See Government Grow

An award-winning historian's pathbreaking book uses federal education policy from the Great Society to Reagan's New Morning to demonstrate how innovative policies become entrenched irrespective of who occupies the White House.

When Congress endorsed substantial aid to schools in 1965, the idea that the federal government had any responsibility for public education was controversial. Twenty years later, not only had that controversy dissipated, Washington's role in education had dramatically expanded. Gareth Davies explores how both conservatives and liberals came to embrace the once daring idea of an active federal role in elementary and secondary education and uses that case to probe the persistence-and growth-of big government during a supposedly antigovernment era. By focusing on institutional changes in government that accompanied the civil rights revolution, Davies shows how initially fragile programs put down roots, built a constituency, and became entrenched. He explains why the federal role in schools continued to expand in the post-LBJ years as the reform impulse became increasingly detached from electoral politics, centering instead on the courts and the federal bureaucracy. Meanwhile, southern resistance to school desegregation had discredited the "states rights" argument, making it easier for conservatives as well as liberals to seek federal solutions to social problems. Although LBJ's landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act deferred to local control, the legislation of the Nixon-Ford years issued directives that posed greater challenges to traditional federalism than Johnson's grand ideals. As Davies shows, the new political climate saw the achievement of such breakthroughs as mandated bilingual education, school finance reform, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act-measures that, before the seventies, would have been considered unthinkably intrusive by liberals as well as conservatives. And when Ronald Reagan promised to abolish the Department of Education, conservatives worked with liberals to derail his agenda. Davies' surprising study shows that the distancing of American conservatism from its anti-statist traditions helped pave the way for today's "big government conservatism," which enabled a Republican-dominated Congress to pass No Child Left Behind. By revealing the endurance of Great Society values during a period of Republican ascendance, his book opens a window on our political process and offers new insight into what really makes government grow.

This book contains eight papers focusing on factors associated with the growth of government. There is a large literature in public economics, especially public choice, on the determinants of the growth of government. The papers in this volume focus on a number of arguments related to why government has grown in many developed countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapters focus on taxation, trade openness, technology, income changes, and tax compliance. The volume features prominent scholars such as Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, Casey Mulligan, Gordon Tullock, Randall Holcombe, and Tyler Cowen.

The aim of this book is to explain the post-war growth of the public sector in a number of developed economies. The purpose is to see whether scientists familiar with their respective countries' institutional, political and economic framework, but still working as a group, can advance some common factors behind the growth of government.

In contrast to the experience in industrial countries, government sectors in a number of African countries grew rapidly in relative size through the 1980s and early 1990s, implying a differential between measured GDP growth and growth of private sector activity. In these countries, the government sector was also an important source of employment growth. Leaving aside issues of crowding out, boosting growth in this way raises questions of fiscal sustainability. It also urges caution in interpreting growth performance.

How and why has government gotten bigger? “Should be a compulsory assignment for any seminar on modern political culture.” —The Journal of American History American government has evolved over the generations since the mid-nineteenth century. The changing character of these institutions is a critical part of the history of the United States. This engaging survey focuses on the evolution of public policy and its relationship to the constitutional and political structure of government at the federal, state, and local levels. A new chapter in this revised and updated edition also examines the debate about “big government” in recent decades. “A marvelous multidisciplinary synthesis that builds on the findings of historians of national, state, and local government, along with those of economists and political scientists, to provide a coherent account of the rise of modern American governing structures.” —Journal of Interdisciplinary History

This work closely examines the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese economic system to discover where the nation may be headed and what the Chinese experience reveals about emerging market economies.

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year From the front lines of economics and policymaking, a compelling case that economic growth is a force for good and a blueprint for enrolling it in the fight against climate change. Economic growth is wrecking the planet. It’s the engine driving climate change, pollution, and the shrinking of natural spaces. To save the environment, will we have to shrink the economy? Might this even lead to a better society, especially in rich nations, helping us break free from a pointless obsession with material wealth that only benefits the few? Alessio Terzi takes these legitimate questions as a starting point for a riveting journey into the socioeconomic, evolutionary, and cultural origins of our need for growth. It’s an imperative, he argues, that we abandon at our own risk. Terzi ranges across centuries and diverse civilizations to show that focus on economic expansion is deeply interwoven with the human quest for happiness, well-being, and self-determination. Growth, he argues, is underpinned by core principles and dynamics behind the West’s rise to affluence. These include the positivism of the Enlightenment, the acceleration of science and technology and, ultimately, progress itself. Today growth contributes to the stability of liberal democracy, the peaceful conduct of international relations, and the very way our society is organized through capitalism. Abandoning growth would not only prove impractical, but would also sow chaos, exacerbating conflict within and among societies. This does not mean we have to choose between chaos and environmental destruction. Growth for Good presents a credible agenda to enroll capitalism in the fight against climate catastrophe. With the right policies and the help of engaged citizens, pioneering nations can set in motion a global decarbonization wave and in parallel create good jobs and a better, greener, healthier world.