Political Science : Public Policy

Global climate change poses not only environmental hazards but profound risks to planetary peace and stability as well. Climatic Cataclysm gathers experts on climate science, oceanography, history, political science, foreign policy, and national security to take the measure of these risks.The contributors have developed three scenarios of what the future may hold. The expected scenario relies on current scientific models to project the effects of climate change over the next 30 years. The severe scenario, which posits a much stronger climate response to current levels of carbon loading, foresees profound and potentially destabilizing global effects over the next generation or more. Finally, the catastrophic scenario is characterized by a devastating “tipping point” in the climate system, perhaps 50 or 100 years hence. In this future world, the land-based polar ice sheets have disappeared, global sea levels have risen dramatically, and the existing natural order has been destroyed beyond repair.The contributors analyze the security implications of these scenarios, which at a minimum include increased disease proliferation; tensions caused by large-scale migration; and conflict sparked by resource scarcity, particularly in Africa. They consider what we can learn from the experience of early civilizations confronted with natural disaster, and they ask what the three largest emitters of greenhouse gases—the United States, the European Union, and China—can do to reduce and manage future risks.In the coming decade, the United States faces an ominous set of foreign policy and national security challenges. Global climate change will not only complicate these tasks, but as this sobering study reveals, it may also create new challenges that dwarf those of today. Contributors include Leon Fuerth (George Washington University), Jay Gulledge (Pew Center on Global Climate Change), Alexander T. J. Lennon (Center for Strategic and International Studies), J.R. Mc more...

Price: $28.95

Clustering as an economic policy concern has become increasingly fashionable. The authors of this book shed light on this subject on which there remains remarkably little understanding, and even less agreement, regarding what clusters are, what they require for success and what impacts they are likely to have in different contexts, locally, nationally and globally. more...

Price: $140.00

The U.S. healthcare system is in critical condition--but this should come as a surprise to no one. Yet until now the solutions proposed have been unworkable, pie-in-the-sky plans that have had little chance of becoming law and even less of succeeding. In Code Red, David Dranove, one of the nation's leading experts on the economics of healthcare, proposes a set of feasible solutions that address access, efficiency, and quality. Dranove offers pragmatic remedies, some of them controversial, all of them crucially needed to restore the system to vitality. He pays special attention to the plight of the uninsured, and proposes a new direction that promises to make premier healthcare for all Americans a national reality. Setting his story against the backdrop of healthcare in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present day, he reveals why a century of private and public sector efforts to reform the ailing system have largely failed. He draws on insights from economics to diagnose the root causes of rising costs and diminishing access to quality care, such as inadequate information, perverse incentives, and malfunctioning insurance markets. Dranove describes the ongoing efforts to revive the system--including the rise of consumerism, the quality movement, and initiatives to expand access--and argues that these efforts are doomed to fail without more fundamental, systemic, market-based reforms. Code Red lays the foundation for a thriving healthcare system and is indispensable for anyone trying to make sense of the thorny issues of healthcare reform. more...

Price: $29.95

America has set ambitious goals for improving health, but they are doomed to failure unless we address persistent and in some cases widening disparities by income and race. This book tells the story of one groundbreaking approach that attacks the problem by focusing on the wellness of whole neighborhoods. Since their creation during the 1960s, community health centers have served the needs of the poor in the tenements of New York, the colonias of Texas, the working-class neighborhoods of Boston, and the dirt farms of the South. As products of the civil rights movement, the early centers provided not only primary and preventive care, but also social services, economic development, and empowerment. Bonnie Lefkowitz explores the program’s unlikely transformation from a small and beleaguered demonstration effort to a network of close to a thousand modern health care organizations serving nearly 15 million people. more...

Price: $17.00

Aims to analyze the optimal allocation of local public goods in urban agglomerations, and the allocation consequences of increasing competition in the provision of them. This book uses two aspects present in the concept of Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions, which are de-localized membership and uni-functionality of jurisdictions. more...

Price: $125.00