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New Books in Public Policy

New Books in Public Policy

New Books Network

Interviews with Scholars of Public Policy about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
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Top 10 New Books in Public Policy Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best New Books in Public Policy episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to New Books in Public Policy for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite New Books in Public Policy episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Sharada Sugirtharajah's edited volume Religious and Non-Religious Perspectives on Happiness and Wellbeing (Routledge, 2022) explores the theme of happiness and well-being from religious, spiritual, philosophical, psychological, humanistic, and health perspectives. Taking a non-binary approach, it considers how happiness in particular has been understood and appropriated in religious and non-religious strands of thought. The chapters offer incisive insight from a variety of perspectives, including humanism, atheism and major religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism. Together they demonstrate that although worldviews might vary substantially, there are concurrences across religious and non-religious perspectives on happiness that provide a common ground for further cross-cultural and interreligious exploration. What the book makes clear is that happiness is not a static or monolithic category. It is an ongoing process of being and becoming, striving and seeking, living ethically and meaningfully, as well as arriving at a tranquil state of being. This multifaceted volume makes a fresh contribution to the contemporary study of happiness and is valuable reading for scholars and students from religious studies and theology, including those interested in interreligious dialogue and the psychology of religion, as well as positive psychology.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Dialysis is a medical miracle, a treatment that allows people with kidney failure to live when otherwise they would die. It also provides a captive customer for the dialysis industry, which values the steady revenues that come from critically required long-term care that is guaranteed by the government.

Tom Mueller's six year deep dive into the dialysis industry has yielded his latest book, How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death, and Dollars in American Medicine (W. W. Norton, 2023). It's both an historical account of this lifesaving treatment and an indictment of the industry that is dominated by two for-profit companies that control ~80% of the market.

There is a precarious balance between ethical care for patients and the prioritization of profits for the providers, a tension that has led to ethical, political, and legal debates about the rationing and exploitation of life-saving care and quality of life.

Dialysis services are desperately needed by patients who require the dangerous, uncomfortable, and exhausting treatments multiple times per week, and pay for it through complex insurance procedures.

Tom Mueller’s book includes a vivid account of CEOs who lead their companies with messianic zeal to drive revenues continually up while simultaneously reducing the cost of care. He introduces us to the doctors charged with reducing those costs even at the expense of high-quality care and negative health outcomes. And we meet the patients themselves, who have little choice but to put their lives and well-being at the mercy of this system.

How did a lifesaving medical breakthrough become a for-profit enterprise that threatens many of the people it’s meant to save? And who are the brave people -patients, doctors, and employees of the system who are willing to tell their stories despite tremendous pressure to remain silent? And why do we as Americans accept worse outcomes at higher costs than the rest of the world?

Tom Mueller's highly readable yet devastating book illustrates the dialysis industry as a microcosm of American medicine.

Mueller challenges us to find a solution for dialysis, an approach that could also provide the opportunity to begin fixing our country’s dysfunctional healthcare system and a fighting chance at restoring human health outcomes, rather than the extraction of profits, as its true purpose.

To contact Tom Mueller, visit www.tommueller.co

Suggested reading:

Also mentioned:

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This provocative and interesting book has received considerable attention. Roaring reviews and interviews include The Financial Times (UK), The Telegraph (UK), Modem (Radio Switzerland Italian), Hufftington Post (Italy), El Diario (Spain), ABC (Australia), History Today (UK), The New Republic (USA), The New Yorker (USA), among others around the world.

During the interview, Alfani tells of the challenges of putting together. Also, how the book builds on prior research and his interests in diverse fields in social sciences. About the book:

How the rich and the super-rich throughout Western history accumulated their wealth, behaved (or misbehaved) and helped (or didn't help) their communities in times of crisis.

The rich have always fascinated, sometimes in problematic ways. Medieval thinkers feared that the super-rich would act 'as gods among men'; much more recently Thomas Piketty made wealth central to discussions of inequality. In this book, Guido Alfani offers a history of the rich and super-rich in the West, examining who they were, how they accumulated their wealth and what role they played in society. Covering the last thousand years, with frequent incursions into antiquity, and integrating recent research on economic inequality, Alfani finds--despite the different paths to wealth in different eras--fundamental continuities in the behaviour of the rich and public attitudes towards wealth across Western history. His account offers a novel perspective on current debates about wealth and income disparity.

Alfani argues that the position of the rich and super-rich in Western society has always been intrinsically fragile; their very presence has inspired social unease. In the Middle Ages, an excessive accumulation of wealth was considered sinful; the rich were expected not to appear to be wealthy. Eventually, the rich were deemed useful when they used their wealth to help their communities in times of crisis. Yet in the twenty-first century, Alfani points out, the rich and the super-rich--their wealth largely preserved through the Great Recession and COVID-19--have been exceptionally reluctant to contribute to the common good in times of crisis, rejecting even such stopgap measures as temporary tax increases. History suggests that this is a troubling development--for the rich, and for everyone else.

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According to Dr. Justin O’Connor, culture is at the heart of what it means to be human. But twenty-five years ago, the British government rebranded art and culture as 'creative industries', valued for their economic contribution, and set out to launch the UK as the creative workshop of a globalised world.

Where does that leave art and culture now? Facing exhausted workers and a lack of funding and vision, culture finds itself in the grip of accountancy firms, creativity gurus and Ted Talkers. At a time of sweeping geo-political turmoil, culture has been de-politicised, its radical energies reduced to factors of industrial production. Culture is Not an Industry: Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common (Manchester UP, 2024) is about what happens when an essential part of our democratic citizenship, fundamental to our human rights, is reduced to an industry.

Culture is not an industry argues that art and culture need to renew their social contract and re-align with the radical agenda for a more equitable future. Bold and uncompromising, the book offers a powerful vision for change.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources--union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories--Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and their labor activism.

While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle's Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are.

Aimee Loiselle is assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Today I talked to Ryan Manucha about his new book Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022).

In 2012, after Gerard Comeau had driven to Quebec to purchase cheaper beer and crossed back into New Brunswick, police officers tailed and detained him, confiscated his haul, and levied a fine. With Comeau's story as his starting point, Ryan Manucha tells the fascinating tale of Canadian interprovincial trade. Interprovincial trade barriers and other frictions bring much-needed revenue into the coffers of provincial governments, which then can direct these funds toward various social services, but hinder the mobility of professionals, account for the different building codes imposed by Canadian provinces, and generally increase the price tag for Canadian consumers. In a candid interview, Ryan explains his interest in this topic, the backbone of his book's argument, and his efforts to make change workable.

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Decentering Whiteness in Libraries: A Framework for Inclusive Collection Management Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) serves as a "how to" guide for evaluating and crafting collection development policies that will help create equity in library collections. In this book, Andrea Jamison not only contextualizes the need for inclusive collection development policies but provides user-friendly tables, guides, and sample policies.

This episode discusses why the history of inequality in libraries matters to our work today and what we can learn from it; how the Library Bill of Rights can be used as an advocacy tool; how we can evaluate and create diverse collection management policies; where to get started with putting policy into practice; and more.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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From the unending quest to turn metal into gold to the major discoveries that reveal how the universe works, experiments have always been a critical part of the hard sciences. In recent decades social scientists have started to catch up and the results are shifting the way we do nearly everything. Randomized control trials, called RCT’s, have a logic so simple that anyone can understand how they work and even run them themselves. It’s simple. You come up with an idea to get something to happen. You take a group of subjects and randomly split it in half. You try your idea on one group and leave the other group alone. The difference in outcomes will tell you if your idea works or not.

In Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World (Yale University Press, 2018), Andrew Leigh demonstrated the impact that social scientists are making with this powerful tool. From opportunity experiments to changing your socks, researchers are putting old ideas to the test and finding out what works and what doesn’t. The book reads like a series of interesting examples places beautifully together to shed light on how it is that we can be better at finding out what we do and do not know.

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New Books in Public Policy - Rodrigo Zeidan, "Economics of Global Business" (MIT Press, 2018)
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01/18/19 • 40 min

I spoke with Professor Rodrigo Zeidan of New York University, Shanghai. He has just published Economics of Global Business (MIT Press, 2018), a great book with innovative real-world macroeconomic analyses of timely policy issues, with case studies and examples from more than fifty countries. The book is particularly suitable for use as an introduction to macroeconomics for business students. If you are looking for something accessible that covers also the most contemporary topics (inequality, climate change, migration, sustainability, austerity, financial crisis...), go and buy it.

It is a beautiful book written having in mind students with no previous education in economics. It is original in its style, in the selection of themes and in the approach to policy making. The book is divided into two parts and 15 chapters. The preface starts with an amazing personal story of his infancy.

After presenting analytical foundations, modeling tools, and theoretical perspectives, Economics of Global Business goes a step further than most other texts, with a practical look at the local and multinational tradeoffs facing economic policymakers in more than fifty countries. Topics range from income equality and the financial crisis to GDP, inflation and unemployment, and, notably, one of the first macroeconomic examinations of climate change. Written by a globetrotting economist who teaches and consults on three continents, Economics of Global Business aims not for definitive answers but rather to provide a better understanding of the context-dependent rationales, constraints, and consequences of economic policy decisions.

The book covers long-run and short-run growth (with examples from the United States, China, the European Union, South Korea, Japan, Latin America, Africa, Australia, and Vietnam); financial crises and central banks; monetary and fiscal policies; government budgets; currency regimes; climate change and macroeconomics; income inequality; and globalization. All chapters rely on recent and historical examples of economic policy in action.

Rodrigo Zeidan is an Associate Professor of Practice of Business and Finance at New York University Shanghai and a Visiting Professor at Brazil's Fundação Dom Cabral and Copenhagen Business School. His more recent research focuses on Sustainable Finance, alongside issues in Corporate Finance and Development Economics. Alongside his article in Nature Sustainability, his research has been published in the Journal of Corporate Finance, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Business Ethics and Journal of Environmental Management, among others. Rodrigo has written extensively for media outlets, including the The New York Times, World Economic Forum, Bloomberg, Americas Quarterly and Financial Times.

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Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman's book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice (St. Martin's Press, 2024) presents a modern argument, grounded in philosophy and cultural criticism, about childbearing ambivalence and how to overcome it.

Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, Millennials and Zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor.

With lucid argument and passionate prose, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a women’s issue but a basic human one. And at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of human reproduction, Berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life—not only in the present but, in choosing to have children, in the future.

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FAQ

How many episodes does New Books in Public Policy have?

New Books in Public Policy currently has 1873 episodes available.

What topics does New Books in Public Policy cover?

The podcast is about Podcasts, Social Sciences and Science.

What is the most popular episode on New Books in Public Policy?

The episode title 'Simone Wesner, “Artists’ Voices in Cultural Policy: Careers, Myths and the Creative Profession after German Unification” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on New Books in Public Policy?

The average episode length on New Books in Public Policy is 51 minutes.

How often are episodes of New Books in Public Policy released?

Episodes of New Books in Public Policy are typically released every day.

When was the first episode of New Books in Public Policy?

The first episode of New Books in Public Policy was released on May 9, 2008.

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