New Books in Public Policy

How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) charts the New Labour era of cultural policy, detailing the shift from the optimism of the late 1990s to the eventual crisis of funding and policy currently confronting culture in the UK. The book identifies the faustian pact between government and cultural sector, as increased funding came at the price of delivering economic and social policy agendas and responding to bureaucratic forms of management. The book uses a range of examples to illustrate this problematic bargain, from the disasters of the Millennium Dome and The Public, through an analysis of the 2012 Olympic Games. Alongside the range of cultural policy projects discussed is an exploration of the infrastructure, in particular the government departments and public bodies, which are at the root of the failure of British cultural policy between 1997 and today. These failures, including how policy did little or nothing to broaden the base of consumers for state sponsored cultural institutions, are set against the need to renew the meaning and purpose of culture in government. Written with a sharp wit and full of intriguing commentary on the personalities of the key players, the book is essential reading for anyone keen to understand why Britain continues to struggle with the idea of cultural policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Conventional thinking tells us that private school education is better than public schooling in the US. Why else would parents pay the hefty price tag often associate with private education, especially at very elite schools? But, Dr. Christopher Lubienski and Dr. Sarah Lubienski question this assumption in their new book, entitled The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013). In this publication, the authors use two large-scale datasets on mathematics outcomes to isolate the effects of schooling on children and they find that public schools actually score better than their private school counterparts in this measure when the proper variables are held constant. To explain their findings, Lubienski and Lubienski argue that public school usually have better certified teachers and more often teach with more modern pedagogical methods. While the book does not contend that all public schools are great, the authors would like their findings that show traditional public schools do in fact show positive outcomes to be considered alongside a policy discourse that is increasingly dominated by calls of privatization and autonomy–such as vouchers and charter schools. Dr. Christopher Lubienski joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can follow him and the host of this podcast on Twitter at @CLub_edu and @PoliticsAndEd, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Janet K. Shim‘s new book juxtaposes the accounts of epidemiologists and lay people to consider the roles of race, class, and gender (among other things) in health and illness. Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease (New York University Press, 2014) integrates several kinds of sources into a theoretically-informed sociological investigation of inequality and cardiovascular disease, including interviews with epidemiologists and people of color who are dealing in different ways with the disease, participant observation at conferences and health education events, and engagement with discourses of cultural and social theory. Shim considers the points of commonality and divergence among lay and epidemiological communities in terms of how each group conceptualizes the nature of social and cultural difference, the significance of difference for health and disease, and the reliability of different forms of knowledge. In the process, Heart-Sick places these accounts into dialogue with theories of biopower and biopolitics, intersectionality (a notion that addresses how “interlocking systems of oppression shape both the distribution of chances and of risk”), and fundamental causality (a concept that considers social conditions as fundamental causes of disease). The result is a masterfully articulated and clearly argued study that will be of interest to sociologists of science and medicine, historians, and curious readers interested in becoming better informed about the processes through which we have come to understand our bodies and selves and the consequences of those processes for research and treatment of heart disease. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Is there any such thing as a generic drug? Jeremy A, Greene‘s new book Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) treats its subject matter with a learned skepticism that lets the reader see through the eyes of the historical actors who helped define the modern drug industry. By inverting preconceived notions about what we take to be mundane, mass-produced chemical identities, the book offers a broad yet pointed glance at an industry and its attendant regulatory structures that developed alongside modern consumer culture. Claims about the equivalence and lower price of generic medicines, uncoupled from the patents held by major firms, were always hotly contested, and Jeremy’s book shows how debates about branding–or lack thereof–were at the heart of the rationalization of medical practice. Generic opens with evocative stories about the legal and scientific crises and personal tragedies wrought by tense relations between medical science and industry. We then learn about early debates over international standardization of chemical names and the emergence of firms that marketed generics as a specific kind of product that were a part of the very same consumer-driven value system their proponents wanted to replace. These anonymous drugs prompted research that could establish sufficient similarity between them, while at the same time provoking disputes of authority between physicians and pharmacists that produced a new regulatory regime and standards which were embodied and shaped by emerging large, bureaucratic health care providers. In the end, the story of generics as champions of access and affordability in an age of elusive therapeutics and ‘me-too’ drugs designed to cash in on innovation is complicated by the global changes in production and trade they have wrought. Are ‘global’ drugs perceived as ‘universal’? Jeremy’s book will promote discussion and thought about the medical mundanities we so often take for granted. Generic takes the philosophically-inflected themes of the history of science into a realm of pressing urgency, and reveals fascinating parallels that actually make it more enjoyable for a broad audience. This interview is the first half of a pair of new books on the pharmaceutical industry; be on the lookout for my next interview with Joseph M. Gabriel about his new book: Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Paul Loeb is well known in sociology as the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in Challenging Times, and for the previous edition of the book reviewed here. His books are used in college classes all across the country. Paul also has a presence as a public intellectual who takes his ideas to the radio waves, college speakers’ forums, and the Internet. He is the founder of the Campus Election Engagement Project. This new edition of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Time (Basic Books; Second Edition, 2014) is a reader with about 50 carefully selected readings, divided into nine groups each of which has its own title. These are short readings of 3-10 pages, each written by a notable political or literary figure. Alice Walker, Pablo Neruda, Desmund Tutu, and Marian Wright Edelman are among the authors. Loeb enlivens the collection with anecdotes recalling his interactions with some of the writers–such as the evening he spent drinking wine with the radical priest and antiwar activist Philip Berrigan. In this interview Paul Loeb shares thoughts on the writers and experiences that shaped the course of his life, and offers some reflections on the forces that are shaping our own time. Go to: www.paulloeb.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, to the ill-equipped and ill-fated responses to disasters like the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, and Hurricane Katrina, a common denominator in all of these events, and those similar, was a lack of inter- and intra-government information sharing. In his new book Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange (MIT 2014), Alon Peled, associate professor of political science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, conceptualizes a platform that would incentivize inter-agency information sharing. Called the Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE), the platform would not only enable the trading of information, but also offers the valuation of information assets. In this way the PSIE creates an inter-government economic system. In detailing of the opportunities and threats to such a system, Peled offers examples of how similar systems have been implemented in governments throughout the world, and uses interdisciplinary training and experience in information technology and political science to describe a system and rationale that could offer assistance to those looking for simplified and efficient government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

So how many billionaires are there in the world? And what do they have to do with politics? Darrell  M. West has answered those questions in Billionaires: Reflection on the Upper Crust (Brookings 2014). West is vice president of Governance Studies and director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. As an election approaches, the role of money and politics is fresh on everyone’s mind. Darrell West takes this issue on at its zenith. He examines the relationship of the 1,645 men and women global billionaires to politics in the US and elsewhere. What he discovers likely confirms some of the greatest fears of many who lament elite politics. But West’s book is not simply a screed against wealth; he shows the different ways money has entered into policy-making process through new models of philanthropy and efforts to curb corruption. He offers recommendations in the book’s conclusion to address the inadequacies in our current system of campaign finance regulation and transparency laws that might limit some of the harmful effects of too much money in politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today? Kara W. Swanson‘s wonderful new book traces the history of body banks in America from the nineteenth century to today, focusing especially on milk, blood, and sperm. Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014) takes readers into early twentieth-century America, when doctors first turned to human bodies and their parts as sources of material to help cure their most desperate cases. As these doctors developed an expertise in harvesting body products and sought reliable and cooperative supplies thereof, human milk and blood were first transformed into commodities. Swanson’s story introduces some of the most crucial actors in this history, including wet nurses, professional blood donors, Red Cross volunteer “Grey Ladies,” doctors, blood bank managers, mothers who ran milk banks, sperm donors, and many, many others. The story is deeply satisfying on many levels: as a window into particular human lives, as a conceptual history with material consequences, and as a set of case studies that illuminates and informs today’s legal and medical landscapes. This is a book that should be on the shelves and in the hands of anyone interested in legal history, medical history, modern notions of “property,” and the ways that the past had shaped what happens to our bodies in the present and what might happen to them in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. Author Matthew Huber shows the crucial role oil and housing policy played in the New Deal and how, in subsequent decades, government policies drove many Americans to the suburbs and increased their dependence on petroleum. Although such policies were central to suburbanization, Americans in these new neighborhoods tended to forget this fact, and instead, saw their success in the suburbs as the outcome of private achievements. Over time, such places became the crucible for the growth of neoliberalism. Lifeblood demonstrates the role oil played not only in suburbanization, but in the rightward shift of American politics over the past four decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The death penalty is a subject that can easily inflame emotions. However, in his book, Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty (Northeastern University Press, 2013), Dr. Anthony Santoro does an amazing job of objectively presenting opposition to and support of the death penalty and explaining his own opposition to it. At the same time, Dr. Santoro explores, primarily through a focus on Virginia, a broad range of perspectives on the death penalty, such as official church statements, Bible studies, a gubernatorial election, and death-row chaplains. Through this religious, political, and profoundly humanistic exploration of the death penalty, Santoro argues that the death penalty is not primarily about the victim or the perpetrator, but about us. As such, this volume is both factually informative and thought provoking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy