Community perspective: Widening inequality hurts us all

The former Secretary of Labor discusses the causes and consequences of our nation's rising inequality.Income distribution

The Future of Learning

As part of UMass Boston’s recent celebration to mark the inauguration of Chancellor Michael F. Collins, M.D., the Division of Corporate, Continuing and Distance Education (CCDE) hosted a “virtual symposium” featuring Robert B. Reich. Between April 24 and May 8, CCDE posted a streaming video and a downloadable audio file of a presentation that Professor Reich had delivered on April 11, 2006 at the national conference of the University Continuing Education Association. This talk was supplemented, on May 3, by a live teleconferencing Q&A session with Professor Reich and about fifty UMass Boston graduate students

The Future of Learning

As part of UMass Boston’s recent celebration to mark the inauguration of Chancellor Michael F. Collins, M.D., the Division of Corporate, Continuing and Distance Education (CCDE) hosted a “virtual symposium” featuring Robert B. Reich. Between April 24 and May 8, CCDE posted a streaming video and a downloadable audio file of a presentation that Professor Reich had delivered on April 11, 2006 at the national conference of the University Continuing Education Association. This talk was supplemented, on May 3, by a live teleconferencing Q&A session with Professor Reich and about fifty UMass Boston graduate students. This article originally appeared in a 2006 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 21, Issue 1): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol21/iss1

Bailout: A Comparative Study in Law and Industrial Structure

Economies are like bicycles: the faster they move, the better they maintain their balance. Changes in consumer preferences, technologies, international competition, and the availability of natural resources all require economies to reallocate capital and labor to newer and more profitable uses. Societies that redeploy their capital and labor more quickly and efficiently than others are apt to experience faster growth and greater improvements in productivity

Solving Social Crises by Commissions

\u27\u27The report of the Commissioners, said Washington in his sixth address to Congress, \u27· marks their firmness and abilities and must unite all virtuous men. The first commission to deal with a social crisis in America had recommended that the President send troops into western Pennsylvania to end the Whiskey Rebellion. As a cartoon of the day put it, sending 15,000 troops into the Allegheny and Monongahela River valleys against a few farmers for the collection of such a small tax was like swatting flies with a meat axe. But social order was at stake; and that commission, like the.scores of crisis commissions which were to follow it, provided the chief executive with a strategy for restoring the commonweal while assuring the public that the problem could, in fact, be handled

What Happened to the American Social Compact?

The Sixth Annual Frank M. Coffin Lecture on Law and Public Service was held on October 6, 1997. Robert B. Reich, formerly the Secretary of Labor under the Clinton Administration, and currently a University Professor and the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University and its Heller Graduate School, presented “The American Social Compact: What It Was and Where It Went.

Geometric Generalisations of SHAKE and RATTLE

A geometric analysis of the Shake and Rattle methods for constrained Hamiltonian problems is carried out. The study reveals the underlying differential geometric foundation of the two methods, and the exact relation between them. In addition, the geometric insight naturally generalises Shake and Rattle to allow for a strictly larger class of constrained Hamiltonian systems than in the classical setting. In order for Shake and Rattle to be well defined, two basic assumptions are needed. First, a nondegeneracy assumption, which is a condition on the Hamiltonian, i.e., on the dynamics of the system. Second, a coisotropy assumption, which is a condition on the geometry of the constrained phase space. Non-trivial examples of systems fulfilling, and failing to fulfill, these assumptions are given