Серия "Wildavsky Forum Series"

How well can democratic decision making incorporate the knowledge and expertise generated by public policy analysts? This book examines the historical development of policy analysis, as well as its use in legislative and regulatory bodies and in the federal executive branch. The essays show that policy-analytic expertise effectively improves governmental services only when it complements democratic decision making. When successful, policy analysis fosters valuable new ideas, better use of...

In the United States, the soaring cost of health care has become an economic drag and a political flashpoint. Moreover, although the country&apos;s medical spending is higher than that of any other nation, health outcomes are no better than elsewhere, and in some cases are even worse. In <i>The Quality Cure,</i> renowned health care economist and former Obama advisor David Cutler offers an accessible and incisive account of the issues and their causes, as well as a road map for the...

Rebecca M. Blank offers the first comprehensive analysis of an economic trend that has been reshaping the United States over the past three decades: rapidly rising income inequality. In clear language, she provides an overview of how and why the level and distribution of income and wealth has changed since 1979, sets this situation within its historical context, and investigates the forces that are driving it. Among other factors, Blank looks closely at changes within families, including women’s...

This book looks at the way we tax the poor in the United States, particularly in the American South, where poor families are often subject to income taxes, and where regressive sales taxes apply even to food for home consumption. Katherine S. Newman and Rourke L. O’Brien argue that these policies contribute in unrecognized ways to poverty-related problems like obesity, early mortality, the high school dropout rates, teen pregnancy, and crime. They show how, decades before California’s passage of...

In <i>Bounded Rationality and Politics</i>, Jonathan Bendor considers two schools of behavioral economics—the first guided by Tversky and Kahneman’s work on heuristics and biases, which focuses on the mistakes people make in judgment and choice; the second as described by Gerd Gigerenzer’s program on fast and frugal heuristics, which emphasizes the effectiveness of simple rules of thumb. Finding each of these radically incomplete, Bendor’s illuminating analysis proposes Herbert...

With a timely new foreword by Robert Frank, this groundbreaking book explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today. Although middle-income families don&apos;t earn much more than they did several decades ago, they are buying bigger cars, houses, and appliances. To pay for them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off «expenditure...