New Books in Public Policy

In his new book, Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society, (Hoover Institution Press, 2011) William Damon, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, argues that we are failing to prepare today’s young people to be responsible American citizens. Damon, who is also the director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, shows that our disregard of civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a tangible effect on the attitudes, understanding, and behavior of large portions of the youth in our country today. In our interview, we discuss Howard Zinn, Michael Barone, political correctness, and the status of the American Dream. Read all about it, and more, in Damon’s thought-provoking new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael Auslin's Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard University Press, 2011), the author, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the history of cultural exchange between the United States and Japan, and how important that exchange has been, and continues to be, from a political perspective. Auslin, who is also a columnist for WSJ.com, analyses the "enduring cultural exchange" between the two countries, and describes the various stages through which this vital relationship has evolved over the last century and one half. As Auslin shows, the relationship between the United States and Japan has had a large number of twists and turns, culminating in the current close and mutually beneficial connection between the two nations. In our interview, we talk about baseball, pop culture, gunboat diplomacy, and the first Japanese ever to set foot in America. Read all about it, and more, in Auslin's useful new book. Please become a fan of "New Books in Public Policy" on Facebook if you haven't already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What kind of education are students at top American law schools getting? And how does that education influence their activities upon graduation? In Walter Olson‘s Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (Encounter Books, 2011), the author, an economist and not a lawyer, looks at what is happening at our nation’s elite law schools, and its implications for citizens, businesses, and taxpayers. Olson, a Senior Fellow at the CATO Institute, describes what he calls the consensus view of law school faculties, and how hard it is for law students to find alternative points of view. He describes how the litigation explosion’s origins stem from the views of one influential professor, and the costs that this “American disease” imposes on our economy. In addition, he describes some revealing conflicts between trial lawyers and their allies that reveal the financial incentives motivating the testimony of certain scholars in favor of costly and often frivolous lawsuits. Read all about it, and more, in Olson’s penetrating new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

When in medical school, I found myself drawn to the study of infectious diseases in large part because of the mixture of science and anthropology – infectious diseases are always about the way we interact with the world around us, what we do with whom and when and where and how often. Take the recent examples of the global spread of pandemic influenza (a respiratory virus spread in the air) and the epidemic of cholera in Haiti (which depends on lack of access to clean water to spread), and how in each case the spread of the infection says something about the world and the ways in which the world’s population is connected. Now, the most important infection of our time is HIV, and its predominant modes of transmission are particularly complicated and culturally loaded human behaviors: sex and intravenous drug use. In her engaging, informative, and fun book, The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS (Norton, 2008), Elizabeth Pisani draws on her experiences doing field work as an epidemiologist in Indonesia and on staff at UN AIDS, the joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, during the time when the world was coming to grips with the fact of an exploding global epidemic of HIV. If you want to design effective interventions, you have to understand exactly who and what those interventions should target. But how easy is it to figure out who has sex with whom and when and where and how often? Or who injects drugs and shares needles? Doing so is loaded with pitfalls, and Elizabeth lays them out for us, exploring how preconceptions, ignorance, and technical problems can cloud our ability to see what’s really happening, to interpret what we see, and, most importantly, to figure out effective ways to intervene. She reminds us that what’s true for Jersey may be completely false in Jakarta. And, on top of all that, how do you convince the people who hold the purse-strings to pay for everything? These are fascinating problems and we thank Elizabeth for sharing her expert insights. Elizabeth’s blog and website, The Wisdom of Whores, is also a great source of news and ideas in the world of HIV/AIDS and much else. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

If a parent decides not to vaccinate their children, is that an individual choice, or is it a serious threat to the public health? In Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (Basic Books, 2011), Dr. Paul Offit discusses the very real threats to the public health created by the anti-vaccine movement, both in the U.S. and around the world. In the book, Dr. Offit reviews the history of vaccines, their importance, and the various attempts to discredit them over the past few centuries. One of these efforts, readers will be interested to know, led to the creation of the Raggedy Ann doll. Read all about it, and more, in Dr. Offit’s frightening new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Wrongful conviction is, both morally and practically, the worst mistake that society can inflict on an individual. From Franz Kafka to Errol Morris, from Arthur Koestler to Harper Lee, Western culture is deeply shaken at the prospect of the innocent person condemned. Outside of fiction, it used to be nearly impossible to prove a convict’s innocence to a level of certainty that could overturn the judgment of a jury: after all, twelve peers have found that it would be unreasonable even to doubt his guilt. In the absence of procedural error, society lacked any way to correct such a verdict. But in the late nineteen-eighties, with the advent of reliable DNA testing, that changed. One wrongful conviction is a tragedy; a hundred thousand wrongful convictions is a statistic. In his new book Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong (Harvard UP, 2011), Brandon L. Garrett tries to bridge the gap between the two. Drawing on court records and archives at the Innocence Project, he presents an extensive analysis of two hundred and fifty erroneous convictions for extremely serious crimes. The data, unique in history, constitute a perfect ‘natural experiment’ for evaluating the weaknesses of the criminal-justice system. The stories Garrett brings to light are horrifying in their routine simplicity and in the absence of malice that led to such unjust results. Moreover, the exonerees’ faulty trials share many common elements, and the patterns of error Garrett has identified point the way toward crucial reforms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Why do people become homeless? Is it because some people have made bad decisions in their lives or can’t hold onto a stable job? Or is homelessness the result of a depilating mental illness or chemical addiction? From a different perspective, perhaps homelessness is less an “individual issue” but more a “systemic one.” As sociologists are apt to point out, maybe homelessness should be linked to broader issues like the lack affordable housing, or the short supply of well paying jobs, and even institutional racism. In her new book Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Teresa Gowan explores how these different ways of thinking, and talking, about homelessness not only shape the public policy responses to it, but also affect how homeless individuals themselves come to see their identities, daily struggles, and challenges. Gowan initially set out to produce an ethnographical study of homeless recyclers in San Francisco. Over time, however, the project expanded to look at how these individuals navigate different narratives of homelessness, depending on their relationship to the informal recycling economy, the city’s shelters and treatment centers, and their time spent in correctional facilities. As you’ll hear in this interview, the different ways that we traditionally think about homelessness–what Gowan identifies as sin talk, sick talk, and system talk–converge in interesting ways when placed in the context of actual life on the streets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This week New Books in Public Policy interviews Bob Goldberg about his new book Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet Is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit (Simon & Schuster, 2010). The book is a look at the way medical science is discussed and played out over the Internet. As Goldberg says on his website, tabloid medicine is “medical reporting or information based on or consisting of Internet material that sensationalizes and exaggerate the dangers of medical technology without describing the benefits.” In the interview, Goldberg talks about both this problem and its implications, from parents refusing to vaccinate their children to suicidal people avoiding antidepressants for fear of overhyped side effects. He also discusses the role of those who seek to foment fear, as well as discredit their opponents, using new media and innuendo regarding inappropriate conflicts of interest. Finally, Bob takes on the New Books in Public Policy signature question, “What policies would you initiate if you were king for a day?” and gives his policy prescriptions for addressing the problem of Tabloid Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The United States Army is a product of our society and its values (for better and for worse), but it also makes claims to shape our society – and of course to defend it. What is the relationship between military service and citizenship? How do we as Americans balance the competing demands of liberty and equality when we establish armed forces to defend us? How are our changing ideas about race, gender, andcivil rights reflected in our military? These are just some of the important questions raised by Beth Bailey‘s America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Harvard UP, 2009). By focusing on the transition from a draft army to a volunteer force in 1973 and the ongoing efforts of the United States Army to reform itself and recruit soldiers, Bailey has in effect written an institutional history of the Army over the past four decades. It is a book that should be (andis being) avidly read by members of the armed forces and military bureaucracies as well as citizens interested in the role of our armed forces from a social as well as a military perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show the world that China had arrived. So they outfitted a small army (50,000 men) with artillery pieces and rocket launchers (over 10,000 of them) and proceeded to make war on the heavens. The idea was to “seed” clouds with silver iodide before they got to Beijing and rained on the Chinese parade. Or maybe the idea was to frighten the rain gods. Who knows? In any case, none of it worked: the massive, loud, and surely expensive operation had, according to most experts, no measurable effect on the weather around the Chinese capital. You might say you can’t blame them for trying. But according to James Rodger Fleming, you can. In his incisive new book Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia UP, 2010), Fleming shows that although people have always dreamed of controlling the weather, and many have tried to do so, no one has ever succeeded. The reason is simple: the atmosphere of the Earth is not like your refrigerator or oven. It’s just too big and complex to be man-handled by any known or even realistically imagined technology. But, as Fleming demonstrates, there are always desperate people who refuse to accept this intuitive fact. So we are presented with a gallery of rain-making mountebanks, charlatans, and swindlers ever-ready to part rain-seeking fools and their rain-seeking money. In Fleming’s excellent telling, the story is entertaining though a bit sad. It’s sadder still that the weather-controlling con is still being run by seemingly well-intentioned people who claim they can “fix” global warming by means of some out-sized, outrageous, and out-of-this-world engineering scheme. Fleming, who both knows the science and has looked at the history, is more than dubious. The only way we can “fix” the sky is to leave it alone and hope for the best. It turns out, however, that leaving the sky alone is hard. It’s actually easier to attack it, proclaim victory, and continue as before. Just ask the Chinese. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In 1980 I left Kansas to go to college in Iowa. A lot of things caught my attention about Iowa, for example, that the people really are very nice. I also noticed that there were a lot of drugs. One of them was “crystal methamphetamine,” or “crystal meth” for short. I’d never heard of it before (which is not surprising), but I quickly learned that, while not as fashionable as coke, it was inexpensive and widely available. Lots of people did it. It made them feel good. I left Iowa in 1984 for California, and with it any thought of crystal meth. “Crank,” however, remained, ever ready to make people feel good when they had nothing much to feel good about. And as Nick Reding explains in Methland. The Death and Life of an American Small Town (Bloomsbury, 2009) America’s midland didn’t have much to feel good about in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Globalization was hammering the industries that had long supported places like little Oelwein, Iowa, the subject of Reding’s attention. Light manufacture, meatpacking, and agriculture were all in decline. Wages were dropping, poverty rising, and people were leaving for the coasts (as I had). Misery loves company, but there was less and less company to be had in Oelwein. Misery, however, also loves drugs, and there was plenty of meth to go around thanks to a peculiar alliance between: 1) big pharma–which opposed any legislation to limit the sale of the essential over-the-counter ingredient in meth; 2) south-of-the-border drug cartels–who took said over-the-counter ingredient and made massive quantities of meth; and 3) some down-on-their luck Iowans–who arranged for the import of said drug. In some ways, meth did what it was supposed to do: it made sad people happy and tired people strong. But it also destroyed the lives of users, their families, and their communities. The bi-costal press reported that the hicks of flyoverland had been possessed by a new kind of “reefer madness.” The rest of the story–globalization, lobbying by big pharma, the drug cartels–it missed for the most part. Nick Reding didn’t, and we in Iowa owe him a debt of gratitude. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This week we have Professor Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa on the show talking about his new book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Professor Gordon is the author of two previous monographs, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2004) and New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Mapping Decline breaks new ground not only in our understanding of the decay of the American inner-city, but also in its use of quantitative data in combination with GIS mapping technologies. The book is full of beautiful maps that paint a vivid, if somewhat depressing, picture of American urban history. Philip J. Ethington of the University of Southern California calls Mapping Decline “a searing indictment of policymakers, realtors, and mortgage lenders for deliberate decisions that sacrificed their own city of St. Louis on the altar of race.” That it is. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy