New Books in Public Policy

The mass industrial democracy that is the modern United States bears little resemblance to the simple agrarian republic that gave it birth. The market revolution is the reason for this dramatic and ironic metamorphosis. The resulting tangled frameworks of democracy and capitalism still dominate the world as it responds to the Panic of 2008. Early Americans experienced what we now call modernization. The exhilaration and pain they endured have been repeated in nearly every part of the globe. Born of freedom and ambition, the market revolution in America fed on democracy and individualism even while it generated inequality, dependency, and unimagined wealth and power. John Lauritz Larson explores the lure of market capitalism and the beginnings of industrialization in the United States. His research combines an appreciation for enterprise and innovation with recognition of negative and unanticipated consequences of the transition to capitalism and relates economic change directly to American freedom and self-determination, links that remain entirely relevant today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

It is easy to dismiss juveniles in prison as “bad seeds”, as people with which we have nothing in common, and of which we want only distance. David Chura, however, did not maintain his distance, and has been working with at-risk kids for other 40 years. His new book, I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup (Beacon Press, 2010), is a collection of stories from the time he taught kids in a New York County jail. These narratives paint a picture of children who have been abused, neglected, and chronically disappointed by those in their lives and in the justice and foster system. Chura exposes a number of issues in the justice system and in society at large which contribute greatly to the outcome of these kids’ lives, and seeks to inform us that far from simply being “bad”, the gulf between these children and ours are mainly due to circumstances, not to personality or inborn traits. Chura shares stories that we rarely hear, of a world we barely know, in order to give a voice to those who are often silenced. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Isaac Campos is the author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Campos is an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His book traces the intellectual history of marijuana from Europe to Mexico and the ways in which usage of the drug was portrayed – as a source of madness and violence — in the Mexican media. Campos turns on its head the popular myth that drug regulation in Mexico derives from US sources. For political scientists and for all those interested in the issue, the book offers a deep historical context for the current “war on drugs” and related violence in the US and in Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Jesse Rhodes‘ book An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind (Cornell University Press, 2012). The book synthesizes nearly forty years of US political history. It tells the story of the development and passage of the No Child Left Behind law by George W. Bush. The book builds on political science theories of political entrepreneurship, institutionalism, and incrementalism to narrate the debate about education reform. Rhodes captures the people, the organizations, and the institutions that have defined education policy since the 1980s. The book is accessible, thorough, and a must read for scholars of education politics and policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Is there such a thing as too much choice? In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less – How the Culture of Abundance Robs Us of Satisfaction (Harper Perennial, 2005), author Barry Schwartz answers with a resounding yes. Though some choice is healthy and necessary, Barry argues that in modern society, we are overwhelmed with them, leading us to feel dissatisfied and sometimes even unable to make a decision at all. The dominant view that the market will provide and enable people to get that they want in life is illusory, as human beings are not as rational as we think we are, and our subjective experience of an event does not always correlate with how objectively “good” it is. In this podcast, Barry also talks about how some people, who he calls maximizers, end up suffering more from the overabundance of choices in our society, for these people always strive to make the very best decision in order to have the very best. This leads to paralysis, overanalyzing, and ultimately, to overall dissatisfaction. What makes us happy, he argues, is not to strive for the very best, but to be content with the good enough. As Barry states, “I think that in modern America, we have far too many options for breakfast cereal and not enough options of president.” 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 happens in our brains when we do things that feel good, such as drinking a glass of wine, exercising, or gambling? How and why do we become addicted to certain foods, chemicals and behaviors? David Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, explains these phenomena in his latest book, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good (Viking, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

From the time we are children, we are encouraged to see our lives as in large measure aimed at finding a spouse. In popular media, the unmarried adult is seen as suspicious, unhealthy, and pitiable. At the same time, marriage is portrayed as necessary for a healthy and flourishing adult life. And we often see the event of a wedding to have a morally transforming power over the individuals who get married. But with only a little bit of reflection, our popular conception of the meaning and significance of marriage begins to look problematic. Is marriage really so different from other kinds of interpersonal relations that it should be accorded such a central place in our popular views about adulthood? Are those who happen to never fall in love and so never get married really doomed to an inferior or morally impoverished kind of life? And when one considers the significant social and legal benefits, rights, and privileges that accrue to individuals in virtue of their being married the standard picture seems all the more objectionable. These thoughts have led some to conclude that marriage should be disestablished as a civic status. In Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law (Oxford University Press, 2012), Elizabeth Brake criticizes the popular view of marriage as intrinsically dyadic, heterosexual, and focused on romantic love and sexual exclusivity. She also rejects the idea that marriage is a unique kind of moral relation, one that differs in kind from friendships and other kinds of caring relationships. Brake also challenges the current political and legal significance that currently attaches to marriage. Yet she also rejects marriage disestablishment; employing arguments drawing from John Rawls’s later work, Brake opts instead for a conception of minimal marriage in which marriage is conceived as a relation between two or more people for purposes of mutual care. 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 her new book, The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare (Regnery Publishing, 2012), Sally C. Pipes, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Pacific Research Institute, argues that the Obama health care law will make our health care system worse and provides a step-by-step plan for how to dismantle and replace it. She also proposes an alternative, free market-based reform that will bring down costs, expand coverage, and support innovation in life-saving drugs and technology. In our interview, we talked about her vision for the future of health care, the rise of new conservative health experts, and how the Canadian health system failed her own mother in a time of great need. Read all about it, and more, in Pipes’ detailed 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

Lynn Stout‘s pathbreaking book Cultivating Conscience:How Good Laws Make Good People (Princeton University Press, 2010) represents a much-needed update to the discipline of law and economics. Using current social science and discarding threadbare premises, it develops new methods for theorizing and deploying law in its real-life context — starting from the simple observation that, as a matter of scientific fact, people are often remarkably and demonstrably unselfish. In updating her own field of study, Prof. Stout found herself, unexpectedly, calling into question one of its most cherished axioms. Scholars of law and economics had always begun with the assumption that people were “rationally selfish.” Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book Nudge called into question the first term of that formula; Prof. Stout, holder of an endowed chair in Corporate and Securities Law at UCLA, now challenges the second.On the evidence of this book, it seems more than possible that her insights will prove more significant in the long run. Lucidly summarizing the vast quantities of recent social-science research on so-called prosocial behavior, Cultivating Conscience shows how selfishness is overhyped as a driver of human conduct.Prof. Stout finds repeatedly that when there is a gap between actual legal structures and current legal theory, the problems are not with the law, but with the theory — problems rooted in certain academic cultures, unscientific thinking, and inattention to the empirically proven power of human conscience. The prospect of correcting these errors suggests a new direction for the field of law and economics. Conscience may turn out to be a policy tool as useful as incentivization. In fact, the power of Prof. Stout’s analytic framework, both as description and prescription, may make one-dimensional evaluation of legal incentives obsolete. Using the method proposed here, policymakers attentive to the key parameters of authority, conformity, and empathy may develop ways to “cue” conscientious behavior in a wide variety of social contexts. 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 her new book The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For (Ivan R. Dee, 2011), Naomi Schaefer Riley, former Wall Street Journal editor and affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, critically examines the tenure system. She believes “tenure . . . is eroding American education from the inside out” and places too much emphasis on research and not enough on teaching. In our interview, we talked about why tenure does not help students get a better education, why faculty donations went 8:1 in favor of Barack Obama in the 2008 election, and how much the government spends to subsidize academic articles. Read all about it, and more, in Riley’s provocative 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

In his new book, Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2011), David Feith, Chairman of the Civic Education Initiative and assistant editor at The Wall Street Journal, worked with some of America’s top education experts to address the problem of widespread civic illiteracy. Feith assembled 23 different educational experts, including a former Education Secretary, Supreme Court Justice, and two Senators, to address the question of how to improve civic education in the U.S. The result is a thorough analysis of civic illiteracy and its causes, as well as a host of suggestions for how to fix the problem. In our interview, we talked about how Feith came up with the idea to promote civic education in his college dorm room, whether U.S. schools have the capacity to impart the type of education necessary to do the job, and what the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements can tell us about the state of civic education in America. Read all about it, and more, in Feith’s eye-opening 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

In his new book, A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next (Regnery Publishing, 2011), David Horowitz, long ago editor of Ramparts magazine and creator of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, takes a thoughtful look at humanity’s quest to find meaning in life. Horowitz uses the works of Marcus Aurelius and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as his own experiences, to try to measure the sum of a man’s accomplishments. In our interview, we talked about Horowitz’s journey from left to right, the state of the universities, and whether things are getting better or worse in America. Read all about it, and more, in Horowitz’s bracing 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

In his new bookActing White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), former White House aide Ron Christie recounts the history of the pejorative term “acting white.” He traces its lineage from the present day through the Black Power movement back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, unraveling a fascinating history in the process. In our interview, we talked about Ron’s experiences as an African-American Republican, his ambitious vow to eradicate the term “acting white,” and his hopes for the future of America’s African-American community. Read all about it, and more, in Christie’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

If you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a “pre-war building” is. First and foremost, it’s better than a “post-war building.” Why, you might ask, is that so? Well part of the reason has to do with wartime and post-war “urban renewal,” that is, the process by which the Washington, big city governments, big city banks, and big city developers came together to clear “slums” and erect modern (really “modernist”) apartment blocks and complexes of apartment blocks. Think “the projects” (or, more generally, “public housing“). In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the New York City Housing Authority supervised the construction of a lot of them. Today roughly 500,000 New Yorkers live in them. And many of them, I would guess, probably wish they lived in “pre-war buildings.” Sandy Zipp does a wonderful job of telling the story of this re-making of New York in his fascinating book Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford UP, 2010). Along the way, myths are busted (“the projects” were not built for poor folks), villains are redeemed (Robert Moses wasn’t really such a bad guy), and ugly buildings are explained (many serious people really thought tower blocks were beautiful). The book makes plain why large chunks of Manhattan (and many other cities) look the way they do and why they are thought of the way they are. Read it and find out. 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 his new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011), Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at Wheaton College, discusses the state of reading in the United States. Where some would argue that there are too few people doing the wrong kind of reading, Jacobs argues the contrary. He believes that literature is flourishing, pointing to the existence of enormous booksellers like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, as well as the influence of Oprah’s Book Club as evidence. In our interview, we talked about why our reading muscles have weakened over time, the importance of reading at whim, and the wondrous reading silence of children immersed in books. Read all about it, and more, in Jacob’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

Colleges and universities have a reputation for being radical places where tenured radicals teach radical ideas. Don’t believe it. Consider this: the set of academic departments that one finds in most “colleges of liberal arts and sciences”–history, chemistry, sociology, physics, and so on–has remained remarkably stable for many decades. How, exactly, is that “radical?” Yet as Mikaila Lemonik Arthur shows in her enlightening book Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education (Ashgate, 2011), some curricular changes have occurred, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. When I went to college in the 1980s, interdisciplinary minors and majors such as Women’s’ Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Queer Studies (the three cases Lemonik Arthur analyses) were in their infancy. Now the first is nearly ubiquitous, the second is growing rapidly, and the third is gaining steam. How did these new “identity studies” disciplines succeed in finding a place at the already-full academic table despite the residence of many stakeholders? Lemonik Arthur’s answer is complicated, but suggests that the deans are more nimble that we–or rather I–thought. Beginning in the late 1960s, they saw rising demand for courses in these emerging disciplines, some of which was signaled by waves of student activism. They responded by increasing the supply, albeit slowly. The first institutions to do so were of lessor status. Once they showed that the “identity studies” courses were viable in terms of enrollment and didn’t harm (and in fact helped) recruitment and fund-raising efforts, the more prestigious schools followed. Their status rose and the money began to flow. These two developments, in turn, allowed the “identity studies” disciplines to institutionalize, that is, to secure places among (actually, between) departments and in course catalogue. This is a fascinating study of how even authoritarian institutions (like most colleges and universities!) can sometimes prove responsive to their clients. 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 students in my undergraduate class on gender, sexuality, and human rights are a pretty tough bunch. They know they’re in for some unpleasant topics: sex trafficking, domestic violence, mass rape in wartime. But when I have them read Amartya Sen’s classic article on the effects of son preference – that stops them in their tracks. A hundred million girls and women simply missing from the planet due to sex-selective abortion, infanticide, and neglect of daughters. You can almost see the chill go through the room. Thanks to Mara Hvistendahl, I now need to revise that number upward. 160 million girls and women are missing in Asia alone, she writes in her new book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (Public Affairs, 2011). And the effects are grim. These include sex trafficking and sale of brides to meet the demands of the “surplus men” who can’t find mates in their own communities, and they include high rates of violence in societies with a large number of unattached men. And the Western side of the story is equally depressing. Here we see Western population planners suggesting sex selection as a way to curb “Third World” population growth – and exporting the technology to make it possible. And we see pro-choice feminists completely at a loss for how to grapple with the issue. This is not a happy book, but it’s an almost unbearably important one. You’ll be glad you read it. 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 his new book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV (Broadside Books, 2011), Ben Shapiro, who is the youngest person ever to get a nationally syndicated column in the U.S., details the story of how television executives use the medium to spread political propaganda. Shapiro interviewed over one hundred prominent media figures, from the writer of House to the former president of ABC Entertainment and NBC, to get a sense of the political agendas driving those who produce scripted TV. In our interview, we talked about how politics makes shows dated, the conservative cast members of the A-Team, and why he won’t watch Glee. Read all about it, and more, in Shapiro’s revealing 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

In her new book, La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life(Times Books, 2011), Elaine Sciolino, Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, explores the role of seduction in the French way of life. Sciolino argues that seduction plays an integral role not only in romantic and personal relationships in France, but also in business transactions, intellectual debates, and political campaigns. In our interview, we talked about Jacques Chirac’s hand-kissing technique, how everyone in France knew about Dominique Strauss Kahn’s aggressive seduction techniques before most Americans had ever heard of him, and the romantic benefits of being lead groundskeeper at Versailles.Lisez tout et plus dans le nouveau livre charmant de Sciolino. (Read all about it and more in Sciolino’s charming 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

In his new book, History of the Future: The Shape of the World to Come Is Visible Today (Lexington Books, 2011), Max Singer, Senior Fellow and co-founder of the Hudson Institute, argues that the human race is undergoing an enormous transition, from an agrarian, violent past to a wealthy and peaceful future. Singer believes that all countries are on parallel paths to becoming modern states, albeit at different points in the process. As such, he tries to predict the future of the majority of countries that are still making this transitioning by examining the experiences of countries that have already completed the transition. In our interview, we talked about the rise of China, why Churchill thought that scuttling the British Navy would immediately end the British Empire, and how freedom is the key element to creating economic powerhouses. Read all about it, and more, in Singer’s wide-ranging 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

Marriage is at the center of some of our fiercest political debates. Here are some recent developments regarding marriage in the United States. Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced that it would no longer defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). A few weeks ago, New York became the largest state to allow same-sex marriage, joining five other states, the District of Columbia, and the Coquille and Suquamish Indian tribes in Oregon. The Senate Judiciary Committee has recently started to consider a bill that would grant federal benefits to same-sex married couples. But to what extent should the state be involved at all in regulating or recognizing marriage? In her recent book, Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce (Princeton University Press, 2010), Tamara Metz argues for the “disestablishment” of marriage. Marriage, Metz argues, like religion, should be separated from the state. She further claims that the liberal state should only be in the business of legally recognizing a wide variety of intimate caregiving unions among consenting, able-minded, able-bodied, adult intimates. In this interview, she clarifies her position further. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

One hallmark of important art, in any medium, is a thoughtful relation with artistic precursors. Every artist reckons with heroes and rivals, influences and nemeses, and the old work becomes a part of the new. In Adam Bradley’s seminal monograph on hip-hop lyrics, Book of Rhymes, legendary MC Mos Def describes his desire to participate in posterity: “I wanted it to be something that was durable. You can listen to all these Jimi records and Miles records and Curtis Mayfield records; I wanted to be able to add something to that conversation.” In the last thirty years, technology has transformed the conversation between past and present musicians: it is now possible to quote a previous work not only note for note, but byte for byte. The turntable and the sampler are the hip-hop artist’s quintessential instruments. The culture of hip-hop bricolage, coupled with intense commercial pressures in the recording industry and an inevitable proliferation of rip-off artists, has created difficult challenges for copyright law and for the concept of licensing. Several cultures must adapt to each other, and often they are doing so in the courtroom. In a study both comprehensively theoretical and rich with the voices of musicians and producers, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola have addressed together both the legal and the cultural implications of digital sampling in the music industry. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling (Duke University Press, 2011), in tandem with related multimedia projects from the Future of Music Coalition, lays out what they have learned and suggests a way forward for the industry in the digital age. 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 his new book, A Vulcan's Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) Dov Zakheim, former chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense, describes his time as a Vulcan, one of the elite group of eight foreign policy experts who advised President Bush's presidential campaign, most of whom later served in the Bush administration. Zakheim brings an insider's perspective to the Department of Defense's management of the War on Terror, and is not afraid to call out people who were not up to the job. In our interview, we talked about why it's so hard to get rid of Pentagon weapon systems, what "snowflakes" are, and why so many former Bush Pentagon officials have written books. It's all there, and more, in Zakheim's eye-opening 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

In their new book Search and Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google (Telescope Books, 2011), Scott Cleland, President of Precursor LLC, and Ira Brodsky, founder of Datacomm Research, aim to expose the unethical internet behemoth they believe to be hiding behind the motto “Don’t be Evil.” Cleland and Brodsky believe that Google has a hidden political agenda, and is attempting to shape the world to match this agenda by controlling your information, as well as who has access to that information. In our interview, we talked about how terrorists have used Google, why “Don’t be Evil” is an unimpressive goal, and the ways individuals can de-Googlify, if they so choose. Read all about it, and more, in Cleland and Brodsky’s troubling 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 I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were from the mean streets of New York City (The Doors were from the soft parade of L.A….); they hung out with Andy Warhol (The Beatles hung out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi…); they had a female drummer (The Grateful Dead had two drummers, but that still didn’t help…); and, of course, they did heroin. Or at least they wrote a famous song about it. We did not do heroin, but we thought that those who did–like Lou Reed and the rest–were hipper than hip. I imagine we would have done it if there had been any around (thank God for small favors). We thought we had discovered something new. But as Eric C. Schneider points out in his marvelous Smack: Heroin and the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), the conjunction of music, heroin, and cool was hardly an invention of my generation. The three came together in the 1940s, when smack-using bebop players (think Charlie Parker) taught the “Beat Generation” that heroin was hip. Neither was my generation the last to succumb to a heroin fad. The triad of music, heroin, and cool united again in the 1990s, when drug-addled pop-culture icons such as Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), and Calvin Klein (of “heroin chic” fame) taught “Generation X” the same lesson. History, or at least the history of heroin, repeats itself. For white, middle-class folks like me heroin chic was an episode, a rebellious moment in an otherwise “normal” American life. But as Schneider makes clear, the passage of heroin from cultural elites to the population at large was not always so benign, particularly in the declining inner-cities of the 1960s and 1970s. Here heroin had nothing to do with being cool and everything to do with earning a living and escaping reality. For millions of impoverished, hopeless, urban-dwelling hispanics and blacks, heroin was a paycheck and a checkout. The drug helped destroy the people in the inner-city, and thus the inner-city itself. In response to the “heroin epidemic” of the 1960s and 1970s, the government launched the first war on drugs, focusing its energy on “pushers.” But there were no “pushers” because–and this is the greatest insight in a book full of great insights–pushing was not the way heroin use spread, either among middle-class college kids or the down-and-out of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. No one pushed heroin on anyone. Rather, users taught their friends how to use; in turn, those friends–now users–taught their friends, and so on. Heroin stealthily spread through personal networks. The only part of the process that was visible was the result: in the case of suburban college kids, bad grades and rehab; in the case of poor urban hispanics and blacks, crime and incarceration. Not surprisingly, when the heroin “epidemic” ended, it was not due to the war on drugs. Heroin simply fell out of fashion, in this case being replaced by another fashionable drug, powder and crack cocaine. Today we are fighting cocaine just as we fought heroin, and, by all appearances, with similar success. 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 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