San Antonio College Library

The early twenty-first century is witnessing a concerted effort to privatize risk--to shift responsibility for the management or mitigation of key risks onto private-sector organizations or directly onto individuals. Proposals to reform Social Security through the creation of private accounts are perhaps the leading example, but in a wide range of areas, similar trends are now playing out. Yet, ironically, pensions and other private systems for responding...

A combination of social history, labor history and a history of the New Deal, interweaving stories of migrant workers, laborers and policy makers. One chapter is devoted to the arts of the period and their portrayals of workers. Summaries of several leftist plays are also given, including plays by Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, and Erskine Caldwell. Also has several pages of photographs of Depression scenes and leaders of the period.

In Illusions of Prosperity, Blau launches a far-reaching assault on the idea that "the market" knows best. Blau writes that while the share of the national income held by the bottom four-fifths of the population (the poor and broad middle class combined) has continued to decline, the top fifth gained 97 percent of the increase in total household income between 1979 and 1994. Blau looks at recent reforms in NAFTA, education, job training, welfare,...