D.C. Policy Seminar on Residential Segregation
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 The Academy collaborated with the American Enterprise Institute for a half-day seminar on residential segregation in the United States. The sessions used the July 2015 volume of The ANNALS as a point of entry for conversations among scholars and policymakers about the causes and consequences of segregation in America and the effectiveness of various policies that aim to ease race- and class-based sorting of our population. About twenty-five experts in economics, sociology, and public policy and from academia and government agencies participated in this invitation-only event.
The seminar's first panel, moderated by volume co-editor Glenn Firebaugh (Penn State), focused on the state of knowledge about segregation and centered on findings published in The ANNALS volume. The second panel - moderated by Robert Doar of AEI - addressed the role that policy plays in alleviating segregation or whether market forces can promote mobility and homeownership in a way that encourages integration. The closing Q&A was moderated by Dan Lichter (Cornell) and Rachel Dwyer (Ohio State), and focused on how residential segregation impacts children and whether housing policy can improve outcomes for low- and middle-income kids, particularly with respect to education outcomes. Other important topics of discussion included the pitfalls and benefits of gentrification, the impact of credit availability, and whether homeownership should remain a worthy public policy priority. |
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Penn's Rebecca Maynard Joins Academy Board
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T he Academy is pleased to welcome Dr. Rebecca Maynard to its Board of Directors. Dr. Maynard is currently the University Trustee Professor of Education and Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. She is a past President of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management and former Commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance at the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. At Penn, she directed the Predoctoral Training Program in Interdisciplinary Methods for Field-Based Education Research, which served more than seventy-five PhD students in various disciplines, for 12 years. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn, she was Senior Vice President at Mathematica Policy Research. Dr. Maynard is currently president of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness.
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UC-Davis To Host ANNALS Editors at Speaker Series
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Carroll Seron and Charis Kubrin (UC-Irvine), editors of the March 2016 volume of The ANNALS on California prison realignment, will participate in the UC Center Sacramento (UCCS) speaker series on July 28, 2016, to discuss the findings published in their volume.
The realignment of the corrections system in California has been described as "the biggest criminal justice experiment ever conducted in America." Seron and Kubrin will present how realignment has been implemented in California and whether the rest of the country can learn from what has been happening in the state. Their edited volume of The ANNALS offers the first systematic, scientific analysis of realignment and its effects.
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As attendees of the annual AAPSS gala dinner know, the Academy inducts a distinguished class of Fellows each year. Once past the inductee introductions and the draping of medals, matters get serious. It is an evening of very smart social scientists saying very smart things. This year's May 12th dinner on the rooftop of the Newseum was an intellectual feast, similar to those that preceded it, and no doubt those that will follow. Readers of this note will find reward in joining us next year. What you missed if you were not able to join us that evening:
Nobel Prize Winner and the 2016 Kenneth Boudling Fellow, James Heckman
,
used his remarks to remember Boulding, the economist, philosopher, poet, and peace activist, for whom Heckman's fellowship is named. Boulding, Heckman remarked, "was more than an economist ... he became a very broad gauge scholar." And although Boulding lost interest in mainstream economics, reported Heckman, he remained "an active participant in social science." So can it be said of Heckman, whose life-long, Nobel Prize-winning research echoes an early finding from his sociological colleague, Jim Coleman: What happens inside the school is significantly affected by what happens outside the school, in the family, and the community.
Sherman James, a social epidemiologist from Emory University, much of whose work deals with the health of African Americans, and who was named the 2016 Mahatma Gandhi Fellow, reminded us that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s fight for racial equality was influenced by Gandhi. James asked the audience, "What then do we Americans owe Gandhi? As health-oriented social science scholarship makes abundantly clear," James answered, "a great deal." The signature legislative acts of the civil rights era were not limited to the justly celebrated Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they were equally Medicaid and Medicare. The result: black infant mortality and premature black adult mortality from heart disease and stroke fell dramatically. Not surprisingly, "the largest reductions occurred in the U.S. South."
Esther Duflo, the 2016 Sir Arthur Lewis Fellow, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT, said that "a great pleasure of working in development economics is [that] the field is extremely varied in the approaches that it takes to questions ... [There is] a combination of a theoretically grounded view of a particular problem ... but also the ability to learn from realities in the field." As co-founder and co-director of the Poverty Action Lab, Duflo has the ambitious goal of radically improving "the lives of people who live in extreme poverty ..." by improving "policymaking through better scholarship." She has persuasively argued for, and realized, stronger connections between research and policy.
Thomas Sugrue, the 2016 Walter Lippmann Fellow, noted that it was a particular honor to receive a fellowship by this name, because "Walter Lippmann was a consistent advocate of bringing rigorous scholarship to bear on contemporary politics, social problems, and policymaking." "In my own scholarship and in my engagement with modern America," Sugrue informed the attendees, "I try to write in the spirit of Lippmann, drawing no bright line between scholarship and policymaking, no bright line between empirical research and advocacy..." In one important respect, however, Sugrue differs from Lippmann, who gave little attention to persistent racial inequality. Sugrue has made that a central focus, challenging "conventional historical wisdom, particularly about the ways we talk and think about race and racial inequality in the United States."
Philip Tetlock,
the 2016 Herbert Simon Fellow, recounted a story that he said indicated that there was "a shift in mindset going on, gradually, haltingly ..." Six years ago, when he and his wife and collaborator, Barbara Mellers, were still at the University of California, Berkeley, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence proposed that they establish "a level playing field forecasting tournament in which intelligence analysts who had access to classified information would compete against outsiders." Could academic teams "out-predict intelligence analysts on outcomes of national security relevance?" As we now know (and reported in his bestselling
Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction
) the answer is sobering. Experts across many sectors are much less successful at predicting than we had assumed.
Twelve of the best took to the stage in 2016: Boulding, Ghandi, Lewis, Lippmann, and Simon, all re-celebrated by the new Academy Fellows: Heckman, James, Duflo, Sugrue, and Tetlock, and then this year's joint winners of the Moynihan Prize, Belle Sawhill and Ron Haskins. The same play, but a new cast on May 18, 2017.
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 In the July volume of The ANNALS, special editors Katharine M. Donato of Vanderbilt University and Douglas S. Massey of Princeton University grapple with studying undocumented migration and how clandestine populations fare in the "second era of global capitalization." There are now some 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States, for example, many of whom are relegated to the low-wage employment sector. And with climate change and rising levels of civil warfare, migrants are no longer moving to seek better economic opportunities per se, but to escape environmental catastrophes and violence. Yet, in this new era of globalization, countries are increasingly limiting and controlling the entry of migrants into their lands. "The potential for illegal migration is thus greater now than in the past," say Donato and Massey, and, therefore, studying and understanding the causes and consequences of undocumented migration are perhaps more important than ever. |
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Call for 2018 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize Nominations
We are accepting nominations for the 2018 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize. The Moynihan Prize recognizes social scientists, public officials and other leaders in the public arena who champion the use of informed judgment to improve public policy.
Candidates must be able to accept the award in person at a ceremony to be held the following spring as well as deliver a major public policy address on a topic of his/her choosing. Please click
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