It makes intuitive sense: If you want to want to tackle the epidemic of obesity among adults, try stopping it in childhood.

Around the country, hospitals and other health care providers have set up intensive six-month programs to treat obese children as young as 6. Children and their parents get dietary training, exercise regimens, and weekly family counseling about healthier lifestyles. The idea is that children will not just slim down but also develop healthier habits that will stay with them well into adulthood. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a panel of independent health care experts convened by the government, recommends such treatment for all obese children 6 years or older.

But a new Stanford study ― drawing on health data going back 40 years, as well as some more limited data on the results of treating obesity in children ― suggests that this head-on treatment of youngsters will have a surprisingly meager impact on reducing obesity-related illness in adulthood.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that people go through a great many changes as they grow up. Many obese children slim down without any special treatment, and many thin children become overweight as adults. Even if children get treatment at the age of 6 or 8 that’s considered successful, the researchers say, many will be obese again by the time they are 30 or 40. And many who weren’t obese at young ages will be obese later.

The new study, “Analyzing Screening Policies for Childhood Obesity,” appeared in the April 2013 issue of Management Science. It was conducted by Lawrence M. Wein, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business; Yan Yang, a recent graduate of the doctoral program at Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering; and Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, assistant professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine and a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, a research center at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Some of their findings:

• Intensive obesity treatment has very little impact on the likelihood that obese 6-year-olds will suffer from hypertension as adults. A full 25.1% of those who receive treatment will have hypertension by the time they are 40, for example, compared to 26.8% of those who don’t get treatment.
• Early childhood screening for obesity has limited predictive value for health in adulthood. The researchers  calculate that 18.8% of 6-year-olds who are not obese will suffer from hypertension by the time they reach 40.
• You would have to provide intensive treatment to 20 obese 6-year-olds to get just one less case of adult hypertension when those individuals are 40.
• Intensive treatment has a more significant long-term impact for 16-year-olds, but even that effect may be modest. The researchers predict that about 34.9% of obese 16-year-olds who get treatment would still develop obesity-related illnesses by the age of 40, compared to 39.4% of those who didn’t get treated at age 16.

No one disputes that obesity is an epidemic health problem in the United States. About 35% of American adults are obese, a two-fold increase since 1980. Roughly 17% of children are obese, about triple the rate in 1980. Estimates of the cost of treating Americans of all ages for obesity-related illnesses, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, range as high as $190 billion per year.

While educating children and families about exercise and diet might be useful to individual youngsters, the issue under study at Stanford was whether widespread, intensive treatment for obese young children offers much bang for the buck. A six-month program can easily cost $3,500 per child, so treating every obese child in the United States would cost billions, and the number of service providers needed would probably far outstrip the number who currently offer treatment. At the moment, relatively few obese children get such treatment, because both public and private insurance programs are reluctant to cover it.

For any given amount of money spent on treatment, the Stanford researchers estimate, concentrating on teenagers who are 16 or older would produce a slight increase in health benefits compared to treating all obese children from the ages of 6 to 18. Alternatively, the cost of obtaining the same long-term reductions in adult obesity-related illness could be reduced by 28% by focusing on 16-year-olds.

An even smarter strategy from a public policy standpoint, the researchers argue, could be to put more money into universal efforts aimed at all children ― better nutrition in the schools, better playgrounds and fitness programs in the schools, and public efforts to reduce consumption of junk food ― rather than focusing on just obese children.

“There are a lot of good things we can do in the schools, in the supermarkets of big cities, in the food industry, and in the beverage industry,” says Wein, an affiliated faculty member at FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation. “From a cost-effectiveness standpoint, I believe this would be a better way.”

The new study is likely to be controversial. Because almost no children received intensive obesity treatments back in the 1970s or 1980s, the researchers used statistical modeling to infer the long-term benefits. It sounds highly theoretical, but the approach is analogous to predicting the trajectory of a hurricane and then estimating how much a change in conditions would knock the hurricane off the path originally predicted.

The researchers began by getting a baseline for what happens to children in the absence of treatment, drawing on two national data sets that tracked the health conditions of children and adults over several decades. That allowed them to estimate the likelihood that children of particular weights and ages will suffer from diabetes or hypertension by the time they are 40. The researchers then combined those long-term probabilities with shorter-term results from studies of children who did and who did not receive treatment.

Businesses have used similar types of statistical modeling for years to make decisions about the timing of production, inventory acquisition, shipping, and many other issues. Wein, who began his career by using mathematical tools to optimize manufacturing systems, has used them for more than two decades to analyze potential social and health challenges: responding to disease pandemics, optimizing emergency nutrition during famines, dealing with bioterrorist threats.

The researchers emphasize that there may still be important short-term reasons to intensively treat obesity in some younger children. They also caution that their study doesn’t imply that parents should stop worrying if their children are seriously overweight. But if a prime goal of intensive childhood treatment is to reduce chronic disease in adults, they say, there are better ways to tackle the problem.

Edmund L. Andrews is a freelance writer.

Kenneth Scheve, a professor of political science and expert on the politics of economic policymaking, has been named director of The Europe Center.

The announcement was made Wednesday by Gerhard Casper, director of the institute.

“As we add to our work on governance in developing countries by also focusing on the governance issues of the developed world, including Europe and the United States, Ken will bring just the right expertise and scholarship to the Europe Center,” Casper said.

Scheve succeeds Amir Eshel, the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. Eshel, a professor of German studies and comparative literature, has led The Europe Center and its predecessor – the European Forum – since 2005. Casper thanked Eshel for his eight years of outstanding leadership and added that the emphasis Eshel placed on the humanities will remain a defining element of the center’s work.

The European Forum was founded in 1997 and renamed The Europe Center three years ago. The center has matured into Stanford’s focal point for European policy-oriented research and is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies.

Scheve (pronounced SHEE-vee) plans to build on the center’s strength as a magnet for faculty and researchers across Stanford who are interested in European issues.

“The mission of The Europe Center is to promote interdisciplinary research on the history, culture, institutions and people of Europe with the idea that that in itself is an important objective,” he said. “Studying Europe with a mix of perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities is a productive way to learn about an array of social and political phenomena that face all societies.”

He said two of the most important issues in international relations – failed states and the role that international institutions play in managing conflict and cooperation – can be better understood through a thorough study and examination of European history, society and current affairs.

“The European Union is the most mature and complex international institution that’s ever been developed,” Scheve said. “Seeing how it both succeeds and struggles to govern is instructive in thinking about how international institutions function in the world more generally. Governance issues within European states, in relation to the EU, and in Europe’s relationships with the rest of world are important public policy problems about which research at Stanford can play a role in informing contemporary policy debates.”

Along with continuing to provide a vibrant forum for faculty, Scheve wants to expand The Europe Center’s relationship with Stanford students.

Looking to the university’s Bing Overseas Studies Program, he sees an opportunity for the center to provide more research and internship opportunities for undergraduates planning to study in Europe.

“We can help prepare them for their overseas studies and help promote undergraduate courses and research opportunities in and about Europe,” he said. “I want us to bridge their educational experience on campus with what happens in the Bing program in Europe.”

For graduate students, Scheve wants to encourage interdisciplinary research by offering grants and fellowships with a particular focus on pre-dissertation and dissertation completion support.

Scheve – who is currently writing a book on the comparative history of the rise of progressive taxation in 19^th and 20^th century Europe and other advanced economies – has taught at Stanford since 2012.

He previously taught at Yale and the University of Michigan. His first experience with Stanford came in 2005, when he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Scheve holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Notre Dame. He earned his doctorate in political science from Harvard in 2000.

China’s impressive economic growth over the last three decades and increasing political influence and military capabilities have caused people around the world to wonder or worry about how China will use its new-found power. More specifically, they wonder whether, and how, China might attempt to transform the international system that has enabled it to become the world’s second largest economy and potential contender for global leadership.

Thomas Fingar, the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, addressed these and related questions during the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center’s annual Oksenberg Lecture on May 22. 

After describing how China has benefitted from participation in the liberal order led and maintained by the United States, Fingar argued that China has neither the will nor the ability to lead or transform the existing system, and that its continued “rise” will increase its stake in the system and make it even less willing to seek changes that could jeopardize its own success. He also suggested that other nations benefitting from the existing order would constrain China from attempting radical change even if it wanted to.

Following Fingar’s remarks, Jia Qingguo, associate dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University, said it is important to recognize that China is in the midst of a major transition. It is both a developed and a developing country, he said.

Thomas Christensen, director of Princeton University’s China and the World Program, added that due to China’s weight in the world, it will be called on more and more to collaborate on critical global issues, such as climate change and disease.

Fingar’s keynote remarks drew on “China's Vision of World Order,” a chapter published in Strategic Asia 2012–13: China's Military Challenge (National Bureau for Asian Research), as well as Shorenstein APARC’s research initiative on China’s interactions with its neighbors.

Since 2002, Shorenstein APARC has held the Oksenberg Lecture Series as a tribute to the legacy of Michel Oksenberg, a pioneer in the field of Chinese politics and an important force in shaping American attitudes toward China.

An audio podcast of the May 22 event is available on the Shorenstein APARC website.

Greater income inequality among places, not just people, reshapes the labor market in America and beyond. Driving the change: the innovation cluster.

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Dr. Moretti's book, The New Geography of Jobs, was described by Forbes magazine as “easily the most important read of 2012.”

Americans frequently debate why wages are growing for the college-educated but declining for those with less education. What is less well-known is that communities and local labor markets are also diverging economically at an accelerating rate.

A closer look at the 300-plus metropolitan areas of the United States shows that Americans with high school degrees who work in communities dominated by innovative industries actually make more, on average, than the college graduates working in communities dominated by manufacturing industries, according to research by University of California, Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, the author of The New Geography of Jobs, a book that Forbes magazine called “easily the most important read of 2012.” In the San Jose metropolitan area, for example, a high school graduate averages $68,009, compared with the $65,411 that is average for a college graduate in Bakersfield, Calif.

Some places have always been more prosperous than others, but these differences have increased more rapidly over the last 30 years as the gross domestic product and patents for new technologies have concentrated in two to three dozen communities that Moretti identifies as “brain hubs” or “innovation clusters.”

In these clusters, highly specialized innovation workers, such as engineers and designers, generate about three times as many local jobs for service workers ― such as doctors, carpenters, and waitresses ― as do manufacturing workers, Moretti said recently when speaking at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Here are edited excerpts from Moretti’s answers to questions from the Stanford audience.

What causes clusters to emerge?

This is a very active area of research, but I think fundamentally, there are three major reasons why clustering takes place. One is the thick labor market effect. If you are in a very highly specialized position, you want to be in a labor market where there are a lot of employers looking for workers, and a lot of workers looking for employers. The match between employer and employee tends to be more productive, more creative and innovative in thicker labor markets.

It is the same thing for the vendors, the providers of intermediate services. Companies in the Silicon Valley will find very specialized IP lawyers, lab services, and shipping services that focus on that niche of the industry. And because they are so specialized, they're particularly good at what they're doing.

The third factor is what economists call human capital spillovers ― the fact that people learn from their colleagues, random encounters in a coffee shop, at a party, from their children, and so on. There's a lot of sociological evidence that this is one of the attractions of Silicon Valley. You're always near other people who are at the frontier, so you tend to exchange information. Sometimes it's information about job openings. Sometimes it’s information about what you're doing, what type of technology you're adopting, what type of research you are doing. And this, as you can imagine, is important for R&D, for innovation.

So these three forces are crucial, and that means that localities that already have a lot of innovation tend to attract even more workers and even more employers. That further strengthens their virtuous circle.

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Dr. Enrico Moretti leading a seminar organized by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) of the Stanford Graduate School of Business as part of its Silicon Valley Project.

Are these clusters sustainable forever?

Probably not. Previous clusters have collapsed in spectacular ways. The Silicon Valley of the 1950s was Detroit. People have researched the rise of Detroit, and it mimics very well the rise of Silicon Valley in terms of the amount of innovation, the type of engineering, the type of salaries they were paying. In the 1950s, if you were a car engineer, there wasn't any better place in the world to be, and if you were a car company, you had to be there. But then, of course, it collapsed.

In my book, I have a chapter on the difference between Detroit and Silicon Valley. This region has kept reinventing itself in ways that are remarkable. It was all orchards, and then it became all hardware, and then it became all software. And now it's becoming something else: social media and biotech and clean tech. Some types of clusters don't survive big negative shocks, and other clusters are able to leverage themselves into the next thing.

Is there a clean energy cluster that is structurally different from an internet or an IT or a biotech cluster? Or are they all intermingled?

Typically, clusters are very specialized. Silicon Valley is the exception in the sense that there are so many different technologies. More typical examples are Boise, Idaho, for radio technology or Portland, Oregon, for semiconductors. Seattle has a combination of software and now a growing body of life sciences. Boston is mostly life science. D.C. is a remarkable story. It's very diversified now in terms of private-sector innovation, but most clusters are going to be small pockets of one industry.

Does your argument hold for high-paid but non-high-tech sectors? I was thinking of New York being a financial sector or L.A. being entertainment, and Houston being oil and gas. Then you mentioned Washington, D.C. That's government.

I would argue that three you mentioned would belong to what I define as innovation sectors in the following sense: Finance in New York is not bank tellers; it’s people who invent new products, new technology, and new ways of making things. They are unique, and you can't easily reproduce the cluster somewhere else. That certainly applies to entertainment, especially the digital part of entertainment that is the fastest-growing part of entertainment jobs.

It also applies to the D.C. cluster. The growth of D.C. over the last 20 years is mostly driven by private-sector headquarters moving there, and an educated labor force. Some of the companies are military contractors. Some companies are life science. They're anchored by the National Institutes of Health being there, and other government agencies. But most of the growth actually comes from the private sector.

Now oil, Houston, I'm not sure. I don't know how strong these clustering forces are for these type of jobs. I would imagine ― and we're not talking about the guy who drills, but it's more like the guy who plans where to drill ― to the extent that there is a high component of innovation that makes something that is unique, I would say it applies.

If I'm a high-tech worker, how am I responsible for creating five other jobs? It’s hard for me to accept there are five.

The way to interpret the multiplier is to imagine dropping 1,000 innovation jobs in one city but not in another, and then going back 10 years later to measure how many additional local service jobs there are in the city that experienced that innovation-sector drop of jobs. So it's a long-run effect, but it’s not impossible for three reasons.

One is that the average high-tech worker tends to do very, very well, and people who are wealthy tend to spend a large fraction of their salary on personal and local services. They tend to go to restaurants and movies, and to use taxis and therapists and doctors on average more than people who are paid less.

The second reason is high-tech companies themselves employ a lot of local services; everything from security guards to IP lawyers, from the janitor to the very specialized consultant. High-tech companies tend to use more services than manufacturing companies.

The third reason is the clustering effect. Once you attract one of those high-tech workers, then in the medium to long run, you're going to be attracting even more of those high-tech workers and companies, which will further increase your multiplier. So it's a long-run number, measured over a 10-year period.

You pointed out that the salaries of the less-educated part of the local population are higher in those places that do have a lot of the innovation. How is that reconciled with the drastic drop over 30 years in their national average compensation?

We don't have enough brain hubs where innovation is concentrated. We have 320 metro areas in the U.S., and probably, by my definition, we have 15 to 20 brain hubs. In those places, you have brisk job creation outside the innovation sector, and you have decent wages for people outside. But we also have a big chunk of the country producing not very much, in part because manufacturing jobs have been shrinking, and innovation hasn't really taken place.

So what hope is there for these areas?

That's a million-dollar question. It's tough because, in some sense, if this clustering effect is particularly strong, it's good news for places like here, but it's terrible news for places like Flint or Detroit. A successful local labor market has a very nice equilibrium, where you have a lot of skilled workers who want to go there and a lot of innovative employers who want to go there. It's really hard to re-create somewhere else.

And it's not like we're not trying. We're spending $15 to $18 billion annually in what economists call place-based policies, which are essentially subsidies to try to attract employers to these areas. The idea being: “They're not coming, so if we just break this vicious circle, if we just bring some, then the clustering effect starts taking off. We can effectively create innovation hubs where they don't exist.”

I haven't found one example of an innovation hub in the U.S. that has been created by deliberate policy that says, "We're going to create an innovation hub here." Taiwan might be a good success story. It’s hard to get data, but Taiwan was an agricultural economy in the 1960s that had very little innovation. Then in the 1970s, it created enormous government subsidies for semiconductors and a lot of other technologies. All the others didn't pan out, but semiconductors worked. Taiwan is still putting money in, so it's not exactly clear whether it's a perfect example. Picking the next big thing is very hard for the venture capitalist. It's virtually impossible for the government worker.

What's the situation in other regions around the world ?

Obviously, India and China are major success stories, but that doesn't mean that this clustering effect is not at play within those countries. A different example is Italy, where I am from. Italy has been the Detroit in this story. It had a very strong pharmaceutical sector in the 1980s, and a smaller computer cluster. Once the pharmaceutical industry started becoming global, you saw mergers and a concentration of the industry’s R&D in a few places. I know because my dad was employed there, and his lab was first moved to Sweden and then to New Jersey.

I think the same is happening throughout many countries in continental Europe, and even in places like China and India, which have success stories but enormous regional differences. The innovative part of the Chinese economy is concentrated in a handful of megalopolises.

This is an interesting paradox of the current economy. Probably the best news of the last 20 years globally is the vast increase in the standard of living in places like China and India and Brazil, so there's certainly been a convergence in the standard of living when you compare nations. But when you look within those developing nations, you see the same great divergence that you see here.

Enrico Moretti is professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Michael Peevey and Donald Vial Career Development Chair in Labor Economics. He is also director of the Infrastructure and Urbanization Program at the International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics and Oxford University. His talk at Stanford was hosted by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, located in the Graduate School of Business.

 

Kathleen O'Toole is a journalist who frequently writes about social science. She is currently assistant editorial director of marketing and communications at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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REAP Co-Director Scott Rozelle recently spoke at a Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation (龍應台文化基金會) event about China and the middle income trap. Using the contrasting experiences of South Korea and Mexico as a guide, Rozelle provided a glimpse into the economic ramifications of allowing the gap between rural and urban education in China to grow wider. Read the CommonWealth Magazine article in Chinese here.

Although the Japan Studies Program (JSP) was formally established in 2011, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center’s (Shorenstein APARC) newest addition has a rich history that equals or even exceeds that of the Center itself. The archives—through dozens of occasional and working papers, studies, photographs of landmark events, and books—reveal three vibrant decades of research on Japanese economics, industry, government, and international relations.

Japan studies took root when the Center was founded in 1983 and has evolved with the political, economic, and social changes in Japan, and with developments in U.S.-Japan relations. Under the leadership of co-founding Center director Daniel I. Okimoto, one of the earliest projects explored U.S.-Japan competition and collaboration in high-tech industries during the 1980s and 1990s. Other initiatives led to a definitive three volume comparative study of Japan’s political economy, and an exploration of the United States’ evolving ties with its Northeast Asia allies, including Japan.

Early Center activities brought together distinguished scholars, practitioners, and policymakers from Japan and the United States for fruitful interdisciplinary academic collaboration and meaningful policy dialogue, and laid the groundwork for many enduring relationships with Japanese universities, ministries, and other organizations. One of the first of such activities was the U.S.-Japan Congressional Seminar series, through which members of the U.S. Senate and the Japanese Diet met for candid, in-depth discussion on issues of mutual significance related to trade, international economic policy, industrial policy, and security.

After Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, the country underwent a range of political, economic, and social transformations. Even amidst challenges, Japan has adapted, as its firms continue to be globally competitive in many areas, and it persists as an Asian economic powerhouse; on the security front, Japan remains one of the closest allies of the United States. Emerging out of these transformations is a new Japan that offers quite a different picture from the old rapid-growth era.

The newly instituted Japan Studies Program aims to make Stanford a U.S. leader in the field of contemporary Japan studies. As an integral component of the Center, JSP facilitates multidisciplinary, social science–oriented research on contemporary Japan, emphasizing both academic scholarship and policy-relevant research. The program aims to become a central platform for Stanford students and the broader community for understanding and engaging with Japan.

JSP actively collaborates with other organizations on campus, such as the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS), the US-Asia Technology Management Center, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. During the one-year anniversary of the March 11 Great Tohoku Disaster, JSP co-sponsored a lecture series with CEAS examining Japan’s growth and recovery, and it held a major conference focused on restructuring Japan’s energy industry. Since 2011, its popular lunchtime seminar series has brought numerous high-caliber guest speakers to Stanford for insightful talks on subjects ranging from cloud computing in Japan and the United States to the comeback of Japan’s conservative party and the new era of “Abenomics.”

JSP experts actively contribute to Shorenstein APARC’s publishing program of timely, policy-oriented edited volumes and working papers, and regularly contribute op-eds and journal articles to numerous leading newspapers and scholarly journals, including the Journal of East Asian Studies, Socio-Economic Review, and Energy Policy.

Looking ahead, Takeo Hoshi, who joined the Center as JSP’s director in December 2012, says, “I want to make Shorenstein APARC the first place that researchers, policymakers, business practitioners, and students visit to understand more about the Japanese economy and politics—I look forward to working with everyone at Shorenstein APARC (and beyond) to achieve this goal.” With a strong, growing core of affiliated faculty, researchers, and staff, the future for Japan studies at Stanford looks bright.

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In 2007, Daniel Okimoto, Shorenstein APARC director emeritus, received Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in recognition of decades of work. (Credit: courtesy Daniel Okimoto)

(l-r) Kenji Kushida, Masahiko Aoki, Kiyoshi Kurokawa, and Takeo Hoshi ( JSP director). Kurokawa, chair of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, spoke at JSP on how the scientific community can help policymakers respond to change in a globalized world. (Credit: Wena Rosario)

For almost two decades, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) produced outstanding work in Korean affairs but lacked a separate program for Korean studies; by the turn of the millennium, however, it was clear that more attention and resources needed to be devoted to Korea. Between 1960 and 1990, capitalist South Korea had risen from the devastation of the Korean War to produce an economic “miracle on the Han River,” followed soon by full democratization. In the process, it became a global model of development. Meanwhile, North Korea was pursuing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles while maintaining one of the world’s last Stalinist systems, even outlasting the Soviet Union itself despite a devastating famine in the mid-1990s, and the regime’s threats presented a major concern to policymakers. Together, the two Korean states with radically different systems, competing for hegemony on the divided Korean Peninsula, constituted an unparalleled “natural experiment” for social scientists.

Since 2001 when Gi-Wook Shin was invited to found a program within Shorenstein APARC, the Stanford Korean Studies Program (KSP) has developed into a world-renowned center offering impactful programs addressing current, policy-relevant issues and events. KSP sponsors conferences and workshops that bring together leading Korea scholars and policymakers for meaningful dialogue. Special events afford the general public the opportunity to engage with distinguished practitioners as well as emerging scholars. KSP also supports fellowships, collaborates with a broad range of visiting scholars, publishes award-winning books and reports, and offers commentary to leading media.

Amassing talent to create a premier program

From its one-person beginning a decade ago, KSP now has faculty members in sociology, history, and literature, with two more appointments pending. In addition, KSP has two full-time staff members and a research assistant. A Korean language lecturer and a Korean Studies librarian support program activities. KSP taps into the rich array of Stanford-based faculty and senior fellows who conduct policy-related research on Korea within FSI-affiliated centers and programs, and at the neighboring Hoover Institution.

KSP has sponsored collaborative research projects on a range of Korea-related subjects. The South Korean National Assembly Project considered the generational change under way in South Korea’s government and its political and ideological implications, specifically how such changes affect Assembly votes—and Korean policy—on major issues. Other projects focus on mass media and U.S.-Korea relations, including the ROK-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum, the Korean experience of historical injustice and reconciliation, and a book series on Korean democratization sponsored by the Academy of Korean Studies. Findings from such groundbreaking projects are regularly presented at KSP seminars and conferences, and published as books and journal articles.

A next generation of scholars

KSP is devoted to training the next generation of Korea scholars by offering courses on Korea through various academic departments, working closely with the Center for East Asian Studies, which offers an MA in East Asian studies with a specialty in Korea. A writing prize in Korean studies was created in 2012, and KSP co-sponsors a Korea internship program and convenes popular overseas seminars in Seoul, enabling Stanford undergraduates to experience Korean politics, history, and culture firsthand. In collaboration with the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education, Stanford KSP is expanding opportunities for high school students to take online courses on Korea and for U.S. secondary school teachers to bring Korean studies into their curricula.

Each year, KSP offers outstanding opportunities for fellowships and visiting scholars from Korea and elsewhere. With generous fellowship support from the Pantech Group and the Koret Foundation, KSP has hosted over 100 alumni, including two former South Korean foreign ministers, former senior officials from the United States, South Korea, and China, and leading Korea scholars and experts. These visiting scholars participate intensively in KSP research, educational, and outreach programs, and continue their association with the program after leaving Stanford through an active alumni association.

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John Everard, former British ambassador to Pyongyang and a Pantech Fellow, speaks on North Korea at the annual Koret Conference, part of the 2011 celebration of Stanford KSP’s tenth anniversary. (Credit: Rod Searcey)

Students from Seoul’s Hana Academy perform traditional Korean music for participants of the Hana-Stanford Conference on Korea. (Credit: Rod Searcey)