Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States

Description

Americans claim a strong attachment to the work ethic and regularly profess support for government policies to promote employment. Why, then, have employment policies gained only a tenuous foothold in the United States? Margaret answer this question with two related elements: the power of ideas in policy as a straightforward outcome of public preferences, she shows how ideas frame problems and how interests from around possibilities created by the interplay of ideas and politics.

Margaret Weir is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. With Ira Katznelson, she is the coauthor of Schooling for All: Class, Race and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (Basic Books/University of California).

"Politics and Jobs establishes a new landmark in the study of economic and social policies in the United States. Weir's insightful and analytically powerful book will be widely read and cited for years."-William Julius Wilson, University of Chicago