Legacy of privilege: David Deming and Raj Chetty on how elite college admissions policies affect who gains power and prestige

The populism of self-destruction: How better policies can blunt the anti-clean energy backlash threatening humanity’s future

Populism—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 forces are shaping the new clean energy pushback, including genuine popular resentment in some communities left over from economic transitions like the loss of manufacturing jobs due to globalization. Robert Lawrence is a former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and an economist affiliated with the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government who studies trade policy. Dustin Tingley of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is a political scientist researching the politics of the climate crisis and co-author of the new book “Uncertain Futures: How to Unlock the Climate Impasse.” With time running out for the world to make significant reductions in fossil fuel use, they join PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli to discuss strategies and policy ideas to keep the momentum going toward a sustainable energy future.

Policy Recommendations:

Robert Z. Lawrence’s Policy recommendations:

• Move away from protectionism and use international open trade to create opportunities for developing countries to contribute to the energy transition and grow economically.
• Accelerate investment in clean energy technology development to ensure that green energy solutions are significantly more cost-effective than fossil fuel alternatives.
• Replace current incentive-based government programs to encourage clean energy development with a carbon tax to bring in increased revenue and fund clean energy research and infrastructure changeover.
• Exempt imported steel from current U.S. tariffs when it is used in making clean energy infrastructure such as wind turbines.

Dustin Tingley’s policy recommendations

• At the federal level, systematically analyze the public finance challenge that states and communities are going to face from the clean energy transition and plan support
• Prioritize transparency when making green investments in communities, to ensure they are effective and that companies are playing by the rules.
• Pass legislation to share revenue from wind and solar project leases on federal lands with state and regional governments in the same manner those governments receive funds from oil and gas leases.
• Encourage clean energy technology companies to get more civically involved with the communities where they are located.

Episode Notes:

Robert Z. Lawrence is the Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment at HKS and is affiliated with the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. He is Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on trade policy and he currently serves as Faculty Chair of The Practice of Trade Policy executive program at Harvard Kennedy School. He served as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1998 to 2000 and has also been a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including “Crimes and Punishments? Retaliation under the WTO;” “Regionalism, Multilateralism and Deeper Integration;” and “Can America Compete?” Lawrence has served on the advisory boards of the Congressional Budget Office, the Overseas Development Council, and the Presidential Commission on United States-Pacific Trade and Investment Policy. He earned his PhD in economics at Yale University.

Dustin Tingley of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is a Professor of Government in the Harvard Department of Government and Deputy Vice Provost for Advances in Learning. His research has spanned international relations, international political economy, climate change, causal inference, data science/machine learning, and digital education, with most focus now on the politics of climate change and energy transitions. His new book with Alex Gazmararian, “Uncertain Futures: How to Unlock the Climate Impasse,” was published with Cambridge University Press. The book features the voices of those on the front lines of the energy transition -- a commissioner in Carbon County deciding whether to welcome wind, executives at energy companies searching for solutions, mayors and unions in Minnesota battling for local jobs, and fairgoers in coal country navigating their community's uncertain future. His book on American foreign policy with Helen Milner, Sailing the Water's Edge, was published in fall 2015, and was awarded the Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book published in the field of U.S. national policy.

He teaches courses on the politics of climate change and the environment, data science, and international relations. In the fall of 2023 he is teaching a new course called Energy at Harvard Business School. He received a PhD in Politics from Princeton and BA from the University of Rochester.

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 assistance for PolicyCast is provided by Nora Delaney, Robert O’Neill, and Jim Smith of the Harvard Kennedy School Office of Communications and Public Affairs. 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.

Public policy, values, and politics: Why so much depends on getting them right

Public 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 discussthe 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 alsoaddresses the issue of public distrust in policy advice and the vital role that values play in policy making and educating public leaders, even when those values—including economic justice and diversity and inclusion—are under attack by some in the political sphere.“Our job is to enunciate our values, and to explain how those values can help us serve the world,” he says. Elmendorf became dean of HKS in 2015 after a career steeped in policy research and formulation, mostly involving his chosen field of economics. He has worked as the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a deputy assistant director of the U.S. Treasury, an assistant director of research at the Federal Reserve Board, and a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. As dean, he’s seen the school through a campus expansion, the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing polarization and attacks on government and higher education in the public sphere, and the current domestic political fallout from the conflict between Gaza and Israel—all while diversifying the school’s community of students and scholars and affirming the important role of training public leaders and developing workable policy solutions to big public challenges.

Doug Elmendorf’s Policy Recommendations:

• Experts should be humble, admit the limitations of their knowledge, and make sure that the policies they propose benefit all members of society.
• Policymakers should talk with experts in an appropriately constructive, critical manner, ask questions designed to get at the truth most effectively, and use that truth in what they do.
• Members of the public should prioritize interacting with other people in their societies and their communities who are different from them.
• The publish should have empathy for leaders given the difficulty of making good policy, but they should also be appropriately demanding and expect their leaders to be straight with them and to work hard on policies that can help improve people's lives.

Douglas Elmendorf has been dean and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School since 2016. He had been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution after serving as the director of the Congressional Budget Office from January 2009 through March 2015. He had previously been a senior fellow at Brookings, assistant director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board, deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, and an assistant professor at Harvard University. In those policy roles, Doug worked on budget policy, health care issues, the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy, Social Security, income security programs, financial markets, macroeconomic analysis and forecasting, and a range of other topics. He earned his PhD and AM in economics from Harvard University and his AB summa cum laude from Princeton 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.

Editorial support for PolicyCast is provided by Nora Delaney, Robert O’Neil, and James Smith of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadowsand the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.

The Ghost Budget: How U.S. war spending went rogue, wasted billions, and how to fix it

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

• Create a veterans trust fund with an oversight board to pay for the long-term costs of caring for military personnel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, costs which will not peak for as much as 50 years.
• Amend existing laws to automatically cover Iraq and Afghanistan veterans for toxic exposure to burn pits.
• Pass legislation requiring a set aside of a certain amount of funding long-term veterans care for every dollar appropriated for war spending.
• Restrict the ability of the White House and Congress to use the emergency and OCO (Overseas Contingency Operations) funding mechanisms to spend money on conflicts and to move war spending back into the main defense budget process.
• Address budgetary dysfunction in Congress by strengthening and empowering the House and Senate budget committees and streamlining their complicated and confusing budget subcommittee structures.

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 entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University.

Design and graphics support for PolicyCast 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. Editorial support is provided by the OCPA Editorial Team: Nora Delaney, Robert O’Neill, and James Smith.

The Great Creep Backward: Policy responses to China’s slowing economy

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 Ranallito 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:

• Liberal nations should take a realistic view of security issues involved in engagement with China, while preserving cultural interaction and scientific knowledge exchanges with the long-term benefits to both sides.

• The United States should focus on deepening free trade agreements and opening up new markets and in the Asia Pacific region to counter-balance China's influence.

Meg Rithmire’s Policy Recommendations:

• U.S. and Western officials should reassure China they that they want to see its economy succeed as long as it isn’t weaponizing trade and is moderating its geopolitical ambitions to reduce conflict.

• Continue pursuing “de-risking” policies instead of decoupling policies that would lead to a hard economic break with China.

• Avoid framing the situation as a choice between bringing jobs back to the United States or keeping them in China, while also addressing the fallouts of global trade and compensating those who are negatively affected.

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 isthe F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor atHarvard Business School, where she teaches in theBusiness, 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 theFairbank 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 from Columbia University.

Design and graphics support for PolicyCast is provided by Laura King, Delane Meadowsand the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team. Nora Delaney and Robert O’Neill provide editorial support.

Two peoples. Two states. Why U.S. diplomacy in Israel and Palestine needs vision, partners, and a backbone

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:

• The U.S. should stake out a strong, principled position on a two-state solution based on land for peace.
• The U.S. should build a broad multinational coalition around its diplomacy in the region.
• U.S. leaders and diplomats should make American national security interests clear, both globally and in the region.

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.