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A solution to inequalities wherever we look—in health care, secure retirement, education—is as close as the public library. Or the post office, community pool, or local elementary school. Public options—reasonably priced government-provided services that coexist with private options—are all around us, ready to increase opportunity, expand freedom, and reawaken civic engagement if we will only let them. Whenever you go to your local public library, send mail via the post office, or visit Yosemite, you are taking advantage of a longstanding American tradition: the public option. Some of the most useful and beloved institutions in American life are public options—yet they are seldom c...
Changes in longevity, marriage, and the workplace have undermined Social Security, making the experience of old age increasingly unequal. Anne Alstott’s pragmatic, progressive revision would permit all Americans to retire between 62 and 76 but would provide generous early retirement benefits for workers with low wages or physically demanding jobs.
In order to create a more secure world for children and their parents, Anne Alstott argues, we must fundamentally change the way we think about parents' obligations to children--and about society's obligations to parents. Drawing on the same innovative thinking that propelled her and Bruce Ackerman's influential work The Stakeholder Society, Alstott proposes a solution both pragmatic and controversial. She outlines two unsentimental proposals intended to improve parents' economic options while respecting every individual's own choices about how best to combine paid work and child-rearing. Rejecting both state paternalism and easy libertarianism, Alstott's proposals are bold and unapologetic in their implications.
Must we resign ourselves to a growing chasm between rich and poor? Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott propose an innovative alternative in this thought-provoking book: an eighty thousand dollar grant for every qualifying young adult. The authors analyze this plan from many perspectives and argue that such a citizen's stake would open the way to a society that is more democratic, productive, and free. "A serious, smart book, which also functions as a cogent critique of the inequality of opportunity that has become a given in modern America."-New Yorker "A Big New Idea so bold in its simplicity, so pure in its claims to justice, . . . that the only shock is that it is certain to get a hearing as ...
Tax law is political. This book highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impacts tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume, assembled by two law professors who work in the field, is an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It is a resource not only for scholars and students in the fields of taxation and economics, but also for those who engage with critical race theory, feminist legal theory, queer theory, class-based analysis, and social justice generally. Tax is the one area of law that affects everyone in our society, and this book is crucial to understanding its impact.
Volume V in the acclaimed Real Utopias Project series, edited by Erik Olin Wright. Are there ways that contemporary capitalism can be rendered a dramatically more egalitarian economic system without destroying its productivity and capacity for growth? This book explores two proposals, unconditional basic income and stakeholder grants, that attempt just that. In a system of basic income, as elaborated by Philippe van Parijs, all citizens are given a monthly stipend sufficient to provide them with a no-frills but adequate standard of living. This monthly income is universal rather than means-tested, and it is unconditional - receiving the basic income does not depend upon performing any labor ...
Fifty of today's finest thinkers were asked to let their imaginations run free to advance new ideas on a wide range of social and political issues. They did so as friends, on the occasion of Philippe Van Parijs's sixtieth birthday.
A vital collection bringing together Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 from the acclaimed political and literary magazine Boston Review. From the COVID-19 pandemic to uprisings over police brutality, we are living in the greatest social crisis of a generation. But the roots of these latest emergencies stretch back decades. At their core is a politics of death: a brutal neoliberal ideology that combines deep structural racism with a relentless assault on social welfare. Its results are the failing economic and public health systems we confront today--those that benefit the few and put the most vulnerable in harm's way. Contributors to this volume not only protest these neoliberal roots of our p...