BiblioVault - Books by Brown, Lawrence

Baltimore Revisited

Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City

Edited by P. Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, and Joshua Clark Davis

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Nicknamed both “Mobtown” and “Charm City” and located on the border of the North and South, Baltimore is a city of contradictions. From media depictions in The Wire to the real-life trial of police officers for the murder of Freddie Gray, Baltimore has become a quintessential example of a struggling American city. Yet the truth about Baltimore is far more complicated—and more fascinating.

To help untangle these apparent paradoxes, the editors of Baltimore Revisited have assembled a collection of over thirty experts from inside and outside academia. Together, they reveal that Baltimore has been ground zero for a slew of neoliberal policies, a place where inequality has increased as corporate interests have eagerly privatized public goods and services to maximize profits. But they also uncover how community members resist and reveal a long tradition of Baltimoreans who have fought for social justice.

The essays in this collection take readers on a tour through the city’s diverse neighborhoods, from the Lumbee Indian community in East Baltimore to the crusade for environmental justice in South Baltimore. Baltimore Revisited examines the city’s past, reflects upon the city’s present, and envisions the city’s future.

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Health Policy and the Disadvantaged

Lawrence D. Brown, ed.

Duke University Press, 1991

This important collection of essays, originating in a 1989 conference on the disadvantaged in American health care, provides incisive commentary on U.S. health care policy and politics. Examining public responses to health crises and analyzing the political logic of the American community, this volume charts the immobility of U.S. health policy in recent years and points to its disastrous consequences for the 1990s.
Focusing on the particular needs of disadvantaged groups—the elderly, children, people with AIDS, the mentally ill, the chemically dependent, the homeless, the hungry, the medically uninsured—these essays develop strong policy statements. The authors describe the growth in U.S. health care programs, from Kerr-Mills to Medicare, Medicaid, and subsequent revisions, and stress the serious omissions resulting from incremental policy expansion, both in identifying disadvantaged groups and in implementing programs. They report the weakness of the U.S. health care system compared to systems of other technologically developed countries.

Contributors. Deborah A. Stone and Theodore R. Marmor, Judith Feder, Alice Sardell, Bruce C. Vladeck, Michael Lipsky and Marc A. Thibodeau, Daniel M. Fox, William E. McAuliffe, M. Gregg Bloche and Francine Cournos, Lawrence D. Brown, James A. Morrone

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The Private Abuse of the Public Interest

Market Myths and Policy Muddles

Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Despite George W. Bush’s professed opposition to big government, federal spending has increased under his watch more quickly than it did during the Clinton administration, and demands on government have continued to grow. Why? Lawrence Brown and Lawrence Jacobs show that conservative efforts to expand markets and shrink government often have the ironic effect of expanding government’s reach by creating problems that force legislators to enact new rules and regulations. Dismantling the flawed reasoning behind these attempts to cast markets and public power in opposing roles, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest urges citizens and policy makers to recognize that properly functioning markets presuppose the government’s ability to create, sustain, and repair them over time.

The authors support their pragmatic approach with evidence drawn from in-depth analyses of education, transportation, and health care policies. In each policy area, initiatives such as school choice, deregulation of airlines and other carriers, and the promotion of managed care have introduced or enlarged the role of market forces with the aim of eliminating bureaucratic inefficiency. But in each case, the authors show, reality proved to be much more complex than market models predicted. This complexity has resulted in a political cycle—strikingly consistent across policy spheres—that culminates in public interventions to sustain markets while protecting citizens from their undesirable effects. Situating these case studies in the context of more than two hundred years of debate about the role of markets in society, Brown and Jacobs call for a renewed focus on public-private partnerships that recognize and respect each sector’s vital—and fundamentally complementary—role.

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