2020. Restorative practitioners have risen to the challenge to shift restorative justice processes, trainings, and classes to virtual platforms, a change that many worried would dilute the restorative experience. How can people build relationships with genuine empathy and trust when they are not in a shared physical space? How can an online platform become an environment for people to take risks and practice new skills without the interpersonal support available when meeting face to face? Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools for Online Learning: Games and Activities for Restorative Justice Practitioners (Good Books, 2024) is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to build community and foster development of restorative justice knowledge and skills via online platforms. The games and activities included support building relationships, introducing the restorative justice philosophy, practicing key skills, and understanding and addressing structural and racial injustices. More resources are available at this website.Kathleen McGoey is a trainer and facilitator of restorative justice practices and conflict transformation. With a background leading restorative justice implementation in communities and schools, she currently supports cities, workplaces, and families to utilize restorative approaches to address incidents of harm. This is Kathleen's third publication since completing an MA in International Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She lives in Colorado.Lindsey Pointer is an assistant professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School and principal investigator for the National Center on Restorative Justice. In addition to The Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools, Lindsey is the author of The Restorative Justice Ritual (2021) and Wally and Freya (2022), a children's picture book about restorative justice. Lindsey has a PhD in Restorative Justice from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and is a former Fulbright and Rotary Global Grant recipient. She lives in Colorado.Stephen Pimpare is Professor of Public Policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire (Verso, 2024), Adam Greenfield presents a compelling vision for collective resilience in an age of perpetual crisis. As we grapple with what Greenfield terms the "Long Emergency"—an era marked by cascading disasters from pandemics to climate-driven catastrophes—this timely book explores how we might reclaim agency and foster community in the face of overwhelming challenges.Greenfield's central argument is both radical and deeply pragmatic: by synthesizing diverse tactics of mutual aid and community organizing, we can construct a coherent way of life that not only helps us survive but potentially thrive amidst upheaval. Drawing inspiration from a rich tapestry of historical and contemporary examples, he illustrates how grassroots networks of care and solidarity can serve as powerful bulwarks against despair and disempowerment.The author takes readers on a journey through various models of collective action and self-organization. He examines the Black Panthers' survival programs and the remarkable effectiveness of Occupy Sandy's disaster relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Greenfield also highlights the crucial role played by neighborhood-based mutual aid groups during the COVID-19 lockdowns, demonstrating how local initiatives can fill gaps left by institutional failures.However, Greenfield's vision extends beyond ad hoc responses to specific crises. He invites readers to consider larger-scale experiments in participatory democracy and communal living, such as the municipalist movements in Spain and the autonomous region of Rojava in Syria. These examples serve as proof of concept for alternative forms of social and political organization that prioritize collective well-being and ecological sustainability.Lifehouse is both a manifesto and a call to action. It is an invitation to rediscover and nurture our individual and collective capacities that have long been suppressed under late capitalism. Greenfield argues that by building robust networks of mutual support and reimagining local power structures, we can create resilient communities capable of weathering the storms ahead.This book arrives at a critical juncture as the effects of climate change become increasingly apparent and traditional institutions struggle to address mounting global challenges. Greenfield's work offers not just a critique of the current system but a roadmap for creating meaningful alternatives rooted in solidarity and shared purpose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In cities across the world, a new urban condition is spreading rapidly: an ever-increasing push toward efficiency, sanitization, surveillance and the active eradication of any aberration, friction or alternative. From Dubai, Hong Kong and London to Amsterdam and Cairo, the smooth city, with its gated communities and theme-park zones, insidiously transforms urban life into seamless "experience." While the demand for safe, clean and well-functioning urban environments is understandable, the ascent of the smooth city corrodes the democratic and emancipatory potential of cities, leaving little space for the experimental and the non-normative.In Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives (Valiz, 2023), René Boer investigates the origins, characteristics and consequences of "smoothness" and points toward possible alternatives.René Boer is a critic, curator and organizer in and beyond the fields of architecture, art, design and heritage. Based in Amsterdam, he is a founding partner of Loom: Weaving New Worlds and an editor at Failed Architecture.This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo, a graduate student in urban studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked professionally as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor to the City of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy