The pattern of the economic system has undergone dramatic changes over the past century, especially in terms of global markets. Golden standards are now part of the history. The US dollar has been an international monetary unit since 1944. Sixty years later, the Euro appeared. The trend in the development of economic processes indicates that future global markets will be the product of the national currencies of the countries with the most advanced economies. This trend is promoted by the process of globalization. On the other hand, state intervention in the economy will be indispensable in near future. Not only is there room for such intervention, but the need to intervene is growing more and more immediate. However, it is people who have an essential role to the development of the economy, since no economic system could exist without people. It is people who ‘breathe life’ to the economy. Economy was invented by people for the sake of people, i.e. to provide for their existence. Hence, the focus of economy must be on people. It is the economy which should exist in favour of people, not people who should exist in favour of the economy.

The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency in 2016 is attributable to voting shifts in a small number of states between the 2008 and 2012 elections and the 2016 election. There were six states that voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 and 2012 elections and then for Donald Trump in 2016. In one state, Florida, voting shifts among the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections were small. However, in the other five states, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the voting shift was large, and it is the shifts in these states that largely account for Trump's Electoral College win. This article documents concentration of voting shifts in these and nearby states. These states share certain characteristics in common, including specialization in manufacturing, slow population growth, a common pattern with regards to Hispanic population change, and higher-than-average percentages of non-college-educated whites. In all of these states, disproportionate numbers of people voted twice for Obama and then for Trump. These voters, though a small percentage of the total electorate even in these states, were key to the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. This article examines how the aforementioned characteristics of these states contributed to the decisive shift by these voters and led to Trump's decisive victories in these five states.

spring 2007 contexts b o o k re ie w s offers a convincing analysis of policymaking and social mobilization at both the state and the federal levels. Less ambitious scholars would have focused only on the federal level, which the Townsend Plan targeted. Discussing the sometimes indirect but very real influence of the Townsend Plan at the state level is a major contribution of this book. Although Amenta has already published several coauthored articles on the Townsend Plan, this book puts all the pieces of the puzzle together, meaning that scholars who have read these articles may want to read When Movements Matter anyway. This excellent book should have a lasting influence on debates about social movements and about American welfare-state development. Although I find Amenta’s book compelling, it has some minor shortcomings. The first is that Amenta ignores one potentially significant, yet indirect, aspect of the Townsend Plan’s influence on American policy and society: the history and the social construction of retirement as a major social and economic institution. As William Graebner showed more than a quarter century ago in A History of Retirement: The Meaning and the Function of an American Institution (1980), retirement only became a “universal” American institution in the postwar era, as the growth of Social Security and private pensions dramatically expanded the safety net available to aging workers who were leaving the labor market. Considering that the Townsend Plan actively promoted retirement through its policy platform and its motto “Youth for Work, Age for Leisure,” it is surprising that Amenta barely raises this crucial issue in his book. Students of aging and old-age policy may not find as much here has they might have expected, given the topic. Another problematic aspect of When Movements Matter is the way Amenta seems to overstate the influence of the Townsend Plan before and during the enactment of the 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act. Even without the pressures from the Townsend Plan, this legislation probably would have been enacted because it was grounded in an irresistible deal between Democrats and Republicans. Amenta is right to stress the role of the Townsend Plan in relation to the 1939 legislation, but I am not convinced it was the primary force behind it. These minor shortcomings should not deter social movement scholars and students of social policy from reading this solid and insightful piece of scholarship. When Movements Matter suggests that it is both possible and necessary to link the literatures on public policy and social movements in order to understand better these two key aspects of modern societies. This is yet another reason to recommend this great book. As historian Edward D. Berkowitz states in his dustjacket blurb, “This is historical sociology at its best, written by one of the field’s best practitioners.”

This paper expands upon earlier research concerning methodological issues with interracial exposure and isolation (p*) indices. The earlier research, based on the fifty largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States, showed that due to skewness in the distribution of neighborhood racial compositions, these indices often overstate the degree of racial diversity in the neighborhoods of most individuals. That research showed that in the fifty largest metropolitan areas, a new measure, the median exposure or isolation index (p*-md), provided a result more representative of the situation of most individuals. This paper expands the earlier research to include all U.S. metropolitan areas. Focusing on white exposure to African Americans, it is shown that in most metropolitan areas, the majority of whites live in areas significantly whiter than indicated by the p* measure used in past studies. Moreover, the more segregated an area is, the more p* understates the degree to which African Americans are excluded from most whites' neighborhoods. Several implications of this finding for race relations are discussed. It is concluded that p*-md provides a more accurate picture than p* of the neighborhood racial composition of most white individuals.