Havoc And Reform

How disasters—that have wrecked work sites throughout American history, in all parts of the nation and all sectors of the economy—have also inspired policy reform. Workplace disasters have wreaked havoc on countless American workers and their families. They have resulted in widespread death and disability as well as the loss of property and savings. These tragic events have also inspired safety reforms that reshaped labor conditions in ways that partially compensated for death, suffering, and social dislocation. In Havoc and Reform, James P. Kraft encourages readers to think about such disastrous events in new ways. Placing the problem of workplace safety in historical context, Kraft focuses on five catastrophes that shocked the nation in the half century after World War II, a time when service-oriented industries became the nation's leading engines of job growth. Looking to growing areas of economic life in the Western Sunbelt, Kraft touches on the 1947 explosion of the Texas City Monsanto Chemical Company plant, the 1956 airliner collision over the Grand Canyon, the hospital collapses following the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, the 1980 fire at the Las Vegas MGM Grand, and the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. These incidents destroyed places of employment that seemed safe and affected a relatively wide range of working people, including highly trained, salaried professionals and blue- and white-collar groups. And each took a toll on the general public, increasing fears that anyone could be in danger of being killed or injured and putting pressure on public officials to prevent similar tragedies in the future. As Kraft considers how these tragedies transformed individual lives and specific work environments, he describes how employees, employers, and public leaders reacted to each event. Presented chronologically, his studies offer a unique and sobering outlook on the rise of a now vital and integral part of the national economy. They also underscore the ubiquity and persistence of workplace disasters in American history while building on and challenging literature about the impact of World War II in the American West. Within a broader frame, they speak to the double-edged nature of modern life.

Education policymaking is traditionally seen as a domestic political process. The job of deciding where students will be educated, what they will be taught, who will teach them, and how it will be paid for clearly rests with some mix of district, state, and national policymakers. This book seeks to show how global trends have produced similar changes to very different educational systems in the United States and Japan. Despite different historical development, social norms, and institutional structures, the U.S. and Japanese education systems have been restructured over the past dozen years, not just incrementally but in ways that have transformed traditional power arrangements. Based on 124 interviews, this book examines two restructuring episodes in U.S. education and two restructuring episodes in Japanese education. The four episodes reveal a similar politics of structural education reform that is driven by symbolic action and bureaucratic turf wars, which has ultimately hindered educational improvement in both countries.

In this volume, leading American health economists provide a critical assessment of the current state of knowledge of insurance market reform that is accessible to both policy-makers and researchers.

Following the 2010 earthquake catastrophe, this book examines the economic and political challenges facing Haiti. It presents an overview of the country's economic history, and seeks new prospects for economic growth and development in the future.

On 24 July 2021, India completed three decades of continuing economic reforms. From P.V. Narasimha Rao to Narendra Modi, this period has seen six successive governments under five Prime Ministers across nine terms, all of whom have added to and collectively transformed the country. They have shifted the political narrative from coercive controls to economic freedom. This book tracks India's economic journey that got a reboot on 24 July 1991 with the unveiling of the Statement on Industrial Policy 1991 and the Union Budget 1991, and celebrates the path of India as the world's sixth-largest economy, with all indicators pointing to it becoming the world's third-largest within this decade. It captures and analyses each aspect of this journey, the constraints and convictions of each government as it treaded the challenging path of reforms.

Over the past twenty-five years, the presidency of Yeshiva University has been a mighty pulpit from which Dr. Norman Lamm has addressed many of the critical issues that have faced world Jewry and confronted Modern Orthodoxy. As spokesman for the institution that he leads, the movement he champions, and the Jewish people he loves, Dr. Lamm has fearlessly addressed such issues as the possibilities for faith and real religious commitment in the modern world: unity within a fragmented and contentious Jewish community, morality within a libertine contemporary society, and the prospect for Zionism and Israel within the world of nations. He has defined the parameters and structured the vision of Modern Orthodoxy as a vibrant and attractive religious phenomenon that combines fidelity to Jewish tradition while embracing the modern world of knowledge and culture, with tolerance for all Jews and civility toward all humankind. This is the definitive work on modern orthodoxy.