Is television dead? The classic television era of the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by limited choices of programs broadcast on over-the-air channels to families as if they were seated around a hearth, has given way to a new era. Now, satellite, cable and new technologies offer a multitude of choices for viewing what we like; when we like; where we like; on a variety of screens, telephones, and websites.

On February 19, 2010, scholars gathered at the Annenberg School for Communication to discuss the overreaching sociological impacts of television over the past 60 years and the way it has impacted our values, ideologies, institutions, social structure, and culture.

The symposium was led by Elihu Katz and Paddy Scannell, co-editors of a volume of The Annals titled The End of Television? Its Impacts on the World (So Far). The volume examined the effects on family and politics, on values and everyday behavior, as well as on democracy, social integration, trust and suspiciousness, materialism, and social and physical identity.

Joining in the discussion were Michael Schudson, Daniel Dayan, Marwan Kraidy, Joseph Turow, and Graeme Turner.

Session 1

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Session 2

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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

[pagebreak]Also speaking at the Moynihan Prize ceremony was William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University.  Wilson spoke about Moynihan’s major contributions to social science and described him as “bold and controversial…but the controversy was productive. This man’s work was agenda setting.  I am so pleased that he is finally getting the full recognition that he deserves.”

In accepting the Prize, Dean Ellwood spoke about the importance of encouraging more social and political scientists to work to influence public policy. “Something we are not very good at but we really need to be much better at,” he said, is thinking about “implementation, what works.  When do policies actually successfully get implemented?” He added that in academia there is a need to reward the policy fruits of intellectual labor. “To say, not only do we admire you if you have had an impact on ideas, but maybe if those ideas have had an impact on the world,” he stated. 

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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."[pagebreak]

"I subsequently had many occasions to meet him. He was one of the first people I saw on coming to Washington because, of course, one does need to see one’s confirmation committee chair quite quickly. He said, as I recall, 'David, Welcome to Washington. I look forward to reading your book about why welfare reform failed this time.' And he would periodically take me out to lunch. (I dealt with him because I was just about the only person in the administration working on this topic that he seemed to tolerate). These meetings were an intellectual and political feast. And when I was leaving the administration, just before welfare reform was finalized— when it became clear that I was not comfortable in the direction it was heading--he took me to lunch again and he said, 'David, there is a time to stay and a time to go. This is the right time to go. Well done.' His words meant the world to me."

"I want to pick up on the theme that we have heard about repeatedly tonight: when is it that political and social scientists have influence on policy? And, why isn’t the influence greater? First of all, I think there are actually two places where we have lots of influence. One is what I would call the big ideas. Social and political scientists sometimes come up with paradigm shifting ideas that reframe the entire policy debate. Joe Nye’s 'soft power,' Bill Wilson’s work on concentrated poverty and marriageable men, work on the spatial dimension of crime and so many others are all examples of big ideas that have changed the way we think about a problem or maybe even have let people see a problem that they did not know existed. Those ideas are rare and special and not always welcome by the policy profession. Almost by definition, big ideas challenge orthodoxy, and sometimes they make a big difference."

"The second way in which scholars really can have influence is through powerful, objective evaluations. Serious evaluations of public policies, often using randomized controlled experiments, are becoming more common. In my field of welfare, the work of MDRC and similar firms has been superb and hugely important. Now, at long last, we are seeing such evaluations in education and other social policy realms. Typically the lessons from credible evaluations are simple. They show that “this worked” or “this did not work.” And thoughtful people from across the political spectrum take such results very seriously."

"There is a third type of policy influence that is still troublingly rare. That is the influence of social scientists and political scientists on public policy development and design -- the very creation of the detailed policies themselves. What I am talking about are the thoughtful, serious policies that form the backbone of policy development and practice. The one exception to this is probably macroeconomics. But I am not a macroeconomist (and by the way, microeconomists get as confused about what macroeconomists do and how they do it as the rest of you do). So the obvious question is why do so few people from academia actually come and participate, join a team, or at least play a really central role from the outside?"

"I would like to argue that in some ways it is shocking that any of us have real influence, and then I want to conclude with a few thoughts about how we might do better."

Compare the worlds of governance and scholarship. Public policy is about politics, because democracy is about politics. And political values, constituencies, advocacy, courting of moneyed interests, are central to democratic politics. Each political party has different core principles. Election requires serving and engaging constituents, building alliances, supporting your friends, challenging your enemies. And politics calls for raising money—sometimes from quite self-interested sources.

"And what do we political and social scientists cherish above all? We are supposed to believe in objective truth. At best, we will talk about politics as a constraint on getting to the truth. We are especially nervous about powerful interests who feel strongly that public policy should go in a certain way. We almost by nature resist any temptation to appease key constituents because we are going to be tainted by their special interests."

"Most policy-makers and most politicians, on the other hand, do not recoil at the notion that there might be strong interests supporting them in their position. To give you a couple of examples: one of my roles during the Clinton administration on welfare reform was to deal with outside groups. I was in charge of dealing with AFSCME, the largest public sector union, so I met with AFSCME’s president, Gerry McEntee. At our first meeting, McEntee looked at me and said, 'Near as I can tell, you want to create more public service jobs for welfare recipients than I have members. I find that a little threatening.' That was a really good opening line. And I stumbled over my answer."

"Even more telling in some respects was a comment that was made to me. I was one of three people, along with Mary Jo Bane and Bruce Reed, in the early part of the Clinton administration, who were supposedly kind of overseeing welfare reform. And at one point, fairly far along, the chief political officer for the Department of Health and Human Services came to me, someone who was a good friend of mine and so forth, and he said, 'You know, David, when the final deal is cut on welfare reform, you won’t be in the room.' And I said, 'I am one of those in charge. We are making these decisions, we are figuring it out, and no one knows more.' And he said, 'David, you care more about the impacts on poor people than you do about the political futures of those making the final decisions. You won’t be in the room.'"

"Another obvious difference is the primacy of action versus ideas. If you sit in the Congress or the White House or the State House, your goal is to pass a bill, to get something to happen, to make a policy change. And there are events and elections that open a rare window of opportunity. You must act now or the chance will be lost. You strike while the iron is hot, whether or not the evidence is in. Moreover, getting something passed may require making compromises, accepting elements one does not believe in, and adding policies that can seem silly or even dangerous. To those of us in academia, ideas are what really matter, rather than whether or not some bill gets passed quickly, especially a poorly thought out bill full of political compromise. Nothing is better to us than a beautiful model. We believe reflection is far more important than action. (If you do not believe this, attend a faculty meeting). We always believe more information is needed. Truman used to say he wanted a one-handed economist because his were always saying “on the one hand – on the other hand.” Any of you who have tried to put together a conference volume, even from papers that were supposedly already done, know that timeliness never, never trumps thoughtful, accurate, effective scholarship. All of these characteristics make us very dangerous political allies. Not only are we hesitant and indecisive, we speak our minds publicly. We might even resign in protest."

"And so why on earth should or would politicians want to have to deal with scholars, who are so preoccupied with truth and ideas, and ultimately principles, when policymakers are trying to get something done? And why should we scholars enter a process that inevitably forces us to compromise our core values? Does it really matter, anyway?"

"I believe we must have scholars to be involved because democracy needs some voices on the inside who focus on facts before politics. Pat Moynihan’s notion that was cited earlier this evening was dead on: policymakers are welcome to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. We have been through a period where facts seemed only relevant through a political lens, often used only when convenient for beating up the opposition. Those of us who have worked on political campaigns or even been in government, know that one of our major roles is to convince our side not to say something that is completely wrong or completely stupid and completely inconsistent with any evidence whatsoever. That is a really important role. Effective decision making requires the presence of some people who really do put truth before salability, and who are not beholden to outsiders."

"We also want scholars involved because they can often see the larger implications of smaller decisions using models and theories and ideas. Scholars are more likely to see the unexpected and counterproductive consequences of seemingly appealing policies. They understand where critical opportunities lie and how altered policies will shape behavior. We need scholars involved so that they can explain and spread the big ideas that are now emerging. Policymaking must by necessity be practiced by people who are radically pragmatic. But ideas and idealists are a vital leavening. We need truth tellers, canaries in the coal mine, and the occasional game-changing vision."

"It is equally important for academics that some of our number do spend time in government and governing. Those of us who have had the opportunity to serve really do come back and ask different questions. We see the possible in a different light. Politics becomes a source of information about people’s values and expectations rather than an unpleasant constraint. The risk of scholarship writing itself into beautiful irrelevance is sharply reduced if at least some of its leaders deal in a serious and intense way with those who are elected or appointed to serve the people. Asking the right questions is the hard part for most of us, and working with democratic institutions teaches us to focus so differently."

"And, of course, working in government can be incredibly exciting. Getting a chance to change the tax code so that millions more people get a tax credit for working and then watching as work increases dramatically among low income mothers does have a certain intense hold that seems hard to match—even if the intellectual content of changing basic incentives is not exactly at the frontier of knowledge."

"So for democracy and for our professions, I would argue that it is imperative that more scholars engage and participate. Frankly, I do not expect politics or politicians to change too quickly. I believe, though I have never examined any evidence, that staff in both the Congress and the executive branch are becoming better trained over time and more open to critical intellectual ideas. But the core themes of politics and policymakers will always turn critically on action and advocacy and alliances."

"So I think it falls to us in academia to push our profession to be a little more admiring of service, a little more forgiving of uneasy political engagements, a little more open to the ideas and insights from those who have dirtied themselves. I believe this can be done without compromising our most precious ideal of pursuing truth and objectivity."

"To start with, many of us need to think very differently about politics. Economists are especially challenged in this regard. We just think politics is at best a constraint and at worst a dangerous impediment to wise and efficient policy. But one of the things I learned most vividly was that politics is about information. It is about understanding the values that people hold dear, and values are quite vital to everything we do. At one time academics all seemed to love the guaranteed annual income or the negative income tax—even Milton Friedman supported it. But to sell the idea, politicians had to claim it encouraged work—which it really did not. An idea, no matter how appealing, is not good policy if you have to sharply mislead the American public to convince them to be for it. We proclaim our faith in democracy while casually arguing that the public is badly informed. Politics and its derivative policies are largely about values."

"On core policy values, honest scholars have two choices. They can either assert up front 'I have these certain value-laden principles that help guide my policy', e.g. 'if you work you should not be poor' or 'it is reasonable to expect people to work if they are able and if work pays.' Or they can accept the core policy values of the political leaders. Too often scholars try to hide their values when looking at policy. And when social scientists get into power sometimes they fight with each other using data that is really about values. During the Jimmy Carter days, the Labor Department and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare had a huge fight because the Labor Department wanted work-based reforms that were based on common opportunity and expectations placed on citizens, in other words supporting workers but insisting on work. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare folks wanted a negative income tax based on minimum common rights of citizens. The competing teams had dueling simulation models that sought to prove the virtues of their own strategy. The truth was that these were incompatible ideals."

"It’s worth noting that once a basic outline of the ideals is set, we scholars are exceptionally good at thinking about the means to the ends. If one was seeking to consider the ways to ensure that people who worked are not poor, academics have wonderful tools for examining alternative options. It is comparatively easy to ask which methods are most effective in getting people working. Should we raise the minimum wage or expand the Earned Income Tax Credit? Should we use incentives or some sort of requirements or rules-based system and the like?"

"We are not as good at thinking about implementation, but we ought to be. Scholars should value work that looks at the forces that can shape and alter delivery systems and bureaucracies. We need to understand how and when policies actually successfully get implemented. In the end, I concluded that welfare reform needed to focus on changing the culture of welfare offices, not the culture of poverty. By the way, implementation design is something that Congress is equally bad at. Congress is remarkably good at passing laws that have no credible way of working. They pass a new rule every day when they find some legitimate yet often isolated problem, and the accumulation of policies looks like the tax code. Manuals for welfare workers would literally be books and books and books and books thick. So guess what? There actually wound up being no policy rather than effective policy."

"In my view, we must find a way in academia to reward and admire service. This can be done in several ways. We can welcome practitioners into our midst and listen to and learn from them. We can have policy schools where policy impact gets a bit more weight. But ultimately I hope that we might learn to value and evaluate service in much the same way we do with journal articles. Did the person provide important and honest ideas? At the time and in the period since, can they look critically at the policy ideas being considered? Has the scholar become an advocate, or a wiser observer? Did the ideas really have an impact?"

"There are home runs in the intellectual policy arena too. We ought to find a way to evaluate them with the same rigor and admiration we apply to traditional research. Very few of our departments actually look at that in anything other than a neutral fashion, but more commonly negative. I remember when I was in the job market long ago and I went to various universities and I would occasionally dare to say, 'I am kind of interested in doing public policy work.' And some places would implicitly say, 'Why didn’t you tell us this earlier? We could have saved your plane fare.' The more open minded suggested, 'You know, policy work is fine. Some people play basketball with their free time, you can do policy, as long as it does not interfere with your work.' We really do have to decide, if we believe this, that we are actually going to reward it so that young people that do it. I believe our democracy and our scholarship urgently need a more supportive atmosphere."

"So, thanks again to the Academy. Pat Moynihan was a remarkable man and none of us, I think, will ever have the chance to be or even see anyone much like him. I think he would be very discouraged if he felt like the professions that he participated in and the social science did not figure out a way to keep social scientists involved. So here is a Pat Moynihan dream. When we have these awards 10 years from now, the dream would be that rather than having people all talk about the puzzle of why we don’t we have more influence or why academia does not value policy work, all of the honorees will say, 'Isn't it great that scholarly ideas are so often a central part of everything we do.'"

"So from the bottom of my heart, thank you very much for this great honor."

David Ellwood is dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The preceding remarks were taken from his acceptance speech delivered at the Newseum on May 7, 2009 upon receiving the 2009 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize.

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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."[pagebreak]

"Moynihan attempted to synthesize structural and cultural analyses to understand the dynamics of poor black families and the plight of low-skilled black males.  And now, more than forty years after the public release of his report, we are seeing the beginnings of a more sophisticated synthesis of structure and culture by social scientists who readily acknowledge Moynihan’s important contribution to this subject."

"Also, he was one the first social scientists to call attention to the growing gap between the black middle class and the black poor—a gap that has continued to widen and has been the focus of a lot of research and writings, including my own."

"Finally, Moynihan was among the early social scientists who recognized that as racial barriers fall in the face of anti-discrimination legislation, the cumulative effects of racial oppression will make it extremely difficult for many poor African Americans to take advantage of opportunities provided by the civil rights movement.  Accordingly, he recommended a shift in civil-rights activity to increase the resources of the black family."

"Since Moynihan’s writings on race and ethnic relations and on poverty and family structure have been the focus of so much subsequent research—indeed the number of studies boggles the mind—I strongly feel that he ranks among some of our most important social scientists."

"Although many of Moynihan’s ideas represent an original synthesis of existing scholarship, his work was bold and controversial.  But, the controversy was productive.  I think that my colleague at Harvard, Theda Skocpol, put it best.  She stated that Moynihan’s taste for controversy has influenced both his political and academic careers.  And that he had an extraordinary ability to dramatize an issue by putting his finger on things.  For example, she states, his report on the black family performed a national service in dramatizing the issue of family structure, and many people 'who care about inequality are fully aware of its contribution.'  I fully agree.  This man’s work was agenda setting.  I am so pleased that he is finally getting the full recognition that he deserves.  Thank you."

William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. The preceding are excerpts from his remarks in presenting the 2009 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize to David Ellwood.

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

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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.[pagebreak] 

What a thrill it is that this Academy so uniquely singles out a particular type of scholar to recognize, the ones of us who cannot stay put in one place.  What a complete honor it is to be recognized by association to a giant, who stood for the social sciences as robustly as did Herbert Simon.  Herb, as many of you may know, received his PhD in political science, one; sat in a department of psychology, two; was the founder of the field of computer science, three; and received the Nobel Prize in economics.  It is hard to imagine that another one like him will be amongst us anytime soon, and I consider myself doubly privileged for knowing him up close through my husband, Bhaskar, whose mentor and thesis advisor he was.  When this Academy was created to, it says, promote the progress of the social sciences it was an organization well ahead of its time.  How many old societies can say that they included women from the beginning, even when that beginning was 115 years ago?  Hell, around that time my university had turned Mary Calkins down for the degree of PhD even though she had met all requirements and obtained all necessary male signatures.  It is also said of this organization’s Annals that in it difficult topics were not avoided.  Indeed, it devoted the 1901 meeting to an analysis of race with Booker T. Washington presenting a paper.  In this sense, the issues I have been passionate about and had the privilege of understanding have been the heart and soul of this Academy’s work, more than any other I can think of.  So, again, I am indebted to you for this association with you.

But it is also true that progress being what it is, the founders of this Academy surely did not have my brand of social science in mind.  In 1889, the idea of a computer was, as we know it, somewhat rudimentary.  Computers aside, it would have been inconceivable that the time taken in milliseconds to complete a mental operation could in any sense inform contemporary political, economic, or social issues.  And yet that is what my work, because of the work of those before me and alongside me, Susan Fiske most notably, has turned this into a thriving social science.  We have taken complex thoughts and feelings, thoughts and feelings about ourselves, others who are similar, and especially others who are not so similar, and reduced them first to a number such as 550.  It takes the mind 550 milliseconds to categorize the most important social entities in our universe so far, that is to say other humans, into social groups; black or white, male or female, rich or poor, old or young.  And based on these numbers, in a slightly more complex configuration than I am letting on, we have made a host of claims that we ourselves could scarcely have imagined some years ago.  We now know first and foremost that we are not the people we think we are.  We are deeply flawed beings.  Herb Simon used a more palatable phrase to refer to us as boundedly rational, not perfectly rational, not classically rational, but boundedly rational.  Human beings, he said, have neither the facts nor the consistent structure of values nor the reasoning power at their disposal to make decisions in line with subjective expected utility, which he said is a beautiful object deserving a prominent place in Plato’s heaven of ideas but impossible to employ in any literal way in making actual human decisions.  Our failures, we have learned, stem from the quite ordinary aspects of our brains and minds, our sociocultural environments, and the immediate situations in which we find ourselves.  In spite of the many positive effects such influences have on us they also disrupt, for no obvious fault of our own, the moral pacts that we make with ourselves to be good, to be fair, to be just.  To reveal these invisible aspects of our minds has been the difficulty.  But the power of technology has allowed us glimpses of our deepest nature and how our social worlds shape us to be who we are, and to our great delight the message we have taken on the road, that we are unconsciously biased in ways that do not make us proud, seems to be slowly getting heard.  It may not be welcomed, but it is being engaged with.  Over ten million tests of implicit bias have been sampled at the website in the last ten years; legal scholars and lawyers have made use of these ideas in moving forward their own work; businesses have found that these ideas persuade even the most intransigent members about the barriers to diversity; doctors and social workers find it stunning that even they, the most well-intentioned of all, may be far from their own goal of serving everybody equally. 

In all of this bleak rewriting of our natures, there is a silver splash.  It being the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin, it is especially timely to remember something that he said so well.  Darwin said that it is not the strongest who will survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one who is most adaptive to change.  What the social sciences that I am so fortunate to have been a part of have shown is that the darndest aspects of the mind can be explored and laid bare.  To do with it what is right and what is good is in our hands because we are, above all else, infinitely adaptable.

Mahazarin Banaji is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. These remarks were prepared for her induction as the 2009 Herbert Simon Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

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.[pagebreak]

I want to close by taking a concrete example that was in this morning’s newspapers. The House passed yesterday a version of what is called “Cash for Clunkers.” I do not know how many of you know what that is. If you look it up on Wikipedia, it will tell you I invented either the concept or the name. This is not true. I did not invent either. The basic idea of Cash for Clunkers is to pay above market value to get people to turn in gas-guzzling old cars—clunkers. I wrote about this in The New York Times last July. It’s a program that I have liked for a long, long time. I lauded it, first of all, as environmental policy—which is probably the most obvious. Secondly, as fiscal stimulus—it was a way to spend money in a very sensible way, and you could get it out pretty fast, though not instantly. Thirdly, as something that did some income equalization because, if you think about who owns the clunkers, it is the low-income people, by and large—or rather, low-income people and some professors. And by the way, as a throwaway remark at the end of the piece I said, “You know, the auto industry is having problems. This would be pretty good for the auto industry.” That was last July. Now, there was some research base for these claims—but nothing that would pass muster with the referees of the American Economic Review, I can assure you of that—based on pilot programs that had gone on here and there. So this idea went into the policy hopper, and the policy hopper is a messy sausage grinder, as most of us in this room know. It just missed getting into the Obama stimulus package. It was then revived as part of the energy policy—it is, after all, environmental policy—at which point the lobbyists start descending on the idea and the economic analysis got pushed aside completely. The impetus for this program now, I think, is obvious to all—which is that the auto industry is now not just in trouble but on its knees, and Cash for Clunkers is now being thought of as a way to stimulate the demand for new cars. It was apparently very successful in this regard in Germany, this year or last year. And so all the rest, as Hillel would have said, has become commentary. This program is now about increasing the demand for cars; and the environmental, income distribution, and stimulus aspects have all gone by the wayside. The next step is for the House and the Senate to conference this because there are different bills in the House and the Senate. Again, I can assure you that economic analysis will be irrelevant in that conference. I can assure you of that, though I cannot predict what will come out of the conference.

But I want to close by explaining why I brought this policy up. In addition to its timeliness, I think it illustrates some of the interactions among analysts, advisors, commentators, and policy makers, that I was talking about. Cash for Clunkers is, after all, a good idea that came out of pure economic reasoning.

Alan Blinder is the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and co-director of Princeton’s Center for Economic Policy Studies. These remarks were prepared for his induction as the 2009 John Kenneth Galbraith Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

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.[pagebreak]

Political scientists had already identified problems with the model—agency capture for one--but I argued that the model had completely degenerated so that a one-time means to making good policy had become an electoral end. Members of Congress took credit for passing a law while avoiding responsibility for the specific consequences. In fact, they would step in to remedy problems created by the legislation--blaming bureaucrats and judges for them--thus profiting again from their initial irresponsibility.

This line of work evolved into a more general interest in inter-branch relations and in the 1980s I had a fair amount of contact with academic lawyers who were attempting to construct a new model of administrative law that took account of empirical realities.

In the 1990s I wrote another general interest book, Divided Government. Our two parties were becoming more distinct and more differentiated, as political scientists had long advocated, but the evidence suggested that Americans didn’t like what professors did. In fact, they persisted in electing Republican majorities and Democratic Congresses, thus vitiating the theoretical positive effects of responsible parties. This struck me as a puzzle worth exploring, and those explorations eventually led to my most recent contribution.

In 1998 I moved to Stanford and (half) of my job description changed. Hoover Fellows are encouraged to reach out and touch the larger world of journalists, politicos and interested laypersons. And as I did so I began to realize how poorly the popular picture of American politics reflected reality. The result was Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America.  (Incidentally, the first sentence of the preface quotes Senator Moynihan’s pithy observation that “we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts.” That has been my credo). Culture War? was all about facts. My collaborators and I showed that the views of blue and red state residents were not nearly as divergent as generally supposed, that hot button issues like abortion were not very important to most Americans, that even on hot button issues, there’s lots of common ground, and that the polarized political class doesn’t look like most of America.

A New York Times feature story that discussed the book was published in June of 2004 and a flurry of publicity ensued. A little more than a month after publication an obscure Democratic Senate candidate took the podium at the Democratic National Convention and said, among other things, that “…we worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.”

I would love to believe that Obama had read the book, or at least that someone on his staff had told him, “hey, there’s this professor on the West Coast who says all this polarization stuff is overblown,” but I guess I’ll never know.

Many of you have seen Joe Nye’s op-ed decrying the separation of academic social science from the real world of practice. Reading it made me reflect on my own attempts to bridge that separation. I think Joe overlooked the most obvious reason most of us don’t actually serve in governmental capacities: we become academics because we don’t want a 9-5 job, so the prospect of a 7-7 job is that much more horrifying. But his more general point about the lack of interest in policy-relevant research is worth serious consideration.

In my own case dissatisfaction with the status quo was the principal motivation for reaching out to a more general audience. American politics professors don’t have high expectations for government. That’s not a cynical observation, only a reflection of our appreciation of the difficulties of governing a big heterogeneous country through highly decentralized, politically responsive institutions. But sometimes government seems to be doing even worse than usual. Judging by the gray hair in the audience a lot of you will remember the 1970s—environmental crises, energy crises, stagflation—a bad decade all around. But there was a lack of critical analysis in the American politics literature, a reluctance to evaluate. I believed there was something between dispassionate description and polemics, and Keystone was an attempt to hit that in-between spot.

Similarly, in the 1990s I realized that I didn’t like the two parties as they were evolving, and my reaction might be common among the general public.

And in the 2000s I just got fed up with journalists and politicos blaming voters for the sorry state of national politics.

Peer reaction to these efforts may shed some light on Joe Nye’s complaint. Keystone won no professional prizes. In fact, it received several negative reviews, and I heard through the grapevine that some senior congressional scholars were unhappy with me. I certainly had some worries that publishing the book was not a good career move. In fact, as soon as the manuscript went off to Yale Press I went right back to another project and in a few years published a mainstream political science book, Retrospective Voting. This one was aimed squarely at professional political scientists and sold accordingly. When I was negotiating with Harvard in 1982, Joe, our late colleague Arthur Maass told me flatly that he didn’t like the Congress book, but that Retrospective Voting was in the tradition of V.O. Key, so he didn’t oppose me.

Similarly, Culture War? has won no prizes. Indeed, to my knowledge there has not been a review in any professional journal. There’s been little professional criticism. Rather, the more typical reaction seems to be that “we all knew that already.” Yes, if “we all” means the several hundred professionals who spend their lives mucking around in public opinion data, we all did.

But there may be grounds for optimism. After 32 years, Keystone is still in print, very slowly closing in on 90,000 copies sold. Culture War? sold 65,000 copies during President Bush’s second term, and there have been about 650 class adoptions to date.

So just as the political class is not representative of the public at large, so the academic class—the elite research professoriate—may not be representative of the academic public at large. I suspect there is much greater appreciation of research that makes policy contributions than we realize, and Joe’s attempt to push academics in that direction may meet with less resistance than we might think.

Thank you all for this honor.

Morris Fiorina is the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. These remarks were prepared for his induction as the 2009 Harold Lasswell Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

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.[pagebreak]  So we wrote a book on transnational relations in world politics, which said you have to look at non-state actors like terrorists and multinational corporations and other such things, and we followed that with a book on power and interdependence, saying that when you thought about how states worked with each other in economic relations, it was through use of force, it was the manipulation of asymmetrical interdependence and creating institutional regimes, which made it easier or harder for one or another state to do such things, or another group, a non-state group.  And we also developed a concept which we called complex interdependence, which was what would it be like if you had some situations in which states were not the major actors, in which you found that they were not using force, and pursuit of security was not their dominant concern.  Which would, I think, describe the relations among most of what we call advanced democracies today; the idea of fighting between France and Germany, between the U.S. and Japan, the U.S. and Canada, this is just outside the domain of what makes sense and yet a large chunk of international politics is like that.  So, in that sense, I think when Bob and I first wrote about these concepts in the early 1970s we were regarded as slightly fringe, slightly far out.  There was a revival of the Cold War, everybody quickly glommed on to revival of the traditional paradigm, and yet today if we think of a world in which every politician has globalization tripping off his or her tongue, and if you look at a world in which non-state actors killed more Americans on 9/11 than the government of Japan did in December, 1941, some of the thoughts that we developed in the 1970s have actually come full circle, now they are commonplace.  They were not when we first invented them.

I followed that with another discontent in the late 1980s, which was the way we thought about power in my subfield.  There was a tremendous tendency to think of power in terms of what I call the concrete fallacy--that you confuse power, which is actually about behavior – getting others to do what you would like them to do – with the resources that produce it.  And so people thought of power as either something you could drop on your foot or drop on another city.  And it struck me that this was inadequate and that it was narrowly truncating how we thought about power in our field.  And as I was trying to write a book at the time, in the late 1980s, about why I thought the theory of declinism that my friend Paul Kennedy had written, that the Americans were on the way out, was wrong.  It struck me that he had an inadequate concept of power.  Now, it is also true that when I wrote the book Bound to Lead, which coined the term “soft power,” I think I got the answer right but Paul got all the royalties.  I looked at military power and economic power and said, “There is still something missing,” to understand why the Americans were influential, and that is the ability to get what you want by attraction, by setting others’ preferences and then after you have set the preferences they can bargain as they wish.  That I think has had some effect and what strikes me is that when you find not just Tony Blair or the Prime Minister of Japan using the term soft power, as he did a week ago when I was in Tokyo, but when you see that Hu Jintao instructs the Seventeenth Party Congress of the Communist Party that China needs to think more about soft power, you think “Oh my goodness, this thing has gone around further than I expected.”  Now, it is also true that when you use a term like that it can get misused.  And in 2004, I published a book in which I inserted the term “smart power,” because too many people were interpreting what I was saying is that soft power, the ability to attract rather than coerce and pay, is sufficient and it was not.  What I was trying to say is that you need to be able to figure out how to combine hard and soft power in different contexts.  And in that sense, the terminology “soft power” is an analytical concept, “smart power” is a normative concept, preference, you want smart strategies which are able to be successful.  And I was pleased then when Hillary Clinton, testifying before the Senate for her confirmation hearings, referred to the new administration’s desire to use smart power.  And, again, I thought this was gratifying to know that ideas which had been developed in an abstract sense were actually doing something in policy.  I had seen ideas that I developed in the abstract affect policy when I served in government, but they were ideas that I had taken in with me. The idea, though, that you can sit in the Academy and write something and then it does pervade a broader policy community, that I think is a more intriguing question as to when it takes off and when it does not.  Who knows what effect all this has had on policy?  There are so many different causes of any given political event, so many different things that people pick up or use or do not use and discard for a variety of motives and reasons that nobody can claim that their ideas have had a strong or powerful effect.  But it is nice to see at least that they are being given lip service in the sense that they are coming out of the lips of people who are in a place to do something with power. 

But, finally, I did publish this piece in The Washington Post on April 13th, which was called Scholars on the Sidelines, which noted that perhaps not for economists but for academic political scientists that there were fewer and fewer who were actually serving, who were transferring ideas in Dick Neustadt’s idea of  In-and-Outers than there had been in the past, and that probably the fault for this was not the Obama administration or the government, but was something in the Academy, the way we approached the question of the usefulness of our ideas and whether we cared about the usefulness of our ideas or at least translating them into accessible terms.  And that does bother me.  That, I think, is a problem that we as a profession need to think about.  So while I am pleased that there has been lip service to some of my ideas, I would be much more satisfied if there were a greater concern in the Academy to make sure that ideas were making this world a better place.

Thank you very much for the honor.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is the University Distinguished Service Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. These remarks were prepared for his induction as the 2009 Theodore Roosevelt Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

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.[pagebreak]

I went on to conduct field experiments on a wide range of police practices, including stop-and-frisk tactics against guns. My first experiment in Kansas City showed a 50 percent reduction in gun crimes compared to a similar area where the practice was withheld. This result was replicated six times in other cities, all showing less murder or gunshot wounds. Gun patrols were then widely adopted across the U.S. in the 90s; gun arrests soared, and the national homicide rate dropped by almost half.

Some observers say our research on gun crime may have helped reduce murder. A more important link might be to our discovery that over 60 percent of reported crime occurs at just 3 percent of street addresses. This finding led to some of the largest police departments restructuring their basic patrol operations around the “hot spots” where crime is concentrated rather than around large patrol beats. Police were given further encouragement for that policy by our randomized trial in Minneapolis. That experiment doubled patrol time in 55 high-crime hot spots while leaving it unchanged in 55 others, measuring patrol independently with systematic observation. In the hot spots with more patrol, we found two-thirds less crime than in the hot spots left alone.

Two decades later, the impact of that research remains limited to a few big agencies like New York. Most police departments still waste police patrols in low-crime areas, and put too little patrol into hot spots. Like doctors refusing to wash their hands, police remain resistant to evidence-based practice. So do state legislatures which use research findings that they like but ignore findings that they don’t like—including those from my research on policing domestic violence.

My domestic violence research produced the change in public policy that I regret the most, even though it was the methodological breakthrough I value the most. With the unanimous consent of City Councils in Minneapolis and Milwaukee, I organized police to follow random assignment of arrest or mediation in each case of misdemeanour domestic assault. That Minneapolis experiment became the first randomized trial of arrest in the history of policing. Even better, the experiment had a clear finding of “what worked.” We found that there was half as much repeat violence after arrest as after mediation.

That result was just what a large advocacy community wanted to hear. As an Assistant Attorney General of the U.S. said to me, “it’s a good thing your study got the right result, because otherwise I would have attacked your methodology.” Our initial “arrest works best” finding led to 28 state legislatures, and several other nations, passing laws that mandated arrest in all such cases. This was despite our cautions that the Minneapolis experiment should be replicated before any policy was mandated.

Five years later we were able to repeat the Minneapolis experiment in Milwaukee. There we found the bad news: that while arrest worked best for suspects who had jobs, it backfired terribly for suspects who were job-less. Three independent experiments then confirmed this result: that arrest of unemployed men doubled their level of domestic violence. Yet neither legislatures nor the news media took any notice of this strong evidence against mandatory arrest. 

These results finally drove me from doing experiments to building theory. The result was my defiance theory, that criminal sanctions increase crime whenever the people punished are weakly bonded to society and view their punishers as illegitimate. This theory fits the facts of a wide range of criminogenic effects, from arrests of juveniles to the negative effects of British crackdowns on Northern Irish terrorism.

Defiance theory has also been central to our field tests of restorative justice meetings between offenders and their victims, designed to increase the legitimacy of punishment with the emotional impact on offenders of hearing their victims describe the harm offenders caused. In fifteen years on three continents, my colleague Heather Strang and  I have completed 12 randomized tests of this police-led practice. Our best results are from 7 controlled trials in the UK, which produced an 8-to-1 return on investment in the costs of crime prevented by restorative justice. Yet even our finding of 27 percent fewer criminal convictions after restorative justice has failed to move the UK government to make use of our results, which we found with their money. At least we can assure the Jerry Lee Foundation and other co-funders of the research that this new approach meets almost any definition of an “evidence-based practice.”

As more of a hedgehog than a fox, I have seen public policy embrace some but not all of the three big ideas reflected in my work: experiments, concentrations, and legitimacy. The first big idea is that to the extent possible, public policies need to have solid randomized experiments as the standard for what is now quite loosely called “evidence-based practice.” The 1997 Report to the U.S. Congress I led on “What Works and What Doesn’t” in preventing crime adumbrated a similar message in President Obama’s inaugural address on all government spending. Since then a small industry has been established to systematically review evidence of crime prevention program effectiveness.

The second big idea is that crime is heavily concentrated in a skewed distribution best known as the “power few.” In the past two decades, policies from policing to parole have slowly invested more in places and people that are high-risk and less in those that are low-risk. But until the evidence of risk is linked to evidence of program outcomes, the use of risk analysis per se may do little good. Untested policies based solely on risk may be no better than those based on tradition or guesswork.

The third idea has had the least effect so far, yet may be the most important. Whatever good it does, criminal justice also causes crime, and a lot of it. One reason for iatrogenic law enforcement may be found in my defiance theory about offenders who view their punishment as illegitimate. But unless we complete a lot more research that is open to that hypothesis, we may continue to cause crime with punishment.

The hedgehog in me says the solution to that problem is idea number 1: better use of better evidence to allocate or withhold spending. So far the Obama administration has encountered stiff opposition to this idea, even in medical practices. Yet the idea is now well-entrenched in the UK’s National Health Service. It is also under discussion at the UK’s national police agency. We may still see a future in which criminology has more impact on policy than at present, especially if it can reach the public to affect politics as well as policy.

I take comfort from the story of James Lind, the doctor whose experiments found a cure for scurvy. Despite the huge cost of this disease to the British navy, it took over 40 years to adopt his recommendation to hand out limes every day to British sailors. As Senator Moynihan once said, politics is not for the short-winded. Neither is research on public policy.

Lawrence W. Sherman is Director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania and Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Darwin College. These remarks were prepared for his induction as the 2009 Thorsten Sellin Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Trudy Rubin: Professor Nye, let’s start with a definition; what is soft power?

Joseph Nye: Power is the ability to affect others to get what you want. There are three ways you can do it: you can threaten people with coercion (sticks), you can pay them, induce them with carrots, or you can get them to want what you want, and that ability to attract people to get what you want through attraction is soft power. And the extent to which you can use soft power, you can save a lot on carrots and sticks.

Joe Nye and Trudy Rubin

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TR: In the Bush administration, there was a lot of disdain toward the very concept of soft power. I think Donald Rumsfeld once said he didn’t know what it meant. And during that same period America’s image abroad went down according to all the poles. So, was Rumsfeld right?  Does it really matter?

JN: I think that it does matter, if you think of what the Bush administration tried to do with their hard power, including invading Iraq. We have become so unpopular in Turkey that the Turkish Parliament wouldn’t allow the 4th Infantry Division to go across Turkey and enter Iraq from the north. So the loss of our soft power in Turkey, actually interfered with our hard power, and that is a clear case where Rumsfeld’s not understanding of soft power was expensive.

TR: So when my readers write me, and they say, “why should we care about public opinion abroad?” they’re missing something?

JN:  They’re missing something because public opinion abroad creates either an enabling or disabling environment. If being pro-American is a kiss of death for a foreign leader because public opinion is angry at the United States, their leader is less able to give the Americans what he or she wants, so it does cost.[pagebreak]

TR: Is there a new relevance to soft power in an age where our biggest security threats are asymmetrical, and come from non-state actors like Islamist terrorist groups?

JN: Very much so.  If you think of the threats that we face, many of them are ones that you cannot deal with directly with military force. Take transnational terrorism. Yes, force is part of the answer. You have somebody like Osama Bin Laden, you are never going to attract him, and you have to kill or capture him. But the key question is the mainstream Muslims. Is Bin Laden going to be able to recruit them or are they going to restrain themselves and not fall into his trap, and that is where soft power comes in. You cannot prevail against transnational terrorism if you are taking positions which make it easy for the Bin Ladens of this world to recruit from the mainstream.

TR: I want to come back to that point of whether it’s image or policy positions. But before we get there, I just want to talk a little bit about Barack Obama and soft power. You wrote that, “It’s difficult to think of any single act that would do more to restore America’s soft power than the election of Obama to the Presidency.” Now that he is president do you see signs of a change as he is beginning to do things that shift our image, change the symbols, and is there more you are waiting to see?

JN: As a top British politician told me right after the election, the United States is a unique country.  That is, in a sense by electing an African American President, we changed our image in the minds of billions of people. And that did a lot to restore the American’s dream and make us attractive again. But Obama is going to have to follow that symbolism with policy. And if the policies are unattractive, the election alone won’t be sufficient.

TR: But you point to something, which is the shift in America's image, and obviously the election of an African American affects that...I just came back from the Davos World Economic Forum where United States was the symbol of what not to do, and our competency was in doubt. Has the economic crisis really affected our image and our ability to project a presence that other people want to imitate?

JN: It clearly has been costly to us, not just economically but also in terms of our soft power. The Wall Street Model, which was the envy of everybody in the economic area, has collapsed; there are no more investment banks for example. But I think what the long-run costs will look like depend on how well we both recover in terms of not only the real economy, but also what sort of frame we set up for regulations of the financial institutions. If in, say, 3-5 years we've done that well, I think we can recover from the losses that we've suffered in the last year.

TR: When you look at those aspects of America that people used to want to emulate-- economy, culture, democracy--how does that stand now? For example, democracy. President Bush pushed democratization and famously in Iraq tried to impose it through invasion. Is our democracy, besides our economy, still an object that other people want to imitate?

JN: I think many people had their doubts during the Bush administration. They felt that the way we were treating civil liberties in response to terrorism, the presence of Guantanamo, these things called in question our democracy. I think the fact that we had an election in 2008, which led to such a surprise, the fact that an African American with a strange sounding name could rise from nowhere and become President. I think that restored a lot of faith in American democracy. But the key questions are going to be whether we follow up on that election with other policies. I think President Bush spoke a lot about democracy, I'm sure he believed in it, but there's a big gap between a vision which is high in sounding but impractical, and a vision which is something you can implement. I think President Bush and his effort to impose democracy coercively were a failure, and that had a cost for us. To the extent that we support democracy and support civil society and groups in other countries, who move in that direction, I think that's more natural and more likely to improve our soft power.

TR: Do you think that Obama's announcement that he intends to close Guantanamo and that he will not countenance torture will have an impact-- has had an impact?

JN: I think that definitely has an impact. Now there are still some hard questions left. What do you do with some of these people who are out to kill us? You can't just let them go, it's not clear you can put them through the normal court system. Some people say you can, others say not, but the one thing you can make clear is that there should be a situation where they have an independent judicial review. That the executive branch shouldn't be judge, jury, and executioner. And that in our tradition of separation of powers, having a framework after Guantanamo, where people have some degree of judicial review, is important for the values we stand for. The same is true with the present statement on torture, we torture the word "torture" in the way we applied it in the Bush administration, and now we've got a pretty clear statement that, for example, water boarding is torture.

TR: And can you see signs that this is already improving or changing the way those abroad are looking at us as opposed to the way they did during the Bush years?

JN: There are some public opinion poll results that suggest positive reactions to this, but I think we're going to wait to see. Public opinion goes up and down, it's volatile, and on the other hand it does trend in, you can take averages over time and see whether the trends that are short, or trends that are continuous, or whether they are flips.

TR: Let's talk about how soft power can be used in practical terms and how it meshes with hard power, which is a combination that you called "smart power." Let me just ask you to give an example, say how would soft power be relevant to Obama policy on Iran?

JN: Iran is not going to be solved by soft power alone. Actually many things are not solved by soft power alone, North Korea being another example. But to the extent that you attract others and get support, you may contribute to the solution. So if American soft power is strong in Europe, in the Middle East, and other areas; we're more likely get support for the kinds of sanctions that may be necessary to try to push Iran in the direction of making compromises on its nuclear program. And to some extent the ability of the Americans to attract a younger generation inside Iran may help in Iran in the elections, to produce Khatami instead of Ahmadinejad, the current President. So soft power isn't the sole solution, but it can contribute.

TR: And again, say on the question of reaching out to the Muslim world, on the one hand we have the images of Gaza, which is linked to United States by Israeli policy, on the other hand we have President Obama making a speech, or giving an interview right away to an Arab television station, and promising soon, if not in his first hundred days, to visit a Muslim capital. Again, do you think soft power well used in this instance can make a difference?

JN: I think it can make some difference. Our support for Israel is definitely going to be unpopular in many Arab countries, but it doesn't mean we're going to change that support. On the other hand there are things we can do such the President has done with the interview Al Arabiya, his statement about a visit and so forth, which can at least counter balance some of the unpopularity of our view of supporting Israel.

TR: One thing that has interested me a lot is the speeches that Secretary Gates has been giving about the need to complement hard power with soft power. You don't usually expect this from a Secretary of Defense, and he has been very adamant that there has to be a civilian complement to the military aspect of our power. He said recently on his speech that he wanted "a dramatic increase in the civilian instruments of national security" among which he included diplomacy, foreign aid, civic action, reconstruction, and development. He also talked about strategic communications; I guess he means public diplomacy. Now the Bush administration made a big priority of public diplomacy, but it didn't seem to win many heart and minds especially in the Middle East. How can we do better, what did they do wrong, and what should we be doing differently?

JN: Bob Gates' speech in Kansas in 2007, it was really quite a remarkable statement. He said we have to invest in our soft power, and this may be odd for the Secretary of Defense to plead for resources in the state department, but that's what we need. And I think he is right, the trouble with public diplomacy I think in much of the Bush administration was that they saw it as a spin or selling, and people become suspicious of that. If something looks like propaganda people don't trust it, it loses credibility. You think of public diplomacy, it runs on a spectrum between telling and listening, and some of the most effective dimensions of public diplomacy are in the middle, where you have exchanges, where people are both listening and saying. And I think what Bob Gates is getting at, is that there are whole series of instruments, and that just spin or propaganda isn't the most effective or another way of putting it. The best propaganda is not propaganda.

TR: This certainly comes to mind when you think of the way that we've been reaching out to the Arab world in terms of communications. For example Alhurra, the TV station that we set up to reach out doesn't seem to have much of an impact at all.

JN: It seems to have some listener shift in Iraq; it tends to preach to the converted. But on my visits to the Middle East when I've asked people who were basically pro-American, do they listen to Alhurra, and they tell me "no," they just regard it as American propaganda.

TR: Should American officials be appearing more in Al Jazeera or certainly on Al Arabiya, the station to which President Obama gave that interview?

JN: Yes, all of the above, including Alhurra as well, but you can't restrict yourself just to our own wholly owned subsidiary. We should be getting out our message on many different forms of communication, including the stations you've mentioned and also using the Internet more effectively.

TR: I was going to ask you about that, obviously that's the medium that the young people of the world are using, and Jihadi website certainly have a huge audience. Do we do enough to reach out via the Internet to those audiences? Young Muslims?

JN: I don't think we have done nearly enough. It's generational; I mean the large majority of the populations in Muslims countries aren't going to be using the Internet everyday. But among the younger generation who are the ones who are most vulnerable to recruitment, many of them do. And we have to be using the Internet much more effectively to communicate there. Our enemies do, we've got to do better.

TR: What's the problem that is so obvious? Is it that we don't hire enough young people, or do we perhaps need a new agency dedicated to this? Should we bring back the U.S. Information Agency, which many people think was a disastrous mistake to disband with those wonderful Libraries, and city centers around the world, and staff it with only under 35s?

JN: In principle that might not be a bad idea, but in practice it's going to take too much political capital. I think it was a mistake to abolish the U.S. Information Agency, but you spend an awful lot of political capital on reorganizing things. I think more effective is to make sure we include a group of younger people who are attuned to the use of the Internet in our public diplomacy efforts. If you go back to my metaphor about listening and telling being on a spectrum, the Internet fits very much in the middle of particularly chat rooms and blogs, and so forth. These are two ways and we need a group of young, public diplomacy officers who are adept to that.

TR: One of the areas where people admired us the most and wanted to imitate the most was simply in coming to the United States, to study here, to go on exchanges here or perhaps to immigrate here, or even to visit here. And as you know, one of the awful aspects of post 9/11 has been this clamp down on foreign Visas, which have angered many genuinely, fine people who want to visit here and have been treated terribly. The anti-immigration sentiment that has flourished, although not necessarily in the White House, President Bush tried, but he failed to get a better immigration bill, and a sort of pinch approach to exchanges. Are all of the above the things that we really need to look seriously at, even though we're at an economic crunch time?

JN: There is a trade-off between security and openness, but we've aired I think on too much on the security end. After 9/11, it's natural that we would've tried to close down on Visas. They noticed that the people who were here were not foreign students; they had another agenda. There are about 600, 000 foreign students who come to the United States. The vast majority of them go home with much more positive views of the United States and can serve as people who can explain the United States. They're more credible when they explain the United States than we are when we do it through propaganda. So closing down on Visas so that young people don't come here is shooting ourselves in the foot. And while we need to be careful about the security side of this trade off we sort of let the pendulum swing too much in that direction. This is something that both Colin Powell and Condi Rice did something about. I mean it got really bad after 9/11, through their efforts it improved somewhat, and we've now recovered to the level that we were in terms of student Visas from before 911. But let's face it, a lot of people when they arrive to the United States, the first people they see are border-controlled people, and if they're treated rudely or badly, it leaves a very poor impression.

TR: Just on this question of student exchanges, have you had cases with graduate students as I've heard so often from China or from the Middle East, who went home for a vacation and couldn't come back again, and got delayed, had to cancel their program?

JN: Yes we had several cases particularly and immediately after 9/11 in the year or two after. I've heard less of that recently, so there's been some improvement.

In their volume of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “Exceptional Outcomes: Achievement in Education and Employment among Children of Immigrants,” Patricia Fernández-Kelly and Alejandro Portes point out the daunting challenges facing children of immigrants but focus on a small group that has beaten the odds.  They look at why some manage to get advanced degrees and high-paying jobs and ask what their success can tell us about the kind of policies that might help more children of immigrants match their achievement.

Patricia Fernández-Kelly and Alejandro Portes sat down with Annals Executive Editor Phyllis Kaniss for an interview about the volume on February 23, 2009. In the interview, the co-editors described how the combination of a strict upbringing and an a “very significant other”—an outside adult influence—was found to allow children of poorly educated immigrants to succeed in graduating from college. They also pointed up that the government can do more to bolster the availability of these outside adult influences.

“Supporting these programs and expanding them is within the realm of policy, and I think, from our findings, we can wager they would have a significant role in reducing the exceptionality of the cases that we interviewed,” Portes noted.

The volume is based on the on third survey of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), which followed a large sample of second-generation minority youth – from early adolescence into adulthood. From those children, about 1,500 were identified as living in the most difficult level of circumstances: coming from single-parent homes in impoverished areas, with parents with low levels of education and humble occupations, and representing members of a group that was negatively stigmatized.

Of those 1,500 children, about 50 eventually graduated from a four-year university. More of the children ended up in prison than graduated from a university.

“Most people don’t realize how significant circumstance is in shaping the fates of children – not just immigrant children, but native-born children as well,” Fernández-Kelly said.  She pointed out that in such circumstances, parents are unlikely to be able to guide their children on the pathway to college.

Patricia Fernandez-Kelly

Alejandro Portes

“The parents tried as hard as they could, as most parents do, to instill in their children respect for education,” Fernández-Kelly said. “But because they had, themselves, very low levels of education and had endured harsh experience, they often could not guide their children in a way that would result in successful navigation of the hazardous waters of successful educational achievement.” 

The parents of the children in the study often did not know how to help their child sign up to take the SAT, fill out college applications, or study for higher-level courses.

“The parents often made terrible mistakes,” Fernández-Kelly said.

But the parents of the 50 exceptional children who graduated from college did something right. They enforced a strict upbringing, not allowing their children to associate too much with others.

“I am not saying this is an ideal form of parenting,” Fernández-Kelly said. “But it is, in the case of impoverished families, one effective way to reduce the extent to which their children will fall prey to the lures of peer groups.”

In addition, these exceptional children benefited from the influence of a “very significant other,” like a teacher or guidance counselor, who had the knowledge to guide the children toward higher education.

This factor in influencing the educational outcomes of immigrant children can be changed by “policy intervention,” Fernández-Kelly and Portes concluded.

“This kind of external assistance may be expanded, perhaps by creating incentives for school personnel, for teachers and counselors, to stereotype less and to provide these opportunities,” Portes said.

Even in the current economic recession, Portes said he is hopeful that the government will pay more attention to the educational needs of the children of immigrants.

“Sometimes crises bring great opportunities,” he said. “If out of this stimulus there is serious investment in education and some of those stimulus dollars are put in the direction of supporting schools and supporting voluntary programs and creating jobs for people at that level, it may be that the situation will not be as tragic as it was.”

 

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama became the first African American to be sworn in as President of the United States. In the days that followed, a debate has emerged over whether the nation is entering a new “post-racial” phase. While actor Will Smith claims that “all our excuses have been removed” and Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina declared that “every child has lost every excuse,” New York Times columnist Charles Blow has strenuously objected that black children face “enormous and ingrained obstacles.”

Which view is more accurate? How are we to square the election of the nation’s first black president with the dire conditions still facing many of the country’s black families?  What precisely are the obstacles still facing black children and how might the election of a black president help lift them?

A new collection of articles by some of the country’s leading sociologists addresses many of these questions, by revisiting the so-called Moynihan Report, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1965 assessment of the threats facing the increasing number of black children growing up in families with single, unwed mothers. The volume, edited by Douglas S. Massey and Robert S. Sampson, examines the present-day status of obstacles first identified by Moynihan, while raising new threats that were unimaginable forty years ago. They include

• The fact that so many young black males are withdrawing from school at ever earlier ages—and turning to illegal activities—because they see no prospects for legitimate jobs in their future. As Harry Holzer writes, such ultimately self-destructive behavior both reflects—and results in—a deteriorating labor market for young, black men.
• The persistence of continued discrimination in hiring facing blacks who are looking for jobs.  As Devah Pager and Diana Karafin write, negative racial stereotypes by employers are not likely to be revised even in light of actual, positive experiences with black workers.

• The disadvantages that black children face when they are raised by unmarried mothers. Sara McLanahan describes the dramatic growth in the proportion of African American children born outside of marriage (from 24 percent in 1965 to 69 percent in 2000) as well as white children born to unmarried parents (from 6 percent in 1965 to 24 percent today) and presents increasing evidence that single parenthood reduces the life chances of children.

• The added concern that many black children have little contact with their fathers, because both parents have gotten romantically involved with other people in relationships that produce subsequent children. Kathryn Edin, Laura Tach, and Ronald Mincy present research that this “multi-partner fertility,” contrary to the stereotype of the “hit and run father,” is what leads men become less involved with their offspring over time, with devastating effects on the abandoned children.

• The fact that so high a percentage of black children have parents who are in prison or jail. Bruce Western and Christopher Wildeman point out that in 2000, 10.4 percent of black children under the age of 10 had a parent in prison or jail, with 60-70 percent of black male high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s now going to prison. Western and Wildeman make clear that the growing number of black children whose parents have been incarcerated will be at greater risk of poverty, violence and following their parents into prison.

• The consequences for black children of facing a world in which most white Americans endorse broad goals of integration and equality but continue to attribute the low socioeconomic status of blacks to their own weaknesses. As Lawrence Bobo and Camille Charles write in describing this shift in racial attitudes, disadvantaged blacks continue to suffer the effects of white reluctance to support governmental efforts to benefit African Americans.

• The legacy for black children of living in segregated pockets of poverty and disadvantage in the nation’s cities. As Robert Sampson writes, the long-term persistence of neighborhood racial inequality, despite gentrification and secular changes, is likely to remain durable over time absent government intervention and play a role in reproducing poverty over time.

What can be done to address these obstacles? The authors offer a number of specific policy interventions for addressing the conditions facing black children, including: 

• Investing in early childhood education to counter “achievement gaps.”
• Improving early links to the labor market, while helping young men avoid early “disconnection.”
• Increasing the incentives for less-educated young men to take available jobs.
• Reducing the specific barriers and disincentives faced by ex-offenders and low-income non-custodial fathers.
• Increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit  and extending it to unmarried fathers to increase their attachment to the labor force.
• Investing in efforts to reduce unwed fertility and strengthen marriage, while recognizing the need to address underlying social and economic conditions that prevent low-income couples from maintaining stable unions.
• Reducing incarceration rates by eliminating the sentencing discrepancy between crack and powdered cocaine and restoring judicial discretion by repealing mandatory minimum sentencing and three strikes laws while at the same time funding ex-felon reintegration programs.
• Experimenting with de-concentration of public housing, community policing, and increased investment in physical infrastructure and quality of schools to ameliorate the concentrated pockets of poverty and disadvantage in America’s cities.

The full volume of The Moynihan Report Revisited, volume 621 of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science is available here.

The following are excerpts from a series of interviews with some of the country’s top terrorism experts conducted by Trudy Rubin, the Worldview columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer in conjunction with the July 2008 volume of The Annals on “Terrorism: What the Next President Will Face.”  This  interview is with Peter Bergen, CNN’s terrorism analyst and  one of the only Americans to interview Osama bin Laden in 1997.  His most recent book is The Osama bin Laden I know:  An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader.

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Trudy Rubin:  Bruce, you say in your article that Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world today, no issue is more critical to get right for the next President. What do you mean by that? 

The following are excerpts from a series of interviews with some of the country’s top terrorism experts conducted by Trudy Rubin, the Worldview columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer in conjunction with the July 2008 volume of The Annals on “Terrorism: What the Next President Will Face.”  This interview is with Kenneth Pollack, of the Brookings Institution, an expert on national security and on the Persian Gulf. He served as Director of Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council under President Clinton and his latest book is A Path Out of the Desert:  A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East.

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By now you’ve seen it, as have millions of Americans: last week’s cover of The New Yorker. The infamous illustration features false views of Barack Obama taken by his fiercest opponents. Speaking on the Charlie Rose show, the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, has pointed out that the magazine's liberal leanings are well-known. He wonders: can't people take a joke? The short answer is that we would, but our brains won’t let us.

The brain does not save information permanently, as do computer drives and printed pages. After our brains store a fact, the information does not rest. Instead, as a piece of information is recalled, it may be “written” down again as part of the process of strengthening it. Along the way, the fact is gradually separated from the context in which it was originally learned. The phenomenon, known as source amnesia, allows us to have semantic knowledge, a type of memory in which we recall a fact (i.e. “at a red light, stop”) without the bother of recalling exactly when we learned it.

Most of the time this trick is useful. If we had to remember where we learned that red meant stop, we wouldn’t drive very safely. But the same trick can lead people to forget whether a statement is even true. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term to longer-term storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. So any intended satire in the magazine cover may eventually be forgotten, leaving people to recall vaguely that Barack Obama is somehow un-American.

Another brain trick compounds the false memory problem. Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues have shown that if people aren't given enough time to think, they tend to automatically accept a statement as being true. Visual information is processed particularly rapidly. And what's more immediate than a caricature?

Psychologists have suggested that legends propagate by striking an emotional chord. In the same way, ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods. Indeed, unscrupulous campaign strategists know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. One emotionally-laden false belief about Senator John McCain dates back to the 2000 Presidential primary campaign. He did well until the South Carolina primary, at which time rumors surfaced about a mixed-race child that he had allegedly fathered. Apparently, this did not play well with Southern voters. Shortly thereafter, his candidacy faltered. As one study has shown, ideas have special staying power if they evoke a feeling of disgust.

Because of these tricks your brain plays on you, journalists can paradoxically make misinformation stick by repeating a falsehood even as they debunk it. In covering the controversy that was evoked over the New Yorker cover, virtually every major TV journalist repeated the stereotyped charges against the candidate—many citing polling data on how many Americans believe them—before noting that the beliefs were false. An especially bad variant is the common habit of replaying parts of an ad that they are about to show is false. In television, which above all else is a visual medium, image can easily trump verbal content.

If journalists are to avoid adding to the public’s misinformation, they need to find other strategies, such as offering an equally competing, true storyline. For instance, rather than repeating the false belief then denying that Obama is a Muslim, a less misleading approach would be to report on the candidate’s discovery of Christianity after a secular youth.

In other words, when journalists write their stories, they should spend less time worrying about presenting both sides of a story when one side is false - and more time considering the quirky ways that brains process the disagreement.