"Prismatic Metropolis is destined to become a standard reference for students of urban inequality. Based on thoughtful analysis of very rich and original data sets, this authoritative volume demonstrates the important interplay of structural conditions and cultural-psychological factors in generating and sustaining inequality in one of the nation's most important metropolises."
-WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, Harvard University

"Far too much of what we think we know about urban poverty stems from studies of blacks and whites in older industrial cities, yet the urban future will increasingly unfold in dynamic, post-industrial agglomerations inhabited by a diverse array of racial and ethnic groups. In their comprehensive analysis of inequality in Los Angeles, the contributors paint a startling picture of the urban future, one increasingly segmented by race, place, ethnicity, and class. Prismatic Metropolis points the way to a new urban sociology for a new century."
-DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, University of Pennsylvania

"In documenting the dynamics of race, ethnicity, and gender in access to housing, jobs, and advancement at work, Prismatic Metropolis maps the contours of social and economic inequality in the nation's foremost "global city." Chapters provide wide-ranging coverage, from a pathbreaking analysis of the reproduction of housing segregation patterns, to detailed accounts of the ways that racial attitudes, social networks, childcare obligations, transportation systems, and ethnic economic enclaves link race and gender to economic success. This extraordinary volume, while based on analyses of one city, has lessons for all U.S. cities. Prismatic Metropolis is the essential starting place for understanding how race, ethnic, and gender inequality play out in contemporary cities and for discovering pathways toward economic and social justice."
-BARBARA RESKIN, Harvard University

This book cuts through the powerful mythology surrounding Los Angeles to reveal the causes of inequality in a city that has weathered rapid population change, economic restructuring, and fractious ethnic relations. The sources of disadvantage and the means of getting ahead differ greatly among the city's myriad ethnic groups. The demand for unskilled labor is stronger here than in other cities, allowing Los Angeles's large population of immigrant workers with little education to find work in light manufacturing and low-paid service jobs.

A less beneficial result of this trend is the increased marginalization of the city's low-skilled black workers, who do not enjoy the extended ethnic networks of many of the new immigrant groups and who must contend with persistent negative racial stereotypes.

Patterns of residential segregation are also more diffuse in Los Angeles, with many once-black neighborhoods now split evenly between blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other minorities. Inequality in Los Angeles cannot be reduced to a simple black-white divide. Nonetheless, in this thoroughly multicultural city, race remains a crucial factor shaping economic fortunes.

LAWRENCE D. BOBO is professor of sociology and Afro-American studies at Harvard University.

MELVIN L. OLIVER is vice president of the Ford Foundation. He is responsible for overseeing the Asset Building and Community Development Program.

JAMES H. JOHNSON JR. is William Rand Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Management, Sociology, and Public Policy and director of the  Urban Investment Strategies Center in the Kenan Institute in the Kenan-Flager Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

ABEL VALENZUELA JR. is assistant professor of urban planning and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also associate director of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, Institute for Social Science Research.

CONTRIBUTORS:  Elisa Jayne Bienenstock, Camille Zubrinksi Charles, Walter C. Farrell Jr.,  Jennifer L. Glanville,  Elizabeth Gonzalez,  David M. Grant,  Tarry Hum, Devon Johnson,  Michael I. Lichter,  Julie E. Press,  Michael A. Stoll, Susan A. Suh,  Jennifer A. Stoloff.  

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

"The Boston Renaissance is a tour de force. Drawing upon a rich array of new data, Barry Bluestone and Mary Huff Stevenson provide an original and insightful analysis of Boston's remarkable triple revolution. This book is replete with information and should be read by scholars and policymakers alike."
-WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, Harvard University

"How an old and declining northeast city transformed itself into one of the most successful urban communities in American is a story the must be told, and it is told effectively in The Boston Renaissance."
-MICHAEL S. DUKAKIS, professor of political science and former governor of Massachusetts

"Dubbed an urban disaster case only twenty years ago, Boston today is a high-tech boom town, a marvel of tight labor markets and sky rocketing real estate. How did this transformation come about and who has reaped the bounty? We learn how different ethnic groups reshaped the social landscape of the metropolitan region and how the tracks of that upheaval shaped race relations. The Boston Renaissance is essential reading for scholars, policy makers, and citizens concerned with urban change in the twenty-first century."
-KATHERINE S. NEWMAN, Kennedy School of Government

"As the authors point out, Boston was considered an economic basket case as recently as 1982. In terms of the poverty rate, violent crime, and other indexes of urban decline, Boston was at the bottom. Two decades later, employment has climbed to an all time high. The city's neighborhoods are making remarkable comebacks, and Boston's crime prevention strategy has become the model for cities across the nation. The Boston Renaissance is the story of how a struggling city grew into America's urban success story."
-THOMAS M. MENINO, Mayor of Boston

This volume documents metropolitan Boston's metamorphosis from a casualty of manufacturing decline in the 1970s to a paragon of the high-tech and service industries in the 1990s. The city's rebound has been part of a wider regional renaissance, as new commercial centers have sprung up outside the city limits. A stream of immigrants have flowed into the area, redrawing the map of ethnic relations in the city. While Boston's vaunted mind-based economy rewards the highly educated, many unskilled workers have also found opportunities servicing the city's growing health and education industries.

Boston's renaissance remains uneven, and the authors identify a variety of handicaps (low education, unstable employment, single parenthood) that still hold minorities back. Nonetheless this book presents Boston as a hopeful example of how America's older cities can reinvent themselves in the wake of suburbanization and deindustrialization.

BARRY BLUESTONE is the Russell B. and Andr`ee B. Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.

MARY HUFF STEVENSON is associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and senior fellow at its McCormack Institute of Public Affairs.

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

"The authors of this important new book show how to open up the 'black box' of randomized experimental designs, yielding critical insights and linking the experimental findings to behavioral theories. Each of the chapters in Learning More from Social Experiments offers state-of-the-art lessons for practitioners and analysts alike."
-DAVID CARD, Class of 1950 Professor of Economics and head of the Center for Labor Economics, University of California, Berkeley

"Learning More from Social Experiments is an important addition to the library of any program evaluator or field researcher. Building on their decades of real-world experience designing, conducting, and analyzing social experiments, Howard Bloom and his MDRC colleagues provide an array of stimulating examples demonstrating how the marriage of careful research design and modern statistical methodology can dramatically improve the explanatory power of field studies."
-JUDITH D. SINGER, James Bryant Conant Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Policy analysis has grown increasingly reliant on the random assignment experiment—a research method whereby participants are sorted by chance into either a program group that is subject to a government policy or program, or a control group that is not. Because the groups are randomly selected, they do not differ from one another systematically. Therefore any differences between the groups at the end of the study can be attributed solely to the influence of the program or policy. But there are many questions that randomized experiments have not been able to address. What component of a social policy made it successful? Did a given program fail because it was designed poorly or because it suffered from low participation rates? In Learning More from Social Experiments, editor Howard Bloom and a team of innovative social researchers profile advancements in the scientific underpinnings of social policy research that can improve randomized experimental studies.

Using evaluations of actual social programs as examples, Learning More from Social Experiments makes the case that many of the limitations of random assignment studies can be overcome by combining data from these studies with statistical methods from other research designs. Carolyn Hill, James Riccio, and Bloom profile a new statistical model that allows researchers to pool data from multiple randomized-experiments in order to determine what characteristics of a program made it successful. Lisa Gennetian, Pamela Morris, Johannes Bos, and Bloom discuss how a statistical estimation procedure can be used with experimental data to single out the effects of a program’s intermediate outcomes (e.g., how closely patients in a drug study adhere to the prescribed dosage) on its ultimate outcomes (the health effects of the drug). Sometimes, a social policy has its true effect on communities and not individuals, such as in neighborhood watch programs or public health initiatives. In these cases, researchers must randomly assign treatment to groups or clusters of individuals, but this technique raises different issues than do experiments that randomly assign individuals. Bloom evaluates the properties of cluster randomization, its relevance to different kinds of social programs, and the complications that arise from its use. He pays particular attention to the way in which the movement of individuals into and out of clusters over time complicates the design, execution, and interpretation of a study.

Learning More from Social Experiments represents a substantial leap forward in the analysis of social policies. By supplementing theory with applied research examples, this important new book makes the case for enhancing the scope and relevance of social research by combining randomized experiments with non-experimental statistical methods, and it serves as a useful guide for researchers who wish to do so.

HOWARD S. BLOOM is chief social scientist at MDRC.

CONTRIBUTORS: Johannes M. Bos, Lisa A. Gennetian, Carolyn J. Hill, Charles Michalopoulos, Pamela A. Morris, James A. Riccio.