A new framework for studying markets as the product of organizational planning and understanding the practical limits of market design.
 
The Western energy crisis was one of the great financial disasters of the past century. The crisis began in April 2000, when price spikes started to rattle California’s electricity markets. Decades later, some blame economic fundamentals and ignorant politicians, while others accuse the energy sellers who raided the markets. In Failure by Design, sociologist Georg Rilinger offers a different explanation, one that focuses on the practical challenges of market design. The unique physical attributes of electricity made it exceedingly difficult to introduce markets into the coordination of the electricity system, so market designers were brought in to construct the infrastructures that coordinate how market participants interact. An exercise in social engineering, these infrastructures were intended to guide market actors toward behavior that would produce optimal market results and facilitate grid management. Yet, though these experts spent their days worrying about incentive misalignment and market manipulation, they unintentionally created a system riddled with opportunities for destructive behavior. Rilinger’s analysis not only illuminates the California energy crisis but also develops a broader theoretical framework for thinking about markets as the products of organizational planning and the limits of social engineering, contributing broadly to sociological and economic thinking about the nature of markets.

 

Failure by Design: The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning (Sample)

With employers offering free flu shots and pharmacies expanding into one-stop shops to prevent everything from shingles to tetanus, vaccines are ubiquitous in contemporary life. The past fifty years have witnessed an enormous upsurge in vaccines and immunization in the United States: American children now receive more vaccines than any previous generation, and laws requiring their immunization against a litany of diseases are standard. Yet, while vaccination rates have soared and cases of preventable infections have plummeted, an increasingly vocal cross section of Americans have questioned the safety and necessity of vaccines. In Vaccine Nation, Elena Conis explores this complicated history and its consequences for personal and public health.

Vaccine Nation opens in the 1960s, when government scientists—triumphant following successes combating polio and smallpox—considered how the country might deploy new vaccines against what they called the “milder” diseases, including measles, mumps, and rubella. In the years that followed, Conis reveals, vaccines fundamentally changed how medical professionals, policy administrators, and ordinary Americans came to perceive the diseases they were designed to prevent. She brings this history up to the present with an insightful look at the past decade’s controversy over the implementation of the Gardasil vaccine for HPV, which sparked extensive debate because of its focus on adolescent girls and young women. Through this and other examples, Conis demonstrates how the acceptance of vaccines and vaccination policies has been as contingent on political and social concerns as on scientific findings.

By setting the complex story of American vaccination within the country’s broader history, Vaccine Nation goes beyond the simple story of the triumph of science over disease and provides a new and perceptive account of the role of politics and social forces in medicine.

Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization (Sample)

There is little debate that health care in the United States is in need of reform. But where should those improvements begin? With insurers? Drug makers? The doctors themselves? In Big Med, David Dranove and Lawton Robert Burns argue that we’re overlooking the most ubiquitous cause of our costly and underperforming system: megaproviders, the expansive health care organizations that have become the face of American medicine. Your local hospital is likely part of one. Your doctors, too. And the megaproviders are bad news for your health and your wallet.

Drawing on decades of combined expertise in health care consolidation, Dranove and Burns trace Big Med’s emergence in the 1990s, followed by its swift rise amid false promises of scale economies and organizational collaboration. In the decades since, megaproviders have gobbled up market share and turned independent physicians into salaried employees of big bureaucracies, while delivering on none of their early promises. For patients this means higher costs and lesser care. Meanwhile, physicians report increasingly low morale, making it all but impossible for most systems to implement meaningful reforms.

In Big Med, Dranove and Burns combine their respective skills in economics and management to provide a nuanced explanation of how the provision of health care has been corrupted and submerged under consolidation. They offer practical recommendations for improving competition policies that would reform megaproviders to actually achieve the efficiencies and quality improvements they have long promised.
This is an essential read for understanding the current state of the health care system in America—and the steps urgently needed to create an environment of better care for all of us.

Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America (sample)

In this age of nearly unprecedented partisan rancor, you’d be forgiven for thinking we could all do with a smaller daily dose of politics. In his provocative and sharp book, however, Ned O’Gorman argues just the opposite: Politics for Everybody contends that what we really need to do is engage more deeply with politics, rather than chuck the whole thing out the window. In calling for a purer, more humanistic relationship with politics—one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange—O’Gorman draws on the work of Hannah Arendt (1906–75). As a German-born Jewish thinker who fled the Nazis for the United States, Arendt set out to defend politics from its many detractors along several key lines: the challenge of separating genuine politics from distorted forms; the difficulty of appreciating politics for what it is; the problems of truth and judgment in politics; and the role of persuasion in politics. O’Gorman’s book offers an insightful introduction to Arendt’s ideas  for anyone who wants to think more carefully

Politics for Everybody: Reading Hannah Arendt in Uncertain Times (Sample)

Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history.
 
What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history.
 
Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.

Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America (sample)

A startling discovery—that job market success after college is largely random—forces a reappraisal of education, opportunity, and the American dream.

As a gateway to economic opportunity, a college degree is viewed by many as America’s great equalizer. And it’s true: wealthier, more connected, and seemingly better-qualified students earn exactly the same pay as their less privileged peers. Yet, the reasons why may have little to do with bootstraps or self-improvement—it might just be dumb luck. That’s what sociologist Jessi Streib proposes in The Accidental Equalizer, a conclusion she reaches after interviewing dozens of hiring agents and job-seeking graduates.

Streib finds that luck shapes the hiring process from start to finish in a way that limits class privilege in the job market. Employers hide information about how to get ahead and force students to guess which jobs pay the most and how best to obtain them. Without clear routes to success, graduates from all class backgrounds face the same odds at high pay. The Accidental Equalizer is a frank appraisal of how this “luckocracy” works and its implications for the future of higher education and the middle class. Although this system is far from eliminating American inequality, Streib shows that it may just be the best opportunity structure we have—for better and for worse.

The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay after College (Sample)

An eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and around the world.

Some Americans today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the worst features of American politics. Yet for as long as anyone can remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in American political culture, which ties ideals of liberty and equality to assumptions about the inherent goodness of the text’s design. The Constitutional Bind explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life.

In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home.

Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights.

The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (Sample)

The first critical book on “appropriate technology,” Developing to Scale shows how global health came to be understood as a problem to be solved with the right technical interventions.
 
In 1973, economist E. F. Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful, which introduced a mainstream audience to his theory of “appropriate technology”: the belief that international development projects in the Global South were most sustainable when they were small-scale, decentralized, and balanced between the traditional and the modern. His theory gained widespread appeal, as cuts to the foreign aid budget, the national interests of nations seeking greater independence, postcolonial activism, and the rise of the United States’ tech sector drove stakeholders across public and private institutions toward cheaper tools. In the ensuing decades, US foreign assistance shifted away from massive modernization projects, such as water treatment facilities, toward point-of-use technologies like village water pumps and oral rehydration salts. This transition toward the small scale had massive implications for the practice of global health.
 
Developing to Scale tells the history of appropriate technology in international health and development, relating the people, organizations, and events that shaped this consequential idea. Heidi Morefield examines how certain technologies have been defined as more or less “appropriate” for the Global South based on assumptions about gender, race, culture, and environment. Her study shows appropriate technology to be malleable, as different constituencies interpreted its ideas according to their own needs. She reveals how policymakers wielded this tool to both constrain aid to a scale that did not threaten Western interests and to scale the practice of global health through the development and distribution of technical interventions.

Developing to Scale: Technology and the Making of Global Health (Sample)

The first full-scale biography of Robert Welch, who founded the John Birch Society and planted some of modern conservatism’s most insidious seeds.
 
Though you may not know his name, Robert Welch (1899-1985)—founder of the John Birch Society—is easily one of the most significant architects of our current political moment. In A Conspiratorial Life, the first full-scale biography of Welch, Edward H. Miller delves deep into the life of an overlooked figure whose ideas nevertheless reshaped the American right.

A child prodigy who entered college at age 12, Welch became an unlikely candy magnate, founding the company that created Sugar Daddies, Junior Mints, and other famed confections. In 1958, he funneled his wealth into establishing the organization that would define his legacy and change the face of American politics: the John Birch Society. Though the group’s paranoiac right-wing nativism was dismissed by conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley, its ideas gradually moved from the far-right fringe into the mainstream. By exploring the development of Welch’s political worldview, A Conspiratorial Life shows how the John Birch Society’s rabid libertarianism—and its highly effective grassroots networking—became a profound, yet often ignored or derided influence on the modern Republican Party. Miller convincingly connects the accusatory conservatism of the midcentury John Birch Society to the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party, the Trump administration, Q, and more. As this book makes clear, whether or not you know his name or what he accomplished, it’s hard to deny that we’re living in Robert Welch’s America.
 

A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism (Sample)

Named one of Choice’s “Outstanding Academic Titles of 2024”

A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States.
 
From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do?
 
In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis.  Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied.  Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century.

When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America (Sample)

The music industry’s ongoing battle against digital piracy is just the latest skirmish in a long conflict over who has the right to distribute music. Starting with music publishers’ efforts to stamp out bootleg compilations of lyric sheets in 1929, Barry Kernfeld’s Pop Song Piracy details nearly a century of disobedient music distribution from song sheets to MP3s.
 
In the 1940s and ’50s, Kernfeld reveals, song sheets were succeeded by fake books, unofficial volumes of melodies and lyrics for popular songs that were a key tool for musicians. Music publishers attempted to wipe out fake books, but after their efforts proved unsuccessful they published their own. Pop Song Piracy shows that this pattern of disobedience, prohibition, and assimilation recurred in each conflict over unauthorized music distribution, from European pirate radio stations to bootlegged live shows. Beneath this pattern, Kernfeld argues, there exists a complex give and take between distribution methods that merely copy existing songs (such as counterfeit CDs) and ones that transform songs into new products (such as file sharing). Ultimately, he contends, it was the music industry’s persistent lagging behind in creating innovative products that led to the very piracy it sought to eliminate.

Failure by Design: The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning (Sample)

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