Abstract:

By the standards of prosperity and peace, the post-Cold War international order has been  an unparalleled success. Over the last thirty years there has been more creation of wealth, and reduction of poverty, disease, and food insecurity than in all of previous history. During the same period, the numbers and lethality of wars have decreased. Yet these facts have not deterred an alternative assessment that asserts that civil violence, terrorism, and failed states are at unprecedented high levels, and the numbers of refugees are at an all time high.

There is no global crisis of failed states and endemic civil war, no global crisis of refugees and migration, and no global crisis of disorder. Instead what we have seen is a particular historical crisis unfold in the greater Middle East, which has collapsed order within that region, and has fed the biggest threat to international order: populism in the United States and Europe.

Speaker Bio:

Stephen John Stedman is Deputy Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law (CDDRL), Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. At CDDRL Professor Stedman directs the project on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, which examines the sources and extent of polarization and paralysis in Western democracies. From 2010 to 2012 he served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections. Professor Stedman drafted the Commission’s report, Deepening Democracy: A Strategy for Improving the Integrity of Elections Worldwide.  In 2003-2004 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary General and Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary General.

Professor Stedman has written widely on transnational threats to international security. He is currently researching the historical development of the concept of security and how its meanings have changed over time. Professor Stedman received his BA, MA and PhD degrees from Stanford University.  He and his wife, Corinne Thomas, are the Resident Fellows in Crothers -- Stanford’s academic theme house on global citizenship.

About the event: In his talk Toomas Hendrik Ilves will discuss how various digital tools have been used in democracies in Europe and the US in an attempt to disrupt and affect elections outcomes. These are new approaches, meant if not to alter electoral outcomes then at least to sow discord and seem in some instances to have been successful. Methods used include hacking into political parties' servers and “doxxing” embarrassing hacked materials; disseminating via “bots” false stories that have occasionally gone viral; as well highly granular big data analyses to target voters with ads specifically tailored to their profiles as culled from social media.

About the Speaker: Toomas Hendrik Ilves was born on December 26, 1953, to an Estonian family living in Stockholm, Sweden. He was educated in the United States, receiving a degree from Columbia University in 1976 and a master's degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978.

In 1984 he moved to Munich, Germany, to work at the office of Radio Free Europe, first as a researcher and foreign policy analyst and later as the head of the Estonian Desk.

From 1993 to 1996 Ilves served in Washington as the ambassador of the Republic of Estonia to the United States and Canada. During this time, he launched the Tiger Leap Initiative to computerize and connect all Estonian schools online with Education Minister Jaak Aaviksoo. He then served as minister of foreign affairs from 1996 to 1998. After a brief period as chairman of the North Atlantic Institute in 1998, he was again appointed minister of foreign affairs, serving until 2002.

From 2002 to 2004, Ilves was a member of the Estonian Parliament and in 2004 he was elected a member of the European Parliament, where he was vice-president of the Foreign Affairs Committee. As a MEP, he initiated the Baltic Sea Strategy that was later implemented as official regional policy of the European Union.

Ilves was elected president of the Republic of Estonia in 2006. He was re-elected for a second term in office in 2011.

During his presidency, Ilves has been appointed to serve in several high positions in the field of ICT in the European Union. He served as chairman of the EU Task Force on eHealth from 2011 to 2012 and was chairman of the European Cloud Partnership Steering Board at the invitation of the European Commission from 2012 to 2014. In 2013 he chaired the High-Level Panel on Global Internet Cooperation and Governance Mechanisms convened by ICANN. From 2014 to 2015 Ilves was the co-chair of the advisory panel of the World Bank's World Development Report 2016 "Digital Dividends" and was also the chair of World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Cyber Security beginning in June 2014.

Starting from 2016, Ilves co-chairs The World Economic Forum working group The Global Futures Council on Blockchain Technology. In 2017 he joined Stanford University as a Bernard and Susan Liautaud Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

President Ilves has published many essays and articles in Estonian and English on numerous topics ranging from Estonian language, history, and literature to global foreign and security policy and cyber security. His books include essay collections in Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Hungarian, and Russian.

His international awards and honorary degrees include Knight of Freedom Award by the Casimir Pulaski Foundation (2016), the Aspen Prague Award by the Aspen Institute (2015), the Freedom Award by the Atlantic Council (2014) and the NDI Democracy Award by the National Democratic Institute (2013). His Honorary Degrees include an Honorary Degree from St. Olaf College, US (2014), an Honorary Degree from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland (2010), and an Honorary Degree from Tbilisi University, Georgia (2007).

"The Effects of Expert Recommendations on Health Insurance Choices:  Evidence from a Randomized, Controlled Trial"

Please note: All research in progress seminars are off-the-record unless otherwise noted. Any information about methodology and/or results are embargoed until publication.

Medicare beneficiaries consistently report difficulty choosing a Medicare Part D plan, rarely change their plans and are often not enrolled in the plan providing the most generous coverage for their medications. In this project, we test whether providing personalized information on the financial implications of enrolling in different plans, both with and without expert recommendations, improves decision outcomes for Medicare Part D enrollees relative to directing them to the Medicare.gov website. We describe and report the results of a randomized, controlled trial of the effects of using a patient-centered Medicare Part D decision tool during 2017 open enrollment (October 15 through December 7, 2016) among patients who are members of a large multispecialty group practice.

"Billing Irregularities by Health Care Providers: Evidence from Anesthesia"
 

Please note: All research in progress seminars are off-the-record unless otherwise noted. Any information about methodology and/or results are embargoed until publication.

 

In the United States, physicians exercise tremendous discretion in choosing billing details that determine payment for their services.  While understanding the degree to which physicians inappropriately use this discretion has implications for setting payment policies, separating inappropriate discretion from actual differences in patient complexity is empirically challenging.  In anesthesia, providers are compensated by self-reported length of time (“anesthesia time”) spent on a case. Therefore, anomalous patterns in a practitioner’s reported times—e.g., an excess number of cases with an anesthesia time ending in five (e.g., 65 minutes)—can objectively identify inappropriate billing when those reported times are also longer than expected. Using a national database of over 6.5 million anesthesia cases from 5,755 anesthesia providers, we found that anomalous patterns are common—nearly one-quarter of providers report an unusually large number of cases with anesthesia times ending in 5 or zero.  Providers who were particularly anomalous—those in the top 5^th percentile in terms of anesthesia times ending in 5 or zero—also tended to report anesthesia times that were 22 minutes longer than expected, which would net an additional $34 to $98 per case, depending on payer.  While inappropriate practices seem confined to a minority of anesthesia providers, our results provide some impetus for ongoing policy efforts aimed at reducing the amount of discretion given to physicians.