Search Results

This chapter examines the process of transplanting American housing institutions to Russia through three stages: privatization, establishment of mortgage finance, and the government's attempts to rescue the market from failure. After the collapse of Soviet rule, the new government tried to construct a housing market via the Housing Sector Reform Project (HSRP). The Yeltsin administration and its American advisers had three goals: to reduce the state's role in the housing sector, to enable markets to allocate housing according to resources and preferences, and to convince the public that housing markets are efficient and fair. This chapter first provides an overview of the Russian government's attempts to transplant the housing market during the period 1992–1998 before analyzing why the market failed in the next five years. It then discusses the emergence of the mortgage market in 2005–2009, with particular emphasis on mortgage subsidies and mortgage lending. It also considers the tension between state and market in Russian housing policy and concludes by assessing the consequences of the market failure for Russian housing.

This chapter argues that from the Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s through the anti-Vietnam War movement and the “new politics” of the 1960s and 1970s, liberals and leftists worked together to strengthen individual political and social rights. They sought to advance the interests of the industrial working class within the framework of liberal capitalist society, and to oppose war and empire. The chapter also describes the left edge of the liberal political tradition across the broad sweep of industrial U.S. history, revealing both the way in which the radical left provided idealistic, sometimes utopian fuel for liberal reform projects, as well as the broad influence of liberal ideas on the political left in the United States.

This chapter focuses on the evidence-based medicine (EBM) reform project. Ultimately, if the EBM project is to realize its aspirational goal to improve the quality and efficiency of U.S. medical care, it is necessary but insufficient for research agencies like Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to endure. In the long run, patterns of medical governance must change. PCORI (or whatever entity succeeds it) must develop a reputation among key stakeholders for competence, relevance, and impact that causes policy makers to conclude that supporting EBM is in their own political interest. The chapter then draws on lessons from the literature on U.S. state building to develop strategies to increase the durability of medical governance reform in contemporary American politics. It also briefly reviews the challenges of political sustainability that face any new agency or policy.

This chapter provides the domain of historical documents in order to explore how these boundaries of finance works. Such boundaries are not a mere historical curiosity, but something which is very much with us, and forcefully so. In the light of their historical development, the chapter explores the proliferation of cognitive intermediations, valuations, interpretations, and predictions of market movements. Returning to the issue of status groups, it asks whether, in an era of automated transactions, securities analysts will play an ever growing role as the prominent status group in financial markets. Recent financial scandals, as well as regulatory measures, suggest that this is already happening. With regard to the almost total dependence of contemporary financial transactions on sophisticated technological systems. The chapter raises the question of whether new forms of manipulation and deceit constitute the dark side of what is taken to be rationalization and progress. It also explores a whole series of phenomena, such as fascination with charismatic speculators. In an era of global markets, the boundaries of finance play a crucial role in legitimating both universal market expansion and reform projects, such as the ones concerning pension systems.

This chapter examines the inequalities that emerged in Russia after housing was privatized but not fully commodified. It contrasts empirical trends in housing inequality in Russia with the expectations of the Washington Consensus on housing market transition, focusing on the Housing Sector Reform Project that was supposed to replace Soviet-style socialism with the American variety of capitalism. It also analyzes statistical evidence on inequality and mobility patterns that characterize Russia's housing order, with particular emphasis on who are most likely to obtain separate apartments. It shows that what emerged in Russia is not a housing market, but a regime of property without markets, in which housing is privately owned but incompletely commodified.