Background
Eberstadt, Nicholas Nash was born on December 10, 1955 in New York City. Son of Frederick and Isabel (Nash) Eberstadt.
(Throughout the world, numbers are increasingly used to gu...)
Throughout the world, numbers are increasingly used to guide acts of government - but not always for the better. In this volume, the author examines the "facts and figures" that have led to measures unhelpful or injurious to their intended beneficiaries. "The Tyranny of Numbers" offers a look at problems such as world hunger, the population explosion, the Third World debt crisis, and the poverty in South Africa, in which misdiagnoses have driven action. In America, the author argues, antipoverty programmes proceed without an understanding of what the data actually show about living standards and child health. And our surprise at the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the crisis in the USSR may betray an equal misunderstanding of data that revealed the weakness in those systems.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0844737631/?tag=2022091-20
( In current intellectual and public discourse, the entir...)
In current intellectual and public discourse, the entire modern world-from the affluent United States to the poorest low-income regions-is beset today by a broad and alarming array of "population problems." Around the globe, leading scientists, academics, and political figures attribute poverty, hunger, social tension, and even political conflict to contemporary demographic trends. These authorities assert that the size, composition, and growth rate of population routinely pose direct and major threats to human well-being. They argue for interventions aimed specifically at altering society's demographic rhythms. In this wide-ranging and carefully reasoned book, renowned demographer and social scientist Nicholas Eberstadt challenges these ideas and exposes their glaring intellectual -shortcomings. Eberstadt makes the case that the very conception of "population problems" is inherently ambiguous and arbitrary, lending itself to faulty analysis and inappropriate diagnoses. Careless thinking about population is typically a result of inattention to, or indifference toward, the fundamental unit in all populations: the individual human being. In our time, Eberstadt writes, problems attributed to demographic trends are actually rooted in political and ethical situations. The brave new world of economic reform, far from bringing about the good society, serves only to postpone that society by a cavalier disregard of social and culture factors in human evolution. Eberstadt warns against a melodramatic approach to issues such as hunger and malnutrition. Material advances in the economy and cultural advances in the polity are safeguards against the worst outcomes of current problems in population. His reversal of cause and effect marks this as a volume apart, provocative, controversial, but surefooted in its scholarly sensibility and methods. In an academic world in which demographers are now speaking of the peaking of population rather than its infinite expansion, Eberstadt moves the discussion to family ties and common bonds. Demographers and family planners alike have much to learn from an approach that takes seriously the pitfalls as well as blessings of so-called zero-growth in the world -population.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1560004231/?tag=2022091-20
(With the establishment in 1948 of a Soviet-sponsored Demo...)
With the establishment in 1948 of a Soviet-sponsored Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the northern half of the Korean peninsula and a U.S.-supported Republic of Korea (ROK) in the South, a thousand years of political and administrative unity came to an official end for the Korean nation. At the same time, the political quest for Korean reunification may be said to have commenced. For the DPRK government, the reunification of Korea -- on the DPRK's own terms -- has been an overriding policy objective since its very inception.Korean reunification on the DPRK's terms was not only feasible but promising at one time. As Nicholas Eberstadt shows in The End of North Korea, the cherished goal of Korean unification is drawing closer -- but it is not a reunification on DPRK terms.Eberstadt has an extraordinary ability to find meaning observable signals of impending systemic dysfunction, although data are sorely lacking from a regime resolutely dosed to the outside world. He astutely pieces together a picture of North Korea trapped in a self-perpetuating spiral of economic degeneration. The regimes commitment to hypermilitarization (it has been near total wax mobilization since at least the early 1970s) and its insistence on an especially idiosyncratic variant of central economic planning have taken their toll. The most vivid manifestation of systemic woes was the widespread food shortages in North Korea of 1995 and 1996 -- and one incontestable indication of economic collapse is a hunger crisis precipitated by a breakdown in the national food system. Eberstadt observes that the therapies that might restore the regime to health also threaten to destroy its power.As theeconomic base beneath the North Korean state falters and the prospect of state failure draws closer, the lethal power in the hands of the regime and the leadership's incentives to exploit it to secure foreign support increase. According to Eberstadt, North Korea's endgame exposes all of Northeast Asia, and possibly even countries outside the region, to immediate and mounting peril The author looks at what steps can be taken -- and by whom -- to maximize the likelihood of a benign outcome.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0844740888/?tag=2022091-20
(This work presents a detailed picture of the divergent so...)
This work presents a detailed picture of the divergent socio-economic trends in divided Korea since its 1945 partition. It also covers the social and political situation in the North and South today, and the domestic and international challenges to a successful Korean reunification.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1563245574/?tag=2022091-20
( One third of the world's population today lives under g...)
One third of the world's population today lives under governments that consider themselves to be Marxist-Leninist. In many of these places, severe poverty was endemic in the years before Communist authorities came to power. Communist governments claim to have a special understanding into and effectiveness in dealing with problems of poverty. Marxist-Leninist rulers have been in power for nearly thirty years in Cuba, nearly forty years in China, and over sixty-five years in the Soviet Union. How do the poor fare in such places today? Western intellectuals often assume there is an inevitable tradeoff between bread and freedom under communism. What populations lose in the way of civil and political rights, they gain in social guarantees that protect them against material hardship. In The Poverty of Communism, Nick Eberstadt challenges this assumption and shatters it. He shows that Communist governments in a wide variety of settings have been no more successful in attending to the material needs of the most vulnerable segments of the populations they govern than non-Communist governments against which they might most readily be compared. Indeed, measured by the health, literacy, and nutrition of their people, Communist governments may today be less effective in dealing with poverty than are non-Communist governments. The Poverty of Communism is a pathbreaking investigation. In a series of separate studies, Eberstadt analyzes the performance of Communist governments in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and Cuba. This is the first scholarly effort to assess the record of Communist governments with respect to poverty in a detailed and comprehensive fashion. Well written, carefully argued, and reflecting a sweeping range of knowledge, The Poverty of Communism will be of interest to specialists in the countries investigated as well as those concerned with comparative economic and political development. Above all, it gives testimony to the plight of voiceless populations about which all too little has been written from an objective standpoint.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887388175/?tag=2022091-20
researcher social sciences educator
Eberstadt, Nicholas Nash was born on December 10, 1955 in New York City. Son of Frederick and Isabel (Nash) Eberstadt.
AB magna cum laude, Harvard University, 1976. Master of Public Administration, Harvard University, 1979. Master of Science, London School of Economics, 1978.
Doctor of Philosophy, Harvard University, 1996.
Visiting research fellow Rockefeller Foundation, New York City, 1979—1980. Visiting fellow Harvard School Public Health, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980—2002. Visiting scholar American Enterprise Institute, Washington, 1985—1999, Henry Wendt chair in political economic, since 1999.
Member board advisers National Bureau Asian Research, Seattle, since 1996. Board directors Environmental Literacy Council, Washington, United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Washington. Member Advisory Committee for Volunteer Foreign Aid.
Member advisory board National Center for Health Statistics. Consultant in field; member President' Council Bioethics, HELP Commission.
( In current intellectual and public discourse, the entir...)
(With the establishment in 1948 of a Soviet-sponsored Demo...)
(This work presents a detailed picture of the divergent so...)
( One third of the world's population today lives under g...)
(Throughout the world, numbers are increasingly used to gu...)
Member Cambridge Democratic City Committee, 1974-1977. Founding member Committee for Free World, New York City, 1981-1990. Member of Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard Club New York City.
Married Mary Tedeschi, October 24, 1987. Children: Frederick William, Catherine Nash, Isabel, Alexandra.