Policy 360

Dr. Jim Young Kim is a physician and anthropologist who previously served as the President of the World Bank. As a student at Harvard he co-founded the influential non-profit Partners in Health with Dr. Paul Farmer. Kim has received the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and was named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World." Dr. Kim sat for a wide-ranging conversation with the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy Dean Judith Kelley.  The two discuss China, the challenge and the need to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, and how anyone can use their own skills to make real change.

Scholars, practitioners, advocates and students gathered recently at Duke University to examine the topic of redistricting, the process of drawing congressional boundaries. The conference included judges and mathematicians, investigative reporters, and more. Each contributed insights to try and untangle the complex web that redistricting had become. This episode includes comments from: James Andrew Wynn, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit Jonathan Mattingly, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, Duke University Tyler Dukes, Investigative Reporter, Raleigh News & Observer and Adjunct Instructor in the Sanford School of Public Policy Art Pope, Chairman, John William Pope Foundation Tom Ross, President, The Volcker Alliance and Co-Chair, North Carolinians for Redistricting Reform Guest: Professor Deondra Rose, Director of Polis, the Center for Politics at Duke University.

There’s been tremendous political wrangling in the US recently about raising the debt ceiling (how much money we allow ourselves to borrow). The U.S. is not the first country in history borrow money and we won’t be the last.  In the late imperial period until the early 1920s, Russia needed cash, and they got it from Britain and France. Owing so much money gave Russia a kind of power; if Russia defaulted, it would have been catastrophic for the countries that lent them money. Guest: Duke professor Jennifer Siegel. Her book is For Peace and Money: French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars.

If you’ve ever opened the New York Times, it’s likely that you’ve read something by Frank Bruni. He worked at the paper for 25 years as metro reporter, White House correspondent, Rome bureau chief, and even the chief restaurant critic for a time. He was also the first openly gay op-ed columnist at the Times. Bruni is now a faculty member at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and he joins Dean Judith Kelley to talk about polarization, ambivalence and ambiguity in the media. Here's the article they discuss.

Duke University’s Cyber Policy program has a new report that shows data brokers are openly and explicitly advertising sensitive information about US individuals for sale including demographic information, political preferences, even real-time GPS locations on current and former U.S. military personnel. The authors say such data brokerage is a virtually unregulated practice in the United States. Guest:  Justin Sherman directs data brokerage research for Duke’s Privacy & Democracy Project during his fellowship through Duke’s Technology Policy Lab.

Most Americans have no idea that there are elaborate pretend Iraqi and Afghan villages scattered around the United States – on US military bases. The villages are designed to look real. There are people in them - many of the people were born in the Middle East and immigrated to the U.S. They now play pretend versions of themselves, in pretend Middle Eastern villages, in the very real forests and deserts of the U.S. Christopher Sims has been photographing the villages, and he joins Duke Sanford Dean Judith Kelley to discuss his work. Sims is a new faculty member at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He also serves as the Undergraduate Education Director at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. Credits/Transcript: https://policy360.org/2021/09/08/inside-military-training-villages/

COVID-19 has ripped through nursing homes and long-term care facilities in the US, painfully unveiling and amplifying the problems that have been inherent in long-term care delivery for decades. Guest: Nathan Boucher is an assistant research professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

What does it take to build a business from the ground up? Are there special challenges that women face? Are there lessons that can be learned from those who have, as they say, been there and done that when it comes to building organizations that matter? Our guest today is Maya Ajmera, who started her first organization, the Global Fund for Children, shortly after she graduated from Duke University with a Master of Public Policy degree. She’s now the President and CEO of the Society for Science and Publisher of its award-winning magazine, Science News. 

What role do corporations play in a functioning democracy? Is there a way to encourage companies to be more socially responsible? Guest: Stan Litow is the author of The Challenge for Business and Society: From Risk to Reward. At IBM he led the global corporate social responsibility program. Litow now teaches graduate courses at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He has held high level positions for the Mayor and Governor of New York, and served as New York City’s Deputy Schools Chancellor.

Our guest this episode is part of a team of researchers that used data from real people's social media accounts to build bots that expose people to news they don't agree with – then they measured how users reacted. What they found is that when people are exposed to views that oppose their own, they actually become MORE not LESS polarized. Guest: Chris Bail,  Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Data Science and director of The Polarization Lab at Duke University; Author of Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing.

Sometimes we know exactly what the consequences of a policy will be, and sometimes we don’t. In this episode, we’ll explore a surprising consequence related to stepped-up enforcement of immigration policy in one county in North Carolina: Mecklenburg County. Guest: Professor Christina Gibson-Davis is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke and co-author of the study Heightened Immigration Enforcement has Troubling Impact on Babies.  

In this episode, we look at ways to demystify artificial intelligence (AI) for military commanders and arm military personnel with the right questions to ask to distinguish AI with real, enduring capabilities from so called “drive-by AI.” Guest: Marc Losito is a Master of Public Policy student at the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy, where he is a Carlucci Fellow in Security Studies. He is also a Warrant Officer in the US Army. He authored an article for the Small Wars Journal, "The Commander's AI Smart Card".

As Elizabeth Warren memorably wrote, “It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street.” That quotation is an apt introduction to Mallory SoRelle's book, Democracy Declined – the Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection.  Consumer financial protections are becoming more and more complex and yet the system still requires individuals to sift through fine print to make sure they aren't going to get taken advantage of by predatory lenders. In this episode we'll look at the history of federal policies related to consumer financial protection, and options for how policies might be changed to benefit Americans and our economy. Get show notes, transcript, credits.

In this episode, we explore new research into providing healthcare recommendations by algorithm. Professor Kate Bundorf recently published a study examining the impact of algorithmic information and recommendations on consumer choice in health insurance plans.

On January 27, 2021, the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security issued a first-ever National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin due to a heightened threat environment across the U.S., which DHS believes will persist in the weeks following the Jan. 6 Presidential Inauguration. In a recent guest column in the Tampa Bay Times, Duke Professor David Schanzer wrote “Jan. 6 demonstrated to all Americans what many observers have been warning about for years – we have a serious domestic terrorism threat on our hands." Schanzer joins Judith Kelly to explore options to reduce the threat. Schanzer directs the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. Music: Blue Dot Sessions freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/ Music licensed under Creative Commons Attribution creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ Learn more about the Sanford School of Public Policy: sanford.duke.edu

Duke Professor Anne-Maria Makhulu joins Dean Judith Kelley to compare the current racial and socioeconomic disparities of South Africa with the disparities that have been made increasingly apparent over the past decade in the United States. The scholars discuss the countries' similarities and differences with regards to the coronavirus response, responses to police violence, movements for racial equity, and more. Makhulu says that one lesson to be learned from this comparison is that "the intractable problems that South Africa confronts are in fact the same intractable problems that the United States confronts. And there has to be a conversation about the infrastructure of racism, which is economic [...]" Music: Blue Dot Sessions freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/ Music licensed under Creative Commons Attribution creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ Learn more about the Sanford School of Public Policy: sanford.duke.edu

The end of the Cold War is often considered a bit of a geopolitical anomaly. In 1980 the increasing antagonistic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union caused many to fear that the conflict was once again on the path to nuclear fallout. President Regan famously characterized the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” and while Soviet media described U.S. foreign policy as “nuclear insanity.” Then suddenly, things quickly shifted. The two superpowers started cooperating and even more surprisingly the Soviet Union collapsed by the end of the decade and just like that the Cold War ended. As historian John Lewis Gaddis has observed “Wars, hot or cold, do not normally end with the abrupt but peaceful collapse of a major antagonist.” So what changed in those 5 years that brought about the end of the Cold War? Simon Miles is an Assistant Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, and his recently released book Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War see

In a special episode, Policy 360 joins a panel of Duke University experts for a debrief the day after election day 2020. Sanford professors Mac McCorkle, Director of POLIS: Center for Politics, and Deondra Rose, director of Research at POLIS: Center for Politics, moderate a discussion with four other professors here at Duke. John Aldrich is a professor of Political Science and an expert on politics in the United States. Duke Law School professor Guy-Uriel Charles is an expert on constitutional law, election law, campaign finance, and more political issues in the United States. He is also the Co-Director of the Duke Law Center on Law, Race, and Politics. Public policy and journalism professor Bill Adair is the director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. Bill also created the Pulitzer Prize-winning website Politifact. Judith Kelley is the Dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy. She is an expert in international relations and has written extensively about election observation in an atte

This episode takes a look behind the curtain to see what actually happens during elections and just how your vote counts and is counted. Judith Kelley is joined by Damon Circosta, the Chair of the North Carolina State Board of Elections.  

Since graduating from Sanford in 2015, Emily Feng has travelled all over China as a foreign correspondent covering topics ranging from human rights, to technology, to the environment. As foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, Feng uncovered key information surrounding the Chinese oppression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, China. Her coverage of the human rights abuses in Xinjiang won several human rights press and journalism awards. Feng now works as NPR’s Beijing correspondent and joins Dean Judith Kelly to discuss her path from Sanford graduate to award winning journalist, share stories from her work, and provide a unique insight on key issues she has reported on such as the Uighurs in Xinjiang, the protests in Hong Kong, and the coronavirus pandemic.