Chapter 28 — Further Reading

The American social-policy literature is enormous. The selections below are the volumes and articles most often used in undergraduate political-science and policy courses, paired by perspective where relevant. Read across the perspectives. The point of an annotated bibliography is not to give you only the books that confirm a single view; it is to give you the conversation.

Healthcare and the Affordable Care Act

Theda Skocpol and Lawrence R. Jacobs, Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, latest edition). Skocpol — Harvard sociologist and one of the most important scholars of American social policy — and her co-author trace the political path of the ACA from origins through implementation. Skocpol's analysis is sympathetic to the law's coverage gains and clear-eyed about its compromises. The book is short and accessible.

Avik Roy, How Medicaid Fails the Poor and various papers at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP). Roy is the most influential conservative healthcare-policy thinker in the post-ACA era. His work is technical, data-driven, and proposes specific market-mechanism reforms within a universal-coverage framework. Read his FREOPP white papers on universal coverage through reformed exchanges; they represent the strongest version of conservative healthcare policy.

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal (Henry Holt, 2014) and selected New Yorker essays — particularly "The Cost Conundrum" (2009). Gawande is a practicing surgeon who writes about how American healthcare actually works on the ground. Being Mortal is about end-of-life care and how the healthcare system serves (and fails) older Americans; "The Cost Conundrum," about geographic variation in Medicare spending, was widely credited as influencing the ACA's accountable-care-organization provisions. Gawande's clinical perspective is invaluable.

Jonathan Gruber, Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It's Necessary, How It Works (Hill and Wang, 2011). Gruber, MIT economist, was a key technical advisor for both the Massachusetts and federal reforms. The book explains the policy machinery in plain language. Gruber later became a controversial figure for impolitic remarks about voter understanding; the underlying technical work remains essential.

Jonathan Cohn, The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage (St. Martin's, 2021). A deeply reported political history of the ACA from passage through the 2017 repeal effort, by a journalist who covered every twist of the story.

T.R. Reid, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (Penguin, 2009). A comparative tour of healthcare systems in peer democracies. Reid is a journalist; the book is accessible. Useful precisely because it shows how varied the universal-coverage models are — from single-payer to Bismarckian to mandatory-private.

Welfare and the safety net

Larry Mead, The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America (Basic Books, 1992) and Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin (Princeton UP, 2004). Mead is the intellectual architect of the work-requirement turn in American welfare policy. The New Politics of Poverty makes the conservative case for paternalist social policy — that the right response to poverty is enforcing work expectations, not relaxing them. Government Matters documents how Wisconsin's pre-1996 reforms worked. Read for the strongest version of the conservative welfare-policy position.

Robert Moffitt, ed., Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States (multiple volumes; NBER / University of Chicago Press). The standard technical reference on the major U.S. social programs. Each chapter is by a leading specialist. Empirical-economics oriented; assumes some quantitative literacy.

Hilary Hoynes, et al., various papers on SNAP and EITC effects, especially the "Long-Run Impact of Cash Transfers to Poor Families" line of research with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond. Hoynes is the most-cited contemporary economist of the U.S. safety net. Her work on SNAP childhood exposure and adult outcomes, on EITC labor-supply effects, and on the safety net's counter-cyclical role is foundational.

Sara McLanahan and Christopher Jencks, various papers; McLanahan's Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Harvard UP, 1994, with Gary Sandefur). McLanahan was the leading sociologist of family structure and child outcomes. Her work documents the substantial effects of family structure on child wellbeing and the limits of policy responses. The findings are uncomfortable for some progressive frames; her response was to advocate for more comprehensive supports rather than to abandon the project.

Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). Ethnographic and quantitative documentation of the rise of extreme poverty in the post-1996 era. Edin and Shaefer document the families who fell out of the cash-welfare system and into deep poverty. Critical of TANF's effects on the most vulnerable; argues for reinstated cash assistance.

Inequality, family, and the broader frame

Jamie Galbraith, Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, 2016). Galbraith — Texas economist, son of John Kenneth Galbraith — provides the macroeconomic frame for understanding why inequality has grown and why the safety net's adequacy questions matter. Compact and accessible.

Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic (Basic Books, 2016) and A Time to Build (Basic Books, 2020). Levin is the most important conservative public intellectual on family and social policy in the 2020s. He argues for "subsidiary" institutions — family, religious community, civic association — as the primary site of human flourishing, with policy designed to support rather than substitute.

Reihan Salam, Melting Pot or Civil War? (Sentinel, 2018). Though primarily about immigration, Salam's broader project is rebuilding the conservative coalition around a working-class economic agenda. His writing on family policy is influential in the post-2016 conservative reformulation.

Compact magazine and American Affairs, ongoing. Leading journals of the post-Trump conservative reform tradition. Both publish substantial pro-family economic-policy work distinct from libertarian-conservative orthodoxy. Read for the contemporary conservative argument that family-supportive economic policy is a national priority.

Comparative perspectives

Jacob Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle Over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (Cambridge UP, 2002). The classic study of how the U.S. welfare state is structured around private benefits with public subsidies (employer health insurance, retirement plans) rather than direct public provision. Essential for understanding why American social spending looks small in cross-national comparisons that use only direct outlays.

OECD, Health at a Glance (annual) and Society at a Glance (annual). These OECD reports are the standard sources for cross-national comparisons of healthcare and social-policy outcomes. Available free at oecd.org. The data discussions in this chapter draw heavily on these sources.

Commonwealth Fund, Mirror Mirror: Comparing Health Systems Across Countries (latest edition). Most accessible comparative healthcare-systems report. Includes both quantitative outcome data and qualitative system descriptions. The Commonwealth Fund's perspective is sympathetic to universal-coverage reforms, but the data are well-documented and the comparisons are technically careful.

Primary policy sources

For factual claims in this chapter and for the exercises, the following primary sources are essential:

  • Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (cms.gov): Marketplace enrollment, Medicaid enrollment by state, Medicare data.
  • Social Security Administration Office of the Chief Actuary: Trustees' reports, benefit calculators, demographic data.
  • Congressional Budget Office (cbo.gov): annual Budget and Economic Outlook, long-term budget outlook, score of major legislation.
  • Census Bureau: Current Population Survey, Supplemental Poverty Measure, Household Pulse Survey, American Community Survey.
  • Kaiser Family Foundation (kff.org): state-level health policy data, polling, issue briefs.
  • Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (cbpp.org): center-left analytical work on safety-net programs.
  • American Enterprise Institute (aei.org) and Manhattan Institute (manhattan.institute): center-right analytical work; AEI's poverty-research group has done particularly important CTC-related work.
  • Niskanen Center (niskanencenter.org): cross-partisan family-policy and welfare-reform analyses; their 2021-22 CTC work was widely cited.
  • HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE): TANF financial and caseload data; safety-net program inventories.

The discipline of social policy is empirical. The works listed above all rest on these primary sources. When you are evaluating any of them, the test is whether the author's claims survive translation into the underlying numbers. Most do; some don't. Knowing how to check is the most durable skill the chapter can give you.