Böcker av Ganesh Sitaraman

Why are the airlines always in a crisis?Everyone has a horror story about air travel-cancellations, delays, lost baggage, tiny seats, poor service. In this day and age, there is no reason that flying should be this bad. In Why Flying Is Miserable, Ganesh Sitaraman, a law professor and policy expert, explains how this happened: It was a conscious choice made by Washington in the 1970s to roll back many forms of regulation that began during the New Deal, in the name of unimpeded capitalism and more competition. Today, the industry is an oligopoly, with only four too-big-to-fail airlines that have received billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts and still can't offer reliable service. Miserable air travel is the perfect symbol of the type of unregulated capitalism that America has unleashed. But there are ways to fix airlines-and, by extension, many other sectors of industry-because, after a half-century run, people are sick and tired of the turbulence that deregulation has brought to our economy.

A public option is a government-provided social good that exists alongside a similar privately provided good. While the public option is typically identified with health care policy, public options have been a longstanding feature of American life in a variety of sectors, ranging from libraries to swimming pools. Public schools, for example, coexist alongside private schools. However, there is surprisingly little research on 'public options' as a general category. Rather, over the last few decades, considerable scholarly and popular efforts to ensure access to important social goods have focused on market subsidies (like vouchers) or privatization - which both face increasing criticism. Uniting scholars from across disciplines, this volume delves into the theory of the public option, explores several important case studies, and shows how public options could be a corrective to the trend toward privatization and subsidies. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

A leading progressive intellectual offers an agenda for how real democracy can triumph in America and beyond

A solution to inequalities-in health care, retirement, education, recreation, communication-is as close as the public library, post office, community pool, or elementary school. The Public Option shows that opportunities to develop reasonably priced government-provided services that coexist with private options are all around us.

In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system.  For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic?  The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution is a tour de force of history, philosophy, law, and politics. It makes a compelling case that inequality is more than just a moral or economic problem; it threatens the very core of our constitutional system.