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AAPSS / Brookings Event: The Great Recession and the Social Safety Net
 The ANNALS, “The Effects of the Great Recession”, edited by Sheldon Danziger. Webcast video of the entire event can be viewed on the Brookings' website.
The volume, as a whole, assesses the impact of the 2007-09 great recession on social well-being, broadly speaking. The event at Brookings focused on the performance of the social safety net during the recession, featuring an article presented by Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins and a panel discussion that followed Moffitt’s presentation. The panel discussion was moderated by Ron Haskins, Co-Director of the Brookings Center on Children and Families and Budgeting for National Priorities Project, and included Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, Betsey Stevenson of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Moynihan Prize Winner Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Congressional Attacks on the Social Sciences Muted in Appropriations Act of 2014
 H.R. 3574: Consolidated Appropriations Act, a bill that sets the federal budget for fiscal year 2014. �The new budget can be seen as a victory for the social and behavioral sciences communities, in as much as its passage does not include language restricting National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health funding for social and behavioral sciences�such language was a component of previous proposed legislation and continuing resolutions funding government operations. �For more than nine months, for example, a legal provision maintained that NSF funding for political science could be used only for projects that directly promoted national security and U.S. economic interests.
For further analysis of the bill and its implications on social science research, consult the Inside Higher Ed.
Coming Up in The ANNALS:
Strengthening Governance in South Africa: Building on Mandela's Legacy
March 2014, Volume 652
In this volume of The ANNALS, special editor Robert I Rotberg, a Fulbright professor at two Canadian universities, gathers a group of mostly South African authors to reflect on the late Nelson Mandela’s legacy in South Africa and on the African continent as a whole, and to advance ideas for how South Africa can build and improve on what Mandela envisioned for his post-apartheid country. The volume marks the twentieth anniversary since the transition from the apartheid government to democracy.
“Good governance,” Rotberg writes in the Preface, “is what Africa and South Africa lack most.” The way forward for South Africa, then, Rotberg contends, “follows the path of improved governance through thoughtful educational and medical responses, the creation of abundant jobs, and a thorough remediation of the many other difficult governance challenges facing the African National Congress-controlled government of South Africa.” Contributors to this volume, who come from academia, think tanks, the world of journalism, and that of policy, delve into what, they believe, these educational, medical, economic, and political reforms should be. |
