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Editor's Note, Padraig O’Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

This issue of the journal publishes the proceedings of the two “Youth at Risk” seminars the Family Impact Institute conducted at the Massachusetts State House in April 2012 and March 2013, for state policy makers, including legislators, legislative aides, the governor’s staff, and agency representatives. What makes these seminars unique is that they focus researchers’ attention on what policy makers want and not on what researchers think they should want.

Among the hardest hit by the recession were the poor, whose numbers swelled when tens of thousands of the new jobless and their families joined them. Many of these families, …

Home And Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

From the Editor's Note by Padraig O'Malley: Shaun O’Connell has lost none of his touch. In “Home and Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America,” O’Connell juxtaposes two novels: Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (1998) and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) and reveals the parallels and contrasts that enrich the discussion of Irish and Irish American identities. Toibin, an Irish writer, would have us see an America, land of the free, as an open, inviting place but exacting in redeeming promises made; McDermott, an American writer, portrays an Ireland that is magical, a little bit of heaven, but finally a closed and bitter place. …

Devolution: The Retreat Of Government, Judith Kurland

New England Journal of Public Policy

Devolution as practiced in much of the world is decentralization of program authority and responsibility to achieve greater administrative efficiency or program standards. Devolution as practiced by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress is not that, nor is it a diminution of federal power and the strengthening of states’ rights. Rather, it is a radical restructuring of government to prevent the expenditure of funds for traditional Democratic programs of the New Deal and the Great Society, and to prohibit states from being either more generous in social programs or more stringent in regulating industry than this administration desires.

This …