PolicyCast

HKS Senior Lecturer Linda Bilmes, an expert on public finance who has studied post-9/11 war costs for the past 20 years, says their staggering $5 trillion cost was enabled by what she calls “The Ghost Budget.” Using an unprecedented combination of borrowing, accounting tricks, and outsourcing, presidential administrations, Congress, and the Pentagon were able to circumvent traditional military budget processes in a way that kept war costs out of the public debate and resulted in trillions being spent with minimal oversight. The result: corporations and wealthy investors raking in huge profits, massive waste and fraud, and—combined with the Bush and Trump tax cuts—a shifting of the burden of the costs of war away from the wealthy and onto middle- and lower-income people and future generations. Of course by any metric, the United States-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were costly. Human life? At least 430,000 Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistani civilians dead, along with more than 7,000 U.S. military personnel and thousands of civilian contractors. Democratic progress? Afghanistan is once again an authoritarian theocracy under the Taliban, and instead of transforming Iraq and the region, the U.S. invasion and occupation undermined popular sentiment toward democracy, unleashed sectarian violence, and strengthened autocratic regimes. But the budgetary problems are something we can address now, Bilmes says, with congressional reforms and planning prudently for the long-term costs of the wars, including caring for veterans. “The Ghost Budget” is also the title of Bilmes’ next book, which will be published next year. Linda Bilmes’ Policy Recommendations Episode Contributors: Linda J. Bilmes, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, is a leading expert on budgetary and public financial issues. Her research focuses on budgeting and public administration in the public, private and non-profit sectors. She is interested in how resources are allocated, particularly defense budgets, costs of war, veterans, sub-national budgeting and public lands. She is a full-time Harvard faculty member, teaching budgeting, cost accounting and public finance, and teaching workshops for newly-elected Mayors and Members of Congress. Since 2005, she has led the Greater Boston Applied Field Lab, an advanced academic program in which teams of student volunteers assist local communities in public finance and operations. She also leads field projects for the Bloomberg Cities program. She served as the Assistant Secretary and CFO of the U.S. Department of Commerce under President Bill Clinton. She currently serves as the sole United States member of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA), and as Vice-chair of Economists for Peace and Security. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University. She was a member of the National Parks Second Century Commission and served on the U.S. National Parks Service Advisory Board for eight years. She has testified to Congress on numerous occasions and has authored or co-authored numerous books, including the New York Times bestseller “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict” (with Joseph E. Stiglitz) and “The People Factor: Strengthening America by Investing in Public Service” (with W. Scott Gould). She was also featured in the Academy-award nominated documentary "No End in Sight," and was the recipient of the 2008 Speaking Truth to Power Award from the American Friends Service Committee. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, Bilmes earned a BA and an MBA from Harvard University and a PhD from Oxford University. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and...

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Rana Mitter and Harvard Business School Associate Professor Meg Rithmire say that after decades of tremendous growth, an economically slowing China is the new normal. With a growing debt-to-GDP ratio, an aging population, a devastating real estate bubble, and a loss of confidence among both foreign investors and domestic consumers, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party face a daunting array of thorny problems—including ones of their own making resulting from the One Child law policy and other home-grown policies. So how should the United States and other Western countries respond? Is it a moment China's rivals can use to their advantage, or one where great power rivalry can give way to great power cooperation? And how will an economic slowdown affect China’s geopolitical ambitions, and is an annexation of Taiwan now more or less likely? Rana Mitter is a historian and the S.T. Lee Chair in U.S.-Asia relations at the Kennedy School and the former director of the China Center at Oxford University. Harvard Business School Associate Professor Meg Rithmire is a political scientist who studies the comparative political economy of development in Asia and China’s economic relations with the rest of the world, particularly the United States. They join host Ralph Ranalli to explore some of the underlying reasons behind for the country’s current malaise, and to offer some policy ideas to help create a positive outcome with relations with China moving forward. Rana Mitter’s Policy Recommendations: Meg Rithmire’s Policy Recommendations: Episode Notes: Rana Mitter is the ST Lee Chair in U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and a member of the board of directors of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. A historian who focuses on the politics and history of modern China, particularly during the communist era, he was formerly director of the China Centre at Oxford University, Mitter is the author of several books, including “Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II,” which was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is “China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism.” His recent audio documentary on contemporary Chinese politics "Meanwhile in Beijing" is available on BBC Sounds. He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the UK Historical Association. A Fellow of the British Academy, he holds a master’s degree and a PhD from King’s College, Cambridge (UK). Meg Rithmire is the F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, where she teaches in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit. A political scientist, her my teaching and research focus on comparative politics and political economy with a geographic focus on Asia, especially China and Southeast Asia. Rithmire is also faculty affiliate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, where she convenes a seminar on the Chinese economy. Her first book, “Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism,” examines the role of land politics, urban governments, and local property rights regimes in the Chinese economic reforms. Her most recent book, “Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia” investigates the relationship between capital and the state and globalization in Asia, comparing China, Malaysia, and Indonesia from the early 1980s to the present. The book examines how governments attempt to discipline business and how businesses adapt to different methods of state control. She holds a master’s degree in political science from Emory University and a master’s and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism...

Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Ed Djerejian says Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin once told him “There is no military solution to this conflict, only a political one.” Rabin was assassinated a few years later and today bullets are flying, bombs are falling, and 1,200 Israelis are dead after the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 and nearly 30,000 Gazans have been killed in the Israeli response. Yet Djerejain still believes that a breakthrough is possible even in the current moment, as horrible as it is. Djerejian, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Relations, says the crisis has shaken the regional status quo to the point where—if the United States pursues diplomacy that includes principled pragmatism, coalition-building, and good old- fashioned backbone—a breakthrough may finally be possible. But in a recent paper he argues that any breakthrough will have to be built around a two-state solution, which he says is the only path to peace and stability not only in Israel and Palestine, but the wider Middle East. Djerejian’s career as a diplomat spanned eight U.S. presidential administrations beginning with John F. Kennedy’s, and he also served as U.S. Ambassador to Syria and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Ed Djerejian's Policy Recommendations: Ambassador (Ret.) Edward P. Djerejian is a residential Senior Fellow at the Middle East Initiative in Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Relations. Djerejian joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1962 and his 32-year diplomatic career spanned eight presidential administrations from John F. Kennedy to William J. Clinton. Djerejian is a leading expert on national security, foreign policy, public diplomacy, and the complex political, security, economic, religious, and ethnic issues of the broader Middle East. He is the author of “Danger and Opportunity: An American Ambassador's Journey Through the Middle East.” He recently completed a nearly 30-year tenure as founding director of Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. Ambassador Djerejian graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1960. He received an Honorary Doctorate in the Humanities from his alma mater in 1992 and a Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, from Middlebury College. He speaks Arabic, Russian, French, and Armenian. His many awards and honors include the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, the Department of State’s Distinguished Honor Award, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the Anti-Defamation League’s Moral Statesman Award, the Award for Humanitarian Diplomacy from Netanya Academic College in Israel, the National Order of the Cedar. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. Editorial support is provided by Nora Delaney and Robert O’Neill. Design and graphics support is provided by Laura King, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

As our discourse and our politics have become both more polarized and paralyzed, Harvard Kennedy School faculty members Erica Chenoweth and Julia Minson say we need to refocus on listening to understand, instead of talking to win. In mid-2022, the School launched the Candid and Constructive Conversations initiative, based on the idea that frank yet productive discussions over differences are not only vital to democracy and a functioning society, but that the ability to have them was also an essential skill for students, staff, and faculty in the Harvard community and beyond to learn. The effort—which uses techniques and principles based on surveys and decision science—took on even greater urgency after the recent events in Israel and Gaza and their fallout in the U.S., including at Harvard and other universities. Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment and the academic dean for faculty Engagement at HKS, as well as one of the world’s leading authorities on conflict and alternatives to political violence. Associate Professor of Public Policy Julia Minson is a decision scientist who studies the psychology of disagreement, and has developed research-based, practical methods that nearly anyone can use to make difficult conversations into productive ones. Policy Recommendations: Erica Chenoweth’s Policy Recommendations: Julia Minson’s Policy Recommendations: Erica Chenoweth is the Academic Dean for Faculty Engagement and the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, Faculty Dean at Pforzheimer House at Harvard College, and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. They study political violence and its alternatives. At Harvard, Chenoweth directs the Nonviolent Action Lab, an innovation hub that provides empirical evidence in support of movement-led political transformation. Chenoweth has authored or edited nine books on mass movements, nonviolent resistance, terrorism, political violence, revolutions, and state repression. Their recent book, “Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know,” explores what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance. Their next book with HKS Lecturer in Public Policy Zoe Marks, “Bread and Roses: Women on the Frontlines of Revolution,” investigates the impact of women’s participation on revolutionary outcomes and democratization. Chenoweth maintains the NAVCO Data Project, one of the world’s leading datasets on historical and contemporary mass mobilizations around the globe. Along with Jeremy Pressman, Chenoweth also co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest and scholarly project that documents political mobilization in the U.S. since January 2017. Associate Professor of Public Policy Julia Minson is a decision scientist with research interests in conflict, negotiations and judgment and decision making. Her primary line of research addresses the “psychology of disagreement” – How do people engage with opinions, judgments and decisions that are different from their own? She is particularly interested in simple, scalable interventions to help people be more receptive to views and opinions they strongly oppose. Much of Julia’s research is conducted in collaboration with the graduate and post-doctoral members of MC² – the Minson Conflict and Collaboration Lab. At the Kennedy School Julia is affiliated with the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, the Center for Public Leadership, and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. Julia teaches courses on negotiations and decision-making as part of the Management, Leadership and Decision Science area, as well as through HKS Executive Education. Prior to coming to the Kennedy School, Julia served as an Adjunct Lecturer at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where she taught Negotiations at both the MBA and...

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Kathryn Sikkink and former longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth have spent years both studying the transformational effects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and have worked on the ground to make its vision of a more just, equal world a reality. On December 10th, the world celebrated not only the annual Human Rights Day, but also the 75th anniversary of the UDHR, which some historians and social scientists consider to be the greatest achievement in the history of humankind. It was the first time representatives of the world community declared that every human person on earth was entitled to the same rights as every other, without discrimination, and no matter the circumstances. It was an achievement that was both historically radical—legal slavery in the United States had ended just 80 years earlier—and yet one which made perfect, urgent sense in the post-World-War-II context of a humanity whose collective conscience was still reeling at the horrors and inhumanity of conflict. Appalled by the dehumanization and mass slaughter of human beings in the Holocaust, where 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis along with Poles, Roma, homosexuals and other groups, by Japanese atrocities including 2.7 million people murdered in Northern China alone, by the first use of atomic weapons, and by other acts of mass civilian killing, the world’s nations gathered to write a new definition of what it means to be human. The result was the UDHR, which was drafted by a committee led by former U.S. first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It was radical not just because it was so universal, but also because it was remarkably comprehensive—going far beyond basics like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to enumerating human rights to privacy, health, adequate housing, freedom from torture and slavery, the right to nationality, to take part in government, to work for equal pay, to have protection against unemployment, to unionize, to a decent standard of living, to rest and leisure, to enjoy culture, art, and science, and finally to a social and international order where the rights in the Declaration could be fully realized. ikkink is a faculty affiliate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at HKS, where Roth just finished a senior fellowship. They join PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli to explain how the UDHR has forever changed the way we think about our fellow human beings, and to suggest policies that will keep pushing the global community toward a more just, fair, and compassionate world. Policy Recommendations: Kathryn Sikkink’s Policy Recommendations: Ken Roth’s Policy Recommendations: Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a faculty affiliate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Sikkink’s work centers on international norms and institutions, transnational advocacy networks, the impact of human rights law and policies, transitional justice, and the laws of war. She has written numerous books, including “The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilies,” “Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century,” and “The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics,” which was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Center Book Award and the Washington Office on Latin America/Duke University Human Rights Book Award. She holds an MA and a PhD from Columbia University and has been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and a Guggenheim fellow. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. Kenneth Roth is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading international human rights organizations, which operates in more than 90 countries. Roth has been called “the godfather of the human rights” for his dedication to the cause and for helping change...

Legacy admissions, particularly at elite colleges and universities, were thrust into the spotlight this summer when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in admissions. The ruling raised many questions, and fortunately, Harvard Kennedy School professor David Deming and Harvard Economics Professor Raj Chetty were there with some important answers—having just wrapped up a 6-year study of the impact of legacy admissions at so-called “Ivy-plus” schools. Students spend years preparing to face judgment by colleges and universities as a worthy potential applicant. They strive for report cards filled with A’s in advanced placement courses. They volunteer for service projects and participate in extracurricular activities. They cram furiously high-stakes standardized tests. They do all that only to find a big question many top colleges have is effectively: “Who’s your daddy? And who's your mother? Did they go to school here?” Using data from more than 400 colleges and universities and about three and a half million undergraduate students per year, the two economists found that legacy and other elite school admissions practices significantly favor students from wealthy families and serve a gate-keeping function to positions of power and prestige in society. Read Chetty and Deming's paper (co-authored by John Friedman): Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of College Admissions David Deming’s Policy Recommendations: Raj Chetty’s Policy Recommendations: Raj Chetty is the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics at Harvard University. He is also the director of Opportunity Insights, which uses “big data” to understand how we can give children from disadvantaged backgrounds better chances of succeeding. Chetty's research combines empirical evidence and economic theory to help design more effective government policies. His work on topics ranging from tax policy and unemployment insurance to education and affordable housing has been widely cited in academia, media outlets, and Congressional testimony. Chetty received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2003 and is one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, he was a professor at UC-Berkeley and Stanford University. Chetty has received numerous awards for his research, including a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship and the John Bates Clark medal, given to the economist under 40 whose work is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field. David Deming is the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy and the academic dean of the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also the faculty dean of Kirkland House at Harvard College and a research associate at NBER. His research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market. He is a principal investigator (along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman) at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility. He is also a faculty lead of the Project on Workforce, a cross-Harvard initiative that focuses on building better pathways to economic mobility through the school-to-work transition. He recently co-founded (with Ben Weidmann) the Skills Lab, which creates performance-based measures of “soft” skills such as teamwork and decision-making. In 2022 he won the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics. In 2018 he was awarded the David N. Kershaw Prize for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy and management under the age of 40. He served as a Coeditor of the AEJ: Applied from 2018 to 2021. He also writes occasional columns for the New York Times Economic View, which you can find linked on his personal website. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former...

Harvard Kennedy School faculty member Jorrit de Jong and Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson say the big, intractable problems challenges facing city leaders today are too complex to be addressed by any one agency or government department. Complex challenges like the shortage of economic opportunity and affordable housing, homelessness, the effects of the climate crisis, crime—and can only be solved by multiple organizations working together. But that’s easier said than done. Bringing together government agencies, nonprofits, private business, academia, and the public into successful collaborations can be a huge challenge. Different people bring different agendas and goals. They don’t necessarily trust each other. Sometimes they can’t even agree on what the problem actually is and they fail before even getting started. In a recent study, de Jong and Edmondson found that the most successful problem-solving collaborations have a number of things in common, including building a culture of safety and trust and being empowered to try, fail, and learn from mistakes. Sometimes, they say, the key can be just finding a place to start. Jorrit de Jong is the Emma Bloomberg Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School. He is director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on the challenges of making the public sector more effective, efficient, equitable, and responsive to social needs. A specialist in experiential learning, Jorrit has taught strategic management and public problem-solving in degree and executive education programs at HKS and around the world. He is also Faculty Co-Chair of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, a joint program of Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, the world’s most comprehensive effort to advance effective problem-solving and innovation through executive education, research, curriculum development, and fieldwork in cities. He is also Academic Director of the Innovations in Government Program at the Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. In that capacity, he launched the Innovation Field Lab, an experiential learning, executive education, and action-oriented research project working with 15 cities in Massachusetts and New York to help them leverage data, community engagement and innovation to revitalize distressed and underinvested neighborhoods. He holds a PhD in Public Policy and Management from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, as well as a Master in Philosophy and a Master in Public Administration from Leiden University. He has written extensively, including the books “The State of Access: Success and Failure of Democracies to Create Equal Opportunities;” “Agents of Change: Strategy and Tactics for Social Innovation;” and “Dealing with Dysfunction: Innovative Problem Solving in the Public Sector.” Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society. Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked No. 1 in 2021. he also received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017. She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organizational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets. Her 2019 book, “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth,” has been translated into 15 languages. Her prior books: “Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy;” “Teaming to Innovate;” and “Extreme Teaming” explore teamwork in dynamic organizational environments. Edmondson’s latest book, “Right Kind of...

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Todd Rogers and Lecturer in Public Policy Lauren Brodsky say trying too hard to sound intelligent—even when communicating complex or nuanced ideas—isn't a smart strategy. Because today’s overburdened information consumers are as much skimmers as readers, Rogers and Brodsky teach people how to put readers first and use tools like simplification, formatting, and storytelling for maximum engagement. They say you can have the most brilliant, well-researched ideas in the policy world, but you can’t communicate them, they’ll never reach the ultimate goal—making an impact. Rogers is the faculty chair of the Behavioral Insights Group at the Kennedy School and the author of “Writing for Busy Readers: The Science of Writing Better.” Brodsky is senior director of the HKS Communications Program and the author of “Because Data Can’t Speak for Itself,” a book about how to more effectively communicate the data that supports groundbreaking research and evidence-based policy proposals. They say snarky millennials may be to something when they dismissively mocked your wordy social posts and text messages by replying “TLDR”—"too long; didn’t read”—because that’s how many busy readers feel about a lot of the writing that researchers, academics, and policy wonks do. Todd Rogers is a Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is a behavioral scientist who works to improve communication, increase student attendance, and strengthens democracy. At Harvard, he is the faculty director of the Behavioral Insights Group and faculty chair of the executive education program Behavioral Insights and Public Policy. He received a Ph.D. jointly from Harvard's department of Psychology and Harvard Business School, and received a B.A. from Williams College, majoring in both Religion and Psychology. He is also co-founded two social enterprises: the Analyst Institute which focuses on improving voter communications, and EveryDay Labs, which partners with school districts to reduce student absenteeism. He is the author of the book “Writing for Busy Readers: The Science of Writing Better.” Lauren Brodsky is the senior director of the HKS Communications Program and a lecturer in public policy who teaches courses on policy writing and persuasive communications. She is also faculty chair of the executive education program “Persuasive Communication: Narrative, Evidence, Impact.” A co-author of the book “Because Data Can’t Speak for Itself,” she also publishes the website Policy Memo Resource (www.policymemos.hks.harvard.edu) at HKS. Lauren lectures widely on policy communications and the use of evidence in writing for governmental agencies and non-profit organizations. She is a former Theodore Sorensen Research Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where she conducted archival research on public diplomacy programs during the Kennedy administration. She holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A.L.D. and Ph.D. from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who served as CDC director from 2021 to 2023, calls the job “probably the hardest thing I will ever do.” But she also calls it “the honor of a lifetime.” When she was appointed by President Biden as the CDC’s 19th director, she was already used to politicized health care issues, having spent her formative years as a physician working on HIV and AIDS. But COVID thrust her into an unprecedented spotlight, forcing her to lead a demoralized agency through the challenges of implementing policy and informing the public while navigating a highly polarized and often toxic public sphere and rapidly changing scientific data. Walensky says she learned some hard and valuable lessons during her tenure. After stepping down from the post this summer, Walensky is now a senior fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, studying the topic of women’s leadership in the health care field. She is also exploring health care policy issues in concurrent fellowships at both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. Dr. Rochelle Walensky is a renowned expert exploring the challenges and what it means for leaders, organizations, and the world to protect public health. Dr. Walensky was the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and served as the 19th director of the CDC and the ninth administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Having received an M.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, she also trained in internal medicine and earned an MPH in clinical effectiveness from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2001. In the earliest part of the pandemic, Dr. Walensky served on the front lines, taking care of patients, serving on the Massachusetts General Hospital incident management team, and conducting research on vaccine delivery and strategies to reach underserved communities. Dr. Walensky’s tenure at the CDC began on January 20th, 2021, when she led the nation—and the world—through unprecedented times, facing the largest density of infectious threats likely ever seen in the United States. Dr. Walensky has also worked to improve HIV screening and care in South Africa, led health policy initiatives, and researched clinical trial design and evaluation in a variety of settings. She was chair of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at the National Institutes of Health from 2014 to 2015. She has also been a member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents and served as co-director of the Medical Practice Evaluation Center at Massachusetts General Hospital since 2011 before assuming the position of CDC director. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

Kennedy School Lecturer in Public Policy Bruce Schneier says Artificial Intelligence has the potential to transform the democratic process in ways that could be good, bad, and potentially mind-boggling. The important thing, he says, will be to use regulation and other tools to make sure that AIs are working for us, and just not for Big Tech companies—a hard lesson we’ve already learned through our experience with social media. When ChatGPT and other generative AI tools were released to the public late last year, it was as if someone had opened the floodgates on a thousand urgent questions that just weeks before had mostly preoccupied academics, futurists, and science fiction writers. Now those questions are being asked by many of us—teachers, students, parents, politicians, bureaucrats, citizens, businesspeople, and workers. What can it do for us? What will it do to us? Will it take our jobs? How do we use it in a way that’s both ethical and legal? And will it help or hurt our already-distressed democracy? Schneier, a public interest technologist, cryptographer, and internationally-known internet security specialist whose newsletter and blog are read by a quarter million people, says that AI’s inexorable march into our lives and into our politics is likely to start with small changes, like AI helping write policy and legislation. The future, however, could hold possibilities that we have a hard time wrapping our current minds around—like AI entities creating political parties or autonomously fundraising and generating profits to back political candidates or causes. Overall, like a lot of other things. it’s likely to be a mixed bag of the good and the bad. Bruce Schneier is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a faculty affiliate at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS, a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. An internationally renowned security technologist, he has been called a "security guru" by the Economist and is the New York Times best-selling author of 14 books—including A Hacker's Mind—as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter “Crypto-Gram” and blog “Schneier on Security” are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and AccessNow, and an advisory board member of EPIC and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. PolicyCast is co-produced by Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Joseph Kalt and Megan Minoka Hill say the evidence is in: When Native nations make their own decisions about what development approaches to take, studies show they consistently out-perform external decision makers like the U.S. Department of Indian Affairs. Kalt and Hill say that’s why Harvard is going all in, recently changing the name of the Project on American Indian Economic Development to the Project on Indigenous Governance and Development—pushing the issue of governance to the forefront—and announcing an infusion of millions in funding. When the project launched in the mid-1980s, the popular perception of life in America’s indigenous nations—based at least partly in reality—was one of poverty and dysfunction. But it was also a time when tribes were being granted increased autonomy from the federal government and starting to govern themselves. Researchers noticed that unexpected tribal economic success stories were starting to crop up, and they set about trying to determine those successes were a result of causation or coincidence. Over the decades, Kalt and Hill say the research has shown that empowered tribal nations not only succeed themselves, they also become economic engines for the regions that surround them. The recent announcement of $15 million in new support for the program, including an endowed professorship, will help make supporting tribal self-government a permanent part of the Kennedy School’s mission. Joseph P. Kalt is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and director of the Project on Indigenous Governance and Development, formerly the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. He is the author of numerous studies on economic development and nation building in Indian Country and a principal author of the Harvard Project's The State of the Native Nations. Together with the University of Arizona's Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, the Project has formed The Partnership for Native Nation Building. Since 2005, Kalt has been a visiting professor at The University of Arizona's Eller College of Management and is also faculty chair for nation building programs at the Native Nations Institute. Kalt has served as advisor to Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, a commissioner on the President's Commission on Aviation Safety, and on the Steering Committee of the National Park Service's National Parks for the 21st Century. A native of Tucson, Arizona, he earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles, and his B.A. in Economics from Stanford University. Megan Minoka Hill is senior director of the Project on Indigenous Governance and Development and director of the Honoring Nations program at the Harvard Kennedy School. Honoring Nations is a national awards program that identifies, celebrates, and shares outstanding examples of tribal governance. Founded in 1998, the awards program spotlights tribal government programs and initiatives that are especially effective in addressing critical concerns and challenges facing the more than 570 Indian nations and their citizens. Hill serves on the board of the Native Governance Center, is a member of the NAGPRA Advisory Committee for the Peabody Museum, and is a member of the Reimagining our Economy Commission at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Hill graduated from the University of Chicago with a Master of Arts Degree in the Social Sciences and earned a Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs and Economics from the University of Colorado Boulder. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer...

The history of American democracy has always been fraught when it comes to race. Yet no matter how elusive it may be, Harvard Kennedy School professors Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Archon Fung say true multiracial democracy not only remains a worthy goal, but achieving it is critically important to our collective future. From the earliest, formative days of the American political experiment, the creation of laws and political structures was often less about achieving some Platonic ideal of the perfect democratic system than it was about finding tenuous compromises between people and groups who had very different beliefs and agendas when it came to the status of people of other races. Those tensions have been baked into our system ever since, and the history of the movement toward a true multi-racial democracy in the United States has been marked with conflict, progress, reaction, and regression—from the 3/5’s Compromise to the Civil War to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement and on up to threats to democracy in our present day. Fung is a leading scholar of citizenship and self-governance and the faculty director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Muhammad is a professor of history, race, and public policy and director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project. He is also the former director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. They say that in our increasingly diverse and interconnected country and world, the question isn’t whether or not to strive for a multiracial democracy, but, if you don’t fully reckon with how race has shaped our system of governance, can you really have democracy at all? Archon Fung is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores policies, practices, and institutional designs that deepen the quality of democratic governance. He focuses upon public participation, deliberation, and transparency. He co-directs the Transparency Policy Project and leads democratic governance programs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. His books include Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency and Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy. He has authored five books, four edited collections, and over fifty articles appearing in professional journals. He received two SBs — in philosophy and physics — and his PhD in political science from MIT. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He directs the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project and is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, he was an associate professor at Indiana University. His scholarship examines the broad intersections of racism, economic inequality, criminal justice and democracy in U.S. history. He is co-editor of “Constructing the Carceral State,” a special issue of the Journal of American History, and the award-winning author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. He is currently co-directing a National Academy of Sciences study on reducing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system. A native of Chicago’s South Side, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Economics in 1993, and earned his PhD in U.S. History from Rutgers University. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an BA in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia...

As the U.S. prepares to spend hundreds of billions on new projects, HKS Professor Stephen Goldsmith says successfully upgrading our infrastructure will not only require spending all that money smartly, but spending it on infrastructure that is itself smart—full of sensors that can anticipate problems before they require costly repairs and that serve multiple functions instead of just one. With the passage of 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government has ushered in levels of infrastructure spending we haven’t seen since the days of President Dwight Eisenhower. Between direct spending and loans, there could be as much as $800 billion dollars in spending the coming years on everything from roads and bridges to water treatment to public transit to climate readiness to clean energy to internet access. While the current infrastructure spending has been pushed mainly by Democrats, he says he’d also like to see Republicans rediscover their Eisenhower-style belief in public investment—both in physical infrastructure and what he calls soft infrastructure like job training and education to address social and economic inequities. Goldsmith is director of the Innovations in American Government Program at the Kennedy School, but he is also a veteran of the infrastructure front lines—having served as the mayor of Indianapolis, a deputy mayor in New York City, as a chief domestic policy advisor to the George W. Bush campaign in 2000. Stephen Goldsmith is the Derek Bok Professor of the Practice of Urban Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of Data-Smart City Solutions at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. He currently directs Data-Smart City Solutions, a project to highlight local government efforts to use new technologies that connect breakthroughs in the use of big data analytics with community input to reshape the relationship between government and citizen. He previously served as Deputy Mayor of New York and Mayor of Indianapolis, where he earned a reputation as one of the country's leaders in public-private partnerships, competition, and privatization. Stephen was also the chief domestic policy advisor to the George W. Bush campaign in 2000, the Chair of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and the elected prosecutor for Marion County, Indiana from 1977 to 1989. He has written numerous books, including The Power of Social Innovation; Governing by Network: the New Shape of the Public Sector; Putting Faith in Neighborhoods: Making Cities Work through Grassroots Citizenship; The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance; and most recently Growing Fairly, How to Build Opportunity and Equity in Workforce Development. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Gordon Hanson and Harvard Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability James Stock say an important part of the green energy transition will be mitigating its effects on employment, both in the United States and overseas. Talking about the clean energy transition can conjure up images of commuters using sleek electric trains and electric cars powered by the sun and wind, and of workers with good-paying jobs installing the infrastructure of the future. But the outlook for communities that are economically tied to the fossil fuel economy that will be left behind isn’t quite as sunny. Stock is director of Harvard's Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, which brings together researchers from around the university to collaborate on climate solutions. Hanson is co-director of the Reimagining the Economy Project at the Kennedy School's Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. They say making the green energy transition is urgent and vital, but to do it successfully will mean planning a different sort of transition for almost a million workers in just the American fossil fuel extraction and refining industries alone—not to mention millions of workers further up the fossil fuel ecosystem. Thanks to previous economic shocks like globalization, automation, and the decline of the coal industry, we’ve seen first-hand the devastation that large-scale job loss can wreak on one-industry cities and company towns. Hanson and Stock say harnessing the lessons from those prior transitions can help power a future that’s both green and inclusively prosperous. Gordon Hanson is the Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also Chair of the Social and Urban Policy Area at HKS, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Hanson received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1992 and his BA in economics from Occidental College in 1986. Prior to joining Harvard in 2020, he held the Pacific Economic Cooperation Chair in International Economic Relations at UC San Diego, where he was founding director of the Center on Global Transformation. In his scholarship, Hanson studies the labor market consequences of globalization. He has published extensively in top economics journals, is widely cited for his research by scholars from across the social sciences and is frequently quoted in major media outlets. Hanson’s current research addresses how the China trade shock has affected US local labor markets, the causes and consequences of international migration, and the origins of regional economic divides. James H. Stock is Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University; the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and a member of the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School. His current research includes energy and environmental economics with a focus on fuels and on U.S. climate change policy. He is co-author, with Mark Watson, of a leading undergraduate econometrics textbook. In 2013-2014 he served as Member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, where his portfolio included macroeconomics and energy and environmental policy. He was Chair of the Harvard Economics Department from 2007-2009. He holds a M.S. in statistics and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

When it comes to the climate crisis, there’s barely a day that goes by when we don’t hear about the impending effects of rising sea levels and storm-driven tides. But Harvard professors Jaqueline Bhabha and Hannah Teicher say there’s another rising tide that’s not getting as much attention, despite its potential to reshape our world. It’s the wave of climate migrants—people who have been and will be driven from their homes by rising seas, extreme heat, catastrophic weather, and climate-related famine and economic hardship. Some will try to relocate within their home countries, others across international borders, but most experts predict that there will be hundreds of millions of them. In fact the United Nations says hundreds of millions of people globally have already been forced to relocate for climate-related reasons, and experts say as many as a billion people could be seeking new homes by 2050. Meanwhile, immigration is already a political third rail in many countries, including the United States, and has driven a rise in both authoritarianism and ethnonationalism. So where will they go? And what kind of welcome will they receive when they get there? Bhabha and Teicher are working on those questions, examining everything from the language we use when we talk about climate migration to international law and human rights to urban planning policies that can help create win-win situations when newcomers arrive. They say major changes to our climate and to the earth’s habitable spaces are coming, and a large part of adjusting to that successfully will involve another difficult change—to our way of thinking about how we share the world with our fellow humans. Jacqueline Bhabha is a faculty affiliate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, director of research for the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, a professor of the practice of health and human rights at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School. From 1997 to 2001 Bhabha directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Prior to 1997, she was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She has published extensively on issues of transnational child migration, refugee protection, children's rights and citizenship. She is author of Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age, and the editor of Children Without A State and Human Rights and Adolescence. Bhabha serves on the board of directors of the Scholars at Risk Network, the World Peace Foundation, and the Journal of Refugee Studies. She is also a founder of the Alba Collective, an international NGO currently working with rural women and girls in developing countries to enhance financial security and youth rights. She received a first class honors degree and an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and a J.D. from the College of Law in London. Hannah Teicher is an assistant professor of urban planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Her research is broadly concerned with how mitigation and adaptation to climate change are shaping urban transformations across scales. Her current research explores how receiving communities for climate migrants can learn from other forms of relocation to address tensions between host communities and newcomers. She is interested in how local level planning will grapple with the confluence of adaptation and migration as well as how urban restructuring will evolve at national and transnational scales. For the Climigration Network, Teicher co-chairs the Narrative Building Work Group which guided development of Lead with Listening, a guidebook for community conversations on climate migration. She is also an active member of the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from MIT, a Master of Architecture from the University of British Columbia, and a BA in...

Harvard Kennedy School professors Nancy Gibbs and Tom Patterson say local news is civic infrastructure. And it's crumbling. Like bridges, local news organizations use facts to help people connect with each other over the chasm of partisan political divides. People need reliable information to make important decisions about their lives—Where should I send my child to school? Who should I vote for? Should I buy a bigger house or a new car?—just as much as they need breathable air, clean water, and safe roads. Unfortunately, internet-driven market forces have cut traditional sources of revenue by 80 percent, and vulture capitalists have bought up local newspapers, sold off their physical assets and gutted newsroom staffs. Across America, more than 2,000 local news organizations have shut their doors in just the past two decades. Meanwhile, studies show that when local news declines, voting and other key forms of civic participation decline with it. Gibbs and Patterson join host Ralph Ranalli to talk about how to rebuild the local news ecosystem and with it, the civic health of America’s community life. Nancy Gibbs is the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics Public Policy and the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Until September 2017, she was Editor in Chief of TIME, the first woman to hold the position. During her three decades at TIME, she covered four presidential campaigns and she is the co-author, along with Michael Duffy, of two best-selling presidential histories: The President’s Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity (2012), and The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House (2007). She has interviewed five U.S. presidents and multiple other world leaders, and lectured extensively on the American presidency. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University and a master’s degree in politics and philosophy from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She has twice served as the Ferris Professor at Princeton University, where she taught a seminar on politics and the press. Thomas Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at HKS. He has authored numerous books, including Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism; How America Lost Its Mind: The Assault on Reason That's Crippling Our Democracy, and Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?. An earlier book, The Vanishing Voter, examined electoral participation, and his book on the media’s political role, Out of Order, received the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication. His first book, The Unseeing Eye, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century. His articles have appeared in Political Communication, Journal of Communication, Public Opinion Quarterly, and other academic journals, as well as in the popular press. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1971. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Robert Stavins and Professor Daniel Jacob of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences are at the forefront of new efforts to monitor and control methane, a potent greenhouse gas. It used to seem like methane wasn't such a big deal. It was that other climate gas, the one that was the butt of cow flatulence jokes and that only stayed in the atmosphere for a decade or so. But since important global warming targets are now just 7 years away and science has developed a better understanding of both methane’s pervasiveness and its potent role in warming the atmosphere, it’s now very much on the front burner for increasingly concerned climate policymakers. The good news is that the science of monitoring methane emissions has taken huge leaps forward recently, thanks to advances in supercomputing, weather modeling, and satellite imaging, to the point where we could soon have daily real-time monitoring and measuring of methane emissions around the globe. Our two guests are playing an important role in that effort. Robert Stavins is an economist and the director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Project and the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements. Daniel Jacob was named the world’s top environmental scientist last year by Research.com and his groundbreaking work has been instrumental in creating methane monitoring systems so precise they can track emissions to a specific company or another individual source—from space. Both say that the need to address the methane issue is urgent and that the countries of the world now have the wherewithal to get methane emissions under control. There are hopeful signs, including a major international agreement called the Global Methane Pledge, but the big question will be whether global leaders have the will to follow through. Robert Stavins is the A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy & Economic Development, Director of Graduate Studies for the Doctoral Programs in Public Policy and in Political Economy and Government, Cochair of the MPP/MBA and MPA/ID/MBA Joint Degree Programs. He is the Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a University Fellow of Resources for the Future, former Chair of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Economics Advisory Board, and a member of the editorial councils of scholarly periodicals. His research has examined diverse areas of environmental economics and policy and has appeared in a variety of economics, law, and policy journals, as well as several books. Stavins directed Project 88, a bipartisan effort cochaired by former Senator Timothy Wirth and the late Senator John Heinz to develop innovative approaches to environmental problems. He has been a consultant to government agencies, international organizations, corporations, and advocacy groups. He holds a BA in philosophy from Northwestern University, an MS in agricultural economics from Cornell, and a PhD in economics from Harvard. Daniel Jacob is the Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Harvard University. His research covers a wide range of topics in atmospheric chemistry, from air quality to climate change, and has led the development of the GEOS-Chem global 3-D model of atmospheric composition. In 2022, he won both the Best Scientist Award and the Environmental Sciences in United States Leader Award from Research.com as the top environmental scientist in the world. Jacob has also served as a mission scientist on eight NASA aircraft missions around the world and was awarded NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal in 2003. Jacob has trained over 100 Ph.D. students and postdocs over the course of his career. In 1994 he was made a Fellow of American Geophysical Union (AGU) and was awarded the James B. Macelwane Medal. He...

Economist and Harvard Kennedy School Professor Joe Aldy says possibly the most complex—and one of the most existentially important—problems facing humanity is how to pull out the roots of fossil fuel infrastructure that are so deeply embedded in the global economy. The work is complex and the scale is immense; In fact it’s been said that transitioning the global economy from fossil fuels to sustainable sources will require the largest reallocation of capital in human history. Meanwhile Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its willingness to weaponize oil and natural gas distribution was a sign to many that the green energy transition will be bumpy and buffeted by geopolitical crises and the domestic politics of countries around the world. Joe Aldy is here to help us swap our rose-colored glasses for a clear-eyed vision of what the future holds for the economics of climate. Joe Aldy is a Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a University Fellow at Resources for the Future, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is also the Faculty Chair for the Regulatory Policy Program at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. His research focuses on climate change policy, energy policy, and regulatory policy. In 2009-2010, Aldy served as the Special Assistant to the President for Energy and Environment, reporting through both the National Economic Council and the Office of Energy and Climate Change at the White House. Aldy was a Fellow at Resources for the Future from 2005 to 2008 and served on the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 2000. He also served as the Co-Director of the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, Co-Director of the International Energy Workshop, and Treasurer for the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists before joining the Obama Administration. He holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University, a Master of Environmental Management degree from the Nicholas School of the Environment, and a BA from Duke University. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

Matt Andrews, the faculty director of the Building State Capability program at Harvard Kennedy School, says the reasons why African nations haven’t done better at soccer’s world championships have a lot in common with why much of the continent’s economic promise has also gone unfulfilled. The World Cup, the biggest championship in soccer—or football, depending on where you are from—is currently underway and it's one of the two most-watched sporting events on the planet, the other being the Olympic Games. Yet even though it’s a world-wide event, the list of World Cup champions is dominated by European countries like France, Italy, and Germany, plus a handful of South American ones like Argentina and Brazil. No African nation, meanwhile, has ever made it even as far as the semifinals, although Morocco will have the opportunity to make history tomorrow when they face off against Portugal in the quarterfinals. Some possible reasons for Africa’s lack of success were recently outlined in a research paper by Matt Andrews, the Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development at HKS and faculty director of the Building State Capability program. Andrews, who grew up as a soccer fan in South Africa, says the problem isn’t talent—in fact, top professional soccer teams around the world are loaded with African-born players. Instead, Andrews says the reasons Africa’s soccer teams don’t do better look a lot like the reasons their economies don’t do better—they lack the institutional support that would help them realize their latent talent and promise. Matt Andrews is here today to talk football, goals, aspirations, and how to put African on a winning path. Matt Andrews is the Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has worked in over 50 countries across the globe as a civil servant, international development expert, researcher, teacher, advisor and coach. He has written three books and over 60 other publications on the topics of development and management. He is also the faculty director of the Building State Capability program at Harvard, which is where he has developed – with a team – a policy and management method to address complex challenges. This method is called problem driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) and was developed through over a decade of applied action research work by Matt and his team. It is now used by practitioners across the globe. Matt holds a BCom degree from the University of Natal, Durban (South Africa), an MSc from the University of London, and a PhD in Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has a unique perspective on the topic of climate resiliency. He was a city official in 2012 for Superstorm Sandy—which many call the worst disaster in New York City’s history—and in 2021 for Hurricane Ida, which caused $24 billion worth of flooding in the Northeastern United States, making it the costliest and most damaging storm since Sandy nine years before. He was also mayor during most of those nine years, when policymakers, planners, and the citizens of New York tried to grapple with the enormous task of making the city more resilient in the face of ever more destructive and dangerous weather events driven by the man-made climate crisis and global warming. With 520 miles of shoreline, 443 miles of underground railroad and subway tracks, and 14 major under-river tunnels, New York City is a nightmare to protect from rising seas and catastrophic rainfall, and de Blasio and city planners proposed billions in dollars of resiliency projects—including extending Manhattan’s shoreline 500 feet at the island’s vulnerable southern tip. But those plans, he says, encountered some surprisingly strong headwinds, including neighborhood opposition, short political and public attention spans, and competing concerns including the COVID-19 pandemic. So how do vulnerable localities like New York City overcome such obstacles and prepare for an increasingly adversarial climate? de Blasio, who is currently a visiting fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, explores the possibilities with host Ralph Ranalli. Bill de Blasio is a Fall 2022 Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. He served as the 109th mayor of New York City from 2014 to 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, he held the office of New York City Public Advocate from 2010 to 2013 and started his career as an elected official on the New York City Council, representing the 39th district in Brooklyn from 2002 to 2009. Prior to being an elected official, de Blasio served as the campaign manager for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s successful senatorial campaign of 2000 and got his start in NYC government working for Mayor David Dinkins. He launched a campaign for president during the 2020 Democratic primary but ended his bid before the primary election. He holds an A.B. from New York University in metropolitan studies, and a master of international affairs degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an A.B. in Political Science from UCLA and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.