Summary: For more than a quarter century, economist and Harvard Kennedy School professor Dani Rodrik has been ringing alarm bells about the dangers of globalization. And for a long time, it didn’t seem like a whole lot of people were listening. Now as record economic inequality, a climate in crisis, and global financial shocks from to the COVID pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have exposed the vulnerabilities and shortcomings of unchecked globalization and neoliberal orthodoxy about the primacy of markets, Rodrik may be having the world’s least-satisfying “I told you so” moment. But while the temptation might be to look backward for vindication, Rodrik is choosing to look toward solutions instead. He says that finding a way forward for the world economy will require two kinds of thinking: small picture—about how to create good jobs in an equitable way in specific settings—and big picture: imaging possible futures and what a more inclusive, post-globalization economy might look like. And he says it will also mean freeing political and economic discourse from what he calls a “prison of ideology” that rigidly limits policymakers’ ability to consider solutions outside of market-centric approaches. Rodrik recently launched a new project called Reimagining the Economy with fellow professor Gordon Hansen, supported by a $7.5 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The initiative will be based at the Kennedy School's Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. Dani Rodrik is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has published widely in the areas of economic development, international economics, and political economy. His current research focuses on employment and economic growth, in both developing and advanced economies. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the inaugural Albert O. Hirschman Prize of the Social Science Research Council and the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences. Professor Rodrik is currently president of the International Economic Association and co-director of the Economics for Inclusive Prosperity network. His newest books are “Combating Inequality: Rethinking Government's Role” (2021, edited with Olivier Blanchard) and “Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (2017).” He is also the author of “Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science” (2015), “The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy” (2011) and “One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth” (2007). Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an A.B. in Political Science from UCLA and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.
Maia Sandu has been president of Moldova since December 2020. She is the first woman to be president of the country, and she named fellow Party of Action and Solidarity member Natalia Gavrilița as prime minister, marking the first time that two women have held the country’s two highest political posts at the same time. Sandu was named prime minister in June 2019, but was removed from power just six months later when Moldova’s Russia-leaning socialist party pulled out of the governing coalition over her reform efforts. She served as the country’s education minister from 2012 until 2015, instituting numerous reforms including ending widespread cheating on exams and bribery of education officials. Sando holds earned her mid-career masters of public administration degree at Harvard Kennedy School in 2010, and worked as a senior advisor for the World Bank in Washington DC before returning to Moldova. Sandu was born in 1972 in the city of Risipeni, in what was then the Moldavian Soviet Socialistic Republic, the daughter of a veterinarian and a schoolteacher. Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Public Affairs and Communications is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former newspaper journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an A.B. in Political Science from UCLA and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg, Delane Meadows and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.
Development economist Rema Hanna sees the thousands of new social protection programs created during the COVID-19 pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study the best ways to help lift people out of poverty. The Harvard Kennedy School professor tells PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli that with the pandemic came massive economic and social disruption—people couldn’t work, and there were widespread closures of not just businesses but also schools and other social institutions. Governments and relief organizations leapt into action, and by last May more than 220 countries or territories had either planned or implemented more than 3,000 new social protection programs. Social protection refers to policies and programs that insulate people against the risks and shocks of life—like COVID, natural disasters, and economic downturns—but that also provide ongoing financial assistance to low-income families and work to break poverty cycles. Hanna sees those thousands of new programs n...
A mass grave behind a church. Bodies of children and families buried under the rubble of a theater where they had been seeking refuge. Streets littered with bodies of civilians who were shot, hands tied behind their backs. Almost every day, the headlines bring news of new violations of international human rights norms and the rules of war in Ukraine, including attacks by the Russian army on hospitals, schools, residential buildings, and even water facilities. Those revelations have also launched daily accusations against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military of war crimes and illegal aggression, and calls for international investigations and prosecutions. Now a group of Harvard Professors says that the war in Ukraine could be a watershed moment for the evolving notion of meaningful international justice. In a recent Op-Ed, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Kathryn Sikkink and Harvard Chan School of Public Health faculty members Patrick Vinck and Phuong Pham, say it is tim...
HKS professors Meghan O’Sullivan and Jeffrey Frankel say the draconian sanctions on Putin’s regime—which came together faster than almost anyone predicted—will have far-reaching and lasting effects well beyond Russia’s borders. In a nuclear-armed world where direct superpower conflict can have apocalyptic consequences, the proxy battlefield has become economics and finance. Instead of firing missiles, combatants lob sanctions to inflict pain and achieve strategic goals. Rather than cutting off supply routes, opponents cut off access to capital reserves and international financial systems. And during the first weeks of Russia’s war on Ukraine, developments on both the physical and economic battlefields have been swift and unpredictable. But now with an international sanctions regime against Vladimir Putin’s Russia taking shape with a depth and a breadth that took many analysts by surprise, it’s possible to widen the lens on the war in Ukraine to explore not only how it may sh...
Harvard Kennedy School Professors Alex Keyssar and Archon Fung say the U.S. political system, stripped of a consensus belief in democratic principles, is racing down a dangerous road toward political and social upheaval and possible minority rule. American democracy, they tell PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli, is in trouble to an extent not seen in many decades, possibly since the Civil War, or perhaps ever. If you believe in democracy as essentially one-person, one-vote, and as a system where every voter has a roughly equal say in how our country is governed, then frankly, you would never design a system of elections and governance like the one in the United States. But the U.S. system wasn’t built for that. It was built, compromise piled upon compromise, to somehow accommodate people with very different views—about what the country should be and who should have the power to decide—inside one system that, at a minimum, everyone could at least live with. But now, stripped of a conse...
Host Ralph Ranalli is a senior writer and producer at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs, and a veteran journalist, media producer, and entrepreneur. Cornell William Brooks is the Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations and Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also Director of The William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at the School’s Center for Public Leadership, and Visiting Professor of the Practice of Prophetic Religion and Public Leadership at Harvard Divinity School. Brooks is the former president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights attorney, and an ordained minister. Professor Linda J. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and a leading expert on budgetary and public financial issues. Her research focuses on budgeting and public administration in the public, private and non-profit sectors. She is a full-time Harvard faculty member, teaching budgeting, cost accounting and public finance, and teaching workshops for newly-elected Mayors and Members of Congress. Since 2005, she has led the Greater Boston Applied Field Lab, an advanced academic program in which teams of student volunteers assist local communities in public finance and operations. She also leads field projects for the Bloomberg Cities program. She currently serves as the sole United States member of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA), and as Vice-chair of Economists for Peace and Security. PolicyCast is a production of Harvard Kennedy School and is co-produced by Susan Hughes. For more information please visit our web page or contact us at PolicyCast@hks.harvard.edu.
It takes a lot to impress Professor Graham Allison when it comes to geopolitics. He is, after all, the Cold Warrior’s Cold Warrior—as one of America’s most influential defense policy analysts and advisors, he was twice awarded the Defense Department’s highest civilian honor for his work on nuclear disarmament with Russia. He’s a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations, a founding member of the Trilateral Commission, and a renowned political scientist who has served as dean of the Kennedy School and head of the school’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Yet even Allison says he marvels at the rapid transformation of China, the world's rising economic, technological, and military superpower, and he says it’s well past time for the United States and the rest of the world to hear some hard truths about China’s power and potential dominance of world affairs during the 21st Century. To explain how China has not only caught up with, but in numerous cases surpassed, the United States, Allison and a group of colleagues are writing a series of five research papers on the key areas of economics, technological advancement, military power, diplomatic influence, and ideology. The third paper, on China’s extraordinary rise as an economic superpower, states that while some may be tempted to still see China as a developing country, the truth is that it has been adding the equivalent of the entire economy of India to its GDP every four years and that the number of people in the Chinese middle class—some 400 million—now far outnumber the entire population of the United States. Meanwhile, China is either catching up or leading in foundational technologies of the 21st century like AI, quantum computing, and green tech, while recent war games predict that China’s modernized, expanded military would likely win a military conflict over Taiwan. Graham Allison talks about China’s rise and what could be the next great superpower rivalry—but also about the possibilities for a new paradigm for the US-China relationship that goes beyond Cold War thinking.
The Nobel Committee has awarded its 2021 Peace Prize to Maria Ressa for being a fearless defender of independent journalism and freedom of expression in the Philippines, and particularly for her work exposing the human rights abuses of authoritarian President Rodrigo Duterte. But the prize is also a de facto acknowledgement that Ressa has become something of a one-woman personification of the struggles, perils, and promise of journalism in the age of social media. A longtime investigative reporter and bureau chief for CNN, she began thinking about how social networks could be used for both good and evil while covering terrorism and seeing how it was used to drive both radicalism and build movements for positive change. She originally founded Rappler, her Manila-based online news organization, as a Facebook page, but now she says that one-time Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg’s dominance as a worldwide distributor of news has become a boon to repressive regimes and a threat to democracy worldwide. Rappler’s mission statement is to speak truth to power and build communities of action for a better world—but for Ressa, speaking truth to power has come at a high personal cost. She has been subjected to harassment, criminal and civil legal action, and even arrest, even as she has refused to back off even an inch. When we spoke for this interview, Ressa was just finishing a visiting fellowship at the Kennedy School, where she was affiliated with both the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and the Center for Public Leadership.
Barely a news cycle goes by these days without someone in public office saying ‘We can’t afford that,’ while at the same time defending their favorite budget priorities and tossing around mind-numbingly large cost figures in the billions and trillions of dollars. Those debates can seem very cynical, and of course Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as a person who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing. But Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer Linda Bilmes says things are even worse than that—not only are we not having discussions based on value, our understanding of what projects and policies actually cost is fundamentally flawed. A former CFO of the US Commerce Department and an internationally known expert in public budgeting and finance, Professor Bilmes has made it her mission to change the conversation about cost in the public sphere, and she’s helped identify the true costs of everything from America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to our National Parks...