Russell Sage Foundation Books at Harvard University Press

Here Sen deftly argues that the dictum “all people are created equal” serves largely to deflect attention from the fact that we differ in age, gender, talents, physical abilities, material advantages, and social background. He argues for concentrating on higher, more basic values: individual capabilities and freedom to achieve objectives.

Confronting Poverty proposes thoughtful reforms in employment and training, child support, health care, education, welfare, immigration, and urban policies, all crafted from the successes, as well as the failures, of policies over the past three decades.

The authors challenge the view that restraining government social spending and cutting welfare should be our top domestic priorities. Instead, they propose policies that would reduce poverty by supplementing the earnings of low-wage workers and increasing the employment prospects of the jobless.

This collection consists of Richard J. Herrnstein’s most important and original contributions to the social and behavioral sciences—his papers on choice behavior in animals and humans and on his discovery and elucidation of a general principle of choice called the matching law.

The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States.

Since the introduction of the income tax in 1913, controversy has raged about how heavily to tax the rich. Notably absent from this debate is hard evidence about the actual impact of taxes on the behavior of the affluent. This book presents evidence by leading economists of the effects of taxes on the formation of businesses, the supply of labor, the form of executive compensation, the accumulation of wealth, the allocation of portfolios, and the realization of capital gains.

This book explores the growing tension between the requirements of employers for a flexible work force and the ability of parents and communities to nurture their children and provide for their health, welfare, and education. Increasingly, workers must be able to move across firms and even across types of work, as jobs get redefined, thus separating workers from the social institutions--family, long-term jobs, and stable communities--that sustained economic expansions in the past and supported the growth and development of the next generation.

Michèle Lamont takes us into the world inhabited by working-class men—the world as they understand it. Interviewing black and white working-class men who, because they are not college graduates, have limited access to high-paying jobs and other social benefits, she constructs a revealing portrait of how they see themselves and the rest of society. They find their identity and self-worth in their ability to discipline themselves and conduct responsible but caring lives. This book also opens up a wider perspective by examining American workers in comparison with French workers. By singling out different “moral offenders” in the two societies, workers reveal contrasting definitions of “cultural membership” that help us understand and challenge the forms of inequality found in both societies.

In spite of an unprecedented period of growth and prosperity, the poverty rate in the U.S. remains high relative to the levels of the early 1970s and relative to those in many industrialized countries today. This book brings the problem of poverty in America to the fore, focusing on its nature and extent at the dawn of the 21st century.

In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg explores American immigration policy from the colonial period to the present, discussing how it has been used as a tool of nation building. This is an authoritative account of American immigration history and the political and social factors that brought it about. Zolberg’s book shows how America has struggled to shape the immigration process to construct the kind of population it desires.

In this bold and groundbreaking work, Nancy MacLean shows how African-American and later Mexican-American civil rights activists and feminists concluded that freedom alone would not suffice: access to jobs at all levels is a requisite of full citizenship. Tracing the struggle to open the American workplace to all, MacLean chronicles the cultural and political advances that have irrevocably changed our nation over the past fifty years.

From the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” in the U.S. to the rise of Le Pen’s National Front in France, conservative politicians in the last thirty years have capitalized on voters’ resentment of ethnic minorities to win votes and undermine government aid to the poor. Combining historical analysis and empirical rigor with major theoretical advances, the authors of this book construct a theoretical model to calculate the effect of voters’ attitudes about race and immigration on political parties’ stances on income distribution.

Now that the welfare system has been largely dismantled, the fate of America’s poor depends on what happens to them in the low-wage labor market. In this timely volume, Newman explores whether the poorest families benefited from the tight labor markets and good economy in the late 1990s.