Books in the Wildavsky Forum Series series

The Western cultural consensus based on the ideas of free markets and individualism has led many social scientists to consider poverty as a personal experience, a deprivation of material things, and a failure of just distribution. This book finds this dominant tradition of social thought about poverty and well-being to be full of contradictions.

"e;Do you know if you are going to heaven?"e; Shortly after being appointed the first Director of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives-the "e;faith czar"e;-John J. DiIulio Jr. was asked this question. Suddenly DiIulio, a Catholic Democrat who pioneered programs for inner-city children, was acutely aware that he was no longer a private citizen who might have humored the television evangelist standing before him. Now he was, as he recalls in his introduction-"e;responsible for assisting the president in faithfully upholding the Constitution . . . and faithfully acting in the public interest without regard to religious identities."e; Using his brief tenure in the George W. Bush administration as a springboard, this lively, informative, and entertaining book leaps into the ongoing debate over whether as a nation America is Christian or secular and to what degree church-state separation is compelled by the Constitution. Avoiding political pieties, DiIulio makes an impassioned case for a middle way. Written by a leading political scholar, Godly Republic offers a fast-paced, faith-inspired, and fact-based approach to enhancing America's civic future for one and all.

In Bounded Rationality and Politics, Jonathan Bendor considers two schools of behavioral economics-the first guided by Tversky and Kahneman's work on heuristics and biases, which focuses on the mistakes people make in judgment and choice; the second as described by Gerd Gigerenzer's program on fast and frugal heuristics, which emphasizes the effectiveness of simple rules of thumb. Finding each of these radically incomplete, Bendor's illuminating analysis proposes Herbert Simon's pathbreaking work on bounded rationality as a way to reconcile the inconsistencies between the two camps. Bendor shows that Simon's theory turns on the interplay between the cognitive constraints of decision makers and the complexity of their tasks.

With a timely new foreword by Robert Frank, this groundbreaking book explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today. Although middle-income families don't earn much more than they did several decades ago, they are buying bigger cars, houses, and appliances. To pay for them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off "e;expenditure cascades"e; that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class. Writing in lively prose for a general audience, Frank employs up-to-date economic data and examples drawn from everyday life to shed light on reigning models of consumer behavior. He also suggests reforms that could mitigate the costs of inequality. Falling Behind compels us to rethink how and why we live our economic lives the way we do.

In the United States, the soaring cost of health care has become an economic drag and a political flashpoint. Moreover, although the country's medical spending is higher than that of any other nation, health outcomes are no better than elsewhere, and in some cases are even worse. In The Quality Cure, renowned health care economist and former Obama advisor David Cutler offers an accessible and incisive account of the issues and their causes, as well as a road map for the future of health care reform-one that shows how information technology, realigned payment systems, and value-focused organizations together have the power to resolve this seemingly intractable problem and transform the US health care system into one that is affordable, efficient, and effective.

Just how well can democracy incorporate knowledge and expertise through public policy analysts? This book examines the evolution of policy analysis, its use in legislative and regulatory bodies, and its use within the federal executive branch to improve governmental services.

Just how well can democracy incorporate knowledge and expertise through public policy analysts? This book examines the evolution of policy analysis, its use in legislative and regulatory bodies, and its use within the federal executive branch to improve governmental services.