Departments

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welfare state

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    5/19/2023

    Review: Are Basic Income Programs Captive to the Power of the Market?

    by Simon Torracinta

    Two historians argue that the basic income is an idea that is circumscribed by the assumption that society will be organized around markets. A reviewer says the programs are the starting point for politics that escape that constraint. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    2/6/2023

    The Blindness of Colorblindness: Revisiting "When Affirmative Action was White"

    by Ira Katznelson

    The author of a key work on the way racial discrimination was built into the New Deal and postwar American social policy addresses objections to his book two decades later, and concludes that white supremacy and the influence of southern conservatives over legislation are still powerful explanations. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    1/29/2023

    Do French Pension Protests Reveal a Lazy Nation?

    by Robert Zaretsky

    French workers are among the most productive in Europe, but today's protests over a potential increase in the retirement age show a long tradition of defending the value of leisure as the chance to pursue one's own ends outside of paid labor. 

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    1/11/2023

    50 Years at Cook County Hospital Prove Abortion is Healthcare

    by Amy Zanoni

    Abortion rights activists have focused on horror stories of the pre-Roe era as cautionary tales, but the history of public hospitals since Roe shows that real reproductive freedom requires expanded access to care and a robust social safety net. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    6/15/2022

    Why Does US Policy Make Things Hard on Parents?

    For decades, the political idea that social services aimed at supporting parents and children constitute a governmental intrusion on the family has been used to thwart the kinds of supports that parents and children in the rest of the industrial world enjoy. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    1/25/2022

    Abortion isn't a "Choice" without Racial Justice

    by Sara Matthiesen

    The recent failure of the broad social spending initiatives of Build Back Better and the impending judicial overthrow of Roe are connected, and signal the need for a movement for reproductive freedom that goes beyond "choice" to address systemic inequalities. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    12/2/2021

    In Praise of One-Size-Fits-All Social Policy

    by Lawrence B. Glickman

    "To call a vaccine mandate a constraint on an “intensely personal decision” is to obfuscate the fundamental reality that pandemics are intensely social."

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    7/16/2021

    Will Biden Reverse 50 Years of Failure on Child Care Policy?

    by Anna K. Danziger Halperin

    Achieving better childcare policy requires recognizing women may be both mothers and workers, and moving past ideological views that women's economic independence is against the interest of families. 

  • SOURCE: Slate
    5/1/2021

    FDR’s Second 100 Days Were Cooler Than His First 100 Days

    by Jordan Weissmann

    The first 100 days of the New Deal could be described as disaster response. The second 100 days, according to historians William Leuchtenberg, Erich Rauchway and David Kennedy, were when the administration took steps that transformed labor relations and birthed a modern social welfare state. 

  • SOURCE: The Dispatch
    5/3/2021

    The Era of Big Government is Here

    From a conservative writer's perspective, the conservative movement is at a low moment, without the ability to set the boundaries of policy debates as the Biden administration considers deficit spending and progressive reform.

  • SOURCE: Public Seminar
    3/11/2021

    The United States Is Picking Up Where The Great Society Left Off

    by John Stoehr

    Comparing the recent COVID relief bill to the 2009 bailout of the subprime crisis shows a rapid turn away from the Republican and New Democratic consensus that social welfare assistance must be tied to work and limited to people who are "deserving."

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    2/18/2021

    ‘There’s No Natural Dignity in Work’

    by Ezra Klein

    Is it time to revisit the basic premise of American welfare policies that encouraging or requiring paid labor is the best way to deal with poverty? 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    11/5/2020

    The Supreme Court We Need

    by Linda Greenhouse

    The veteran Supreme Court reporter argues that the nation needs the court to enable government to actually take action to solve big national problems. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    9/22/2020

    How the Welfare State Became the Neoliberal Order (Review)

    by Pablo Pryluka

    Although the Tennessee Valley Authority was a pioneering public works project, its alumni worked in Latin America to advance redevelopment projects that elevated the authority of big business, a model now associated with the neoliberal turn in the developed world.