The 2009 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize was presented to David Ellwood, Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, at a dinner ceremony at the Newseum in Washington, DC on May 7, 2009.  The $20,000 Moynihan Prize was created by the American Academy of Political and Social Science to recognize public officials and scholars who champion the use of informed judgment to improve public policy.  David Ellwood, who served as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 1993-95, is one of the nation’s leading scholars on poverty and welfare.

The 2009 Moynihan Prize was presented by Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., senior political analyst for MSNBC, who served as a senior adviser to Senator Moynihan.  “I have been asked countless times in the last few years what would Senator Moynihan think about this or that issue of the day,” O’Donnell noted.  “I always say I don’t know.  Even when I have a very good feel for what his angle on the issue would be, I say I don’t know … because, at best, I could only tell you 50 percent of what he would think or maybe 80 or 90 if it was a simple issue.  But that final 10 or 20 percent, that surprising, often counterintuitive, thing that would make it a Moynihan idea?  Well, for that, you could only ask the man himself.  So, in the years that I haven’t been able to check with him first, I have never spoken for him.  Until now.

“I can tell you with absolute certainty that if he could be here tonight, Pat Moynihan would be honored to say the following words himself:
“For his distinguished record of scholarship, public service and strengthening the quality of government leadership, David T. Ellwood is presented the 2009 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.”

To read or listen to the remarks delivered by Lawrence O'Donnell and William Julius Wilson, click on the photos below.

Lawrence O'Donnell	William Julius Wilson	David Ellwood

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"David Ellwood’s work exemplifies that rare combination of outstanding scholarship and dedicated public service that the Moynihan Prize was created to recognize.  Professor Ellwood has devoted his career to a policy arena that Daniel Patrick Moynihan cared deeply about: reducing poverty for American families and addressing the challenges of low pay and unemployment. Like Professor Moynihan before him, he has also played a key role in training tomorrow’s political leaders and encouraging his best students to enter government service."

"Beginning with his landmark book, Poor Support: Poverty and the American Family, Professor Ellwood has stressed the need to 'make work pay.' In a 1989 op-ed in the Washington Post, he wrote with Moynihan-like clarity about the plight of poor households with full-time workers. He said: 'The problem facing these families is not distorted values, dependency, or some culture of poverty. Their problem is that their wages are too low.'"

"Professor Ellwood’s work has significantly influenced public policy in the United States and abroad. His most recent research focuses on the changing structure of American families, the forces reshaping fertility and marriage patterns, and the larger implications of these changes for society and the economy. With Mary Jo Bane, he co-authored Welfare Realities: From Rhetoric to Reform. He is also the author of A Working Nation: Workers, Work, and Government in the New Economy."

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"Daniel Patrick Moynihan represented, to my eyes, the best in public service. I think of Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a magnificent thinker, larger than life. He was a man of both deep intellectual thought and principled action, a combination that is altogether too rare. I admired him intensely."

"I first met Daniel Patrick Moynihan in about 1980 and I had just read The Moynihan Report in a serious way for the first time. I was a young, new assistant professor and he came to visit the Kennedy School. I went up to him in a little social gathering and said, 'Your Moynihan Report was visionary. It was terrific; I just thought it was so impressive.' He looked at me – I had a beard and kind of long hair – and through clenched teeth he said, 'It took me ten years to get over that report,' and he turned away. Yet five years later he came back to the school and gave one of our most prestigious lectures, using the occasion to once again talk about family structure and the re-emergence of that critical set of issues. We see that report is one of the great visionary reports of all time, as William Julius Wilson just mentioned. It was classic Moynihan. It pulled together little bits and pieces of evidence and came to a startling conclusion. And it was not just a report. It was designed to spur action by the President to take on these challenges."

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"It amuses me every time I read that some of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s critics dismiss the importance of his scholarly work—arguing that he rarely published in peer-review journals, that his writings on poverty and welfare were shoddy, and that, as one critic put it, 'he had not made a positive contribution to public understanding of these topics.'"

"I categorically reject such views.  Indeed, Moynihan made major contributions to social science in three areas: (1) race and ethnic relations; (2) poverty and family structure; and (3) social science and public policy. His book, Beyond the Melting Pot, co-authored with Nathan Glazer, is one of the most widely cited books on race and ethnic relations.  This book effectively challenged the view that immigrants would eventually lose their ethnic identities by showing that ethnicity is an enduring social form, persisting through successive generations."

"Moynihan’s study of the relationship between poverty and family structure, famously known as the Moynihan Report, is, as I noted in a recent article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, an important and prophetic document.  It is important because it continues to be a reference for studies on the black family and the plight of low-skilled black males.  It was prophetic because Moynihan’s predictions about the fragmentation of the African American Family and its connection to inner-city poverty were largely borne out, and since 1990, social scientists and civil rights leaders have echoed his concerns about black make joblessness and the need for social policies that would address their skills deficits and change behavioral responses that emanate from severe employment constraints."

Douglas Massey

On May 7th, 2009, AAPSS President Douglas S. Massey inducted five scholars as Fellows of the Academy, in recognition of their outstanding contributions to social science and their sustained efforts to communicate their research beyond their disciplines.  They included: Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University; Alan S. Blinder, Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University; Morris P. Fiorina, Wendt Family Professor of Political Science and senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; Joseph S. Nye, Jr., University Distinguished Service Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government; and Lawrence W. Sherman, Director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania and Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge.

In inducting the new Fellows, Professor Massey noted that they also shared “a belief in the value of bringing the power of the intellectual realm --and the weight of data, research, and evidence--to bear on society’s most vexing policy issues.  We have come together to honor a set of individuals who have made particular contributions in that arena—using the power of their intellects and cutting-edge research to fight poverty, to attack crime and gun violence on our city streets; and to propose an entirely new approach to foreign policy beyond the use of military force. They have helped chart a course for the American economy in the midst of turmoil, to understand the way the unconscious fuels dangerous prejudices and stereotypes, and to improve the ability of elected leaders to understand and better reflect their constituents’ preferences.”

At the installation dinner, which was held at the Newseum in Washington, DC, the new Fellows spoke about how they felt their research had influenced public policy in ways that they welcomed. To read, or listen to, their acceptance speeches, click on the photos below.

Mahzarin Banaji	Alan Blinder	Morris Fiorina
Joseph Nye	Lawrence Sherman

AAPSS Fellow Dr. Mahazarin Banaji

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In this moment when we are witness to the breakdown of systems financial and social in which so many had such faith, we might remember with a smile and even some mischief the words of Winston Churchill, who said that America--referring to the American government--that America can always be counted on to do the right thing, but not until it had tried every other method first.  With much less of a smile, many of us in this room have surely wondered in recent months if perhaps we might have avoided inflicting suffering on so many, especially the most vulnerable amongst us, if our leaders had been educated, even slightly, in the core ideas of the social sciences and had an understanding, even a superficial one, of the power of its methods of discovery.  Would we be a decidedly better society if we had had not one Senator Moynihan but dozens like him involved in setting policy domestically and advising globally?  The answer, based on my deep confidence of the virtue of what social scientists have done, is a resounding yes.  I was a teenager in India when Ambassador Moynihan was the United States representative to that country.  And I surely gained personally from his role in the ingenious sequestering of P.L. 480 funds, which otherwise would have set that country on a severe inflationary trajectory.  To know how to do this is not easy.  It requires an ability to manufacture a whole system, to deliver a policy that will affect millions who will scarcely know how they were affected or even that they were affected.  It requires deep knowledge of complex systems, but as I say to my students, social science is not rocket science, it is a whole lot harder.

AAPSS Fellow Dr. Alan Blinder

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I want to talk about economics and public policy and, in particular, to develop a paradox—which, Webster reminds, us is an apparent contradiction, not an actual contradiction. The paradox is about the standing of economics within the social sciences. Many scholars in economics are very aloof—you might even say, disengaged from reality. Much of the work that economic scholars produce is completely impenetrable to almost everybody, including most other economic scholars. This is true much more so in economics than in any of the other social sciences, by a large margin I think. And yet economists are involved more in the public policy domain—as advisors, as commentators, and even as government officials—than people in the other social sciences. I personally have been involved in all three of those roles. In addition, I fancy myself as being a scholar. I can tell you these roles are very, very different. When you approach an economic problem as a scholar does, you want detachment. Objectivity is extremely important. Standards of evidence are very high. The time horizon is often very long—not only the time horizon of the problem, but also the time horizon of the research. I often cite the Robert Mondavi principle, that is, a good scholar releases no work before its time.

If you are a commentator on or an advisor about economic policy, you have to work on a rather different time horizon. You cannot be as detached as a pure scholar. Subjectivity creeps in, even politics creeps in. The standards of evidence necessarily fall, hopefully not to zero—that is the trick. The time horizon shortens dramatically, both the policy time horizon (over what time does this issue matter) and the time you have to come up with an answer. When I was on President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, I used to tell incoming staff members that, if I tell you it is a research project, that means you have until Friday; the other things we needed much faster than that. And then, of course, at the end of all this you might have the misfortune—really the good fortune—that I had of becoming a public official yourself. Then you really do have to get down and dirty. Objectivity gives way to subjectivity. Politics, depending on where you are (not so much at the Fed, but in the political part of the government), is everywhere. The standard of evidence falls really low, hopefully not to zero—that is the art there. The time horizon shortens dramatically, and you just have to give the best answer you can now, whether or not Robert Mondavi would say it is time.

AAPSS Fellow Dr. Morris Fiorina

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If there is an afterlife, I hope that Professor Lasswell has a sense of humor. Those of us in the rational choice school operate with a minimalist conception of human psychology (our critics say an impoverished conception), whereas Lasswell believed that Freudian psychology was the key to understanding human behavior. Oh well, perhaps there are similarities between us that I am unaware of.

All false modesty aside, I can be brief. When the letter arrived instructing me to speak for five-seven minutes tonight on my contributions to public policy I was somewhat taken aback because I was not aware that I had made such contributions. I have been an ivory tower academic for most of my career with only sporadic attempts to alter the course of public policy. But I don’t want to leave the impression that the Academy made a mistake in selecting me, so I will briefly summarize my possible contributions, and stimulated by a recent Washington Post op-ed by Joe Nye, I’ll reflect on the motivation for periodically stepping down from the Ivory Tower, and the reaction among my professional peers when I did so.

In 1977 I published a little book, Congress—Keystone of the Washington Establishment. In that book I tried to apply the coup de grace to the New Deal Model of public policy making. According to that model Congress should pass legislation that established general public interest goals, and delegate the specifics to an agency staffed by experts. The courts, in turn, would defer to agency expertise, and the result was good public policy.

AAPSS Fellow Dr. Joseph Nye

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It is a real pleasure to have the honor of being the Theodore Roosevelt Fellow of the American Academy. I do not know how you chose who got which titles, but it seems to be particularly appropriate since the idea of speaking softly and carrying a big stick was the original definition of smart power.  But I also realize, as I think about the honor, that as I watch my children growing up, people would call the house and say, “Is Dr. Nye there?”  And they would all say, “Yes, but he is not the useful kind.”  If I think back to the work that I have done and what affect it has, in all of five minutes or so, what strikes me is that it probably grew out of a dissatisfaction with the dominant paradigm of my own field at the time, in which the general view at the height of the Cold War was a sense of realism in which states were the only significant actors, security was their only significant goal, and force was their dominant instrument.  And I had actually done my PhD in East Africa on relations between Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, and it just struck me that the dominant paradigm did not capture what I was seeing or studying.  And I had the good fortune in my early stages as assistant professor at Harvard to encounter a likeminded friend, Bob Keohane, who has become a lifelong friend, and the two of us shared this discontent with the constraints or limits of the dominant paradigm in our field.  Not that it was not useful for some purposes, but that it was unduly constraining.

AAPSS Fellow Dr. Lawrence Sherman

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Thorsten Sellin was a long-term editor of The Annals of the AAPSS and a criminologist who did the first empirical studies of the death penalty. He concluded from his work that the death penalty had no effect on crime rates. While we still don’t really know the answer to that question, his early work did establish the mold for assessing the effects of public policies on crime. Thus, it is a great honor for me to be elected as a Thorsten Sellin Fellow.

My own work on crime began at the height of the Vietnam War, when my local draft board approved my request to serve as a conscientious objector by working in the New York City Police Department. I didn’t carry a gun or make arrests. But I did spend a lot of time in police cars. The draft board said they approved my work as a civilian analyst because they thought I might get killed.

But I survived to evaluate natural experiments in three cities that had restricted police powers to shoot and kill. My research was cited in the 1985 Supreme Court decision abolishing the Common Law power to kill fleeing suspects. Their decision was based, in part, on my findings that such restrictions caused no increase in either violent crime or attacks on police. In the aftermath of that decision, police killings of U.S. citizens, and particularly African-Americans, were reduced by hundreds of people per year.