"From the award-winning journalist and best-selling author of America's Bitter Pill: a tour de force examination of 1) how and why major American institutions no longer serve us as they should, causing a deep rift between the vulnerable majority and the protected few, and 2) how some individuals and organizations are laying the foundation for real, lasting change. In this revelatory narrative covering the years 1967 to 2017, Steven Brill gives us a stunningly cogent picture of the broken system at the heart of our society. He shows us how, over the last half-century, America's core values--meritocracy, innovation, due process, free speech, and even democracy itself--have somehow managed to power its decline into dysfunction. They have isolated our best and brightest, whose positions at the top have never been more secure or more remote. The result has been an erosion of responsibility and accountability, an epidemic of shortsightedness, an increasingly hollow economic and political center, and millions of Americans gripped by apathy and hopelessness. By examining the people and forces behind the rise of big-money lobbying, legal and financial engineering, the demise of private-sector unions, and a hamstrung bureaucracy, Brill answers the question on everyone's mind: How did we end up this way? Finally, he introduces us to those working quietly and effectively to repair the damages. At once a diagnosis of our national ills, a history of their development, and a prescription for a brighter future, Tailspin is a work of riveting journalism--and a welcome antidote to political despair"--

"In recent years, 'Nudge Units' or 'Behavioral Insights Teams' have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over the world, public officials are using the behavioral sciences to protect the environment, promote employment and economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase national security. In this book, Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge, breaks new ground with a deep yet highly readable investigation into the ethical issues surrounding nudges, choice architecture, and mandates, addressing such issues as welfare, autonomy, self-government, dignity, manipulation, and the constraints and responsibilities of an ethical state. Complementing the ethical discussion, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science contains a wealth of new data on people's attitudes towards a broad range of nudges, choice architecture, and mandates"--

" Squeezed weaves together intimate reporting with sharp and lively critique to show how the high cost of parenthood and our increasingly unstable job market have imploded the middle-class American Dream for many families, and offers surprising solutions for how we might change things Families today are squeezed on every side--from high childcare costs and harshemployment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects--from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses--have been wrung out by a system that doesn't support them, and enriches only a tiny elite. Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She offers real solutions to these problems, including outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families are already putting into motion, and argues for the cultural reevaluation of parenthood and caregiving. Written in the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, Squeezedis an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful,itcasts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors"--

"Every day, innovative entrepreneurs pioneer bold economic ideas that change the way we live and work. Companies like Google, Apple, Oracle, Facebook and Twitter aren't the only ones shaping our economic future--there's another trend emerging that will change the ways we work and live. The "sharing economy," or the "collaborative consumption economy," includes companies like TaskRabbit, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Zaarly, and DocVacay who are purveyors of an economic system that revolves around sharing human and physical resources. This new aspect to the economy, Steven Hill argues, is a dead end for U.S. workers, as well as for the national economy. In Raw Deal, Hill shows the "sharing economy" is a new and troubling component to what is an overall bad economy that undermines workers. Vulnerable freelancers and day laborers hire themselves out for ever smaller jobs and amounts of money, and it is only the companies who hire them who reap the big benefits. Hill argues that we must shift the support for American workers to one that is individual-based rather than workplace-based. Countering the onset of the freelance society and the new economy is the new civil rights and labor struggles of our time. This important book answers these questions and provides pragmatic solutions to adapt our economic system to its new realities, launching a new civil rights struggle capable of transforming the freelance society into a stakeholder society"--