Lisa

Moving the Needle

Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what happens when jobs are plentiful and workers are hard to come by? A timely investigation into sustained tight labor markets, Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves benefits, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market.

Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data, as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs highlight the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets.

Moving the Needle is an urgent and original call to implement policies that will maintain the current momentum and prepare for potential slowdowns that may lie ahead

The Globalization Myth

The conventional wisdom about globalization is wrong.

Over the past forty years as companies, money, ideas, and people went abroad, they increasingly looked regionally rather than globally. In The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter, Shannon O’Neil details this transformation and the rise of three major regional hubs in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Current technological, demographic, and geopolitical trends look only to deepen these regional ties. O’Neil argues that this has urgent implications for the United States. Regionalization has enhanced economic competitiveness and prosperity in Europe and Asia. It could do the same for the United States, if only it would embrace its neighbors.

Mason-Dixon

The United States is the product of border dynamics—not just at international frontiers but at the boundary that runs through its first heartland. The story of the Mason-Dixon Line is the story of America’s colonial beginnings, nation building, and conflict over slavery.

Acclaimed historian Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive narrative of the America’s defining border. Formalized in 1767, the Mason-Dixon Line resolved a generations-old dispute that began with the establishment of Pennsylvania in 1681. Rivalry with the Calverts of Maryland—complicated by struggles with Dutch settlers in Delaware, breakneck agricultural development, and the resistance of Lenape and Susquehannock natives—had led to contentious jurisdictional ambiguity, full-scale battles among the colonists, and ethnic slaughter. In 1780, Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated the next phase in the Line’s history. Proslavery and antislavery sentiments had long coexisted in the Maryland–Pennsylvania borderlands, but now African Americans—enslaved and free—faced a boundary between distinct legal regimes. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the Mason-Dixon Line became a federal instrument to arrest the northward flow of freedom-seeking Blacks. Only with the end of the Civil War did the Line’s significance fade, though it continued to haunt African Americans as Jim Crow took hold.

Mason-Dixon tells the gripping story of colonial grandees, Native American diplomats, Quaker abolitionists, fugitives from slavery, capitalist railroad and canal builders, US presidents, Supreme Court justices, and Underground Railroad conductors—all contending with the relentless violence and political discord of a borderland that was a transformative force in American history.

Class Matters

The dirty secret of elite higher education in the United States is that the focus on racial diversity provides cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy and shuts out talented working-class students. The framework of race-based preferences—a well-intentioned program that is deeply unpopular—disproportionately helps upper-middle-class students of color, helps justify a system of legacy preferences for the well-off, and pits working-class people of different races against one another. Major public and private universities have clung to the status quo anyway, because doing so is easier financially than helping disadvantaged students who require financial aid to enroll. These institutions act as if the predominant version of affirmative action is the only way to promote racial diversity, but that simply isn’t true. It’s just cheaper for them.

Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges lays out a different vision. While there has been widespread alarm that racial diversity will plummet now that the Supreme Court has disallowed racial preferences in college admissions decisions, it doesn’t have to be that way. Ironically, in fact, that decision will likely lead to a liberal public policy result – a new robust set of affirmative efforts to enroll low-income and working-class students, a disproportionate share of whom are Black and Latino. In the aftermath of this historic decision on race, upending a half century of precedent, Class Matters lays out a positive agenda for the next stage of elite college admissions that produces economic and racial diversity alike.

No One Left Alone

As the first Black woman to anchor the Boston-area evening news, Liz Walker found herself in an industry that defined the neighborhood of Roxbury largely by violence. But when she became a pastor there, Walker grew close to households marked not only by trauma but by courage–including the family of Cory Johnson, a young father who was murdered. In the wake of their worst nightmare, the family reached out for help.

As Walker’s congregation invited neighbors to gather, they created soft spaces for others’ grief to land. There, in the stories told, the meals shared, the tears shed, and the silences kept, people found a space to receive their sorrow. Out of this ministry grew a grassroots trauma-healing program, one now being replicated across the country.

Through this groundbreaking book, begin to imagine what story-sharing groups might look like in your context. Face the disparity of grief that comes from racism and systemic inequality, and learn to confront legacies of harm. Discover the healing power of listening, as well as the art and skills of accompanying someone in pain. Further, grasp how caregivers, pastors, counselors, and other healers–many with their own wounds–can benefit from soft spaces too.

Marked by history and surrounded by violence and loneliness, we all long for healing. In the tradition of esteemed writers like Bryan Stevenson and Cole Arthur Riley, Walker writes about how community helps us transfigure trauma. There is nothing dramatic about listening to someone’s story or sharing our own. But there is mystery here, and sacredness. No one has to be left alone.

Lisa

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