PolicyCast

Harvard Kennedy School

4.4 (78)
EDUCATION
UPDATED SEMIMONTHLY

PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the big problems and issues we're facing in our society and our world. Host Ralph Ranalli talks with leading Harvard University academics and researchers, visiting scholars, dignitaries, and world leaders. PolicyCast is produced at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

NOV 21

Legalized gambling is exploding globally. What policies can limit its harms?

Turbocharged by the internet and mobile technology, legalized gambling has exploded across the globe, leaving behind ruined lives, broken families and financial hardships, and should now be classified as a major public health concern. A four-year study by a public health commission on gambling convened by The Lancet, the respected British journal of medicine, found that net global losses by gamblers could exceed $700 billion by the year 2028, and that 80% of countries now allow some form of legal gambling. But HKS Professor Malcolm Sparrow, a leading scholar on regulating societal harms, says that in reality the percentage of countries where gambling is practiced is closer to 100% because internet- and mobile-based gambling—often using cryptocurrencies—can easily circumvent borders. Among the commission's more concerning findings is that a significant portion of virtual gamblers are teenagers, and that more than 1 in 4 teens are at risk of becoming compulsive or problem gamblers. Sparrow tells PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli that the harms are also widespread, since the suffering from each problem gambler also affects on average six to eight people around them—ranging from spouses to relatives to friends to employers and co-workers. Sparrow says the commission has identified a number of policy solutions to mitigate the growing fallout from gambling expansion, ranging from limiting the speed and intensity of virtual gambling products to prohibiting gambling with credit cards and banning gaming companies from offering loans. Policy Recommendations from the Lancet Public Health Commission on Gambling: - Push governments to define gambling as primarily a public health issue, and prioritize health and wellbeing over economic gains when crafting gambling policies. - Adopt effective regulation in all countries—regardless of whether or not they have legalized gambling—including limiting promotion and marketing, providing accessible support for betting-related harms, and denormalizing gambling through public awareness campaigns. - Create independent regulators in jurisdictions where gambling is legal to enforce protections including safeguards for young people, consumer protections, and mandatory limits on gambling activities. - Shield development of gambling policies, research, and treatment from industry influence through a shift to independent funding sources. - At the international level, require UN entities and intergovernmental organizations to address gambling harms as part of broader health and wellbeing strategies. - Create an international alliance of stakeholders to lead advocacy, research, and collaboration on gambling-related issues. - Adopt a resolution recognizing the public health impacts of gambling at the World Health Assembly.

43 min
NOV 7

How emotion science could help solve the leading cause of preventable death

The World Health Organization says smoking is the leading cause of global preventable death, killing up to 8 million people prematurely every year—far more than die in wars and conflicts. Yet the emotions evoked by national and international anti-smoking campaigns and the impact of those emotions has never been fully studied until now. HKS Professor Jennifer Lerner, a decision scientist who studies emotion, and Vaughan Rees, the director for the Center for Global Tobacco Control at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, say their research involving actual smokers in the lab shows that sadness—the emotion most often evoked in anti-smoking ads—can actually induce people to smoke more. Lerner and Rees’ research also found that evoking gratitude, an emotion that appears to function in nearly the exact opposite manner to sadness, made people want to smoke less and made them more likely to join a smoking-cessation program. Lerner and Rees join host Ralph Ranalli on the latest episode of the HKS PolicyCast to discuss their research and to offer research-backed policy recommendations—including closer collaboration between researchers who study emotion science, which is also known as affective science, and agencies like the Centers for Disease Control. Jennifer Lerner’s Policy Recommendations: ● Promote active collaboration between researchers and public health agencies (e.g., CDC, FDA) to develop health communications that leverage the most current, research-backed findings from affective and decision science. ● Rigorously assess not only the benefits of public service announcements but also potential harms. Assessments often overlook the emotional distress these messages can cause, despite the potential of distress to undermine desired outcomes. Vaughan Rees’ Policy Recommendations: ● Expand research into integrating emotion-based strategies, such as gratitude exercises, into school-based prevention programs for adolescents to reduce the risk of tobacco and other substance use, as well as risky sexual behaviors. ● Introduce research-backed, emotion-based components in cessation counseling and support systems, helping individuals better manage high-risk situations and maintain abstinence after quitting.

43 min
OCT 24

Policies—and a new global program—to fight anti-LGBTQI+ discrimination

Anti-LGBTQI+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex) discrimination is on the rise, both in the United States, where hate crime statistics are climbing, and globally, with the increase in right-wing populist governments weaponizing public sentiment against marginalized people. But there are also rights advocates around the world pushing back, despite threats of physical harm, prosecution, and even death. The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy’s Timothy McCarthy and Diego Garcia Blum, who are leading a new program to support those advocates, joined host Ralph Ranalli to on the most recent episode of PolicyCast to talk about the project and about policy responses to a growing threat. The Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program recently held a summit featuring 20 leading rights advocates from countries including Kenya, Russia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Morocco, and Pakistan to explore research-based methods to build social movements and to dismantle myths and stigmas harming their communities. McCarthy, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is the program’s faculty chair, Garcia Blum is program director and a member of the Carr Center staff. Together they also co-teach the course “Queer Nation: LGBTQI+ Protest, Politics, and Policy in the United States” at HKS.

54 min
OCT 9

The essential reforms needed to fix the housing crisis

America is in the grip of a severe housing crisis. Tenants have seen rents rise 26 percent while home prices have soared by 47 percent since early 2020. Before the pandemic, there were 20 US states considered affordable for housing. Now there are none. And 21 million households—including half of all renters—pay more than one-third of their income on housing. Harvard Kennedy School Associate Professor Justin de Benedictis-Kessner and former Burlington, Vermont Mayor Miro Weinberger say that’s because homebuilding hasn’t kept up with demand. They say housing production is mired in a thicket of restrictive zoning regulations and local politics, a “veto-cracy” that allows established homeowners—sometimes even a single disgruntled neighbor—to block and stall new housing projects for years. Weinberger, a research fellow at the Taubman Institute for State and Local Politics, and de Benedictis-Kessner, whose research focuses on urban policy, say even well-intentioned ideas like so-called “inclusionary zoning” laws that encourage mixed-income housing development may also be contributing to the problem. They join PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli to discuss how housing became a affordability nightmare for millions of people. During this episode, they offer policy ideas on how streamline the inefficient and often subjective ways home building projects are regulated and how to level the democratic playing field between established homeowners and people who need the housing that has yet to be built.

47 min
SEP 25

How to change the narrative on women as leaders

As Vice President Kamala Harris making a strong bid for the U.S. presidency, HKS Women and Public Policy Program Co-Director Hannah Riley Bowles says Harris is just one of many “path breakers” who have dramatically increased leadership opportunities for women. But she also says the reaction to Harris’ campaign in the media and the public conversation shows how the popular narrative about the efficacy of female leaders still lags behind the reality of what successful women are achieving. And she says that narrative also isn’t supported by research, including multiple studies showing that on average women are actually rated higher than men for a number of important leadership qualities associated with performance. Bowles is the Roy E. Larsen Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at the HKS, she chairs the HKS Management, Leadership, and Decision Sciences (MLD) Area, and she recently completed her tenure as co-director of the Center for Public Leadership. She’s a recognized expert in the study of negotiation and gender. She joins PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli to talk about how studies say women in leadership roles are really performing, the ways women can successfully attain positions of responsibility and power despite traditional obstacles, and some forward-looking policy recommendations that could make things better.

40 min
AUG 1

How to turn back a rising tide of political threats and violence

The attempted assassination of former President and candidate Donald Trump has catalyzed an important discussion about both actual violence and threats of violence against political candidates, office-holders, policymakers, election officials, and others whose efforts help make our democracy work. Harvard Kennedy School professors Erica Chenoweth and Archon Fung join host Ralph Ranalli to talk about political violence, what it is, what it isn’t, why it has grown, and—most importantly—strategies for mitigating it to ensure the health of democratic governance in the United States and beyond. The motivations and political leanings of the 20-year-old Pennsylvania man who shot and wounded Trump with an AR-15-style assault rifle, Thomas Crooks, remain murky, making it difficult to make sense of why it happened. In one sense it was a continuation of an unfortunate 189-year-old tradition of assassinations and attempted assassinations of U.S. presidents. But for many scholars, researchers, and political analysts, it also appeared to be a culmination of a more recent uptick in the willingness of some people to use violence to achieve their political aims in today’s highly polarized society. Fung is director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS and has talked to numerous local officials about their first-hand accounts of being on the receiving end of violent threats. Chenoweth is director of the Nonviolence Action Lab and is a longtime scholar of both political violence and nonviolent alternatives.

52 min
MAY 15

Self-destructive populism: How better policy can reverse the anti-clean energy backlash

Populism—the political term that describes a group of self-described common people who oppose elite—has turned up in what for many is an unexpected place: the push for a worldwide transition to clean energy. Even though they’re vital to preventing the most catastrophic consequences of the manmade global climate crisis, clean energy measures are encountering pushback from multiple sources ranging from local citizens groups, to cost-conscious consumers, to self-styled conservationists, to right-wing politicians, and to corporate boardrooms. Harvard Kennedy School Professor Robert Z. Lawrence and Professor Dustin Tingley from Harvard’s Department of Government say a number of forces are shaping the new clean energy pushback, including genuine popular resentment in some communities left over from economic transitions like the loss of manufacturing jobs due to globalization. Robert Lawrence is a former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and an economist who studies trade policy. Dustin Tingley is a political scientist researching the politics of the climate crisis and co-author of the new book “Uncertain Futures: How to Unlock the Climate Impasse.” With time running out for the world to make significant reductions in fossil fuel use, they join PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli to discuss strategies and policy ideas to keep the momentum going toward a sustainable energy future.

51 min
APR 25

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

Public policy has great power, both to improve people’s lives if it is planned and executed well and to cause significant suffering if it is not, says Harvard Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf, who will step back from his post this summer to rejoin the faculty. He joins PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli in this episode to discuss the crucial role policy plays in everyday life, the often-imperfect ways it gets made, and the factors that shape it, including politics, values, education, and communication. He also addresses the issue of public distrust in policy advice and the vital role that values play in policy making and educating public leaders, even when those values—including economic justice and diversity and inclusion—are under attack by some in the political sphere. “Our job is to enunciate our values, and to explain how those values can help us serve the world,” he says. Elmendorf became dean of HKS in 2015 after a career steeped in policy research and formulation, mostly involving his chosen field of economics. He has worked as the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a deputy assistant director of the U.S. Treasury, an assistant director of research at the Federal Reserve Board, and a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. As dean, he’s seen the school through a campus expansion, the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing polarization and attacks on government and higher education in the public sphere, and the current domestic political fallout from the conflict between Gaza and Israel—all while diversifying the school’s community of students and scholars and affirming the important role of training public leaders and developing workable policy solutions to big public challenges.

41 min

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TRAILER

PolicyCast is back!

Harvard Kennedy School's PolicyCast is back! Enjoy this preview of our relaunch with host Thoko Moyo of upcoming episodes featuring autonomous vehicles expert Mark Fagan, Center for Public Leadership Director Ambassador Wendy Sherman, and Professor Erica Chenoweth, who has conducted groundbreaking research on the effectiveness of nonviolent civil movements.

E202

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4 min

4.4

out of 5

78 Ratings

Good

05/27/2020

22J56

Excellent pidcast
Disappointing

Mar 31

Zaptrax

Interesting topics all examined from the same perspective with little or no questioning of the conventional wisdom. Sad to see.
variety of topics and thoughtfully crafted

11/14/2019

DarbyKirvs

Just what I was in search of! Thanks
Great Podcast!

11/12/2019

uZandi

The interviewer is exceptional and the content is timely. Love the “Fixing ourselves is hard” with Iris. Please keep them coming.