Shows
PolicyCastForget smaller or bigger. If you want better government, invest.Elizabeth Linos is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor for Public Policy and Management, and Faculty Director of The People Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The majority of her research focuses on how to improve government by focusing on its people and the services they deliver. Specifically, she uses insights from behavioral science and evidence from public management to consider how to recruit, retain, and support the government workforce, how to improve resident-state interactions, and how to better integrate evidence-based policymaking into government. Her research has been published in numerous academic journals including Nature Human Behaviour, Econometrica...
2025-07-1745 min
PolicyCastChristiane Amanpour says objective journalism means pursuing truth—not neutralityChristiane Amanpour is chief international anchor of CNN’s flagship global affairs program “Amanpour,” which airs weekdays on CNN International and nightly on PBS in the United States. She is also host of “The Amanpour Hour,” and is based in the network’s London bureau. Beginning in 1983 as an entry-level assistant on the international assignment desk at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, Amanpour rose through the organization becoming a reporter at the New York bureau, and later, the network’s leading international correspondent. On the ground during the siege of Sarajevo, Amanpour exposed the brutality of the Bosnian War, reporting on the...
2025-06-0429 min
PolicyCastMoments that matter: How to bake fairness into the workplaceIris Bohnet is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and the co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. She is a behavioral economist, combining insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, often with a gender or cross-cultural perspective. Her most recent research examines behavioral design to embed equity at work. She is the author of the award-winning book “What Works: Gender Equality by Design” and co-author of the book “Make Work Fair.” Professor Bohnet advises governments and companies around the world, including serving as Special Advisor on the Gend...
2025-05-0643 min
PolicyCastCrypto is merging with mainstream finance. Regulators aren’t readyTimothy Massad is currently a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School and a consultant on financial regulatory and fintech issues. Massad served as Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2014-2017. Under his leadership, the agency implemented the Dodd Frank reforms of the over-the-counter swaps market and harmonized many aspects of cross-border regulation, including reaching a landmark agreement with the European Union on clearinghouse oversight. The agency also declared virtual currencies to be commodities, introduced...
2025-04-1755 min
PolicyCastProfessor Joe Nye coined the term “soft power.” He says America’s is in decline under TrumpJoseph S. Nye Jr. is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus, and former Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He has served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, and as deputy undersecretary of state for security assistance, science and technology. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, he was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy, and in 2011, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers. His most recent book, published in 2024, is “A Life in the American Century.” His other book...
2025-04-0931 min
PolicyCastAmerica’s geopolitical realignments, authoritarianism, and Trump’s endgameAmbassador Wendy Sherman, the 21st U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and the first woman in that position, has been a diplomat, businesswoman, professor, political strategist, author, and social worker. She served under three presidents and five secretaries of state, becoming known as a diplomat for hard conversations in hard places. As Deputy Secretary, she was the point person on China. While serving as Undersecretary for Political Affairs, Sherman led the U.S. negotiating team that reached an agreement on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between the P5+1, the European Union and Iran. And, as Counselor at the S...
2025-04-0339 min
PolicyCastIf the U.S. courts can’t defend the rule of law, who can?With a Republican Congress apparently unwilling to check Trump’s power, many Americans fear a looming constitutional crisis and are looking to the federal courts to ride to the rescue. But political scientist and Harvard Kennedy School Professor Maya Sen, who studies the federal judiciary, says the cavalry probably isn’t coming. The Trump administration has seemingly defied judicial orders on deportations, withholding congressionally appropriated funds for federal programs, eliminating birthright citizenship, and other issues. Meanwhile, surrogates like Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk have stated in social media posts that Trump is simply not bound by j...
2025-03-1946 min
PolicyCastAI can make governing better instead of worse. Yes, you heard that right.Danielle Allen and Mark Fagan say that when tested, thoughtfully deployed, and regulated AI actually can help governments serve citizens better. Sure, there is no shortage of horror stories these days about the intersection of AI and government—from a municipal chatbot that told restaurant owners it was OK to serve food that had been gnawed by rodents to artificial intelligence police tools that misidentify suspects through faulty facial recognition. And now the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE say they are fast-tracking the use of AI to root out government waste and...
2025-03-1241 min
PolicyCastRicardo Hausmann on the rise of industrial policy, green growth, and Trump’s tariffsFor market purists, any mention of the term industrial policy used to evoke visions of heavy-handed Soviet-style central planning, or the stifling state-centric protectionism employed by Latin American countries in the late 20th century. But that conversation turned dramatically over the last several years, as President Joe Biden’s signature legislative achievements like the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act showcased policies designed to influence and shape industries ranging from tech to pharma to green energy. My guest today, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Ricardo Hausmann, is the founder and director of the Growth Lab, which studies wa...
2025-03-0558 min
PolicyCastOligarchy in the open: What happens now as the U.S. confronts its plutocracy problem?Ten years ago, political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern took an extraordinary data set compiled by Gilens and a small army of researchers and set out to determine whether America could still credibly call itself a democracy. They used case studies 1,800 policy proposals over 30 years, tracking how they made their way through the political system and whose interests were served by outcomes. For small D democrats, the results were devastating. Political outcomes overwhelmingly favored very wealthy people, corporations, and business groups. The influence of ordinary citizens, meanwhile, was at a “non-significant, near-zero level.” America, they...
2025-02-1346 min
PolicyCastWhat the EU must do to compete—and become the leader the world needsAlexander De Croo became Belgium’s prime minister in October of 2020. It’s a relatively small country, with about 12 million inhabitants—slightly less than the city of Los Angeles—but it’s very much the face of Europe with the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and NATO all calling Brussels home. Prime Minister De Croo, who saw the country through the COVID pandemic, says that the geopolitical and economic upheavals already being instigated by the “America first” ethos of President Donald Trump will present another stiff test for the leadership of not only his country but the EU. In this...
2025-02-0735 min
PolicyCastThe policy changes needed now to avoid a climate-driven global food crisisThe warning lights are blinking for the world’s food supply. At least that’s what 150 Nobel Prize and World Food Prize laureates said in a recently-published open letter calling for a “moonshot” urgency effort to start the immediate ramping up of food production to meet the global demands of 9.7 billion people by 2050. Harvard Kennedy School economist Wolfram Schlenker, the new Ray A. Goldberg Professor of the Global Food System says doing that will require urgent policy changes and, in some cases, policy reversals to meet those goals against the headwinds of climate change. Even as crop yields are under st...
2025-01-2439 min
PolicyCastFrom insight to impact: Dean Jeremy Weinstein wants the Kennedy School to embrace and solve complex public problemsJeremy Weinstein became the newest dean in the 88-year history of the Harvard Kennedy School this past June, arriving from Stanford University, where he was an award-winning scholar and the founding faculty director of the Stanford Impact Labs. The pursuit of deep scholarly curiosity and roll-up-your-sleeves impact has been a theme in his life and career, as well as an approach he intends to accelerate schoolwide at HKS under his leadership. Growing up, Weinstein experienced a family run-in with government policy gone horribly wrong—one that could have inspired a deep cynicism about the role of government in people’s li...
2025-01-0856 min
PolicyCastLegalized gambling is exploding globally. What policies can limit its harms?Turbocharged by the internet and mobile technology, legalized gambling has exploded across the globe, leaving behind ruined lives, broken families and financial hardships, and should now be classified as a major public health concern. A four-year study by a public health commission on gambling convened by The Lancet, the respected British journal of medicine, found that net global losses by gamblers could exceed $700 billion by the year 2028, and that 80% of countries now allow some form of legal gambling. But HKS Professor Malcolm Sparrow, a leading scholar on regulating societal harms, says that in reality the percentage of countries where...
2024-11-2142 min
PolicyCastHow emotion science could help solve the leading cause of preventable deathThe World Health Organization says smoking is the leading cause of global preventable death, killing up to 8 million people prematurely every year—far more than die in wars and conflicts. Yet the emotions evoked by national and international anti-smoking campaigns and the impact of those emotions has never been fully studied until now. HKS Professor Jennifer Lerner, a decision scientist who studies emotion, and Vaughan Rees, the director for the Center for Global Tobacco Control at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, say their research involving actual smokers in the lab shows that sadness—the emotion most often evok...
2024-11-0743 min
PolicyCastPolicies—and a new global program—to fight anti-LGBTQI+ discriminationAnti-LGBTQI+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex) discrimination is on the rise, both in the United States, where hate crime statistics are climbing, and globally, with the increase in right-wing populist governments weaponizing public sentiment against marginalized people. But there are also rights advocates around the world pushing back, despite threats of physical harm, prosecution, and even death. The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy’s Timothy McCarthy and Diego Garcia Blum, who are leading a new program to support those advocates, joined host Ralph Ranalli to on the most recent episode of PolicyCast to talk about the proj...
2024-10-2453 min
PolicyCastThe essential reforms needed to fix the housing crisisAmerica is in the grip of a severe housing crisis. Tenants have seen rents rise 26 percent while home prices have soared by 47 percent since early 2020. Before the pandemic, there were 20 US states considered affordable for housing. Now there are none. And 21 million households—including half of all renters—pay more than one-third of their income on housing. Harvard Kennedy School Associate Professor Justin de Benedictis-Kessner and former Burlington, Vermont Mayor Miro Weinberger say that’s because homebuilding hasn’t kept up with demand. They say housing production is mired in a thicket of restrictive zoning regulations and local politics, a “veto...
2024-10-0947 min
PolicyCastHow to change the narrative on women as leadersAs Vice President Kamala Harris making a strong bid for the U.S. presidency, HKS Women and Public Policy Program Co-Director Hannah Riley Bowles says Harris is just one of many “path breakers” who have dramatically increased leadership opportunities for women. But she also says the reaction to Harris’ campaign in the media and the public conversation shows how the popular narrative about the efficacy of female leaders still lags behind the reality of what successful women are achieving. And she says that narrative also isn’t supported by research, including multiple studies showing that on average women are actually...
2024-09-2640 min
PolicyCastHow to turn back a rising tide of political threats and violenceThe attempted assassination of former President and candidate Donald Trump has catalyzed an important discussion about both actual violence and threats of violence against political candidates, office-holders, policymakers, election officials, and others whose efforts help make our democracy work. Harvard Kennedy School professors Erica Chenoweth and Archon Fung join host Ralph Ranalli to talk about political violence, what it is, what it isn’t, why it has grown, and—most importantly—strategies for mitigating it to ensure the health of democratic governance in the United States and beyond. The motivations and political leanings of the 20-year-old Pennsylvania man who shot a...
2024-08-0152 min
PolicyCastSelf-destructive populism: How better policy can reverse the anti-clean energy backlashPopulism—the political term that describes a group of self-described common people who oppose elite—has turned up in what for many is an unexpected place: the push for a worldwide transition to clean energy. Even though they’re vital to preventing the most catastrophic consequences of the manmade global climate crisis, clean energy measures are encountering pushback from multiple sources ranging from local citizens groups, to cost-conscious consumers, to self-styled conservationists, to right-wing politicians, and to corporate boardrooms. Harvard Kennedy School Professor Robert Z. Lawrence and Professor Dustin Tingley from Harvard’s Department of Government say a number of force...
2024-05-1551 min
PolicyCastPublic policy, values, and politics: Why so much depends on getting them rightPublic policy has great power, both to improve people’s lives if it is planned and executed well and to cause significant suffering if it is not, says Harvard Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf, who will step back from his post this summer to rejoin the faculty. He joins PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli in this episode to discuss the crucial role policy plays in everyday life, the often-imperfect ways it gets made, and the factors that shape it, including politics, values, education, and communication. He also addresses the issue of public distrust in policy advice and the vital role that...
2024-04-2541 min
PolicyCastThe Great Creep Backward: Policy responses to China’s slowing economyHarvard 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...
2024-03-1455 min
PolicyCastTwo peoples. Two states. Why U.S. diplomacy in Israel and Palestine needs vision, partners, and a backboneFormer 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 Relati...
2024-02-2938 min
PolicyCastThe document that redefined humanity: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 75Harvard 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...
2023-12-2143 min
PolicyCastHow to keep "TLDR" syndrome from killing your policy proposalHarvard 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 Behav...
2023-10-2545 min
PolicyCastDr. Rochelle Walensky on making health care policy under fireDr. 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 sph...
2023-10-0541 min
PolicyCastAI can be democracy’s ally—but not if it works for Big TechKennedy 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 quest...
2023-09-2043 min
PolicyCastThe more Indigenous nations self govern, the more they succeedHarvard 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...
2023-06-0835 min
PolicyCastIf you don’t have multiracial democracy, you have no democracy at allThe 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...
2023-05-1645 min
PolicyCastWhy smart infrastructure is a smart investment—for both Democrats and Republicans—in an era of historic public works spendingAs 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...
2023-04-1836 min
PolicyCastTransitioning to clean power without workers absorbing the shockHarvard 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 su...
2023-04-0638 min
PolicyCastLocal news is civic infrastructure. And it’s crumbling. Can we save it?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 vult...
2023-03-0744 min
PolicyCastJoe Aldy on the complex economics of the clean energy transitionEconomist 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 th...
2023-01-2545 min
PolicyCastGoals and realities: What World Cup performances can teach us about development in African countriesMatt 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...
2022-12-0933 min
PolicyCastHow American cities can prepare for an increasingly destructive climateFormer 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 resili...
2022-11-2333 min
PolicyCastFormer Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven on stemming the tide of right-wing authoritarianismDuring his 7 years leading Sweden’s government from 2014 to 2021, Stefan Löfven had a front row seat to observe the rise of right-wing and neo-fascist political parties both at home and around Europe. A former welder, and union leader from working class roots, Löfven earned the nickname “the escape artist” during his years as prime minister for his knack for holding together governments despite his country’s increasingly fractious and polarized politics. But this year the Sweden Democrats—a party with its roots in fascist and white nationalist ideology—became the second leading vote-getter and were embraced as part of a ruli...
2022-10-1939 min
PolicyCastThe pandemic's silver lining—a trove of data on social protection programsRema Hanna is the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South-East Asia Studies and Chair of the International Development Area at the Harvard Kennedy School. She also serves as the Faculty Director of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) at Harvard University’s Center for International Development and is the co-Scientific Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South East Asia Office in Indonesia. In addition, Professor Hanna is a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). Her research revolves aroun...
2022-05-0535 min
PolicyCastO'Sullivan and Frankel: How the sanctions on Putin's Russia are reshaping the world economic orderHKS professors Meghan O’Sullivan and Jeffrey Frankel say the draconian sanctions on Putin’s regime—which came together faster than almost anyone predicted—will have far-reaching and lasting effects well beyond Russia’s borders. In a nuclear-armed world where direct superpower conflict can have apocalyptic consequences, the proxy battlefield has become economics and finance. Instead of firing missiles, combatants lob sanctions to inflict pain and achieve strategic goals. Rather than cutting off supply routes, opponents cut off access to capital reserves and international financial systems. And during the first weeks of Russia’s war on Ukraine, developments on both the phy...
2022-03-1739 minPolicyCastKeyssar and Fung: America’s flawed democracy is in deep—and possibly fatal—troubleHarvard Kennedy School Professors Alex Keyssar and Archon Fung say the U.S. political system, stripped of a consensus belief in democratic principles, is racing down a dangerous road toward political and social upheaval and possible minority rule. American democracy, they tell PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli, is in trouble to an extent not seen in many decades, possibly since the Civil War, or perhaps ever. If you believe in democracy as essentially one-person, one-vote, and as a system where every voter has a roughly equal say in how our country is governed, then frankly, you would never design a...
2022-02-1738 minPolicyCastThe U.S. pays reparations every day—just not to Black AmericaHKS faculty members Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes explore the vexing disconnect between the vast US system of restorative justice and the deep-rooted, intergenerational harms suffered by Black Americans. Every day, someone somewhere in America is being compensated under what is known as restorative justice, a type of justice that instead of meting out punishment to a wrongdoer, seeks to make the victims or their families whole—or at least repair them as much as possible. Restorative justice is also known as reparative justice, or, in the context of the experience of Black Americans from the fir...
2022-02-0345 minPolicyCastNobel Prize winner Maria Ressa on how social media is pushing journalism—and democracy—to the brinkThe Nobel Committee has awarded its 2021 Peace Prize to Maria Ressa for being a fearless defender of independent journalism and freedom of expression in the Philippines, and particularly for her work exposing the human rights abuses of authoritarian President Rodrigo Duterte. But the prize is also a de facto acknowledgement that Ressa has become something of a one-woman personification of the struggles, perils, and promise of journalism in the age of social media. A longtime investigative reporter and bureau chief for CNN, she began thinking about how social networks could be used for both good and evil w...
2021-12-1042 minPolicyCastHow our flawed debates about cost prevent us from spending public money wiselyBarely a news cycle goes by these days without someone in public office saying ‘We can’t afford that,’ while at the same time defending their favorite budget priorities and tossing around mind-numbingly large cost figures in the billions and trillions of dollars. Those debates can seem very cynical, and of course Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as a person who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing. But Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer Linda Bilmes says things are even worse than that—not only are we not having discussions based on value, our understanding of what...
2021-12-0244 min
PolicyCastSystems Failure: With the climate crisis hitting poor people hardest, David Keith says now is the time to explore solar geoengineeringLeaders from around the globe are meeting in Scotland today for the COP26 summit, talking about ways to speed up efforts to fight global warming. Yet even the optimists in Glasgow admit that the scientific consensus is that it’s already too late to cut emissions fast enough to avoid a dangerous rise in the earth’s temperature by 2 degrees Celsius, which is expected to lead to severe droughts, blistering heat waves, deadly flooding, and rising seas.Despite these dire predictions, there has been one potential weapon in humanity’s anti-warming arsenal that, in terms of practical resear...
2021-11-0230 min
PolicyCastSystems Failure: Economist Jason Furman says economic inequality costs everyoneHarvard Kennedy School Professor Jason Furman recently testified before the House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth and called growing inequality the fundamental challenge for the U.S. economy. He says that slow income growth, coupled with growing disparities in how the overall economic pie is divided, have contributed to inequality that is now pervasive by race, ethnicity, gender, income, and education. That inequality hurts everyone, he says, limiting growth and depriving society of productive contributors to the economy. About our guest: Jason Furman is the Aetna Professor of the Practice of Ec...
2021-09-2925 min
PolicyCastSystems Failure: How to respond when our algorithms are biased and our privacy is in perilHarvard Kennedy School Professor Latanya Sweeney is a pioneer in the fields of algorithmic fairness and data privacy and the founding director of the new Public Interest Tech Lab at Harvard University. The former chief technology officer for the US Trade Commission, she’s been awarded 3 patents and her work is cited in two key US privacy regulations, including the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). She was also the first black woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, and she says her experiences being the only woman of color in white male-dominated classrooms and la...
2021-09-1731 min
PolicyCastHappiness in an age of fear and grievanceHarvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School Professor Arthur Brooks studies happiness: Where it comes from, how to achieve it, and how it affects our lives, our decision-making, and the world around us. But how do we define happiness? Is it how we feel? Is it an approach to life? And how much control over it do we really have? What percentage of our happiness comes from, say, our environment, or from genetics? Can government make us happier? Should it? In a time of stress and division when the world is seemingly desperate for more happiness, Brooks joins host...
2021-07-3046 min
PolicyCastStaying Power: Tony Saich on 100 Years of the Chinese Communist PartyThe Chinese Communist Party rules a country that is already an economic superpower and is poised to become a military and geopolitical one as the 21st Century unfolds. But Harvard Kennedy School Professor Tony Saich says the party’s 100th birthday next month is also a time to remember the party’s struggles and humble beginnings. From it’s early days as Soviet-supported client and its existential struggles with the Chinese Nationalists; to the tragic excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; to its economic transformation and growing middle class, the party has made disastrous errors as wel...
2021-06-1035 min
PolicyCastBetween blind faith and denial: Finding a productive approach to merging policy, science, and technologyPolicyCast is a production of Harvard Kennedy School and is hosted by Associate Dean for Communications and Public Affairs Thoko Moyo.Our guest for this episode, Sheila Jasanoff, is the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School and the founder and director of the Program on Science, Technology and Society.PolicyCast is produced and engineered by Ralph Ranalli and co-produced by Susan Hughes.For more information please visit our web page or contact us at PolicyCast@hks.harvard.edu.
2021-05-0534 min
PolicyCastDemocracy’s uncertain prospects 10 years after the Arab SpringPolicyCast is a production of Harvard Kennedy School and is hosted by Associate Dean for Communications and Public Affairs Thoko Moyo.PolicyCast is produced and engineered by Ralph Ranalli and co-produced by Susan Hughes.For more information please visit our web page or contact us at PolicyCast@hks.harvard.edu.
2021-03-2532 min
PolicyCastJoe Aldy on how Joe Biden can jumpstart the global climate effortJoseph Aldy, an economist and professor of the practice of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, has seen this all before. A climate in crisis. A big economic downturn. A transition from a Republican administration to a new Democratic president looking to drastically change the country’s direction. Twelve years ago, Aldy was a member of then-President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team as it took over from the George W. Bush administration. He says the challenges today are much the same—figuring out how to push aggressive measures to stave off the worst effects of climate change while b...
2020-12-0834 min
PolicyCastYoung voters ascendant: How a generational shift won the 2020 election and could remake American politicsIn 2019, the 72-million strong Millennial generation (23-to-38-year-olds) quietly surpassed the Baby Boomers as America’s largest living generational cohort. In the 2020 election, they made their voices heard with a roar. Not only did younger voters—and particularly younger voters of color—turn out to vote and organize for candidates in record numbers, they also provided the margin of victory for Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in key states like Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. Mark Gearan is director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. He was also director of the Peace Corps un...
2020-11-1835 min
PolicyCastGarbage in, garbage out: Dissecting the disinformation that clouds our decisionsSome choices are easy. Some are hard. Some are momentous, which is how many people are describing today’s US national election. Yet all of the choices we make have one thing in common: Our decisions are only as good as the information we have to base them on. And with the rise of disinformation, misinformation, media manipulation, and social media bubbles, we’re finding it increasingly hard to know what information to trust and to feel confident in the decisions we make.Harvard Kennedy School Professor Matthew Baum and Joan Donovan, the research director for the Shor...
2020-11-0342 minPolicyCastIf the Electoral College is a racist relic, why has it endured?This is the first episode of PolicyCast's 2020-2021 season. Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. An historian by training, he specializes in the exploration of historical problems that have contemporary policy implications.In this episode, Professor Keyssar discusses his new book: "Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?" (Harvard University Press, 2020) He is also the author of the widely-read book: "The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States" (Basic Books, 2000), for which he was named a finalist fo...
2020-09-1532 min
PolicyCastChampioning human rights amid disease and discriminationJoining PolicyCast and host Thoko Moyo for this episode are Kennedy School Professors Mathias Risse and Jacqueline Bhabha of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Professor Risse is faculty director of the Carr Center and his work focuses on global justice and the intersections of human rights, the climate crisis, inequality, and technology. He is also the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Administration at Harvard Kennedy School.Professor Bhabha is an expert in public health — particularly involving children and vulnerable populations — as well as an internationally-known human rights lawyer. She is FXB Dir...
2020-07-0135 min
PolicyCastWhen discrimination and a pandemic collideFirst there was the shock of realizing that the COVID-19 pandemic would be widespread and lengthy. Now issues of race, equity, and the coronavirus are quickly coming to the fore, as data pours in showing how the virus is hitting minority communities the hardest.Harvard Kennedy School Professor Cornell Brooks says historic systemic discrimination, lack of access to healthcare and healthy food, housing and employment disparities, and other issues have left communities of color uniquely vulnerable.Discrimination means people in communities of color can’t follow many recommended individual actions for the pandemic including staying at...
2020-04-2030 min
PolicyCastPost-expert democracy: Why nobody trusts elites anymoreDemocratic governance expert Archon Fung says that since 2016 we have entered a political dramatically different from the previous 35 years. He calls it a period of “wide aperture, low deference Democracy.” In simplest terms, it’s an era when a much wider range of ideas and potential policies are being debated and when traditional leaders in politics, media, academia, and culture are increasingly being questioned, pushed aside, and ignored by a distrustful public.And he says the fate of those leaders and elites is significantly of their own making, because they have supported self-interested policies that have re...
2020-02-0339 min
PolicyCastThe climate crisis was caused by economics, can economics be part of the solution?The New York Times called it one of the worst outcomes in a quarter-century of climate negotiations. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said the international community "lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance to tackle the climate crisis” at the recent UN Climate Summit in Madrid.But Harvard Kennedy School Professor Robert Stavins says global climate negotiators still accomplished something important last month at the COP25 conference—because of what they didn't do. Instead of approving lax rules full of loopholes that big polluting countries like Brazil and Australia were...
2020-01-0637 min
PolicyCastDavid Deming on why free college is a good investmentHarvard Kennedy School Professor David Deming, whose research focuses on the economics of education, recently wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Tuition-free College Could Cost Less Than You Think.” Making college education widely affordable in the U.S. is vital, Deming says, because a degree will likely be a prerequisite for the labor market of the not-too-distant future.
Professor Deming recently sat down with PolicyCast host Thoko Moyo to discuss not just how to lower college costs, but also how to improve educational quality and what that could mean for students across the socioeconomic spectrum. In addi...
2019-10-2826 min
PolicyCastFixing ourselves is hard: Iris Bohnet on solving bias in the workplaceIris Bohnet is a behavioral economist, a leading researcher into gender bias, and Harvard Kennedy School's academic dean. She’s got some tough advice for the world’s biggest governments, corporations, and organizations: Stop wasting money on traditional diversity training programs, because they don’t work. But Dean Bohnet tells host Thoko Moyo that there's also good news: By focusing on fixing processes rather than people, we can create workarounds that solve for our stubborn biases.
Bohnet is also co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at HKS and her research combines insights from economics and psycho...
2019-10-1645 min
PolicyCastAmbassador Wendy Sherman on high-stakes negotiation and authentic leadershipAmbassador Wendy Sherman has been at the table for some of the most challenging negotiations in recent history. She’s held talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and sparred with Iranian officials to hammer out the 2015 nuclear weapons deal.
Now she’s brought what she’s learned about authentic leadership, diplomacy, and succeeding as a woman in a male-dominated field to a new book, which is titled “Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power and Persistence”
Ambassador Sherman is a professor of the practice of public leadership, director of the Center for...
2019-09-3037 min
PolicyCastRobot car revolution: Using policy to manage the autonomous vehicle futureHarvard Kennedy School Lecturer Mark Fagan is spearheading the Autonomous Vehicles Policy Initiative at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, helping to ensure government officials can successfully navigate the impending robot car revolution. Mark talks with host Thoko Moyo about how AVs could have disruptive impacts on traffic safety and congestion, public transit, jobs, and even data privacy.
The Autonomous Vehicles Policy Initiative consults with stakeholders both inside and outside of the United States. Through research, teaching, and work with decision makers in administrations, with technologists and business leaders from AV companies and startups, and...
2019-09-1638 min
PolicyCastPolicyCast is back!Harvard Kennedy School's PolicyCast is back! Enjoy this preview of our relaunch with host Thoko Moyo of upcoming episodes featuring autonomous vehicles expert Mark Fagan, Center for Public Leadership Director Ambassador Wendy Sherman, and Professor Erica Chenoweth, who has conducted groundbreaking research on the effectiveness of nonviolent civil movements.
Our relaunch starts Monday with Harvard Kennedy School Lecturer in Public Policy Mark Fagan, who is leading the Autonomous Vehicles Policy Initiative at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. The initiative is working to help local governments prepare for the impacts of driverless cars, which are...
2019-09-1403 min