Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America

Product Description The first comprehensive map of the social safety net, public and private, in the United States.Societies are often judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members: the poor and near poor. In the United States, this responsibility belongs not only to governments, but also to charities, businesses, individuals, and family members. Their combined efforts generate a social safety net. In Who Cares, Christopher Howard offers the first comprehensive map of the US social safety net. He chronicles how different parts of American society talk about poverty-related needs. And he shows what Americans do to provide basic levels of income, food, housing, medical care, and daily care. Although the US social safety net is extensive, major gaps remain, particularly impacting Blacks, Hispanics, and individuals who are not employed full-time. Drawing heavily upon evidence from the years right before the Covid-19 pandemic, Howard demonstrates that these problems persist even when the economy seems healthy. Who Cares concludes with an initial assessment of how the social safety net performedduring the pandemic. Review "Who Cares is a fresh, informative look at the nature of the American welfare state: why do we care about some needs more than others? What's the actual level of protection afforded, and for whom? What do key actors (the public, parties and politicians, unions, and business organizations) have to say? Will the gaps exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic spur a reset, or not? Chris Howard wields his stunningly clear prose to examine both the usual policy areas (income, healthcare, food) and the often-overlooked (housing, child- and elder-care). I can't wait for the conversations this thoughtful book will prompt." -- Andrea Louise Campbell, author of Trapped in America's Safety Net About the Author Christopher Howard is the Pamela C. Harriman Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary, where he has worked since 1993. He specializes in the history and politics of US social policy. Howard is the author of three books and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Social Policy; he has also written numerous journal articles and book chapters. He is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Scholars Strategy Network. He has won a campus-wide teaching award and an Outstanding Faculty Award from the state of Virginia. Chris was a History major at Duke University and earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT.

Politics & Social Sciences

Howard, Christopher

Social Sciences

Oxford University Press

The first comprehensive map of the social safety net, public and private, in the United States.\nSocieties are often judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members: the poor and near poor. In the United States, this responsibility belongs not only to governments, but also to charities, businesses, individuals, and family members. Their combined efforts generate a social safety net. In Who Cares, Christopher Howard offers the first comprehensive map of the US social safety net. He chronicles how different parts of American society talk about poverty-related needs. And he shows what Americans do to provide basic levels of income, food, housing, medical care, and daily care. Although the US social safety net is extensive, major gaps remain, particularly impacting Blacks, Hispanics, and individuals who are not employed full-time. Drawing heavily upon evidence from the years right before the Covid-19 pandemic, Howard demonstrates that these problems persist even when the economy seems healthy. Who Cares concludes with an initial assessment of how the social safety net performed 
during the pandemic.

Thinking Like a Political Scientist: A Practical Guide to Research Methods (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

Each year, tens of thousands of students who are interested in politics go through a rite of passage: they take a course in research methods. Many find the subject to be boring or confusing, and with good reason. Most of the standard books on research methods fail to highlight the most important concepts and questions. Instead, they brim with dry technical definitions and focus heavily on statistical analysis, slighting other valuable methods. This approach not only dulls potential enjoyment of the course, but prevents students from mastering the skills they need to engage more directly and meaningfully with a wide variety of research. With wit and practical wisdom, Christopher Howard draws on more than a decade of experience teaching research methods to transform a typically dreary subject and teach budding political scientists the critical skills they need to read published research more effectively and produce better research of their own. The first part of the book is devoted to asking three fundamental questions in political science: What happened? Why? Who cares? In the second section, Howard demonstrates how to answer these questions by choosing an appropriate research design, selecting cases, and working with numbers and written documents as evidence. Drawing on examples from American and comparative politics, international relations, and public policy, Thinking Like a Political Scientist highlights the most common challenges that political scientists routinely face, and each chapter concludes with exercises so that students can practice dealing with those challenges.

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

University of Chicago Press

Each year, tens of thousands of students who are interested in politics go through a rite of passage: they take a course in research methods. Many find the subject to be boring or confusing, and with good reason. Most of the standard books on research methods fail to highlight the most important concepts and questions. Instead, they brim with dry technical definitions and focus heavily on statistical analysis, slighting other valuable methods. This approach not only dulls potential enjoyment of the course, but prevents students from mastering the skills they need to engage more directly and meaningfully with a wide variety of research. With wit and practical wisdom, Christopher Howard draws on more than a decade of experience teaching research methods to transform a typically dreary subject and teach budding political scientists the critical skills they need to read published research more effectively and produce better research of their own. The first part of the book is devoted to asking three fundamental questions in political science: What happened? Why? Who cares? In the second section, Howard demonstrates how to answer these questions by choosing an appropriate research design, selecting cases, and working with numbers and written documents as evidence. Drawing on examples from American and comparative politics, international relations, and public policy, Thinking Like a Political Scientist highlights the most common challenges that political scientists routinely face, and each chapter concludes with exercises so that students can practice dealing with those challenges.

An examination of a 1970s Conceptual art project―advertisements for fictional shows by fictional artists in a fictional gallery―that hoodwinked the New York art world. From the summer of 1970 to March 1971, advertisements appeared in four leading art magazines―Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, and ARTnews―for a group show and six solo exhibitions at the Jean Freeman Gallery at 26 West Fifty-Seventh Street, in the heart of Manhattan's gallery district. As gallery goers soon discovered, this address did not exist―the street numbers went from 16 to 20 to 24 to 28―and neither did the art supposedly exhibited there. The ads were promoting fictional shows by fictional artists in a fictional gallery. The scheme, eventually exposed by a New York Times reporter, was concocted by the artist Terry Fugate-Wilcox as both work of art and critique of the art world. In this book, Christopher Howard brings this forgotten Conceptual art project back into view. Howard demonstrates that Fugate-Wilcox's project was an exceptionally clever embodiment of many important aspects of Conceptualism, incisively synthesizing the major aesthetic issues of its time―documentation and dematerialization, serialism and process, text and image, publishing and publicity. He puts the Jean Freeman Gallery in the context of other magazine-based work by Mel Bochner, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, and Ed Ruscha, and compares the fictional artists' projects with actual Earthworks by Walter De Maria, Peter Hutchinson, Dennis Oppenheim, and more. Despite the deadpan perfection of the Jean Freeman Gallery project, the art establishment marginalized its creator, and the project itself was virtually erased from art history. Howard corrects these omissions, drawing on deep archival research, personal interviews, and investigation of fine-printed clues to shed new light on a New York art world mystery.

The Jean Freeman Gallery Does Not Exist (Mit Press)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

The MIT Press

Splendid Isolation: a Study of Ideas Concerning Britain's International Position and Foreign Policy During the Later Years of the Third Marquis of

Macmillan; St. Martin's Press

How to build wealth with passion and purpose 
 The power to create great wealth is already within you. But monetizing that raw energy doesn’t happen by itself. As Christopher Howard shows, building great wealth is a dual process. It begins by identifying your passion―the things you truly and deeply care about, whatever they may be. Next, passion needs to be endowed with purpose: a clearly defined vision of the future you intend to create. Once this happens, money is simply the natural reward. When you bring the value of passion and purpose to the marketplace, financial prosperity is the instant result. It’s like awakening to a new reality―not just for yourself, but for everyone who shares in your success. And make no mistake: sharing is a key element in the success of Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, and the other billionaire entrepreneurs Chris introduces in these pages. Instant Wealth―Wake up Rich! proves that ultimate success is by no means a matter of selling out principles in order to become rich. On the contrary, it’s becoming rich in order to bring that riches to the world. As a true entrepreneur himself, Christopher Howard has put these lessons to work in the creation of his own fast-growing international business. What’s worked for him―and for so many other hugely successful entrepreneurs―can work for you too. All it takes is passion, purpose, and waking up to instant wealth.

Instant Wealth Wake Up Rich!: Discover The Secret of The New Entrepreneurial Mind

Business & Money

Business Culture

wiley

Despite costing hundreds of billions of dollars and subsidizing everything from homeownership and child care to health insurance, tax expenditures (commonly known as tax loopholes) have received little attention from those who study American government. This oversight has contributed to an incomplete and misleading portrait of U.S. social policy. Here Christopher Howard analyzes the "hidden" welfare state created by such programs as tax deductions for home mortgage interest and employer-provided retirement pensions, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit. Basing his work on the histories of these four tax expenditures, Howard highlights the distinctive characteristics of all such policies. Tax expenditures are created more routinely and quietly than traditional social programs, for instance, and over time generate unusual coalitions of support. They expand and contract without deliberate changes to individual programs.
 Howard helps the reader to appreciate the historic links between the hidden welfare state and U.S. tax policy, which accentuate the importance of Congress and political parties. He also focuses on the reasons why individuals, businesses, and public officials support tax expenditures. The Hidden Welfare State will appeal to anyone interested in the origins, development, and structure of the American welfare state. Students of public finance will gain new insights into the politics of taxation. And as policymakers increasingly promote tax expenditures to address social problems, the book offers some sobering lessons about how such programs work.

The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States

Accounting

Princeton University Press

The Hidden Welfare State

Economics

The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy

The Welfare State Nobody Knows challenges a number of myths and half-truths about U.S. social policy. The American welfare state is supposed to be a pale imitation of "true" welfare states in Europe and Canada. Christopher Howard argues that the American welfare state is in fact larger, more popular, and more dynamic than commonly believed. Nevertheless, poverty and inequality remain high, and this book helps explain why so much effort accomplishes so little. One important reason is that the United States is adept at creating social programs that benefit the middle and upper-middle classes, but less successful in creating programs for those who need the most help.
 This book is unusually broad in scope, analyzing the politics of social programs that are well known (such as Social Security and welfare) and less well known but still important (such as workers' compensation, home mortgage interest deduction, and the Americans with Disabilities Act). Although it emphasizes developments in recent decades, the book ranges across the entire twentieth century to identify patterns of policymaking. Methodologically, it weaves together quantitative and qualitative approaches in order to answer fundamental questions about the politics of U.S. social policy. Ambitious and timely, The Welfare State Nobody Knows asks us to rethink the influence of political parties, interest groups, public opinion, federalism, policy design, and race on the American welfare state.

Politics & Government

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Howard, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Howard, Christopher

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Howard, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America

Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America

Thinking Like a Political Scientist: A Practical Guide to Research Methods (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

Thinking Like a Political Scientist: A Practical Guide to Research Methods (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

The Jean Freeman Gallery Does Not Exist (Mit Press)

Splendid Isolation: a Study of Ideas Concerning Britain's International Position and Foreign Policy During the Later Years of the Third Marquis of

Instant Wealth Wake Up Rich!: Discover The Secret of The New Entrepreneurial Mind

The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States

The Hidden Welfare State

The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy