Search results

Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part 1. The Soviet Union -- Chapter 1. The Health Crisis in the Soviet Union -- Chapter 2. A Second Look at the Health Crisis in the Soviet Union -- Chapter 3. Human Factors in Soviet Economic Development -- Chapter 4. Administering Utopia -- Chapter 5. Understanding, and Misunderstanding, Soviet Power -- Part 2. Communist China -- Chapter 6. What We Now Know About China -- Chapter 7. Material Poverty in the People's Republic of China in International Perspective -- Part 3. Other Experiments -- Chapter 8. The Cost of Pax Sovietica -- Chapter 9. Literacy and Health: The Cuban "Model" -- Chapter 10. Health of an Empire: Poverty and Social Progress in Eastern Europe, Mongolia, Vietnam, and Cuba -- Chapter 11. Progress Against Material Poverty in Communist and Non-Communist Countries in the Postwar Era -- Part 4. Conclusion -- Chapter 12. Communism and the Plight of the Poor -- Index

"One third of the world's population today lives under governments that consider themselves to be Marxist-Leninist. In many of these places, severe poverty was endemic in the years before Communist authorities came to power. Communist governments claim to have a special understanding into and effectiveness in dealing with problems of poverty. Marxist-Leninist rulers have been in power for nearly thirty years in Cuba, nearly forty years in China, and over sixty-five years in the Soviet Union. How do the poor fare in such places today? Western intellectuals often assume there is an inevitable tradeoff between bread and freedom under communism. What populations lose in the way of civil and political rights, they gain in social guarantees that protect them against material hardship. In The Poverty of Communism, Nick Eberstadt challenges this assumption and shatters it. He shows that Communist governments in a wide variety of settings have been no more successful in attending to the material needs of the most vulnerable segments of the populations they govern than non-Communist governments against which they might most readily be compared. Indeed, measured by the health, literacy, and nutrition of their people, Communist governments may today be less effective in dealing with poverty than are non-Communist governments.The Poverty of Communism is a pathbreaking investigation. In a series of separate studies, Eberstadt analyzes the performance of Communist governments in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and Cuba. This is the first scholarly effort to assess the record of Communist governments with respect to poverty in a detailed and comprehensive fashion. Well written, carefully argued, and reflecting a sweeping range of knowledge, The Poverty of Communism will be of interest to specialists in the countries investigated as well as those concerned with comparative economic and political development. Above all, it gives test"--Provided by publisher.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part 1: Men Without Work -- 1: The Collapse of Work in the Second Gilded Age -- 2: Hiding in Plain Sight: An Army of Jobless Men, Lost in an Overlooked Depression -- 3: Postwar America's Great Male Flight from Work -- 4: America's Great Male Flight from Work in Historical and International Perspective -- 5: Who Is He? A Statistical Portrait of the Un-Working American Man -- 6: Idle Hands: Time Use, Social Participation, and the Male Flight from Work

In A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic, one of our country's foremost demographers, Nicholas Eberstadt, details the exponential growth in entitlement spending over the past fifty years. As he notes, in 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government's total outlays. Today, entitlement spending accounts for a full two-thirds of the federal budget. Drawing on an impressive array of data and employing a range of easy- to- read, four color charts, Eberstadt shows the unchecked spiral of spending on a range of entitlements, everything from medicare to disability payments. But Eberstadt does not just chart the astonishing growth of entitlement spending, he also details the enormous economic and cultural costs of this epidemic. He powerfully argues that while this spending certainly drains our federal coffers, it also has a very real,long-lasting, negative impact on the character of our citizens. Also included in the book is a response from one of our leading political theorists, William Galston. In his incisive response, he questions Eberstadt's conclusions about the corrosive effect of entitlements on character and offers his own analysis of the impact of American entitlement growth.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- Part I: Population Problems in the United States -- 1. Prosperous Paupers and Affluent Savages: The New Challenges to Social Policy in America -- 2. Why Babies Die in D.C -- 3. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Epidemiologist -- Part II: Population Problems Under Communism -- 4. Mortality and the Fate of Communist States -- 5. The Soviet Way of Death -- 6. Health and Mortality in Eastern Europe: Retrospect and Prospect -- 7. Demographic Shocks in Eastern Germany, 1989-1993 -- Part III: Global Population Problems -- 8. Justifying Population Control: The Latest Arguments -- 9. Starved for Ideas: Misconceptions that Hinder the Battle Against World Hunger -- 10. Population Prospects for Eastern Asia to 2015: Trends and Implications -- 11. What If It's a World Population Implosion? Speculations about Global De-Population -- Index.

China's population prospects over the decades ahead are largely shaped by pro-longed sub-replacement childbearing, likely to have been in effect for half a century by 2040. China's population is on track to peak in the coming decade and to decline at an accelerating pace thereafter. Between 2015 and 2040, China's population aged 50 and older is on course to increase by roughly one-quarter of a billion people; the under-50 population is set to decline by a roughly comparable magnitude. China is set to experience an extraordinarily rapid surge of population aging, with especially explosive population growth for the 65-plus group, even as its working-age population (conventionally defined as the age 15–64 group) progressively shrinks. Additionally, a number of demographic changes underway now constitute "wild cards" for China's future: including (1) the impending "marriage squeeze" due to abnormal sex ratios at birth from the one-child policy era; (2) the problem of mass urbanisation under a system that consigns migrants in urban areas to an officially inferior status; and (3) the revolutionary changes in the Chinese family structure, which portend a dramatic departure from previous arrangements on which Chinese society and economy depended.

Our species has freed itself from formerly binding demographic patterns and limits.