Abstract: Steve Fetter worked in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the first three and last two years of the Obama administration.  In the first period he played a role in the debates that defined the administration’s nuclear policy; in the latter period he participated in the final push to make progress on what became known as “the Prague agenda.”  He will discuss the key successes and failures in President Obama’s attempt to revise U.S. nuclear weapon policy and lessons that can be learned for a future administration that seeks to reduce nuclear risks. 

Bio: Steve Fetter is Associate Provost, Dean of the Graduate School, and Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.  Service in the U.S. government includes five years at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, two years at the Department of Defense, and a year at the State Department.  He has been a visiting fellow at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Livermore and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control.  Fetter holds a Ph.D. in energy and resources from Berkeley and a S.B. in physics from MIT.

Abstract: Revenge may not be a necessary condition for deterrence to operate, but it can certainly prove sufficient in many circumstances.  The psychology of revenge is implicitly embedded into the theory and practice of deterrence; it adds an important source of credibility to the threat of retaliatory strike. This discussion provides a deeper theoretical examination of the psychological nature of revenge, its situational triggers, and the implications for deterrence. This approach distinguishes revenge from other forms of retaliation often conflated with revenge, such as negative reciprocity, and highlights the importance of emotional cues such as anger and hatred as motivators.  This allows for greater clarification in understanding the psychological mechanisms that process information, regulate and trigger emotions, and provides a foundation for policymakers to determine the nature of the adversary they confront. We argue that the human psychology of revenge explains why and when policymakers readily commit to the otherwise seemingly ‘irrational’ retaliation that makes deterrence work. Counterintuitively, however, revenge is not motivated by the rational expectation of future deterrence; rather, it is driven by the intrinsic pleasure that one expects to experience upon striking back.  In other words, exacting revenge for perceived transgressions simply feels incredibly satisfying to most people. It is when revenge is sought for its own sake that its prospect can be such an effective deterrent to adversaries, and why it has evolved as such an effective psychological strategy.

Bio: Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford University and has taught at Cornell, UCSB  and Harvard. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at Harvard University. She has been a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences twice. She is the author of four books, a co-editor of two additional volumes, and author of over two hundred academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines encompassing topics such as experimentation, emotion and decision making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.

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Existing scholarship attributes various political and economic advantages to democratic governance. These advantages may make more democratic countries prone to financial crises. Democracy is characterized by constraints on executive authority, accountability through free and fair elections, protections for civil liberties, and large winning coalitions. These characteristics bring important benefits, but they can also have unintended consequences that increase the likelihood of financial instability and crises. Using data covering the past two centuries, I demonstrate a strong relationship between democracy and financial crisis onset: on average, democracies are about twice as likely to experience a crisis as autocracies. This is an empirical regularity that is robust across a wide range of model specifications and time periods.

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Is philanthropy, by its very nature, a threat to today’s democracy? Though we may laud wealthy individuals who give away their money for society’s benefit, Just Giving shows how such generosity not only isn’t the unassailable good we think it to be but might also undermine democratic values and set back aspirations of justice. Big philanthropy is often an exercise of power, the conversion of private assets into public influence. And it is a form of power that is largely unaccountable, often perpetual, and lavishly tax-advantaged. The affluent—and their foundations—reap vast benefits even as they influence policy without accountability. And small philanthropy, or ordinary charitable giving, can be problematic as well. Charity, it turns out, does surprisingly little to provide for those in need and sometimes worsens inequality.

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Why do some dissident groups survive government repression while others get eliminated? This paper argues that a group's ideology conditions its organizational structure and underground organizing capacity, in turn affecting survival. Extreme groups tend to develop a compartmentalized structure and have militants skilled in underground organizing. Compartmentalization and underground organizing decrease the probability of capture, as well as mitigate the downstream effects of captures. Using a novel dataset of individuals on Pinochet's wanted lists and the victims of the dictatorship in Chile, this paper demonstrates that the rate of victimization of ultraleftists is significantly lower than that of more moderate but similarly targeted groups. Archival and interview data show that differences in survival are due to organizational structure and skills, and that these characteristics flow from ideology. In contrast to other research on repression, this study compares the intended-to-repress and repressed populations to better understand the heterogeneous effects of violence.

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Three years after the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted, it's already clear we will fall short on our current trajectory. Global challenges are getting more complex, and the fast pace of change is disrupting the status quo faster than we can adapt. Bridging this gap will require a fresh mindset. Rather than rigid programs, we need to embrace risk and accelerate learning in order to create more cost-effective and scaleable solutions. It's time to bring the best practices for innovation that have underpinned Silicon Valley's success to global development.

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Ann Mei Chang is a leading expert on social innovation the author of Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good (Wiley, Oct 2018). Previously, she served as the Chief Innovation Officer at both USAID and Mercy Corps. Prior to her pivot to social good, Ann Mei was a seasoned Silicon Valley executive, with more than 20 years experience at such leading companies as Google, Apple, and Intuit, as well as a number of startups.

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Influential theories indicate concern that campaign donors exert outsized political influence. However, little data documents what donors actually want from government; and existing research largely neglects donors' views on individual issues. We argue there should be significant heterogeneity by party and policy domain in how donors' views diverge from citizens'. We support this argument with the largest survey of U.S. partisan donors to date, including an over sample of the largest donors. We show that Republican donors are much more conservative than Republican citizens on economic issues, whereas their views are similar on social issues. By contrast, Democratic donors are much more liberal than Democratic citizens on social issues, whereas their views are more similar on economic issues. Both parties' donors are more pro-globalism than their citizen counterparts. We replicate these patterns in an independent dataset. These patterns can help inform significant debates about representation, inequality, and populism in American politics.

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