New Books in Public Policy

Michele Wakin’s new book Hobo Jungle: A Homeless Community in Paradise (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020) is an up-close exploration of the evolution that has taken place with unsheltered homelessness. She provided an evocative portrait of a jungle encampment that has endured since the Great Depression in one of the wealthiest cities located on California’s south coast.The realities of homelessness are quite complex. For decades unhoused populations have lived in camps or other makeshift settings, even when shelters are available. Is this a chosen act of resistance? Is it an act of self-preservation? Or do homeless people live on the streets (and in the “Jungle”) because they are too addicted, too mentally ill, or too criminal to live by the rules and regulations of a shelter?Michele Wakin, Ph.D. is professor of sociology at Bridgewater State University. She is the author of Otherwise Homeless: Vehicle Living and the Culture of Homelessness.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Are we asleep at the (common)wheel? Civil rights attorney and law professor Gilda R. Daniels insists that contemporary voter ID laws, voter deception, voter purges, and disenfranchisement of felons constitute a crisis of democracy – one that should remind us of past poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and physical intimidation – that should spur us to action. Uncounted combines law, history, oral history, and democratic theory to illuminate a 21st century, premediated legal strategy to disenfranchise voters of color.In Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression (NYU Press, 2020), Daniels establishes the context of 21st-century voter suppression then focuses on the importance of the Voting Rights Act in discouraging voter suppression – and the negative impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). She elucidates the types – and impacts – of voter deception with attention to possible impacts on the presidential election in 2020. Throughout the work, she connects past and present to demonstrate the radical impact of voter suppression on voting and this is particularly apparent in the chapters on voter purging and felon disenfranchisement.The podcast includes a fascinating discussion of the impact of COVID-19 on voter suppression – particularly regarding absentee voting. Daniels complements her nuanced analysis of the cycles of voter suppression in America with concrete steps for combatting it urging people to educate, legislate, litigate, and participate.This timely book offers an analysis that is both deep and highly accessible. It is simultaneously a work of scholarship and a practical call to action.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Criminal responsibility is a key-organizing concept of the criminal law, but Arlie Loughnan argues that it needs re-examination. Focusing on the Australian experience, Self, Others and the State: Relations of Criminal Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2020) questions assumptions about the rise and prominence of criminal responsibility from the late colonial period until recent times. The focus on significant events since the turn of the twentieth century draws out the complexity of criminal responsibility and how its assumed neutrality obscures dynamics of subjectivity, rationality and power in the criminal system.This book will be of interest to a broad range of scholars. Anyone interested in legal philosophy, Australian history, criminal law and also discrimination will find this book invaluable. Self, Others and State will make you question what you know about the law and reveal your own assumptions about its doctrines and principles.Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality and criminal law. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong protests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A stark disparity exists between black and white youth experiences in the justice system today. Black youths are perceived to be older and less innocent than their white peers. When it comes to incarceration, race trumps class, and even as black youths articulate their own experiences with carceral authorities, many Americans remain surprised by the inequalities they continue to endure. In Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (NYU Press, 2019), Carl Suddler brings to light a much longer history of the policies and strategies that tethered the lives of black youths to the justice system indefinitely.The criminalization of black youth is inseparable from its racialized origins. In the mid-twentieth century, the United States justice system began to focus on punishment, rather than rehabilitation. By the time the federal government began to address the issue of juvenile delinquency, the juvenile justice system shifted its priorities from saving delinquent youth to purely controlling crime, and black teens bore the brunt of the transition.In New York City, increased state surveillance of predominantly black communities compounded arrest rates during the post–World War II period, providing justification for tough-on-crime policies. Questionable police practices, like stop-and-frisk, combined with media sensationalism, cemented the belief that black youth were the primary cause for concern. Even before the War on Crime, the stakes were clear: race would continue to be the crucial determinant in American notions of crime and delinquency, and black youths condemned with a stigma of criminality would continue to confront the overwhelming power of the state.Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

I spoke with Dr Simon Bowmaker, Professor of Economics at New York University, Stern School of Business. He has recently published When the President Calls: Conversations with Economic Policymakers (MIT Press, 2019).His book is a very original and timely contribution on the relationship between US presidents and their economic advisers. The book, 674 pages, is divided into nine sections (one for each president from Nixon to Trump) and 35 chapters (one for each economic adviser of those nine presidents). The book covers 50 years of US history, 1969 to 2019 and is enriched by amazing pictures of the advisers ‘in action’ with their presidents.What is it like to sit in the Oval Office and discuss policy with the president? To know that the decisions made will affect hundreds of millions of people? To know that the wrong advice could be calamitous? These 35 officials worked in the executive branch in a variety of capacities but all had direct access to the policymaking process and can offer insights about the difficult tradeoffs made on economic policy.The interviews shed new light, for example, on the thinking behind the Reagan tax cuts, the economic factors that cost George H. W. Bush a second term, the constraints facing policymakers during the financial crisis of 2008, the differences in work styles between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the Trump administration's early budget process.We started our conversation talking about the origin of the book and its development. Simon explained how he managed to reach such an impressive number of interviewees. We then discussed the background of the advisers, their relationship with ‘their’ presidents and how they managed to receive their ‘call’. I have asked him if he thinks that in the 50 years covered by the book, the relationship between presidents and advisers has evolved in some direction. He offered a very interesting answer about the alternative sources that today politicians can use to make their own minds.When the President Calls offers a unique, behind-the-scenes perspective on US economic policymaking. This is a great new book, original, well written, enjoyable. Many readers would find it interesting and helpful: to begin with, economists, historians, and politicians.Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Co-operative economy and collective ownership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Automobiles and their associated infrastructures, deeply embedded in Western cities, have become a rapidly growing presence in the mega-cities of the Global South. Streets, once crowded with pedestrians, pushcarts, vendors, and bicyclists, are now choked with motor vehicles, many of them private automobiles. In Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities (MIT Press, 2020), Govind Gopakumar examines this shift, analyzing the phenomenon of automobility in Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore), a rapidly growing city of about ten million people in southern India. He finds that the advent of automobility in Bengaluru has privileged the mobility needs of the elite while marginalizing those of the rest of the population.Gopakumar connects Bengaluru's burgeoning automobility to the city's history and to the spatial, technological, and social interventions of a variety of urban actors. Automobility becomes a juggernaut, threatening to reorder the city to enhance automotive travel. He discusses the evolution of congestion and urban change in Bengaluru; the “regimes of congestion” that emerge to address the issue; an “infrastructurescape” that shapes the mobile behavior of all residents but is largely governed by the privileged; and the enfranchisement of an “automotive citizenship” (and the disenfranchisement of non-automobile-using publics). Gopakumar also finds that automobility in Bengaluru faces ongoing challenges from such diverse sources as waste flows, popular religiosity, and political leadership. These challenges, however, introduce messiness without upsetting automobility. He therefore calls for efforts to displace automobility that are grounded in reordering the mobility regime, relandscaping the city and its infrastructures, and reclaiming streets for other uses.Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Howard Friedman's new book Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life (University of California Press, 2020) should be required reading for anyone sitting down to watch the evening news. The Covid-19 crisis is, unfortunately, a new broad-based instance in the valuation of human life. And I do mean value: in terms of cash dollars. Ultimate Price covers the ways that companies, courts, nations, and individuals have come to put a price tag on individual existence. While the book was written prior to the current situation, it provides an excellent starting point to understand what we are observing as governments, companies, healthcare providers, and individuals make life-and-death decisions.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Paul M. Renfro, expert on the American Carceral State, discusses the origins of the concept of stranger danger and the creation of a child safety regime. He explores the impact on the gay rights movement, racial dynamics in missing children cases, and the connection between the Clinton era and the child welfare regime in the US.

How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet. If we continue to spill excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we will run out of time to keep our global temperature from increasing. Since approximately 80% of greenhouse gases come from cities, it follows that in the design of cities lies the fate of the world.As urban designers respond to the critical issue of climate change they must also address three cresting cultural waves: the worldwide rural-to-urban migration; the collapse of global fertility rates; and the disappearance of the middle class. In Five Rules for Tomorrow's Cities: Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class (Island Press, 2020) planning and design expert Patrick Condon explains how urban designers can assimilate these interconnected changes into their work.Condon shows how the very things that constrain cities—climate change, migration, financial stress, population change—could actually enable the emergence of a more equitable and resource-efficient city. He provides five rules for urban designers: (1) See the City as a System; (2) Recognize Patterns in the Urban Environment; (3) Apply Lighter, Greener, Smarter Infrastructure; (4) Strengthen Social and Economic Urban Resilience; and (5) Adapt to Shifts in Jobs, Retail, and Wages.In Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities, Condon provides grounded and financially feasible design examples for tomorrow’s sustainable cities, and the design tools needed to achieve them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy