Do federal social programs work?

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Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser

As events highlight deep divisions in attitudes between America and Europe, this is a very timely study of different approaches to the problems of domestic inequality and poverty. Based on careful and systematic analysis of national data, the authors describe just how different the two continents are in the level of their State engagement in the redistribution of income. They go through various possible economic explanations for the difference, including different levels of pre-tax income, openness, and social mobility; they survey politico-historical differences such as the varying physical size of nations, their electoral and legal systems, and the character of their political parties, as well as their experiences of war; and they examine sociological explanations which include different attitudes to the poor and notions of social responsibility, as well as, most importantly, attitudes to race. They calculate that attitudes to race explain half the observed difference in levels of public redistribution of income.

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Young-Sun Hong

This is the first comprehensive study of the turbulent relationship among state, society, and church in the making of the modern German welfare system during the Weimar Republic. Young-Sun Hong examines the competing conceptions of poverty, citizenship, family, and authority held by the state bureaucracy, socialists, bourgeois feminists, and the major religious and humanitarian welfare-organizations. She shows how these conceptions reflected and generated bitter conflict in German society. And she argues that this conflict undermined parliamentary government within the welfare sector in a way that paralleled the crisis of the entire Weimar political system and created a situation in which the Nazi critique of republican "welfare" could acquire broad political resonance.

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José Patrick Mayidika Ngimbi Nimy

Voici un ouvrage détonnant par lequel José Patrick Nimy Mayidika Ngimbi signe son retour au Congo après onze années de séjour à l'étranger. L'ouvrage est tout un programme, en même temps une interpellation claire et une mobilisation de ce qui reste de l'élite congolaise et de tous les patriotes fidèles et prêts pour la refondation de la République.

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Dan Coats

Senator Coats addresses the need to strengthen the authority and economic well-being of those institutions that teach moral values. As author of the legislative package The Project for American Renewal, he argues that the government must use its authority to empower constructive actions in the nongovernmental sector. Presented as the third annual Kuyper Lecture, Mending Fences includes responses from three distinguished social activists, who offer their suggestions for promoting justice and moral responsibility in America. They are Glenn C. Loury, professor of economics and director of the Institute on Race and Social Division, Boston University; Mary Nelson, founding president of Bethel New Life (Chicago); and Stanley W. Carlson-Thies, director of social policy studies, the Center for Public Justice.