Americans choose from a dizzying array of schools, loosely categorized as "public" and "private." How did these distinctions emerge, and what do they tell us about the relationship in the United States between public authority and private enterprise? Challenged by the rise of Catholic and other parochial schools in the nineteenth century, states sought to protect the public school monopoly through regulation. Ultimately, however, Robert N. Gross shows how the public policies that resulted produced a stable educational marketplace, where choice flourished.
According to conventional wisdom, government may intervene when private markets fail to provide goods and services that society values. This view has led to the passage of much legislation and the creation of a host of agencies that have attempted, by exquisitely detailed regulations, to compel legislatively defined behavior in a broad range of activities affecting society as a whole—health care, housing, pollution abatement, transportation, to name only a few. Far from achieving the goals of the legislators and regulators, these efforts have been largely ineffective; worse, they have spawned endless litigation and countless administrative proceedings as the individuals and firms on who the regulations fall seek to avoid, or at least soften, their impact. The result has been long delays in determining whether government programs work at all, thwarting of agreed-upon societal aims, and deep skepticism about the power of government to make any difference. Strangely enough in a nation that since its inception has valued both the means and the ends of the private market system, the United States has rarely tried to harness private interests to public goals. Whenever private markets fail to produce some desired good or service (or fail to deter undesirable activity), the remedies proposed have hardly ever involved creating a system of incentives similar to those of the market place so as to make private choice consonant with public virtue. In this revision of the Godkin Lectures presented at Harvard University in November and December 1976, Charles L. Schultze examines the sources of this paradox. He outlines a plan for government intervention that would turn away from the direct "command and control" regulating techniques of the past and rely instead on market-like incentives to encourage people indirectly to take publicly desired actions.
The book the American Prospect calls “an essential resource for future reformers on how not to govern,” by America’s leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian “An essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons.” —Naomi Klein A sweeping exposé of the ways in which private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy, the hardcover edition of The Privatization of Everything elicited a wide spectrum of praise: Kirkus Reviews hailed it as “a strong, economics-based argument for restoring the boundaries between public goods and private gains,” Literary Hub featured the book on a Best Nonfiction list, calling it “a far-reaching, comprehensible, and necessary book,” and Publishers Weekly dubbed it a “persuasive takedown of the idea that the private sector knows best.” From Diane Ravitch (“an important new book about the dangers of privatization”) to Heather McGhee (“a well-researched call to action”), the rave reviews mirror the expansive nature of the book itself, covering the impact of privatization on every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military. Cohen and Mikaelian also demonstrate how citizens can—and are—wresting back what is ours: A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the state of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code. “Enlightening and sobering” (Rosanne Cash), The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a wide range of issues and offers what Cash calls “a progressive voice with a firm eye on justice [that] can carefully parse out complex issues for those of us who take pride in citizenship.”
List of Tables and Figures; List of Acronyms; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Thinking Big Again; Chapter 1: From Crisis Ideology to the Division of Innovative Labour; Chapter 2: Technology, Innovation and Growth; Chapter 3: Risk-Taking State: From 'De-risking' to 'Bring It On!'; Chapter 4: The US Entrepreneurial State; Chapter 5: The State behind the iPhone; Chapter 6: Pushing vs. Nudging the Green Industrial Revolution; Chapter 7: Wind and Solar Power: Government Success Stories and Technology in Crisis; Chapter 8: Risks and Rewards: From Rotten Apples to Symbiotic Ecosystems; Chapter 9: So.
A Washington Post Book of the Year Winner of the Merle Curti Award Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “A masterful study of privacy.” —Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books “Masterful (and timely)...[A] marathon trek from Victorian propriety to social media exhibitionism...Utterly original.” —Washington Post Every day, we make decisions about what to share and when, how much to expose and to whom. Securing the boundary between one’s private affairs and public identity has become an urgent task of modern life. How did privacy come to loom so large in public consciousness? Sarah Igo tracks the quest for privacy from the invention of the telegraph onward, revealing enduring debates over how Americans would—and should—be known. The Known Citizen is a penetrating historical investigation with powerful lessons for our own times, when corporations, government agencies, and data miners are tracking our every move. “A mighty effort to tell the story of modern America as a story of anxieties about privacy...Shows us that although we may feel that the threat to privacy today is unprecedented, every generation has felt that way since the introduction of the postcard.” —Louis Menand, New Yorker “Engaging and wide-ranging...Igo’s analysis of state surveillance from the New Deal through Watergate is remarkably thorough and insightful.” —The Nation
Aristotle offers a conception of the private and its relationship to the public that suggests a remedy to the limitations of liberalism today, according to Judith A. Swanson. In this fresh and lucid interpretation of Aristotle's political philosophy, Swanson challenges the dominant view that he regards the private as a mere precondition to the public. She argues, rather, that for Aristotle private activity develops virtue and is thus essential both to individual freedom and happiness and to the well-being of the political order. Swanson presents an innovative reading of The Politics which revises our understanding of Aristotle's political economy and his views on women and the family, slavery, and the relation between friendship and civic solidarity. She examines the private activities Aristotle considers necessary to a complete human life—maintaining a household, transacting business, sustaining friendships, and philosophizing. Focusing on ways Aristotle's public invests in the private through law, rule, and education, she shows how the public can foster a morally and intellectually virtuous citizenry. In contrast to classical liberal theory, which presents privacy as a shield of rights protecting individuals from one another and from the state, for Aristotle a regime can attain self-sufficiency only by bringing about a dynamic equilibrium between the public and the private. The Public and the Private in Aristotle's Political Philosophy will be essential reading for scholars and students of political philosophy, political theory, classics, intellectual history, and the history of women.
What, exactly, is private property? Or, to ask the question another way, what rights to intrude does the public have in what is generally accepted as private property? The answer, perhaps surprisingly to some, is that the public has not only a significant interest in regulating the use of private property but also in defining it, and establishing its contour and texture. In The Public Nature of Private Property, therefore, scholars from the United States and the United Kingdom challenge traditional conceptions of private property while presenting a range of views on both the meaning of private property, and on the ability, some might say the requirement, of the state to regulate it.
Companies like Google and Apple heralded the information revolution, and opened the doors for Silicon Valley to grow into an engine of dazzling technological development, that today champions the free market that engendered it against the supposedly stifling encroachment of government regulation. But is that really the case? In this sharp and controversial expose, The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato debunks the pervasive myth that the state is a laggard, bureaucratic apparatus at odds with a dynamic private sector. Instead she reveals in case study after case study that, in fact, the opposite is true: the state is our boldest and most valuable innovator. The technology revolution would never have happened without support from the US Government. The breakthroughs--GPS, touch-screen displays, the Internet, and voice-activated AI--that enabled legendary Apple products to be smart successes were, in fact, all developed with support from the state. Mazzucato reveals that many successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs integrated state-funded technological developments into their products and then reaped the rewards themselves. The algorithm behind Google’s search engine was initially sponsored by NASA. And 75% of NMEs--new, often-ground-breaking drugs not derivative of existing substances--trace their research to National Institutes of Health (NIH) labs. The American government, it turns out, has been enormously successfully at stimulating scientific and technological advancement. But by 2009, just some months following the Great Recession--the US government, constrained by austerity measures, started disinvesting from its holdings in research fields like health, energy, electronics. The trend is likely to continue, and the repercussions of these policies could wreak havoc on our technology and science sectors. But Mazzucato remains optimistic. If managed correctly, state-sponsored development of Green technology, for instance, could be as efficacious as suburbanization & post-war reconstruction in the mid-twentieth century, and unleash a wide-spread golden age in the global economy. The limitations of natural resources and the threat of global warming could become the most powerful driver of growth, employment, and innovation within just one generation--but to be successful, the Green Revolution will depend on the initiatives of proactive governments. By not admitting the State’s role in economic and technological progress, we are socializing only the risks of investing in innovation, while privatizing the rewards in the hands of only a few businesses. This, Mazzucato argues, hurts both future of innovation and equity in modern-day capitalism. For policy-makers, Silicon Valley start-up founders, venture-capitalists, and economists alike, The Entrepreneurial State stirs up much needed debate and offers up a brilliant corrective to spurious beliefs: to thrive, American businesses have always and will need to depend on the support of our country’s most audacious entrepreneur, the state.
What are the political motivations behind firms' decisions to adopt policies that self-regulate their behavior in a manner that is beyond compliance with state, federal and local law? Public Forces and Private Politics in American Big Business advances a new understanding of the firm as a political actor that expands beyond the limited conceptualizations offered by economists and organization theorists. Timothy Werner develops a general theory of private politics that is tested using three case studies: the environment, gay rights and executive compensation. Using the conclusions of these case studies and an analysis of interviews with executives at 'Fortune 500' firms, Werner finds that politics can contribute significantly to our understanding of corporate decision-making on private policies and corporate social responsibility in the United States.
