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As Baby Boomers are now in their 60s, policymaker and media attention is becoming focused on how this generation will manage during its long period in retirement. This book acknowledges that many, though not all, in this age group have accumulated substantial assets, so they are now asking themselves what they will do with what they have. The book explores of how people entering retirement will deploy their accumulated assets in the near and long term to meet their myriad spending, investment, and other objectives. The book studies emerging issues regarding assets and expectations on the verge of retirement, including uncertainty regarding life expectancy and morbidity. It is composed of chapters from contributors including a Nobel Laureate and a wonderful mix of academics and practitioners from the legal, financial, and economic fields.

First established at the end of the 19th century, the juvenile justice system has long been searching for an effective set of guiding principles. Over the last hundred years, through a series of piecemeal rulings, it has undergone an evolution from its original foundation on the rehabilitation model to the current “get-tough” system that increasingly treats juvenile offenders as adults. At present, there is no overarching theory or model of juvenile justice intervention in this nation or even in any given state. Juvenile justice policy is best characterized as a helter-skelter array, inconsistent across jurisdictions, with no overarching theoretical framework providing guidance. Indeed, the field is desperately in need of a coherent model to serve as a guide to policymaking. In recent years, substantial gains have been made in the relevant knowledge on juveniles and offender treatment. We know more about the cognition and functioning of minors generally, and juvenile offenders specifically, as well as about how they respond to different types of interventions. Public attitudes have softened since the height of the “get-tough” era, and many policymakers are open to new ideas as they recognize that the current system just isn't effective. This book presents a vision for a new juvenile justice system, founded on the evidence at hand and promoting the principles of rehabilitation and reintegration into society. The book develops its own juvenile justice policy proposals effectively by carefully addressing the problems with past policy approaches and recent theoretical contributions, the science underlying the new perspective to be elucidated in the book, and how that science informs the book's perspective. Most helpfully, it provides a detailed description of the proposed new model along with discussion of the procedural rules that should accompany its implementation, and articulation of the way in which the model would work in practice.

This book gathers together decades of writing by the author, to address important questions about U.S. national security policy from the end of World War I to the global war on terror. Why did the United States withdraw strategically from Europe after World War I and not after World War II? How did World War II reshape Americans' understanding of their vital interests? What caused the United States to achieve victory in the long Cold War? To what extent did 9/11 transform U.S. national security policy? Is budgetary austerity a fundamental threat to U.S. national interests? The wide-ranging chapters explain how foreign policy evolved into national security policy. The book stresses the competing priorities that forced policymakers to make agonizing trade-offs and illuminates the travails of the policymaking process itself. While assessing the course of U.S. national security policy, the author also interrogates the evolution of his own scholarship. Over time, slowly and almost unconsciously, the author's work has married elements of revisionism with realism to form a unique synthesis that uses threat perception as a lens to understand how and why policymakers reconcile the pressures emanating from external dangers and internal priorities.

This book examines the ever changing environment within higher education, including the permanent decline in state support for public universities. It raises the question of how research universities can survive with reduced subsidies and increased competition from both non-profit and growing for-profit institutions. The book offers a strategic framework for determining how tuition and access should be set and how universities should decide on quality and program scope. Throughout the text, real-world examples illustrate successful and unsuccessful adoptions of the book's proposals.

Each phase of Arab–Israeli peacemaking has been inordinately difficult in its own right, and every critical juncture and decision point in the long process has been shaped by U.S. politics and the U.S. leaders of the moment. This book tracks the American determination to articulate policy, develop strategy and tactics, and see through negotiations to agreements on an issue that has been of singular importance to U.S. interests for more than forty years. In 2006, the Study Group on Arab–Israeli Peacemaking was formed, a project supported by the United States Institute of Peace, to develop a set of “best practices” for American diplomacy. The Study Group conducted in-depth interviews with more than 120 policymakers, diplomats, academics, and civil society figures and developed performance assessments of the various U.S. administrations of the post-Cold War period. This book, an objective account of the role of the United States in attempting to achieve a lasting Arab–Israeli peace, is informed by access to key individuals and official archives.

This book considers how policymakers react to dramatic developments on the world stage. Few expected the Berlin Wall to come down in November 1989; no one anticipated the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. American foreign policy had to adjust quickly to an international arena that was completely transformed. The book assembles a number of officials as contributors. These policymakers describe how they went about making strategy for a world fraught with possibility and peril. They offer provocative reinterpretations of the economic strategy advanced by the George H. W. Bush administration, the bureaucratic clashes over policy toward the breakup of the USSR, the creation of the Defense Policy Guidance of 1992, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the writing of the National Security Strategy Statement of 2002, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A group of scholars address these same topics. They examine whether opportunities were seized and whether threats were magnified and distorted. They assess whether academicians and independent experts would have done a better job than the policymakers did. Together, policymakers and scholars impel us to rethink how our world has changed and how policy can be improved in the future.

What is the role of intelligence agencies in strategy and policy? How do policymakers use (or misuse) intelligence estimates? When do intelligence–policy relations work best? How do intelligence-policy failures influence threat assessment, military strategy, and foreign policy? These questions are at the heart of recent national security controversies, including the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq. In both cases the relationship between intelligence and policy broke down—with disastrous consequences. This book explores the complex interaction between intelligence and policy and shines a spotlight on the problem of politicization. Major episodes in the history of American foreign policy have been closely tied to the manipulation of intelligence estimates. The book describes how the Johnson administration dealt with the intelligence community during the Vietnam War; how President Nixon and President Ford politicized estimates on the Soviet Union; and how pressure from the George W. Bush administration contributed to flawed intelligence on Iraq. It also compares the U.S. case with the British experience between 1998 and 2003, and demonstrates that high-profile government inquiries in both countries were fundamentally wrong about what happened before the war.

Policymaking in large bureaucracies is hardly a simple process. Even the most respected policymakers have to contend with obstacles that seemingly have little to do with the issue at hand—office politics, work structure, and shifting political environments. Yet learning to manage such complex environments is necessary for good policymaking. This book outlines the complex thought processes of policymakers as they struggle to influence both foreign and domestic policy decisions from within the United States government bureaucracy. Focusing on three critical situations to illuminate the politics of policy choice—the successful attempt to sell missiles to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s; the Iran-Contra scandal; and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s attempt to regulate smoking as well as the efforts to do the same by an outside lobbyist—the book dissects the intuitive yet rigorous framework that highly skilled policymakers follow in order to influence government outcomes. Throughout, this book offers detailed accounts of the policy process at work in the Reagan, first Bush, and Clinton administrations, from the cabinet level down to the middle tiers of the federal bureaucracy. The book describes the shifting real-world conditions that government officials face as they struggle to shape the policy agenda, offering a look at the complex considerations involved from all perspectives, with concrete examples.

How can policymakers effectively reduce poverty? Most mainstream economists advocate promoting economic growth, on the grounds that it generally reduces poverty while bringing other economic benefits. However, this dominant hypothesis offers few alternatives for economies that are unable to grow, or in places where economic growth fails to reduce or actually exacerbates poverty. This book draws on extensive fieldwork in two Chinese provinces—Yunnan and Guizhou—that are exceptions to the purported relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction. In Yunnan, an outward-oriented developmental state, one that focuses on large-scale, urban development, has largely failed to reduce poverty, even though it succeeded in stimulating economic growth. Provincial policy shaped roads, tourism, and mining in ways that often precluded participation by poor people. By contrast, Guizhou is a micro-oriented state, one that promotes small-scale, low-skill economic opportunities—and so reduces poverty despite slow economic growth. It is no coincidence that this Guizhou approach parallels the ideas encapsulated in the “scientific development view” of China's current president Hu Jintao. After all, Hu, when he was Guizhou's leader, helped establish the micro-oriented state in the province. The book's conclusions have implications for our understanding of development and poverty reduction, economic change in China, and the thinking behind China's policy decisions.

The global financial crisis highlighted the impact on macroeconomic outcomes of recurrent events like business and financial cycles, highs and lows in volatility, and crashes and recessions. At the most basic level, such recurrent events can be summarized using binary indicators showing if the event will occur or not. These indicators are constructed either directly from data or indirectly through models. Because they are constructed, they have different properties than those arising in microeconometrics, and how one is to use them depends a lot on the method of construction. This book presents the econometric methods necessary for the successful modeling of recurrent events, providing valuable insights for policymakers, empirical researchers, and theorists. It explains why it is inherently difficult to forecast the onset of a recession in a way that provides useful guidance for active stabilization policy, with the consequence that policymakers should place more emphasis on making the economy robust to recessions. The book offers a range of econometric tools and techniques that researchers can use to measure recurrent events, summarize their properties, and evaluate how effectively economic and statistical models capture them. These methods also offer insights for developing models that are consistent with observed financial and real cycles.

To mobilize America's intellectual resources to meet the security challenges of the post-9/11 world, US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates observed that “we must again embrace eggheads and ideas.” But the gap between national security policymakers and international relations scholars has become a chasm. This book traces the history of the relationship between the Beltway and the Ivory Tower from World War I to the present day. Recounting key Golden Age academic strategists such as Thomas Schelling and Walt Rostow, the book shows that social science research became most oriented toward practical problem-solving during times of war and that scholars returned to less relevant work during peacetime. Social science disciplines like political science rewarded work that was methodologically sophisticated over scholarship that engaged with the messy realities of national security policy, and academic culture increasingly turned away from the job of solving real-world problems. In the name of scientific objectivity, academics today frequently engage only in basic research that they hope will somehow trickle down to policymakers. Drawing on the lessons of this history as well as a unique survey of current and former national security policymakers, the book offers concrete recommendations for scholars who want to shape government work. The result is a rich intellectual history and an essential wake-up call to a field that has lost its way.

In most post-conflict countries nongovernmental organizations are everywhere, but their presence is misunderstood. This book investigates the unintended outcomes of what it calls the NGO boom in Bosnia and Kosovo. The book argues that when international actors try to rebuild and reconstruct post-conflict countries, they often rely on and look to NGOs. Although policymakers and scholars tend to accept and even celebrate NGO involvement in post-conflict and transitioning countries, they rarely examine why NGOs have become so popular, what NGOs do, or how they affect everyday life. After a conflict, international NGOs descend on a country, local NGOs pop up everywhere, and money and energy flow into strengthening the organizations. In time, the frenzy of activity slows, the internationals go home, local groups disappear from sight, and the NGO boom goes bust. Instead of peace and stability, the embrace of NGOs and the enthusiasm for international peacebuilding turns to disappointment, if not cynicism. For many in the Balkans and other post-conflict environments, NGOs are not an aid to building a lasting peace but are part of the problem because of the turmoil they foster during their life cycles in a given country. This book will be useful to practitioners and policymakers interested in improving peacebuilding, the role of NGOs in peace and development, and the sustainability of local initiatives in post-conflict countries.

During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Laos was positioned to become a major front in the Cold War. Yet American policymakers chose to resist communism in neighboring South Vietnam instead. Two generations of historians have explained this decision by citing logistical considerations: Laos’s landlocked, mountainous terrain made the kingdom an unpropitious place to fight, while South Vietnam better accommodated America’s military forces. This book is a reinterpretation of U.S.-Lao relations in the years leading up to the Vietnam War. It argues that Laos boasted several advantages over South Vietnam as a battlefield, notably its thousand-mile border with Thailand and the fact that the Thai premier was willing to allow Washington to use his nation as a base from which to attack the communist Pathet Lao. More significant in determining U.S. policy in Southeast Asia than strategic appraisals of the Lao landscape were cultural perceptions of the Lao people. The book contends that U.S. policy toward Laos under Eisenhower and Kennedy cannot be understood apart from the traits Americans ascribed to their Lao allies. Drawing on diplomatic correspondence, contemporary press coverage, and the work of iconic figures like “celebrity saint” Tom Dooley, the book finds that the characteristics American statesmen and the American media attributed to the Lao—laziness, immaturity, ignorance, imbecility, and cowardice—differed from traits assigned the South Vietnamese and made Lao chances of withstanding communist aggression appear dubious. The book provides a new perspective on how prejudice can shape policy decisions and even the course of history.

Social mobility needs a re-boot. The narrow, economistic way of measuring it favoured by politicians and academics is unsustainable and is contributing to rising inequality. This timely book provides an alternative, original vision of social mobility and a route-map to achieving it. It examines how the term ‘social mobility’ structures what success means and the impact that has on society. Providing a new holistic approach that encompasses education, the economy and politics, Atherton recasts the relationship with employers, embracing radical opportunities provided by technology and rethinking what higher education means. He also goes beyond employment to incorporate progress in non-work areas of life. Based on the need to improve well-being, not just income or occupation, the book addresses one of the key issues facing 21st century society in a new way and provides valuable insights for policymakers and academics.

At the end of World War II, the federal government announced plans to terminate its public child care programs that had been established during the war for working mothers. In response, women in California protested and lobbied to keep their centers open, even as these programs rapidly vanished in other states. Analyzing the informal networks of cross-class and cross-race reformers, policymakers, and educators, this book traces the rapidly changing alliances among these groups. During the early stages of the childcare movement, feminists, Communists, and labor activists banded together, only to have these alliances dissolve by the 1950s as the movement welcomed new leadership composed of working-class mothers and early childhood educators. In the 1960s, when federal policymakers earmarked child care funds for children of women on welfare and children described as culturally deprived, it expanded child care services available to these groups but eventually eliminated public child care for the working poor. Deftly exploring the structural forces impeding government support for broadly distributed child care as well as the possibilities for partnership and the limitations among key parties such as feminists, Communists, labor activists, working-class mothers, and early childhood educators, the book helps to explain the barriers to a publicly funded comprehensive child care program in the United States.