American government is in trouble. It seems to cost more, deliver less, and inspire deeper cynicism year by year. Some say the only solution is to shrink the public sector down to a competent core. Others call for restructuring, reinvention, and reform at the federal level. But the most popular prescription is to shift the public sector's center of gravity away from Washington and toward the separate states. Democrats and Republicans alike have celebrated devolution as a return to America's Federalist roots, a spur to efficiency, and a remedy for the rigidity, waste, and arrogance that alienate citizens from their government. They contend that the fifty state governmentssmall, flexible, close to the people,” and disciplined by competitionwill be more efficient and more responsive than the lumbering federal bureaucracy.But will devolution deliver? In Disunited States, John D. Donahue contends that despite its broad appeal, letting Washington fade and the states take the lead is a dubious strategy for reform. It reflects a misreading of America's history, a warped view of its bedrock values, and a false analogy to the virtues of competition and decentralization in the private sector. At worst, he argues, America's willing disintegration within an integrating world economy will be recorded among history's monumental follies. At best, devolution will prove to be a detour on America's path to renewal.Donahue shows that shifting power toward the states will do much less than advocates promise to boost efficiency and accelerate innovationand much more than they admit to undercut national interests and corrode America's sense of commonwealth. Addressing controversial topics as diverse as welfare reform, school funding, legalized gambling, and interstate bidding for business investment, he weaves a coherent case that isolated action by competitive state governments, not excessive centralization, poses the graver threat to Americans' most cherished goals. The ascendancy of the states cannot relieve us of the need to confront our problemsgrowing inequality, eroding trust in government, and an imperiled middleclass cultureas a nation.Indeed, the proponents of shifting power to the states fail to account for the fact that America retains national interests and national values that will get short shrift in an unregulated environment where states accelerate their competition to attract business investment and capital while simultaneously competing to reduce the costs of social welfare programs.The genius of the founders was to forge a single vital nation out of the several separate states, and Disunited States reveals that the road to national divisionthe road not taken by Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, or Washingtonmay turn out to lead us not toward restored greatness, but away from it.

Disunited States: What's At Stake As Washington Fades And The States Take The Lead

Politics & Social Sciences

Donahue, John D.

Politics & Government

Basic Books

What government activities should be contracted out to private companies? This thoughtful book by a Harvard policy analyst shuns global answers and explores how to examine individual cases.

The Privatization Decision: Public Ends, Private Means

Business & Money

Economics

Privatization Decision

Government has become a refuge, and a relic, of America’s crumbling middle-class economy. As the public and private worlds of work have veered in different directions, the gaps between them are warping government work in unintended ways. 
Three decades of economic turbulence have rendered American workplaces more demanding and less secure, more rewarding for high-end workers and punishing for workers without advanced skills. This workplace revolution, however, has largely bypassed government. Public employees―representing roughly one-sixth of the total workforce―still work under the conditions of dampened risk and constrained opportunity that marked most of the economy during the middle-class boom following World War II.
The divergent paths of public and private employment have intensified a long-standing pattern: elite workers spurn public jobs, while less skilled workers cling to government work as a refuge from a harsh private economy. The first trend creates a chronic talent deficit in the public sector. The second trend makes the government workplace rigid and resistant to change. And both contribute to shortfalls in public-sector performance.
The Warping of Government Work documents government’s isolation from the rest of the American economy and arrays the stark choices we confront for narrowing, or accommodating, the divide between public and private work.

The Warping of Government Work

Harvard University Press

All too often government lacks the skill, the will, and the wallet to meet its missions. Schools fall short of the mark while roads and bridges fall into disrepair. Health care costs too much and delivers too little. Budgets bleed red ink as the cost of services citizens want outstrips the taxes they are willing to pay. Collaborative Governance is the first book to offer solutions by demonstrating how government at every level can engage the private sector to overcome seemingly insurmountable problems and achieve public goals more effectively.
 John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser show how the public sector can harness private expertise to bolster productivity, capture information, and augment resources. The authors explain how private engagement in public missions--rightly structured and skillfully managed--is not so much an alternative to government as the way smart government ought to operate. The key is to carefully and strategically grant discretion to private entities, whether for-profit or nonprofit, in ways that simultaneously motivate and empower them to create public value. Drawing on a host of real-world examples-including charter schools, job training, and the resurrection of New York's Central Park--they show how, when, and why collaboration works, and also under what circumstances it doesn't.
 Collaborative Governance reveals how the collaborative approach can be used to tap the resourcefulness and entrepreneurship of the private sector, and improvise fresh, flexible solutions to today's most pressing public challenges.

Collaborative Governance: Private Roles for Public Goals in Turbulent Times

Zeckhauser, Richard J.

Princeton University Press

Far from being another short-lived buzzword, "globalization" refers to real changes. These changes have profound impacts on culture, economics, security, the environment—and hence on the fundamental challenges of governance. This book asks three fundamental questions: How are patterns of globalization currently evolving? How do these patterns affect governance? And how might globalism itself be governed? The first section maps the trajectory of globalization in several dimensions—economic, cultural, environmental, and political. For example, Graham Allison speculates about the impact on national and international security, and William C. Clark develops and evaluates the concepts of "environmental globalization." The second section examines the impact of globalization on governance within individual nations (including China, struggling countries in the developing world, and the industrialized democracies) and includes Elaine Kamarck's assessment of global trends in public-sector reform. The third section discusses efforts to improvise new approaches to governance, including the role of non-governmental institutions, the global dimensions of information policy, and Dani Rodrik's speculation on global economic governance.

Governance in a Globalizing World

Nye, Joseph S.

Nye, Joseph S., Jr

Reference

Brookings Institution Press

The widening of the gap between the rich and the poor since the early 1970s has been well documented. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to whether the devolution of governmental responsibilities from the federal to state level will simplify or complicate efforts to alleviate inequality. In this report, John D. Donahue analyzes devolution from the standpoint of four realms of public policy: workplace laws, education and job training, antipoverty efforts, and taxes. Policymakers attempting to improve life for Americans at the lower end of the income ladder are apt to consider using tools available in each of those areas. But, largely because of devolution, Donahue concludes, the effectiveness of those tools in addressing inequality is likely to be weakened

Hazardous Crosscurrents: Confronting Inequality in an Era of Devolution (The Devolution Revolution)

Twentieth Century Fund

Shortchanging the Workforce: The Job Training Partnership Act and the Overselling of Privatized Training

Public Interest Pubn

The Dragon, the Eagle, and the Private Sector

The governments of China and the United States - despite profound differences in history, culture, economic structure, and political ideology - both engage the private sector in the pursuit of public value. This book employs the term collaborative governance to describe relationships where neither the public nor private party is fully in control, arguing that such shared discretion is needed to deliver value to citizens. This concept is exemplified across a wide range of policy arenas, such as constructing high speed rail, hosting the Olympics, building human capital, and managing the healthcare system. This book will help decision-makers apply the principles of collaborative governance to effectively serve the public, and will enable China and the United States to learn from each other's experiences. It will empower public decision-makers to more wisely engage the private sector. The book's overarching conclusion is that transparency is the key to the legitimate growth of collaborative governance.

The Dragon, the Eagle, and the Private Sector: Public-Private Collaboration in China and the United States

Eggleston, Karen

Cambridge University Press

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