San Antonio College Library

Examines the economic system in the United States, discusses governmental agencies and regulations, and analyzes current problems.

Few Americans realize that over half the revenues of the voluntary service organizations in this country come from federal and state governments. The image of the voluntary agency as neighbor helping neighbor - a thousand small independent points of light - is deceptive, for it masks the increasing dependence of nonprofit service organizations on government funding. In recent years, government's primary response to the growing problems of homelessness,...

Reforming health care, revamping the welfare system, preserving or cutting Social Security, creating employment programs for displaced employees, and revising U.S. social programs to help working parents with children - all of these endeavors and more are part of ongoing national debates about the future of social policy in the United States. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, renowned social scientist Theda Skocpol shows how historical understanding,...

Using the new institutional economics, Professors Alston and Ferrie show how paternalism in Southern agriculture helped shape the growth of the American welfare state in the hundred years following the Civil War. Paternalism was an integral part of agricultural contracts prior to mechanization. It involved the exchange of "good and faithful" labor services for a variety of in-kind services, most notably protection from physical violence. The Southern...

The Workfare State is a fascinating and essential new account of the rise of work as a condition for social assistance in the United States. Work became a requirement for social assistance, reinforcing the low-wage economy of the South and in turn the political bases of the lawmakers responsible for the change. That the same forces that shaped welfare legislation in the 1930s continued to do so decades later, and for similar economic and racial reasons,...