Solutions … not theories. Political progress … not political posturing. Instead of the constant jockeying for political advantage, in What Works, author and columnist Cal Thomas focuses on what promotes the general welfare, regardless of which party or ideology gets the credit. Thomas probes and provides answers to questions like, Why must we constantly fight the same battles over and over? Why don't we consult the past and use common sense in...

This is the first book to explore the public policy process through 19 contributions from diverse scholars from all over the world, using empirical material to demonstrate how many of the key theories and concepts may be applied to its analysis.

Succeeding in the art of contemporary policymaking involves designing policies which reflect the deeply interconnected nature of political space. Nevertheless, policy continues to be articulated through age-old categories and hierarchies of scale. This book asks why scale occupies this enduring position of privilege in policymaking, highlighting how scales are far from 'natural' features of policy and that they are instead essential to the armoury...

Which Side of History? offers a collection of bold essays on how technology is affecting democracy, society, and our future. Featuring prominent national voices such as Sacha Baron Cohen, Marc Benioff, Ellen Pao, Ken Auletta, Chelsea Clinton, Tim Wu, Khaled Hosseini, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Jaron Lanier, Willow Bay, Sal Khan, Sherry Turkle, Shoshana Zuboff, Vivek Murthy, Geoffrey Canada, and many more. The essays focus on the extraordinary...

For decades, development economists believed that central planning, not economic freedom, was the key to economic growth in developing countries. In 1956 Gunnar Myrdal, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, wrote, "The special advisers to underdeveloped countries who have taken the time and trouble to acquaint themselves with the problem all recommend central planning as the first condition of progress." While the argument that socialism...

Tracing the international and Australian history of both licit and illicit drug use, this investigation combines the topic of drug use with analyses of political power, the rise of the market, and social issues. It examines the way in which drug consumption is regulated in the era of global free trade by first looking at the start of the opium-growing industry and the racist origins of drug laws. Providing a social history of drug use through the...

In my 10 plus years of teaching, I have found that students struggle with two major challenges in writing a quality capstone paper. First, they have difficulty creating a rigorous analytical framework. Too often, the papers tend to be more descriptive in nature, which means that the final policy recommendation may be flawed. This book attempts to fill that gap by discussing in detail the various components of the framework as well as their interdependence....

With a journalist's eye for detail, Robert Zelnick looks at Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's key role in the controversial University of Michigan affirmative action cases of 2003, providing key background information, detailed descriptions of daily arguments, and an evaluation of the final rulings.

It is often assumed that because the contemporary welfare state is generous, its critics must therefore lack generosity, as well as compassion. Tibor R. Machan, a distinguished moral philosopher, demonstrates why that is a mistaken notion. He places generosity among the human virtues and shows why virtue requires moral choice rather than coercion. He argues that generosity can only be cultivated in freedom because there is no virtue in a compulsory...

For the past decade Americans have been intensely concerned with the quality of American education, which is hardly surprising given the importance of education to society and the growing evidence of problems in American education. Nowhere are those problems more severe than in our inner cities, where learning has all but ceased in many schools. It was concern about inner-city children that led the Cato Institute to convene a conference, "Education...