Over the last four decades the public trust in government in the United States has fallen dramatically due to a "perfect storm" of contributing factors, such as a seemingly never ending string of political scandals, partisan polarization and toxic attack politics, and miserable failures to respond to natural disasters or the devastation of the Great Recession. This book contains the academic presentations that were made at the Symposium on Advancing Excellence and Public Trust in Gover...

America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In What's Wrong with America?, Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum analyze those challenges - globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption - and spell out what needs to be done now to rediscover America's power and prowess.They explain how the end of the cold war blinded the na...

A 2012 ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEARMany of the United States' most innovative entrepreneurs have been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Charles Pfizer to Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Elon Musk. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small businesses were founded by immigrants, generating trillions of dollars annually, employing millions of workers, and helping establish the United States as the most entre...

For philanthropists of the past, charity was often a matter of simply giving money away. For the philanthrocapitalists-the new generation of billionaires who are reshaping the way they give-it's like business. Largely trained in the corporate world, these "social investors" are using big-business-style strategies and expecting results and accountability to match. Bill Gates, the world's richest man, is leading the way: he has promised his entire fortune to finding a cure for the diseases t...

Do you believe in the freedom of individuals to determine their own future and solve problems cooperatively?Don't hurt people, and don't take their stuff. Simple and straightforward, that's liberty in a nutshell—no assembly required.And yet it seems like, more and more, the decisions Washington makes about what to do for us, or to us, or even against us, are having an increasingly adverse impact on our lives. Young people can't find jobs, millions of Americans are losing th...

An inside look at the secretive world of elite philanthropists--and how they're quietly wielding ever more power to shape American life in ways both good and bad.While media attention focuses on famous philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Charles Koch, thousands of donors are at work below the radar promoting a wide range of causes. David Callahan charts the rise of these new power players and the ways they are converting the fortunes of a second Gilded Age into ...

**A handbook for how political power really works, and what it takes to make change happen“[Liu] addresses a central question of this age: what, exactly, citizens who are unhappy with national politics can do, other than write a check or await the next chance to vote.” —The Atlantic**In this age of epic political turbulence, citizens everywhere are organizing to claim their power. Do you understand what power truly is, how it flows, who has it, and how you can exer...

"Policies that will allow innovation to flourish. His recipe is a familiar one but not yet familiar enough to engage the preoccupied minds of warring political parties in Washington." — Alan Murray, The Wall Street JournalAmerica seems to be on a downward slide. Our government spends too much, our economy creates too little, and we aren't preparing our children to compete in a global marketplace. Yet our politicians—Republican and Democrat alike—just don't ...

Tavis Smiley presents the successor to his two bestselling books, The Covenant of Black America and The Covenant in Action—Accountable will serve as a report card, holding the politicians accountable for what they have promised and holding the community responsible for its actions or inactions.In Accountable, New York Times bestselling author Tavis Smiley addresses two issues: Public officials and the promises t...

" Powerful, compelling, and well researched . . . demolishes what may be the most destructive myth in America." —David Korten, author of Agenda for a New EconomyThe Self-Made Myth exposes the false claim that business success is the result of heroic individual effort with little or no outside help. Brian Miller and Mike Lapham not only bust the myth; they present profiles of business leaders who recognize the public investments an...

Across the US, cities and metropolitan areas are facing huge economic and competitive challenges that Washington won't, or can't, solve. The good news is that networks of metropolitan leaders mayors, business and labor leaders, educators, and philanthropists are stepping up and powering the nation forward. These state and local leaders are doing the hard work to grow more jobs and make their communities more prosperous, and they're investing in infrastructure, making manufacturing a pr...

We are said to be living in the age of entitlement. Scholars and pundits declare that millennials expect special treatment, do whatever they feel like, and think they deserve to have things handed to them. In The Myth of the Age of Entitlement, Cairns peels back the layers of the entitlement myth, exposing its faults and arguing that the majority of millennials are actually disentitled, facing bleak economic prospects and potential ecological disaster. Providing insights ...