Nancy Folbre challenges the conventional economist's assumption that parents have children for the same reason that they acquire pets--primarily for the pleasure of their company. Children become the workers and taxpayers of the next generation, and "investments" in them offer a significant payback to other participants in the economy. Yet parents, especially mothers, pay most of the costs. The high price of childrearing pushes many families into poverty, often with adverse consequences for children themselves. Parents spend time as well as money on children. Yet most estimates of the "cost" of children ignore the value of this time. Folbre provides a startlingly high but entirely credible estimate of the value of parental time per child by asking what it would cost to purchase a comparable substitute for it. She also emphasizes the need for better accounting of public expenditure on children over the life cycle and describes the need to rethink the very structure and logic of the welfare state. A new institutional structure could promote more cooperative, sustainable, and efficient commitments to the next generation.

"The fifteen case studies in this book place the reader in a wide variety of real public health leadership situations. . . . Each situation is presented to the student with the swirl of communications, conflicts, and conundrums that I have found accompany any difficult public health leadership judgment. The case writers have done a very good job of placing the student in public health decisional situations that, to me, feel like the reality of my own professional life." —William L. Roper, MD, MPH, Dean, School of Public Health The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the Foreword The six chapters and fifteen cases contained in this book challenge students to ask the appropriate questions and stimulate their thinking about public health leadership and management. The chapters provide the student with: a framework and tools for case analysis, and the important environmental context of the health care system in general and public health systems specifically. The 15 public health case studies: are all based on actual situations faced by real public health leaders encompass all of the core disciplines in public health are geographically diverse, and include international content, and provide substantial detail that immerses the student in meaningful decisional simulations. The situations presented by each case are vivid and provide not only a basis for practicing professional public health judgments but also provide a lasting impression that aids in retention of the lessons learned.

Since 1950, the South has undergone the most dramatic political transformation of any region in the United States. The once Solid-meaning Democratic-South is now overwhelmingly Republican, and long-disenfranchised African Americans vote at levels comparable to those of whites. In The Rational Southerner, M.V. Hood III, Quentin Kidd, and Irwin L. Morris argue that local strategic dynamics played a decisive and underappreciated role in both the development of the Southern Republican Party and the mobilization of the region's black electorate. Mobilized blacks who supported the Democratic Party made it increasingly difficult for conservative whites to maintain control of the Party's machinery. Also, as local Republican Party organizations became politically viable, the strategic opportunities that such a change provided made the GOP an increasingly attractive alternative for white conservatives. Blacks also found new opportunities within the Democratic Party as whites fled to the GOP, especially in the deep South, where large black populations had the potential to dominate state and local Democratic Parties. As a result, Republican Party viability also led to black mobilization. Using the theory of relative advantage, Hood, Kidd, and Morris provide a new perspective on party system transformation. Following a theoretically-informed description of recent partisan dynamics in the South, they demonstrate, with decades of state-level, sub-state, and individual-level data, that GOP organizational strength and black electoral mobilization were the primary determinants of political change in the region. The authors' finding that race was, and still is, the primary driver behind political change in the region stands in stark contrast to recent scholarship which points to in-migration, economic growth, or religious factors as the locus of transition. The Rational Southerner contributes not only to the study of Southern politics, but to our understanding of party system change, racial politics, and the role that state and local political dynamics play in the larger context of national politics and policymaking.

Race. The mere mention of the R-word is a surefire conversation-stopper. In this book about AmericaÆs most divisive social issue, Dominic J. Pulera offers a compelling roadmap to our future. This accessible and penetrating analysis is the first to include detailed coverage of AmericaÆs five "racial" groups: whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. The author contends that race will matter to Americans during the twenty-first century because of visible differences, and that differences in physical appearance separating the races are the single most important factor shaping intergroup relations, in conjunction with the social, cultural, economic, and political ramifications that accompany them. Pulera shows how, why, when, and where race matters in the United States and who is affected by it. He explains the ongoing demographic transition of America from a predominantly white country to one where nonwhites are increasingly numerous and consequently more visible. The advent of a multiracial consciousness has tremendous implications for AmericaÆs future, because the racial significance of almost every part of the American experience is increasing as a result. The author concludes on a note of cautious optimism as he explores whether the visible differences dividing Americans are reconcilable.