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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social welfare & social services > Welfare & benefit systems
A core principle of the welfare state is that everyone pays taxes
or contributions in exchange for universal insurance against social
risks such as sickness, old age, unemployment, and plain bad luck.
This solidarity principle assumes that everyone is a member of a
single national insurance pool, and it is commonly explained by
poor and asymmetric information, which undermines markets and
creates the perception that we are all in the same boat. Living in
the midst of an information revolution, this is no longer a
satisfactory approach. This book explores, theoretically and
empirically, the consequences of 'big data' for the politics of
social protection. Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm argue that more
and better data polarize preferences over public insurance and
often segment social insurance into smaller, more homogenous, and
less redistributive pools, using cases studies of health and
unemployment insurance and statistical analyses of life insurance,
credit markets, and public opinion.
A core principle of the welfare state is that everyone pays taxes
or contributions in exchange for universal insurance against social
risks such as sickness, old age, unemployment, and plain bad luck.
This solidarity principle assumes that everyone is a member of a
single national insurance pool, and it is commonly explained by
poor and asymmetric information, which undermines markets and
creates the perception that we are all in the same boat. Living in
the midst of an information revolution, this is no longer a
satisfactory approach. This book explores, theoretically and
empirically, the consequences of 'big data' for the politics of
social protection. Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm argue that more
and better data polarize preferences over public insurance and
often segment social insurance into smaller, more homogenous, and
less redistributive pools, using cases studies of health and
unemployment insurance and statistical analyses of life insurance,
credit markets, and public opinion.
A master class in family therapy--now updated with an additional
ten years' case experience
Few people have had as profound an impact on the theory and
practice of family therapy as Salvador Minuchin. As one commentator
put it, "Memories of his classic sessions have become the standard
against which therapists judge their own best work." This new
edition of the classic, Mastering Family Therapy, offers beginners
and experienced practitioners alike the opportunity to learn the
art and science of family therapy under this pioneering clinician
and teacher.
In elegant clinical interplays, Minuchin, his colleagues Wai-Yung
Lee and George Simon, and eight advanced students provide answers
to such critical questions as:
* What does it take to master the art of family therapy?
* How do I create an effective personal style?
* How can I become an instrument for growth for troubled
families?
This updated Second Edition features:
* An overview and critique of new models of treatment in the field,
especially evidence-based models of family treatment
* New case material highlighting the impact of societal context on
families
* Minuchin's conceptualization of a four-step process of family
assessment, including how history can impact current family
functioning
A new and thoroughly revised version of the classic text,
Mastering Family Therapy, Second Edition is essential reading for
all those who practice, study, or teach family therapy.
The Social Security Handbook: Overview of Social Security Programs,
2022 provides information about Social Security programs and
services, and identifies rights and obligations under the Social
Security laws. The completely updated Handbook, organized by
section number, is a readable, easy-to-understand reference for
comprehending complex Social Security programs and services and
contains information on several topics relevant to Social Security
policies: *How Social Security programs are administered *Who is
and isn't covered under retirement, survivors, disability, and
hospital insurance programs *Who is responsible for submitting the
necessary evidence to support a claim *How claims are processed by
the Social Security office *What Social Security benefits are owed
to you *How to obtain information about your rights under Social
Security policy The Handbook is designed to help users understand
the gray areas of the Social Security Act, and to provide critical
information about rights and obligations under Social Security
laws. The Handbook outlines how to: *Protect your benefits and
avoid benefit loss; *Monitor government agencies and get
information about policy changes that will affect your benefits;
*Make the most of hospital and Medicare coverage; *Determine the
amount of benefits that are subject to federal income taxes; *Check
Social Security earnings and benefits; and *Get up-to-date news
about future Social Security programs and services.
Decades into its existence as a foundational aspect of modern
political and economic life, the welfare state has become a
political cudgel, used to assign blame for ballooning national debt
and tout the need for personal responsibility. At the same time, it
affects nearly every citizen and permeates daily life--in the form
of pension, disability, and unemployment benefits, healthcare and
parental leave policies, and more. At the core of that disjunction
is the question of how we as a society decide who should get what
benefits--and how much we are willing to pay to do so. Probable
Justice traces a history of social insurance from the eighteenth
century to today, from the earliest ideas of social accountability
through the advanced welfare state of collective responsibility and
risk. At the heart of Rachel Z. Friedman's investigation is a study
of how probability theory allows social insurance systems to
flexibly measure risk and distribute coverage. The political genius
of social insurance, Friedman shows, is that it allows for various
accommodations of needs, risks, financing, and political aims--and
thereby promotes security and fairness for citizens of liberal
democracies.
While colonial imposition of the Canadian legal order has
undermined Indigenous law, creating gaps and sometimes distortions,
Indigenous peoples have taken up the challenge of rebuilding their
laws, governance, and economies. Indigenous conceptions of land and
property are central to this project. Creating Indigenous Property
identifies how contemporary Indigenous conceptions of property are
rooted in and informed by their societally specific norms,
meanings, and ethics. Through detailed analysis, the authors
illustrate that unexamined and unresolved contradictions between
the historic and the present have created powerful competing
versions of Indigenous law, legal authorities, and practices that
reverberate through Indigenous communities. They have identified
the contradictions and conflicts within Indigenous communities
about relationships to land and non-human life forms, about
responsibilities to one another, about environmental decisions, and
about wealth distribution. Creating Indigenous Property contributes
to identifying the way that Indigenous discourses, processes, and
institutions can empower the use of Indigenous law. The book
explores different questions generated by these dynamics,
including: Where is the public/private divide in Indigenous and
Canadian law, and why should it matter? How do land and property
shape local economies? Whose voices are heard in debates over
property and why are certain voices missing? How does gender matter
to the conceptualization of property and the Indigenous legal
imagination? What is the role and promise of Indigenous law in
negotiating new relationships between Indigenous peoples and
Canada? In grappling with these questions, readers will join the
authors in exploring the conditions under which Canadian and
Indigenous legal orders can productively co-exist.
The Social Security Act of 1935 must be counted among the most
monumental pieces of legislation ever passed by Congress. Today,
sixty-five years after its enactment, public support for Social
Security remains extremely strong. At the same time, there have
been reports that Social Security is in grave danger of financial
collapse, and numerous groups across the political spectrum have
agitated for its reform. The president has put forward proposals to
rescue Social Security, conservatives argue for its privatization,
and liberals advocate increases in its funding from surplus tax
revenues.
But what is the average person to make of all this? How many
Americans know where the money for Social Security benefits really
comes from, or who wins and loses from the system's overall
operations? Few people understand the current Social Security
system in even its broadest outlines. And yet Social Security
reform is ranked among the most important social issues of our
time.
With "Making Sense of Social Security Reform," Daniel Shaviro makes
an important contribution to the public understanding of the issues
involved in reforming Social Security. His book clearly and
straightforwardly describes the current system and the pressures
that have been brought to bear upon it, before dissecting and
evaluating the various reform proposals. Accessible to anyone who
has an interest in the issue, Shaviro's new work is unique in
offering a balanced, nonpartisan account.
This book provides two main contributions to the existing
literature on the history of welfare institutions and social rights
in the 20th century. First, it is, to the best of our knowledge,
the first research to analyze the cross-country comparison of
welfare policies between the two countries from a historical
prospective. The comparison is particularly interesting as we focus
on two nations with very different institutional settings. On one
side Switzerland, a federal state. On the other Italy, a
centralized state until only very recently. The second important
contribution of this book is the specific set of policies analyzed:
policies aimed at protecting motherhood, childhood and women
workers' rights during the 20th century, a period in which European
society changed drastically.
Black Religious Landscaping in Africa and the United States uses
the prism of spatial theory to explore various aspects of Black
landscapes on the African continent and Black Atlantic diasporic
locations. The volume explores the ways in which Black people in
Africa and in the Diaspora have identified obstacles and barriers
to Black freedoms and have constructed counter-landscapes in
response to these obstacles. The chapters in the book present
diverse representations of the Black creative impulse to form
religious landscapes and construct social, economic and political
spaces that are habitable for Black people and Black bodies. These
landscapes and spaces are physical, psychological and conceptual.
They are gendered and racialized in ways that are shaped by their
specific religious, geographic and socio-historical contexts. These
contexts are influenced by colonial systems and institutions of
modern slavery. The landscapes that people of African descent
struggle to construct, reshape and inhabit are intended to counter
the effects of these oppressive systems and institutions and often
include attempts to reclaim and adapt sources, concepts, tools and
techniques that are indigenous to specific geographical contexts or
ethno-racial groups. The contributors hope in this volume to offer
a look at how the cartographic struggles and constructive
engagements within these Black-inhabited spaces are rooted in Black
movements that support the emancipation of Black lives and Black
bodies from the oppressive forces of dominant geographies.
In many rich democracies, access to financial markets is now a
prerequisite for fully participating in labor and housing markets
and pursuing educational opportunities. Indebted Societies
introduces a new social policy theory of everyday borrowing to
examine how the rise of credit as a private alternative to the
welfare state creates a new kind of social and economic
citizenship. Andreas Wiedemann provides a rich study of income
volatility and rising household indebtedness across OECD countries.
Weaker social policies and a flexible knowledge economy have
increased costs for housing, education, and raising a family -
forcing many people into debt. By highlighting how credit markets
interact with welfare states, the book helps explain why similar
groups of people are more indebted in some countries than others.
Moreover, it addresses the fundamental question of whether
individuals, states, or markets should be responsible for
addressing socio-economic risks and providing social opportunities.
In many rich democracies, access to financial markets is now a
prerequisite for fully participating in labor and housing markets
and pursuing educational opportunities. Indebted Societies
introduces a new social policy theory of everyday borrowing to
examine how the rise of credit as a private alternative to the
welfare state creates a new kind of social and economic
citizenship. Andreas Wiedemann provides a rich study of income
volatility and rising household indebtedness across OECD countries.
Weaker social policies and a flexible knowledge economy have
increased costs for housing, education, and raising a family -
forcing many people into debt. By highlighting how credit markets
interact with welfare states, the book helps explain why similar
groups of people are more indebted in some countries than others.
Moreover, it addresses the fundamental question of whether
individuals, states, or markets should be responsible for
addressing socio-economic risks and providing social opportunities.
For over three decades, the capability approach proposed and
developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum has had a distinct
impact on development theories and approaches because it goes
beyond an economic conception of development and engages with the
normative aspects of development. This book explores the new
frontiers of the capability approach and its links to human
development in three main areas. First, it delves into the
philosophical foundations of the approach, re-examining its links
to concepts of common good, collective agency and epistemic
diversity. Secondly, it addresses its 'operational frontier',
aiming to give inclusive explanations of some of the most advanced
methods available for capability researchers. Thirdly, it offers a
wide range of the applications of this approach, as carried out by
a mix of renowned capability scholars and researchers from
different disciplines. This broad interdisciplinary range includes
the areas of human and sustainable development, inequalities,
labour markets, education, special needs, cities, urban planning,
housing, social capital and happiness studies, among others.
Employment and Development brings together the contributions of
2014 IZA Prize in Labor Economics award winner Gary S. Fields to
address global employment and poverty problems. Most of the poor in
developing countries live in households in which people work, but
still they are poor because the best available work pays so little.
Employment and Development: How Work Can Lead From and Into Poverty
questions how economic growth affects standards of living, how
labor markets work in developing countries, and how different labor
market policies affect well-being. Through a collection of essays,
this book tackles major questions in development and labor
economics. Who benefits from economic growth and who is hurt by
economic decline? Why are distributional factors and labor market
conditions improving in some countries but not in others? How do
developing countries' labor markets work? How would labor market
conditions change if different policies were to be put into effect?
What are the welfare consequences of these changes? Through
distributional analysis, Fields examines inequality, poverty,
income mobility, and economic well-being, and through analysis of
changing labor market conditions he examines employment and
unemployment, employment composition, and labor earnings. By
concentrating on the poor and understanding how the labor markets
work for them and how their labor market earnings might be raised
in response to different policy interventions, Fields addresses
questions of first-order importance for human well-being.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC
BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford
Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and
selected open access locations. All over the world, economic
inclusion has risen to the top of the development discourse. A
well-performing education system is central to achieving inclusive
development - but the challenge of improving educational outcomes
has proven to be unexpectedly difficult. Access to education has
increased, but quality remains low, with weaknesses in governance
comprising an important part of the explanation. The Politics and
Governance of Basic Education explores the balance between
hierarchical and horizontal institutional arrangements for the
public provision of basic education. Using the vivid example of
South Africa, a country that had ambitious goals at the outset of
its transition from apartheid to democracy, it explores how the
interaction of politics and institutions affects educational
outcomes. By examining lessons learned from how South Africa failed
to achieve many of its goals, it constructs an innovative
alternative strategy for making process, combining practical steps
to achieve incremental gains to re-orient the system towards
learning.
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