Publications

California, with its progressive tax system and dynamic economy, has some of the highest levels of per-capita government spending in the country. But state programs systematically suffer from fragmentation and complexity. Part 4 of our white paper series argues that, to make the state more affordable, we need to streamline and simplify public programs to more effectively help residents cope with high costs.

To address its unaffordability problem, California must reform regressive regulations. Time and time again the state has pursued progressive goals through policies that raise the cost of essentials — hitting low-income residents hardest. This regressively funded progressivism is a major driver of California’s high cost of living. Part 3 of our white paper series explores how these costly and often ineffective regulations work and offers a path toward durable reform.

The primary driver of California’s unaffordability and poverty is our high cost of living. And the foremost driver of high costs in California is a policy regime that makes it difficult to build the physical infrastructure we need to deliver essentials, particularly housing. Part 2 of our white paper series on making California more affordable explains the origins of growth restrictions in California, explores the implications of those restrictions, analyzes the politics of pro-growth policies, and offers a path forward to achieve sustainable growth.

In this monograph, BESI faculty affiliate David J. Vogel and CUNY political scientist Roger Karapin offer an original analysis of the federal government’s sectoral climate policy accomplishments over the last five decades with concrete recommendations for policy makers.

Historians Robyn d’Avignon (NYU) and Matthew Shutzer (UC Berkeley) coordinated the Forum section for a volume of the journal Environmental History, in which novel archival sources and approaches take center stage. Situated in case studies in Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific, and the United States, the essays call attention to how underutilized archival knowledge has begun to reframe environmental historians’ approach to subterranean histories.

This project looks at how AI is being developed and adopted within religious organizations. This is a project that spans disciplinary boundaries, bringing digital sociology and the sociology of culture into conversation with theology and religious studies.

An increasingly important and overlooked dimension of digital content quality for kids is the level of visual stimulation. This project uses computer vision to quantify these overstimulating visual features that are linked to adverse cognitive and behavioral outcomes.

This project revisits the net neutrality debate in light of contemporary technological realities. Distributed caching infrastructure is no longer incidental; it is functionally necessary for high-performance internet service. The authors propose democratizing caching by requiring that first-hop ISPs offer standardized caching services as a component of baseline broadband access.

California is less affordable and poorer than it should be given the strength of our economy. Part 1 of our white paper series on making California more affordable presents the basic facts on California’s unaffordability problem. Most strikingly, California’s high costs and insufficient incomes give California the highest poverty rate in the country when accounting for cost of living.

Read BESI director Paul Pierson’s introduction to our four-part white paper series on addressing California’s affordability problem.

In a paper for the May 2026 issue of the journal Energy Policy, BESI climate fellow Kathryn Chelminski and her co-authors Guixing Wei and Gian Pietro Bellocca investigate how utility governance structure affects electrical grid reliability in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities.