—Tom Wolfe

Manhattan Institute fellows and the books they write are unique in the world of policy research. Sought after by America's most respected opinion makers, media, and publishing houses, our authors move public sentiment and reshape both policy and culture.

Contact: Bernadette Serton Book Director

MANHATTAN INSTITUTE BOOKS DRIVE THE DEBATE

The Manhattan Institute's book program has built an unparalleled public policy legacy over three decades long: Charles Murray's Losing Ground (Basic Books, 1984) reframed the dialogue about welfare and led to historic reform-legislation. Peter Huber's Liability (Basic Books, 1988) and Galileo's Revenge (Basic Books, 1991), and Walter Olson's The Litigation Explosion (Dutton, 1991), sparked national debates on civil justice, junk science, and tort reform. Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare (William Morrow, 1993) was a paradigm-shifting exposé of the 1960s' counterculture and its devastating impact on the underclass. In Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities (Free Press, 1996), George Kelling and Catherine Coles articulated the policing strategies that reduced crime at record rates.

The legacy continues to the present day. On its 2011 list of the top ten "Books That Drive the Debate," the National Chamber Foundation—the think-tank affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—included two Manhattan Institute books: Steve Malanga's Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer (Ivan R. Dee, 2010) and Robert Bryce's Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future (PublicAffairs, 2010).

INFLUENCING PUBLIC OPINION

A New York Times bestseller, Ed Glaeser's Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Penguin Press, 2011) was excerpted in The Atlantic and featured on The Daily Show. Counterintuitive and provocative, it showcased the superior alternative to a liberal-driven city agenda, and proved there is a large audience receptive to the innovative urban policies developed by the Manhattan Institute.

The first author to be published by City Journal's new joint venture with Basic Books, Kay Hymowitz captured the gender zeitgeist in Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, which was prominently excerpted by the Wall Street Journal on the front page of its review section. Her analysis sparked an international debate in 2011, covered intensely both in the blogosphere and in traditional media such as The Today Show, The Guardian (UK), and The Globe and Mail (Toronto).

The Seamless City: A Conservative Mayor's Approach to Urban Revitalization That Can Work Anywhere by former St. Petersburg mayor Rick Baker (Regnery, 2011), earned a review in The Daily Beast headlined, "America's Best Mayor?" and paid tribute to all the Manhattan Institute's policy research that Baker used to transform Florida's fourth largest city Lester Brickman's Lawyer Barons: What Their Contingency Fees Really Cost America (Cambridge University Press, 2011) challenged the broad academic consensus in his legal field, exposed the conflict of interests in our civil justice system that protect lawyers using contingency fees as their business model… and earned praise from John Stossel, Richard Epstein, and Forbes.com. Michael Knox Beran, whose previous titles have included a New York Times notable book of the year, released a critically acclaimed collection of essays titled, The Pathology of the Elites: How the Arrogant Classes Plan to Run Your Life (Ivan R. Dee, 2010).

CREATING ATTENTION FOR OUR BOOKS WITH OUR NETWORK, RESOURCES, AND EXPERIENCE

Our fellows receive valuable institutional support before, during and after publication: original policy research, in-house veteran editorial guidance, and a carefully crafted marketing campaign expanding the breadth and extending the duration of a traditional publishing house's efforts. In cooperation with an author's publisher, we approach influential opinion leaders, e-mail thousands of our supporters, host speaking engagements often covered by C-SPAN, and maintain a book Web site for our authors, as well as facilitate podcasts, op-ed placements, radio and TV bookings, and print and on-line interviews.

At the Manhattan Institute, our fellows receive the attention merited by their originality of thought and professional performance, and the result is evident in the intellectual distinction and enduring success of their books.

Studies show that the factor outside the home that most affects a student's academic performance is the observable quality of his or her teacher in front of a classroom – not a teacher's seniority, certification level, classroom size, or anything else.

By accumulating and interpreting the lessons provided by modern research about the role teachers play in public schools, and exploring the consequences of those findings, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Marcus Winters proves that the basic assumptions underlying teacher training, recruitment, and compensation -- are inconsistent with the proven facts.

Despite the gains of the feminist revolution, the myth of women as victims persists. Both Congress and President Obama continue to advocate policies that favor women over men, and feminists lobby for more affirmative action to achieve gender parity. But when women are compared to men in the same jobs, with the same experience, the much-touted wage gap disappears. In Women's Figures, senior fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth challenges the misconceptions about women's progress and provides charts and graphs illustrating how much women are gaining in the 21st Century, and how unjustified gender-driven affirmative action is.

Social scientists may claim knowledge of how particular policies will affect human behavior, but in fact, most real-world political and economic decisions are made within a fog of uncertainty that drastically inhibits our ability to predict the results of alternative courses of action.

Economists, sociologists, and other experts outside the hard science discipline have only a limited ability to achieve useful insight for human society because they de-emphasize something crucial to knowledge-gathering: controlled experimentation. An entrepreneur and software inventor whose business is built on experimentation, Manhattan Institute senior fellow JimManzi lays out the case for process by trial and error, deep epistemic humility, and the preservation of liberty in the absence of perfect clarity.

A native of Italy, Manhattan Institute senior fellow and City Journal contributing editor Luigi Zingales knows firsthand the dangers of pairing a nominally capitalist economy with a government allowed to pick the winners and losers: the result is less capitalism than it is « corporatism, » and most people grow to resent and distrust free markets because of it.

Americans, which have historically avoided socialism and its corresonding corruption, have enjoyed a uniquely positive relationship with capitalism and its benefits. But in this ground-breaking book, Zingales examines the consequences of the U.S. government bailing out private industries, and more Americans beginning to believe that their fortunes are not the result of hard work, but sheer luck. Zingales offers a populist solution to preserve America's free-market exceptionalism.

"Green jobs" are the just most recent reappearance of a perennial idea—industrial policy designed to promote certain industries. Senior fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth shows how green policies have failed in the past, both in the United States and in other countries, harming economies by raising energy prices and reducing employment. Regulating to Disaster debunks the myth once and for all that government "investment" in green jobs helps Americans and America's economy.

Glaeser reveals a little known but essential paradox of modern life: technology and globalization, long seen as the bane of urbanity, are actually making cities healthier and more vital than ever. He also offers up a wealth of other counterintuitive lessons: how misguided California environmentalists created the Sun Belt boom, what a great city like New York can learn from a middling city like Houston, which cities must shrink or die, what’s wrong with London, what’s right with Lagos, and much more.

Using intrepid reportage, myth-shattering analysis, and eloquent argument, Glaeser makes an impassioned case for the city’s import and splendor. He reminds us forcefully why we should love our cities and how to give them their due or else suffer consequences that will hurt us all, no matter where we live.

In Lawyer Barons: What Their Contingency Fees Really Cost America, Manhattan Institute visiting scholar Lester Brickman makes a broad and deep inquiry into how contingency fees distort our civil justice system, influence our political system and endanger democratic governance. Contingency fees are the way personal injury lawyers finance access to the courts for those wrongfully injured. While the public senses that lawyers manipulate the justice system to serve their own ends, few are aware of the high costs that come with contingency fees. Lawyer Barons sets out to change that, providing a window into the seamy underworld of contingency fees that the bar and the courts not only tolerate but even protect and nurture. Contrary to a broad academic consensus, Lawyer Barons argues that the financial incentives for lawyers to litigate are so inordinately high that they perversely impact our civil justice system and impose other unconscionable costs. It thus presents the intellectual architecture that underpins all tort reform efforts.

In Manning Up, Manhattan Institute senior fellow and City Journal contributing editor Kay Hymowitz argues that the gains of the feminist revolution had a dramatic, unanticipated effect on the current generation of young men. Traditional roles of family man and provider have been turned upside down as "pre-adult" men, stuck between adolescence and "real" adulthood, find themselves lost in a world where women make more money, are more educated, and are less likely to want to settle down and build a family. Their old scripts are gone, and young men find themselves adrift. Unlike women, they have no biological clock telling them it's time to grow up. Hymowitz argues that it's time for these young men to "man up."

How do we KEEP America great? Rick Baker, former mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida, provides a compelling—and challenging—answer: by making American cities great. And great cities are built first of all through strong leadership. During his two terms in office, Rick Baker worked toward a clear, uncompromising goal: to make St. Petersburg the best city in America. The Seamless City offers practical advice, based on his nine years of experience in City Hall, to show how every mayor and city council can make their city dramatically better.

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