This text provides an essential introduction to the ideas and skills of creative problem solving. It shows how and why people are blocked in their thinking, how this impairs the creative problem solving process, and how creative problem solving techniques can help overcome these difficulties. Theories of creative thinking are critically examined and used to justify the variety of techniques which can be used to find insights into difficult management problems. Contents include: * paradigm shift and the need for creative thinking in management * blocks to creativity and how to overcome them * defining and redefining problems * Extensive explanations and illustrations of the methods and techniques of the creative problem solving process - Lateral Thinking, Morphological Analysis and Synectics * evaluating ideas - qualitative and quantitative approaches * implementing and managing ideas. Using case-studies and case histories, together with extensive diagrams, examples and thought-provoking questions, this textbook provides the most up-to-date and extensive approach to this important topic.

An analysis of eight of the largest US welfare programmes affecting children. These programmes include Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the Food Stamp Program. Medicaid, housing assistance, supplemental feeding programmes such as WIC and School Lunch, Head Start and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Despite the fact that these programmes were designed to serve children, most discussion of welfare reforms focuses on the incentives that the welfare system creates for parents. This analysis represents an evaluation of the evidence regarding the effects of welfare programmes on the children themselves. Programmes such as Medicaid and Head Start have a larger effect on measures of child well-being than cash transfer programs such as AFDC. This suggests an economic rationale for the recent trend towards providing a larger proportion of assistance in-kind.

This book represents the first systematic evaluation of the evidence regarding the effects of welfare programs on the children themselves. In-kind programs such as Medicaid and Head Start have a larger effect on measures of child well-being than cash transfer programs such as AFDC. This suggests an economic rationale for the recent trend towards providing a larger proportion of assistance in-kind.
"Welfare and the Well-Being of Children" provides an analysis of eight of the largest U.S. welfare programs affecting children. These programs include Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the Food Stamp Program, Medicaid, housing assistance, supplemental feeding programs such as WIC and School Lunch, Head Start and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Despite the fact that these programs were designed to serve children, most discussions of welfare reforms focus on the incentives that the welfare system creates for parents.

In one of the most provocative books ever published on America's social welfare system, economist Janet Currie argues that the modern social safety net is under attack.

Unlike most books about antipoverty programs, Currie trains her focus not on cash welfare, which accounts for a small and shrinking share of federal expenditures on poor families with children, but on the staples of today's American welfare system: Medicaid, Food Stamps, Head Start, WIC, and public housing. These programs, Currie maintains, form an effective, if largely invisible and haphazard safety net, and yet they are the very programs most vulnerable to political attack and misunderstanding.

This book highlights both the importance and the fragility of this safety net, arguing that, while not perfect, it is essential to fighting poverty. Currie demonstrates how America's safety net is threatened by growing budget deficits and by an erroneous public belief that antipoverty programs for children do not work and are riddled with fraud.

By unearthing new empirical data, Currie makes the case that social programs for families with children are actually remarkably effective. She takes her argument one step further by offering specific reforms--detailed in each chapter--for improving these programs even more. The book concludes with an overview of an integrated safety net that would fight poverty more effectively and prevent children from slipping through holes in the net. (For example, Currie recommends the implementation of a benefit "debit card" that would provide benefits with less administrative burden on the recipient.)

A complement to books such as Barbara Ehrenreich's bestselling "Nickel and Dimed," which document the personal struggles of the working poor, "The Invisible Safety Net" provides a big-picture look at the kind of programs and solutions that would help ease those struggles. Comprehensive and authoritative, it will prompt a major reexamination of the current thinking on improving the lives of needy Americans.