The health of American democracy ultimately depends on our willingness and ability to work together as citizens and stakeholders in our republic. Government policies often fail to promote such collaboration. But if designed properly, they can do much to strengthen civic engagement. That is the central message of Carmen Sirianni's eloquent new book. Rather than encourage citizens to engage in civic activity, government often puts obstacles in their way. Many agencies treat citizens as passive clients rather than as community members, overlooking their ability to mobilize assets and networks to solve problems. Many citizen initiatives run up against rigid rules and bureaucratic silos, causing all but the most dedicated activists to lose heart. The unfortunate—and unnecessary—result is a palpable decline in the quality of civic life. Fortunately, growing numbers of policymakers across the country are figuring out how government can serve as a partner and catalyst for collaborative problem solving. Investing in Democracy details three such success stories: neighborhood planning in Seattle; youth civic engagement programs in Hampton, Virginia; and efforts to develop civic environmentalism at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The book explains what measures were taken and why they succeeded. It distills eight core design principles that characterize effective collaborative governance and concludes with concrete recommendations for federal policy.

In this no-holds-barred look at the nation's money system, Harrington gives investors the strategies to thwart corporate domination of the earth's resources, decentralize the economy, restore democracy, tame corruption, and regain community control of financial resources.

In Governing for the Long Term, Alan M. Jacobs investigates the conditions under which elected governments invest in long-term social benefits at short-term social cost. Jacobs contends that, along the path to adoption, investment-oriented policies must surmount three distinct hurdles to future-oriented state action: a problem of electoral risk, rooted in the scarcity of voter attention; a problem of prediction, deriving from the complexity of long-term policy effects; and a problem of institutional capacity, arising from interest groups' preferences for distributive gains over intertemporal bargains. Testing this argument through a four-country historical analysis of pension policymaking, the book illuminates crucial differences between the causal logics of distributive and intertemporal politics and makes a case for bringing trade-offs over time to the center of the study of policymaking.

"This book examines how democratic governments manage long-term policy challenges, asking how elected politicians choose between providing policy benefits in the present and investing in the future"--

'Pontusson's book does an excellent job in taking a critical look at Swedish investment politics. . . . On the whole, this book is the best overall explanation of Swedish investment politics. It gives the reader a clear basis for understanding the rise of Swedish social democracy and provides a detailed examination of the developments of industrial policy, codetermination, and wage-earner funds.'--Contemporary Sociology

For decades, free trade was advocated as the vehicle for peace, prosperity, and democracy in an increasingly globalized market. More recently, the proliferation of foreign direct investment has raised questions about its impact upon local economies and politics. Here, seven scholars bring together their wide-ranging expertise to investigate the factors that determine the attractiveness of a locale to investors and the extent of their political power. Multinational corporations prefer to invest where legal and political institutions support the rule of law, protections for property rights, and democratic processes. Corporate influence on local institutions, in turn, depends upon the relative power of other players and the types of policies at issue.

This book offers a structured, deductive approach to Austrian investing, beginning with an analysis of the current investing paradigm. There are five economic concepts on which the Austrian School of Economics has a unique view: Entrepreneurship, Class Probability, Capital, the Interest Rate, and Institutions. This book explains, lesson by lesson, how each of theseshapes our thinking about investing. If we follow them through their logical consequences, they leave us with a unique approach to investing. Except for the theory of probability, there has not been a comprehensive analysis of the linkages between these concepts, when it comes to investing. Although they would have been obvious to the average investor before the age of democracy, since the French and American revolutions, government interventions have steadily transformed the way we think about them (and the way we invest). Above all, Entrepreneurship and Institutions are downplayed today, while investors use Case Probability, and confuse the concepts of Money and Capital. This book offers a historical review of these interventions, to shed light on how we went from what was common sense to the status quo. Offering a sometimes technical analysis, the book examines a series of fundamental investment fallacies, their origins and how not to fall for them.