California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and how We Can Fix it

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University of California Press, 2010 - History - 224 pages
"California Crackup is brilliant. It cuts through the familiar tangle of diagnoses and quick-fix solutions to provide a comprehensive and persuasive analysis of California's dysfunctional governmental system. Paul and Mathews have coolly laid out a complicated story, made it readable, sometimes even comedic. It is the best discussion of the issue I've seen in over three decades."--Peter Schrag, author of California: America's High-Stakes Experiment

"I know of no other work that combines so succinctly and enjoyably a historical summary of California's existing problems with such a sweeping and provocative program of reform."--Ethan Rarick, University of California, Berkeley

"Mark Paul and Joe Mathews have produced an indispensable guide to California's crisis of governance--and they have done so with humor, scholarship, fairness and storytelling verve. Every Californian should read this book."--Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars

"Mark Paul... has a talent for presenting California Big Think stuff in an easily accessible and always readable way...[offering] clear and creative insights on the subject of California's collapse."--CalBuzz

"Joe Mathews has done an artful, fascinating, and convincing job of connecting the California of today's Schwarzenegger era to the long history that made his rise possible.--James Fallows, The Atlantic Monthly on Mathews' book, The People's Machine
 

Contents

Prologue Out of Luck
1
BUILDING AND BREAKING CALIFORNIA
5
THE CALIFORNIA FIX
77
Epilogue Good Rules to Match Its Mountains
185
Notes
193
Acknowledgments
211
Index
217
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