A Need for Fundamental Change: The Role of Policy in Enabling Successful Families

The basis for adoption-related policy in the U.S. is encapsulated in the mantra that every child deserves a safe, permanent and loving family. While this “child placement” focus is clearly vital, it’s also the case that the population of children and families served by adoption (as well as by the child welfare system more generally) has changed dramatically over the last several decades. As a result, many thousands of safe, permanent and loving families are struggling every day. This presentation will examine current policies of governments at all levels, child placement agencies, service providers and others who offer support to families – and will suggest that they need major reforms in order to give children and their families the wherewithal to succeed

Subsidies, Hierarchy and Peers: The Awkward Economics of Higher Education

Higher education is an industry where markets don't clear, prices on average cover less than a third of production costs, the resulting student subsidies are given in strikingly different amounts by different schools, creating a sharply hierarchical market. And an input important to production can be bought only from the firm's own customers. This paper describes the resulting structure of costs, prices, subsidies, and hierarchy using an augmented theory of nonprofits and 1995 national data to show their magnitudes and suggest their often significant implications. Public intuition and economic models of firms, industries, and welfare often yield distorted understanding and dubious public policies.

In the Mirror: The Legitimation Work of Globalization

This essay examines the legitimation work of globalization by bringing into dialogue the authors' research on immigration, finance, and intercountryadoption. It is concerned with the practices that produce, define, and preclude both movement and connection, such as "naturalizing" some border crossings while criminalizing others; denying the histories and policies that allow some parents to "choose" babies while others must abandon them; and challenging the practices through which small states tweak transnational financial systems while allowing multinational corporations privileges denied small states. Legitimation work (re)configures jurisdictionality, transparency, and sovereignty - the constructs on which debates over globalization's consequences hinge. Examining how these constructs order, include, and exclude persons, goods, and practices sheds light on the boundaries, slippages, and connections between the legitimate and the illegitimate within global processes