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Author: Marc Miringoff Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198030576 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
This book is written for people who are skeptical and uneasy when they hear politicians, economists, and reporters tell Americans "You're never had it so good" as they recite lists of leading economic indicators. The Social Health of a Nation, as its subtitle indicates, tell us, "How America is Really Doing." The facts in this book confirm what many American know intuitively - they are not better off now, not with income inequality at its worst level in fifty years, not with more and more Americans dropped from insurance rolls, not with thousands of Americans feeling the effects of corporate downsizing, not with real wages on a long term decline. This book provides the facts to see the rest of the picture, the condition of the American national spirit that can never be revealed by economic indicators alone. It also provides a forceful argument that, without the social side of the picture, Americans are in the dark about the nation's progress. This book as not an ideological tract, however. It's purpose is portrayal, not prescription. Not everything reported is bad news; an entire chapter is devoted to indicators of improving social performance. Because it does not advocate, for example, a return to big government or any quick-fix solution, this book will be welcomed by readers from all parts of the political spectrum or of no particular political persuasion. It will appeal to concerned individuals from business, government, clergy, and other professions, and to those who represent no interest group. It will also be widely used as supplemental text in a variety of sociology, economics, and political science courses. The Social Health of the Nation is written by two sociologists, Marc and Luisa Miringoff. Marc is currently the Professor of Social Welfare Policy at Fordham University Graduate Center, and the founder and Director of the Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy. Luisa is Professor of Socioogy at Vassar College, where she has served as Department Chair and Director of its Urban Studies Program. Both earned Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. Since 1987, Marc has headed a research team to develop the Index of Social Health, a nationally recognized social barometer that has been featured in ten New York Times and four Washington Post articles. This index has commanded increasingly large electronic and print media attention because of its powerful presentation of trends in family life, income, health, housing, child poverty, and other social indicators of everyday life in the United States. The Social Health of the Nation will include the previously unreleased and very newsworthy Index for 1998. But it will contain much more. Influenced by the effectiveness of the Index of Social Health, in the summer of 1996, the Ford Foundation approached the authors with a plan. Alarmed by a lack of government attention in the United States to monitoring the nation's social health, the Foundation had a vision of creating a book building on the Index of Social Health, to show what is needed to advance this field and deepen its impact. To that end, the Foundation provided financial assistance for the book's development by funding Miringoff's Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy to convene a twenty-five member team, the Working Group on Social Indicators, including nationally known pollster, Daniel Yankelovich, and Director of Research and Vice President of CNN, Judy Milestone. Each member of the Working Group was motivated to improve social reporting in the United States. They came from the media, universities, and government, representing fields as diversse as law, medicine, sociology, and economics. The vision of the Ford Foundation, with the assistance of this working group, has now become a reality in The Social Health of the Nation, a nine chapter book written by Marc and Marque Luisa Miringoff. This book does show the other side of the Official Portrait of How America is Doing, providing comprehensive coverage of improving, shifting, and worsening social performance. It fills in the blanks after all the economic indicators are posted. The book contains surprises, the same kind that have been made the yearly release of the Social Index of Health a subject of media attention for twelve years, an index whose 1998 figures will be released exclusively in this book. While some of the indicators will shock, other will give reason for hope, as we see evidence of improved performance in unlikely places. For those whose livelihoods and well-being depend on the social health of the United States, this book provides the information necessary to find creative solutions for improved performance. For students in a wide range of courses this book will become required reading.
Author: Marc Miringoff Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198030576 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
This book is written for people who are skeptical and uneasy when they hear politicians, economists, and reporters tell Americans "You're never had it so good" as they recite lists of leading economic indicators. The Social Health of a Nation, as its subtitle indicates, tell us, "How America is Really Doing." The facts in this book confirm what many American know intuitively - they are not better off now, not with income inequality at its worst level in fifty years, not with more and more Americans dropped from insurance rolls, not with thousands of Americans feeling the effects of corporate downsizing, not with real wages on a long term decline. This book provides the facts to see the rest of the picture, the condition of the American national spirit that can never be revealed by economic indicators alone. It also provides a forceful argument that, without the social side of the picture, Americans are in the dark about the nation's progress. This book as not an ideological tract, however. It's purpose is portrayal, not prescription. Not everything reported is bad news; an entire chapter is devoted to indicators of improving social performance. Because it does not advocate, for example, a return to big government or any quick-fix solution, this book will be welcomed by readers from all parts of the political spectrum or of no particular political persuasion. It will appeal to concerned individuals from business, government, clergy, and other professions, and to those who represent no interest group. It will also be widely used as supplemental text in a variety of sociology, economics, and political science courses. The Social Health of the Nation is written by two sociologists, Marc and Luisa Miringoff. Marc is currently the Professor of Social Welfare Policy at Fordham University Graduate Center, and the founder and Director of the Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy. Luisa is Professor of Socioogy at Vassar College, where she has served as Department Chair and Director of its Urban Studies Program. Both earned Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. Since 1987, Marc has headed a research team to develop the Index of Social Health, a nationally recognized social barometer that has been featured in ten New York Times and four Washington Post articles. This index has commanded increasingly large electronic and print media attention because of its powerful presentation of trends in family life, income, health, housing, child poverty, and other social indicators of everyday life in the United States. The Social Health of the Nation will include the previously unreleased and very newsworthy Index for 1998. But it will contain much more. Influenced by the effectiveness of the Index of Social Health, in the summer of 1996, the Ford Foundation approached the authors with a plan. Alarmed by a lack of government attention in the United States to monitoring the nation's social health, the Foundation had a vision of creating a book building on the Index of Social Health, to show what is needed to advance this field and deepen its impact. To that end, the Foundation provided financial assistance for the book's development by funding Miringoff's Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy to convene a twenty-five member team, the Working Group on Social Indicators, including nationally known pollster, Daniel Yankelovich, and Director of Research and Vice President of CNN, Judy Milestone. Each member of the Working Group was motivated to improve social reporting in the United States. They came from the media, universities, and government, representing fields as diversse as law, medicine, sociology, and economics. The vision of the Ford Foundation, with the assistance of this working group, has now become a reality in The Social Health of the Nation, a nine chapter book written by Marc and Marque Luisa Miringoff. This book does show the other side of the Official Portrait of How America is Doing, providing comprehensive coverage of improving, shifting, and worsening social performance. It fills in the blanks after all the economic indicators are posted. The book contains surprises, the same kind that have been made the yearly release of the Social Index of Health a subject of media attention for twelve years, an index whose 1998 figures will be released exclusively in this book. While some of the indicators will shock, other will give reason for hope, as we see evidence of improved performance in unlikely places. For those whose livelihoods and well-being depend on the social health of the United States, this book provides the information necessary to find creative solutions for improved performance. For students in a wide range of courses this book will become required reading.
Author: National Research Council Publisher: National Academies Press ISBN: 0309264146 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 421
Book Description
The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.
Author: Marque-Luisa Miringoff Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317477022 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
Calling for a fundamental change in the focus of public policy in America, this book paints a vivid portrait of the nation's social health. Miringoff and Opdycke clearly show that social progress has stalled and the country's energies need to be directed at critical domestic issues in the years ahead.The authors propose a new agenda for monitoring America's social well-being built around sixteen key indicators of American life, such as infant mortality, teenage suicide, health insurance coverage, and affordable housing. They maintain that social conditions, like economic conditions, must be constantly monitored in order to have a clear sense of "how we are doing" as a society.The book builds on the work of the Institute for Innovation in Social Policy and argues that there needs to be a greater visibility for social issues - and a closer link between social reporting and public action - to better address the nation's social problems. It considers the critical role of the media in advancing public understanding of social issues, and examines important advances in the community indicators movement and international social reporting. Eye-opening and compelling, the book is a provocative centerpiece for policy debates and national initiatives on today's crucial domestic concerns.
Author: Mary Jo Bane Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000010414 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 335
Book Description
Leading scholars examine how the church, community organizations, and the government must work together to provide for America's poor in the aftermath of welfare reform. . Who will provide for Americas children, elderly, and working families? Not since the 1930s has our nation faced such fundamental choices over how to care for all its citizens. Now, amid economic prosperity, Americans are asking what government, business, and non-profit organizations can and can’t do and what they should and shouldn’t be asked to do. As both political parties look to faith-based organizations to meet material and spiritual needs, the center of this historic debate is the changing role of religion. These essays combine a fresh perspective and detailed analysis on these pressing issues. They emerge from a three-year Harvard Seminar sponsored by the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life that brought together scholars in public policy, government, religion, sociology, law, education, and non-profit leadership. By putting the present moment in broad historical perspective, these essays offer rich insights into the resources of faith-based organizations, while cautioning against viewing their expanded role as an alternative to the government’s responsibility. In Who Will Provide? community leaders, organizational managers, public officials, and scholars will find careful analysis drawing on a number of fields to aid their work of devising better partnerships of social provision locally and nationally. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001..
Author: Margaret R. Miles Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1630874531 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 237
Book Description
Education is about learning to think. Much of what we call thinking, however, is a hodge-podge of repetitious self-talk, opinion, and cutting and pasting of second-hand ideas. Moreover, thinking in the present has often been alien to scholars who were tempted to think abstractly. But life and thought belong together and require each other, as Plotinus pointed out many centuries ago: "[T]he object of contemplation is living and life, and the two together are one" (Ennead 3.8.8). Presently, many women and men in the academic world are thinking concretely within the context of their own lives and with acknowledged accountability to broader communities with whom they think and to whom they are answerable. The essays in this volume consider Christianity as an aspect of North American culture, bringing the critical tools of the academy to thinking about some of the perplexing and pressing problems of contemporary public life. Three interactive and interdependent themes traverse these essays: gender, the effects of media culture, and institutions. Each of these themes has been central to Margaret Miles's work for thirty years. Each understands corporeality as fundamental both to subjectivity and society. Miles finds that Christianity, critically appropriated, provides ideas and methods for thinking concretely about life in North American society.
Author: John Bruhn Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 144190364X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
Sociologists and anthropologists have had a long interest in studying the ways in which cultures shaped different patterns of health, disease, and mortality. Social scientists have documented low rates of chronic disease and disability in non-Western societies and have suggested that social stability, cultural homogeneity and social cohesion may play a part in explaining these low rates. On the other hand, in studies of Western societies, social scientists have found that disease and mortality assume different patterns among various ethnic, cultural and social-economic groups. The role of stress, social change and a low degree of cohesion have been suggested, along with other factors as contributing to the variable rates among different social groups. Social cohesion has been implicated in the cause and recovery from both physical and psychological illnesses. Although there has been a large amount of work established the beneficial effects of cohesion on health and well-being, relatively little work has focused on HOW increased social cohesion sustains or improves health. This work is based on the premise that there are risk factors, including social cohesion that regulate health and disease in groups. One of the challenges is how to measure social cohesion – it can be readily observed and experienced but difficult to quantify. A better understanding of how social cohesion works will be valuable to improving group-level interventions.
Author: Margaret R. Miles Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1498282393 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 83
Book Description
The Long Goodbye: Dementia Diaries discusses a disease that is both personal and social for more than five million patients and their families and friends in the United States today. Now that there are medical strategies for preventing and/or curing strokes, heart attacks, even cancer, many more people are going to live into the dementia years in the near future. Although many dementia horror stories circulate in conversation and in the media, they are not the whole story. Creative approaches to loving a dementia patient can make for a valuable learning experience for family and caregivers. In The Long Goodbye Margaret Miles describes her commitment to making--rather than passively suffering--her spouse's dementia experience. Family and friends who accompany patients find embedded in the experience moments of great beauty, hilariously funny incidents, new companions, and life insights. The narrative provides both a travelogue and suggestions for a richly meaningful life passage for all participants. The Long Goodbye seeks to supply a balanced picture of a disease usually represented as unmitigated loss.
Author: Mark Anielski Publisher: New Society Publishers ISBN: 0865715963 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
An exploration of why our measures of economic progress do not reflect the values that make humans happy offers a new economic model, "Genuine Wealth," to redefine progress and measure the real determinants of well-being.
Author: Marc Miringoff
Author: Marc Miringoff
Author: National Research Council
Author: Marque-Luisa Miringoff
Author: Marc L. Miringoff
Author: Mary Jo Bane
Author: Margaret R. Miles
Author: John Bruhn
Author: Margaret R. Miles
Author: Leon Sharpe
Author: Mark Anielski