New Books in Public Policy

The health of former NFL players has received plenty of attention in recent years. The suicides of Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, along with stories of retired players in only their 40s and 50s affected by dementia and ALS, have revealed the toll that a professional football career can take on a man’s body and brain. In their new book Is There Life After Football? Surviving the NFL (New York University Press, 2014), James Holstein, Richard Jones, and George Koonce, Jr., discuss the discovery of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy as well as other physical problems that afflict former NFL players. Yet the most stunning finding of their research is not how life in football affects players’ health, but rather how it affects their ability to find and hold a job, to maintain relationships, even to engage in basic social interactions. The research leading to the book began with George Koonce, a nine-year veteran of the NFL. George’s career ended like those of most NFL players, not with a press conference announcing his retirement but with word from his last team that they “were moving in a different direction” and then a long wait for another team to call. After finally accepting that his playing days were over, he went on to earn his doctorate at Marquette University, writing his dissertation on the transitions of players into and out of professional football. Jim and Rick joined with their former graduate student to expand the research, accumulating thousands of pages of interview transcripts with former NFL players. The result is a candid look inside the “bubble” of NFL life and then the difficulties experienced by former players–men in only their late 20s and early 30s–when they leave that isolated, abnormal world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Wikipedia is one of the most popular resources on the web, with its massive collection of articles on an incredible number of topics. Yet, its user written and edited model makes it controversial in many circles. In Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Thomas Leitch of the University of Delaware English Department has written a book that challenges many of the criticisms of Wikipedia. Yet he also reviewed the importance of authority as an issue with all research in the twenty first century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Contemporary American political culture is arguably more divisive than ever before. Blue states are bluer, red states are redder, and purple states are becoming harder and harder to find. Because of this divisiveness, teaching social studies and civics education has now become an overwhelmingly difficult task. Should a teacher share political leanings? How can teachers ensure that students are learning a wide political spectrum? Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy set out to answer these questions and more in The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education (Routledge 2014), from the Critical Social Thought series. The researchers undertook a massive years-long longitudinal study of high schools in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. From different classroom styles and teacher pedagogy, to impact on students, The Political Classroom offers an in-depth glimpse into the American civics education classroom. Dr. Hess joins New Books in Education for the interview and you can find more helpful resources on social students and civics education at thepoliticalclassroom.com. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Commercial interests are often understood as impinging upon the ethical norms of medicine. In his new book, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Joe Gabriel shows how the modernization of American medicine was bound up in the ownership, manufacture, and marketing of drugs. Gabriel unearths the early history of intellectual property concerns as they entered the domain of medical practice itself. Through his careful marshaling of evidence, he takes readers back to a time when the norms and legal structures of commercial capitalism in the U.S. were just as much at issue as those of the professionalization of medicine. This fascinating book serves as a pointed reminder that the sources of therapeutic rationale are just as much tied to the production and regulation of therapies as the collective decision-making on ethical practice. Along with my previous interview with Jeremy Greene, this discussion will hopefully make accessible a broad perspective on the development of medicine in the 20th century by focusing on its ties to industry. Medical Monopoly charts the history of property rights over medicines at the dawn of the 19th century through World War I. The important broader transition here is that while before the Civil War–at least in medicine–patents were seen as tantamount to granting problematic monopoly, by the end of the 19th century they were understood as the best available regulatory mechanism for preventing more problematic imitation. Whereas patent medicines had previously been linked to quackery, the emergence and rapid expansion of the “ethical” pharmaceutical industry after the Civil War was due to its adherents advocating for more effective regulation of commerce within medicine. Rather than reverting to secrecy, firms began to circulate and publish information on new remedies and the results of studies to physicians. As the explosion of new medicines remained at pace with the boom of consumer goods in the late 19th century, patenting and corporate investment in monopolistic practices became understood as a mechanism to advance the public good. The expansion of laboratory science and norms of chemical manufacturing in the 20th century only bolstered this union further.Medical Monopoly is a fascinating and important read that people interested in medical policy should pay attention to. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Emilie Cloatre‘s award-winning book, Pills for the Poorest:An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2013), locates the effects–and ineffectualness–of a landmark international agreement for healthcare: the World Trade Organization’s “Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.” Cloatre takes seriously the idea of TRIPS as a technology in Bruno Latour’s meaning of the word–as a material object that anticipates effects in specific settings. Cloatre follows the text from its consolidation in European meeting halls to its use in the former French and British colonies of Ghana and Djibouti. Pills for the Poorest is a significant ethnography of law and healthcare in Africa that shows precisely how this paper tool begat new buildings, relationships, experts, and, indeed, pills, but only in particular places, among certain people, and for particular kinds of pharmaceuticals. Cloatre is a broadly trained scholar and talented researcher who shows the power of Actor Network Theory as an analytic device, and yet does so with a spirit of critique in the best sense: that is, as an act of sympathetic, yet persistent, questioning. As a text itself, the book has potential to reshape the thinking of readers from a wide range of fields, from law, science studies, healthcare policy, and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The 1960s marked a “new era of vaccination,” when Americans eagerly exposed their arms and hind ends for shots that would prevent a range of everyday illnesses–not only prevent the lurking killers, like polio. Medical historian Elena Conis shows that Americans’ gradual acceptance of vaccination was far from a medical fait accompli: it was–and remains–a political accomplishment that has stemmed from a patchwork of efforts to expose children, in particular, to compulsory vaccine programs. Grown in the culture of postwar American politics, vaccines deliver more than prophylactics. They succor a set of assumptions about economic inequality, racial difference, sexual norms, and gendered divisions of labor. Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization (University of Chicago, 2014) is a timely and accessible social history of American policy and practices towards vaccination that shows how support for vaccination has rarely advanced for medical reasons alone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones are the authors of The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill and Jones is the J. J. “Jake” Pickle Regents Chair in Congressional Studies and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. The Politics of Information picks up where the authors’ last book, The Politics of Attention, leaves off. They explore how information enters into the policy process and how that has evolved over time, focusing on what they call the “paradox of search”. They make extensive use of the publicly available data that they have collected over the last decade called the Policy Agendas Project. They argue that: “Information determines priorities, and priorities determine action” (p. 40). They discover is that the policy process is replete with information – not all high quality – and that different policy problems integrate information in different ways. They also find that the government has “broadened” – addressing an ever growing array of issues – rather than just “thickening” – through growth in the overall size of government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The US Census has been an important American institution for over 220 years. Since 1790, the US population has been counted and compiled, important figures when tabulating representation and electoral votes. The Census has also captured the racial make-up of the US and has become a powerful public policy tool with both data and clout, affecting a range of policies from segregation to affirmative action. In What Is Your Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (Princeton University Press 2013), Dr. Kenneth Prewitt provides a broad historical and political overview of the racial counting component of the Census, from its inception to its future. Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University, was formerly the Director the US Census Bureau, and his first-hand experience strengthens the narrative throughout the book. Prewitt’s book follows the historical ebbs and flows of the Census and race politics in the US, which are unequivocally linked. From the early era of counting the slave population, to later integrating the new immigrant whites–such as Southern European Catholics and East European Jews–with the larger White Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority, and calumniating with race identity politics reflected in the Census discourse today, What Is Your Race? is a fascinating and thorough account of an American institution that has had a powerful influence on policy and society. Specifically, the racial categories, called statistical races in the book, used in the Census have been etched into the American psyche, and the results have sometimes been quite devises. Why should the Census count Hispanics in their own category and not Middle Eastern Americans? Prewitt faced these kinds of tough questions while running the Census and now grapples with them in this book. His final recommendation to ease tensions created from the simplistic statistical race measurement currently used by the Census is to incrementally move away form these categories and to move towards counting national origin, providing much more statistical granularity. You will have to read the book for the full policy prescription, which is fully mapped out for the next century. Dr. Prewitt joins New Books in Education for the interview. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Without a doubt, the paramount duty of a municipality, of any size, is the delivery services to its constituents. These services range from the seasonal-think snow removal, to the daily-ensuring traffic lights work, to the critical-think trash removal. Cities, particularly those in large urban areas, are tasked with finding ways to respond to issues important to the people for whom they work. New technology and data collection platforms are assisting municipalities to respond to the needs of citizens, and changing the relationships between the government and the governed. In their new book, The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance (Jossey-Bass 2014), Stephen Goldsmith, Daniel Paul Professor of Practice at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and director of Data-Smart City Solutions, and Susan Crawford, John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at Harvard Law School and co-Director of the Berkman center, detail how urban centers are using technological solutions to engage citizens and improve services. Examining cities as diverse as Boston, Chennai, Rio de Janeiro, and others, Goldsmith and Crawford explore how engaging citizens and government with technology can increase a city’s social capital and build trust in local government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Jeff Smith is the author of Ferguson in Black and White (Kindle Single, 2014). Smith is assistant professor of political science at The New School’s Milano Graduate School. Smith writes this book from a position of academic and personal expertise. He grew up in the area and served as a state representative for several years. Ferguson in Black and White provides useful background about the socio-political history of the St. Louis region that set the stage for Michael Brown’s killing and the painful aftermath. Smith writes: “In St. Louis, parochialism is inextricably intertwined with race.” He ends the book with specific recommendations for how to improve conditions in the future for the residents of Ferguson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy