New Books in Public Policy

Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Native Americans. So argues science writer Harriet Washington in A Terrible to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (Little, Brown Spark 2019). While acknowledging IQ is a biased and flawed metric, she contends it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Using copious data and synthesizing a generation of studies, Washington calculates the staggering, population-scale neurological effects of marginalized communities having been forced to live and work in landscapes of waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, asthma, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as drags on cognitive development to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected—and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem.Harriet A. Washington has been the Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, and a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law. She is the author of Deadly Monopolies, Infectious Madness, and Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton University Press, 2017) sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period.When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. Kohler-Hausmann rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the "underclass" could be managed only through coercion and force.Getting Tough illuminates this narrative through three legislative cases: New York's adoption of the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, Illinois's and California's attempts to reform welfare through criminalization and work mandates, and California's passing of a 1976 sentencing law that abandoned rehabilitation as an aim of incarceration. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, Getting Tough offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making. This work will focus on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and Illinois.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Does a person’s well-being go well beyond how much money they have in their bank account? In Social Poverty: Low-Income Parents and the Struggle for Family and Community Ties (NYU Press, 2019), Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin provides an in-depth picture of the social ties among low-income, unmarried parents, highlighting their often-ignored forms of hardship. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 31 couples who participated in a government-sponsored relationship education program called Family Expectations, Dr. Halpern-Meekin brings necessary attention to the relational and emotional dimensions of socioeconomic disadvantage.Halpern-Meekin takes an unconventional approach by focusing on social poverty as more than just a derivative of economic poverty, having its own condition, which also perpetuates poverty. In Social Poverty, Halpern-Meekin sheds light on the fundamental place of core socioemotional needs in the lives of humans. The author highlights a new direction for policy and poverty research that can enrich scholars’ understanding of disadvantaged families around the nation.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on student outlook on classroom technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How do women -- especially poor and low-income women with histories of childhood sexual trauma and drug addiction -- respond to and deal with an HIV/AIDS diagnosis? How do some manage to not merely rebuild their lives, but remake them entirely? Why do others fail? Join us to talk to Celeste Watkins-Hayes about her book Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality(University of California Press, 2019). You'll hear what she learned from a decade’s long immersion in the lives of these remarkable women, and what lessons that has to offer to politicians, policymakers, and service-providers.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Small is beautiful, right? Isn't that what we've all been taught? From Jeffersonian politics to the hallowed family farm, from craft breweries to tech start ups in the garage. Small business is the engine and the soul and the driver of the American system. That's the dominant narrative. And according to Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind, it is really wrong. In their new book, Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business (MIT Press, 2018), the authors review the empirical evidence and conclude that large businesses create more, generate more intellectual capital, pay better, pollute less, are more diverse, and score higher on pretty much any measure of economic or employee well-being that you can come up with. It is a shocking conclusion, but one that everyone involved in the regulation of business should be aware of. (And, by the way and probably a surprise to many, small business has had its thumb on the regulatory scales for much of the republic's history.) Big is Beautiful goes against--way against--the prevailing narrative about business in this country.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Over the past forty years, U.S. prisons and jails have used various psychotropic drugs. In this interview, Anthony Ryan Hatch discusses the need to think deeply about mass incarceration, pharmaceuticals, and psychiatry. He talks about the role of pharmacies and drug experiments in prison settings, and he underlines the ways that institutions themselves can be addicted to drugs. These are just a few of the topics that he examines in his recent book, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America(University of Minnesota Press, 2019). And, importantly, he also offers thoughts about recovery from this addiction.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Eric Blanc is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics(Verso, 2019). Blanc is a former teacher, journalist, and doctoral student in sociology at New York University. He has written for The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin magazine.Red State Revolt explains the emergence and development of the historic wave of teacher strikes in Arizona, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. Blanc embedded himself into the organizations that helped plan the walkouts, gaining access to internal planning meetings and secret Facebook groups. The result is a rich portrait of the labor movement and contemporary political organizing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Where in the world do working moms have it best? In her new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press, 2019), Caitlyn Collins explores how women balance motherhood and work across the globe. Using interviews with middle class working mothers in Sweden, East and Western Germany, Italy, and the United States, Collins digs deep into how policies and cultural values shape these women’s lives. This book will be of interest to any working parent and would be a great addition to any sociology of family or sociology of work course.Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Why does Korean cultural policy matter? In Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State (Routledge, 2018), Hye-Kyung Lee, a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings College, London, demonstrates the importance of South Korea is both an example in comparative cultural policy, and as a fascinating case study in its own right. The book offers historical analysis, as well as a major theoretical contribution in the form of the ‘new patron state’. The book charts the development and changes in cultural policy, from the project of national ‘modernisation’ to the Korean Wave. Thinking through questions of state theory and neoliberalism, as well as the role of culture in democracy, the book will be essential reading across the arts and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

David Karol’s new book, Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines the history of environmental policy within American political parties. He ably integrates the early conservation movement into the discussion, providing foundational understandings of the distinction between the conservationists at the beginning of the 20th century and the growth and evolution of the environmental movement in the second half of the 20th century. Red, Green, and Blue also compares the U.S. engagement with “green” politics and how environmentalism and green social movements have operated in other developed, western democracies. The thrust of this book, which is part of the Element series at Cambridge University Press, is to focus on how, where, and why environmental policy became more acutely partisan. Karol also examines the functioning of party coalitions and interest groups as they wove together around environmental issues.Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is author of Not in My District: The Politics of Military Base Closures (Peter Lang, 2003). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy