Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Housing Market 'Reset' And The Future Of American Housing Policy, Alan Mallach

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

The foreclosure crisis and the collapse in housing prices that have engulfed much of the United States are fundamentally changing the ways in which the American housing market works, challenging many of the assumptions about the role of housing and the housing market that we have held for the past decades. In my lecture, I will discuss how and why those changes are taking place and how they vary across the United States and explore what they mean for American housing policy in the future, and how they are making us reconsider how we think about home ownership, rental housing, …

Deficits And Disaster, Ron Haskins

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

The nation’s deficit path is unsustainable. The public debt is likely to increase by $1 trillion per year until 2020, and then increase at an ever increasing rate after that. Far from helping the nation address its exploding deficit, the last two administrations and every congress since 2000 have taken actions that have intensified the problem. It is time for Americans to face the high probability that due most fundamentally to their continuing demand for high spending and low taxes, sometime in the next decade or so one or more catastrophes will strike America. This presentation will lay out the …

Skew Selection Theory Applied To The Wealth And Welfare Of Nations, Susan F. Allen, Deby L. Cassill

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

According to skew selection theory, working citizens who build wealth and, at the same time, share portions of their wealth with those in need are more likely to survive economic downturns than citizens who hoard wealth. In this article, skew selection is employed as a theoreticalframework to support governmental efforts to develop social policies that protect the income of working citizens and, at the same time, provide for vulnerable, non-working children and elders. To illustrate its applicability, the social policies of Japan, Sweden and the United States-all of which are challenged by decaying ratios of working to non-working citizens-are compared …

May Roundtable: The Downfall Of Human Rights? Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“The Downfall of Human Rights” by Joshua Kurlantzick. Newsweek. February 19, 2010.

Woman's Work: Female Lighthouse Keepers In The Early Republic, 1820–1859, Virginia Neal Thomas

History Theses & Dissertations

During the Early Republic between 1820 and 1859, women, on average, comprised about five percent of the principal lighthouse keepers in the United States. These women represent a unique exception to the experience of the majority of working women during the Early Republic. They received equal pay to men, and some supervised lower-paid male assistants. They filled these predominately male positions because lighthouse work had much in common with stereotypical woman's work, they were most often related to the previous keeper, and they fit within cultural ideals of gender roles. Inquiry beyond the romantic image crafted for these light keepers …

Costs Of Defending Against Rising Sea Levels And Flooding In Mid-Atlantic Metropolitan Coastal Areas: The Basic Issues, James V. Koch

Economics Faculty Publications

Rising ocean levels have resulted in increasingly severe flooding in numerous metropolitan coastal areas. What would it cost to minimize or eliminate such damage? Relatively little economic work has been done to provide an answer, at least partially because some authorities believe attempts to deal with flooding ultimately are futile. Further, discussions of funding always involve massive welfare transfers from the non-flooded to the flooded. The cost of erecting a single mile of new sea wall exceeds $35 million in 2009 dollars and annual maintenance costs range between 5 and 10 percent.

Benchmarking And Evaluating The Comparative Efficiency Of Urban Paratransit Systems In The United States: A Data Envelopment Analysis Approach, Hokey Min, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty Scholarship

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 encouraged public transit authorities to reassess the way they serve aging populations and physically handicapped individuals requiring door-to-door services. As the demand for paratransit services rose dramatically the last few years due to a growing number of aging baby-boomers and injured Iraq-Afghanistan War veterans, many public transit authorities have been faced with the dilemma of meeting the growing demand while controlling costs in times of ongoing budget crises. To help public transit authorities better cope with such a dilemma, this paper evaluates the comparative operating efficiency of 75 selected paratransit agencies in …