"An important contribution to the research literature on anti-poverty policy that should be read by anyone interested in that subject."
-Industrial and Labor Relations Review

"A first-rate collection of papers on important topics. The great value of this collection is that it asks questions whose answers are really worth knowing. It is valuable to have an entire book focused on policy- especially on demand-side policies."
-LAWRENCE MISHEL, research director, Economic Policy Institute

"A helpful primer for those who wish to begin looking at policy responses to the problems facing low-wage laborers in this country. The writing style is general enough that the book is likely to be accessible to non-economists and people with only a modest understanding of empirical methods .... It should also be read by key staffers in Congress and the administration."
-DAVID ELLWOOD, John F. Kennedy School of Government

The American economy is in danger of leaving its low-skilled workers behind. In the last two decades, the wages and employment levels of the least educated and experienced workers have fallen disastrously. Where willing workers once found ready employment at reasonable wages, our computerized, service-oriented economy demands workers who can read and write, master technology, deal with customers, and much else. Improved education and training will alleviate this problem in the long run, but educating the new workforce will take a substantial national investment over many years. In the meantime, we face increasingly acute questions about how to include low-skill workers in today's economy.

Generating Jobs takes a hard look at these questions, and asks whether anything can be done to improve the lot of low-skilled workers by intervening in the labor market on their behalf. These micro demand-side policies seek to improve wages and employment levels—either by lowering the costs of hiring low-skilled workers through employer subsidies, or by raising wage levels, benefit levels, or hours of employment, or by providing employment via government jobs. Although these policies are not currently popular in the U.S., they have long been used in many countries. Generating Jobs provides a clear-eyed assessment of this history, and asks if any of these policies might be applicable to the current problems of low-skilled workers in the United States.

The results are surprising. Several recently touted panaceas turn out to be costly and ineffective in the American labor market. Enterprise zones, for instance, are an expensive way of moving jobs into areas of high unemployment, costing as much as $60,000 per job. Similarly, job-sharing, which has had uneven success in Europe, turns out to be ill-suited to conditions in the U.S., where wages are relatively low and workers need to work long hours to maintain income. On the other hand, a number of older, less flashy policies turn out to have real, if modest, benefits. Wage subsidies have increased employment among qualifying workers, and public employment policies can increase the number of workers from targeted groups working during the program.

While acknowledging that many solutions are counterproductive, this definitive review of active labor market policies shows that many programs can offer real help. More than any rhetoric, Generating Jobs is the best guide to future action and a serious response to those who claim that nothing can be done.

RICHARD B. FREEMAN is Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is also director of labor studies at the National
Bureau of Economic Research and director of the Program for Discontinuous Economics at the London School of Economics.

PETER GOTTSCHALK is professor of economics at Boston College and research affiliate at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

CONTRIBUTORS: Richard B. Freeman, Peter Gottschalk, Rebecca M. Blank, Edward M Gramlich, Colleen M. Heflin, Harry J. Holzer, Susan N. Houseman, Lawrence F. Katz, Douglas L. Kruse, and Stephen Nickell.

"[America Works] is a slim, readable volume that both celebrates market forces and< provides a stark warning of the need to strengthen the institutions that hold those forces in check."
-THE AMERICAN PROSPECT

"What a great idea! Have Richard Freeman, the nation's if not the world's leading labor-market economist, draw on his research and wisdom to address the signature issue of our day- generating broad-based income growth once again. Readable, reasoned, compassionate and enjoyable, and, unlike much economics, renders conclusions and policy advice."
-LAWRENCE MISHEL, Economic Policy Institute

"With longer hours, lower taxes, fewer unions, and wider inequality than most of our competitors, Richard Freeman believes that U.S. exceptionalism has gone too far. This highly informative little book-backed by a decade's worth of research-offers Freeman's unique insights into where we are now, and the policy changes that will ensure we do better in the future."
-DAVID CARD, University of California, Berkeley

"Richard Freeman admires the American labor market, those who participate in it, and the regulatory framework within which it works. But, he readily admits that things are hardly perfect. Wage inequality is huge; increases in labor productivity are shared among rent- seeking and increasingly criminal CEOs rather than with workers. More generally workers are losing influence on workplace decisions. The continuing pressures from globalization and from increasing inequality are likely to make bad things worse. But, Freeman believes that we can mitigate the weaknesses in the American labor market without losing its benefits. You may agree or you may not, but before making up your mind you should read America Works."
-EUGENE SMOLENSKY, University of California, Berkeley

The U.S. labor market is the most laissez faire of any developed nation, with a weak social safety net and little government regulation compared to Europe or Japan. Some economists point to this hands-off approach as the source of America’s low unemployment and high per-capita income. But the stagnant living standards and rising economic insecurity many Americans now face take some of the luster off the U.S. model. In America Works, noted economist Richard Freeman reveals how U.S. policies have created a labor market remarkable both for its dynamism and its disparities.

America Works takes readers on a grand tour of America’s exceptional labor market, comparing the economic institutions and performance of the United States to the economies of Europe and other wealthy countries. The U.S. economy has an impressive track record when it comes to job creation and productivity growth, but it isn’t so good at reducing poverty or raising the wages of the average worker. Despite huge gains in productivity, most Americans are hardly better off than they were a generation ago. The median wage is actually lower now than in the early 1970s, and the poverty rate in 2005 was higher than in 1969. So why have the benefits of productivity growth been distributed so unevenly? One reason is that unions have been steadily declining in membership. In Europe, labor laws extend collective bargaining settlements to non-unionized firms. Because wage agreements in America only apply to firms where workers are unionized, American managers have discouraged unionization drives more aggressively. In addition, globalization and immigration have placed growing competitive pressure on American workers. And boards of directors appointed by CEOs have raised executive pay to astronomical levels. Freeman addresses these problems with a variety of proposals designed to maintain the vigor of the U.S. economy while spreading more of its benefits to working Americans. To maintain America’s global competitive edge, Freeman calls for increased R&D spending and financial incentives for students pursuing graduate studies in science and engineering. To improve corporate governance, he advocates licensing individuals who serve on corporate boards. Freeman also makes the case for fostering worker associations outside of the confines of traditional unions and for establishing a federal agency to promote profit-sharing and employee ownership.

Assessing the performance of the U.S. job market in light of other developed countries’ recent history highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the free market model. Written with authoritative knowledge and incisive wit, America Works provides a compelling plan for how we can make markets work better for all Americans.

RICHARD B. FREEMAN is Herbert S. Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

A Volume in the the Russell Sage Foundation's Centennial Series

Explores the various aspects of recent debates over the independence of the social sciences. The contributors are Kenneth E. Boulding, Harvey Brooks, Jonathan R. Cole, Stephen Cole, Lee J. Cronbach, Paul Doty, Yaron Ezrahi, Charles Frankel, H. Field Haviland, Hugh Hawkins, Harry G. Johnson, Robert Nisbet, Nicholas Rescher, Edward Shils, and Adam Yarmolinksy. The essays deal with such topics as the relation of "values" to "facts" in social science inquiry; the interplay of theoretical and practical considerations; the moral obligations of social science investigators in political contexts; and the ways and means of protecting and advancing the autonomy of the social sciences.

CHARLES FRANKEL is Old Dominion Professor of Philosophy and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Kenneth E. Boulding, Harvey Brooks, Jonathan Cole, Stephen Cole, Lee J. Cronbach, Paul Doty, Yaron Ezrahi, Charles Frankel, H. Field Haviland, Hugh Hawkins, Harry G. Johnson, Robert Nisbet, Nicholas Rescher, Edward Shils, and Adam Yarmolinsky.

"Anyone serious about immigration studies needs to read this book."
-Choice

"Immigration is transforming America. It's also producing a new generation of immigration researchers, fully equipped with the tools needed to illuminate the distinctive immigrant reality of the twenty-first century. This new collection offers a first harvest of today's emerging scholarship, assembling authors from a variety of disciplines, who engage this always vital topic in new, incisive, and stimulating ways."
-ROGER WALDINGER, UCLA

"Immigration Research for a New Century offers an incredible potpourri of research on the post-1965 wave of immigrants to the United States by a new generation of younger immigration scholars. The chapters cover almost every group from high tech engineers in Silicon Valley to Nuer refugees from the Sudan in Minnesota. Many of these studies report novel findings and fresh interpretations. For example, Greta Gilbertson and Audrey Singer find that some Dominican immigrants acquire U.S. citizenship not as the final stage of settlement, but as an insurance policy before returning to the Dominican Republic. In another chapter, Jennifer Lee explains the advantages of immigrant entrepreneurs relative to African American small businesses through differential access to networks of wholesalers and suppliers. Several papers describe the organization and content of 'transnational ties' among contemporary immigrants in the United States. There are many more gems sprinkled among the chapters in this fine volume."
-CHARLES HIRSCHMAN, University of Washington, Seattle

"This thought-provoking book offers fresh, valuable insights into a wide range of issues in immigration research. A prominent characteristic and strength of this volume is the immigration research from a broad disciplinary and methodological spectrum. This fine collection should not be missed by any student of immigration."
-PHILIP Q. YANG, Contemporary Sociology

The rapid rise in immigration over the past few decades has transformed the American social landscape, while the need to understand its impact on society has led to a burgeoning research literature. Predominantly non-European and of varied cultural, social, and economic backgrounds, the new immigrants present analytic challenges that cannot be wholly met by traditional immigration studies. Immigration Research for a New Century demonstrates how sociology, anthropology, history, political science, economics, and other disciplines intersect to answer questions about today's immigrants.

In Part I, leading scholars examine the emergence of an interdisciplinary body of work that incorporates such topics as the social construction of race, the importance of ethnic self-help and economic niches, the influence of migrant-homeland ties, and the types of solidarity and conflict found among migrant populations. The authors also explore the social and national origins of immigration scholars themselves, many of whom cameof age in an era of civil rights and ethnic reaffirmation, and may also be immigrants or children of immigrants. Together these essays demonstrate how social change, new patterns of immigration, and the scholars' personal backgrounds have altered the scope and emphases of the research literature, allowing scholars to ask new questions and to see old problems in new ways.

Part II contains the work of anew generation of immigrant scholars, reflecting the scope of a field bolstered by different disciplinary styles. These essays explore the complex variety of the immigrant experience, ranging from itinerant farmworkers to Silicon Valley engineers. The demands ofthe American labor force, ethnic, racial, and gender stereotyping, and state regulation are all shown to play important roles in the economic adaptation of immigrants. The ways in which immigrants participate politically, their relationships among themselves, their attitudes toward naturalization and citizenship, and their own sense of cultural identity are also addressed.

Immigration Research for a New Century examines the complex effects that immigration has had not only on American society but on scholarship itself, and offers the fresh insights of a new generation of immigration researchers.

NANCY FONER is professor of anthropology at the State University of New York, Purchase.

RUBÉN G. RUMBAUT is professor of sociology at Michigan State University.

STEVEN J. GOLD is professor and associate chair in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Steven J. Gold, Rafael Alarcon, Nancy C. Carnevale, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Josh DeWind, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Herbert J. Gans, Greta Gilbertson, Jennifer S. Hirsch, Jon D. Holtzman, Jane Junn, Kathy A. Kaufman, Fred Krissman, Gallya Lahav, Jennifer Lee, Peggy Levitt, Howard Markel, Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, George J. Sanchez, Audrey Singer, Alexandra Minna Stern, Ayumi Takemaka, Mary C. Waters, Steven S. Zahniser, Aristide R. Zolberg. 

The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America’s collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants’ ability to integrate into American society.

Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform’s ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution.

The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants’ propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants’ use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants’ benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants’ use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare.

Even though few states took the federal government’s invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law’s most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare.

MICHAEL E. FIX is senior vice president and director of studies at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and co-director of MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy.

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael E. Fix, Frank D. Bean, Randy Capps, Danielle A. Crosby, Ron Haskins, Everett Henderson, Ariel Kalil, Neeraj Kaushal, Leighton Ku, Jennifer Van Hook, and Michael J. Wishnie.

Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute

In the weeks following 9/11, the Bush administration launched the Patriot Act, rejected key provisions of the Geneva Convention, and inaugurated a sweeping electronic surveillance program for intelligence purposes—all in the name of protecting national security. But the current administration is hardly unique in pursuing such measures. In Security v. Liberty, Daniel Farber leads a group of prominent historians and legal experts in exploring the varied ways in which threats to national security have affected civil liberties throughout American history. Has the government’s response to such threats led to a gradual loss of freedoms once taken for granted, or has the nation learned how to restore civil liberties after threats subside and how to put protections in place for the future?

Security v. Liberty focuses on periods of national emergency in the twentieth century—from World War I through the Vietnam War—to explore how past episodes might bear upon today’s dilemma. Distinguished historian Alan Brinkley shows that during World War I the government targeted vulnerable groups—including socialists, anarchists, and labor leaders—not because of a real threat to the nation, but because it was politically expedient to scapegoat unpopular groups. Nonetheless, within ten years the Supreme Court had rolled back the most egregious of the World War I restrictions on civil liberties. Legal scholar John Yoo argues for the legitimacy of the Bush administration’s War on Terror policies—such as the detainment and trials of suspected al Qaeda members—by citing historical precedent in the Roosevelt administration’s prosecution of World War II. Yoo contends that, compared to Roosevelt’s sweeping use of executive orders, Bush has exercised relative restraint in curtailing civil liberties. Law professor Geoffrey Stone describes how J. Edgar Hoover used domestic surveillance to harass anti-war protestors and civil rights groups throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Congress later enacted legislation to prevent a recurrence of the Hoover era excesses, but Stone notes that the Bush administration has argued for the right to circumvent some of these restrictions in its campaign against terrorism. Historian Jan Ellen Lewis looks at early U.S. history to show how an individual’s civil liberties often depended on the extent to which he or she fit the definition of “American” as the country’s borders expanded. Legal experts Paul Schwartz and Ronald Lee examine the national security implications of rapid advances in information technology, which is increasingly driven by a highly globalized private sector, rather than by the U.S. government.

Security v. Liberty shows that civil liberties are a not an immutable right, but the historically shifting result of a continuous struggle that has extended over two centuries. This important new volume provides a penetrating historical and legal analysis of the trade-offs between security and liberty that have shaped our national history—trade-offs that we confront with renewed urgency in a post-9/11 world.

DANIEL FARBER is Sho Sato Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

CONTRIBUTORS: Alan Brinkley, Stephen Holmes,  Ronald D. Lee, Jan Ellen Lewis, L.A. Powe Jr., Ellen Schrecker,  Geoffrey R. Stone,  John Yoo. 

Social science has been an important influence on legal thought since the legal realists of the1930s began to argue that laws should be socially workable as well as legally valid. With the expansion of legal rights in the 1960s, the law and social science were bound together by an optimistic belief that legal interventions, if fully informed by social science, could become an effective instrument of social improvement. Legal justice, it was hoped, could translate directly into social justice. Though this optimism has receded in both disciplines, social science and the law have remained intimately connected. Social Science, Social Policy, and the Law maps out this new relationship, applying social science to particular legal issues and reflecting upon the role of social science in legal thought.

Several case studies illustrate the way that the law is embedded within the tangled interests and incentives that drive the social world. One study examines the entrepreneurialism that has shaped our systems of punishment from the colonial practice of deportation to today's privatized jails. Another case shows how many of those who do not qualify for legal aid cannot afford an effective legal defense with the consequence that economic inequality leads to inequality before the law. Two other studies look at the mixed results of legal regulation: the failure of legal safeguards to stop NASA's fatal 1986 Challenger launch decision, and the complicated effects of regulations to curb conflicts of interest in law firms. These two cases demonstrate that the law's effectiveness can depend, not only on how it is drafted, but also on how well it harmonizes with pre-existing social norms and patterns of self-regulation.

The contributors to this volume share the belief that social science can and should influence legal policymaking. Empirical research is necessary to offset anecdotal evidence and untested assertions. But research that is acceptable to the academy may not stand up in court, and, as a result, social science does not always get a sympathetic hearing from legal decision makers. The relationship between social science and the law will always be complex; this volume takes a lead in showing how it can nonetheless be productive.

PATRICIA EWICK is associate professor of sociology and associate dean at Clark University.

ROBERT A. KAGAN is professor of political science and director of the Center for Law and Society at the University of California at Berkeley.

AUSTIN SARAT is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and president of the Law and Society Association.

CONTRIBUTORS: Malcolm M. Feeley, Lawrence M. Friedman, Kenneth Mann, Deborah L. Rhode, Neil Vidmar, Jack Katz, David Weisburd, Diane Vaughan, Susan P. Shapiro.

Evaluates a technological approach to social change which seeks to cure society's ills by dealing with its symptoms, rather than root causes. It examines four such technological shortcuts in terms of their relevance to specific social problems: methadone in controlling heroin addiction; antabuse in treating alcoholism; the breath analyzer in highway safety; and gun control in reducing crime. The authors seek solutions which do not require large amounts of new resources or planning, and will accelerate the pace of social change. They indicate that technological handling of such problems may be the answer.

AMITAI ETZIONI is professor of sociology at Columbia University and director of the Center for Policy Research.

RICHARD REMP is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Columbia University and research associate at the Center for Policy Research.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) stands among the great achievements of American democracy. Originally adopted in 1965, the Act extended full political citizenship to African-American voters in the United States nearly 100 years after the Fifteenth Amendment first gave them the vote. While Section 2 of the VRA is a nationwide, permanent ban on discriminatory election practices, Section 5, which is set to expire in 2007, targets only certain parts of the country, requiring that legislative bodies in these areas—mostly southern states with a history of discriminatory practices—get permission from the federal government before they can implement any change that affects voting. In The Future of the Voting Rights Act, David Epstein, Rodolfo de la Garza, Sharyn O’Halloran, and Richard Pildes bring together leading historians, political scientists, and legal scholars to assess the role Section 5 should play in America’s future.

The contributors offer varied perspectives on the debate. Samuel Issacharoff questions whether Section 5 remains necessary, citing the now substantial presence of blacks in legislative positions and the increasingly partisan enforcement of the law by the Department of Justice (DOJ). While David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran are concerned about political misuse of Section 5, they argue that it can only improve minority voting power—even with a partisan DOJ—and therefore continues to serve a valuable purpose. Other contributors argue that the achievements of Section 5 with respect to blacks should not obscure shortcomings in the protection of other groups. Laughlin McDonald argues that widespread and systematic voting discrimination against Native Americans requires that Section 5 protections be expanded to more counties in the west. Rodolfo de la Garza and Louis DeSipio point out that the growth of the Latino population in previously homogenous areas and the continued under-representation of Latinos in government call for an expanded Section 5 that accounts for changing demographics.

As its expiration date approaches, it is vital to examine the role that Section 5 still plays in maintaining a healthy democracy. Combining historical perspective, legal scholarship, and the insight of the social sciences, The Future of the Voting Rights Act is a crucial read for anyone interested in one of this year’s most important policy debates and in the future of civil rights in America.

DAVID L. EPSTEIN is professor of political science at Columbia University.

RICHARD H. PILDES is Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law.

RODOLFO O. DE LA GARZA is faculty fellow in the Department of Political Science and director of the Project on Immigration, Ethnicity, and Race at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University.

SHARYN O'HALLORAN is the George Blumenthal Professor of Politics and professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University.

CONTRIBUTORS: David L. Epstein, Richard H. Pildes, Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Sharyn O'Halloran, Stephen Ansolabehere, Thomas Brunell, Bruce E. Cain, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Louis DeSipio, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Heather K. Gerken, Bernard Grofman, Richard L. Hasen, Samuel Issacharoff, Karin MacDonald, Peyton McCrary, Laughlin McDonald, Michael P. McDonald, Spencer Overton, Nathaniel Persily, Christopher Seaman, and Richard Valelly.
 

Today, a third of American children are born outside of marriage, up from one child in twenty in the 1950s, and rates are even higher among low-income Americans. Many herald this trend as one of the most troubling of our time. But the decline in marriage does not necessarily signal the demise of the two parent family—over 80 percent of unmarried couples are still romantically involved when their child is born and nearly half are living together. Most claim they plan to marry eventually. Yet half have broken up by their child's third birthday. What keeps some couples together and what tears others apart? After a breakup, how do fathers so often disappear from their children's lives?

An intimate portrait of the challenges of partnering and parenting in these families, Unmarried Couples with Children presents a variety of unique findings. Most of the pregnancies were not explicitly planned, but some couples feel having a child is the natural course of a serious relationship. Many of the parents are living with their child plus the mother’s child from a previous relationship. When the father also has children from a previous relationship, his visits to see them at their mother’s house often cause his current partner to be jealous. Breakups are more often driven by sexual infidelity or conflict than economic problems. After couples break up, many fathers complain they are shut out, especially when the mother has a new partner. For their part, mothers claim to limit dads’ access to their children because of their involvement with crime, drugs, or other dangers. For couples living together with their child several years after the birth, marriage remains an aspiration, but something couples are resolutely unwilling to enter without the financial stability they see as a sine qua non of marriage. They also hold marriage to a high relational standard, and not enough emotional attention from their partners is women’s number one complaint.

Unmarried Couples with Children is a landmark study of the family lives of nearly fifty American children born outside of a marital union at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Based on personal narratives gathered from both mothers and fathers over the first four years of their children’s lives, and told partly in the couples' own words, the story begins before the child is conceived, takes the reader through the tumultuous months of pregnancy to the moment of birth, and on through the child's fourth birthday. It captures in rich detail the complex relationship dynamics and powerful social forces that derail the plans of so many unmarried parents. The volume injects some much-needed reality into the national discussion about family values, and reveals that the issues are more complex than our political discourse suggests.

PAULA ENGLAND is professor of sociology at Stanford University.

KATHRYN EDIN is professor of public policy and management at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

CONTRIBUTORS:  Amy Claessens,  Mimi Engel,  Christina M. Gibson-Davis,  Heather D. Hill,  Kathryn D. Linnenberg,  Katherine A. Magnuson,  Lindsay M. Monte,  Joanna Reed,  Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer.