New Deal to New Frontier: From security to opportunity in the American welfare state

This paper considers U.S. social policy in the years 1935-1960 through the prism of recurring disagreements over the appropriate balance between social security and individual freedom. The disagreements were sharpest in the 1930s, when the Social Security bill was drafted and revised, and resumed in intensity after World War II, with the introduction of President Truman's health insurance proposal. The disagreements diminished during the 1950s, as Republicans came to accept Social Security. When John Kennedy became president, during the first crisis in public confidence over the Aid to Dependent Children title of the Social Security Act, discussions about balancing security and freedom had lost currency. The paper argues that this loss of currency was unfortunate. The Roosevelt administration's approach to balancing goals of social security and individual freedom was a reasonable gamble, even when applied to single women and their children, and might have served Kennedy and subsequent presidents well.

Recent developments in chiral gauge theories: Approach of infinitely many fermi fields

I present the recent developments in a specific sub-field of chiral gauge theories on the lattice. This sub-field pertains to the use of infinitely many fermi fields to describe a single chiral field. In this approach, both anomalous and anomaly free theories can be discussed in equal footing. It produces the correct anomaly in the continuum limit. It has the potential to describe fermion number violating processes in the presence of a gauge field background with non-trivial topological charge on a finite lattice.Comment: 6 TeX pages: 6; Latex file, needs espcrc2.sty which is attache

Virasoro Conformal Blocks and Thermality from Classical Background Fields

We show that in 2d CFTs at large central charge, the coupling of the stress tensor to heavy operators can be re-absorbed by placing the CFT in a non-trivial background metric. This leads to a more precise computation of the Virasoro conformal blocks between heavy and light operators, which are shown to be equivalent to global conformal blocks evaluated in the new background. We also generalize to the case where the operators carry U(1) charges. The refined Virasoro blocks can be used as the seed for a new Virasoro block recursion relation expanded in the heavy-light limit. We comment on the implications of our results for the universality of black hole thermality in $AdS_3$, or equivalently, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis for $CFT_2$ at large central charge.Comment: 27+7 pages, 3 figures; typos corrected, citations adde