The Unsustainable American State

The Unsustainable American State PDF Author: Lawrence Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195392132
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown rapidly in recent decades, but as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. Covering the early nineteenth century to the present, The Unsustainable American State offers an unsettling account of the dysfunctionalities that accelerated the erosion of American state capacity in the post-1970s era: persistent racial division, growing economic inequality, democratic decline, and imperial overreach.

The Unsustainable American State

The Unsustainable American State PDF Author: Lawrence Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195392132
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book

Book Description
The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown rapidly in recent decades, but as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. Covering the early nineteenth century to the present, The Unsustainable American State offers an unsettling account of the dysfunctionalities that accelerated the erosion of American state capacity in the post-1970s era: persistent racial division, growing economic inequality, democratic decline, and imperial overreach.

The Unsustainable American State

The Unsustainable American State PDF Author: Lawrence Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199736812
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown at an explosive rate in our era of globalization. Yet as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. The crisis exposed the system's manifold political and economic dysfunctionalities. Featuring a cast of leading scholars working at the intersection of political science and American history, The Unsustainable American State is a historically informed account of the American state's development from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses in particular on the state-produced inequalities and administrative incoherence that became so apparent in the post-1970s era. Collectively, the book offers an unsettling account of the growth of racial and economic inequality, the ossification of the state, the gradual erosion of democracy, and the problems deriving from imperial overreach. Utilizing the framework of sustainability, a concept that is currently informing some of the best work on governance and development, the contributors show how the USA's current trajectory does not imply an impending collapse, but rather a gradual erosion of capacity and legitimacy. That is a more appropriate theoretical framework, they contend, because for all of its manifest flaws, the American state is durable. That durability, however, does not preclude a long relative decline.

Fate of the States

Fate of the States PDF Author: Meredith Whitney
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101601493
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
"Forget everything you think you know about the direction of the American economy, about our grow­ing need for foreign oil, about the rise of the service economy and the decline of American manufacturing. The story of the next thirty years will not be a repeat of the last thirty." One of the most respected voices on Wall Street, Meredith Whitney shot to global prominence in 2007 when her warnings of a looming crisis in the financial sector proved all too prescient. Now, in her first book, she expands upon her biggest call since the financial crisis.

Unsustainable

Unsustainable PDF Author: Jessica Restaino
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739172565
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Unsustainable: Re-imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-Learning, and the University, edited by Jessica Restaino and Laurie Cella, explores short-lived university/community writing projects in an effort to rethink the long-held "gold standard" of long-term sustainability in community writing work. Contributors examine their own efforts in order to provide alternate models for understanding, assessing, and enacting university/community writing projects that, for a range of reasons, fall outside of traditional practice. This collection considers what has become an increasingly unified call for praxis, where scholar-practitioners explore a specific project that fell short of theorized "best practice" sustainability in order to determine not only the nature of what remains--how and why we might find value in a community-based writing project that lacks long-term sustainability, for example--but also how or why we might rethink, redefine, and reevaluate best practice ideals in the first place. In so doing, the contributors are at once responding to what has been an increasing acknowledgment in the field that, for a variety of reasons, many community-based writing projects do not go as initially planned, and also applying--in praxis--a framework for thinking about and studying such projects. Unsustainable represents the kind of scholarly work that some of the most recognizable names in the field have been calling for over the past five years. This book affirms that unpredictability is an indispensable factor in the field, and argues that such unpredictability presents--in fact, demands--a theoretical approach that takes these practical experiences as its base.

The Beholden State

The Beholden State PDF Author: Brian C. Anderson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442223448
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
While there is plenty of literature on California’s history, topography, and attractions, The Beholden State: California's Lost Promise and How to Recapture It is the first book examining in rigorous detail how a place seen just a generation ago as the dynamic engine of the American future could, through bad policy ideas, find itself with among the highest unemployment rates and poorest educational outcomes in the country

America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions

America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions PDF Author: John W. Day
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1493932438
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
This book takes you on a unique journey through American history, taking time to consider the forces that shaped the development of various cities and regions, and arrives at an unexpected conclusion regarding sustainability. From the American Dream to globalization to the digital and information revolutions, we assume that humans have taken control of our collective destinies in spite of potholes in the road such as the Great Recession of 2007-2009. However, these attitudes were formed during a unique 100-year period of human history in which a large but finite supply of fossil fuels was tapped to feed our economic and innovation engine. Today, at the peak of the Oil Age, the horizon looks different. Cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas are situated where water and other vital ecological services are scarce, and the enormous flows of resources and energy that were needed to create the megalopolises of the 20th century will prove unsustainable. Climate change is a reality, and regional impacts will become increasingly severe. Economies such as Las Vegas, which are dependent on discretionary income and buffeted by climate change, are already suffering the fate of the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Finite resources will mean profound changes for society in general and the energy-intensive lifestyles of the US and Canada in particular. But not all regions are equally vulnerable to these 21st-century megatrends. Are you ready to look beyond “America’s Most Livable Cities” to the critical factors that will determine the sustainability of your municipality and region? Find out where your city or region ranks according to the forces that will impact our lives in the next years and decades. Find out how: ·resource availability and ecological services shaped the modern landscape ·emerging megatrends will make cities and regions more or less livable in the new century ·your city or region ranks on a “sustainability” map of the United States ·urban metabolism puts large cities at particular risk ·sustainability factors will favor economic solutions at a local, rather than global, level ·these principles apply to industrial economies and countries globally. This book should be cited as follows: J. Day, C. Hall, E. Roy, M. Moersbaecher, C. D'Elia, D. Pimentel, and A. Yanez. 2016. America's most sustainable cities and regions: Surviving the 21st century megatrends. Springer, New York. 348 p.

Sustainable Security

Sustainable Security PDF Author: Jeremi Suri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190611480
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Sustaining security : rethinking American national security strategy / Jeremi Suri and Benjamin Valentino -- Dollar diminution and new macroeconomic constraints on American power / Jonathan Kirshner -- Does American military power attract foreign investment? / Daniel Drezner and Nancy Hite-Rubin -- Preserving national strength in a period of fiscal restraint / Cindy Williams -- State finance and national power : Great Britain, China, and the United States in historical perspective / Jeremi Suri -- Reforming American power : civilian national security institutions in the early cold war and beyond / William Inboden -- To starve an army : how great power armies respond to austerity / John W. Hall -- Climate change and US national security : sustaining security amidst unsustainability / Joshua William Busby -- At home abroad : public attitudes towards America's overseas commitments / Benjamin Valentino -- The right choice for NATO / William Wohlforth -- The United States and the Middle East : interests, risks, and costs / Daniel Byman and Sara Bjerg Moller -- Keep, toss, or fix? : assessing US alliances in East Asia / Jennifer Lind -- Terminating the interminable? / Sumit Ganguly -- Neutralization as a sustainable approach to Afghanistan / Audrey Kurth Cronin -- Conclusion / Jeremi Suri and Benjamin Valentino

Unsustainable

Unsustainable PDF Author: James T. Bennett
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030789047
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
This book examines the history, politics, and economics of alternative energy. Since the energy crisis of the 1970s, governments around the world have subsidized and otherwise incentivized alternative forms of energy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. This search has taken on added urgency in the twenty-first century, as the specter of climate change has engendered ambitious state-level renewable portfolio standards, enhanced federal incentives, and inspired “100% renewable” electrical generation targets in such states as Vermont and Hawaii. To save the planet from destruction, wind, solar, and other renewable energy alternatives must replace fossil fuels. But how did we get here and what is the cost? After an in-depth study of the Carter administration's synthetic fuels program, the focus shifts to the two most prominent, perhaps most promising, and certainly most promoted—and government subsidized—“green” and “renewable” energies today: wind and solar. Because wind has made the most headway and drawn the most controversy, it receives the most attention. Although the primary focus is on the American experience with renewable energy, the policies and politics of renewables in Scotland, Wales, Denmark, Spain, and other European nations are also discussed. Issues considered in the book include the nature and efficacy of renewable subsidies; the employment of federal and state tax codes to encourage renewables; the lobbies and interest groups that campaign for government support of renewables; and the fierce battles over the siting of renewable facilities. Unlike other works on this subject, the book probes in depth the nature of the opposition to wind and solar, both in the matter of siting and in their worthiness as recipients of substantial government assistance.

Debating the American State

Debating the American State PDF Author: Anne M. Kornhauser
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081224687X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The New Deal left a host of political, institutional, and economic legacies. Among them was the restructuring of the government into an administrative state with a powerful executive leader and a large class of unelected officials. This "leviathan" state was championed by the political left, and its continued growth and dominance in American politics is seen as a product of liberal thought—to the extent that "Big Government" is now nearly synonymous with liberalism. Yet there were tensions among liberal statists even as the leviathan first arose. Born in crisis and raised by technocrats, the bureaucratic state always rested on shaky foundations, and the liberals who built and supported it disagreed about whether and how to temper the excesses of the state while retaining its basic structure and function. Debating the American State traces the encounter between liberal thought and the rise of the administrative state and the resulting legitimacy issues that arose for democracy, the rule of law, and individual autonomy. Anne Kornhauser examines a broad and unusual cast of characters, including American social scientists and legal academics, the philosopher John Rawls, and German refugee intellectuals who had witnessed the destruction of democracy in the face of a totalitarian administrative state. In particular, she uncovers the sympathetic but concerned voices—commonly drowned out in the increasingly partisan political discourse—of critics who struggled to reconcile the positive aspects of the administrative state with the negative pressure such a contrivance brought on other liberal values such as individual autonomy, popular sovereignty, and social justice. By showing that the leviathan state was never given a principled and scrupulous justification by its proponents, Debating the American State reveals why the liberal state today remains haunted by programmatic dysfunctions and relentless political attacks.

The Crash Course

The Crash Course PDF Author: Chris Martenson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118013123
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The next twenty years will be completely unlike the last twenty years. The world is in economic crisis, and there are no easy fixes to our predicament. Unsustainable trends in the economy, energy, and the environment have finally caught up with us and are converging on a very narrow window of time—the "Twenty-Teens." The Crash Course presents our predicament and illuminates the path ahead, so you can face the coming disruptions and thrive--without fearing the future or retreating into denial. In this book you will find solid facts and grounded reasoning presented in a calm, positive, non-partisan manner. Our money system places impossible demands upon a finite world. Exponentially rising levels of debt, based on assumptions of future economic growth to fund repayment, will shudder to a halt and then reverse. Unfortunately, our financial system does not operate in reverse. The consequences of massive deleveraging will be severe. Oil is essential for economic growth. The reality of dwindling oil supplies is now internationally recognized, yet virtually no developed nations have a Plan B. The economic risks to individuals, companies, and countries are varied and enormous. Best-case, living standards will drop steadily worldwide. Worst-case, systemic financial crises will toss the world into jarring chaos. This book is written for those who are motivated to learn about the root causes of our predicaments, protect themselves and their families, mitigate risks as much as possible, and control what effects they can. With challenge comes opportunity, and The Crash Course offers a positive vision for how to reshape our lives to be more balanced, resilient, and sustainable.