PolicyCast

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David Deming on why free college is a good investment Oct 28, 2019

Show notes

Harvard 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 addition to being a professor at HKS and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Deming is also the new faculty director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at HKS and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He recently won the David Kershaw Prize, which is given to scholars under the age of 40 who have made distinguished contribution to the field of public policy and management.

To learn more about the Malcolm Wiener Center, please visit: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/wiener

PolicyCast is hosted by Harvard Kennedy School Associate Dean of Communications Thoko Moyo. The show is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.

Fixing ourselves is hard: Iris Bohnet on solving bias in the workplace Oct 16, 2019

Show notes

Iris 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 psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, primarily with a gender or cross-cultural perspective. She is the author of the award-winning book What Works: Gender Equality by Design, and was named one of the "Most Influential People in Gender Policy" by apolitical in 2018 and 2019.

For more about the Women and Policy Policy Program (WAPPP), please visit: https://wappp.hks.harvard.edu/.

PolicyCast is hosted by Harvard Kennedy School Associate Dean of Communications Thoko Moyo. The show is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman on high-stakes negotiation and authentic leadership Sep 30, 2019

Show notes

Ambassador 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 Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She is also a senior counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group and former U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs.

For more about the Center for Public Leadership, please visit https://cpl.hks.harvard.edu/.

PolicyCast is hosted by Harvard Kennedy School Associate Dean of Communications Thoko Moyo. The show is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.

Robot car revolution: Using policy to manage the autonomous vehicle future Sep 16, 2019

Show notes

Harvard 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 with other practicing professionals from the autonomous vehicles space, the initiative seeks to improve policymakers’ capacity to deal with this fast-emerging technology. They find actionable policy and strategy options to help create infrastructure that is livable for humans and AVs, and that helps mitigate the social consequences of the AV revolution.

For more on the initiative, please visit: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/taubman/programs-research/autonomous-vehicles-policy-initiative

PolicyCast is hosted by Harvard Kennedy School Associate Dean of Communications Thoko Moyo. The show is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.

PolicyCast is back! Sep 14, 2019

Show notes

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 already being field-tested across the U.S. and which will could have major impacts on traffic congestion, public transit ridership, public safety, and even data privacy.

Future episodes will feature conversations with HKS professors, researchers, and other experts about public policy, public leadership, politics, media, international relations, and more.

PolicyCast is hosted by Harvard Kennedy School Associate Dean of Communications Thoko Moyo. The show is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.

201 Predicting the Future Through Know-How May 30, 2018

Show notes

Professor Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Kennedy School’s Center for International Development, and Tim Cheston, a research fellow with the center’s Growth Lab, explain how they leveraged data from the Atlas of Economic Complexity to assess the knowhow of more than 130 countries and predict their economic growth over the next eight years.

Learn more about CID's new growth predictions: http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/rankings/growth-projections/

200 Securing Elections Against Cyber Threats May 23, 2018

Show notes

Robby Mook, co-director of the Defending Digital Democracy Initiative and former campaign manager to Hillary Clinton, explains why he and fellow co-directors Matt Rhoades (Romney 2012) and Eric Rosenbach (Belfer Center) came together to create a series of “playbooks” for political campaigns and election officials to help secure against cyber security threats.

Read more about D3P at https://www.belfercenter.org/D3P

199 How History Shapes Our Political Beliefs May 16, 2018

Show notes

HKS Professor Maya Sen, co-author of the new book “Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics,” explains how she and her colleagues were able to pinpoint the extent to which slavery continues to affect political beliefs to this day.

198 Negotiating with the North: The Political Stakes May 09, 2018

Show notes

Lecturer John Park, director of the Kennedy School’s Korea Working Group, lays out the stakes for both North and South Korea, as well as China and the United States, as they enter into negotiations over denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

197 Negotiating with the North: Talks and Tactics May 02, 2018

Show notes

In the first part of an ongoing series on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Dr. Gary Samore, the Belfer Center’s executive director for research, describes the history of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development and subsequent international efforts to dismantle it, including a landmark 1994 agreement which he helped negotiate. He details the negotiating tactics employed by North Korea in the past, expresses skepticism over the possibility of a complete denuclearization, and weighs in on the Trump Administration’s negotiating strategy.

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