How did the United States come to have its distinctive workplace-based health insurance system? Why did Progressive initiatives to establish a government system fail? This book explores the history of health insurance in the United States from its roots in the nineteenth-century sickness funds...

To most Americans, the United States tax code has become a vast and confounding puzzle. In 1940, the instructions to the form 1040 were about four pages long. Today they have ballooned to more than a hundred pages, and the form itself contains more than ten schedules and twenty worksheets. The...

There are far more entrepreneurs than most people realize. But the failure rate of new businesses is disappointingly high, and the economic impact of most of them disappointingly low, suggesting that enthusiastic would-be entrepreneurs and their investors all too often operate under a false set...

While everyone wants energy that is clean, cheap, and secure, these goals often conflict: traditional fossil fuels tend to be cheaper than alternative fuels, but they are hardly clean or (in the case of oil) secure. This timely book provides an easy-to-understand explanation of the issues as...

Corporations are often so focused on making short-term profits for their stockholders that they behave in ways that adversely affect their employees, the environment, consumers, American politics, and even the long-term well-being of the corporation, says Lawrence Mitchell in this provocative...

Three decades ago, federal policymakers-Republicans and Democrats-embarked on a general strategy of deregulation. In the electricity, gas delivery, and telecommunications industries, the strategy called for restructuring to separate production from transmission and distribution, followed by...

There is no one better qualified to tell us about the failures of the American financial system and the grotesque abuses that have taken place in recent years than John Bogle, who as founder and former chief executive of the Vanguard mutual funds group has seen firsthand the innermost workings...

As trade flows expanded and trade agreements proliferated after World War II, governments-most notably the United States-came increasingly to use their power over imports and exports to influence the behavior of other countries. But trade is not the only way in which nations interact...

In this immensely timely book, Andrew Yarrow brings the sometimes eye-glazing discussion of national debt down to earth, explaining in accessible terms why federal debt is rising (and will soon rise much faster), what effects it may have on Americans if debt is not brought under control, why our...

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. The Half-Life of Policy Rationales: How New Technology Affects Old Policy Issues -- 1. Technology,Marine Conservation, and Fisheries Management -- 2. The Lighthouse as a Private-Sector Collective Good -- 3. Motorway Financing and...