Suchergebnisse

Untersuchung der amerikanischen Beschäftigungspolitik seit dem New Deal unter besonderer Berücksichtigung zweier für die Entwicklung der Beschäftigungspolitik entscheidender Phasen: 1) die Transformation von Vorstellungen Keynes'scher Politik in den späten 40er Jahren; 2) der Kampf gegen die Armut (war on poverty) seit 1964. Im Ausblick für die 90er Jahre werden Anregungen für eine neue Arbeitsmarktpolitik bzw. eine Wiederbelebung staatlicher Beschäftigungspolitik gegeben. (AuD-Hng)

This paper investigates representations of American foreign policy in contemporary American historical fiction of the Third Crusade. In this paper, I argue that in his novel The Swords of Faith (2010), Richard Warren Field deploys the analogy of the Third Crusade to reflect on the current American foreign policy. I maintain that Field creates historical parallels between Richard the Lionheart?s foreign policies towards the East in the medieval times and those of the United States in our modern times since the Cold War. Through presenting Richard as frequently deploying religious, moral and humanitarian and self-defence discourses to justify his military interference in other countries? affairs without exposing his real motivations, Field, by means of historical analogy, constructs America?s contemporary foreign policy as a continuation to a long history of overseas interference where the American administrations never state to the public the real intentions behind their interventionist acts. I contend that ultimately, Field tries to urge for more public awareness of American foreign relationships with other countries.

The United States spends billions of dollars annually on social and economic policies aimed at improving the lives of its citizens, but the health consequences associated with these policies are rarely considered. In Making Americans Healthier, a group of multidisciplinary experts shows how social and economic policies seemingly unrelated to medical well-being have dramatic consequences for the health of the American people. Most previous research concerning problems with health and healthcare in the United States has focused narrowly on issues of medical care and insurance coverage, but Making Americans Healthier demonstrates the important health consequences that policymakers overlook in traditional cost-benefit evaluations of social policy. The contributors examine six critical policy areas: civil rights, education, income support, employment, welfare, and neighborhood and housing. Among the important findings in this book, David Cutler and Adriana Lleras-Muney document the robust relationship between educational attainment and health, and estimate that the health benefits of education may exceed even the well-documented financial returns of education. Pamela Herd, James House, and Robert Schoeni discover notable health benefits associated with the Supplemental Security Income Program, which provides financial support for elderly and disabled Americans. George Kaplan, Nalini Ranjit, and Sarah Burgard document a large and unanticipated improvement in the health of African-American women following the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Making Americans Healthier presents ground-breaking evidence that the health impact of many social policies is substantial. The important findings in this book pave the way for promising new avenues for intervention and convincingly demonstrate that ultimately social and economic policy is health policy.

The literature on policy learning has focused our attention on how governments 'puzzle' over society's great problems and foster solutions based on the experience of previous policy as well as new knowledge and ideas. While policy learning is often seen as a linear process, this article aims to show how the learning process can also be circular in the sense that the previous policy from which a given new policy departs is constructed over and over again, which should not be confused with actual past policy. The argument is backed by a comparative policy analysis of lifestyle-focused public health policy in Denmark and the United States over the past three decades. While downplaying their belief in traditional medical treatment technology, most Western nations shifted their health policy objectives in the mid-1970s in order to get into what one report termed 'the business of modifying behaviour', i.e. to counter lifestyle diseases by getting citizens to exercise more, but eat, drink, and smoke less. Based on a study of three decades of Danish and American public health programs, the article shows how two very different health care systems experienced a similar pattern of policy failure. While both systems continually experience that citizens fail to live by what they know is healthy, public health policies always seem to able to generate strong optimism for each new policy program, because the values responsible for policy failure are associated with the medical treatment paradigm that the policies depart from, but never with prevention itself.

In a time of record-setting deficits and concern over burgeoning debt, perhaps no single issue is more hotly debated than how to fix Social Security, a program long called the ""third rail"" of American politics because it killed the political career of anyone who touched it. But the immediacy of America's fiscal problems presents an opportunity to reform and renew one of the largest expenditures in the federal budget. Fixing Social Security requires us to understand the purpose of the program, how it was design