From the 1960s onwards, New Household economists like Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker shifted focus onto the poverty-alleviating impacts of family investment in human capital. This move was informed, first, by increased cultural and political awareness of what Becker referred to as an impoverished ‘underclass’ (1964/1993); second, by the social movements, including civil rights challenges to racial discrimination in schools and labour markets; and third, by government debates during the War on Poverty about the causes of Black family instability. Becker explained family instability as a rational response to price changes in the goods – including children – that families wanted. Given a set of preferences for basic commodities, and facing a defined range of choices, families were conceptualised as maximising utility, subject to constraints of income and time. This permitted hypotheses about how wages and human capital investment affected the cost of children, with effects on family formation and dissolution, fertility, and care-provision by women. As for poverty-alleviation, Becker favoured low-interest education loans. He rejected progressive income taxation and family welfare for incentivising underinvestment in education. Compensatory education programmes would fail by being offset. These policy positions were described by Nancy Folbre and Randy Albelda as a War on the Poor.

In 1979, the publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s memoir, A Dangerous Place, reignited debates in the subcontinent over CIA interference in India’s internal affairs. Four years later, in 1983, a vituperative assault on Henry Kissinger published by the American investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, in his book, The Price of Power, further fanned flames surrounding the CIA’s activities in India. Hersh’s book claimed that the former Indian prime minister, Morarji Desai, had been a CIA asset and passed intelligence to the Agency at the time of the Indo-Pakistan hostilities in 1971. The accusation levelled by Hersh, which prompted Desai to sue in an American court, served as a cause celébère, and saw Kissinger forced to take to publicly testify on CIA operations in India. This chapter examines how perceptions of the CIA in India towards the end of the Cold War were influenced by memoirs, books, and articles ‘exposing’ Agency misdeeds. It analyses the motivations behind such works, their impact on the Agency’s reputation at home and abroad, and the effectiveness of strategies employed by actors in India and the United States to enhance and suppress their reach.