Social Security is the foundation of retirement and disability income support in the United States, paying out $615 billion in benefits in 2008 to nearly 51 million beneficiaries. Although the core functions of Social Security remain largely unchanged, the system now faces an exceptional challenge: It is not financially sustainable in its current form. In the coming years, efforts to meet this ...

medicine, because they are "personal biographies". The "ideas and methods" of these civil servants were part of the lives of real people: the impersonal and impassioned Chadwick and the diplomatic but authoritarian Simon. Finer's account of the scandal of the Andover workhouse for example displays vividly the working of Victorian government through the personal frustrations of Chadwick. Amongst...

Recent social security reforms in Denmark have had the effect of simplifying program administration and expanding the means-testing of benefits, thereby presumably reducing future program costs.’ At the beginning of 1984, the three old-age, survivor, and disability insurance (OASDI) groups were reduced to only two groups-old-age pensioners in one, and all other potential social security recipie...

A reform of a pay-as-you-go social security makes the pensioners worse off and the working generations better off in the period of the reform (in a dynamically efficient economy without altruism). The observed reluctance across all age groups to support such reforms is usually explained by the insurance properties of these schemes. I propose an alternative in a two sector setting. Since the old...

For several years, reports from the Trustees of the Social Security system have warned us that at the current rate of benefits and given the current age structure of our population, the Social Security system will go broke sometime between 2038 and 2042. To address Social Security Trustees’ concerns, President Bush, in his postelection speech, reported that one of the legacies of his administra...

The purpose of this piece is to explore how we might go about understanding the political conditions for poverty alleviation via agrarian reform. It argues that the traditional conceptualization of agrarian reform and its politics -which presents a near impossibility in typical political configurations -is too limiting. The traditional economic focus on intersection of landed rights, agricultur...

What influences perceptions of political polarization? The authors examine the polarization of people's own political attitudes as a source of perceived polarization: Individuals with more extreme partisan attitudes perceive greater polarization than individuals with less extreme partisan attitudes. This "polarization projection" was demonstrated in 3 studies in which people estimated the distr...

The public profile of the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States results not simply from their own interventions in political life, but from the broad array of actions and actors within “public Catholicism” broadly conceived. This article assesses the contemporary profile of the American bishops from this broad angle, particularly in light of new dynamics under the papacy of Francis I. It ...