“The mantra in Michigan was a job, a better job, a career: Through work you would experience upward mobility. There was never any evidence that was the case.”
- Kristin Seefeldt on the false promise of U.S. welfare reform, The Atlantic, Dec. 1, 2015.
“It’s hard to regard a colleague on the other side of the aisle as an implacable foe if your kids go to school together or your spouses volunteer [for] the same good cause.”
- Marina v.N. Whitman on the decline of off-hour interactions between legislators in DC, Detroit Free Press, Dec. 4, 2015.
“It’s not about knowing how to do better, it’s about testing what works. Experiment relentlessly, keep what works, and discard what doesn’t. Following this recipe may yield a government that’s just like Google: clear, user-friendly and unflinchingly effective.”
- Justin Wolfers on using behavioral economics to promote effective governance, The New York Times, Sept. 25, 2015.
“It's really important we understand that our perceptions of threat are different, whether we’re thinking about immigration in the abstract or in our own communities.”
- Mara Ostfeld on her research, which found racial prejudice in American attitudes toward immigrants in their neighborhoods, workplaces, and families, Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2016.
“The tragic legacy of drinking water contamination in Walkerton, Ontario...looms large over Canadian water policy to this day. Just as Flint, Michigan will long be synonymous with these challenges in the United States.”
- Barry Rabe on potential cross-border environmental collaborations between the U.S. and Canada, Brookings FixGov, Mar. 9, 2016.
“The emergency manager law may have been a racially neutral way to address crucial problems of municipal and school district insolvency, but its consequences were foreseeable and certainly not neutral with regard to race.”
- Reynolds Farley on Michigan’s emergency financial management system, Bridge Magazine, Feb. 5, 2016.
Below is a formatted version of this article from State & Hill, the magazine of the Ford School. View the entire Spring 2016 State & Hill here.