In a somewhat inconsequential meeting at the United Nations (UN) in 2009, Kandeh Yumkella, then Director-General of the UN Industrial Development Organization and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s informally assigned “energy guy,” noted something obvious and profound: that “the provision of one light to poor people does nothing more than shine a light on poverty.” Yet much of an emerging discussion on the critical importance of global energy access as a pathway out of poverty continues to focus on what are, in effect, “one-light” solutions. In this essay, we seek to help clarify the challenge of energy access, expose assumptions that are informing policy design in the development and diplomatic communities, and offer a framework for future discussions rooted in the aspirations of people around the world to achieve energy access that is compatible with a decent standard of living.

Our distinctly uncomfortable starting place is that the poorest three-quarters of the global population still use only about 10% of global energy—a clear indicator of deep and persistent global inequity. Because a modern energy supply is foundational for economic development, the international development and diplomatic community has rightly placed the provision of modern energy services at the center of international attention focused on a combined agenda of poverty eradication and sustainable development. This priority has been expressed primarily in the launching of the UN Sustainable Energy for All initiative (SE4All). Still, areas of tension and conflict in such an agenda demand further attention, particularly in relation to climate change, as we discuss later in this essay.

Compounding the difficulty of decisionmaking in such a complex space is that the concept of “energy access” is often defined in terms that are unacceptably modest. Discussions about energy and poverty commonly assume that the roughly two to three billion people who presently lack modern energy services will only demand or consume them in small amounts over the next several decades. This assumption leads to projections of future energy consumption that are not only potentially far too low but therefore imply, even if unintentionally, that those billions will remain deeply impoverished. Such limited ambition risks becoming self-fulfilling, because the way we view the scale of the challenge will strongly influence the types of policies, technologies, levels of investment, and investment vehicles that analysts and policymakers consider to be appropriate.

As Wolfram and colleagues observe in a recent study, “The current forecasts for energy demand in the developing world may be understated because they do not accurately capture the dramatic increase in demand associated with poverty reduction.” The point is that energy access is not an end per se; rather it is a necessity for moving to vibrant and sustainable social and economic growth. The lower the assumed scale of the challenge, the more likely it is that the focus will turn to incremental change that amounts to “poverty management,” rather than the transformational changes that will be necessary if we are to help billions climb out of poverty.

Old numbers

A first step to better understanding the scale of the energy access challenge is to ask how much energy is actually needed to enable poverty alleviation—a level we will term “modern energy access”? To answer this question we focus, for simplicity, on electricity services, rather than energy for heat and cooling or transport. Still, answering the question is not simple. World Bank data indicate that some countries with relatively low levels of access have high levels of electricity use, whereas some countries considered to have full access have extremely low average electricity use. This considerable spread in average annual household consumption levels at different levels of access makes comparing some of the existing analyses tricky.

Let’s turn to places that have modern energy access by any definition of the term, with essentially 100% of residents and the broader economy under full electrification. The average resident of the United States consumes about 13,400 kWh per year, with a large variation by state (for example, households in Maine consume about 40% of those in Louisiana). On average, Europeans generally consume considerably less energy than Americans. For instance, based on 2010 data, the average resident of Germany consumes about 7,200 kWh per year, with Swedes consuming about 15,000 kWh and Greeks about 5,200 kWh, and on the low end the Bulgarians at about 4,500 kWh, or about 60% of German and a third of U.S. levels. For comparison, the global average in 2010 was just under 3,000 kWh per capita per year, which is three-quarters of Bulgarian consumption, but of course this number is strongly skewed by the enormous concentration of energy use in the industrialized world as well as the large number of people with no access at all.

These numbers for the United States, Germany, and Bulgaria can be compared to the definitions of energy access that typically provide the basis for policy discussions and analyses. The International Energy Agency (IEA) is one of the world’s most influential analytical bodies on energy policy, and its flagship product, the World Energy Outlook, has played a leadership role for more than a decade in providing analysis and data of the energy access issues. It defines an initial threshold for energy access to be 250 kWh per year for rural households and 500 kWh per year for urban households, assuming five people per household. This equates to 50 to 100 kWh per year per person, or about 0.5% of that consumed by the average American or Swede and 1.7% of that of the average Bulgarian.

For its part, the IEA and the other organizations active on this issue have recognized that achieving energy access is a process, noting, “Once initial connection to electricity has been achieved, the level of consumption is assumed to rise gradually over time, attaining the average regional consumption level after five years. This definition of electricity access to include an initial period of growing consumption is a deliberate attempt to reflect the fact that eradication of energy poverty is a long]term endeavour.”

The World Bank presents a useful scheme for considering various levels of energy access, illustrating different tiers of access (Table 1). Still, even the highest level of access in the scheme, Tier 5, implies some 2,121 kWh per year per household of five people, or roughly 420 kWh per capita per year, which, at less than 10% of Bulgarian consumption, is still much lower than what typical energy services would imply in even the least energy-consumptive wealthy countries. More than a billion people lack even the minimal levels of access to electricity, and policy analyses, national plans, and projects must start somewhere. Still, achieving minimal levels of energy access is not to be confused with success in achieving goals of modern energy access. The sorts of policies that would make sense to get large numbers of people over a low and arbitrary threshold are very different from those that will underpin sustained growth in economies and consumption. Consider that we do not label people who live on more than $1 per day as having economic access and address policies toward achieving a $1.25 level, thus still leaving them desperately poor. Everyone understands that $1.25 a day is still not nearly enough. In energy, we often lack such conceptual clarity.

Adding to the challenge of talking clearly about modern energy access and a more realistic level of unmet energy demand in poor countries is the tendency in many analyses to discuss the issue in terms of household energy use. Energy access has links to all sectors of the economy. By focusing on household energy demand, other sectors of a growing economy can end up being ignored in critical power planning exercises and policies. Business and industry growth, for example, is severely constrained in many poor countries not only by a lack of access but also a lack of access to highquality services, meaning those that are reliable enough to meet the needs of private-sector enterprises, from hospitals to factories. Access to modern energy services across an economy, not just in the home, is necessary to sustain and support continued economic growth, a reality that must be accommodated in projections of future energy needs.

TABLE 1

If we aim too low, then there are risks not just in policy failure but in the opportunity costs of policy success. If more ambitious goals are to be achieved, then some attention must also focus on real transformational change. This type of change is often difficult to conceptualize and difficult to represent in most analytical models using traditional baseline or incremental growth approaches. But our analytical models should not limit our creativity and ambition, especially in light of the reality that many nations, such as Thailand, South Africa, Vietnam, and China, have experienced remarkable economic growth and expansion of truly modern energy access for large populations over relatively short periods of time.

New numbers

We now turn to the quantitative implications of moving toward much higher levels of assumed future energy demand for poor countries. As an example, consider the Obama administration’s recent announcement of a new “Power Africa” initiative, focused on increasing the electricity generation capacity of sub-Saharan Africa by adding 10 gigawatts (GW) of generation capacity in order to “double access to power.” Although such an initiative is to be applauded, placing it into a broader context can help to calibrate the level of ambition.

To raise the entire region of sub-Saharan Africa to the average per-capita electricity access available in South Africa (which in 2010 was about 4,800 kWh, similar to the level of Bulgaria) would require 1,000 GW of installed capacity: about the equivalent electricity of 1,000 medium-sized power plants and 100 times the capacity increase in the plan set forth by President Obama. This means that sub-Saharan Africa would need to increase its installed capacity by 33 times to reach the level of energy use enjoyed by South Africans. A recent study by Bazilian and others (2012) showed that even a less ambitious 10-fold increase, perhaps sufficient to provide full access but at relatively modest levels of electricity consumption, would require a 13% average annual growth rate in generating capacity in sub-Saharan Africa, as compared to a historical one of 1.7% over the past two decades. When looked at from the perspective of energy access as the concept is understood in North America and Europe, the magnitude of the energy access challenge is starkly revealed.

Still another perspective is provided by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in its 2012 Global Energy Assessment, which tracks the historical expansion of energy access in several countries. In 1920, only 35% of Americans had energy access, and full access was achieved in the mid-1950s, a period of about 35 years. In contrast, Mexico, which was at about 35% access in 1930, has yet to reach the 100% mark. China went from 35% in 1970 to nearly 100% by about 2000, reflecting a very fast rate in a very large nation. India is following a much shallower trajectory, going from about 25% in 1980 to 65% in 2010. How fast and how far can truly modern energy access occur under an approach focused on rapidly expanding access to truly modern levels? This is the sort of question where researchers might productively direct their attention.

Accelerating a transition to a radically different, and inclusive, energy system is clearly a generational challenge and provides a just and consequential rationale for much greater attention to innovation in energy systems. A first step in that transition is to properly understand the scale of the challenge. With a sense of scale appropriate to energy access commensurate with the organization of modern economies, we are then in a position to discuss the possible costs of achieving such ambitious goals, recognizing that any such discussion is laden with assumptions about economics, technologies, and politics but also that history is replete with examples of nations moving rapidly to achieve greatly increased levels of access in the context of rapid economic growth.

What sorts of investments might be necessary for achieving modern energy access? Based on recent work done by Bazilian and colleagues, it would cost about 1 trillion dollars to achieve the IEA 2012 World Energy outlook definition of total global access—rising to 750 kWh per capita for new connections by 2030—and 17 times more to achieve a level of worldwide access equivalent to that in South Africa or Bulgaria. This massive difference in estimated costs, which is probably insensitive to the precise accuracy of either number, places a value on the ambition gap that results from the difference between a poverty management approach to energy access and one that takes seriously the development aspirations of people around the world. Of course, it is not just cost that changes in the face of such aspirations, but also the sorts of institutions, technologies, infrastructure, policies, and other systems required to support broad-based energy services.

Climate interactions

Most readers will have already recognized that our discussion has significant implications for the question of climate change. Former NASA scientist James Hansen expressed his view of the issue with typical candor, when he said, “if you let these other countries come up to the level of the developed world then the planet is done for.” For the most part, however, the ambition gap has kept this uncomfortable dilemma off the table. If one assumes that billions will remain with levels of energy consumption an order of magnitude less than even the most modest definition of modern access, then one can understand the oft-repeated claim that universal energy access can be achieved with essentially no increase in the global emissions of carbon dioxide.

For example, the projections of the IEA under its “Universal Access Scenario” for energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions show minimal consequences to emissions and consumption, but these projections essentially reflect a “poverty maintenance” level of energy service provision. Emissions increase by such a small amount because new energy consumption increases by a very small amount.

Conflicts between climate and energy priorities deserve a deeper and more open airing in order to help better frame policy options, including the difficult question of tradeoffs among competing valued outcomes. The issues are playing out right now but remain largely unacknowledged. For instance, under U.S. Senate Bill S.329 (2013) the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a federal agency responsible for backstopping U.S. companies that invest in developing countries, is essentially prohibited from investing in energy projects that involve fossil fuels, a policy that may have profound consequences in places such as sub-Saharan Africa that are seeking to develop oil and gas resources to help alleviate widespread energy poverty. At the same time, a different U.S. federal agency, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, helped fund a 4.9-GW coal plant (Kusile) in the Republic of South Africa. The coal plant will help serve both industry and households that currently lack access. These simultaneous interventions appear incoherent. Making such issues more transparent and opening them up to debates with multiple stakeholders with multiple values and success criteria offers the promise of enriching the array of policy options on the table.

The UN has attempted to square this circle of climate and energy through the phrase Sustainable Energy for All. Still, because value judgments must be made and priorities established, the UN initiative has explicitly stated a technology-neutral principle and given primacy to national decisionmaking, and implicitly has made the goal of universal energy access a first among equals of the three sustainable energy goals (the other two relating to renewable energy and energy efficiency). In practice, however, as we have emphasized, the tradeoffs involved in policies related to climate and energy have often received less than a full airing in policy debate.

The course of development followed by virtually all nations demonstrates that people around the world desire a high-energy future. Our plea is that we begin to recognize that fact and focus more attention and resources on positively planning for, and indeed bringing about, that future. Achieving universal modern energy access will require transformations; in aspirations, but also, for example, in technological systems, institutions, development theory and practice, and new ways to conceptualize and finance energy system design. Being clear about what modern energy access means and applying that clarity to the policy discussions galvanized by the 2014–2024 UN Decade of Sustainable Energy can create a foundation for making huge strides in bridging the global equity gap not just in energy but in the new wealth, rising standard of living, and improved quality of life that modern energy access can help to bring.

Ultimately, a focus on energy access at a low threshold limits our thinking and thus our options. Adopting a more ambitious conception of energy access brings conflicting priorities, as well as the scale of the challenge, more clearly into focus and makes hidden assumptions more difficult to avoid. Now more than ever the world needs to ensure that the benefits of modern energy are available to all and that energy is provided as cleanly and efficiently as possible. This is a matter of equity, first and foremost, but it is also an issue of urgent practical importance. Economic and technological challenges are hard enough; let us not add a failure of imagination to that mix.

Recommended reading

After the tragic bombing at the Boston marathon, Boston’s cellular networks instantly filled with calls. One company spokeswoman had to publicly plead with its customers “to use text or email to free up voice capacity for public safety officials at the scene.” In other words, this nation allocates resources that are critical for emergency response through the use of plaintive press releases. U.S. public safety agencies do have the alternative of using their own communications systems, although most of today’s public safety systems are based on pre-Internet, pre-cellular technology that does not meet the needs or expectations of today’s emergency responders.

As I argued in a 2007 article in Issues, part of the problem with traditional public safety communications systems is that many thousands of individual police and fire departments run their own systems, perhaps with a different technology than their neighbors, when what is really needed is a nationwide solution. There has since been movement in this direction, culminating in 2012 when the U.S. Congress funded the creation of a new nationwide network called FirstNet. However, FirstNet’s success is still uncertain. A shift in priorities could put FirstNet on a better path. In particular, whereas much of current discussion of FirstNet revolves around building new infrastructure specifically for public safety—and new infrastructure should certainly be built—time and funding constraints should shift the immediate focus from building new infrastructure to leveraging existing infrastructure and commercial technology in new ways, including new forms of public/private partnerships.

By almost any measure, the thousands of public safety communications networks in the United States today are inadequate. The most discussed problem is the lack of interoperability, which means that in many places emergency workers such as police and firefighters have incompatible communications systems that prevent them from interacting with one another. However, interoperability is just one of the problems. Current public safety infrastructure is unnecessarily expensive, because all these independent and overlapping networks require an order of magnitude more towers than would otherwise be needed. Indeed, if one wants to predict the amount of costly infrastructure that will be built in a region, the number of municipal governments in the region is a far better predictor than either the population or the area of the region. The unnecessarily large number of towers combined with pre-cellular technologies also make public safety an extremely inefficient user of spectrum, and preventing a shortage of available spectrum from hampering economic growth has become a high priority for the U.S. government. Moreover, because so much equipment is designed specifically for the fairly small public safety market, mobile handsets for public safety typically cost an order of magnitude more than handsets that are mass-produced for a consumer market. Finally, traditional public safety systems support only voice communications at a time when consumers carry phones that offer data capabilities and countless applications that would be very useful for emergency responders. In short, U.S. taxpayers expend billions of dollars more than necessary every year to perpetuate a system that fails to meet modern needs or exploit new technologies. The solution to all these problems is to build out a public safety network infrastructure that serves the thousands of municipal public safety organizations and is based on a single technical architecture that uses spectrum efficiently. At this time, such an architecture would be based on the fourth-generation cellular standard (LTE) and Internet standards (IP).

Such a system could save many lives. Imagine a city that has just been battered by a hurricane. Emergency responders from adjacent states rush to the city for search and rescue missions. Today they would come with incompatible communications equipment, so coordination would be a problem. Moreover, as we saw after Hurricane Katrina, even local responders may not be able to communicate if the hurricane destroys the towers they depend on, even if there are commercial systems still working. Those responders who are lucky enough to have access to a working system will have voice communications and nothing more. In contrast, with FirstNet, responders from all agencies will be able to communicate using whatever infrastructure has survived. In addition to voice communications, medics will send video of critical patients back to hospitals, police will distribute pictures of missing children over the airwaves, and firefighters will download the blueprints of damaged buildings to see how to enter safely.

The 2009 transition from analog to digital television created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvent public safety communications by suddenly making bands of prime spectrum available nationwide. Under the right federal policy, it would be possible to adopt a single technical approach nationwide and to choose an approach that uses the latest and most cost-effective cellular and Internet technologies to bring a wide range of broadband services to public safety. This new approach for public safety was endorsed by the government in the 2010 U.S. National Broadband Plan, and later by the White House. The idea became real in 2012 when Congress authorized funding and reserved 20 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum that was previously used for TV for the creation of FirstNet, a network for first responders. This raised expectations, which is both an opportunity and a danger. Now the biggest threat to success for FirstNet may be the risk of not meeting these expectations quickly enough with the resources available. FirstNet’s funding will fall somewhere between $2 billion and $7 billion, depending on how much money is raised in the future auction of spectrum that becomes available after some TV broadcasters voluntarily choose to relinquish their spectrum. If the maximum of $7 billion is raised for FirstNet, it would be a great start, but still not enough money to build out infrastructure everywhere in the country. For example, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimated the cost of building an LTE network in the most-populous areas that would provide indoor coverage to 99% of the population and outdoor coverage to 99.5%. This plan, which would leave roughly 45% of the U.S. land area without coverage inside buildings and 37% with no coverage at all, would cost between $12 billion and $16 billion over 10 years, of which $7 billion would be capital cost. This estimate assumes that costs would be decreased through a high level of cooperation with commercial carriers, which may or may not occur. Lack of cooperation could double or triple capital costs. Moreover, some responded to this analysis by saying that the network should support even greater data rates than the FCC had assumed, because public safety would benefit from higherquality video. Increasing upstream edge-of-cell rates from 256 kilobytes per second to 1.2 megabytes per second was also found to increase capital cost almost threefold. Clearly, infrastructure cannot be built everywhere with this budget, even under best-case assumptions.

Some money may come from state and local sources, but the federal government will need to be the primary funder. Of course, Congress could appropriate more federal money. After all, this kind of infrastructure-building could save lives by strengthening public safety and homeland security, while creating jobs in the short term and saving taxpayer money in the long term. Such opportunities are rare. Nevertheless, additional funding from Congress seems unlikely, given the current state of budget discussions. Thus, if FirstNet is to deliver useful services to the entire nation, rural as well as urban, it cannot rely only on building infrastructure to achieve this. Luckily, there are other options.

Meanwhile, if FirstNet cannot deliver valuable capabilities quickly, it may never get the chance. Congress gave states the ability to opt out of FirstNet entirely and use that 20 MHz of spectrum in other ways. There are also a number of cities that have expressed a preference for running their own infrastructure. If many cities and states go their separate way, the result will recreate the public safety tower of Babel characterized by interoperability failures, costly custombuilt equipment, and inefficient use of expensive infrastructure and valuable spectrum. At the same time, some of these states and cities are understandably anxious to move forward quickly on infrastructure that can save lives. FirstNet can keep them interested in being part of a nationwide system by making clear that concrete benefits are coming soon to every state that backs the FirstNet plan. FirstNet must move quickly, and this urgency should affect the approach to deployment.

Use what we have

The best way to provide useful services nationwide quickly and with limited funding is to leverage commercial infrastructure and technology as much as possible. However, there are strong forces pulling in different directions. Some public safety advocates envision a nationwide public safety infrastructure that is built specifically for public safety and does not make use of existing commercial systems, much as today’s LMR (land mobile radio) public safety systems do not make use of commercial systems. This vision is based in part on the traditional view of public safety agencies that they should be in complete control of their resources, without the need to negotiate with commercial providers, and it is based in part on misconceptions about how far the budget can go. Under the 2012 law, this is simply not feasible, as it would take significant time to roll out all-new infrastructure nationwide and cost far more than $7 billion. Moreover, much of the money and time would be spent building infrastructure in densely populated areas that are already well served by multiple commercial providers. Even with infinite budget and time to deploy, this is not the ideal solution for public safety. When this stand-alone network is not functioning, perhaps because a tornado hit a public safety tower, emergency responders would have no communications at all.

On the other side, there are those who envision emergency responders relying entirely on the products and services emerging from the commercial market. This might be profitable for the carriers, but it would also fail to meet public safety needs, as many public safety representatives have pointed out. It is obvious that there are parts of rural America that will not get LTE coverage any time soon, so emergency responders there cannot rely on the commercial market. Less obvious is the fact that even big cities include areas where signal reliability is inadequate for emergency response, and the cost of extending infrastructure to serve these areas better is not justified based on the number of paying subscribers who live there. Like coverage, infrastructure dependability is also a concern. Profit-seeking commercial carriers do not always have the incentive to provide sufficient power backup or physical hardening to meet public safety standards. Similar issues exist in the handsets. Although public safety agencies can reduce costs by using components mass-produced for the consumer market wherever possible, emergency responders need features that may not emerge from a commercial market without a certain degree of coaxing. Of particular importance is the ability for user devices to communicate directly with each other, rather than requiring that all communications pass through a cellular tower. (Engineers in the Internet world refer to this as “ad hoc networking,” and public safety users refer to it as “talk-around.”)

Considering these limitations, the best path is a hybrid strategy that leverages commercial infrastructure where possible, supplements it where necessary, and allows significant progress in a short time. A number of actions could be taken that would shift FirstNet’s emphasis in its early years to taking advantage of existing commercial capabilities without compromising the overall approach of the FirstNet plan.

Priority roaming agreements. Although deploying infrastructure that operates in the mostly idle 20 MHz of spectrum that has been allocated to public safety is certainly worth doing, the best way to make high-quality LTE services available through much of the nation quickly and at little initial cost is by establishing priority roaming agreements with commercial carriers. With a priority roaming agreement, an emergency responder can tap into a commercial network and have priority access, thereby guaranteeing good quality of service even when the network is congested with traffic from non-emergency responders. LTE offers a wide range of sophisticated features that support priority access, although negotiating the specific details with each carrier will require care. Indeed, in any region where this is possible, priority roaming agreements should be established with multiple carriers.

This has several enormous advantages. One is capacity. There are roughly 3 million U.S. police, fire, and emergency medical services workers, but the commercial cellular infrastructure was designed to support over 320 million subscribers. Even in severe emergencies such as a terrorist dirty bomb attack in Manhattan, commercial networks can offer more capacity than prominent public safety groups have estimated they would need, and still have a lot of capacity left for civilian users. Moreover, being able to roam onto two networks increases capacity available to public safety by far more than the obvious factor of two, because devices such as mobile video cameras that require high data rates can connect to the closest cell tower, regardless of provider. For a given amount of spectrum, the transmission rate achievable near the center of a cell is more than an order of magnitude greater than what is achievable near the edge of the cell. As long as cell towers of different carriers are not collocated, a device can often choose its carrier so that it operates near the center of a cell, and therefore requires far less spectrum. Another advantage is fault tolerance. If just one network, government or commercial, is working, emergency responders can communicate. Coverage is similarly improved, because a location is covered as long as a device there can connect to any one of the networks operating in its region.

Most important given the immediate constraints on First-Net, priority roaming agreements can be established quickly. Although some public safety representatives have expressed concerns about roaming costs, the cost should be less than many people expect, assuming that the prices paid by public safety agencies are no higher than those paid by the general public. Roaming charges are probably proportional to public safety traffic, whereas infrastructure costs are fixed independent of utilization. One cost study showed that roaming is less expensive than building new infrastructure in the long run if and only if the average utilization of the dedicated infrastructure built for public safety is under 10% for the multiyear life of the equipment. By its nature, public safety traffic comes in bursts; utilization can be quite high during large emergencies but is very low most of the time. Utilization of a public safety network may exceed 10% in many areas, making build-out beneficial in the long run. However, utilization probably won’t exceed 10% by much, meaning that priority roaming is a reasonably cost-effective alternative. In the most severe localized emergencies, which might take place over a few square miles, typical roaming charges have been shown to be small as compared to other costs, such as the overtime of emergency responders. The same cannot always be said for emergencies that affect very large areas, such as hurricanes, but there are other ways to protect the budgets of state and local agencies in these extreme cases.

Targeted infrastructure build-out. Because the FirstNet budget will not support nationwide deployment of infrastructure that operates in the public safety band, there will be a strong temptation to spend limited resources in a way that covers as many people as possible. In the short term, when funding is limited and the sense of urgency is great, this is precisely the wrong approach; it does not take full advantage of priority roaming. Initially, priority should be given to areas that meet one of two criteria. The first is that coverage in an area is not sufficient using only priority roaming onto commercial carriers. This may mean bringing coverage to rural areas that have none, but it also means filling in gaps that are important for public safety in urban and suburban areas, such as Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC.

The other criterion for selecting an area for early buildout is if that area will not require government funding. In some parts of the country, commercial providers will be happy to subsidize the build-out as long as they can provide commercial services over any capacity not needed for emergency responders. This creates an opportunity for a public/private partnership. As discussed above, public safety utilization is likely to be low much of the time, and this idle capacity can be quite valuable, at least in big cities where demand is greatest. Indeed, commercial carriers may pay for the privilege of serving public safety in return for access to public safety spectrum. Unfortunately, judging from earlier studies, these arrangements are probably only profitable for carriers in big cities. (There are those who hope to use this strategy to fund a truly nationwide build-out, and they are likely to be disappointed.)

Sharing infrastructure. In areas where commercial carriers already operate in their own spectrum, it is possible to deploy equipment that will “light” the public safety band as well by sharing many components, and this can greatly reduce costs. This may also involve some form of public/private partnership. When doing its cost estimates, the FCC looked at a variety of these cost-saving sharing arrangements. For example, under the sharing agreement, public safety may be able to make use of some or all of the following: existing cell towers, antennae, cabling, radio processing equipment, backup power facilities, and the communications links between cell towers and the nearest communications hub. According to FCC estimates, capital costs would be 2.5 times greater without this form of sharing. Savings are even greater with a synchronous roll-out; i.e., if the radio area networks operating in the public safety band are deployed at the same time as commercial systems are upgraded to LTE. Despite the tremendous cost savings, the approach has its detractors, because as long as funding is viewed as unlimited, it is easier for a government agency to build infrastructure if it does not have to cooperate with commercial companies.

There is a risk when public safety begins to rely on infrastructure owned by commercial operators for its basic operation. Unlike priority roaming arrangements, public safety will generally rely on a single provider in any given location. Initially, carriers may compete with each other to obtain this business, but once one is chosen, FirstNet must avoid becoming locked into that operator, as this would allow the operator to demand unreasonably high rents when the contract is renewed. Risk of capture can be reduced by signing long-term contracts and soliciting bids for followon contracts several years before an existing contract expires. Moreover, carriers are much less likely to use their incumbent position to charge higher rents in big cities where carriers derive significant benefits from access to public safety spectrum. Thus, it might be helpful when negotiating sharing arrangements to pair these cities with rural areas and require carriers to share infrastructure throughout the combined areas.

Note that if this kind of infrastructure sharing with commercial carriers can be used to bring wireless services to emergency responders in a given area, then priority roaming can also be used to provide those same services. If the only goal were to serve these areas as soon as possible, priority roaming would probably be the better choice, but infrastructure sharing is cost-effective where average utilization is high. Thus, both arrangements are desirable in the long run.

Multiband mobile devices. Infrastructure is worthless without mobile devices to use it. Negotiating with device manufacturers and standards bodies to create devices that meet public safety needs should be a high priority for First-Net. To obtain the benefits of priority roaming discussed above, devices must operate in the 20-MHz public safety band as well as bands operated by multiple commercial carriers. Some devices must be more rugged than is typical for the consumer market. Eventually, devices will be needed that support applications of importance to public safety, such as push-to-talk voice communications. This latter capability requires changes in the infrastructure as well as the handset and should be addressed in the standard-setting bodies.

FirstNet can gain the attention of manufacturers and standards bodies as long as it has the support of public safety agencies nationwide. If all of these agencies say they will purchase devices for local police and firefighters as long as those devices meet technical specifications set by FirstNet, then manufacturers will listen. The more states and cities opt out, the less effective this approach will be.

Mobile ad hoc networks. As proposed in the National Broadband Plan, fixed infrastructure should be supplemented with mobile devices that can form ad hoc networks, which means that the mobile devices in a region can communicate among themselves, even if there is no fixed infrastructure such as a working cell tower nearby. FirstNet can also make this happen. A good place to start would be to encourage agencies to equip police cars and fire trucks with such devices. This is a relatively inexpensive way to extend the reach of public safety infrastructure. In a location where the public safety network is reachable outdoors but not indoors, the mobile device on a fire truck may extend coverage into a burning building. Moreover, mobile devices that can form ad hoc networks are invaluable in areas where there is no functioning infrastructure, perhaps after a hurricane or earthquake. At least users in the disaster area could communicate with each other, even if they need some other means to communicate with people far away. FirstNet can make this happen in part by making sure that there is a common standard for public safety agencies nationwide and authentication services for those devices, so that even devices from different agencies can work together and can do so without serious risk of a security breach. Because it serves the nation, FirstNet is also better positioned than any state or municipality to ensure that there are stores of mobile devices that can be moved to a major disaster wherever it occurs.

FirstNet is now positioned to provide emergency responders with high-speed mobile data services, at lower cost, higher spectral efficiency, and greater dependability than we have seen with previous public safety systems. To reach this potential, they must move quickly. The key to making rapid progress at low cost is leveraging commercial infrastructure and commercial technology. This begins by establishing priority roaming agreements with multiple commercial carriers and aggregating the demand of public safety agencies nationwide to convince device manufactures and standards bodies to meet public safety needs. Without rapid progress, there is a danger that states and municipalities will go their own separate ways, and this historic opportunity will be lost.

For more than five decades, fuel cells have been heralded for their potential as a cost-efficient, environmentally friendly means to convert readily available chemical energy into electric energy. So far this potential has not been realized. In the United States, the foremost reason is that the federal government and the fuel cell industry have pursued a host of research programs that never systematically addressed underlying causes of fuel cell challenges, including reliability, longevity, and cost. Also in this process, the research community, which should have been a key player in this pursuit, has largely been on the sidelines. As a result, the fuel cell industry remains saddled with products that cannot compete with conventional sources of electric power. To set things right, the federal government should implement a national project to support basic research activity dedicated to obtaining detailed knowledge of fuel cell electrochemical operations aimed at solving fuel cell challenges and ultimately attaining commercially viable fuel cell products—at the earliest opportunity.

Fuel cells are singularly remarkable in their potential for efficiently converting the energy locked up in chemical bonds to electrical energy. This efficiency is achieved because fuel cells convert the chemical energy contained in a fuel into electrical energy in a single step, extracting more useful energy from the same amount of fuel than any other known device. An internal combustion engine, for example, requires several steps: converting chemical energy contained in gasoline to thermal energy via combustion, using the thermal energy to expand gases within the engine’s cylinders, and then converting the high-pressure gas to mechanical energy via the pistons and drive train. Because they rely on so many energy conversion steps, internal combustion engines are inherently inefficient and lose much energy to incomplete combustion and exhaust heat. As a result, most internal combustion engines deliver an average efficiency of less than 20%.

Fuel cells can deliver at least twice that efficiency. Moreover, if a fuel cell’s exhaust heat is exploited, total efficiency can be even higher. An internal combustion engine is most efficient under full operational loads (that is why car mileage is lower in city driving) and only at certain minimum engine sizes. A fuel cell, on the other hand, delivers high efficiency even while operating under partial design loads, and its high efficiency is scalable from very small units to very large units.

Fuel cells most commonly use hydrogen to generate electricity, but can use various other fuels, including gasoline, natural gas, ethanol, and methanol. Because of their efficiency, fuel cells using carbon-based fuels create less carbon dioxide and no other emissions, such as nitrogen oxide, that would harm the earth’s atmosphere. Hydrogen presents even a better future. Fuel cells using hydrogen generate no emissions (other than water) and so would have the least environmental impact. Moreover, hydrogen is inexhaustible on earth and can be produced from water through renewable forms of energy— including sun, wind, water, geothermal energy, and biomass—that are readily available in every country. Given their high efficiency, fuels cells, no matter the type, would also slow the depletion of the earth’s fossil fuel resources.

In the long run, fuel cell technology can cause a profound change in quality of life on a global scale. The technology has the potential to give individual citizens the ability to generate clean electricity at home instead of buying it from commercial power plants. Such plants commonly burn coal (and thus emit considerable amounts of carbon and other pollutants), and the electricity they produce is often delivered over great distances by an electrical grid that has high transmission losses and is susceptible to frequent—sometimes catastrophic—failures. Individuals also could drive cars that operate on hydrogen instead of gasoline, thereby dramatically reducing their carbon footprint. Fuel cell technology can spur the development of new classes of energy demand and supply systems, transportation systems, and industrial and manufacturing systems around the globe, while generating trillions of dollars in new revenue. In addition, oil importing nations can cut down on the use of oil, thereby gaining greater independence from oil-producing nations, enhancing their energy security, economic security, environmental security, and the national security.

When fossil fuel is depleted or becomes very costly to obtain, the world will be left with only three energy-conversion options: nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and renewable energy. The first two options face serious obstacles. Nuclear fission uses uranium, which like oil is a natural resource with high access cost. It also generates long-lived, hazardous radioactive wastes. Nuclear fusion will not be ready for another 40 years. Fusion-powered electricity generation was initially believed to be as achievable as fission power. However, the extreme requirements for continuous reactions and plasma containment have led to projections of feasibility being extended out by several decades. In 2010, more than 60 years after the first attempts, commercial power production is still believed to be unlikely before 2050.

Renewable energy, at least in today’s most common forms, also faces obstacles. Common renewable energy technologies depend on sunshine and wind or biofuels, which are either intermittent, unreliable, or environmentally unfriendly. The best option with renewable energy will be, without doubt, the fuel cell.

Effort, but little progress

The federal government and its partners in industry have long recognized the promise of fuel cells and have worked together to develop fuel cell technology, infrastructure, and manufacturing capabilities. The government alone has devoted billions of dollars in research and development to fuel cell technology in the past 50 years, and corporations have invested similar amounts.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has been in the lead in promoting fuel cell development over the past two decades, spending $2.4 billion on applications research and product development. Most of the effort has focused on developing four types of fuel cells intended for generating power for electric utilities, and on a fifth type, which has received attention more recently, for generating power for vehicles.

But public and private efforts have not delivered on their promise. They have yielded almost no products that can compete with conventional power sources, at least without subsidies and tax credits. Major impediments to fuel cell commercialization include insufficient longevity, reliability, and, in many cases, unacceptably high cost.

Here is a brief summary of these efforts and the results that were achieved:

Alkaline fuel cells. In the 1960s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was searching for a source of long-endurance power on manned space flight missions, and decided that alkaline fuel cells (AFCs) would be promising. Rather than try to develop AFCs on its own, the agency asked the United Technologies Corporation to develop them. The company succeeded, and its AFCs were used for the Apollo missions to the moon, the Skylab space station, the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous and docking mission, and subsequently the Space Shuttle Program. After achieving success in space missions, the company attempted to adapt its technology to terrestrial applications. But it ran into a major problem: AFC performance is easily degraded by very small amounts of carbon dioxide. AFCs used in space missions could be physically isolated from any carbon dioxide generated by the astronauts, and so this was not an issue for these applications. But removing all carbon dioxide from ambient air on earth would be extremely expensive, and so AFCs built for terrestrial applications had short lifetimes and consequent high cost. After considerable effort to solve the problem, the company eventually abandoned the idea. Today, no U.S. companies are engaged in R&D on alkaline fuel cells.

Phosphoric acid fuel cells. DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy began funding development projects for phosphoric acid fuel cells (PAFCs) in the mid-1970s, in collaboration with several industry-funded groups, including the Gas Research Institute, the Electric Power Research Institute, and an electric utility consortium. The United Technologies Corporation was the primary contractor. The government and industry undertook this joint effort out of concerns about the cost of controlling emissions from coal-based plants and the rise in cost, complexity, and procedural delays for nuclear installations. After a series of efforts to scale up its PAFC systems to reduce cost, United Technologies began, with DOE’s blessing, to promote its technology for commercial sale. But the high price tag discouraged U.S. electric utilities from making any purchases of the company’s initial 11 megawatt power plant. A typical PAFC power plant was priced at $4,360 per kilowatt hour (kW), and installation costs added an additional $2,000/kW. This was more than six times the nominal $1,000/kW cost for conventional power plants.

Despite the lack of interest from utility companies, the company moved ahead with commercialization of a 200 kW system in the early 1990s. Just as DOE’s support for R&D ended, the federal government began to assist United Technologies by offering a series of subsidy programs that promoted commercialization of the company’s PAFC power plants. These programs remained in place for two decades, but they did not succeed in establishing a going market for the technology. In December 2012, the company sold its power unit (UTC Power) to CleanEdge Power, a small fuel cell company. This effectively ended some 50 years support by United Technologies to promote fuel cell technology—the last major U.S. corporation in the fuel cell industry.

By the time DOE terminated its support, it had spent $300 million on various PAFC power plant development activities. Although the government’s funding assisted the private sector to scale up PAFC technology and demonstrate pilot power plants in the field, the efforts did not solve fuel cell price-performance problems and failed to achieve a level competitive field with other sources of electric power.

Molten carbonate fuel cells. DOE’s support, through its Office of Fossil Energy, for molten carbonate fuel cells (MCFCs) yielded equally depressing results. Funding for initial technology development began in 1975 and continued for 30 years, ultimately reaching $481 million by 2005.

With federal funding, companies were able to scale up their systems and conduct field demonstrations of pilot power plants. But MCFC power plants remained extremely expensive and were sold only with major subsidies and other incentives. Today, only one U.S. manufacturer—Fuel Cell Energy—offers power plants of this type, but the company’s position in the business is increasingly tenuous. Its records indicate that 94% of sales in the United States were concentrated in Connecticut and California, states where subsidies were the most generous. Few other states showed interest. Also, the company depends increasingly on POSCO Energy of South Korea. Sales to POSCO increased from 6.4% of total sales in 2009 to 44% in 2011. Moreover, Fuel Cell Energy has licensed POSCO Energy to use its technology to build power plants in South Korea, eroding the company’s prospects as a manufacturer of MCFCs.

Solid oxide fuel cells. In 1977, DOE’s Office of Fuel Energy signed a five-year, $202 million agreement with Westinghouse— later Siemens Westinghouse Power Corporation— to improve its unique tubular design for solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). The design involved forming small hollow tubes with cell components layered on the inside wall of the tubes. The technology proved exceptionally difficult to master, however, and by 2003 lifetimes still were too short and costs were too high to be commercially viable. In 2010, the parent company, Siemens of Germany, put the SOFC business up for sale, after investing more than $1.5 billion and running the company for 10 years.

Having watched this effort fail, DOE launched a 10-year R&D program in 2000 that focused on new planar designs, where components are assembled in flat stacks one on top of the other as well as more innovative tubular designs for SOFCs. Called the Solid State Energy Conversion Alliance (SECA) program, it was intended to develop an SOFC system that would cost as little as $400/kW by 2010, which was a remarkable goal, considering that the Siemens-Westinghouse designs cost in the range of $17,000 to $26,000/kW.

A critical component of DOE’s plan was to undertake basic research—a step that represented a departure from its previous support for fuel cells. The SECA program instituted a core technology team that would conduct basic research to support the industry teams that would design and fabricate the fuel cells and systems. The core technology team was made up of research entities, including universities, national laboratories, and small businesses, and was to engage in precompetitive research that addressed issues common to all industry teams. The goal was to identify and isolate the underlying causes of fuel cell performance problems in order to drive down costs.

Unfortunately, the SECA program suffered from constant tinkering with its goals. Over a period of five years, SECA was transformed into a program to develop a class of SOFC power plants that would be fueled by coal gas and would produce electricity in the megawatt range; then it was incorporated into a FutureGen initiative to build a fossilfuel power plant that would produce electricity and hydrogen gas without harmful emissions; and transformed yet again into a FutureGen initiative that would use so-called Oxy-Fuel technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions. By the end of the decade, SECA’s fundamental cost reduction goals, which were critical to successful commercialization of SOFCs, had been entirely lost.

One of the more disheartening consequences of these changes was that SECA’s core technology research program lost focus. Although the program received more than $467 million between 2000 and 2010, relatively little went to its basic R&D mission. Consequently, the core technology team did not examine the fundamental principles and mechanisms regarding the physics of fuel cell electrochemistry as it had intended. Rather, it gave priority to “symptomatic relief ” of fuel cell performance problems. Projects became so small in scale—many were under $1 million—that they could not advance fuel cell technology and enable a paradigm shift in cost and longevity. In the end, with lack of funding and commitment by DOE, the SECA program effectively ended in 2012.

Today, the SOFC industry in the United States lacks focus and a clear path for growth. There are about a half dozen SOFC developers in the country; none has publicly disclosed its profitability. Overall, the history of SOFCs is a familiar one: in the absence of a SECA-like project that would systematically support basic research, it is very unlikely that the SOFC industry will achieve breakthroughs in power densities and efficiencies that would yield competitive cost-performance.

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Throughout the 1990s, DOE, through its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, supported a small amount of R&D on proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). That changed in 2002 when the Secretary of Energy announced implementation of the FreedomCAR Initiative to develop fuel cell vehicles that would run on hydrogen fuel. In the following year, President George Bush, in his State of the Union Address, announced the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative, which aimed at developing technologies and infrastructure to produce, store, and distribute hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles. The two initiatives were combined into the Freedom-Car and Fuel Partnership.

The partnership ran into implementation problems almost from the start. It inherited the existing organization, the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, that had been formed in 1993 by the federal government and a group called USCAR, an association of Big Three U.S. automakers. This arrangement clearly did not serve the purpose of advancing fuel cell technology R&D. The automakers had commitments to conventional automotive technologies, which discouraged them from focusing on long-term, high-risk fuel cell R&D, particularly if near-term combustion engine technologies were competing for the same funding. So not surprisingly, fuel cell R&D always received a smaller share of funds than hydrogen or conventional vehicle technologies within the total budget.

Reflecting the disadvantaged position of fuel cells in the FreedomCar and Fuel Partnership, the budget devoted to PEMFCs fluctuated constantly. It increased from about $20 million under the original partnership arrangement to as much as $64 million in 2004, declined to $34 million by 2006, only to increase again and decline again in the next few years. Throughout the decade, these fluctuations likely made long-term equitable planning for fuel cell R&D difficult and might have resulted in multiple, insignificant, unrelated, short-term projects. In contrast, the budget for conventional vehicle technologies always received much more funding each year, with no ups and downs. Total funding for the FreedomCAR and Fuel Partnership amounted to $1.6 billion (2002-2012), which was spread among R&D for fuel cells, hydrogen storage technology, advanced combustion and emission control, vehicle systems analysis, and other initiatives. Of the total, fuel cell R&D received $500 million, about 30%.

Was the fuel cell R&D program under the partnership effective? The National Research Council (NRC) reviewed the program and offered mixed findings. In its 2010 report, the review committee spoke well of some of the achievements in the program. It cited an increase in demonstrated lifetimes of fuel cell stacks for on-road vehicles. Indeed, the partnership likely facilitated the entry of some PEMFC products into niche markets, including forklifts and backup power applications. Still, DOE’s 2012 annual progress report stipulated that these products were cost competitive only if subsidies of $3,000/kW were provided and only if they were used for low-power, short duration applications.

The NRC, however, was clearly disappointed that no single fuel cell technology achieved a performance-cost point that would make it competitive with conventional vehicle technologies. In fact, few PEMFCs developed under the program were deployed in the automakers’ own fuel cell vehicles. At the same time, U.S. automakers do not seem to have any near-term plans for new development or commercial launch of fuel cell vehicles.

Why so hard?

What makes fuel cell technology so difficult to master? The answer is simple. Fuel cell operations are complex and the necessary research has not been systematically done to master them. Ironically, this state of affairs is partly due to the fact that it is easy to make a single working fuel cell in the lab, but building fuel cell stacks that generate useful power reliably, efficiently, and cheaply is another matter entirely. History is full of stories in which fuel cell companies developed moderately functional fuel cells, scaled them up for commercial applications (often with government assistance), and rushed the product to market. They subsequently found that their fuel cells did not work well. No matter how many times they encountered problems of cost or efficiency or reliability, however, they always believed things could be fixed with a little more time and a little more money. They were looking for tactical fixes when strategic solutions were needed.

The challenge of making reliable, efficient fuel cells is rooted in the complexities of how they operate, which involves multiple chemical and physical interactions at the atomic level. Perhaps no advanced technology on the market today—including airplanes, computers, or even nuclear reactors—requires the scale, magnitude, and range of scientific, physical, and engineering knowledge that fuel cell technology requires.

Science is making progress, however. Recently, some scientists have successfully applied advanced research tools to understand fuel cell operations at the atomic level and are developing theories to explain details of fuel cell processes. Several examples suggest that this type of work, if integrated into a single collaborative effort, could achieve groundbreaking discoveries that would ultimately lead to viable commercial products:

• Researchers at Tohoku University recently demonstrated how computational chemistry can advance fuel cell development. They linked computationally obtained images with the images obtained from transmission electron microscopy and proved for the first time how computational chemistry can duplicate real-life degradation [of the catalysts? of the electricity-producing materials?] in fuel cells. They have used this discovery to develop a theory of such phenomena, which will help to lay the groundwork to fix the problem.

• Researchers at Yamanashi University and Waseda University, working with others at Shimadzu Corporation, Fuji Electric, and Hitachi, have succeeded in imaging the oxygen distribution within a fuel cell stack for the first time. They used a chemical reagent that absorbs light and emits light of a specific wavelength when oxygen is present and captured an image of oxygen distribution with a charge-coupled device camera. The visualization of the inner working of a fuel cell stack could reveal mechanisms of fuel cell deterioration. They are currently working on the simultaneous visualization of humidity, steam, water, temperature, and carbon dioxide within a fuel cell stack.

• Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have used a novel microscopy method called electrochemical strain microscopy to successfully examine the dynamics of oxygen reduction/evolution reactions in fuel cell materials, which may reveal ways to redesign or cut the costs of the energy devices. According to the researchers, if they can find a way to understand the operation of the fuel cell on the basic elementary level and determine what will make it work in the most optimum fashion, it would create an entirely new window of opportunity for the development of better materials and devices.

• Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed nonprecious-metal catalysts using use carbon, iron, and cobalt to avoid the use of expensive platinum catalysts in hydrogen fuel cells. The team says its next step will be to better understand the mechanism underlying the carbon-iron-cobalt catalyst. Such an understanding could lead to improvements in nonprecious-metal catalysts, further increasing their efficiency and lifespan.

Too valuable to abandon

In considering the disappointing experience with fuel cells, the federal government faces a choice. One option would be to abandon fuel cell development altogether. Another option would be to provide assistance to sustain the temporary survival of the industry. Neither of these options is attractive—or necessary.

Rather, the government can implement what we see as a National Fuel Cell Development Project (NFCDP) that would focus on basic research. Over the past decades, the U.S. federal government, with other governments worldwide, have worked vigorously to help their fuel cell industries build technical capabilities that yielded little economic return. These efforts rested on an assumption that fuel cell technology could be developed into commercially viable products, given enough investment and time to make incremental improvements through applied research and product development. But despite the best of intentions, the fuel cell industry remains in a commercial cul-de-sac and continues to ask for government assistance for survival, including demonstration projects, tax incentives, and subsidies for lowering purchase costs and building a hydrogen infrastructure. Governments are reluctant to stop fuel cell subsidies because they have already invested so much in the industry. And yet, they cannot continue the same policy and subsidy program as before. It is expensive, unproductive, and never ending.

The only viable path ahead is the NFCDP. The federal government should support a basic research strategy and do so as a matter of urgent national priority. Indeed, the NFCDP would focus solely on adding basic research as a key component to the traditional mix of applied research and product development activities that DOE has been implementing for years.

Once fuel cell technology is fully understood and the mechanisms that effect fuel cell performance are known, the fuel cell industry would be able to produce commercially feasible fuel cell prototypes, test them, and acquire solution to every remaining problem within the NFCDP framework. Large-scale simulation, best exemplified by the automotive and aerospace industries, if also implemented, would expedite the commercialization building up from materials and fundamental understanding all the way to manufacturing and distribution of fuel cell products to the marketplace. Thus, the industry could launch commercial products virtually immediately when the project ends, because it already would have a mature technology, well-developed manufacturing capabilities, and marketing infrastructure in place.

The bottom line is that if fuel cell applications are to be successful, basic research must first be successful. Although basic research, applied research, and product development would co-exist in the NFCDP, it should set basic research as its central and primary mission from the start. The project should ensure that basic research always be given the highest priority and that it be kept unencumbered from applied research and product development. Without this protection, basic research will not be able to compete with other research activities; research would likely be directed to abandon its knowledge-seeking mission and shift toward forprofit research that is normally carried out through applied research and product development activities.

At the same time, however, the NFCDP will not be successful unless it links basic scientific research and hypotheses generation to technology development and the empirical data acquired by industry. (This flow is illustrated in Figure 1.) Throughout the life of the project, therefore, the fuel cell industry should have complete access to the NFCDP’s research findings and discoveries and be encouraged to apply these to product development and manufacturing activities. Industry should give the NFCDP continuous feedback on whether fuel cell technology was becoming more durable, efficient, and cost effective. It is essential that industry be fully integrated with the project from start to finish and that companies receive strong incentives to share their information on fuel cell technology and assurance that proprietary data will be protected. The repeated cycle of hypothesis, verification, and data exchange between basic research and applied research and product development will yield improvements in knowledge of fuel cell performance with every step.

What it will take?

The NFCDP’s central and vital mission would necessitate assembling a highly talented cadre of scientists and engineers from all related disciplines in the research, academic, and industry communities. Together they would comprise a critical mass of expertise, knowledge, wisdom, and practical know-how that has never been gathered before for this purpose. The team should be practically and virtually colocated to ensure that team members will be able to integrate their knowledge and collaborate on discoveries in all phases of the project. Most importantly, the team must be led by a strong, can-do manager who has direct access to the nation’s most senior leadership.

The project should be backed at the highest level of priority associated with national energy security policy. Project leaders should be placed directly under the president and be provided with ample resources to explore all possible technology options and momentous freedom. Project leaders also should be granted broad authority to take whatever actions needed, including hiring and firing top leaders and enlisting the nation’s top-quality research cadre.

The NFCDP should have unrestricted access to the national laboratories. They have served as the federal government’s core institutions dedicated to basic R&D and should be deployed as the core of the project’s R&D infrastructure. Importantly, the project must be supported with ample financial resources and extensive research facilities. A research period as long as five years would be desirable to encourage the stability of the research team and continuity of the research environment, while still ensuring that the research team is focused on the tasks at hand. Major technical hurdles can be overcome only through intense, massive investment of resources in a concentrated period.

As a first step toward this goal, a Blue Ribbon committee of top leaders from national research laboratories, industry, and funding agencies should be assembled, under the leadership of the National Academy of Sciences, and charged with preparing a detailed blueprint for implementing the NFCDP.

Among other actions, the committee should identify specific areas of research to be explored. Probable areas of research likely might include the discovery and detailed characterization of fuel cell electrochemical processes and operations; development of a theoretical understanding and empirical validation of underlying causes that drive performance shortfalls, such as cell degradation and insufficient longevity, reliability, and robustness; and exploration of transformational technologies that would enable creation of revolutionary fuel cell types, catalysts, and supporting components using new, less expensive materials. The committee also should identify a range of disciplines that will be needed to support research activities. Research areas likely will include computational chemistry, molecular chemistry, surface chemistry, quantum chemistry, quantum electrodynamics, electromagnetism, mechanical engineering, metallurgical engineering, materials science, mathematics, molecular dynamics, quantum dynamics, thermodynamics, nanotechnology, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, atomic and molecular physics, experimental physics, computational physics, nuclear and particle physics, quantum physics, solid-state physics, theoretical physics, and many more.

Of course, there is no guarantee that an effort such as the NFCDP would lead to delivering successful products; it is a necessary, but not sufficient step. Without it, however, there is no reason to believe that fuel cells will make enough progress to become commercially viable. History has proven that to be the case many times over.

Regardless of who would implement the National Fuel Cell Development Project, whether it is the United States or some other country, the world would benefit equally, in terms of a higher standard of living and a cleaner environment. The time to begin is now. Society has in its grasp the scientific and technical know-how to uncover the secrets of the fuel cell—to discover how it works, why it works, and how it can be made to work better.

Overall life expectancy

The report examines the nature and strength of the evidence on life expectancy and health in the United States, comparing U.S. data with statistics from 16 “peer” countries—other established high-income democracies such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan. For many years Americans have been dying at younger ages than people in almost all other high-income countries, a disadvantage that has been growing for three decades, especially among women.

Set of 17 high income countries ranked by life expectancy at birth, 2007

Lost years of potential life

A measure of years of life lost before age 50 illustrates the amount of premature deaths. The measure shows how many additional years would be lived before age 50 if deaths from a cause were eliminated. Overall, the measure shows that the U.S. loses a larger number of years of life to all disease and injury causes than do any other comparison countries for which comparable data are available. This is true for both males and females younger than age 50.

The causes of extra years of life lost

Deaths from injury—homicide, motor vehicle accidents, and other injuries— contribute more than half of the excess mortality for American males under 50. Noncommunicable diseases are also heavy contributors. For females, injuries also contribute but noncommunicable diseases and perinatal conditions contribute a large part of the excess years of life lost.

Where the United States differs from its peers in cause of death

Closer analysis of the data indicates which causes of death contribute the most to the years of life lost before age 50 in the United States compared to its peer countries. Homicides are particularly prominent for males, whereas noncommunicable diseases and perinatal conditions are more significant for females.

Reaching the middle class

In “Pathways to the Middle Class: Balancing Personal and Public Responsibilities” (Issues, Winter 2013), Isabel Sawhill, Scott Winship, and Kerry Searle Grannis present achievable early milestones sufficient for people to reach the middle class by middle age. They provide an instructive framework for understanding the circumstances that lead children and young adults to succeed—or fall down—while climbing the economic ladder. Understanding these opportunities and pitfalls helps policymakers better design and target interventions that increase children’s likelihood of success.

Consistent with academic research, Sawhill et al. emphasize the importance of early childhood success for future outcomes. Differences in school readiness by income and race appear among children as young as age 4 or 5, and early interventions can help equalize the playing field for disadvantaged children. Early childhood education programs to increase school readiness, such as Head Start, increase the chance that a child will attain a middle-class income by middle age. The evidence suggests that expanding pre-kindergarten programs more broadly would improve adult outcomes.

Sawhill et al. also emphasize the importance of family in successful childrearing. Some express concern that increased government intervention in early childhood education supplants parents’ role in raising their young children. However, the evidence from the Head Start Impact Study, in which certain children were randomly chosen to be eligible for Head Start, shows the opposite: Head Start enrollment increases the time parents spend with their children. For example, Head Start enrollment leads parents to spend 20% more time reading to their children on average, and it leads absent fathers to spend an average of around one day a month more with their children. These increases in parental involvement are sustained, lasting at least several years after children are enrolled in Head Start.

College attainment represents a later milestone in the pathway to the middle class. However, as Sawhill et al. point out, children’s college completion rates are highly correlated with parents’ socio economic status, in part because enrollment and graduation require significant family resources. This socioeconomic gap has widened over time, hardening income persistence across generations. The federal government plays a key role in increasing college attainment by expanding college accessibility through its variety of financial aid programs. Need-based financial aid, such as subsidized Stafford loans and Pell grants, specifically targets low-income students who might otherwise not be able to afford college.

As Sawhill et al. argue, success begets success and public policy interventions can prevent initial disadvantages from becoming entrenched over time. James Heckman’s work has shown that successful interventions at one stage of life increase the effectiveness of interventions at other stages. This suggests an “all-of-the-above” strategy to broadly target achieving the milestones at each stage of life identified by Sawhill et al.

JANICE EBERLY

Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist
U.S. Treasury
Washington, DC

The detailed, data-packed article by Sawhill et al. is important on many fronts. Among other things, it points out that even though early intervenis especially powerful, and even though early disadvantage casts a long shadow over lifelong prospects, it is never too late to make a difference in a person’s life trajectory. It also offers numerical estimates of risk over a lifetime, which helps to answer such perennial questions as “how great is the disadvantage imposed by limited education, gender and other life circumstances? “ In the aggregate, such data help explain the concept of social mobility in America, including what is at stake and when to intervene.

One aspect of the presentation deserves particular praise, and that is the authors’ clear-eyed focus on beginning at the beginning, which is not early childhood—not “zero to three”—but rather the circumstances under which pregnancy occurs. With rare exceptions, this article being one the social interventions typically highlighted to help build stronger children and families begin after pregnancy is confirmed. For example, child and family advocates often argue for more programs to encourage early participation in prenatal care, more programs to support adequate maternal nutrition, more home-visiting programs to begin instruction on parenting, and so on. These are good ideas, on balance, but rarely do these same advocates talk openly about the circumstances surrounding conception itself; that is, when (before high school or more is completed)? with whom (a committed partner)? and under what circumstances (while in heavy debt or facing other serious challenges)? In contrast, the Sawhill et al. article makes abundantly clear that a child’s risk of becoming or remaining poor is deeply affected by maternal age and education as well as the extent to which a pregnancy is marital or nonmarital, intended or unintended—all of which are circumstances that can be ameliorated to a greater or lesser extent before pregnancy occurs.

To begin at the real beginning means that social policy would give a great deal more attention to pregnancy planning and prevention: to helping young people complete an adequate amount of education before becoming parents, to encouraging them to choose mates carefully given that raising a child is expensive and requires many years of dedication, and to avoiding unplanned, unintended pregnancy. Without a willingness to begin at the real beginning, reducing income inequality and strengthening the overall prospects of all Americans will remain less effective and more expensive than necessary.

SARAH BROWN

Chief Executive Officer
National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy
Washington, DC

Talk of inequality has been in political campaigns and in the media in recent months. Sawhill and her colleagues make a crucial contribution by documenting the challenges that low-income children face in succeeding in school and life: Sadly, in today’s America, economically disadvantaged children have a much lower chance of reaching the middle class than their parents and grandparents did.

With this powerful finding in mind, what becomes most important is understanding the challenges that these young people face and the opportunities that can improve their academic and vocational chances. When they experience misfortunes or inevitably make mistakes, as everyone does, the consequences can be far greater than for their wealthier peers. If they become pregnant, have a run-in with the law, or lose a part-time job, they and their parents are much less likely to have the resources to cushion the blow and smooth the road. But just avoiding trouble does not put a young person on a path to the middle class. That’s why policymakers need to focus on creating the conditions that give every child a real opportunity to succeed.

As Sawhill et al. suggest with their thoughtful recommendations for action, we know that good schools are crucial but not sufficient on their own for the long-term academic, vocational, and economic success of our nation’s young people. Research, community wisdom, and common sense tell us that families, the broader community, and schools need to work together to create integrated systems of support for each child. These supports are what America’s Promise Alliance calls the Five Promises: caring adults, safe places, a healthy start, an effective education, and opportunities to serve. Numerous empirical studies show that when young people experience these key developmental supports throughout the first two decades of life, they are more likely to exhibit good socioemotional skills, give back to their communities, and achieve academically and vocationally.

Parents, community leaders, educators, youth workers, and policymakers have focused intense effort to provide these assets. And all of these efforts are starting to pay off. According to the recently released Building a Grad Nation, the high-school graduation rate in 2010 (the most recent data available) was 78.2%, a 6.5 percentage point increase since 2001. This puts the nation on track to achieving the goal of America’s Promise Alliance’s Grad Nation Campaign; a 90% high-school graduation rate by 2020. Although graduating from high school is not sufficient to reach the middle class, it is a crucial starting point.

Americans pride themselves on living in the land of opportunity. By providing each young person with the conditions for success, we can help make the American Dream, including educational, economic, and social mobility, a reality for more and more young people.

JOHN GOMPERTS

President and CEO.
America’s Promise Alliance
Washington, DC
[email protected]

A new research model

In their excellent paper “RIP: The Basic/ Applied Research Dichotomy” (Issues, Winter 2013) authors Venkatesh Narayanamurti, Tolu Odumosu, and Lee Vinse take on the much-debated practice of labeling research, particularly federally supported research, as basic or applied and argue that we should put an end to such one-dimensional categorizations. They comment that the two-dimensional model of the late Don Stokes moved the discussion in the right direction but that it does not go far enough. Arguing that the innovation process is much more complex than either the basic/applied dichotomy or Stokes’ quadrants approach implies, they offer a new characterization of research as “discovery” and “invention.” They note that whatever the initial motivation, research can lead to the discovery of new knowledge about the world as well as the invention of new technologies or processes that have useful applications; indeed, both can result, and they can occur in either order or simultaneously. The authors underpin their arguments with examples in the domain of information and communication (IC) by showing how IC-relevant research discoveries and inventions that led to Nobel Prizes intersected to create new knowledge and technologies and, thus, argue that discovery and invention are not orthogonal and that the arrow between the two may reverse over time

The authors’ criticisms of the linear basic and applied model are sound, as are their arguments for seeking a more accurate model. But I would urge some caution: rapid change in long-standing federal policy often ends badly, and complicated arguments tend to be lost or misinterpreted in our political system. The suggestion of discovery and invention to describe research is an “outcomes” approach, in contrast to basic and applied, which reflect the motivation of the researcher (and often the funding entity). Moreover, as the authors point out, it can take many decades to realize research outcomes. Given this time frame, it is difficult to see how to set priorities in the allocation of funds to different fields of science or, at the grant level, how to select one proposal over another. On the matter of deciding what kind of research is appropriate for the federal government to support and what is best left to private industry, the authors suggest that “federal support is most appropriate for research that focuses on long-term projects with clear public utility,” and they note that “such research could have its near-term focus on either new knowledge or new technology.” But, while “clear public utility” might be appropriate for research in health, energy, security, the environment, and other areas of national interest, what about fundamental studies in most fields of the natural and social sciences, which industry will not support? Even in the most esoteric experimental research fields, such as observational astronomy or elementary particle physics, the interplay between fundamental studies and new technologies, many of practical importance, is richly nonlinear and unpredictable. Furthermore, I would argue that discovering new knowledge about the natural world is in the public interest.

All that said, the authors have made an important contribution to the policy discussion, and we need all the good ideas we can get. The invention and discovery approach points to the effectiveness of a particular kind of research culture, perhaps not unlike Bell Labs in the early days, where scientists and engineers in many fields worked in close proximity, sharing ideas, discoveries, and invention, and were given sufficient time to realize the fruits of their efforts. Although it is perhaps easier to create such an environment in industry than in a university or even national laboratory, the federal research funding agencies should consider how they might include such a model in their program planning, try some experiments, and assess some outcomes.

NEAL LANE

Senior Fellow in Science and Technology Policy

James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Malcolm Gillis University Professor
Rice University
Houston, Texas
[email protected]

Better energy innovation

Michael Levi’s call for “modest” federal programs to stimulate energy innovation (“The Hidden Risks of Energy Innovation,” Issues, Winter 2013) wisely cautions against all-too-common overreaching on the part of advocates and against large, all-in programs that pick winners and losers a priori.

Given the magnitude and extent of our dependence on fossil fuels, it seems clear that there is no single-sector panacea; rather, it is more likely that a diversified portfolio of energy solutions, all sectors of which are ripe for innovation, will emerge for the future; and, given budget realities, this is consistent with the notion of modest programs. In the case of renewable energy technologies, the regional nature of renewable resources suggests that this diversified portfolio will be regional in nature, which also argues for investment in a variety of selective ways that offer high potential for payoffs.

One such regional resource that is already the focus of the sort of modest, carefully targeted federal program that Levi suggests—a resource that has received so little attention that it still flies under the radar of most analysts— is marine renewable energy: the potential of waves, tides, currents, and the oceans’ thermal structure. By providing support for research on critical topics and funding (for which significant recipient matches are required) to help bridge the “valley of death” technology gap, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Program is helping to advance the development of this underappreciated renewable resource toward becoming a full-fledged part of a future energy portfolio.

However, one unexpected, and unfortunate, challenge faced by modest programs of this nature is their invisibility relative to other, more high-profile innovation programs. The federal bureaucracy continues to be quite adept at creating significant roadblocks to progress in the form of both intraand interagency turf squabbles and foot-dragging, and the very nature of modest programs, especially their limited funding for relatively short time frames, makes them fatally vulnerable to such roadblocks. Precious dollars are spent on consultants and lobbying rather than on innovation; even more precious time is spent attempting to navigate the roadblocks.

Thus, successful implementation of Levi’s suggestions will need to include something of the nature of a top-down approach from a very high level or expeditious coordination both within and across agencies to prevent these roadblocks. The former —the “czar” approach— has obvious issues, and the latter presents an ongoing challenge for the entire Executive, one that has proven remarkably intractable in the past and is not being met now. But if modest programs are to succeed, we must do better.

HOWARD P. HANSON

Chief Scientist, Southeast National Marine Renewable Energy Center

Professor of Geosciences, Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida
[email protected]

Michael Levi offers a compendium of reasons why it would be prudent of us to proceed cautiously with the proposition that public investments in technology might obviate the need for regulatory or pricing policies to address global climate change. Public investment strategies face significant ideological hurdles and risk high-profile failures. There is limited public capacity to subsidize higher-cost low-carbon technologies. And some regulatory action will likely ultimately be necessary to drive a full transition from high-carbon technologies to low-carbon technologies.

All of these are useful cautions as policymakers and advocates take stock of their options in the post–cap-and-trade world domestically and the post-Kyoto world internationally. No climate strategy will be free of political and ideological conflict. As long as low-carbon technologies cost substantially more than high-carbon technologies, neither direct subsidies nor carbon taxes and regulations are likely to be sustainable politically or economically. And even with much better and cheaper low-carbon alternatives, significant regulatory action will probably be necessary to achieve a widespread or rapid transition to a low-carbon energy economy.

The debate between the regulators and the innovators is not about whether any regulation or innovation is necessary. It is about which is the tail and which is the dog. And although most technology advocates, including the two of us, recognize the need for regulatory actions, we typically believe that lacking much better technological options, the effects of regulatory action will be modest at best and counterproductive at worst.

Whether one thinks that we have most or all of the technologies we need to mitigate climate change or are likely to develop those technologies in response to regulatory mandates turns out to be rather consequential to what one thinks we should do right now. Hence, the U.S. environmental movement, with the blessings of much of the climate and energy policy community, chose to invest somewhere north of a billion dollars over the past decade in passing a cap–and-trade program that, had it passed, would have established mandatory caps on emissions that under the best of circumstances would have had extremely modest effects on emissions and in retrospect would have established no constraint whatsoever on emissions. Thanks to the recession and the gas revolution (made possible in no small part by a three-decade public technology strategy), U.S. emissions are well below those that would have been mandated by the cap.

Levi would have us believe that the fatal flaw in this strategy was the “maximizing” conceit that passing a cap on emissions would solve both our climate and economic ills. This has become a popular trope among defenders of the environmental movement’s ill-conceived cap-and-trade effort. Had advocates, the story goes, kept the message focused on the climate issue, rather than getting distracted by the public’s demonstrable concern about the state of the U.S. economy, the effort would have fared better.

In this, Levi and others who have advanced this argument confuse messaging that was a symptom of cap-and-trade’s political toxicity with its cause. The more obvious source of cap–andtrade’s demise was the attempt to raise energy prices in the midst of the worst recession in half a century. Claims that the passage of cap-and-trade would create jobs and economic growth were a desperate attempt to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. The U.S. public quite rightly refused to believe that policies explicitly designed to raise energy costs would result in jobs and economic growth.

Moreover, chalking up cap–andtrade’s failure to the particular economic circumstances of the Great Recession fails to reckon with Americans’ abiding distaste for policies designed to raise their energy bills, particularly when those efforts aim to change their behavior. Cap-and-trade has now failed four times in the U.S. Congress, in good economic times and bad, and under both Democratic and Republican control. Efforts to raise Americans’ energy prices in the name of environmental protection have now been directly implicated in Democrats’ losing control of congressional majorities not once but twice over the past 20 years.

Levi suggests that the backlash against Solyndra and other failed technology investments demonstrates that technology- and innovation-centered approaches to climate mitigation are no less toxic politically. Yet despite concerted efforts by Republican operatives to turn Solyndra into a political scandal and campaign issue, not a single Democrat appears to have lost their seat over that controversy. Indeed, in contrast to cap–and-trade, which Democrats banished entirely from their vocabulary after the debacle of the 2010 elections, the President and congressional Democrats continued to tout their commitment to public investments in clean energy technology throughout the recent campaign.

Any lingering question about the relative toxicity of public technology investment policies as compared to carbon caps and taxes should have been put to rest in the weeks after the election, when the President, in his first post-election news conference, again in his inaugural address, and yet again in his State of the Union address, reiterated his intention to continue to press for energy technology investments while ruling out any renewed effort to establish carbon caps or a carbon tax as a priority in his second administration.

Levi is right to note that more highprofile failures like Solyndra risk further inflaming public skepticism about the efficacy of public technology investments. But such skepticism seems to mostly emanate from policy elites like Levi, not the public at large. Public support for government investments in energy technology, clean and conventional, has remained strong despite Solyndra and indeed through myriad failures in decades past.

What the U.S. public seems to understand, and too many energy policy analysts seem to forget, is that any successful technology innovation effort, be it public or private, must have a high failure rate if it is to succeed. Energy technology innovation is hard work and it is expensive, but when it succeeds the payoffs are huge. Just the past few years of the shale gas boom, a product of just such a costly process of trial and error (and one that was savaged in its day by soft-energy environmentalists and neoclassically trained analysts alike), will more than cover the cost of all public subsidies for all energy technologies, clean and dirty, since 1950.

Nonetheless, Levi is right that in these times of ideological polarization and fiscal austerity, energy technology advocates would be well served to look for ways to make public policies designed to accelerate innovation and support emerging technologies more effective and less costly. And they should avoid overpromising. New energy technologies take decades to develop and longer still to displace incumbent technologies. The real benefits from energy technology investments come not from creating jobs or installing above-cost, heavily subsidized technologies, but from technological revolutions that make energy cheaper and cleaner. Although the millions of jobs promised through both the green stimulus investments and cap-and-trade never materialized, the shale gas revolution is projected to create a million new jobs in the oil and gas industry by 2015 and has already generated hundreds of billions of dollars in additional economic growth in the United States annually since 2007.

In the end, despite a number of faulty assumptions, Levi does reach the right conclusion. He writes: “Indeed, a core goal of domestic technology policy should be to make regulation and other incentives easier. Anything that helps cut the cost of technology will reduce the economic burden of other policies when they are eventually pursued, making them more politically palatable.”

Those who believe that energy innovation is the central challenge that all climate mitigation strategies must address could not have said it better. With cheap, clean energy technology, anything is possible; without it, to paraphrase Macbeth, climate politics and policy amount to much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

TED NORDHAUS

Chairman

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

President
The Breakthrough Institute Oakland, CA
[email protected]

Energy conversion

In “Four Technologies and a Conundrum: The Glacial Pace of Energy Innovation,” (Issues, Winter 2013), Michael E. Webber, Roger D. Duncan, and Marianne Shivers Gonzalez provide useful insights into the U.S. energy system by re-casting the conventional picture of energy consumption by resource and end-use sector into one that highlights the major technologies we employ to convert primary energy into more usable forms. In this framework, they identify four technologies that together provide two-thirds of U.S. energy: steam and combustion turbines (primarily for electricity generation), and two types of internal combustion engines (spark- and compression-ignition, used mainly for transportation). All of these technologies, they note, date from the late 18th and 19th centuries (as do others on their list). Thus, they see that “fundamental innovation in power and transportation technology is slow” and call for increased R&D investments concentrated on new energy conversion pathways that reduce waste heat, along with policies that can accelerate the development, commercialization, and adoption of new technologies at scale.

Certainly there is no denying that the U.S. energy sector in general, and the electric power industry in particular, have been laggards in the pace of innovation, as reflected by such measures as patenting activity, R&D spending, and the size of the R&D workforce. Data we assembled for a recent National Academies study, for example, estimated that the ratio of R&D spending to sales was in the range of only 0.2 to 2.2% for energy-related U.S. industries, with utilities near the low end of that range. This compared to roughly 10 to 17% for industries such as software/ computer services, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology. Similarly, the percentage of R&D scientists and engineers in the U.S. utilities labor force (0.3%) was minuscule compared to the most innovative industries (10 to 20%) and far smaller than the average for all U.S. industries (7.1%). Equally sobering has been the sharp decline in federal energy R&D spending over the past three decades, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of all federal nondefense R&D. As a result, the United States spends less on energy R&D than many other industrialized countries as a percentage of gross domestic product, and less than some smaller countries (such as Japan) on an absolute basis as well.

The call by Webber et al. for measures to reverse this trend and accelerate the pace of energy technology innovation thus rings true, and echoes other recent studies. The authors don’t say, however, exactly what policy measures besides R&D investments they would recommend, nor do they elaborate on why folks other than engineers should care about thermodynamic efficiency. Implicit in their discussion, however, is the potential for new energy-conversion technologies to dramatically reduce the rate of natural resource depletion and move us toward a zero-carbon economy based on renewable energy sources. If these in fact are the societal goals we seek, achieving them any time soon will require not only policy “carrots” (such as more R&D) but also policy “sticks” that significantly limit greenhouse gas emissions and create markets for efficient new lowcarbon technologies. Webber et al. call it “imperative” that appropriate policies be put in place soon, an urgency underscored in the America’s Climate Choices study.

Toward that end, the energy accounting scheme they illustrate provides a useful perspective that can help identify major targets of opportunity for technological change. Their approach would be even more useful if electricity generation were treated not as a final end-use sector but as the intermediate process it is. That could help identify other important devices and conversion technologies (such as motors, servers, and incandescent lamps), in which efficiency gains could further contribute to environmental goals, along with other types of innovations. Finally, we should heed the authors’ admonition to not expect new “breakthrough technologies to magically solve the problem. Although the discovery of novel, radical, breakthrough, leapfrog, out-of-the-box, game-changing technologies is what all energy R&D managers hope for, what in retrospect is seen to be a major innovation is more often than not the product of many years of incremental improvements that could not have been achieved overnight. Together with support for new discoveries and inventions, the sustained pursuit of such improvements should be the bedrock of U.S. policies to foster long-term energy innovations.

EDWARD S. RUBIN

Alumni Chair Professor of Environmental Engineering and Science

Professor of Engineering and Public Policy and Mechanical Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvaniarubin [email protected]

Keeping kids in school

“Staying in School: A Proposal for Raising High-School Graduation Rates” (Issues, Winter 2013) by Derek Messacar and Phillip Oreopoulus hits on an issue that every state and chief state school officer has on the education reform agenda. In Kentucky, we have had legislation proposed to raise the dropout age from 16 to 18 for the past four years. Governor Steve Beshear and First Lady Jane Beshear have been tremendous champions of this legislation, and we have typically been able to move the legislation through the House of Representatives. However, the legislation has stalled in the Senate. This year, however, there are positive signs for a compromise on the legislation.

As a former school superintendent whose district was very successful in lowering the dropout rate, I was at first confused by the resistance of legislators and educators in Kentucky to raising the dropout age. The resistance centered on several key issues. First and foremost was the concern about an unfunded mandate created by raising the dropout age. Superintendents were concerned that raising the dropout age would mean that over 6000 more students (16-, 17-, and 18–year-olds) would remain in school, and the state did not have funds to support these students. The next concern was behavior. Many teachers expressed concern that forcing students to stay in school who did not want to be in school would create unsafe schools and classrooms. Also, numerous legislators suggested that the research does not support raising the dropout age. Simplistic correlation studies among states that have raised the dropout age show little to no impact on graduation rates. Finally, the major concern was the lack of funding and resources to support the needed alternative and career/technical programs.

The Messacar and Oreopoulos article provides significant research and data to address the concerns that were voiced in Kentucky and across the nation. A key issue that the article brings to the front is that raising the dropout age has a positive impact on the state’s economy and also lowers a state’s incarceration costs and social program costs. In the long run, raising the dropout age is a revenue producer and not an unfunded mandate.

The national blueprint proposed by the authors does provide concrete suggestions for states and chief state school officers as they address the dropout issue. Ensuring that every child graduates from high school with the skills needed to be successful in college and careers or the military is the moral, civil rights, safety, and economic imperative of our generation.

TERRY HOLLIDAY

Commissioner of Education
Kentucky Department of Education
Frankfort, Kentucky
[email protected]

We can all agree that long-term solutions to our nation’s jobs crisis require us to build a world-class workforce. To do this, we must think strategically about keeping kids in school, and we must ensure that all students graduate from high school on time, ready to enter college or start their careers. As suggested by Messacar and Oreopoulos, nothing short of a comprehensive approach will adequately address our nation’s high-school dropout problem.

Part of any multi-tiered solution should suggest that we transform the school experience to be more relevant and rigorous for students. As a former biology teacher, career and tech-ed high-school principal, and local district superintendent, I’ve seen firsthand the opportunities that exist when students are given more ways to learn in challenging and engaging classroom environments. Project Lead the Way is a terrific example of a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) program that equips students with the skills necessary to compete for high-skill, high-wage jobs.

There’s no question that the most powerful component of any school is the effectiveness of its educators. A great teacher has a lifelong impact on his or her students—in fact, I consider this the most important factor in addressing high-school graduation and dropout rates. We can foster a culture of excellence by ensuring that every classroom has a great teacher, every school has an effective principal, and every district has dynamic local leadership. Through professional evaluation systems and transparent school performance measures, we can recognize local schools for their work.

Another opportunity to decrease dropout rates lies in our ability to find new ways to engage parents. The first step any educator, community member, or legislative leader can take is to advocate for policies that give parents the freedom to choose the school that best meets their child’s needs. Whether it’s through charter schools, magnet schools, or traditional public school transfers, school choice provides an important opportunity to meaningfully engage parents.

Finally, as a state education chief, I understand that it’s tempting to become prescriptive in any well-intentioned effort to decrease high-school dropout rates. While there is no silver bullet that will solve this problem, if we hold ourselves accountable for the results we hope to see in education, and if we give local schools the flexibility to compete, then we will spur innovation at the district level. Messacar and Oreopoulos make a fine argument in favor of increasing the mandatory attendance age, but I fear that unless we transform the school experience in a comprehensive manner, we will continue to elicit marginal results.

TONY BENNETT

Commissioner
Florida Department of Education
Tallahassee, Florida
[email protected]

I enjoyed reading “Staying in School.” I would like to share some additional points to help us continue this critical dialogue about the importance of high-school graduation and dropout prevention.

Many of your readers may not know that the national dropout rate the authors refer to does not include the number of students who drop out but later return to school. For this reason, nearly every state in the nation now calculates and reports four- and five-year cohort graduation rates. These rates reflect the percentage of students who enter high school and graduate four or five years later. In North Carolina, our four-year cohort graduation rate hit an all-time high of 80.4% in 2011–2012. This milestone also represents an increase of 12.1 percentage points since the state first reported a four-year cohort rate of 68.3% in 2006.

In addition, the United States saw a 78.2% four-year graduation rate in 2010, which is up 6.5 percentage points from the 71.7% national rate in 2001, according to the 2013 Building a Grad Nation report released last month. Although there is certainly more work to be done, these achievements at the state and national levels are important to note.

The significant improvement in North Carolina’s graduation rate certainly did not happen by chance. We have implemented many initiatives aimed at keeping students in school, and our hard work is paying off. For example, we have offered many students the opportunity to earn industry-recognized career certifications through our Career and Technical Education program. These programs help students make a real connection between what they are learning in the classroom today and the jobs they will be applying for in the future. Students earned more than 91,000 of these certifications last year, and we are hoping for an even higher number in 2013.

We also are providing many public high-school students an opportunity to get a head start on a college education, for free. North Carolina currently leads the nation with its number of early college high schools, where students can earn a high-school diploma and up to two years of college credit in just four years.

And most recently, we have revised and updated our state’s entire curriculum to reflect the knowledge and skills students must master at each grade level, so they can be successful in higher education and the workplace. We have done all of this work to move us closer to reaching our ultimate goal of a 100% high-school graduation rate.

I appreciate your highlighting the issue of raising the compulsory attendance age. This is certainly one method among many that could help keep more students in school. And while we consider this strategy, let’s also remember to recognize the progress we have made and the successes we have seen so far, so we can ensure not only that more students earn diplomas, but also that they are leaving high school prepared for college, careers, and citizenship.

JUNE ST. CLAIR ATKINSON

State Superintendent
Public Schools of North Carolina
Raleigh, North Carolina

“Staying in School” aptly identifies the complexities as well as the policy opportunities surrounding state and federal efforts to increase high-school graduation rates. I launched Graduation Matters Montana in 2010 to dramatically decrease the number of Montana high-school students who drop out each year. Through a private/public partnership, 28 communities have launched a Graduation Matters initiative, meaning that local schools, community organizations, and main street businesses are working together to address their community’s dropout rate and to develop more college and career pathways.

Early signs are that the strategy is working: 65% of Montana high-school students now attend a Graduation Matters school, and our state dropout rate has gone from 5.1 to 4.1%.

As state superintendent, I am pursuing all angles, from changing state policies to equipping local community efforts through Tool Kits, technical assistance, and privately funded incentive grants. Our state still allows students to drop out at age 16, and I believe we can do better; yet our state legislature has twice rejected proposals to change that state law. I will not wait for state or federal lawmakers to act. Graduation Matters Montana is equipping local community efforts to support student success.

For more information on our community-based strategy, go to http://graduationmatters.mt.gov/, which contains many resources that are particularly pertinent for rural states and rural communities.

DENISE JUNEAU

Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction
Helena, Montana

In spite of substantial debate and controversy in the days leading up to the deadline, sequestration went into effect on March 1 as required by law. Cuts to defense and nondefense R&D will total an estimated $9.0 billion in the FY 2013 federal R&D budget. These cuts will be particularly harsh because they must be squeezed into the final seven months of the fiscal year.

Some agencies have already issued new memoranda on the impact of sequestration on agency operations. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, stated that the “impact could include: not issuing continuation awards, or negotiating a reduction in the scope of…awards to meet the constraints imposed by sequestration. Additionally, plans for new grants or cooperative agreements may be rescoped, delayed, or canceled depending on the nature of the work and the availability of resources.” The National Science Foundation (NSF), meanwhile, has stated that although it will honor existing grants, “the total number of new research grants will be reduced by approximately 1,000.”

As widely expected, Congress failed to pass a more balanced alternative deficit reduction plan to replace the sequester. The House of Representatives, however, did pass an appropriations bill (H.R. 933) that would fund the federal government for the remainder of the 2013 fiscal year. The legislation, which passed 267-151, would fund both defense and nondefense R&D at FY 2012 levels, but because the sequester remains in effect, the net effect is a roughly 7.8% decrease for defense R&D and a 5% decrease for nondefense agency R&D. The House bill was written as an appropriations bill for the Departments of Defense (DOD) and of Veterans Affairs (VA), but as a continuing resolution (CR) for the remaining agencies. This allowed the House to provide some flexibility to DOD and VA on how each could allocate the sequester cuts.

On March 11, the Senate Appropriations Committee released its revised version of the House bill. Both Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL) agreed to the legislation that would continue to fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year. The revised “hybrid” bill does not eliminate the sequestration but does expand on the House version by including additional flexibility for the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Agriculture, and Commerce, as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and NSF. The bill also includes a small increase ($71 million, pre-sequestration cut) for the National Institutes of Health. On March 20, the Senate voted 73-26 to pass its version of the Continuing Appropriations Act. The Act includes an amendment submitted by Senator Tom Coburn (ROK) that limits funding for political science research at the NSF; specifically, the agency will be able to fund political science research only if it is certified by the NSF director as “promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.” The next day, the House of Representatives voted 318-109 to approve the Senate’s changes.

Congress In Brief

On Jan. 28, a bipartisan group of eight senators released a set of principles for immigration reform at a press conference. The draft framework includes a proposal to “award a green card to immigrants who have received a PhD or master’s degree in science, technology, engineering, or math from an American university.” It further states that “It makes no sense to educate the world’s future innovators and entrepreneurs only to ultimately force them to leave our country at the moment they are most able to contribute to our economy.” In addition, it will establish an easier path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who came to the United States as minors—similar to the DREAM Act. This final point is expected to be a point of contention as the debate unfolds, especially as the draft principles still need to be crafted into legislation (more background found here). The bipartisan “Gang of Eight” who crafted the principles are Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY), John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Dick Durbin (DIL), Robert Menendez (D-NJ), and Jeff Flake (R-AZ). Obama subsequently lauded the Senate plan and released his own principles on immigration reform.

The Senate Budget Committee has established a website for citizen input called MyBudget, which provides Americans the opportunity to share their stories, identify their budget priorities, and provide ideas for how to achieve fiscal reform. Participating on the site may be of particular interest to those in the science and innovation community who have firsthand experience with federal R&D funding.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has introduced S.21, the Cybersecurity and American Cyber Competitiveness Act of 2013. Sponsors of the bill hope “to secure the United States against cyber attack, to improve communication and collaboration between the private sector and federal government, to enhance American competitiveness and create jobs in the information technology industry, and to protect the identities and sensitive information of American citizens and businesses.” The bill also includes language that promotes R&D investments to expand the IT workforce and improve the U.S. economy.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held a hearing on January 24 to assess the state of the U.S. mental health system. Six witnesses testified, including Tom Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health, who noted that about one in five Americans is affected by mental illness.

Congressional committee changes

The beginning of any new Congress can feel like a game of musical chairs, and the 113th is no exception. What follows are some notable shifts in committee and subcommittee chairs.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) will chair the Senate Appropriations Committee. Mikulski has been the longtime head of the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations subcommittee, which funds a number of key federal research agencies—for example, the National Science Foundation. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) is the ranking member. On the House side, Hal Rogers (R-KY) returns to chair the House Appropriations Committee and Nita Lowey (D-NY) will serve as the new ranking member. The committee recently announced its majority and minority subcommittee leaders. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) takes over for former Rep. Denny Rehberg as chairman of the Labor-HHS Subcommitee, which funds the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) will chair the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Smith is former head of the Judiciary Committee and was heavily involved in congressional patent reform efforts. Continuing on as ranking member will be Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX). New subcommittee chairs are listed here (majority) and here (minority). In the Senate, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) returns to the helm of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, while John Thune (R-SD) takes over as ranking member. Rockefeller recently announced that he plans to retire in 2014.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) returns to his spot atop the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, while Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has signed on as ranking member. Like Rockefeller, Harkin has announced that this will be his last term in Congress. Harkin is widely known as a strong supporter of federal biomedical research.

In other news, some new caucuses have formed on Capitol Hill. On Dec. 7 Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL) announced the creation of the bipartisan House Science and National Labs Caucus. The caucus’s focus is to raise awareness about the role that federal labs play in long-term economic growth. Other co-chairs include Reps. Chaka Fattah (D-PA), Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), and Alan Nunnelee (R-MS). A few days later, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) announced that she would form a climate change caucus in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Boxer said of the new caucus, “it is going to work with all the committees and all the committee chairmen to make sure we can move forward legislation that reduces carbon pollution and also works on mitigation and all of the other elements… I think you are going to see a lot of bills on climate change.”

“From the Hill” is adapted from the newsletter Science and Technology in Congress, published by the Office of Government Relations of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (www.aaas.org) in Washington, DC.

People often ask how I “broke through the glass ceiling” to succeed in a field that is predominantly male and overcame the barriers women face in science. They don’t always like my answer, because it’s not about gender. It’s about learning how to be effective as a member of a minority in different contexts, understanding the peculiar structure of academic research, and accepting the choices and tradeoffs facing both women and men in balancing work and life in this field.

From my initial interest in science in high school, I never felt held back, overlooked, or underappreciated because I’m female. Quite the opposite: Perhaps because people in science often are so passionate about their work, they may be gender-blinded by the thrill of sharing their fascination and wish to encourage anyone who is interested. And I was.

My enthrallment with science began with thoughts of becoming a physician. That goal changed after a year off after college, when I worked in the Columbia University lab of the eminent neurobiologist Eric Kandel, who went on to share the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons.

Kandel and his colleagues were so encouraging that they inspired me to pursue a career in scientific research rather than medicine. That led to successful graduate and postdoctoral research work, including a Ph.D. at Yale in biology/ neuroscience and research positions at the Salk Institute and the University of California at San Diego.

My path was set. And I had a lot of support from both men and women in science—and owe them a lot.

But a funny thing happened along the way: Despite loving research in all its aspects, I became unsettled by the choices necessary to pursue a career in academic science. First and foremost, one must select a specific area of focus. That requires a measure of healthy monomania, a conviction that one’s chosen question and approach are more interesting, valuable, compelling, and likely to succeed than others’.

But as much as the scientific problems I was working on were enjoyable and inspiring, equally (and sometimes more) engaging and exciting were the projects and results of other scientists. The need to choose a single focus area, in fact, panicked me. This culminated in a pivotal, life-changing experience when, as a postdoc, I received a phone call with good news about funding of my grant application and realized I was more depressed than elated.

If a research scientist is not ecstatic about rare positive news about funding, it is most definitely a sign not to ignore.

After much soul-searching, I decided to leave research and began looking for career opportunities where my breadth of interest would be an asset. An ad for an editorial position at the scientific journal Neuron led me to publishing and eventually the position of editor-in-chief. The pursuit of an editorial career satisfied every need to remain deeply engaged with science and scientists while indulging in broader scientific issues. And although the demanding schedule of academic research was not an issue for me personally when considering this change in career direction, the structure and teamwork nature of editorial work do provide a framework of shared goals, expectations, and flexibility necessary to support a more healthy work/life balance.

My new path led to my leadership today of Cell and Cell Press. Again, all the while I was encouraged, or at least never discouraged, by male and female managers, mentors, and colleagues.

A minority of one

All that said, throughout my professional experiences, from the lab to Cell Press, I have often found myself in the minority; sometimes a minority of one. The only woman. The only junior scientist or editor in a room of distinguished leaders. The only American in a room of Europeans. The only academic in a room of businesspeople. More recently, the only business-minded person in a room of academics.

In all of these cases, effective discussion, successful collaboration, and recognition of the value of my contributions always required a good deal of listening and asking questions, putting myself in others’ shoes, and cogently explaining my perspective and ideas. I’ve found that closing a “gap,” gender or otherwise, requires mutual respect, shared goals, and a positive teamwork approach. Whether or not this attitude measurably contributed to my career success, it certainly made work more fun and rewarding.

If my experience is illustrative, then it’s fair to ask, why is there a gender gap in science, especially at the advanced levels? As the 2011 U.S. Commerce Department report Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation concludes, women remain vastly underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)–related jobs and among degree holders, and women with STEM degrees are less likely to work in STEM jobs, even though the gender wage gap is smaller than in non-STEM jobs. What’s going on here?

Let me suggest a perhaps provocative factor: that the gap is driven by the unusually individualized and competitive nature of academic research. Science trains far more students and postdocs than the number of faculty positions that are available. Growth in government research funding in many countries is limited. Thus, the field is sharply competitive for grant dollars, faculty positions, and stature, and it tends to reward individual over team achievement (no ambitious postdoc ever got a grant or job because she was a good team player or helped another scientist get a key publication). Moreover, no formalized structure tells a scientist what question to work on, what approach to take, or how many hours to invest. No principal investigator I know ever told a postdoc that he or she really should take a vacation.

Right or wrong, these factors are the reality of academic science today and of how scientists are rewarded and advance. Those who stand out and rise above tend to work long days, nights, and weekends, often traveling and presenting constantly. It can be hard for someone who wants a diversified life to compete against someone who’s willing to be in the lab 20 hours a day or on the road for months.

As a result, devotion to science research and pursuing the highest achievement makes seeking a work/life balance (e.g., family time) especially difficult, as is true in many competitive fields. The unique demands of science research exacerbate the challenge. The individualized nature makes it harder for parents and employers to distribute the workload when family duties call. What’s more, in my experience— forgive me—men still tend to be more comfortable with forgoing family time for work. Because the field is so competitive and fast-moving, women who take time for family can lose ground quickly.

Science demands hard choices

So to me, the gender gap is not necessarily a gender issue. That is not to declare the field completely free of gender or other biases, overt or covert, that should be addressed as they occur. Some of my colleagues note other challenges and solutions, including the need for women scientists to serve as role models to inspire young women to follow in their footsteps or mentor young professionals.

On a separate front, many institutions are striving to retain talent by helping both women and men balance work and life. Policymakers and advocates are calling for more generous family leave measures in the United States, similar to what other countries have. And many women and men I know do already achieve the balance they seek and happily thrive on both sides of the scale.

That’s my point: Scientists, like everyone else, understand that life is about making choices, accepting tradeoffs, and adjusting expectations. Plenty of research scientists I know who do not wish to shortchange family life (or other endeavors) for this demanding field are realistic; they understand that they also may not be on the fast track for a Nobel Prize or heading a major research institution. They accept that and are happy to adjust their goals in carving out a successful, productive research career with a comfortable sustainable position in the marathon, but not aiming to be the first to cross the finish line.

I hate to say it, and some might chafe at this notion, but a person who chooses work over other life pursuits may, by definition, do better in that field. That may not be the standard we wish to set. Science might be served better by a system that favors diversity, teamwork, balance, broad intellectualism, civic responsibility, and healthy work/life balance. If so, then collectively we need to embrace and pursue that goal with measures for both men and women that foster and reward those attributes in gaining funding, jobs, and status.

In the end, perhaps Women’s History Month is really about choices, for women, men, and the profession, about the system and life we want. It’s fair to assume that Marie Curie and the other 2013 honorees in the National Women’s History Project Women Inspiring Innovation through Imagination: Celebrating Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics made their own tradeoffs. As Dr. Curie once said, “I have frequently been questioned, especially by women, of how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy.”

Health care in the United States has experienced an explosion in biomedical knowledge, dramatic innovations in therapies and surgical procedures, and expanded capacity to manage conditions that previously were debilitating or fatal—and ever more exciting H clinical capabilities are on the horizon. Yet, paradoxically, health care is falling short on basic dimensions of quality, outcomes, cost, and equity. Actions that could improve the health care system’s performance—developing knowledge, organizing and translating new information into medical evidence, applying the new evidence to patient care—are marred by significant shortcomings and inefficiencies that result in missed opportunities, waste, and harm to patients.

The human and economic impacts are great. An estimated 75,000 deaths could have been averted in 2005 alone if every state had delivered care on par with the best performing state. Current waste—an estimated $750 billion in unnecessary health spending in 2009—diverts valuable and limited resources from productive use.

It is important to note that individual physicians, nurses, technicians, pharmacists, and others involved in patient care work diligently to provide high-quality, compassionate care to their patients. The problem is not that they are not working hard enough. Rather, it is that the health care system does not adequately support them in their work. The system lags in adjusting to new discoveries, disseminating data in real time, organizing and coordinating the enormous volume of research and recommendations, and providing incentives for choosing the smartest route to health, not just the newest, shiniest—and often most expensive—tool. These broader issues prevent clinicians from providing the best care to their patients and limit their ability to continuously learn and improve.

The shortcomings are especially apparent when considering how other industries routinely operate compared with many aspects of health care. Builders rely on blueprints to coordinate the work of carpenters, electricians, and plumbers. Banks offer customers financial records that are updated in real time. Automobile manufacturers produce thousands of vehicles that are standardized at their core, while tailored at the margins. Although health care may face unique challenges in accommodating many competing priorities and human factors, the health care system could learn from these other industries how to better meet specific needs, expand choices, and shave costs.

The bottom line is that the nation, and its citizens, would be better served by a more nimble health care system that is consistently reliable and that constantly, systematically, and seamlessly improves. In short, the nation needs health care that learns by avoiding past mistakes and adopting newfound successes.

A vision—and a pathway

The Institute of Medicine has provided a roadmap for reaching this goal. It is detailed in Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America, a report released in September 2012. The good news is that opportunities for improving health care exist that were not available just a decade ago. Vast computational power is increasingly affordable and widely available, and connectivity allows information to be accessed in real time virtually anywhere by professionals and patients, permitting unprecedented diffusion of information cheaply, quickly, and on demand. Human and organizational capabilities offer expanded ways to improve the reliability and efficiency of health care. And health care organizations and providers increasingly recognize that effective care must be delivered by collaborative teams of clinicians, each member playing a vital role.

Yet simply acknowledging such opportunities does not necessarily result in putting them to good use. Indeed, building a learning health care system within current clinical environments requires overcoming substantial challenges. Clinicians routinely report moderate or high levels of stress, feel there is not enough time to meet their patients’ needs, and find their work environments chaotic. They struggle to deliver care while confronting inefficient workflows, administrative burdens, and uncoordinated systems, preventing them from focusing on additional tasks and initiatives, even those that have important goals for improving care.

Given such real-world impediments, crafting and implementing initiatives that focus merely on incremental improvements and add to a clinician’s daily workload are unlikely to succeed in fundamentally improving health care. Significant change can occur only if the environment, context, and systems in which health care professionals practice are reconfigured to support learning and improvement.

Realizing these objectives will require efforts in four main areas: generating and using real-time knowledge to improve outcomes; engaging patients, families, and communities; achieving high-value care; and creating a new culture of care.

Advancing real-time knowledge

Although unprecedented levels of information are available, clinicians and patients often lack practical access to guidance that is relevant, timely, and useful for the circumstances at hand. For example, of the clinical guidelines for the nine most common chronic conditions, fewer than half address the issues of patients who experience two or more of the conditions at the same time, even though 75 million patients fit this category. Bridging gaps in how knowledge is gathered and used will require applying computing capabilities and analytic approaches to develop real-time insights from routine patient care and then using new technological tools to disseminate the emerging knowledge.

One key step will be to strengthen the digital infrastructure of the health care system to better capture data on clinical care and patient outcomes, on the care delivery process, and on the costs of care. Data should be digitally collected, compiled, and protected as reliable and accessible resources for managing care, assessing results, improving processes, strengthening public health, and generating new knowledge.

Large quantities of clinical data are now generated every day in the regular process of care, but most of the information remains locked inside paper records that are difficult to access, transfer, and query. Digital systems have the potential to turn each of those bothersome traits on its head. Care must be taken, however, to integrate the new electronic methods seamlessly into providers’ daily workflow so as not to disrupt the clinical routine.

To complement the development of better digital systems, efforts are needed to promote expanded access to data and expanded data sharing. The idea is that the capacity for learning experiences increases exponentially when a system can draw knowledge from multiple sources. In one promising example, called distributed data networks, each participating organization stores its information locally, often in a common format. When a researcher seeks to answer a specific research question, all of the organizations in the network execute identical computer programs that analyze the data, create a summary from each site, and share those summaries with the entire network. In other efforts to expand data collection and access, insurance companies and other payer groups, health care delivery organizations, and companies that make medical products should be encouraged to contribute data to ongoing and new research efforts. And patients can play an important role by fully participating in self-reporting systems designed to gather data on patient outcomes, and by using new communication tools, such as personal portals, to better manage and record their own care.

Beyond technical matters, various legal and regulatory restrictions can be barriers to real-time learning and improvement. The privacy and security rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) pose particular challenges. In several surveys, researchers have reported that the rules increase the time and cost of research, impede collaboration among researchers, and make it difficult to recruit volunteers for studies. Protecting patient privacy is, of course, the basic starting point. But the current rules, with their inconsistent interpretation, offer a relatively limited security advantage to patients while impeding health research and the improvement of care. HHS is currently reviewing HIPPA rules, along with the policies of various institutional review boards that oversee research at many locations, with respect to actual or perceived regulatory impediments to the use of clinical data.

As more and better data become available, the obvious job will be to identify and adopt improved approaches for delivering accurate information to clinicians and patients in a timely manner. This will require making decision support tools and knowledge management systems routine features of health care delivery. Accelerating their use requires developing tools that deliver reliable, current clinical knowledge, in a clear and understandable format, to providers at the point of care, in addition to incentives that encourage the use of these tools. This also requires a shift in health professional education to teach skills for engaging in lifelong learning on how best to deliver safe care in an interdisciplinary environment. Furthermore, there are still multiple poorly understood barriers to dissemination and use of scientific evidence at the point of care. Addressing these barriers will require additional research and the development of practical tools that can improve the usefulness and accessibility of such data for clinicians and patients.

Empowering patients

An effective, efficient, and continuously learning system requires patients who are actively engaged in their own care. Clinicians supply information and advice based on their scientific expertise in treatment and their best assessment of potential outcomes, while patients, their families, and other caregivers bring personal knowledge on the suitability—or lack thereof—of different treatments for the patient’s circumstances and preferences. Both perspectives are needed to select the right care. Of course, providing what has come to be called “patient-centered” care does not mean that providers simply agree to every patient request. Rather, it entails meaningful awareness, discussion, and engagement among patient, family, and the care team on the evidence, risks and benefits, options, and decisions in play.

The structure, incentives, and culture of the current health care system, however, are poorly aligned to engage patients and respond to their needs—and patients are often insufficiently involved in their care decisions. Even when encouraged to play a role in decisions about their care, they often lack understandable, reliable information—from evidence on the efficacy and risks of different treatment options to information on the quality of different health care providers and organizations—that is customized to their needs, preferences, and health goals.

Patient-centered care takes on increasing importance in light of research that links such care to better health outcomes, lower costs, and customers—the patients themselves— who are happier with their experience, among other benefits. With these rewards in mind, health care providers and organizations will need to draw on a full toolkit of actions.

Providers should begin by placing a higher premium on involving patients in their own health care to the extent that patients choose, encouraging them and their families to be active participants. From this base, clinicians should employ high-quality, reliable tools and skills that are customized to a patient’s situation to aid in shared decision making. New technologies offer opportunities for clinicians to engage patients by meeting them where they are, rather than in traditional clinical settings. Further efforts may include providing new online sources of information and assisting patients in managing their own health—options that highlight the need for health professionals to assume new roles in partnering with patients.

Several actions can increase patient centeredness more broadly. First, there is a need for new tools that can assist individuals in managing their health and health care. Furthermore, public and private payers can promote and measure patient-centered care through payment models, contracting policies, and public reporting programs. There are also gaps in our ability to measure patient-centered care, which will require the development of a reliable set of measures of patient-centeredness for consistent use across the health care system. These measures can be used both to incentivize patient centered care and to assist organizations as they measure their improvement.

Fostering high-value care

Health care payment policies strongly influence how care is delivered, whether new scientific knowledge and insights about best care are diffused broadly, and whether improvement initiatives succeed. The prevailing approach to paying for health care, based predominantly on paying set fees for individual services and products, encourages wasteful and ineffective care. New models of paying for care and organizing care delivery are emerging to improve quality and value. Although evidence is conflicting on which models work best and under what circumstances, it is clear that a learning health care system would incorporate incentives aligned to encourage continuous improvement, identify and reduce waste, and reward high-value care.

The system would also be transparent. It would systematically monitor the safety, quality, processes, costs, and outcomes of care and make the information available for clinicians, patients, and families to use in making informed choices. This type of information on health care options, quality, price, and outcomes can then spur conversations among individuals and health care providers to promote informed decision making.

Multiple strategies exist for increasing the value of health care. Health care delivery organizations can use systems engineering tools and process improvement methods to eliminate inefficiencies, remove unnecessary burdens on clinicians and staff, enhance patient experience, and improve patient health outcomes. Furthermore, these organizations can reward continuous learning and improvement through internal practice incentives. For their part, public and private payers can adopt outcome- and value-oriented payment models and contracting policies that would support high-quality, team-based care focused on the needs and goals of patients and families. With an eye toward ongoing improvement, payment models, contracting policies, and benefit designs need to continuously refined to better reward high-value care that improves health outcomes.

Creating a new culture

Although each step along the path to a learning health care system is important, none by itself is sufficient. Rather, the host of needed changes must be interwoven to achieve a common goal: health care organizations that are devoted at their very core to optimizing care delivery practices, continually improving the value achieved by care and streamlining processes to provide the best patient health outcomes. Reaching this point will require broad participation by patients, families, clinicians, care leaders, and those who support their work. Health care delivery organizations, however, will play an especially important role. Because of their size and care capacities, they can set an example for improvement across the health care system by using new practice methods, setting standards, and sharing resources and information with smaller facilities and individual care providers.

Although details may vary among organizations, some key concepts will remain constant. A learning health care organization harnesses its internal wisdom—staff expertise, patient feedback, financial data, and other knowledge— to improve its operation. It also engages continuous feedback loops monitoring internal practices, assessing what can be improved, testing and adjusting it response to data, and implementing its findings across the organization.

Simply put, an organization that promotes continuous learning and improvement is one that makes the right thing easy to do. Its environment simplifies procedures and workflows so that providers can operate at peak performance to care for patients, and embraces support tools, such as checklists, that make providers’ jobs easier. This not only improves care delivery and patient outcomes; it also reduces stress on front-line care providers, improves job satisfaction, and prevents staff burnout.

Many organizations still struggle to implement such transformational system changes. They face both external obstacles, such as financial incentives that emphasize quantity of service over quality, and internal challenges to achieving constant improvement. To evolve successfully, health care organizations must develop a culture that supports improvement efforts, by adopting systematic problem-solving techniques, building operational models that encourage and reward sustained quality, and becoming transparent on costs and outcomes.

Leadership will be vital, as an organization’s leadership and governance set the tone for the entire system. The visibility of leaders at the highest level makes them uniquely positioned to define the organization’s quality goals, communicate these goals and gain acceptance from the staff, and make learning a priority. Leaders also have the ability to align activities to ensure that staff members have the necessary resources, time, and energy to accomplish the organization’s goals. By defining and visibly emphasizing a vision that rewards continuous learning and improvement, leadership encourages an organization’s disparate elements to work together toward a common end.

To complement leadership at the top, a continuously learning organization also requires leadership on the part of the managers and front-line workers who translate an expressed vision into practice. Middle managers play a crucial role in on-the-ground, day-to-day management of the units that, collectively, make up an organization. Unit leaders therefore must often challenge the prevailing mental models—deep-seated assumptions and ways of thinking about problems—and refocus attention on the barriers to learning and improvement. To this end, middle managers must be able to set priorities for improvement efforts, establish and implement continuous learning cycles, and foster a culture of respect among staff that empowers them to undertake continuous learning and improve patient care.

To promote continuous learning, health care organizations also need to adopt dedicated learning processes— mechanisms that help in constantly capturing knowledge and using the lessons to implement improvements. Achieving this type of systems-based problem solving requires an organizational culture that incentivizes experimentation among staff. While success is the goal, the system should recognize failure as key to the learning process and not penalize employees if their experiments are unsuccessful. Systems that continuously learn also need to be adept at transferring the knowledge they gain throughout the organization. Although each of these factors is important, it is the organization’s operational model—the way it aligns goals, resources, and incentives—that makes learning actionable. In this way, an organization’s operating model can promote continuous learning, help control variability and waste that do not contribute to quality care, and recoup savings to invest in improving care processes and patient health, and make improvement sustainable.

Pioneering health care organizations that successfully become continuously learning operations—fully or even partially— should also take the lead in diffusing the lessons learned more broadly. In this way, they not only can stand as beacons of opportunity, but also can provide the type of granular, hard-won information that can encourage and speed similar transformations across the entire health care system.

The entrenched challenges of the U.S. health care system demand a transformed approach. Left unchanged, health care will continue to underperform; cause unnecessary harm to patients; and strain national, state, community, and family budgets. The actions required to reverse current trends will be notable, substantial, sometime disruptive—and absolutely necessary.

The challenges are clear. But the imperatives are also clear, the changes are possible, and there are at least signs of success. Moving ahead, following the path to a continuously learning health care system, offers the prospect for best care at lower cost for individuals and society.

Education has long been recognized as important to individual well-being and the nation’s economic growth. Yet, despite significant public and private investment, disparities in educational opportunities, behavior, attainment, and achievement exist among different student populations. For example, from early childhood through postsecondary education, English learners, low-income, and some racial and ethnic minority students generally have less access to quality learning opportunities, materials, and teachers than their peers. Students from these disadvantaged groups also fare less well on a variety of outcomes. In addition to well-documented gaps in K-12 achievement and graduation rates, these students are more likely to be absent or truant, have disciplinary problems in school, encounter the justice system, and engage in risky behaviors, and less likely to attend and graduate from college. As demographics continue to shift in the United States, the imperative for the K-12 education system to address these disparities and better prepare students to thrive in adulthood is greater than ever before.

Recent policy developments are renewing attention to this imperative and providing an opportunity to address it. The Common Core state standards in mathematics and English language arts will increase academic expectations for all students. In a similar vein, realizing President Obama’s goal of producing 8 million more college graduates by 2020 will mean that a more diverse range of students needs to leave high school prepared for the future.

The available evidence suggests that meeting these goals will require appreciable changes in the approaches school systems take to educate students from low-income families, nonwhite students, and English learners. Making these changes will not be easy, for two major reasons. First, anyone who has spent appreciable time in schools, particularly low-performing schools or those with high concentrations of students in poverty, can attest to the complexity of the educational enterprise. Second, education policies and policy research often belie those known complexities, typically emphasizing one or two levers that are perceived as being the most influential at any given time. Without a greater willingness to grapple with more aspects of the system simultaneously when crafting policies and policy research, progress in reducing educational disparities will continue to be incremental, at best.

In this article I explore the mismatch between the complexity of reducing educational disparities and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students, and the comparatively narrower focus of policy research on those topics (and, by extension, the vision of the policymakers who compel that research). Because the work of the National Research Council (NRC) happens in response to requests from government agencies and other organizations concerned with education policy, the NRC’s portfolio can be used as a lens for reflecting how policymakers view the problem and possible solutions. To inform this article, I examined NRC consensus studies from 1999 to the present that were explicitly focused on or motivated by some aspect of equity in K-12 education. I also examined two recent influential reports on the topic of educational disparities. The first is Equity and Quality in Education, a comparative report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on some of the policy levers that can be used to reduce system-wide inequities and help to overcome school failure. The second report, For Each and Every Child, was issued by the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission in February 2013. That report addresses the disparities in meaningful educational opportunities that give rise to achievement gaps and makes recommendations about the ways in which federal policies could address such disparities.

By highlighting the divergence between the problem and the typical approaches to identifying solutions, this article underscores the need for policymakers and policy research to adopt a broader conceptualization of the problem to identify a wider range of possible solutions for improving outcomes. This article by no means offers a comprehensive review of the literature; rather, the analysis of a few select reports is intended to serve as a starting point for discussions about future directions for research and policy.

The complexity of the problem

In any education system, the major elements of the system that influence the teaching and learning process and educational outcomes include curriculum; instructional practices; school organization and climate; assessment and accountability; state, district, and school-level policies; and finance. The major actors in the system are teachers and their capacity to teach, students, principals, and families.

Each of these elements and actors is conceptually distinct, and each serves a different role in the education system. However, as with any complex system, each element and each actor is connected to the others in a nonlinear way (much like nodes in a web or network), and they are mutually dependent on each other. In addition, the interactions among different actors and between people and the other elements of the system are constantly changing over time, and they are determined by the individuals and their goals for the interactions. The following excerpt from a 2002 article by Jennifer O’Day on complexity, accountability, and school improvement illustrates this point:

In a school, for example, teachers interact with students, with other teachers, with administrators, with parents, and so forth. In each of these interactions, the individual actor follows his or her own goals and strategies, which differ from those of other actors to varying degrees. One teacher may seek to develop her students’ mathematical reasoning while another is more focused on keeping students safe and off the streets. These teachers’ differing goals may be manifested in somewhat different strategies in the classroom. Similarly, while one student may show up because he wants to hang out with friends and avoid the truancy officer, another has his eyes on an elite university. Again, students’ particular activities will vary according to their goals.

Those interactions also are governed by the constraints that the system imposes, such as the length and structure of the school day, state or district standards, the standardized testing schedule, and the curriculum materials and other instructional tools that are available to teachers.

Layering in the needs of disadvantaged, low-performing students and schools increases the complexity of the education process. Students’ background characteristics and conditions typically determine the schools they attend, and the neighborhood context, in turn, determines the availability of resources and the capacity of the professionals who work at the school. Indeed, English learners and students living in poverty require more intensive resources to support their learning, and many schools in poor neighborhoods lack the human and material resources to “break the nexus between student background characteristics and student achievement,” as described in the NRC report Making Money Matter. Paradoxically, the schools that need the highest-quality teachers the most—schools with high concentrations of low-income or low-achieving students—have the hardest time attracting them.

Some constraints or elements of the K-12 education system disproportionately affect disadvantaged students and thereby complicate the process of improving their educational outcomes. As one example, tracking, or the practice of sorting students into different courses or curricula based on ability, has many deleterious effects. Students in lowertracked courses often are low-income, nonwhite, or English learners. Tracking in the early grades precludes these students from taking more rigorous courses over the course of their academic careers, isolates them from their higher-achieving peers, reinforces low academic expectations, and leads many to believe that they lack academic competence. By secondary school, students in these lower tracks might disengage and eventually drop out of school. Nonwhite students also are disproportionally represented in special education and subject to discipline policies that remove them from the school or classroom, further limiting their learning opportunities.

Students’ background characteristics and conditions also influence their own education in well-documented ways (see the companion article by Alexandra Beatty for a more detailed discussion of the out-of-school factors and needs that affect K-12 behavior, achievement, and attainment). For low-income students, lack of access to quality early learning opportunities can limit the extent to which they enter kindergarten ready to learn, shaping the course of their education for years. Being hungry, chronically ill from an absence of health care, or stressed from exposure to hardship or violence can diminish concentration, engagement, and performance in school. Older students who take jobs to support their families might attend school sporadically, which affects their education and the functioning of their classes. Improving outcomes and reducing disparities for disadvantaged students is even further complicated by the ways in which students’ lives and out-of-school influences affect the functioning of the school as a whole, and these dynamics are less well understood from a research perspective.

Policy levers

Looking across the research related to the topics in the previous section and in Beatty’s article in this issue, what we know about improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students suggests that the process begins in early childhood, requires attention to psychosocial development as well as academic growth, and mitigates the effects of circumstances and conditions, such as poverty, that hinder students’ learning. Most research that is driven by policy concerns and designed to inform policy, however, does not reflect this broad view, and is therefore limited in its utility to help policymakers consider and address the problem in all its complexity.

A review of NRC consensus reports in the past 15 years that have been driven by some aspect of equity in K-12 education illustrates a striking shift in national policy priorities. In 1999 and 2000, three consensus reports on K-12 education focused explicitly on equity. In 2001, Congress authorized the No Child Left Behind Act (originally the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), which included strict accountability requirements for all students. From 2001 to mid-2012, as No Child Left Behind came to dominate the education landscape, just five NRC consensus reports were driven by the goal of equity in education. Most of the reports fall into two broad topic areas: 1) high-stakes testing and accountability and 2) special populations of students, such as dropouts, minority students, students with disabilities, and English learners, typically as they intersected with testing and accountability.

Reports on each of these topics, however deep and comprehensive, have addressed only a slice of the problem of reducing educational disparities for disadvantaged students. The focus of each report also reflects national educational policy priorities at the time when the report was commissioned. Of course, it is valuable to have a deep understanding of individual elements of the system, but homing in on one aspect in this way does not give policymakers a sense of the limitations of approaching the problem one lever at a time. If it is clear that the problem involves complex interactions among the actors and elements of the system, policymakers must grapple with those complexities. This might explain why many NRC reports caution against the search for a magic bullet and point to the need to attend to other elements of the system, even if they do not address those other elements themselves.

Notably, three older NRC reports—written before No Child Left Behind—adopted more comprehensive approaches to the challenge of promoting greater educational opportunity and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students. The committee that wrote the 1999 report Making Money Matter was charged to answer the question, “How can education finance systems be designed to ensure that all students achieve high levels of learning and that education funds are raised and used in the most efficient and effective manner possible?” In addressing its charge, the committee observed that:

Education finance is only one part of a total system of education. Many of the concerns about the financing of education reflect large issues regarding the overall education system. Hence, proposals for changing the finance system can be presented in at least two ways: (1) as a menu of options for driving the education system in desirable directions or (2) as intertwined components necessary to achieve a given vision of overall education reform.

Thus, Making Money Matter tackled broader issues such as the need for investing in the capacity of the system and professionals in the system to improve achievement, and the need for systematic inquiry into a range of more comprehensive and aggressive reforms in urban schools to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged students.

Initially driven by concerns that high-school exit examinations could have the unintended effect of increasing dropout rates among students whose rates are already far higher than the average, the NRC report Understanding Dropouts (2001) examined the state of knowledge about influences on dropout behavior and the available data on dropouts and school completion. By definition, that examination probed the interaction of nonschool factors and many different aspects of the education system and their role in dropout.

In a related vein, the 2003 report Engaging Schools also had a relatively broad charge to examine what was known about promoting disadvantaged urban adolescents’ engagement and motivation (and academic achievement) in high school. That committee looked at the intersection of several different aspects of the education system (curriculum, teachers, instructional strategies, and the organization of schools) with broader research on motivation and engagement. The committee also took into account the role of family, peer culture, and community resources. Reflecting this comprehensive view of the problem, the report’s recommendations range from greater use of classroom-based assessment of students’ knowledge and skills to restructuring urban high schools to improving communication, coordination, and trust among the adults in the various settings where adolescents spend their time.

Other approaches

Moving beyond the NRC portfolio, two recent policy reports provide contrasting approaches to their recommendations for reducing disparities. The 2012 OECD report Equity and Quality in Education is a cross-national examination of the approaches governments can take to prevent school failure and reduce dropout. The report notes that

Governments can prevent school failure and reduce dropout using two parallel approaches: eliminating system level practices that hinder equity; and targeting low performing disadvantaged schools. But education policies need to be aligned with other government policies, such as housing or welfare, to ensure student success.

At the system level, the OECD report suggests that the following policies could help to reduce or avoid creating disparities in educational outcomes:

• Eliminate grade repetition
• Eliminate early tracking
• Make funding strategies responsive to schools’ and students’ needs
• Provide flexible pathways for students to complete secondary education

In terms of supporting low-performing schools and students to improve, OECD’s recommended strategies include:

• Attracting, supporting, and retaining high-quality teachers
• Creating a school climate that is conducive to learning
• Strengthening school leadership
• Promoting the use of effective classroom learning strategies
• Prioritizing links between schools and communities

These recommendations are consistent with the major elements of the K-12 education system I described in the previous section and that are commonly identified as the “usual suspects” in education policy reports and conversations. And if implemented in U.S. schools, they probably would improve the process of schooling, and perhaps even educational outcomes, for low-income students, nonwhite students, and English learners. But by how much?

The OECD recommendations address a few levers or (staying with the image of the education system as an interconnected web) nodes of the system at a time and do not fully engage with the interactions among them or with the multifaceted causes of disparities in education. To be fair, the report does acknowledge some of the interrelations among the levers, and in the excerpt above, recognizes that the causes of disparities in educational outcomes extend well beyond the education system. But breaking the recommendations into such discrete pieces could tempt policymakers to treat the recommendations as a disconnected set of menu options and might lead them to expect more progress than is reasonable from selecting one or two items from the menu. Without a richer, more fully developed conceptualization of the problem, clear linkages between the solutions and the nature and magnitude of the problem, and an exploration of the tradeoffs involved in tackling one or two levers at a time, the kind of change that is needed to make appreciable progress in reducing educational disparities will probably remain elusive.

For Each and Every Child, the 2013 report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission, offers just such a comprehensive conceptualization, together with a set of interconnected solutions that are directly related to that conceptualization. The Equity Commission’s report contains a “five-part framework of tightly interrelated recommendations to guide policymaking.” The parts are as follows:

• Equitable school finance systems
• Teachers, principals, and curricula that give students an opportunity to thrive
• Early childhood education with an academic focus
• Mitigating poverty’s effects by providing access to early childhood education and a range of support services
• Reforming accountability and governance systems

This framework (and the report) begins to embrace the complexity of reducing educational disparities by explicitly including early childhood education and acknowledging the effects of poverty on educational behavior, achievement, and attainment. And although finance, accountability, and governance arguably represent a few individual levers or nodes of the system, the report makes a compelling case for the ways in which they affect all educational decisions. Moreover, the tightly interrelated nature of the recommendations— linking, for example, suspensions and expulsions that remove disadvantaged students from the learning process to the lack of funding and disparities in high-quality teachers who can provide supports for them to catch up or stay on track academically—lends credence to the commission’s call for more coherent and coordinated policy action at the federal, state, and district levels. Perhaps the Equity Commission’s report will inspire policymakers to approach this challenge of improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students in the more comprehensive and integrated way that it deserves.

A downside to the comprehensive nature of For Each and Every Child is that, on the surface, the commission could be accused of playing it safe by being so comprehensive and including such a wide range of solutions. In fact, reforming governance and accountability structures in the U.S. education system or expanding the reach of schools to mitigate the effects of poverty are anything but safe! Still, faced with such an array of potential, and potentially doable, actions, policymakers could benefit from guidance to avoid a linear, lever-by-lever approach or treating the report’s recommendations as a to-do list rather than the long-term interconnected agenda that it is.

A comprehensive view

As I have mentioned, robust bodies of research, including numerous synthesis reports by various NRC committees, exist on most of the elements and actors of the education system as they relate to reducing disparities for disadvantaged students. The commonly identified levers—funding, standards and accountability, teachers and school leaders, instructional practices, school climate, policy—are undoubtedly important to learning in their own right and as interconnected parts of the system. However, as a nation, our approach to moving these levers to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged students has been ineffective. Moving forward, how can we avoid policy recommendations that read like laundry lists of potentially disconnected strategies that are not commensurate with the complexity of reducing educational disparities and improving outcomes?

Although simultaneously addressing all of the factors that influence educational achievement is undoubtedly difficult, and perhaps even infeasible, focusing on just a few policy levers or on just one youth-serving sector constrains the options available to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged students. And while the education system cannot be expected to solve broader economic and societal problems that influence educational outcomes, strategic policies might support schools and districts in taking more deliberate steps to identify and mitigate their effects to the extent possible in the course of educating students.

Policymakers need clearer guidance from research to make these decisions, particularly about the limits of one-dimensional approaches that do not address the interconnectedness of the elements and actors in the system. Instead of asking which aspects of the system offer the highest-leverage points for improvement, a more productive line of questioning might be, “How much progress are we likely to make by focusing on just one or two elements of the system? If we did focus only on one lever, how long it would realistically take to realize the desired goals? And at what point would it become necessary to begin grappling with improvements to other elements of the system?” To provide an example, a current policy focus is on evaluating teachers’ effectiveness. The questions above become: How much progress will we make in improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students by focusing only on teachers’ effectiveness (and, as is often the case, on policies to remove the lowest-performing teachers)? If we did focus only on evaluating teachers’ effectiveness, how long would it take to reduce achievement gaps and improve outcomes for disadvantaged students to the desired levels? And at what point will it become necessary to begin grappling with improvements to other elements of the system that influence teachers’ performance, such as their training and professional development, the organization and climate of their schools, the high turnover among their principals, or the nonacademic needs of the students they teach?

As I have discussed, a few examples of policy research exist that might encourage this kind of thinking. Specifically, in this article I focused on three NRC reports between 1999 and 2003 that undertook relatively comprehensive examinations of reducing disparities and improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students. In different ways, each of these reports reflected the complexity of that challenge. The far more recent report For Each and Every Child by the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission offers an excellent framework for considering multiple aspects of the education system and how they relate to each other. It also addresses the complexity of reducing disparities in educational outcomes by looking beyond the confines of the K-12 education system for influences on achievement, and at reasonable actions for the school system to mitigate those effects. That report also should be commended for calling attention to the long-term nature of implementing such an ambitious agenda.

On the whole, though, policy research contributes to, or at least does not seriously challenge, the one-lever-at-a-time approach. Despite what we know about improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students, very few individual reports on this topic span the years of early childhood through early adulthood, consider multiple (much less all) elements of the system at once, consider ways to leverage successful interventions from all of the sectors responsible for aspects of young people’s well-being, or involve rethinking the education system in ways that integrate these multiple dimensions to improve achievement and related educational outcomes for disadvantaged students. Yet, given our nation’s dismal track record in educating disadvantaged students, this broader vision of what it means to effectively educate students is exactly what is needed.

To identify directions for future research and policy, I return again to the vision of the education system as a web of interconnected nodes. Although the field has a relatively solid understanding of most of the individual nodes in their own right, research is still needed on certain aspects of individual nodes and on the role of the individual nodes in the larger web, particularly as they relate to reducing educational disparities. Research is also needed on the threads between different nodes, to understand which nodes are more strongly connected to each other, to the teaching and learning process, and to student outcomes. Finally, research is sorely needed on the web as a whole, either through new studies of the education system or by looking across existing bodies of research on different elements of the system. Enhancing the policy understanding in these ways might be a promising start toward the broader vision and ambitious education policies that our most disadvantaged students deserve to help them thrive in the education system and beyond.

On March 11, 2011, Japan suffered one of the most devastating earthquakes in its history, followed by a massive tsunami that engulfed reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant located near the coast. In Japan, the government body that regulates O nuclear power is not highly independent of the utilities it oversees, and regulators had failed to address known safety issues with the reactors. After the crisis, Japan lurched toward a nuclear-free ideology. How can you blame them?

But the catastrophe was not fundamentally caused by a lack of technical information or know-how. Reviewers of the incident found that during the crisis, regulators and company officials made some highly questionable management decisions that were influenced by fears of financial loss and of losing face. Indeed, the catastrophe could have been avoided if good decisions had been made based on available data without the influence of vested interests. As a result, Japan’s energy future has been delimited by human foibles and the resulting breakdown of trust in nuclear energy.

If the tsunami in Japan flooded one coastline and several nuclear reactors, climate change may flood all coastlines and cause worldwide dislocations of people, failures of agriculture, and destruction of industries. The likelihood of these impacts has lent legitimacy to the investigation of intentional climate management, or “geoengineering.” Society may, at some future time, attempt geoengineering in order to stave off the worst, most unbearable effects of climate change. The technical challenge alone is enormous, but Fukushima provides a cautionary tale for managing the endeavor. Is it possible to develop a trustworthy capacity to manage the climate of Earth?

Incentives for manipulation

The potential opportunities, benefits, harms, and risks of geoengineering the climate will almost certainly create incentives to manipulate geoengineering choices, and the stakes will be enormous. Societies globally would be wise to face these potential vested interests as they begin to consider researching geoengineering.

Vested interests, in this realm, relate to fortune, fear, fame, and fanaticism, and what to do about them. In moderation, seeking fortune or fame, exercising caution, or being guided by philosophy are appropriate and can lead to innovation and good decisions. However, these attributes may become liabilities when nations, institutions, or individuals seek to manipulate the decisionmaking process to make money, enhance stature, save face, or influence decisions based on fanatical ideology. Society can and should expect people to act with honesty and integrity, but should also plan for dealing with vested interests.

Before moving to planning, it is first worthwhile to examine the forces at work.

Fortune. Parties who stand to gain or lose fortunes by promoting or opposing a geoengineering decision have a vested interest in manipulating that decisionmaking processes. Researchers or companies with a financial stake in experiments or possible deployments may seek to push research or deployment in a direction that is ill-advised for society as a whole. Recently, for example, a company desiring to sell carbon credits for sequestering carbon in the ocean conducted a rogue experiment on iron fertilization (the Haida experiment) off the west coast of Canada without obtaining permission or giving due consideration to potential environmental impacts. At this time, there is no legal framework in place to protect society’s interests from a financially motivated company attempting such a geoengineering experiment. In the history of environmental remediation, companies that made money from remediation activities have at times fought changes in regulation that would obviate the need for remediation. For example, California used to require the excavation of soil that had been contaminated by leaking gasoline tanks, until researchers documented that naturally occurring soil bacteria would eventually consume the leaked gasoline, thereby obviating expensive excavation. Companies that stood to make a profit from excavation fought this change in regulation. Similarly, a company with contracts to perform geoengineering would have a vested interest in continued deployment.

Countries that produce fossil fuels and companies comprising the fossil fuel industry may view geoengineering as a way to delay or distract attention from mitigation efforts and thus promote the technology to protect their interests. The chief executive officer of Exxon Corporation, Rex Tillerson, articulated his opinion about climate change, glibly commenting: “. . . we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions.” The opinion espoused by Tillerson reflects his company’s vested interests. Investigators have documented cases where companies with vested financial interests have bought studies to suppress or manipulate data related to climate change, smoking, and pharmaceuticals in order to obtain favorable opinions, decrease funding, or delay the publication of research. In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskis, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, described what she saw as the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to manipulate the scientific process and conduct extensive misinformation campaigns related to climate science. These lessons reinforce the idea that the design of a geoengineering enterprise should limit the influence of financial incentives.

Fear. The idea that humans can control the climate is fundamentally hubristic. Individuals involved in geoengineering should be appropriately fearful of this technology and should have great humility and healthy self-doubt that they can control the consequences of intervention.

But there are inappropriate fears that should be avoided. Those involved in geoengineering should not fear losing face when they point out problems or discover negative results. Scientific journals should publish negative results, which for geoengineering are equally as important as positive results. Society surely needs to know if a proposed technology is ineffective or inadvisable.

An institution charged solely with managing geoengineering research would have a vested interest in having geoengineering accepted and deployed, because its continued existence would depend on the approach under consideration being a viable course of action. The institution might be tempted to overstate the benefits of the technologies if it fears losing funding. An institution whose focus is on geoengineering might not want to listen to minority opinions that could slow the momentum of research funding.

As a case in point drawn from recent events, during the economic collapse, there were minority positions within the Bush administration that could have saved the national economy from disaster. For example, the chief of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born, repeatedly warned of the dangers of the unregulated derivative market. Her prescient minority voice was suppressed by powerful groupthink within the administration that was vested in economic growth, and she eventually resigned. One cannot help but wonder how many minority voices were suppressed out of fear in light of Born’s experiences. People who are in the minority and sense problems or dangers must not be afraid to speak against the majority or powerful figures who might become invested in the success of geoengineering research.

Fear is a powerful human motivator and often drives institutional culture. It would be a grave mistake to create institutions and power structures in which people are motivated to become overconfident about their ability to control the climate or fear speaking out when they represent minority opinions or are bearers of bad news.

Fame. Perhaps universally, humans have a desire for recognition. Scientists and engineers and other advocates are not immune from wanting to become a Nobel Prize winner, or be called on by the media, or even just have an enviable publication record. The desire for recognition can become a vested interest that leads to a loss of perspective.

Individuals developing geoengineering concepts are likely to know more about the subject than anyone else, and their expertise has tremendous value for society. However, it is always better to have a fresh pair of eyes on a difficult and consequential subject. Society should not depend solely on the developers of technology to assess the effectiveness and advisability of their proposals.

Fanaticism. Unlike climate change, geoengineering is not yet an ideologically polarized partisan issue, but it could become so. Society would clearly benefit from a debate over geoengineering that is grounded in quality information and reasonable dialogue. Fanaticism would polarize and distort the debate and the sound decisionmaking that society requires.

A reasonable ideological position drifts into fanaticism when it hardens into a rigid devotion. Most people have ideological positions on matters of importance, but human philosophies are incomplete and imperfect. For example, in a moment of surprising candor in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, famously testified that there was a flaw in his free-market ideology, and that the flaw helped cause the crisis. The tendency to adhere too rigidly to one’s worldview can put one in danger of sliding into fanaticism. Fanatics often use unreasonable and unscrupulous means to promote their causes. To state the tragically obvious: Fanatics can sincerely do much harm.

Many groups and people will oppose the very idea of geoengineering for legitimate philosophical reasons and use honest means to argue against such research. They will raise important issues that need to be debated. However, motivated segments with a vested interest in their ideology or worldview can behave like fanatics, ignoring or misrepresenting factual information and using questionable techniques to create distrust, a situation that could in turn lead to an inability to act strategically in face of climate catastrophes.

On the right side of the political spectrum, for example, an individualistic free-market ideology might lead to fanatical positions that see geoengineering as an alternative to “heavy-handed” government regulations to mitigate greenhouse gases. For example, Larry Bell, an endowed professor at the University of Houston and frequent commenter on energy-related matters, remarked in his latest book, Climate Corruption, that for many on the right, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.” Their vested position, aligned with Exxon’s, could be “we will just engineer our way out of this problem.”

On the left, rigid environmental or antitechnology ideologies might lead some groups to oppose any discussion of geoengineering. Geoengineering is born out of a fundamental concern for global environmental health, but as with the climate problem in general, it has conflicts with an environmental ideology that narrowly focuses on species preservation, regional conservation, and what is called the precautionary principle. (One version of the precautionary principle states: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”) Based on an ideology that centers on species preservation, some environmental groups oppose the development of renewable power plants that are designed to help provide energy without emissions but that could cause climate change that could wipe out many species around the globe. In the case of geoengineering, there are environmental groups, such as ETC, that cite the precautionary principle as grounds for banning all geoengineering research, which it sees as a threat to biodiversity. In an ironic twist, rigid antitechnology ideology might become a wedge used by some environmental groups to reject any consideration of geoengineering, even when research is motivated by a desire to preserve biodiversity.

Addressing the four F’s

Moderating the corrupting effects of fortune, fear, fame, and fanaticism should be integral to the development of future geoengineering choices. Society can pay attention to institutional and policy issues that would prevent vested interests from doing harm and provide a counterbalance to human foibles. In this spirit, we offer some guidance for transparency, institutional design, research management, public deliberation, and independent advisory functions. Our suggestions reflect and expand on ideas presented in the Oxford Principles, issued in 2011 by a team of scholars in the United Kingdom as a first effort at producing a code of ethics to guide geoengineering research, and in a report on geoengineering and climate remediation research published in 2011 by the Bipartisan Policy Center, an independent think tank based in Washington, DC. These overlapping strategies each deal with more than one vested interest and could help build genuine trust among scientists, policymakers, and the public.

Transparency. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” When all parties present accurate information clearly and forthrightly, vested interests become less influential. To enable effective public accountability and deliberation, information must be transmitted in a way that is comprehensive, but useful to the lay public. Information users need an accurate understanding of such things as funding priorities, research results, limitations, predictions, plans, and errors. This can be referred to as “functional” transparency, to emphasize that the meaning and significance of the information made transparent should also be transparent, not obfuscated in a blizzard of data.

Functional transparency presents challenges. Scientists use many specialized caveats to express what is known about the climate that are understood by and important for scientists, but can obscure the significance of information and be misleading to nonspecialists. For example, climate scientists have had a difficult time articulating the connections between extreme weather events, such as storms Irene and Sandy, and global climate change. The relationship between weather and climate is complex, and scientists know that such extreme storms have a finite likelihood of occurring with or without climate change. Yet understanding the connections between extreme weather events and climate change is important for effective public deliberations on climate mitigation and adaptation. Scientists’ need for cautious, complex caveats often clouds the issue in public deliberations.

Also, the public is more likely than the scientific community to focus on the context for research. For example, public discourse on geoengineering research, especially outdoor research, is likely to focus on the purpose of the experiment (in fact, some public deliberation never gets beyond this issue), on alternatives to the experiment, on the potential benefits of the methods being researched, and on the potential risks of the experiments being used. This may be especially true whenever there is the possibility that vested interests may be involved, in which case people are wisely concerned about the motives and goals of research. As a case in point drawn from agricultural biotechnology, the debate has largely centered on the motives and goals of research. Proponents of biotechnology often claim that their goals are to address the problems of world hunger and agricultural sustainability. Opponents question these motives, charging that the real goal is a singular focus on increasing the wealth of researchers and their corporate sponsors.

Scientists, however, do not always make the purpose of research completely transparent. For example, some highly legitimate and important climate science research—say, on cloud behavior—simultaneously informs geoengineering concepts. This research spawns the publication of geoengineering analyses, even though geoengineering is not explicitly named as a purpose of the research. Investigators can and do purposely downplay or obfuscate geoengineering as a purpose of research, because this topic is controversial. Just as in the debate about biotechnology, the lack of transparency about the purpose of the research may eventually erode trust and undermine public deliberation about geoengineering. Norms for research transparency should include forthright statements about the purpose of research. There should be clear and understandable assessments of the scope and state of knowledge and expected gains in understanding that could come from research. The transparent release of research information should be designed to inform public deliberation.

As a good example of bridging the divide between scientific discourses and public deliberations, Sweden’s nuclear waste program conducted a study, called a “safety case,” of a proposed repository for nuclear wastes. The study proved a primary tool in developing a public dialogue on the topic, and the process resulted in a publicly approved, licensed facility. The safety case communicated in lay language the technical arguments about why the proposed repository was thought to be safe. It also described the quality of the information used in the argument; that is, how well the factors contributing to safety were understood. The document laid out future plans about what would be done to improve understanding, the expected outcome of these efforts, and how previous efforts to improve understanding performed as expected or not. At a follow-up iteration of the safety case, the results of recent experiments were compared with previously predicted results. Over time, the transparency of this process enabled everyone, including the public, to see that the scientists investigating the future behavior of the proposed repository had an increasingly accurate understanding of its performance.

What lesson does this experience hold for geoengineering? Whereas the goal of this nuclear waste research was to build a successful repository, the goal of geoengineering research is not to successfully deploy geoengineering but rather to provide the best information possible to a decision process about whether to deploy. Nevertheless, the safety case provides a useful example for satisfying the norm of transparency required for effective public deliberations on scientific issues.

There is reason to hope that the propensity for ideological decisionmaking can be limited by transparency in geoengineering research. The experience at Fukushima, however, suggests that the opposite is true: Vested interests can drive nontransparent and poor management decisions that destroy public trust and encourage more extreme, fanatical responses. To engender trust, the people or groups conducting or managing research should explain clearly what they are trying to accomplish, what they know and do not know, and the quality of the information they have. They should reveal intentions, point out vested interests, and admit mistakes, and do all of this in a way that is frank and understandable— all examples of actions that enhance trust. Any subsequent modifications of plans and processes should be transparent and informed by independent assessments of purpose, data, processes, analyses, results, and conclusions.

Institutional design. Institutional design can foster standards of practice and appropriate regulations that will counteract many vested interests. Public funding of research is the first act of research governance, as it implies a public decision to do research in the first place. If research is publicly funded, then democratically elected officials can be held accountable for it. Although public funding would not by itself prevent privately funded research, it would fill a vacuum that private money has so far filled. Furthermore, publicly funded research should not lead to patenting that would produce financial vested interests. Geoengineering should be managed as a public good in the public interest.

Governments should charter the institutions charged with developing geoengineering research to be rewarded for exposing methods that are bad ideas as well as good. One way to obviate institutional vested interest in the success of a method would be to create institutions responsible for a wide spectrum of climate strategies. If an institution investigates an array of alternatives, it would have great freedom to reject inferior choices. In an ideal world, institutions would be created to develop technical strategies for dealing with climate change in general, the defining problem of our time, and these institutions would be given broad purview over mitigation efforts, adaption requirements, and the evaluation of geoengineering.

Just as institutions should not be punished for admitting to failed concepts, individual scientists involved in geoengineering research should not have their careers depend on positive versus negative results. If they discover adverse information, it should be valued appropriately as adding to overall understanding. Organizations that fund research and universities and laboratories that conduct research should publicize and reward research results demonstrating the ineffectiveness, inadvisability, or implausibility of a geoengineering idea. Just as NASA scientists in the early years applauded when a rocket (unmanned, of course) blew up, institutions should reward curiosity and courage in the face of failures.

Research management. Most research in the United States today is “investigator-driven,” in which funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, may design a general call for proposals, but the investigators generate the research topics. Funding agencies may convene workshops to explore strategic research needs that subsequently become part of a programmatic call for research proposals. Workshops help to illuminate research that will contribute to an overall goal, but this process does not organize research to achieve a mission per se. There are important previous instances when research with a large-scale public goal was conducted in a collaborative “mission-driven” manner. Now the nation rarely uses this model, and investigator-driven research is the norm.

Geoengineering research (and climate research in general) might benefit from rediscovering, and perhaps reinventing, collaborative mission-driven research modes that focus on a structured investigation of all interconnected parts of the Earth-human-biosphere systems of interest. Interconnections, key failure modes, and critical information needs would be among critical factors to be systematically identified and addressed. The complex, potentially powerful, and intricate problem of intentional management of the climate requires a systems approach. As well, collaborative mission-driven research management would serve to balance the motivation of individuals by rewarding success in meeting the overall goals of research and would compensate for the somewhat random focus of investigator-driven research.

Initial reactions to this suggestion may tend toward the negative, given how mission-driven research was conducted during the Cold War. In the United States and the former Soviet Union, this style of research resulted in massive radioactive releases into the environment, causing extensive contamination of soil, sediments, and surface- and groundwater throughout weapons complexes. Learning from this experience, and using the suggestions offered here, could lead to a reinvention of mission research for geoengineering that would be open, transparent, publically accountable, and environmentally motivated.

There also may be a need to revise the current method, peer review, for assessing the outcomes of research. Peer review will remain necessary—in part, to help balance the exuberance of individual scientists—but by itself will probably be inadequate. Peer review of journal articles would cover geoengineering projects in pieces, without taking into consideration their tight connection to the context and the entirety of the system problem. There is a potentially useful alternative method that was developed for assessing the results of research on nuclear weapons systems that could not be published for security reasons. With severe limitations on access to peer review, laboratories conducting the research pitted two teams against each other to provide checks and scrutiny on research results. In this “red team/blue team” model, one team develops the research, and the other tries to ferret out all the problems. This approach balances a team that might represent institutional and personal vested interests in promoting a technology with a team whose vested interest is in finding out what is wrong with the idea. For evaluating geoengineering research and results, the red team/blue team approach could be considered a more systematic form of peer review.

Public deliberation. Effective public deliberation of the issues, benefits, risks, liabilities, ethics, costs, and other relevant issues will expose and help to neutralize any vested interests that might be in play. Public deliberation can highlight inappropriate profit-making concerns, point out unbalanced scientific positions, call attention to hubris and institutional bias, and counter the influence of partisan positioning on decisionmaking. Public deliberation will be enhanced and facilitated by research that is conducted transparently in trusted institutions that are managed to produce outcomes in the public interest; that is, through all of the suggestions described here. Public deliberation is perhaps one of the few approaches that can help expose ideologies for what they are, whether they come from the political right, which often obfuscates and denies climate science, or from extreme environmentalism, which often uses scare tactics to stop any technological choice anywhere, anytime. No group or individual should get a pass for mendacity in the face of the choices the nation will have to make regarding climate. Public discourse and deliberation will help prevent manipulative dialogue sponsored by ideologues from becoming decisive.

Deliberative dialogue facilitates real-life decisions about setting and prioritizing research goals and selecting the most appropriate means to achieve those goals. For geoengineering, society needs discussions that characterize ethical and social goals; examine competing alternatives; discuss practical obstacles; consider unwanted side effects; assess the technology, including its effectiveness and advisability; and ultimately produce policy recommendations. The deliberative process requires placing scientific research and technological developments in a larger social and ethical context, using this analysis to select intelligent and ethical goals, and identifying appropriate and effective means to achieve those goals.

A recent project in the United Kingdom is a successful example of effective public deliberation on geoengineering. In 2011, a team of researchers planned an experiment to investigate the feasibility of using tethered balloons to release small aerosol particles into the atmosphere that might reflect a few percent of incoming solar radiation and thereby cool things down a bit. The field test would be part of a larger research project, called Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering, or SPICE, that involved laboratory and computer analysis of several geoengineering techniques. Although the proposed experiment was nearly riskfree— the plan was to spray a small amount of water into the air—public deliberation about the plans revealed that this work looked like a “dash to deployment” for an immature solar radiation management technology. Research on deployment was not deemed to be necessary or important at this stage. Deliberation also exposed the fact that one of the investigators had intellectual property interests in the balloon technology, and this seemed to violate the principle that geoengineering should be conducted as a public good. Consequently, the investigators themselves stopped the experiment. This honest response helped the investigators accrue credibility and build trust, because their decision responded appropriately to public deliberation.

Independent advisory functions. An independent, broadly based advisory group would facilitate all of these suggested strategies for addressing vested interests. Such a group could help develop standards and norms for transparency, assess and evaluate institutional design, help to develop norms for research management, and lead the way in developing modes and norms of public deliberation. Because the issues raised by geoengineering go far beyond science, an advisory body should also be able to address a variety of broader issues, such as ethics, public deliberation, and international implications. This expanded charge implies that a board’s membership should also go beyond scientific expertise.

Forming independent advisory boards will face a number of barriers. Indeed, the need for an advisory function highlights the inherent controversial nature of geoengineering research, a fact that can make the political choice to start research even more difficult. In the United States, a public board of this type would probably have to meet the standards of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which is intended to ensure that advisory committees are objective and transparent to the public. Ironically, the act’s requirements effectively inhibit the formation of advisory committees, because they require funding, which is now scarce. There are other potential problems as well. Much current research on geoengineering is very preliminary, and perhaps all of the techniques identified so far will be ineffective, will have unacceptable side effects, or will be impossible to deploy under real-world conditions. Some people in the geoengineering field are concerned that having an advisory board to oversee research might interfere with the research before it has demonstrated that there is anything—positive or negative— that is worthy of oversight. Also, it is not clear what agency or person in the government should form such a board and to whom it should report.

As a practical example of how an advisory body might prove useful, consider again the SPICE balloon/aerosol experiment in the United Kingdom. If there had been an advisory board in place, it might well have recommended that the government cancel the experiment. Such a recommendation would have facilitated government action to stop the experiment, rather than leaving the decision up to the scientists involved, and this step would have given a rather different message to the public about managing controversial research.

The potential value of advisory boards also has been backed up by the research community itself. At a 2011 workshop on geoengineering governance sponsored by the Solar Radiation Management Initiative (an international project supported by the Royal Society in the United Kingdom, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Third World Academies of Science), participants were asked to consider various forms of organizing geoengineering research. All of them favored a requirement for an independent advisory group, perhaps the only conclusion of this meeting that had unanimous agreement.

In practical terms, consideration of such advisory boards will give rise to many questions about their membership, scope, and authority. To whom should a board report, and how should a national advisory board relate to the international community? How should an advisory board relate to the many governmental and intergovernmental agencies that would almost surely be involved in geoengineering research of one kind or another? Review boards that deal with research involving human subjects cannot actually authorize such research, but they do have the authority to stop research deemed unethical. Should a similar authority be developed for advisory boards on geoengineering research? Answers to these questions should evolve over time, perhaps starting with informal, nonbinding discussions among the various agencies involved.

Just as scientists do not yet know very much about the effectiveness, advisability, and practicality of possible geoengineering technologies, society also does not know very much about how to manage knowledge as it emerges from geoengineering research. If society is to govern this effort without the ill effects of vested interests, it will be necessary to learn how to govern at the same time as researchers are gathering information about the science and engineering of the various concepts. So the early formation of advisory boards or commissions to guide the development of governance is perhaps the first and most important action in countering the potential adverse effects of vested interests and in ensuring that any decisions to pursue or not pursue geoengineering remain legitimate societal choices.

Preparing in advance

Although the future of geoengineering remains uncertain although tantalizing, one thing is clear. It is not too early to begin the conversation about the human weaknesses, vested interests, and frightening possibilities of mismanaging geoengineering. The Fukushima disaster is just one in a long list of reminders of the consequences of not anticipating and moderating the effects of such all too human foibles as fortune, fear, fame, and fanaticism. It is unthinkable that geoengineering should be added to this list of human-caused technological tragedies.

And though much remains to be learned, it is also clear that a number of approaches are already available to moderate the corrupting effects of vested interests: norms for transparency, institutions designed for honest evaluation, management of research in the public interest, public deliberation to expose vested interests and counter fanaticism, and independent advisory boards to highlight and recommend specifics in all of these areas.

The challenge, then, is to get started. Earth is facing ever greater climate threats. Solutions need to be identified and implemented, with all appropriate speed. For many people, geoengineering may offer important help—if the nation, and the world, proceed in a deliberate, thoughtful manner in conducting research and applying the lessons learned.

Gaps in student achievement are well documented. Members of some ethnic minority groups and low-income students consistently perform less well on achievement tests than their peers do. For example, a more than 20-point gap between white and Hispanic students G on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in reading and mathematics has not changed significantly since 1990, and the gaps between black and white students have followed a similar pattern. Recent work has highlighted increases in the gaps among children of different income levels. Achievement gaps show up before children enter kindergarten: Children in the highest socioeconomic group entering kindergarten have cognitive scores 60% higher than those of children in the lowest socioeconomic group. The gaps in test scores and other measures persist throughout K-12 education, and corresponding gaps in high-school graduation rates, college matriculation and completion, and lifetime earnings demonstrate the impact that poor academic achievement has on young people’s lives. But, as Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips noted more than a decade ago in a study of test scores, such gaps are not “an inevitable fact of nature.”

A large volume of research has documented the associations between educational outcomes and factors associated with income and family and cultural background—most recently the collection Whither Opportunity?, edited by Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane and For Each and Every Child, a report from the Equity and Excellence Commission of the U.S. Department of Education. A picture is beginning to emerge of the specific ways in which economic resources influence education, but it has not yet resulted in policies that significantly narrow the gaps.

Schools clearly make a big difference. Research has established that the students most likely to lag behind academically are those who attend schools with less-qualified teachers and poorer resources. The rigor of the curriculum as it is implemented, the quality of teachers, class size, and teacher absence and turnover all have been shown to influence outcomes for students. In other words, what happens once children enter school may support those with disadvantages, or may perpetuate or exacerbate the gaps. (These issues are discussed in detail in a companion article by Natalie Nielsen.)

But there are other factors struggling students frequently share. For example, students whose families are not stable and supportive (those who change schools frequently, whose parents do not participate actively in their education, or whose families are disrupted by substance use or crime) are more likely to struggle in school. So too are students who live in poverty; whose neighborhoods are stressed by unemployment; and who feel unsafe at, and on the way to and from, their schools. The lack of adequate health care and adequate nutrition and untreated medical and mental health problems also are associated with school problems. Each of these sources of disadvantage may significantly impede a child’s academic progress, and these risk factors tend to cluster together, exacerbating their effects.

These important influences on children’s development have been the subject of considerable research, but less progress has been made in directly linking disadvantage that originates outside of school to educational outcomes. The National Research Council (NRC) has produced reports that synthesize research in areas that have important implications for the educational progress of children and adolescents. This article summarizes some of the messages from a body of work produced by the NRC since 2000 that offer insights about the out-of-school factors that may influence educational outcomes.

Produced primarily under the aegis of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families and the Committee on Law and Justice, these reports were not focused on addressing education issues and for the most part do not identify causal connections between out-of-school factors and academic achievement. They do, however, identify mechanisms by which specific sources of disadvantage impede students’ lives at school. As a group, they clearly point to important consequences of out-of-school factors for educational progress and to intersections among the different specific sources of disadvantage. The messages in these reports fall into a few broad categories.

Health and development

Research has vastly expanded understanding of development, particularly in early childhood and adolescence, and points to significant implications for education. Perhaps most important is the recognition that healthy development is a complex and interactive process that encompasses cognitive, psychological and emotional, biological, and behavioral processes, as well as environmental influences.

For example, as experts in early childhood care and education know, children who are ready for kindergarten have had the opportunity to develop the skills on which literacy and mathematical thinking will be built, but also the opportunity to form secure attachments and to develop social and self-regulation skills, so that they can develop successful relationships with their teachers and peers and take advantage of the classroom environment. The kinds of factors that frequently interfere with this development are closely associated with poverty: insecure housing and nutrition, unstable parenting and disruptions in relationships and care, and inadequate medical care.

The presence of extreme disadvantage, particularly when there are multiple sources, may be most harmful in the first years of life. Early experiences shape brain development, researchers have found, and the brain will adapt itself either to positive or to negative experiences. This means that infants and very young children who experience highly stressful family situations and associated risk factors can be permanently affected. These children will enter school at a significant disadvantage as compared with their peers and will present very different challenges to their teachers.

The early years are critical, but brain development continues into early adulthood, and it continues to interact with other factors. Researchers who study aspects of adolescence from different disciplinary perspectives are increasingly recognizing the importance during that phase of life of interactions among brain development, other biological processes, and social and environmental influences. Just as infants’ brains are particularly vulnerable to clusters of risk factors, older children and adolescents may respond to the same challenges in ways that threaten their engagement with school and their academic progress. Adolescents who are highly stressed are particularly prone to both emotional disturbances such as depression and a range of high-risk behaviors such as substance use and abuse. The combination of the initial stress and the mental health or other issue is likely to significantly impair a student’s engagement with school and capacity to keep up academically.

At the same time, disadvantaged children and young people often lack adequate care for medical and mental health problems. Adolescents who have two or more diseases, health conditions, or risky behaviors are particularly vulnerable, and their capacity to succeed academically is likely to be significantly compromised. Adolescents who already have other risk factors—those from low-income families; who are in the foster care system or are homeless; whose families have recently immigrated to the United States; who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender; and those in the juvenile justice system—tend to have more untreated health problems than their peers. These are young people who will also be likely to arrive at school unready to engage and learn, and to respond to academic setbacks or discipline problems by disengaging. Scholars who have focused on health care for adolescents stress that caregivers, teachers, and other adults who may come into contact with a student or a family are unlikely to have a complete picture of the stresses facing the family, even though the issues are likely to be interrelated and difficult to resolve in isolation.

Families and home environment

A closer look at stressors that can exist within the family illustrates their possible impacts on educational outcomes. For example, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and neglect may have profound outcomes. Abuse may have neurological or medical impacts on children and young people, including brain damage, neurobiological effects, mental retardation, speech defects, handicaps, and other health problems. Such abuse may also have impacts on cognitive development that manifest themselves in lowered IQ, difficulties with attention, learning disorders, poor reading, poor school performance, or dropping out of school. Possible effects on behavior may include aggression, truancy, delinquency, running away, drug use, and crime and violence. Effects on young people’s psychological states or emotions may include anxiety, depression, dysthymia, low self-esteem, poor coping skills, or hostility.

Although this sort of abuse is an extreme stressor, it is distressingly prevalent. Researchers estimate that about one in seven children between the ages of 2 and 17 are victims of maltreatment in a given year, and that children in low-income families are more likely than others to be maltreated. Low-income children are also more likely than their peers to move (change residence and often school or district) frequently. Not all mobility is harmful in itself, apart from the associated factors that sometimes result in frequent moves, such as family disruption, housing stress, and poverty. Certain kinds of school mobility, however, have a negative effect on children’s educational progress. Negative effects are found in children who move the most frequently, with the impact increasing with each move. The impact of frequent moves is greatest on younger children and on children with other risk factors, such as homelessness. There is a significant relationship between mobility and both lower school achievement and dropping out, and student mobility has a negative impact on schools as well.

These connections are complex to isolate and tend to be obscured in national data, but researchers have found a decline in achievement test scores of approximately one-tenth of a standard deviation for each move a child makes. Dropout rates can increase by as much as 30% for students who have made three or more moves. The effect of high rates of mobility on schools is large. Students moving in and out of classrooms disrupts both the flow of instruction and the establishment of learning communities, and the effects on students of attending schools with high rates of student mobility are likely to persist throughout their school careers.

Children in families who have recently immigrated to the United States or whose first language is not English may also enter school in the United States at a disadvantage (although being bilingual is academically advantageous). English learners and many minority children have lower vocabularies than their peers, a factor that is associated with both lower socioeconomic status and lower achievement. Children who are either not fluent in English or whose home environment is not linguistically rich are likely to have academic difficulties until their language gaps are closed. There is ongoing theoretical debate over the best ways to address the needs of these students, but researchers agree that teachers often lack training in basic strategies for supporting language development.

Involvement in crime and the juvenile justice system is another obvious hindrance to academic progress and school completion. Causal links have not been established, but the importance of interactions among various risk factors is evident. For example, deficits in verbal and reading skills are linked to drug use, aggression, and delinquency. Students who fall behind in reading lose confidence in their capacity to succeed in school, and school failure undermines their engagement. Researchers have shown that young people who experience the familiar sources of disadvantage (prenatal exposure to drugs, low birth weight, and birth trauma; poor language development; abusive or neglectful parenting; and disorganized family and community environments) are those who are more likely to engage in delinquent or criminal behavior.

Delinquency is associated with poor school performance, truancy, and leaving school at a young age. Moreover, research suggests that some educational practices, such as grade retention, tracking, suspension, and expulsion, may intensify students’ disengagement from school. Such practices, which disproportionately affect minority groups, interfere with students’ attachment to school and with learning and unintentionally reinforce negative stereotypes. They can have long-lasting negative effects on academic achievement. One reason researchers in this area point to practices that isolate young people with disciplinary problems is that when those students are together they tend to reinforce one another’s antisocial impulses.

Researchers of delinquency note that the risk factors that make delinquent behaviors more likely tend to be most prevalent in particular neighborhoods, although research on the effects of differences in neighborhoods and their interactions with individual and family conditions is not yet settled. At the same time, students who live in relatively unstable communities in which weapons are readily available and crime is prevalent are more likely to associate with peers who engage in delinquent behavior and to do so themselves.

Program responses

Other countries have focused on reducing the relationship between achievement and family background and have supported disadvantaged students in achieving to high academic standards. A recent report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has shown that the highest-performing countries are those that invest in children’s early development and sustain the supports through secondary school. These supports include policies focused on public education as well as other areas, such as housing and welfare. Attention to the links among parents, communities, and schools encourages parents’ involvement in their children’s education, which in turn can make a difference in a range of outcomes.

In the United States, many sorts of programs have shown promise in supporting young people and families who are disadvantaged. These include parenting and home visiting programs designed to improve parenting skills and developmental outcomes for infants and very young children; comprehensive early education programs; interventions for disrupted families; and school-based programs focused on specific goals.

Out–of-home child care and other supports for families can provide opportunities for learning, stable relationships, and other resources that can be critical to the development of children who are at risk. Early Head Start, Head Start, and other high-quality preschool programs are among the interventions that have received a good deal of attention, most recently in President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address. High-quality early childhood care and education programs that are successful with disadvantaged children share characteristics such as low child-to adult ratios, small group sizes, and a child-centered approach. Programs such as Head Start that focus on school readiness for low-income children provide services that address families’ health, nutrition, and social needs, as well as children’s cognitive and educational needs. They are designed to be responsive to families’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds and may include full-day services and home visits, as well as support and care from health care professionals and others.

Rigorous studies have documented benefits from such programs, including positive effects on cognitive and language skills; achievement test scores; high-school graduation rates; behavior problems, delinquency, and crime; and employment, earnings, and welfare dependency. Reductions in costs for public education, social services, the justice system, and health care have also been found. By one calculation, every dollar invested in high-quality early care and education yields $13.00 in savings to taxpayers. These effects decline over time, in the absence of other supports to sustain benefits, but are strong and remain discernable. For example, high-quality programs may close between 30 and 70% of achievement gaps, depending on how long children receive the services.

Head Start and some other programs attempt to address the multiple needs that struggling families face, but as children age out of the program, their families still experience challenges that may undermine their capacity to meet academic challenges. Many programs are available for older children. Some school-based programs address problem behaviors, such as aggression and substance abuse, and others provide support and training for parents designed to foster connections between school goals and disciplinary and other practices in the home. Many communities have explored possibilities for providing school-based health programs, particularly for adolescents.

Growing recognition of the importance of health and emotional well-being to young people’s academic potential has led many communities to focus on wraparound programs designed to address a range of needs. Wraparound programs have developed in an ad hoc way and are difficult to define. Such programs might encompass parenting, wellness, and other supports, which may be as diverse as dental and mental health care, literacy classes and job training for parents, and extracurricular after school programs for students. These programs take many forms. One example is in California, where in many counties, children and families in need of support (identified through agencies concerned with children and families, mental and health care, probation, and the like) are given a plan of care and support that is modified as their needs change. The key to this program is coordination among county agencies and a commitment to continue the care as long as it is needed.

Wraparound programs are diverse, and research into their outcomes has varied, but summative analysis of the literature has shown the potential for a range of positive impacts on young people and their families for many approaches. Many individual programs, such as the Harlem Children’s Zone, have tracked their own outcomes and show promising results.

Many programs to support families are school-based. The concept of community schools, which, as defined by the U.S. Department of Education provide integrated comprehensive academic, social, and health services to students, their families, and members of the community, has grown in popularity. Community schools are designed to coordinate, for example, engaging instruction, extracurricular learning opportunities, health and social support, and guidance along pathways to college and a career. Advocates for community schools report promising results in improving academic achievement, reducing dropout rates, reducing disciplinary problems, and increasing parents’ involvement in their children’s education.

One approach to integrating services available to families is in North Carolina, where the Departments of Health and Human Services and Department of Public Instruction have collaborated to develop a program of Child and Family Support Teams. In this program, currently serving 21 out of 115 districts, a plan is developed for each student to coordinate supports from family, friends, and neighbors; as well as mental health and medical professionals, juvenile court counselors, social workers, or others who may be needed. Other states and communities (such as Hawaii, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Iowa) have explored ways to support students and families, but the research literature on such programs is limited.

Intersection points

Some of the reports reviewed for this article were early flags of issues that have merited further work, whereas the more recent ones provide syntheses of the most current thinking in various fields. As a group, they demonstrate the magnitude of the resources that are already devoted to understanding and supporting children and adolescents and their families. This brief overview of a wide range of topics demonstrates the complexity of the disadvantages facing many children and young people in the United States. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 44% of U.S. children live in low-income families (below $44,700 for a family of four), whereas 22% (approximately 16 million children) live in families whose incomes are below the federal poverty level ($23,021 for a family of four).

Each of the risks discussed here is associated with low income, although they are not confined to young people whose family incomes are below these levels, and the negative effects of risk factors appear to be intensified when more than one is present. What else can be inferred from a review of this work?

• The effects of disadvantage are usually cumulative, so academic difficulties are likely to be symptoms of problems of long standing for students. It seems likely that negative influences from outside of school harm the educational experience, and that negative experiences in school may in turn exacerbate out-of-school problems. Researchers describe dropping out of school as a gradual process, rather than a sudden decision. Understanding of the risks to development in the first years of life provides a good reason to believe that in many cases, the difficulties that ultimately result in a student dropping out could begin that early.

• The interactions among developmental factors, environmental factors, and education practices and experiences may exacerbate harm or mitigate it. That is, there are many possible ways that a child may develop the resilience to thrive despite significant disadvantage, and although early development is critical, intervention that comes later can still be beneficial.

• Integration and coordination of the services available to children and families appear to be essential. A single student’s needs might span the full range of responsibilities that jurisdictions undertake—from health and mental care to the juvenile justice system. Only if these entities are in communication about individual students and their families can they be sure their programs are not working at cross purposes and that a critical aspect of the problem is not being overlooked.

This last point may be the most important. Experiencing multiple risk factors over extended times poses the highest risk to well-being and student achievement. The groups of children and adolescents who are in those circumstances have the greatest need for support that is coordinated across sectors. Any given adult—teacher, public health nurse, or probation officer—might be the one who interacts with a child at a critical point and has the opportunity to identify the need for intervention. It is vital that that individual have the knowledge and resources to quickly direct the student or family to the supports they need, even if the needs fall outside of his or her expertise. A community’s investment in the range of services it provides with the aim of helping young people enter adulthood healthy, educated, and ready to flourish, will be maximized if those services can be coordinated.

Many of the individual reports note the importance of establishing and improving links and communication among the entities that work with young people and families, but references to schools are relatively few. These reports nevertheless throw into high relief the reality that schools are unlikely to narrow the achievement gap on their own. The reality that the greatest achievement gaps are between students with different family income levels has been persuasively documented. These programs and reports demonstrate the potential value in focusing more closely on the specific ways that disadvantages impede the academic progress of low-income students.

Emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) continue to rise. The effects of climate change are becoming ever more apparent. Yet prospects for reducing global emissions of CO₂ by an order of magnitude, as would be needed to reduce threats of climate change, seem more remote than ever.

When emissions of air pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen, are reduced, improvements occur in a matter of days or weeks, because the gases quickly disappear from the atmosphere. This is not true for GHGs. Once emitted, they remain in the atmosphere for many decades or centuries. As a result, to stabilize atmospheric concentrations, emissions must be dramatically reduced. Further, there is inertia in the earth-ocean system, so the full effects of the emissions that have already occurred have yet to be felt. If the planet is to avoid serious climate change and its largely adverse consequences, global emissions of GHSs will have to fall by 80 to 90% over the next few decades.

Because the world has already lost so much time, and because it does not appear that serious efforts will be made to reduce emissions in the major economies any time soon, interest has been growing in the possibility that warming might be offset by engineering the planet: a concept called geoengineering. The term solar radiation management (SRM) is used to refer to a number of strategies that might be used to increase the fraction of sunlight reflected back into space by just a couple of percentage points in order to offset the temperature increase caused by rising atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ and other GHGs. Of these strategies, the one that appears to be most affordable and most capable of being quickly implemented involves injecting small reflective particles into the stratosphere.

There is nothing theoretical about whether SRM could cool the planet. Every time a large volcano explodes and injects tons of material into the stratosphere, Earth’s average temperature drops. When Mount Pinatubo exploded in 1991, the result was a global-scale cooling that averaged about half a degree centigrade for more than a year.

So SRM could work. As undesirable impacts from climate changes mount up, the temptation to engage in SRM will grow. But what if someone tries to do it before we knew if it will work, or what dangers might come with it? The time has come for serious research that can get the world answers before it is too late. To that end, we offer a plan.

Variable effects—and benefits

SRM could be designed to bring average temperatures around the world back to something close to their present levels. But because particles injected into the stratosphere distribute themselves around the planet, it is doubtful whether strategies can be found to cool just some vulnerable region, such as the Arctic. Even with a uniform distribution of particles, the spatial distribution of the temperature reductions will not be uniform. For example, work by Katharine Ricke, then at Carnegie Mellon University and now at the Carnegie Institution for Science, has shown that over many decades the level of SRM that might be optimal for China will move further away from the level that might be optimal for India, although in both cases the regional climates would be closer to today’s climate than they would have been without SRM.

Change in precipitation patterns induced by climate change might present a particularly strong inducement to undertake SRM. But here again, there are some variables and some unknowns. Although the best current estimates suggest that SRM, on average, could probably restore precipitation patterns to approximately those of today, the ability of climate models to predict the details of precipitation is still not very good. Also, some parts of the world are likely to find at least a little bit of warming or other climate change to be beneficial, and so later in this century countries in those regions might not want to return to the climate of the past few centuries, even if they could. In the short term, modest warming and elevated CO₂ will probably enhance some agricultural production, although with further warming most agriculture will suffer.

Although SRM could offset future warming, it does nothing to slow the steadily rising atmospheric concentrations of CO₂. The higher concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is already having notable effects on terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. Some plant species are able to metabolize CO₂ much more efficiently than others, giving them a comparative advantage in a high-CO₂ world. This is beginning to disrupt and shift the makeup of terrestrial ecosystems.

Over a third of the CO₂ that human activities are adding to the atmosphere is being absorbed by the world’s oceans. Today the oceans are roughly 30% more acidic than they were in preindustrial times. Sarah Cooley and colleagues at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have estimated that by late in this century, there will be a dramatic drop in harvest yields of molluscs, resulting in a serious decline in the protein available to low-income coastal populations. Also, acidification is already affecting the ability of many coral species to make reef structures. Many marine experts believe that if emissions and ocean acidification continue to increase, most coral reefs will be gone by the end of this century. In addition to being aesthetically and economically important, reefs (along with coastal mangroves) provide the breeding grounds for many oceanic species and form the base of many oceanic food chains.

Political landscape

Today in the United States, there are many people who doubt that climate change is occurring, or if it is, that those changes result from human action. Congress is no longer pursuing legislation to mandate reduced emissions of GHGs, and many political leaders have been avoiding the issue.

Federal regulatory actions to advance energy efficiency and reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants are making modest contributions to reducing emissions of GHGs, as is the tightening of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards covering vehicles. Indeed, as Dallas Burtraw and Matthew Woerman of Resources for the Future recently observed, these regulations, together with the dramatic growth in the use of natural gas, have placed the United States on a path to achieve President Obama’s goal for reducing U.S. emissions of GHGs. The goal calls for cutting emissions by 2020 to a level that is 17% below levels emitted in 2005. Of course, a 17% reduction does not come close to the U.S. share of reductions needed to stabilize the climate. A few states, most notably California and some in the northeast, are taking direct steps to reduce emissions. Overall, however, the United States shows no signs of being ready to adopt policies to implement the large economy-wide emission reductions necessary to deal with climate change.

Explicit climate policy has progressed further in Europe, where there is a widely shared understanding of the reality of climate change and the risks that it holds. But even as Europe has taken steps to begin reducing emissions of GHGs, these efforts also remain modest when compared with what will be needed to stabilize climate. In the 27 nations that comprise the European Union, per capita CO₂ emissions are roughly half those of the United States. However, Europe’s present economic difficulties, together with Germany’s growing dependence on coal as it moves to abandon nuclear power, have resulted in a rate of emissions reduction that now lags that of the United States.

Across the major developing nations—China, India, and Brazil—the primary focus is, of course, on economic growth. China is actively developing wind and solar power, as well as technologies for carbon capture and sequestration. China is doing this because it faces local and regional air pollution that is prematurely killing millions of people, because the government realizes that the country will need to wean itself from coal, and because the government assumes that sooner or later the rest of the world will get serious about reducing emissions and, when that happens, China wants to be a strong player in the international markets.

A tempting quick fix

Although subtle impacts from climate change have been apparent for decades, it is only recently that changes have become more obvious and widespread. Over the next few decades, such changes will become ever more apparent. Because reducing atmospheric concentrations of GHGs is inherently slow and expensive, as more and more people and nations grow concerned, SRM could become a tempting quick fix.

SRM is a technology that has enormous leverage. Recent analysis by a university/industry team of researchers, led by Justin McClellan of the Aurora Flight Science Corporation, suggests that a small fleet of specially designed aircraft could deliver enough mass to the stratosphere in the form of small reflecting particles to offset all of the warming anticipated by the end of this century for a cost of less than $10 billion per year, or roughly one ten-thousandth of today’s global gross domestic product of $70 trillion (in U.S. dollars). In contrast, estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its fourth assessment report suggest that the annual cost of controlling emissions of GHGs to a level sufficient to limit warming will be between half a percent and a few percent of global gross domestic product.

Clearly, given this enormous cost difference, as the impacts of warming and other climate change become more apparent, SRM is going to look increasingly tempting to countries and policymakers who face serious adverse impacts from climate change. Adding to this temptation is the fact that implementing SRM could be done unilaterally by any major nation, which is far from the case with reducing global emissions of GHGs, which would require cooperation among a number of sovereign nations around the world.

Planning a research agenda

Although it is well established scientifically that adding fine particles to the stratosphere would, on average, cool Earth, science cannot be at all sure about what else might happen. For example, science cannot be confident about the fate and transport of particles (or precursor materials) once they are injected. It is unknown whether and how the distribution of particles could best be maintained. The surfaces of some types of particles could provide catalytic reaction sites for ozone depletion, but again details are uncertain. Researchers have documented the transient effects of large volcanic injections, but it is not known whether a planned continuous injection of particles might produce large and unanticipated dynamic effects. In short, if the United States or some other actor were to undertake SRM today, it would be “jumping off a cliff ” without knowing much about where it, and the planet, would land. Humans have a long tradition of overconfidence and hubris in considering such matters. In our view, anyone who undertook SRM based on what is known today would be imposing an unacceptably large risk on the entire planet.

The climate science community has been aware of the possibility of performing SRM for decades. However, most researchers have shied away from working in this area, in part because of a concern that the more that is known, the greater the chance that someone will try to do it. Although such concerns may have been valid in the past, we believe that the world has now passed a tipping point. In our view, the risks today of not knowing whether and how SRM might work are greater than any risks associated with performing such research.

We reach this conclusion for two reasons. First, the chances are growing that some major state might choose to embark on such a program. If science has not studied SRM and its consequences before that happens, the rest of the world will not be in a position to engage in informed discourse, or mount vigorous scientifically informed opposition if the risks are seen as too great. Second, given the slow pace at which efforts to abate global emissions of GHGs have been proceeding, the chances are growing that when the world does finally get serious about abatement, the United States and other nations may in fact need to collectively engage in a bit of SRM, if it can be done safely, in order to limit damages, while simultaneously scrambling to reduce emissions rapidly and perhaps also scrub CO₂ from the atmosphere.

There have been several calls for a significantly expanded research program on SRM. For example, the House Science Committee and an analogous committee in the UK’s Parliament have explored the issue. The United Kingdom has also undertaken a modest program of research support. A task force of the Bipartisan Policy Center, an independent think tank based in Washington, DC, recently developed recommendations for a program of research by the U.S. government. However, most of the limited research now under way in the United States is occurring as part of existing programs that focus on climate and atmospheric science more generally.

Because SRM could rapidly modify the climate of the entire planet at a very modest cost, and because it holds the potential to have profound impacts on all living things, we believe that there is an urgent need for research to clarify its potential impacts and consequences and to provide sufficient reliable information to enable the establishment of appropriate regulatory controls. Building on the work of the Bipartisan Policy Center, the scientific community needs to develop a robust SRM research agenda and obtain the public and private funding necessary to carry it out. In parallel, the community needs to develop guidelines that ensure that such research is responsibly carried out. Finally, as we discuss in detail below, SRM research should be conducted in an open and transparent manner by providing public notification of proposed field experiments and providing decisionmakers and the public with full access to the results of the research.

Except for limited U.S. authority under the National Weather Modification Reporting Act to require notification and reporting of “weather modification” activities, neither U.S. nor international law provides readily useable authority to prohibit, regulate, or report on the conduct of SRM research or field experiments. Our recommendation is to develop and implement a voluntary research code before attempting to impose any regulatory mandates with respect to SRM research, for two reasons. First, a voluntary code can address and work out the various definitional and policy questions we discuss below. Second, a clumsy U.S. attempt to require notice and reporting of SRM research may simply delay or drive that research abroad, frustrating the ultimate objective of open access to responsibly conducted SRM research. A voluntary code, in our view, is the most sensible first step. The United States should take the lead by developing and implementing a code of best SRM research practices and a set of rules governing federally funded SRM research. After doing that, it should then undertake formal governmental steps and informal steps through scientific channels to urge other international players to promptly do the same.

A key component of a significant SRM research program is to develop a fully articulated research agenda. This might be done under the auspices of the U.S. National Academies, drawing on researchers from major universities, national laboratories, and federal agencies, with input from the international research community.

Code of best practices

In parallel with, or even before, developing a full research agenda, there is a pressing need to develop what we will call a code of best SRM research practices. This code will need three components. The first would comprise guidelines to provide open access to SRM knowledge by making research results available to decisionmakers and the public. The second would be the delineation of categories of field experiments that are unlikely to have adverse impacts on health, safety, or the environment (that is, experiments conducted within an agreed-upon “allowed zone” of experimental parameters and expected effects on the stratosphere.) The third component would be agreement that any field research to be conducted outside the allowed zone will not be undertaken before a clear national and international governance framework has been developed.

The development of this code will require a convening entity and sufficient resources to support activities. Federal funding through an Executive Branch agency might be secured for such an undertaking. For example, Congress could fund a National Research Council study to develop a set of clear definitions and research norms. Perhaps a faster way to get this done would be to persuade a well-respected private foundation to provide the necessary resources. The National Academies or the National Research Council would be appropriate organizations to convene the effort. Alternatively, the American Geophysical Union might do this as part of its recently expanded set of activities in public policy.

Formulating guidelines for SRM research and a policy to advance open access to SRM research must address a set of key issues of definition and scope:

• First we need to define what counts as SRM. Is the technology to be deployed only for SRM, such as a specific type of specially engineered reflective particle, or does it also include multiuse technology, such as high-altitude aircraft designed to deliver mass to the stratosphere but also capable of performing a variety of other missions that are completely unrelated to SRM? To the extent that SRM overlaps with fields of use that do not raise concerns, non-SRM commercial activity might be affected by efforts to single out SRM activity for special attention. What about research on “incidental” SRM? Such current or proposed research might include, for example, geophysical studies of future volcanic eruptions; studies of the atmospheric effects of “black carbon,” the strongly light-absorbing particulate matter emitted by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels; and studies of the behavior of sulfur dioxide emitted from stationary industrial sources. Any SRM open-access program must define SRM in order, among other things, to minimize its impact on related but uncontroversial commercial activity.

• Next we need to agree on what constitutes SRM research. Does it include theoretical research, literature searches, term papers, and legal memoranda, or should it be limited to experimental research, and if so, does it extend to laboratory research or should it be limited to only field experiments? If the focus is limited to field experiments, how should (and could) basic studies in atmospheric science be differentiated from studies that are more specifically focused on improved understanding of SRM? Trying to make such a demarcation on the basis of experimenters’ intent strikes us as deeply problematic; objective criteria will be needed.

• Activities that should be subject to a requirement of prior notification of SRM research need to be defined. At what stage of a project (planning, approval, or funding) should public notification occur, and in how much detail? Also, what medium or media (for example, a dedicated public Internet site, a Federal Register notice, or a proposal submitted to a designated governmental entity) should be used?

• Any policy respecting public access to SRM research needs to spell out the type of research it covers. Does it cover only completed peer-reviewed research? What about studies whose results are not published or that are in progress but have not reached the stage of publication? What about industry research and abandoned or unsuccessful projects? How can public access be bounded in such a way as to preserve valid commercial interests while providing the appropriate level of public disclosure?

• The allowed zone stipulated for experiments will have to be defined, based on results of existing scientific knowledge. This will include careful delineation of areas of permissible field studies and of a protocol for determining that a proposed field study lies within the allowed zone.

• Finally, there are a series of important policy questions that must be addressed. Should an open-access policy be a voluntary undertaking by researchers? Should the policy be incorporated into federal grants and contracts? Is it feasible to prescribe regulations that require open access to SRM research? Do any of these policies interfere with academic freedom or intellectual property rights?

Importance of open access

As part of the effort to develop a code of best SRM research practices, the United States should develop strategies that ensure that the knowledge developed through SRM research is available to the general public and to national and international policymakers to support informed policy discourse and decisionmaking. The creditability and usefulness of a research program can best be advanced by providing the public with advance notice of SRM field experiments and public access to research results.

The SRM research code of best practices should include a commitment to make public the existence of all SRM research activities, perhaps through a mechanism as simple as posting to a common Web site. It should include an agreement that results from prescribed types of research will be made public (preferably through publication in refereed journals). It should provide guidance on the types of field studies that can be undertaken without any special oversight or approval. And it should express an understanding with respect to privately held intellectual property, as discussed below.

Because most federally funded research would probably already have been described in publicly assessable proposals, posting announcements with an abstract of plans to conduct specific field studies on a common public Web site is not likely to present a significant problem for most investigators. However, asking investigators to post preliminary findings on such a site could be more problematic. This is because some leading journals adopt a strict interpretation with respect to the definition of “prior publication.” We believe that in the interests of promoting open access to SRM knowledge, an effort should be made to induce several top journals to adopt a more lenient policy in the case of work related to SRM.

In developing a voluntary code for research conduct, comment and advice should be sought from federal agencies, universities and other research institutions, and nongovernmental organizations and companies likely to conduct SRM research. To maximize its acceptance, the code should probably draw a line between research results that are to be publicly disclosed and those that do not need to be publicly disclosed so as to protect the commercial interests of technologies with multiple non-SRM uses. The expectation is that once the code is finalized, its recommendation could be incorporated into approval requirements in government and private nonprofit funding arrangements for SRM research and promoted as a model for industrial researchers and non-U.S. researchers.

U.S. government support

Although there has already been some modest support of SRM research from private sources, if a concerted SRM research program is undertaken in the United States, it most likely will involve funding by the federal government as well as some use of the unique capabilities of federal equipment and laboratories. Federal research activities that meet the definition of SRM research should include provisions requiring that an abstract describing the research to be performed be made publicly available upon execution of the underlying agreement. In the case of research involving field experiments, the National Environmental Policy Act may require an Environmental Impact Assessment, unless the proposed project fits into a category excused from such assessment. If an assessment if required and prepared, the public will have ample notice and opportunity for comment.

Federal research agreements should include provisions requiring delivery to the government of publicly releasable research results, commensurate with the SRM research code of best practice. Federal agencies have experience in negotiating lists in each of their research agreements of specifically identified publicly releasable data that would meet the standards set by the SRM code while at the same time, in appropriate agreements, excluding data whose restriction on public release would not be inconsistent with the SRM research code.

Federal research agreements also typically include a patent rights clause that usually provides that the agreement awardee has the option to elect to retain title to its new inventions made under the agreement. In order to lessen the incentive for private commercial interests to influence the direction of the pursuit of SRM, it would be desirable to restrict the assertion of such private intellectual property rights to technical fields other than SRM. Federal agencies already have statutory authority to take prescribed action to restrict or partially restrict the patent rights of awardees. For example, in order to control commercialization, the Department of Energy has provided for federal government ownership of inventions made by its research contractors in the field of uranium enrichment.

A uniform standard can be applied across transactions involving multiple agencies, through mechanisms such as Federal Acquisition Regulations, Office of Management and Budget circulars, and presidential executive orders. Because the promulgation of government-wide guidance may take some time, individual agencies can act on their own initiative if they feel that their mission justifies such action. Individual agency action may lay the groundwork for broader action across the government. If a lead agency is identified to conduct SRM research, that agency should take such an initiative, in the same way that the National Institutes of Health required that investigators who received its support to conduct analysis of genetic variation in a study population submit descriptive information about their studies to a publicly accessible database. The United States could also use international cooperative research agreements as a means to encourage other countries to follow the code of best SRM research practices.

Action by the U.S. government would set a powerful precedent by a major player in the world economy and world research community, giving the nation better standing to advocate for international action in SRM research. Specific U.S. action, developed with input from stakeholders including public interest groups, would establish a model that ensures appropriate public availability of information without unnecessarily affecting commercial interests.

Understand before regulating

The approach we have advocated would have the United States take the lead in developing a set of norms for good research practice for SRM. We have proposed that once developed, these norms should be adopted by federal research programs and urged upon all privately funded research. Once the norms are developed and implemented, it should be possible to persuade others across the international research community to adopt similar norms. Organizations such as the International Council of Scientific Unions and the national academies of science in various countries are well positioned to promote such adoption.

As we noted above, the U.S. National Weather Modification Reporting Act provides a statutory framework for making an SRM open-access research policy mandatory in the United States, at least insofar as the research entails field experiments that are conducted domestically and are of such a scale that they could actually affect climate or weather. Our recommendation, however, is to develop and implement a voluntary research code before attempting to use this authority to implement federal rules governing SRM research.

There is also the question of whether considerations should attempt to go beyond open-access policies for SRM research (that is, notice and reporting) and impose substantive regulation, such as permit requirements or performance or work practice standards. We believe that it is premature today to embark on the development and implementation of substantive regulatory requirements. But as the prospect of large-scale field studies—or actual implementation— of SRM becomes more real, the need for and pressure to develop such regulation will grow. Because future regulations should be based on solid well-developed science, the creation of a serious program of SRM research, combined with procedures to ensure open access to SRM knowledge, is now urgent.

Since the beginning of the conservation movement in the late 19th century, decisionmakers facing environmental issues have struggled to square the impulse to respect nature’s dignity with more anthropocentric calculations of economic utility. It is a task that has often divided scientists, ethicists, and advocates S who share a regard for biodiversity and ecological integrity, yet differ on how such goals are to be justified and promoted in policy discourse. This debate has evolved over the years as new conservation initiatives and policy proposals have taken center stage, but the core of the dispute remains relatively unchanged: Does viewing species and ecosystems as economic goods preclude seeing them as objects of moral duty? Will the use of economic valuation methods extinguish rather than encourage public support for environmental protection? Can conservation really be expected to succeed by ignoring economic incentives bearing on the protection of wild populations and ecosystems?

A recent proposal to create a “whale conservation market” has highlighted this stubborn ethics/economics divide in a very visible and contentious way. The whale market or “whale shares” idea presents an alternative to the traditional regulatory approach. By calling for the establishment of quotas that could be bought and sold, it allows conservation groups as well as whalers to purchase a fixed number of whale shares, thereby providing a mechanism for whale protection as well as managed harvest. The proposal is for the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to allocate the quotas to member nations on a sustainable-yield basis, which would permit buyers of whale shares to use or sell.

The whale shares idea was first proposed in the January 12, 2012, issue of Nature by one of us (Gerber) and two other researchers: Christopher Costello, the lead author, and Steven Gaines, both at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The concept was intended to attempt to deal with what many conservationists view as a significant policy failure in international whale management. The IWC, charged with the global conservation and sustainable use of whales, introduced a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986 as a temporary strategy to conserve depleted whale stocks while a more long-term plan was developed to manage whales. Fueled by interests that challenge the ethics of whaling, however, the ban has not yet been lifted.

Though still in effect, the ban has not been effective. Despite the moratorium, whaling continues at a pace that is widely considered unsustainable. Scientific whaling, which nations (primarily Japan) conduct under the IWC for research purposes, results in the taking of roughly 1,000 whales per year. Subsistence whaling, which the IWC allows for certain aboriginal groups for cultural or nutritional reasons, yields roughly 350 whales per year. Commercial whaling conducted by nations (primarily Norway and Iceland) under objection to the IWC yields roughly 590 whales per year. These harvest totals have been on the rise, as whaling has more than doubled since the early 1990s. The lack of agreement on how to manage whaling despite decades of negotiations between pro- and antiwhaling nations has called into question the future of the IWC as a path to resolution.

Despite the widely acknowledged failure of the IWC moratorium to curtail unsustainable whaling, the whale conservation market idea has proved to be wildly controversial within conservation and antiwhaling circles. Concerns have been raised about how the system would be established (for example, under what guidelines would the original shares be allocated?) and how it would play out over time (for example, would a legal market lead to increased whaling?). Many critics of the idea are also plainly not comfortable with the ethics of putting a price on such iconic species—that is, with using contingent market methods for what they believe should be a categorical ethical obligation to preserve whales.

On the other hand, the negotiation failures surrounding the global management of whales underscore the need for a realistic and pragmatic discussion about available policy alternatives. Indeed, the vulnerable status of many whale populations and the failure of the traditional regulatory response to halt unsustainable harvests call for a more innovative and experimental approach to whale policy, including considering unconventional proposals, such as the whale conservation market. Although it has generated a fair amount of controversy among conservationists, we believe that the whale shares approach does not in fact violate the customary aesthetic, cultural, and scientific regard for whale species; nor does it require the relaxation of the moral commitment to saving species from further decline and slipping into the extinction vortex. But we also believe that conservationists and antiwhaling activists will need to embrace a more experimental policy stance and a less ideological ethical posture if society wishes to make better progress on this intractable international conservation challenge.

Price versus principle in conservation

Presumably, some of the critics of the whale conservation market idea would agree with the great nature advocate John Muir, who warned that “Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded.” Muir’s skepticism toward economic valuation is fairly typical of the conservation tradition in the United States. The well-known environmental writer Aldo Leopold, for example, wrote in A Sand County Almanac (1949) that society needed to stop viewing the question of good land use as “solely an economic problem” and to do “what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.”

More recently, the economics/ethics debate in conservation has centered on the embrace of the ecosystem services framework as an instrument for biodiversity protection. Critics of this move have suggested that the ecosystem services approach fails on moral and practical grounds to ensure the protection of wild species; its supporters have claimed just the opposite. Specifically, to preservationist-minded conservationists, putting a price on nature, or “making conservation pay,” violates the obligation to respect the beauty and moral worth of species and ecosystems. For utilitarian- or economically oriented conservationists, however, it only makes sense to bring nature’s goods and services into the economic sphere, since this is where they can be appropriately valued and traded off against other societal goods. The debate has proved resilient to settlement. Even attempts to broaden the instrumentalist model beyond narrow economic criteria have not mollified critics, who still argue that conservation should be motivated by aesthetic values and a sense of moral duty, rather than by economic considerations.

Although there are important methodological and philosophical issues of environmental valuation at stake here, the debate can often conceal common policy ground among conservationists, clouding the widely held view that the protection of global biodiversity is a primary societal obligation, a duty that exists regardless of whether it is framed anthropocentrically or for the sake of wild species. This contest, especially when it devolves into an ideological struggle between the respective proponents of ethics and economics in conservation decisionmaking, can hinder efforts to experiment with the design of effective institutions to achieve widely supported policy goals. It has a polarizing effect on conservation stakeholders rather than drawing them together in support of new ideas that deserve to be heard and empirically tested.

In the whale conservation market debate, we believe there is an important distinction to be made between, on the one hand, advocating the use of a particular policy instrument (whale shares) to achieve an important conservation objective (maintaining sustainable whale populations) and, on the other hand, arguing that this policy instrument somehow captures the “real” or “full” value of the conservation target. The whale market approach should not be read as presenting an account of the ultimate moral worth of whale populations; it is instead a proposed economic tool that could—we want to emphasize could—help move actors more swiftly toward the policy outcome of effective whale conservation, an outcome that, it is important to note, may be justified by appeal to the shared ethical responsibility to conserve whales and protect global biodiversity.

In his recent book What Money Can’t Buy, Michael Sandel, an influential political philosopher at Harvard University, warns of the “corrosive tendency” of markets in civic life (including in environmental affairs), a malevolence owing to their tendency to “crowd out” nonmarket attitudes and norms, such as the moral and aesthetic regard that society should have for species, by turning such goods into commodities. Sandel lists a variety of examples of this crowding-out process, from commercializing blood donation, to paying children for good grades, to establishing a market to hunt wildlife that simultaneously funnels revenue into species conservation programs. He concludes that by turning nonmarket relationships and goods into market commodities, the character of the good exchanged in the market is transformed as a result of this commoditization process. As a consequence, the conviction to promote the nonmarket good as a moral obligation, such as the commitment to preserve wildlife for its own sake, is eroded.

The argument from moral corruption is indeed an important consideration in these kinds of cases and should be of concern to any conservationist worried about the extinction of moral attitudes promoting a respect for nature. Yet Sandel does not seem to consider a scenario, such as the whale shares idea, whereby a market in wildlife could be designed to also allow conservationists to purchase permits or shares in order to protect (rather than harvest) the wildlife in question. Although one could still argue that a whale conservation market has the potential to crowd out nonmarket values (for example, the love of cetaceans for their own sake), this is by no means an inevitable outcome, especially if concerted efforts are made to promote the moral values of whales as part of the overall management response.

Why whales matter

Discussion of a “shared responsibility” to conserve whales, their “moral value,” however, begs a basic question: Why should society care about the decline of whale populations? For conservationists, the answer may seem self-evident (and perhaps asking it appears unseemly to some). But it is not always obvious how different stakeholders value whales, what ethical responsibilities these values generate, and what tradeoffs they may require in practice. Examining this dimension of the response to the whale market proposal reveals a second, and perhaps more nuanced, division: the distinction between holistic and individualistic conservation ethics.

Focusing on the aggregate value of whale populations, it might be argued that as units of biodiversity they possess intrinsic value, a value derived from their evolutionary history or ecology, or both. This view takes an ecocentric position regarding natural value. It could also be argued on more humanistic grounds that whales (again, considered in the aggregate) should be protected for their unique beauty or cultural resonance, qualities that transcend their utility. Society could value whales for their role in the delivery of ecosystem services, including ecotourism, such as whale watching—a view that recognizes their contributory value for marine primary productivity. Encounters with whales in the wild may also hold transformative value for humans, prompting for some the reevaluation of their material values and preferences. And researchers might make the argument that whales should be saved because of their value for scientific study, including investigations into whale biology, ecology, and behavior; work that could also pay dividends for conservation science and management.

A different range of answers to “why conserve?” would issue from a zoocentric position, which is less concerned with the population- and system-level efforts of most biodiversity conservationists and more focused on the interests or dignity of whales as considered as individuals (that is, as advanced beings that possess aspects of moral personhood, or simply as sentient animals that can suffer). A biocentric view would proceed from similarly individualistic premises, although the moral status of whales is seen to hang less on their advanced mental capacities and more on their status as living beings with biological interests that humans can either subvert or promote. The more vociferous antiwhaling arguments often reflect either a zoocentric or biocentric ethic (or a hybrid of these views) in objecting to what is perceived as the immoral taking of a complex being’s life. The zoocentric/biocentric stance is well illustrated by the recent Rights for Cetaceans initiative spearheaded by the Helsinki Group, a team of scientists and philosophers advocating moral and legal rights for whales and dolphins under the individual “personhood” category.

Although a sustainable use model such as the whale shares approach is not likely to be acceptable under a strict zoocentric or biocentric principle prohibiting harms to individual animals that would occur under any policy of managed use, in principle it could be supported by an ethically diverse array of socially, ecologically, and evolutionarily oriented conservationists who place a premium on the health and long-term viability of biological populations. Yet if the whale shares approach is effective, it would be expected to result in fewer harms to individual whales (by reducing the total take), an outcome that would uphold conservationists’ ethical commitment to sustainable whale populations and zoocentrists’ and biocentrists’ desire to see fewer harms and deaths.

The issue then becomes one of deciding whether the value of ideological purity surrounding the inviolability of animal rights, or of the biological interests of the individual whale, forecloses the pursuit of a policy with the potential to reduce these harms in the aggregate but not end them entirely. By pointing this out, we are not trivializing the difficulty and moral stakes of such choices, but only reinforcing the idea that the international whaling challenge may require conservationists, antiwhaling groups, and animal welfare/rights supporters of a variety of ethical persuasions to come to grips with the tradeoffs and unavoidable political and policy pragmatics of the issue. This means supporting the experimental development of instruments that might be effective in slowing the unsustainable harvest of whale populations, as well as easing the collective suffering of some of the planet’s most remarkable beings.

Sandel argues, and we certainly agree, that market reasoning requires moral reasoning in order to be fair and to keep the former from corrupting the moral norms and attitudes that society attaches to wild species. But his insistence that society will not be able to decide whether to create markets in such goods until it comes to a consensus about the proper way to value them is unrealistic, given that philosophers and others have been arguing over the moral status of nonhuman species for many decades, if not centuries. It is also risky to the extent that it seems to tether any proposal for species conservation employing economic instruments to the precondition of resolving foundational and vexed questions around the moral status of wildlife.

This is not to reject the deeper moral and philosophical project that Sandel describes, but rather to assert that society cannot wait for its resolution before even considering adopting alternative means for protecting species of high conservation value. Although Sandel is right to worry about the extinction of moral norms and attitudes toward species preservation as a result of marketization, he does not worry enough about the extinction of biodiversity and the high stakes of global conservation efforts that may require experimental approaches (including the use of market instruments), approaches joined by the kind of moral analysis and argumentation that he and many environmentalists and antiwhaling advocates champion.

Ethics and experimentalism

The IWC moratorium’s failure to protect some whale populations from decline due to commercial harvest is grounds for a more experimental design for conservation policy. Novel and out-of-the-box solutions, such as the whale conservation market idea, are needed to move society beyond the current policy gridlock. Under this plan, quotas for hunting of whales would be traded in global markets. But again, and unlike most “catch share” programs in fisheries, the whale conservation market would not restrict participation in the market; both pro- and antiwhaling interests could own and trade quotas. The maximum potential harvest for any hunted species in any given year would be established in a conservative manner that ensures sustainability of the marketed species (that is, harvest levels would be established that would not permit taking more individuals than can be replaced) and maintains their functional roles in the ecosystem. The actual harvest, however, would depend on who owns the quotas. Conservation groups, for example, could choose to buy whale shares in order to protect populations that are currently threatened; they could also buy shares to protect populations that are not presently at risk but that conservationists fear might become threatened in the future.

Although market-based incentives have helped resolve many environmental challenges, conservation markets still play a relatively minor role in wildlife management. Establishing property rights for environmental goods and allowing trade between resource extractors and resource conservationists may offer a path forward in the global management of whales, one that is superior to the current situation created by the moratorium. Indeed, we and various other observers maintain that such a market could ensure the persistence of imperiled populations while simultaneously improving the welfare of resource harvesters. Although much research is needed before such an approach is implemented, the approach offers a way for both whalers and conservationists to “win” in a workable management regime. Such new ideas are urgently needed, given the failing global moratorium on whale hunting.

At the same time, we believe that it remains imperative to link institutional experimentation with economic policy instruments such as whale shares with the deeper moral commitment to species conservation. That is, any future whale conservation market must be securely anchored in a sense of shared responsibility for the conservation of whales and for the protection of globally threatened biodiversity. Efforts to expand and enhance environmental education and build greater public awareness and appreciation of whales as part of a broader environmental ethic are therefore essential; these efforts will necessarily be part of any principled and sustainable conservation strategy.

Despite the long history of the debate, the use of economic and other policy instruments to achieve conservation goals, and the use of what might be called the “hearts-and-minds” approach to building a sense of moral responsibility for conservation, are not mutually exclusive efforts. We suggest, in fact, that an effective and ethical conservation effort requires that society pursue both types of projects as part of a concurrent, multipronged policy to build institutional capacity and international support for whale conservation. This adoption of an experimental and ethically moored attitude toward whale policy is in step with current strategic and philosophical trends within the wider conservation community to balance moral ideals concerning the protection of global biodiversity with a policy and political realism, as exemplified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Biosphere Ethics Initiative.

There are, however, real challenges facing this task of broadening and informing the conservation ethic. One is educational: The public often does not possess much knowledge about biodiversity loss or the policy agendas and efforts of conservation organizations and governments to respond to these declines. For example, in a study of whale conservation awareness among college students in the United States, a group led by E. C. M. “Chris” Parsons, an internationally recognized expert on cetaceans who currently is based at George Mason University in Virginia, found that the majority of their study sample did not know which whales species were the most threatened, had not heard of the IWC, and did not have a clear grasp of U.S. policy toward commercial and subsistence whaling. These deficits clearly will need to be addressed if the “minds” component of a hearts-andminds campaign is to be successful.

It is also is important to point out that the integrated moral and pragmatic approach to whale conservation described here is squarely in line with one of the most significant traditions in conservation philosophy in the United States. Despite his frustration with economic arguments for conservation, Aldo Leopold, a hero to many biodiversity scientists and advocates, did not wish to purge economic values and tools from conservation policy debates. Rather, he sought to create a more significant space for ethical reflection and argument in environmental decisionmaking and thereby balance utility with beauty and morality in the complex societal calculus of managing and conserving nature.

Leopold implored society to stop thinking about environmental questions as solely an economic concern, not to ignore economic considerations in the formulation of good conservation policy. He challenged society to seek the wise harmonization of economics, ethics, and aesthetics in environmental decisions; a challenge yet to be fully achieved. And Leopold recognized, as today’s society should, that the evaluation of conservation policy proposals requires the experiential testing of ideas rather than a priori judgments driven by dogmatic convictions about the efficacy of certain strategies and policy tools in practice.

Toward principled pragmatism

Whale conservation markets may not achieve Leopold’s ideal integration in conservation policy. But properly developed and implemented, and motivated by a shared commitment to sustaining wild species, they could become important tools for conserving declining whale populations, an activity undertaken for the good of these extraordinary marine species as well as for their contribution to human culture and society. Although uncompromising ethics focused on the interests or rights of whales as individuals have long inspired many antiwhaling activists, the more absolutist versions of these principles can pose a challenge to more pragmatic efforts to experiment with policy instruments that might prove more effective than the IWC moratorium. Regardless, we believe that only experience will be the judge of whether such alternative conservation programs work in practice, and reflective experience will provide the means for improving these policy instruments and strategies over time.

The debate in biodiversity conservation between economics and ethics, or between pragmatism and principle, is in many ways a misguided contest, one that assumes that there exists a deep philosophical division between environmental ethics and societal action. Being pragmatic in whale conservation policy does not mean selling out on conservationist principles.

Rather, we suggest that a truly principled approach to whale conservation today, and to biodiversity conservation more broadly, requires conservationists to be pragmatic. That is, they must be open to policy experimentation where current approaches do not seem to be working, as with international whale conservation, and they must be accommodating of the plurality of interests, values, and methods that increasingly define the wider conservation community. Ethical convictions about society’s duties to sustain whale populations have an important motivational role in any principled and pragmatic conservation policy moving forward.

Smart electric meters and the smart grid are innovations in the delivery of electrical services to homes and businesses that can, in principle, permit both consumers and suppliers to save energy, exercise greater control over the uses of energy, and in some cases feed locally generated electricity back into the grid. Europe is adopting this technology, which can play a vital role in achieving environmental goals. In the United States, however, there is resistance prompted by understandable concerns about data privacy and physical security as well as fears about the health effects of wireless telecommunication. Behavioral research has helped overcome this resistance through new methods of data collection and distribution that protect individual privacy while preserving the energy-saving and informational value of smart metering.

Helping people and their technologies work well together is only one of many ways in which behavioral and social sciences contribute to national well-being. Researchers in these sciences have contributed to public policies in areas ranging from defense and national security to health care and education. However, these contributions are not always apparent to the broader science community and the public or in policy settings.

This lack of visibility risks underutilizing the nation’s scientific capabilities as new challenges emerge. For example, as the elderly grow in their proportion of the population — a demographic trajectory we can foresee from surveys designed by social scientists—there will be demand for changes in work arrangements, retirement systems, and health care services, as well as in the design of transportation systems, homes, and neighborhoods. Effective, efficient, and satisfying accommodations to these changes can benefit from the application of the tools of social and behavioral science.

There are also many examples of contributions where the social and behavioral sciences intersect with the physical sciences and engineering. When there is a bridge to be built, we turn to engineers; when there is a vaccine needed, we turn to biochemists. But in determining the relative efficiency of paying for the bridge with a toll or a tax, we turn to economists; and in understanding public acceptance of the vaccine, we turn to social psychologists and public health experts. Society has many challenges that require attention by engineering and the physical and biological sciences, a large number of which also have a human and social dimension.

In recognition of the role of sciences that investigate these dimensions, the National Research Council has launched a new initiative, Social and Behavioral Sciences in Action (SBSIA). This initiative presents key contributions that the social and behavioral sciences have made to policy and society; it will also highlight emerging areas requiring fresh attention. This article, which draws from presentations at the first SBSIA symposium in September 2012, provides details about past successes and future challenges.

Better health care

One of the most socially beneficial but often unnoticed roles the social and behavioral sciences play is facilitating health care research and practice. For example, demographers and other social scientists were instrumental in developing and introducing modern family planning methods and practices around the globe; for example, by illuminating the key role social networks play in people’s decisions to use contraception. Dartmouth’s Atlas of Health Care has collected, analyzed, and publicized geographic variations in health care expenditures in the United States. Atlas researchers found that the rate of hip replacements was four times higher in some U.S. regions than in others and that the rate of shoulder replacements was 10 times higher in some regions. Such data helped policymakers and health care leaders identify opportunities to reduce health care spending while improving the quality of care.

Cultural as well as economic barriers impede health improvements. Rita Colwell, former director of the U.S. National Science Foundation, led a three-year study to evaluate a new method for combating cholera in Bangladesh. That nation faces cholera epidemics every spring and fall, and the disease spreads when people drink contaminated water. Colwell’s team sought to evaluate whether villagers could lower the incidence of cholera by pouring their drinking and cooking water through old folded sari cloth to filter out contaminants. With the help of statisticians and social scientists, they conducted a study that involved 150,000 individuals in 50 villages, including a comparison group that did not use the sari filters. The researchers found that the group that used the filters decreased their rate of cholera by 50%, and that those who did develop the disease generally got milder cases.

The social sciences’ important role became clear early in the study, when they helped the researchers scale an initial hurdle, said Colwell. When the team first submitted the proposal for the study, one of the reviewers rejected it, saying that Indian men would never drink water that had been filtered through old “unclean” sari cloth. The research team, however, found that in fact the men were already using sari cloth to filter flies out of their beer. “We really needed to understand the cultural practices,” explained Colwell.

Sociologists guided the team’s introduction into local communities, advising them on how to present the study. The sociologists also helped design the questionnaire, ensuring that specific questions were framed in culturally acceptable ways. What would have happened if the research team had not included social scientists? “I wouldn’t have had the entre to the villages on such a grand scale—150,000 individuals in 50 villages,” said Colwell. “It would not have been possible. And it would’ve been tragic, because this is an opportunity to take very advanced technology, science, engineering, and [use] those findings in a very practical way to help people.”

An area of health care where the social and behavioral sciences are badly needed but have not yet been tapped is in reforming the culture of medical practice, according to Lucian Leape of the Harvard School of Public Health. In particular, Leape argued, a dysfunctional medical culture is undermining patient safety; a field that for many in the profession really began with the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) 1999 report To Err is Human. Before that report, patient safety was seen as an individual performance issue. “If you didn’t perform well, then it was because you were lazy or careless or ignorant, and if you made mistakes we would punish you,” said Leape. “The Institute of Medicine said, it’s time to change the paradigm, to recognize that errors are caused by bad systems, not bad people, and let’s get to work changing the systems.”

Although considerable work has been done since, with progress in fits and starts, it is hard to prove that efforts to reduce errors have had more than marginal impact, said Leape. It’s apparent that changing systems is very difficult, he continued, and that health care is not a learning culture. Medical education emphasizes individual performance rather than teamwork, and medical culture is hierarchical and siloed. “Changing that culture has got to be the ultimate social science challenge,” he said. For example, a study in eight hospitals around the world found that the use of surgical checklists reduced complications by 40% and deaths by 50%. But it has been hard to achieve these good results on a broader scale; in every hospital there is at least one physician who resists such checklists, feeling individually exempt. ”The simple way to say it is that we don’t do teams very well,” said Leape, “and that’s clearly a social science issue.”

Of course, we also know that the origins of many health conditions are social in nature. In explanations of premature death in the United States, observes Steven Schroeder, social, behavioral, and environmental factors far outweigh genetic factors or problems within the health care system. A 2013 report of the National Research Council (NRC) and IOM has shown that the United States lags well behind other developed nations in morbidity and mortality in almost every respect for individuals less than 75 years old and that social, environmental, and behavioral factors are largely responsible for this disparity. Schroeder found that 60% of premature deaths are attributable to social circumstances, environmental exposures, or behavior patterns, whereas 30% are due to genetic defects and only 10% to the health care system. Innovative longitudinal biosocial surveys of health and aging in the United States and other nations promise to add substantially to knowledge about social and behavioral factors in health and longevity.

Enhanced national security and public safety

Another context in which a better understanding of human behavior can save lives is presented in the work of national security psychologist Robert Fein, who has studied the preattack behavior of assassins and school shooters. In the late 1980s, after four cases in which individuals had tried to attack someone under Secret Service protection, the agency’s director asked Fein and a Secret Service agent to conduct a study that would provide relevant evidence to Secret Service agents about would-be attackers. The researchers examined the pre-attack thinking and behavior of 83 people who had tried to attack a public target.

What they found debunked some commonly held myths about would-be assassins, especially the misleading assumption that there is a standard profile of an assassin. In fact, attackers vary by age, personal background, and other characteristics. Another common myth is that mental illness is a direct cause of assassination attempts. In reality it rarely plays a critical role; when agents try to assess a threat, it may be far more important to ask how organized a suspect is than to ask whether he or she is mentally ill, the researchers concluded. They also found that those who pose threats may not make threats. “No presidential attacker has ever communicated a direct threat to the president, to law enforcement, or to the Secret Service,” said Fein. His findings were disseminated to Secret Service agents and law enforcement agencies around the country and led to changes in investigative activities designed to prevent attacks.

After several high-profile school shootings rattled the nation in the 1990s, the Secretary of Education asked the Secret Service to conduct a similar study of the shooters’ pre-attack behavior, and the agency once again turned to Fein and his colleagues. Using an approach similar to their study on assassins, they examined the thinking and behavior of 41 young people involved in attacks at school. As with the assassins, they found that there is no accurate, useful profile that can predict school violence. However, they did find that most attackers had come to the attention of adults before the attack for problems they were having;plus, many attackers felt bullied, persecuted, or injured by others. In addition, most attackers let others—usually other kids—know that they were planning attacks, but those who knew rarely told adults. These and other findings had a broad impact when Fein and his colleagues developed a series of video teaching tapes and presented them at meetings of school and law enforcement professionals across the country.

Many other areas of the justice system and national security policy have benefited from greater application of behavioral and social science research. For example, two 2011 NRC reports showed that the adoption of behavioral and social science findings and methods could improve the quality and effective use of national intelligence analysis. Another NRC report demonstrates that widely used industrial methods of quality control could speed development, reduce costs, and increase the effectiveness of new defense systems. Experimental and observational research on eyewitness identification have identified unreliability and suggestibility in erroneous identification, and these findings are influencing the conduct of criminal investigations. A 2012 NRC report has identified ways in which new insights into individual development during adolescence may inform improvements in the juvenile justice system. At the same time, social scientific analysis has identified some areas in which it cannot provide definitive findings; for example, with respect to the deterrent effect of capital punishment.

Safer car travel

The goal of human factors engineering is developing technologies in a way that keeps humans at the center of the design process, “making the human-technology marriage work,” as human factors engineer John Lee, University of Wisconsin, Madison, described his field. Lee’s work focuses on finding ways to help people navigate a technological environment many enter every day: their cars. He studies driver distraction, an increasingly serious problem on U.S. roadways. In 2010, for example, 18% of injury-causing crashes, 3,092 deaths, and 416,000 injuries in the United States were attributed to distracted driving.

The difficulty of addressing this problem became evident in one of Lee’s studies, which tested a device designed to make it easier and less distracting to select songs on an MP3 player while driving. The study found that, contrary to expectations, drivers glanced away from the road even longer when selecting songs using the MP3 controller designed to reduce distraction than with the MP3 player alone; and the longer a driver glances away from the road, the more dangerous the situation becomes. “Engineers don’t always get it right,” Lee said.

How can the driver distraction problem be solved? One possible solution is attentive cars, which have sensors to spot obstacles in the environment and warn drivers about them, said Lee. Another option may be sensors that detect when drivers look away and cue them to get their eyes back on the road: “providing feedback so that drivers don’t have to die in order to realize that texting while driving is dangerous,” said Lee. By giving drivers reminders in the moment, he noted, attentive technology can complement the limits of regulations and education.

Human systems engineering has wide-ranging applications. Another context in which people may increasingly need help navigating technological interfaces is education, especially given the sudden emergence and rapid growth of massive open online courses (MOOCs). These courses, taught by professors at MIT, Stanford, and many other prestigious universities, are available free to any student anywhere in the world with Internet access, and they are radically extending the accessibility of higher education. What software interfaces are most useful for these courses? How should materials be presented in different areas of study for different populations? And how can valid methods of assessment be designed and implemented on a large scale with reliable security, given that MOOCs are increasingly taken for credit? Answering questions such as these will depend on findings and insights from the social and behavioral sciences.

The rest of the iceberg

These few though significant examples of the successful use of social and behavioral science to guide policies that work could easily be extended, reaching well into the multiple hundreds if we incorporate examples stretching back across more than a century: standardized testing that solved military recruitment challenges in World War I; National Accounts and sample surveys that helped to meet challenges facing the nation during the Great Depression; content analysis and area studies that contributed to national security in World War II and the Cold War; theoretical understanding of the demographic transition that was used to design global family planning that slowed population growth in the 1950s; large social experiments that revealed unintended consequences and weaknesses in social programs being implemented in the 1960s; and major research findings in early childhood learning that led to innovative parenting and schooling practices.

Despite these successes and opportunities, in one important regard the social and behavioral sciences are offering less guidance to the government and society than they could. There is not a robust understanding of the conditions that lead to the effective use of all of the sciences in the policy process: the physical and biological sciences and engineering as well as the behavioral and social sciences. Creating this understanding is a unique responsibility of the behavioral and social sciences. As documented in a recent NRC report, the use of science is itself a social phenomenon, one that should become a focus of scientific attention. Although researchers and policymakers have given much attention to randomized field trials, evidence-based-policy, and translational research, understanding of the uses of science is still too anecdotal. It is within the reach of political science, decision theory, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and systems theory to focus analytically on the “use of science as evidence in public policy.” This will require a much more ambitious program of research than has yet been mounted. Thus, improvement in the dissemination, communication, and use of scientific evidence looms large among the many challenges and opportunities that face the social and behavioral sciences.

“The imperative of modern society demands more attention to the social and behavioral sciences,” said National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Cicerone at the September conference. “The ambition is there, the methods are getting better, the successes are there, but not many people are hearing about it.”

The chorus of praise that has greeted Paula Stephan’s How Economics Shapes Science is well deserved. I am only echoing other reviewers by describing it as learned, insightful, eloquent, and timely. Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University, brings broad knowledge and rigorous analysis to the complex web of social and political forces that are inescapable—but too rarely discussed—part of the scientific enterprise. Stephan’s goal is not to propose any simple economics-based solutions to the conduct of science but to enrich our understanding of the social system in which science operates. This is not reductionist money-talks economics, but a sophisticated discussion that considers, for example, how the interplay of intellectual curiosity, professional reputation, institutional culture, and financial realities influences the researchers’ actions.

Yet, Stephan does pay attention to the bottom line and peppers the book with interesting information about science’s costs. For example, a typical mouse for research costs $17-$60, but a designer mouse with a particular disposition to diabetes or obesity could cost $3,500. A single researcher uses many mice and can spend more than $200,000 a year in mouse maintenance. The author tenders much more information about what it costs to maintain a faculty member and how that differs between private and public universities, across disciplines, and up and down the hierarchy from grad students and postdocs to full professors.

Stephan also cites more general data that has implications for the research enterprise’s overall effectiveness: 50% of highly cited physicists work in a country other than where they were born; 30% of papers by U.S. authors with more than one author have a non-U.S. coauthor; 6% of scientists and engineers produce 50% of published papers.

Throughout the book Stephan encourages readers to think more deeply about all aspects of the research environment. Prizes matter, but many choices determine how effective they are: Is the honor for a single discovery or a life’s work? Who decides on the priority goal to be incentivized? Do too many new prizes steal thunder from established prizes? We know that university scientists are spending more time consulting with the private sector, but we lack detailed data on how extensive this is, how much money is involved, how the nature of the consulting might be changing, and how this form of technology transfer stacks up against other routes. Collaboration is becoming more necessary in research, but we have yet to figure out related questions, such as how to assign intellectual property rights to discoveries made by teams and to acknowledge group achievement in an award system that has traditionally lionized individuals. Generalizations about research are always suspect because its nature differs by discipline and project, varying from the mathematician working alone in her office to the army of scientists and engineers collaborating at the Large Hadron Collider.

The physical capital of research is also changing, and the result is both greater democratization and increased stratification. Advances in information technology have made it easier for researchers to gain access to data from telescopes and gene sequencers. On the other hand, some research requires direct access to very costly lab facilities and equipment that might be available at only a few institutions and thus to only a handful of researchers. Should this changing landscape influence which types of research deserve government support?

In sifting through the details of how research is conducted today, Stephan does identify a few common problems. The procedures for managing the research enterprise were developed for a much smaller system and need to be updated to today’s scale. Slow growth in available funding has made the system too risk adverse, and the research world has become increasingly inhospitable for young researchers.

Focus on people

The most enlightening and disturbing chapters address the conditions and prospects for young people trying to launch careers in science. These chapters need to be read in full to appreciate the complexity of Stephan’s analysis, and she is too wise to propose a simple solution. But she raises serious questions about the economic efficiency of our current system for training future scientists and makes a strong case that the system is fundamentally organized to serve senior researchers at the expense of the young.

This imbalance prevails partly because 44% of U.S. PhD degrees in science and engineering are awarded to students on temporary visas and that almost 60% of postdocs are on temporary visas. Stephan devotes an entire chapter to the plight of many young people who come to the United States from other countries for graduate school and postdoctoral training. These talented young people contribute hugely to research during their training, and most find a way to stay in the United States when their training ends. But Stephan points out the risks of depending on foreign talent. Many countries are devoting resources to attracting scientists and engineers back home, and a sudden change—such as a Chinese ban on study in the United States—could be very disruptive. Stephan does not reach firm conclusions on whether foreign students are “crowding out” native citizens from science and engineering careers, but she does find evidence that the influx of foreign-born postdocs is depressing wages.

When Stephan returns at the end of the book to the relationship of science to economic growth, she aims to disabuse readers of simplistic notions of how university research leads, albeit slowly, to private sector innovation and increased economic productivity. She explains that innovation entails much more than new science and technology, that university intellectual property practices can sometimes slow technology transfer, that the training of researchers who will work in industry is of more immediate value than the research done in university labs, that spillover effects from research done in firms play a critical role. This is not to deny the important contribution of publicly funded research conducted in universities. But it helps us see that making the most of the national investment in research is not a simple matter.

Stephan’s review of some of the possible inefficiencies in the U.S. research system at least sets the course. Universities could be overinvesting in laboratory facilities and equipment to attract more federal research dollars, the nation could be training more PhD scientists and engineers than needed to perform the research we can afford to fund, and the ups and downs of federal research support play havoc with individual careers. The author reminds us that senior scientists and university administrators do respond to incentives, so that policies should ensure that incentives to individuals and institutions align with national goals.

To help young people considering careers in science make good choices, she would require universities to report the career outcomes for the people they train. Further, she would make research less dependent on the work of trainees because this would reduce the incentive for PIs to hire too many grad students and postdocs. She summarizes the argument made by many that training grants and fellowships are a preferable source of support for grad students and postdocs but acknowledges that empirical support for this case is lacking.

As researchers advance in their careers, Stephan would like them depend less on outside funding to maintain their university positions and to have more access to support for collaborative and interdisciplinary research. And she would like to end the “doubling” rhetoric popular among some science advocates. The rapid doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget, she avers, resulted in inefficient use of resources. A more reliable and predictable level of funding would avoid that problem and disrupt careers less.

Stephan ends by speculating about several questions without definitive answers. As she observes, we have no reliable way of calculating what percentage of gross domestic product should go to research, but the nation could probably benefit from spending more than it does now. The heavy U.S. emphasis on biomedical research raises obvious questions about balance, and she is inclined to shift some resources toward the physical sciences and engineering. On the questions of what size grants are most efficient or whether it would be better to fund individuals for long periods rather than projects for short periods, she is agnostic.

A subtitle to Stephan’s book could be: Consider the Counterfactual. Stephan warns against thinking that because something desirable happened—a new medical treatment was developed or a labor-saving device produced—and because it can be linked to some previous scientific research, that we did the right thing in supporting that research. The desirable event might have occurred without the earlier research funding or we might have stimulated even more and better events if we had spent that research money differently. Astutely, the author calls her final chapter “Can We Do Better?”

For centuries, the United States has been the envy of the world in terms of its higher education system. But now we are largely coasting on a bygone reputation, obscuring the fact that high-quality, affordable college credentials are not getting into the hands of the students who need them most.

One of the greatest assets of America’s higher education system is that we try to provide broad access to college credentials. Instead of remaining content to have a handful of private institutions that largely served the elite, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant Act in the 1860s, providing support for the creation of our public land-grant universities. A century later, hundreds of community colleges were created to ensure open access for all who wanted to enroll in higher education after high school. As awareness grew about the prohibitive expense of a college education, we made sure that all students who wanted to attend could afford it by providing generous state subsidies and federal support such as the GI Bill and Pell Grants. These investments allowed unprecedented numbers of Americans to enjoy the benefits of higher education and helped make us the most college-educated country in the world.

But the tides are changing for our great system. We are slipping, fast. Once first in the world among the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in terms of young adults with college degrees, the United States now ranks 14th. Whereas other nations’ young people are far more likely to have college degrees than their parents, the United States is on the verge of having an older generation that is better educated than the younger. This couldn’t come at a worse time. Technological development and structural shifts in the global economy mean that nearly two-thirds of U.S. jobs will require some form of postsecondary education in the next five years. One-third will require a bachelor’s degree or higher, and about 30% will require some college or an associate degree.

It’s not just the young who need higher education. Those who have seen their blue-collar jobs and membership in the middle class disappear are also yearning to learn the post-secondary skills essential for them to succeed economically. As routine work becomes increasingly automated, employers need workers with the skills necessary to handle complex and changing tasks and situations. A college credential is currently the easiest, if not necessarily the most accurate, proxy for those skills.

Yet even as college is becoming more essential, it is also becoming much more expensive. Tuition and fee increases have outpaced even health care costs, rising by more than four times the rate of inflation during the past 25 years. Students and families are covering those increases with student loan debt. Two-thirds of today’s students graduate with student loans, owing an average of $26,600. The nation’s collective student loan debt is more than $1 trillion, exceeding even our collective credit card debt.

Part of the problem is that our concepts of what colleges and college students look like have not kept pace with the realities. The collegiate archetype—a well-prepared 18-year-old ready to move into a dorm and study full time at the same college for four years, all of it paid for by mom and dad—is now the exception, not the rule. And as for the bucolic residential campus experience? That, too, is an exception. About 80% of today’s students are commuters. Nearly 45% of undergraduates attend community colleges. Nearly 60% attend two or more institutions before they graduate. More and more students are taking some or all of their courses online. In sum, students today are more likely to be older, working, attending part time, and learning outside of traditional credit-bearing classrooms than students in the past. Their lives demand a much different and much better kind of education.

Because many of today’s students are juggling work and family, higher education needs to be more responsive to these scheduling and financial constraints. It also needs to recognize the different experiences and goals that these students bring to the table. Right now, most colleges treat all students the same, as empty vessels that can only be filled within the confines of the college classroom. Compare two hypothetical students pursuing a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. The first is an 18-year-old with no work experience whose interest in the criminal justice system comes from watching Law and Order reruns. The second is a 31-year-old high-school graduate who has hit a degree ceiling at the law firm where she has worked for 12 years. Colleges treat them the same; that is to say, largely like an 18-year-old.

The antiquated images of college and college students also rest on a false distinction between education and training, further harming students pursing education outside the framework of a residential college. More than 40% of students at community colleges are enrolled in noncredit courses, many of which are workforce-training courses requested by and developed in conjunction with employers. Many of these courses include highly sophisticated and complex subject matter, which is then assessed and certified by industry-normed exams. Although employers and students benefit from the training received from these courses, students do not receive college credit and thus miss out on the permanent, portable units on which the widely recognized and remunerated college certificates and degrees are built. This limits students’ ability to enter career paths and adjust to cyclical and structural changes in the economy over time.

Unfortunately, there are few incentives—the biggest one being federal financial aid—to address the needs of these students. Federal financial aid pays largely for time served rather than learning achieved in for-credit courses at established, accredited institutions. Granting credit based on seat time instead of learning gives credit where it shouldn’t and fails to recognize learning that happens outside of classroom walls. This hampers students’ acquisition of valuable degrees and credentials. It also creates structural disincentives for developing new means of giving students the kind of flexible, affordable, and effective education and credentials they need. Institutions are rewarded largely for inputs rather than outcomes. What are the grade-point averages or SAT scores of incoming students? How much have faculty published? Rarely is the question of what students are learning asked, let alone answered.

Why is this the case and what can we do about it? To answer, we need only invoke the old adage “you get what you pay for.” Right now, we are paying for time, not learning. In order to change that, we have to address underlying problems with the basic currency of higher education: the credit hour. This way of measuring student learning is putting our nation’s workforce and future prosperity at risk. That’s because when the credit hour was developed at the turn of the 20th century, it was never meant to measure student learning.

The curious birth of the credit hour

American secondary schools expanded dramatically around the turn of the 20th century, swelling the ranks of high-school graduates. But the extreme variation in high-school practice left many college admissions officers unsure as to what a high-school diploma meant. The National Education Association endorsed a “standard unit” of time students spent on a subject as an easy-to-compare measure. But the idea didn’t stick until later, when Andrew Carnegie set out to fix a problem that had nothing to do with high school: the lack of pensions for college professors.

As a trustee of Cornell University, Carnegie was troubled by poor faculty compensation. Professors made too little to prepare for retirement, leaving many to work far longer than was productive for them or their students. Carnegie decided to create a free pension system for professors, administered by the nonprofit Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Not surprisingly, colleges were eager to participate. The foundation leveraged this excitement to promote another one of its goals—high-school reform—by requiring participating pension colleges to use the “standard unit” for college admission purposes. Colleges had nothing to lose and free pensions to gain, so the time-based standard unit, which became known as the Carnegie Unit, became the de facto standard for determining high-school graduation and college admissions requirements.

Carnegie’s pension system also spurred higher education to convert its own course offerings into time-based units to determine faculty workload thresholds to qualify for the pension program. Using the Carnegie Unit as a model, faculty members who taught 12 credit units, with each unit equal to one hour of faculty-student contact time per week over a 15-week semester, would qualify for full-time pension benefits.

Soon, the credit hour would become the fundamental building block of college courses and degree programs. The move to time-based units however, was never intended to be a measure of student learning. The Carnegie Foundation made this quite clear when discussing its “unit” in its 1906 annual report, in which it was explicitly stated that in the counting, the fundamental criterion was the amount of time spent on a subject, not the results attained.

But colleges did not heed this caveat, and it’s easy to understand why. The standardized nature of credit hours makes them convenient for a number of critical administrative functions, including determining state and federal funding, setting faculty workloads, scheduling, recording course-work, and determining whether students are attending college full time. The problem is that over the years, the credit hour has also come to serve as a proxy for measures of learning. Most importantly, college degrees came to represent the accumulation of credit hours, typically 120 to earn a bachelor’s degree.

More time does not equal more learning

College degrees are still largely awarded based on time served rather than learning achieved, despite recent research suggesting that shocking numbers of college students graduate having learned very little. The 2011 National Research Council study Academically Adrift found that 45% of students completing the first two years of college and 36% completing four years of college showed no statistically significant improvement over time on a test of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and communication skills. A U.S. government study found that the majority of college graduates could not do basic tasks such as summarize opposing newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers with varying interest rates.

Perhaps time is still part of the equation; students should be spending two hours outside of class for every hour in class. But the reality is quite different. In 1961, two-thirds of students spent at least 20 hours a week studying outside of class. By 2003, the percentage had dropped to 20. But, theoretically, colleges supplement the credit-hour count of how much time students have spent in and outside of class with an objective measure of how much they have learned: grades. But it is hard to reconcile today’s grades with the research suggesting that poor learning outcomes are widespread. Whereas 15% of undergraduate course grades were A’s in 1961, today almost half are A’s. Nearly two-thirds of provosts and chief academic officers think grade inflation is a serious problem. Either college graduates have become much smarter over time—a possibility contradicted by all available research—or the function of grades in meaningfully differentiating and rewarding student learning has eroded.

Given these sobering findings, it is not surprising that employers are not particularly impressed with recent college graduates. Only one-third of employers say that college graduates are prepared to succeed in entry-level positions at their companies, and only about one-quarter said that colleges and universities are doing a good job in preparing students effectively for the challenges of today’s global economy. There is a curious disconnect between the widely held belief that American universities are great and the growing recognition that its graduates are not.

When an hour isn’t an hour

Perhaps the strongest evidence of the credit hour’s inadequacy in measuring learning can be found in the policies and choices of colleges themselves. If credit hours truly reflected a standardized unit of learning, they would be fully transferable across institutions. After all, an hour in Massachusetts is still an hour in Mississippi. But colleges routinely reject credits earned at other colleges, underscoring their belief that credit hours are not a reliable measure of how much students have learned.

Many students, however, believe that the credit hour is a standardized currency and assume that their credits will transfer from one school to the next. This is an unfortunate and costly assumption. Take the case of Louisiana community college students. Until recently, students with an associate degree typically lost between 21 and 24 credits when transferring to a four-year state school. That’s a year of time and money lost. Given that nearly 60% of students in the United States attend two or more colleges, the nontransfer of credits has huge individual, state, and national implications.

Yet millions of credits are awarded that lead to degrees where very little, if any, learning is demonstrated. It is no wonder that the federal government has recently begun to weigh in on the credit hour. Because the cornerstone of federal financial aid, the credit hour, doesn’t represent learning in a consistently meaningful way, it is hard for the government to ensure that taxpayer dollars are well spent and that students are getting degrees of value. The problem has been exacerbated by two intertwined trends: the steady increase of online education and the growth of the for-profit higher education industry.

The concept of seat time becomes more difficult to measure when students aren’t in actual seats. From 2002 to 2010, the percentage of students taking at least one online class rose from under 10% to 32%. Online education fueled for-profit education most dramatically; students enrolled in for-profit programs increased more than 300% between 2000 and 2010. Federal policy fueled this boom, by removing a requirement that at least one-half of an institution’s students be enrolled in face-to-face courses to be eligible for financial aid.

One of the primary appeals of online classes is the flexibility they provide to students juggling work and family responsibilities. Online classes are often asynchronous, meaning that students don’t all gather in front of their monitors at the same time each week. Nor do students need to spend the same amount of time in front of their monitors; in many cases, students work at their own pace, going quickly through concepts they have mastered and lingering on those they have not. Although a boon to working students, online courses fit awkwardly with the seat-time basis of the classic credit hour and have become increasingly problematic for education regulators, particularly for the federal government.

Many online and for-profit colleges, as well as colleges of all kinds, are heavily financed by federal student financial aid dollars. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Education gave out more than $187 billion in grants, loans, and other forms of student financial aid, an increase of more than $100 billion in annual aid in just the past 10 years. And the building block of this aid is the credit hour.

Until recently, credit-hour determination was left entirely up to colleges and their peer accreditors. Institutions assigned a number of credit hours to a course and accreditors reviewed the process of determining credits. If the accreditors signed off, the department would open its financial aid coffers to students at the institution.

This began to change in 2009, when the department’s inspector general found inadequate accreditor oversight of the credit-hour assignment processes. Although colleges typically offer three credits for a 15-week course, the inspector general highlighted an institution that granted nine credits for a 10-week course. When the institution’s accreditor flagged what seemed to be an excessive amount of credits, the institution simply broke up the course into two five-week, 4.5-credit courses. The accreditor called the policy egregious, but approved the institution anyway.

In response to the inspector general’s report, and to a growing concern over poor quality controls for federal financial aid, the Department of Education decided there was a need for a consistent, standard definition of a credit hour. This would be tricky: Define the credit hour too tightly, and risk reifying seat time and stifling innovation; define it too loosely, and students and taxpayers could be taken for a ride.

After much discussion and controversy, the department released its final regulation in 2010. The definition used the time-based measure devised nearly a century earlier to determine eligibility for Carnegie’s pension plan. But it also provided alternatives based on evidence of student work or student learning. Unfortunately, the alternative parts of the definition were largely overlooked, in part because the credit-hour definition was just one piece of a series of regulations designed to reduce fraud and abuse in the financial aid program. Thus, many in the industry still believe that their safest and easiest bet is to do what they have always done: use time, rather than learning, to determine credits.

The 15-week, one-hour-in-class-and-two-hours-out definition of a college course is not just easy to measure; it is a long-established practice and convention. The credit hour may be an illusion—studies suggest that typical students work nothing close to two hours out of class for every hour in—but it is an illusion that everyone understands and agrees to believe. This is in stark contrast to agreements about learning outcomes. Although colleges and their accreditors claim that learning outcomes are an integral part of an institution’s DNA, the research findings on poor learning outcomes and rampant grade inflation, combined with the difficulty of credit transfer, tell a different story.

Learning from others

Fortunately, there are institutions that have long used learning, rather than seat time, to award credits and degrees, in addition to more recent efforts to try and measure learning. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Carnegie Foundation emerged again as a central player in new approaches to higher education. As adults supported by the GI Bill and more women entered or returned to school, it became clear that existing time- and place-dependent colleges were often ill-suited to serving these learners. Carnegie produced a series of reports emphasizing that adults were not simply older 18-year-olds; they had skills, knowledge, and educational needs that traditional students did not. Institutions needed a different approach: one that started with recognizing, measuring, and awarding credit for the high-level knowledge and skills adults had acquired through life and work experience.

Several new programs and institutions were created in the early 1970s to address the needs of adult learners. Ewald Nyquist, New York State’s commissioner of education and president of the University of the State of New York, proposed a Regent’s degree program to help those unable to attend traditional college courses with the opportunity to earn a degree. The program used exams and validation of credits earned at other institutions to help students more quickly and inexpensively earn their degree. Learning outcomes and degree requirements were made clear, and students could demonstrate what they already knew and then spend their time learning what they did not. In 1972, the program’s first associate degrees were awarded.

The program soon became a college and eventually became Excelsior College, whose motto is “What you know is more important than where or how you learned it.” Over the years, Excelsior has broadened the ways in which students can earn credits and degrees, adding demonstration of prior learning through a portfolio of projects and in-person or online classes. In early 2012, it announced a modern and inexpensive twist to its competency-based programs. For less than $10,000, students can earn a bachelor’s degree by using free online courses and materials and demonstrating their mastery of the subjects on exams designed by experts from across the country. Excelsior has the largest nursing program in the country, and its graduates do as well as those from traditional time-based programs on national licensure exams.

Exams are commonplace in many industries: Lawyers need to pass the bar before being allowed to practice, doctors must pass the boards, and many professions have specific licensure exams that certify that individuals have the minimum competencies necessary to be credentialed in a given field (for example, Cisco information technology certifications). In higher education, however, learning standards and assessments are largely devolved to the level of the individual course. Individual professors often set their own singular standards, deliver instruction, and then measure the students against these standards. And although grades may be high, evidence suggests learning is scant. This is not to suggest that higher education can and should be measured by one big test. But it needs to do a far better job of identifying and objectively measuring what students are expected to and can actually do. Exam-based credits already exist, in a limited scope, in higher education; they just happen to be geared toward high-achieving, traditional students. In 2012, 3.7 million high-school students took Advanced Placement (AP) exams in the hope of testing out of courses whose material they had already mastered. Although students may have difficulty transferring credits from one college to another, they are likely to face less resistance in receiving credit for AP courses, because institutions know what AP tests mean and are more likely to trust them. These credits are trusted because they are based on learning, not time.

The financial aid hurdle

Despite these innovations, Excelsior and the handful of similar institutions that started in the 1970s remain relatively unknown commodities. This is in large part because students who enroll in competency-based programs typically have not had a key benefit available to students at most other accredited institutions and programs: access to federal financial aid. Although students in Excelsior’s online classes are eligible, students in its competency-based exam programs are not. According to the federal government, these programs are considered independent study programs, because they lack regular faculty-student interaction. This concept has been at the heart of many federal aid policies, largely to protect students and taxpayers from unscrupulous diploma-mill operators. If we can’t measure the time that distance education students spend in class, according to this the thinking, at least we can measure the time they interact with faculty.

In the 1990s, a new institution, Western Governors University (WGU), found a way to overcome the financial aid hurdle. WGU was started by the Western Governors Association, a nonpartisan group of governors from 19 states who were grappling with how to prepare their residents to meet the states’ workforce needs. Populations spread over sparsely populated stretches of the West and rapidly growing urban areas in states such as Nevada and Arizona needed much greater access to higher education. Creating hundreds of new brick and mortar institutions was not financially feasible, nor was expecting that working adults would leave their jobs and families to attend institution hundreds of miles away. The answer was a fully online institution.

But access alone was not enough. The governors heard employer complaints about the quality of college graduates and wanted to be sure students learned what employers needed. The key was competency. Groups of faculty, scholars, and industry experts would define the competencies that students would need to demonstrate for each degree program. Graders unconnected to the students would then evaluate the competencies. This approach not only provided a consistent benchmark for the quality of the degree, it also allowed students to move through the material at their own pace. New students are assessed for competencies they already have, and a learning plan is created to help them master the rest. Students pay a flat rate of less than $3,000 for six months, during which time they can move through as many competencies as they are able. The average graduate earns a bachelor’s degree in 30 months and pays a total of about $14,000. Employers are pleased with WGU graduates: According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 98% rate the graduates as equal to or better than those of other universities, and 42% rate them as better.

Although WGU was originally built to serve students in the western states, today it serves students across the country. States are contracting to create state-branded versions of WGU, and enrollment is growing by 35% a year. This growth is made possible largely by the fact that students at WGU are eligible for federal financial aid.

It may be surprising to learn that WGU uses credit hours to receive federal aid. It wasn’t supposed to. Given the problems that seat time would pose to WGU’s competency-based model, Congress created an alternative way for institutions to receive financial aid, one that used the “direct assessment” of student learning. But WGU never used this authority, choosing instead to work creatively within the confines of the credit hour. Students are required to master 120 competencies, not coincidentally the standard number of credit hours required for a bachelor’s degree. WGU has regular faculty-student interaction, but its faculty members don’t teach. They function as mentors, helping students access the instructional resources they need to learn on their own. WGU’s creative use of the credit-hour requirement and faculty-student interaction has helped it access federal dollars critical to its growth.

Promoting new education models

Although Excelsior and WGU have broken away from seat time, the vast majority of colleges have not. Indeed, current government policies, and the misperceptions of these policies, have made it difficult for them to do so. If the United States is to reclaim its position as the most-educated nation in the world, then federal policy needs to shift from paying for time to paying for learning.

Many of the tools needed to make this shift are available to federal policymakers right now. Surprisingly, the first tool the government should use to help move away from time is its own recent definition of the credit hour. Many institutions and accreditors either don’t recognize the flexibilities in the new definition, or they don’t know how to use them. The government must be much more active in encouraging competency-based education and highlighting the competency models that use or could use the credit hour to receive financial aid.

The second tool is the direct assessment provision created for WGU. WGU hasn’t used it, nor has anyone else. That may soon change. In October 2012, Southern New Hampshire University, which is creating a $5,000 entirely competency-based associate degree, became the first institution to apply to use this provision. Freed from the history and practice of the credit hour, direct assessment could help institutions think more creatively about measuring student learning.

Although government can and should help push the boundaries of what is possible, it will not change the fact that measuring time is easy and measuring learning is not. This poses a real danger to innovation, because there are too many unknowns to safely broaden access to financial aid.

Fortunately, the third tool is the authority to test policies with small, voluntary groups of institutions. The government could ask a series of questions and try to answer them in controlled experiments. Should financial aid pay to assess learning that happened outside of the classroom? For learning achieved on the job? For learning achieved in Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCS)? How much should be paid to assess this learning? What should be the proof of student learning? Successful experiments could yield answers that would pave the way for wide-scale adoption.

These three tools offer a tremendous opportunity to move away from seat time. But a high bar must be set lest we recreate the grade inflation and weak academic standards in the existing time-based system or open up the floodgates to billions of dollars in federal aid to unscrupulous operators. Demonstrated learning outcomes are the key to this endeavor. The government should provide guidelines that are broad enough to support innovation yet stringent enough to prevent abuse. At a minimum, these guidelines should include transparent, externally validated learning outcomes.

But although these three policy tools could be extremely valuable in accelerating the completion of meaningful, learning-based degrees, they have limits. No matter what eventually might be covered by these tools, they apply only to accredited institutions. This means that noninstitutional providers of learning, no matter how good the outcomes, will remain ineligible. A biotech company could create a high-quality, work-based training program whose “graduates” have learned more than most students with an associate degree in science, but unless this training is attached to an accredited institution, the learning outcomes won’t count towards a credential.

If we accept that college-level learning can occur outside of traditional institutions, then why shouldn’t we accept that college-level credit could be granted outside of traditional institutions? For now, the law is very clear on who can grant credit and who can receive federal financial aid: institutions of higher education only. Perhaps after a few rounds of experimentation with the credit hour, direct assessment, and experimental sites, policymakers will see value in awarding credit for learning, irrespective of how long it took, where it happened, or who provided it.

As higher education becomes increasingly necessary and expensive, measuring time, rather than learning, is a luxury that students, taxpayers, and the nation can no longer afford. Moving to transparent, competency-based education would shed light on what students are learning in the classroom. It would also help millions of students capture and validate learning from outside the classroom, meeting students where they are and taking them where they need to go. Students and taxpayers can no longer afford to pay for a time-based measurement designed to help professors qualify for pensions. If we pay for what students learn and can do, rather than how or where they spent their time, it would go a long way toward providing students and the nation with desperately needed, more affordable, and better-quality degrees.

High-school dropouts fare substantially worse than their peers on a wide variety of long-term outcomes. On average, a dropout earns less money, is more likely to be in jail, is less healthy, is less likely to be married, and is unhappier than a high-school graduate. Yet dropout rates in the United States have remained mostly unchanged, at roughly 30%, during the past three decades. This problem disproportionately affects low-income and minority students. Nearly half of these individuals do not graduate with their class.

A growing body of research, however, suggests ways to improve high-school graduation rates and close the achievement gap. A key element is for all states to increase their minimum school-leaving age to 18. Many studies have found that this intervention significantly improves several long-term outcomes. More effort is also needed to keep students engaged in school, even at an early age. If states invest in effective support programs, they can further increase graduation rates and reduce future costs of enforcing compulsory-schooling policies. All of these interventions should be implemented with the goal of strengthening the nation’s primary education system to promote college attendance and improve career outcomes among youth.

Lifetime of challenges

High-school dropouts face daunting challenges. Skills and educational attainment are increasingly important in today’s economy, and individuals with the least education are faring particularly badly. Among recent dropouts, 16% are unemployed and 32% live below the poverty line. Dropouts with jobs earn an average of only $12.75 per hour, with the most common jobs found in the construction, food services, and landscaping industries. Labor-market outcomes remain bleak throughout life. Dropouts aged 50 earn an average of $16.50 an hour and are most commonly employed in construction, food services, and truck transportation.

Dropouts face worse social outcomes as well. For example, 33% of recent female dropouts have given birth as a teenager, 13% of male and female dropouts are separated or divorced, 32% report being unhealthy, and 22% report being unhappy, according to data from the 2005–2010 waves of the General Social Survey, which is considered a reliable indicator of societal trends.

Several studies also link a region’s proportion of dropouts to its overall prosperity. Individuals earn higher wages if they work in regions with fewer dropouts, irrespective of their own level of educational attainment. Crime rates are lower, and civic participation is higher. For these reasons, the high-school dropout rate is sometimes used as a quality measure of schools and an appraisal of the skill level of the future national workforce.

With so much hardship associated with leaving high school before graduating, why do so many students decide to do it? Of course, there is no single explanation: Conflicts at home, urgent financial difficulties, and unexpected pregnancies are only a few examples. Some dropouts say they are too poorly prepared to complete. A majority of these individuals say they are unmotivated or uninspired to go to class. Dropouts are truant more often, experience more academic troubles, and record more failing grades throughout all levels of schooling than do their peers who graduate. Dropouts are more likely to be from households where parents are less active in promoting and helping with school. By the time students decide to leave, they often feel there is disconnect or lack of support between themselves, their parents, and their teachers. The act of dropping out, therefore, must be understood not as a single event but an outcome that begins with school disengagement, often long before the dropout finally decides to stop coming to class.

Many studies have found that youth are particularly predisposed to impulsive behavior, especially in situations involving immediate costs relative to long-term benefits. Similar forces seem to be at play for many students in their decisions to drop out of school. In hindsight, adults who dropped out almost universally express regret. In one study, 74% admitted that they would have stayed in school if they could make the same decision again. So although the reasons students disengage from school are important to understand and address, the basic fact remains that students miss out on long-term payoffs from doing so.

For decades, laws compelling school attendance have been implemented with the goals of raising educational attainment, reducing the number of dropouts, and addressing the problems myopic youth and disinterested parents have in choosing whether the student stays in school. The compulsory-schooling age sets the minimum length of time that students must spend in school before they have the legal option to leave. States generally set the laws covering compulsory attendance. The laws have been around for many decades—in some cases, for more than a century—and they have been updated periodically, sometimes increasing and sometimes decreasing the time, depending on the particular needs and desires of each state. The youngest age at which students are now allowed to leave school is 16 (although often with some exceptions), which is the case in 21 states.

Much scientific evidence supports the view that increasing the compulsory schooling age is socially desirable. As President Barack Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union address: “When students don’t walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. When students are not allowed to drop out, they do better.”

National blueprint

Requiring states to establish compulsory-schooling laws set at age 18 is not, however, a silver bullet for addressing the problem of dropouts. But it could form the cornerstone of a suite of policies to reengage the most at-risk young students; establish the right expectations for students, their families, and educators; and provide a focus for related policies to improve educational outcomes. In this light, we propose a four-part national approach to address the challenge.

First, the federal government should educate states on the benefits of high-school graduation and encourage legislative action to increase the minimum age at which students are legally allowed to drop out of high school to 18 years.

Compulsory schooling and education in general are usually legislated at the state level. The federal government, as it has recently done, can encourage states to consider more-restrictive laws and grade states based on the extent to which they follow federal recommendations. Even if the federal government could impose a national minimum school-leaving age, it is clear, based on experience, that such legislation is not likely to be effective if buy-in does not exist at the regional levels. The federal government has a larger role in disseminating best practices and motivating policies from a cost/benefit perspective.

On balance, the evidence suggests that students with more compulsory schooling would do better across a wide range of lifetime outcomes. The federal government can work to ensure that these benefits are clearly communicated to state and local policymakers, with the understanding that the gains from promoting high-school completion through compulsory schooling outweigh the costs of implementing and enforcing such laws.

Some of the best evidence suggesting that high-school students gain, on average, from staying in school comes from historical changes in compulsory-schooling laws. The first empirical studies in this area dealt with increases in the minimum school-leaving age that occurred in the first half of the 20th century. These studies consistently found large gains in adult socioeconomic outcomes. In the United States, studies found that annual earnings are nearly 10% higher for students compelled to stay an additional year in school, and comparable results have been observed in the United Kingdom and Canada.

In addition, studies using various states’ recent changes to the minimum school-leaving age have found that each year of additional schooling that students receive lowers the probability by 3.6 percentage points that they will end up unemployed, lowers the likelihood by 5.5 percentage points of their being on welfare, and lowers by 8.1 percentage points the likelihood of their living below the poverty line. Among those working more than 25 hours per week, a year of compulsory schooling is also associated with a 10.7% increase in annual earnings. These results may be understated, because education earnings gaps tend to increase with age, and the studies focused on younger cohorts.

Individuals nudged to finish high school through mandatory-schooling laws also fare better than dropouts on outcomes other than employment and income. Compulsory schooling has been shown in some studies to lower overall crime and incarceration rates, although there is some evidence that increasing the minimum school-leaving age to 18 results in higher in-school violence. Compulsory schooling makes individuals healthier: High-school dropouts are more likely to use cigarettes and illicit drugs than are high-school graduates, and better-educated individuals tend to have slightly longer life expectancies. Compulsory schooling reduces the incidence of teen pregnancy and may even have positive effects on memory and other cognitive abilities. There are also documented broader consequences of compulsory education that make democracies more effective by increasing political interest and involvement. In addition, it can decrease intergenerational inequality in educational attainment: Parents with more compulsory schooling are less likely to have children repeat a grade or drop out of school themselves.

Studies have also demonstrated the effects of increasing the school-leaving age above 16 on education attainment. In a study of a sample of 20- to 29-year-olds, for example, for each year the dropout age was extended above 16, school attainment increased by an average of 0.12 years per student. High-school completion rates increased 1.3 percentage points, on average, from increasing the school-leaving age from 16 to 17, and 2.4 percentage points from increasing it to 18. Raising the school-leaving age also led to an increase in college enrollment rates by 1.5 percentage points, suggesting that many of those encouraged to stay on and complete high school take advantage of new opportunities by pursuing college. Using these estimates, increasing the school-leaving age to 18 for every state would lead to approximately 55,000 more students completing high school and 34,000 more students entering college per year.

Lessons drawn from these and other findings can form a compelling argument that may encourage states to examine their compulsory-schooling laws and make sure they reflect the best current scientific evidence.

Second, states should be encouraged to develop new programs to reengage at-risk youth.

Compulsory-schooling laws help establish social norms and expectations for minimum school attainment. But compulsion should be a last resort alongside other policies to promote engagement and foster an environment in which struggling students are encouraged and assisted to complete high school. States should be challenged to come up with innovative plans, relevant to their communities, to keep young students engaged and learning before they approach high-school ages where they actually drop out.

The decision to drop out of school often results from a much longer process of disengagement that begins in elementary school. Patterns of high absenteeism and lower performance by future dropouts tend to start as early as the third grade. Thus, policies that combat early disengagement may prevent at-risk students from falling into a downward spiral, in which missing school causes them to fall behind in their studies, which in turn makes them feel even less motivated to attend classes and puts them further behind. At young ages, truancy is more often related to parental issues. Addressing parent situations that keep children away from school while working with parents to improve conditions for children to cope with the social and academic challenges of school are ways to foster school engagement. Children tend to do better when parents set high expectations for them. Setting rules and helping with homework are ways that parents can encourage their children to adapt to school early and do well in the long term.

Parents also need to be actively involved through all levels of schooling. Although many parents become more involved on learning that their child is considering leaving school, they are often not aware of their child’s poor performance until it is too late. When school administrators and educators communicate more regularly with parents regarding their children’s performance, they provide a means for parents to take a more active role.

The school environment itself is obviously another strong determinant of whether at-risk students succeed. Students who are supported, motivated, and encouraged by their teachers, who regard their teachers as caring, and who receive guidance from their teachers usually like school. In contrast, dropouts often report leaving school because they did not get along with their teachers or classmates. Smaller class sizes or counseling and guidance programs for struggling students are ways to improve how students perceive their teacher support networks.

Recent evidence points to the importance of setting high academic expectations. Students should be made to feel that they are expected to complete high school, and that teachers and parents are there to help make that happen. Compulsory-schooling policies, in a broader context, exist to set minimum expectations about school attendance and attainment. A number of other interventions show promise in fostering expectations and engagement, even at an early age. Mentoring programs, especially, provide opportunities for administrators to directly interact with students and families, and they are relatively cost-effective. For example, Check & Connect is a program that sends support workers to meet with students and parents in urban middle schools to discuss attendance and academic performance. A number of randomized controlled trials have found that the program, developed at the University of Minnesota, leads to lower tardiness and absenteeism and increased graduation, as well as to increases in literacy and school completion. Of course, this intervention is not without cost—the price tag of Check & Connect is approximately $1,100 per student per year—but the long-term benefits of the program probably far outweigh its costs.

Third, state and local governments should improve the enforcement of new and existing laws.

Although a strictly enforced minimum school-leaving age should, in theory, cause every student to either remain in school until the requisite age or face a penalty, compulsory-schooling laws tend not to be strictly enforced, often for reasons of cost. For example, Los Angeles had 260 attendance counselors to cover 660 schools in 2002. Yet Boston had only seven truant officers in 2003, and Denver had only one officer in 2004. In the 1990s, Chicago eliminated all truant officers for budgetary reasons in favor of using mentoring programs to tutor and reengage moderately truant students. More resources clearly should be devoted to hiring more truant officers and attendance counselors.

Although the importance of involving parents in dealing with truant children cannot be overstated, punitive measures may be useful to curb absenteeism in cases where counseling is not as successful. Parents may be unwilling or unable to discipline children to attend school, especially for older adolescents who are more independent. In some cases, the parents may also suffer from problems of mental illness or drug addiction, which further complicates the matter. The credible (and possibly implicit) threat of fines and court hearings for parents may motivate them to make sure their children are attending school regularly. Community service requirements, fines, and misdemeanors sanctioned on students are other ways of targeting truancy in cases where absenteeism is a result of student delinquency. Imposing restrictions on driving privileges has also shown to be a successful deterrent to truancy. However, because fines and court hearings are resource-intensive, they should be used as last resorts after counseling or other corrective measures have been exhausted.

Also, exemptions to compulsory-schooling laws are common in many states. These exemptions permit adolescents to leave school when obviously appropriate. In many cases, dropping out is a result of teenage pregnancy, the need to care for a family member, or an immediate need to make money. States often address these concerns by requiring parental consent, coupled with a younger minimum dropout age, to ensure that basic educational requirements are still met. Having clear exemptions in place would give administrators flexibility to accommodate cases in which the costs of continuing are obviously too high.

These different approaches to enforcement will probably have different results. Researchers are only now learning about which approaches work best. For instance, a study is under way to explicitly test different approaches to enforcing compulsory-schooling laws in a sample of truant youth in Chicago, in the absence of any other enforcement of those laws.

Fourth, compulsory-schooling laws should be designed to promote college attendance and improve the career outcomes of students.

The motivation for a renewed focus on compulsory-schooling laws is the increasingly poor labor-market outcomes of high-school dropouts. In the past several decades, an increasingly competitive global economy and technological advancements have reduced the job opportunities available to less-educated, less-skilled workers and increased them for higher-skilled workers. This increased demand for skilled labor is reflected in the rise in earnings premiums of high-school and college graduates as compared with those of high-school dropouts. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2005 that individuals who graduated from high school earn 1.5 times more than dropouts, and college graduates earn 2.7 times more than dropouts. Yet even high-school graduates have seen large declines in their average earnings levels and employment rates relative to college graduates during the past several decades. This suggests additional opportunities for improved social and economic success through college. Increasing high-school attainment should be regarded as part of a more general goal to make youth more competitive in the labor market.

Although traditional education is clearly highly prized in today’s labor market, the goal of compulsory-schooling laws is not to try to shoehorn all students into that model. Its purpose should be to prepare the nation’s youth for a range of opportunities, including college and careers. To that end, nontraditional programs that have a clear track record of proven results should be eligible to fulfill the requirements of compulsory-schooling laws. For instance, vocational training and school-to-career programs may also be effective ways of providing disengaged students with alternative school options for developing practical, hands-on learning and useful skills for success in the labor market.

Career academies—programs in high schools focused on preparation for postsecondary education and the transition to work—enable students to combine standard classroom learning with on-the-job work experience. These programs are primarily located in urban schools and serve a cross section of students, including many at-risk minority students. They offer small learning communities that combine academic and technical curricula around a career theme to enrich learning. Monthly earnings are higher for career academy graduates, particularly for males, than for similar students who did not participate in the programs. More important, these gains most consistently accrued to students classified as being at the highest risk of dropping out of school. The option to receive assistance in finding work after school also entices many students to graduate on time, because the financial benefits of remaining in school are made more salient. Per-student costs of school-to-work programs can be similar to those of mentoring programs and may even be repaid by graduates through subsequent payroll taxes.

Furthermore, compulsory schooling may be one way of encouraging youth to pursue higher education, even though such laws do not explicitly mandate it. There is evidence that some individuals nudged to complete high school become more interested in college or view higher education as less daunting an obstacle than when they were younger. Some studies have also found that mandating that students complete the college application and financial aid process may lead to increased college enrollment.

In addition to communicating the importance of continued education and mitigating absenteeism, mentoring programs and parent-teacher outreach initiatives also provide opportunities to help students choose courses and plan their learning paths to achieve their long-term career goals. It is important that high schools offer an array of course options to keep students interested in learning and prepare them for college. Vocational training, such as student-work programs, may be useful for providing students who would otherwise typically not go on to college with real-world work experience, which may in turn open doors to a successful career.

Weighing costs

Economic evidence points to sizable financial and nonfinancial benefits, on average, for students from increasing the minimum school-leaving age. But although compulsion and truancy prevention affect particular groups of students more than others, costs and resource burdens affect schools, administrations, and states on a wider scale. This raises the question of whether such costs are justified or offset by the observed gains of at-risk groups.

On the benefits side, for example, is the estimated 10% increase in annual income, on average, from encouraging a student to stay a year longer in school. This means that the lifetime earnings increase from finishing high school and joining the labor force at age 18 rather than exiting high school at age 16 is approximately $226,700. After correcting for the fact that much of this income comes long after the high-school years, this sum is equivalent to a one-time payment of $94,300 at the age of 16 (when individuals are facing the decision of whether to drop out). There are also the many benefits of compulsory schooling that are difficult to quantify, such as reduced teenage pregnancy, improved individuals’ health, reduced dependency on public support programs, decreased crime rates, and increased voting and political involvement. Thus, beyond the increase in earnings of would-be dropouts, there are broader benefits to the students and to their families and communities.

On the cost side, more truant officers or caseworkers would probably be needed, although it is unclear precisely how many. According to estimates made by the Maryland General Assembly in 2012, if each worker makes $85,000 per year (the average in the state) and one worker can monitor 40 students, that is an increase of more than $4,000 to monitor each additional student for two more years.

Also, accommodating tens of thousands of students across the country who otherwise would have dropped out will entail direct costs from some combination of hiring more teachers, building new schools, or increasing class sizes. Per-pupil spending in the United States is roughly $12,300 per year, based on 2011 data from the National Center for Education Statistics. If accommodating each new student costs this amount, a state would pay almost $25,000 to keep a 16-year-old dropout in school through graduation. In reality, however, adding students to the education system is likely to increase costs by far less than the average rate per student. Some new schools and classrooms may have to be built to accommodate the would-be high-school dropouts who remain in school, but most of the infrastructure already exists to support these students. Actual costs of education, then, may be closer to $10,000 or $15,000 for each additional student.

Beyond these direct costs, there may be indirect costs, many of which are difficult to quantify. For example, increasing the number of students in public schools could lead to larger class sizes if schools accommodate these students without hiring new teachers or building new classrooms. Furthermore, some of the students who would remain in school as a result of the law change may be disruptive to their peers because they are among the least-enthusiastic students. This is most likely to affect students who are already struggling, who are most at risk of being distracted and falling into bad habits. There are also concerns that the incidence of crime and violence in schools might rise because of the increased attendance of unhappy and unwilling teenagers. Finally, many schools are already pressed for funds, and the increased financial burdens from compulsory schooling would divert resources from other valuable uses.

Positive bottom line

The best estimates suggest that the economic benefits that accrue to students who graduate more than offset potential costs. Although there is not an off-the-shelf compulsory-schooling program, a comparison can be made by hypothesizing a program that has substantially more teachers and classrooms to hold class size constant, as well as substantially more truant officers to deal with potentially unenthusiastic students. An upper estimate for these costs is roughly $28,800 for each student who is compelled to stay in school for an additional two years (although actual costs may be significantly lower). Thus, per student, the combined quantifiable benefits of increasing the compulsory-schooling age appear to exceed the costs substantially.

It also should not be overlooked that the vast majority of the costs are incurred in the actual education of would-be dropouts, as opposed to the enforcement of any laws. But any intervention that succeeded in reducing the dropout rate by a commensurate level would entail those same direct education costs. Compulsory schooling, then, is only expensive insofar as it is successful in keeping students in school, which, the economic evidence suggests, is a worthy goal.

Furthermore, programs that target disengagement among at-risk students at an early age will not only increase high-school graduation rates and the ensuing benefits that compulsory schooling brings; they also have the potential to significantly lower many of the associated costs. For instance, states will have to devote fewer resources to enforcing compulsory-schooling laws if relatively less-expensive programs such as Check & Connect curb disengagement early in students’ academic careers. These programs also may decrease the number of disruptive students in the public school system, which would minimize some of the potentially negative peer effects of compulsory schooling.

Plus, better-educated students will help drive today’s economy, which is searching for such employees, and the higher income-tax revenues that will result will partially offset states’ costs and provide a worthwhile return on investment. All told, states may find that many of these support programs are sound investments for increasing their population’s education level and economic outcomes in the most cost-effective way.

House, Senate Committees investigate meningitis outbreak

After a meningitis outbreak this fall tied to a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy, House and Senate committees held hearings to investigate what happened, and members on both committees clashed with Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Margaret Hamburg over whether the FDA could have done more to prevent the outbreak.

More than 14,000 patients in 23 states were exposed to a rare form of fungal meningitis through contaminated steroid injections. As of December 12, 2012, 590 cases had been identified in 19 states, resulting in 37 deaths.

In September, clinicians at the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) confirmed several cases of unexplained fungal meningitis and notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A subsequent investigation by the TDH, CDC, and FDA determined that the New England Compounding Center (NECC) in Massachusetts was responsible for the contaminated injections. A subsequent investigation by the FDA and the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy (MBP) found numerous regulatory infractions, inadequate sterilization procedures, and vials of steroid injections containing visible black particulate matter (later confirmed as microbial contamination). The CDC then activated its Emergency Operations Center to contact potentially exposed patients, monitor diagnosis and treatments, and provide up-to-date information on the outbreak. NECC recalled all products currently in circulation and permanently surrendered pharmaceutical licenses for the facility and its three primary pharmacists.

At the hearings held by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, members commended the TDH and the CDC for their responses to the outbreak. Beth Bell, director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Diseases, discussed the importance of federally funded programs that trained clinicians on the ground and provided laboratory and surveillance capacity in preparation for such outbreaks. But members questioned whether the MBP and FDA provided adequate regulatory oversight of NECC.

As discussed at the hearings, in the 14 years that NECC had been in operation, the FDA conducted three series of inspections (each related to a separate complaint or incident), issued two reports of objectionable conditions, and issued a formal warning letter for numerous violations of pharmaceutical regulations. The MBP investigated a dozen additional complaints, issued four advisory letters and reprimands, and entered into a consent agreement with NECC to resolve numerous problems related to the misfiling of prescriptions and problems with drug potency and sterility that had previously led to patient infections. In July 2002, two patients in New York were hospitalized with meningitis-like symptoms after receiving steroid injections from NECC contaminated with bacteria. Subsequent inspections by the FDA again identified problems with drug potency and sterility at NECC, leading the FDA to recommend that the MBP prohibit NECC from drug development until these problems were resolved. The FDA warned that there was “potential for serious public health consequences if NECC’s compounding practices, in particular those relating to sterile products, are not improved.” But NECC continued its operations.

Much of the discussion at the House and Senate hearings focused on two factors underlying the outbreak: the definition of a compounding pharmacy versus a drug manufacturer and the regulatory oversight of the FDA and MBP.

“From the Hill” is adapted from the newsletter Science and Technology in Congress, published by the Office of Government Relations of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (www.aaas.org) in Washington, DC.

In her testimony, Hamburg defined traditional pharmacy compounding as the combining or altering of ingredients by a licensed pharmacist producing a medication tailored to a patient’s special medical needs. This can include reformulating a drug to accommodate patient allergies or altering dosage for children or the elderly. All parties involved in the hearings, including members of Congress, cited the benefits of this practice. Although the FDA maintains heavy oversight over drug manufacturing, Hamburg cited a lack of policy guidelines on pharmacy compounding. She said that Section 503A of the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 exempts compounding drugs from several provisions of FDA regulation, which have been challenged in court with conflicting results and leave the FDA with ambiguous oversight. In such situations, the FDA defers to state-level regulators, whose oversight is more clearly defined.

Hamburg proposed a tiered system of regulation that separates traditional compounding, which requires minimal oversight, from nontraditional compounding, and clearly defines state and federal regulation in each category.

Several members of the committees challenged Hamburg’s perspective, arguing that repeated inspections, reports, and especially the 2006 warning letter indicate that the FDA believed it could exercise regulatory oversight over NECC, and they questioned why the FDA had not continued to do so. Hamburg responded that FDA authority was “limited, unclear, and contested.”

In her testimony, MBP Commissioner Lauren Smith stated that the MBP had “primary responsibility for oversight” and that “troubling questions remain” about MBP investigations of NECC.

The House Committee has requested input from all 50 state boards of pharmacy on the balance between federal and state regulation of compounding pharmacies and has drafted a proposal for legislation to improve drug distribution security.

U.S. Weather Commission proposed

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and the Weather Coalition sponsored a congressional briefing, “Toward a U.S. Weather Commission: Protecting Lives, Livelihoods, and the American Economy,” during which a panel of experts called on Congress to create a U.S. Weather Commission to protect the American people from economic and personal harm.

The panel included John Armstrong, chair of the Committee on the Assessment of the National Weather Service (NWS) Modernization Program; William B. Gail, cofounder and chief technology officer of the Global Weather Corporation; Pamela G. Emch, senior staff engineer and scientist for Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems; and Thomas Bogdan, president of UCAR.

The briefing was held in response to the National Academies report Weather Services for the Nation: Becoming Second to None. The committee that authored the report pointed out that the NWS has not changed its operations or structure since its last modernization in the 1990s. The report contains three core recommendations for the service: prioritize core capabilities, evaluate the organization’s structure and function, and improve collaboration with all parts of the weather enterprise, including the private sector.

According to the expert panel, normal weather events cost the United States $485 billion per year, and major storms in 2011 alone resulted in another $52 billion in damages, 8,000 injuries, and more than 1,000 fatalities. A U.S. Weather Commission would provide guidance to policymakers as they implement the Academies committee’s recommendations to ensure that scientists have the resources they need to improve forecasting capabilities and warning systems.

UCAR and the Weather Coalition suggested that Congress model the new commission after the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, a largely successful advisory panel that provided guidance on ocean policy issues to President Bush from 2001–2004.

Federal science and technology in brief

• The Departments of Commerce and Labor have announced a new initiative, the Make It in America Challenge, which will provide $40 million in competitive grant funding to accelerate the trend of in-sourcing, whereby companies bring jobs back to the United States and make additional investments here. The competition will be opened through a Federal Funding Opportunity to be announced by the start of 2013. It will focus on projects that accelerate job creation by encouraging insourcing of productive activity by U.S. firms, fostering increased foreign direct investment, giving U.S. companies incentives to keep or expand their businesses in the United States, and training local workers to meet the needs of those businesses.
• On November 27, the president signed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, which protects government employees from retaliation when disclosing evidence of gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, or abuse of authority within the government. Of interest to the research community, the legislation includes language that protects against censorship related to research, including efforts “to distort, misrepresent, or suppress research, analysis, or technical information.”
• An effort to pass cybersecurity legislation failed, after Republican leaders objected because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) would not allow an open amendment process. The Senate also failed to pass cybersecurity legislation in August. At that time, Republicans were concerned that mandatory security standards in the bill would put unnecessary burdens on the private sector.
• On November 12, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released an analysis of the cost to implement the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (S. 810). The legislation would prohibit invasive research on great apes, require permanent retirement for animals that are currently being used in research, and expand an existing sanctuary to house them in retirement. According to the CBO, it would cost the federal government $56 million over a four-year period.
• Francis Collins, director of the NIH, announced on November 16 that he has decided not to move forward with a recommendation from NIH’s Scientific Management Review Board that the agency establish a new institute focused on substance use, abuse, and addiction-related research. Thus, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism will retain their institutional identities. Collins formed an internal task force to recommend how a merger of the two institutes could best be accomplished, but in the recent statement he said he concluded that “it is more appropriate for NIH to pursue functional integration, rather than major structural reorganization, to advance substance use, abuse, and addiction-related research.”
• Reps. Randy Hultgren (R-IL) and Chaka Fattah (D-PA) introduced H.R. 815, which declares 2013 the “Year of the Federal Lab” and highlights the accomplishments of national energy laboratories and more than 100 other labs that function as federal research centers.
• On October 5, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and the CDC published the final regulatory rule to govern the use of select agents and toxins. The rule implements a tiered system for regulating select agents based on risk for misuse and danger to public health; for example, 11 agents have been designated as Tier 1 agents and thus will require additional security measures. The agencies removed a number of other agents and viruses from the select agent list. In addition, the rule mandates stricter inventory requirements and audit procedures to enhance security. The rule went into effect on December 4, 2012.

Energy basics

Bruce Everett (“Back to Basics on Energy Policy,” Issues, Fall 2012) reviews the history of government energy policy with discomforting accuracy. One can only hope that the article will persuade more of us that Walt Disney’s first law, “Wishing will make it so,” is fine for feel-good cartoons, but a very poor guide for policy. As the article makes clear, government can take rightful pride in its support of basic research on energy-related science and early-stage engineering. But grandiose schemes to remake our energy economy have not worked.

It is hard to quibble with the main ideas of “Back to Basics,” but successful technologies don’t always follow “the three distinct stages” of basic research, technical development, and commercialization that Everett mentions. For example, James Watt had only a rudimentary understanding of basic thermodynamics as he developed the high-efficiency steam engines that accelerated the Industrial Revolution. And in many of his most important inventions, Thomas Edison was not particularly concerned with having “a solid understanding of the science involved.” Neither Watt nor Edison became bogged down by government interactions. In fact, they hardly interacted with their governments at all, except in the important area of intellectual property.

Discussing externalities, Everett mentions that “Climate change scientists argue that increasing CO2 will have a catastrophic impact on humanity.” Quite a few distinguished scientists, including climate scientists, do not agree with this apocalyptic assessment. There are even credible arguments that more CO2, with its modest warming, will be a net benefit to humankind, for example, because of increased agricultural yields. The movement to demonize CO2 has many of the trappings of religious zealotry. One wonders what future historians will make of the cult-like hectoring of our citizens to reduce their “carbon footprints” or the uncritical promotion of “renewables,” including wind, solar, and ethanol, soon to be available in abundance from cellulose, in accordance with Walt Disney’s first law and congressional legislation.

“Back to Basics” has some of the flavor of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in 1776, which reviewed the British government’s colonial policies in North America. Everett’s equally commonsensical review makes a persuasive case that our government’s policy on energy is in equal need of reform.

WILLIAM HAPPER

Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey
[email protected]

The author served as the director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Research (now the Office of Science) from 1990 to 1993.

I find myself in agreement with Bruce Everett that some energy policies have been misguided, but find that he misses the overall reality. I would argue that there is little evidence of an efficient energy “market” that is effectively choosing among fuels and technologies or that through some mysterious process solves our national security and environmental problems.

First, his characterization of the policies that have promoted nuclear power and biofuels are quite compelling. In fact, he even shortchanges his argument by leaving out the market failure of insurance for nuclear power and the liability limitations of the Price Anderson Act. He also underplays just how flawed biofuels policy is in the United States and Europe, where by default, burning biofuels is assumed to be as carbon-neutral as wind, solar, and geothermal. Carbon credits are provided to low-efficiency woody biomass electricity plants despite their emitting 30% more CO₂ per megawatt-hour than a coal steam turbine. Massachusetts may be the only political entity to have established its criteria for biomass emission credits on a scientifically sound basis.

However, Everett argues that even well-designed and targeted policies to induce changes in the national energy mix are misguided. He argues that cost and the market alone should decide what our energy supply mix should be, and government should retreat to only supporting basic research. He correctly acknowledges that there are circumstances in which government intervention may be needed to correct market externalities such as national security and pollution, but he does not consider climate change to be in that category despite the extent and irreversibility of its impacts. He also dismisses the Pentagon’s interest in efficiency, renewables, and alternative fuels as unnecessary to the military mission of defending our country, which requires a diverse and secure fuel supply. It makes military sense to replace diesel generators in combat with solar panels and lightweight batteries rather than sacrifice troops in the protection of fuel convoys in Afghanistan. He also ignores the past century of cash subsidies and policy advantages that the fossil fuel industry enjoys.

The International Energy Agency reports that globally, fossil fuel subsidies grew to more than $400 billion in 2010. Subsidies and tax breaks for oil, gas, and coal have averaged $3 billion to $5 billion per year in the United States. In addition, the indirect subsidies in the United States for below-market drilling and mining leases on federal lands, allowing mountaintop removal for coal extraction without restoration, the current lax enforcement of environmental rules for protecting water and land from gas and oil fracking, and the unregulated pollution that is permitted under air and water laws is not internalized. Coal is cheap simply because it does not pay the full cost of the damage suffered by others in its extraction and combustion. The vulnerability of our economy to wild spikes in world oil prices has preceded most of the recessions of the past half-century. Our heavy military investment to keep sea lanes open for oil transport is paid out of general revenues and not through an energy tax. Is it not in the national interest to reduce our vulnerability to oil supply disruptions and to spend a bit to reduce oil demand by making homes in the northeast more efficient and increasing fuel economy standards?

In short, the article contains some useful analysis of where policies in the United States have been more beholden to the corporate interests that pushed them than to the national interest. However, looking at other countries, we see that Denmark is now producing more than 25% of its electricity from wind, and Germany is producing more than 15% of its electricity from renewables. Contrary to Everett’s statements, these efforts have paid off with major job increases in renewable energy production for wind, solar photovoltaic, and solar hot water.

The market and market decisions are not necessarily well matched to global politics, national security, environmental threats, or the long time frame associated with climate change. But if we are to rely on them at all, we should eliminate the many financial and indirect subsidies and externalities enjoyed by the fossil fuel industry.

WILLIAM R. MOOMAW

Professor of International Environmental Policy
Director, International Environment and Resource Policy
The Fletcher School
Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts
[email protected]

Each year, the author and Bruce Everett debate energy and climate issues at the Fletcher School.

Bruce Everett details several important misconceptions and failures that undermine our energy innovation system. But his conclusion that the military should retreat from this endeavor ignores technologies that have the potential to both enhance military capability and thrive in the commercial market. In these instances, we can and should leverage the unique institutional attributes of our military, which as Everett points out catalyzed technological change in the 20th century. Biofuels and batteries demonstrate the need for a more nuanced perspective. Because alternative fuels do not make ships go faster or planes fly higher, the Navy has been criticized for their efforts to link biofuels R&D with national security priorities. Battery technologies, on the other hand, offer clear tactical and operational benefits to the Army and Marines.

The challenge then is to design programs that effectively move engineering knowledge between carefully aligned military and commercial applications. It is not to dissolve government/industry partnerships. The three phases Everett describes—conceptual, technical, and commercial—are eerily linear, and it is a contradiction to cite the successes of military innovation while exalting the role of basic research. The military is not Lewis and Clark–like, looking for nothing in particular. The military is looking for something it can buy, operate, and maintain. And it is precisely this end-to-end, incremental approach that fostered so much innovation in the 20th century. Faith in another approach, whether for defense or energy or health, is like faith in the Seven Cities of Gold. It is not enough to understand the essence of research. We must strive to cultivate the essence of innovation.

TRAVIS R. DOOM

Program Specialist
Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes
Arizona State University
Washington, DC
[email protected]

There is one serious and indeed fatal flaw in the article by Bruce Everett. It left out completely the great success story of energy-efficiency policies and technologies pursued over nearly 40 years, with the result of reducing the cost of many energy services to the consumer, often to the point of paying back the investment in a short period, much shorter than the lifetime of the technology purchased. In fact, the reduction in energy costs from only a few technologies supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) in concert with the private sector have repaid the entire government energy R&D budgets for energy efficiency from the beginning of DOE, as measured by dollars saved by the public. [See the 2001 National Research Council (NRC) report Energy Research at DOE: Was it Worth it?] Examples are low-e windows and high-efficiency ballasts for fluorescent lights. The same was true for fossil energy R&D. One particular innovation, the diamond incorporated drilling bit, has contributed significantly to the directional drilling so important to the current natural gas bonanza. A more recent study of the outlook for energy efficiency’s continuing role is given in the 2009 NRC report Real Prospects for Energy Efficiency in the United States. It estimated that cost-effective efficiency improvements could reduce U.S. energy use by 19 to 36 quads by 2030.

Another important point ignored by Everett is that overall energy use per unit of gross domestic product has steadily decreased. This reduction has been influenced by the offshoring of much of our manufacturing and the structural shift to a more service-based economy, but the biggest influence has been the use of more energy-efficient technologies and practices. From this, one can deduce that energy efficiency has contributed more to energy supply than have any of the supply-side technologies.

To evaluate the history of energy policies, one needs to look at the whole picture. Everett’s paper is fatally flawed, even if it had been titled “Back to Basics on Energy Supply Policy.”

WILLIAM FULKERSON

Senior Fellow
Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee
[email protected]

From 1975 through 2002, the U.S. government poured more than $10 billion in tax credits, research funds, and technology into a long-shot idea that commercial volumes of natural gas could be extracted economically from source rock. The effort was superlatively successful, triggering today’s shale gas and shale oil bonanza, which has transformed energy, balance of payments, and geopolitics for the United States. It has also especially benefitted one private player, a sole wildcatter with the patience and stubbornness to endure the years of uncertainty. That would be George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy. In 2002, having absorbed and concentrated the lessons of the quarter-century of federally funded research into work in the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth, Texas, Mitchell sold his company to Devon Energy for $3.1 billion.

In his impressive article on how energy is best developed, Bruce Everett describes succinctly why private players almost always are best at divining the technologies that will actually work commercially. Advocates of robust government research efforts usually cite the Internet, GPS, and semiconductors as examples of what can be done. But, Everett writes, other high-priced government-funded triumphs—the Moon landing and supersonic flight among them—have yet to result in direct commercial application. The difference is that government funding often gets distorted by politics, whereas private players only have the bottom line in mind. Because of this history, Everett argues, the government should finance basic research and avoid joint efforts with industry, not to mention tax credits and renewable mandates. Above all, do not “pick winners” by supporting individual companies.

In his conclusions, Everett aligns with a broad swath of thinking. He is not alone in his advice. But this philosophy would hold up better if it defended itself in the context of the shale boom, which some call the greatest development in energy in a century.

If one had strictly observed Everett’s recommendations, the global economy would be in much worse shape, and the United States in particular would be, because oil and gas supplies would be much tighter. As for Mitchell, he would still be a billionaire from his previous ventures. But he would be at least a couple of billion dollars poorer. Some might say that, given the scale of the triumph when the government did step in effectively on behalf of a single player, picking winners is not necessarily a bad bet.

STEVE LEVINE

Schwartz Fellow, the New America Foundation
Washington correspondent, Quartz (http://www.qz.com)
Adjunct Professor, Energy Security
Georgetown University
Washington, DC
[email protected]

Bruce Everett has once again with clarity of vision and hard-hitting facts delivered a critique of U.S. energy R&D policy over the past 40 years that should be read by every high-ranking energy official in the administration, members of Congress, and the head of every energy trade association in Washington. With devastating detail, he shows how government financial support for the nuclear and renewable energy industries has cost Americans billions of dollars while doing little to change the country’s overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels. His assessments of the state of the U.S. solar, ethanol, and wind (especially offshore) industries are particularly stark, given the minimalist role that they play in the nation’s energy balance. Given this disappointing record, one has to ask why serious energy analysts continue to believe that we can have an energy future based predominately on renewables, demand-side management, and energy efficiency, when the facts clearly say otherwise. How long are we going to continue to hear the mantra that if the price of all fuels just reflected their “real” social and “environmental externalities,” we could make the conversion to a carbonfree future in the next 25 years? If this were so, why does every forecast for the next 25 years project global increases in fossil fuel consumption and rising CO2 emissions?

Where one has to quibble a bit with Everett, however, is in his singular lack of critique of the subsidies received by the fossil fuel industry, where he spent a large portion of his career. There is virtually no mention of the various tax loopholes or advantages for domestically produced oil or the favorable treatment of foreign-produced oil. Although this author has in the past written on how important some of these tax provisions are for independent oil and gas companies who find most of the oil produced in the United States each year, or how certain tax breaks on foreign-produced oil are necessary to level the playing field for U.S.-based international oil companies against their foreign competitors, these provisions are still subsidies little different from those received by the nuclear and renewable energy industries against which Everett rails. Likewise, he is singularly silent about the newest economic engineering tool (master limited partnerships) used increasingly to finance a host of energy projects, particularly natural gas and petroleum product pipelines, owing to their favorable tax treatment.

As a free-market economist, Everett obviously loathes interference in the market geared to forcing the commercialization of new technologies before they are able to compete in the marketplace on their own footing. Although this philosophical stance is respectable, why doesn’t he suggest that it is an equally viable proposition to get rid of all special tax advantages on all energy forms as well as all Clean Energy and Renewable Portfolio standards and put on a serious carbon tax and let the fight begin to see who can compete in the marketplace. At least we would get a reduction in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, while keeping our offshore areas pristine and our food prices perhaps lower both at home and abroad.

CHARLES K. EBINGER

Senior Fellow and Director, Energy Security Initiative
Brookings Institution
Washington, DC
[email protected]

Changing science education

Carl Wieman’s “Applying New Research to Improve Science Education” (Issues, Fall 2012) brings a welcome and refreshing focus on science learning. Creating learning environments that support all students in developing expert-like thinking in science is essential, whether they will join the science and engineering workforce or rely on scientific approaches and findings in making health care choices or voting on land-use issues. As Wieman notes, we have the evidence in hand to improve K-16 learning, synthesized in the National Research Council reports Taking Science to School and Discipline-Based Education Research. Yet the evidence also reveals a striking lack of widespread implementation of teaching practices that take into account students’ prior knowledge and structure their learning with challenging but doable practice in solving problems like experts.

Gateway science, math, and engineering undergraduate courses are key to improving K-16 learning. These courses model science learning and teaching for future teachers and create impediments for more than half the students who enter college intent on a science or engineering major, but leave science because they are discouraged by the poor teaching. The new framework and standards for science education are firmly rooted in the evidence on science learning, but they will be difficult to implement fully if future teachers do not experience these evidence-based practices in their own undergraduate years. Further, all imaginable success in improving K-16 science learning will be for naught if high-school graduates enter traditional lecture-based college courses. The new standards can motivate change in the gateway courses, but this alone is not sufficient.

For the many reasons outlined in Wieman’s article, university culture works against improving teaching. Changing the incentive and rewards systems to create departmental and college-wide cultures that value and recognize effective teaching has been a Sisyphean task. Certainly policy levers focused on accountability are one way to push on the interconnected system of teaching practice, curriculum development, and assessment. Bottom-up efforts from faculty alone cannot leverage the scale of change required. Yet it is faculty behavior that must change. The typical professional development approaches of sharing “what works” and offering evidence has been quite successful in raising awareness of instructional strategies that support science learning, but a relatively small percentage of faculty persist in using effective strategies. Lack of understanding of the principles behind a practice or of how to adapt the practice to one’s specific context are common barriers to persisting with a practice. We need to find ways to both help and provide incentives to faculty to put effective practices into place.

Lasting change needs to be at the level of departments and institutions, achievable only by applying multiple levers, including policy aimed at the incentive system and new forms of professional development. National efforts, including programs by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Partnership in Undergraduate Life Science Education, model creative ways stakeholders can partner to push change at scale. However, as Wieman indicates, implementation must be anchored in the research findings on science learning.

SUSAN RUNDELL SINGER

Laurence McKinley Gould Professor of Biology
Department of Biology
Carleton College
Northfield, Minnesota
[email protected]

The author chaired the National Research Council’s Discipline-Based Education Research committee.

Measuring science

The excellent article “Qualitative Metrics in Science Policy: What Can’t Be Counted, Counts” by Rahul Reki and Neal Lane (Issues, Fall 2012) reminds me of a situation that Neal Lane and I lived through during the time he was director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and I was chair of the National Science Board. We had heard that an Ohio congressman was likely to vote against the NSF budget. Neal had the opportunity to meet with him in his office. I do not remember for sure whether I was along. The congressman asked whether it might be a fair estimate to believe that only one-third of the funds NSF gave led to research having societal impact. One-third might be an overgenerous estimate. Maybe it was more like one-tenth. The congressman said that, granting him this hypothesis, he believed the NSF budget should be cut by two-thirds! Some moments of unease followed. It was agreed that to spend taxpayer dollars having no societal consequences was a waste. The problem was determining which projects had societal benefits.

For example, in the late 1930s, a few people such as Rabi at Columbia University were trying to measure the energy-level structure of atoms having nuclear spin in a magnetic field. These energy spacings were minuscule, much smaller than the energy of thermal fluctuations at room temperature. No one could imagine at the time what practical consequences these radiofrequency experiments on atomic beams could possibly have. Later, Bloch at Stanford and Purcell at Harvard would independently discover that different atomic nuclei within a molecule resonate at different radiofrequencies for the same magnetic field strength, allowing us to learn chemical and structural information about the molecule. Still later, in the 1970s people such as Lauterbur at the University of Illinois and Mansfield at the University of Nottingham would show that a magnetic field whose strength changes over space allowed images to be made. This ushered in what is called magnetic resonance imaging, which is used to distinguish pathologic tissue (such as bone breaks or tumors) from normal tissue. It is why today doctors know how to fix various bone fractures without first cutting you up to see what is wrong.

The congressman understood and did vote for the NSF budget. The real point of this story, however, is to emphasize what Reki and Lane have already stressed: A smart science policy is not simply based on enumeration.

RICHARD N. ZARE

Department of Chemistry
Stanford University
Stanford, California
[email protected]

In reading the article by Rahul Reki and Neal Lane, I was reminded of Lord Kelvin’s famous remarks of a century ago that have had an enormous impact on thinking about what a strong field of study ought to be like. “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” However, this proposition implicitly denies the fact that much of solid human knowledge about the world is not expressed in numbers. Much of scientific knowledge is not quantitative. You and I agree that the tree we see whose leaves are turning red is a maple tree. Only a very small portion of Darwin’s description of species in his great book, or of the description of phenomena addressed by geology, is expressed quantitatively. These scientific fields could be even stronger if some of the phenomena that presently are described qualitatively had a strong quantitative characterization. But we still know a lot about many phenomena that don’t. Kelvin’s argument is greatly exaggerated.

And thinking of this kind has led in a number of fields to a messianic effort to construct measures or indicators of the things being studied, together with a position that the science ought only to be about the phenomena that are characterized quantitatively. This raises two kinds of questions. One is how good particular quantitative indicators are in characterizing what we are really interested in understanding. The other is whether the range of good quantitative indicators we have covers what we want to know.

These issues are presently playing out dramatically regarding the evaluation of what students are learning in school and the quality of the teachers who are trying to help those students learn. Nobody is arguing that it would not be convenient if we had good quantitative measures of both. The argument is about whether the indicators we have and use can adequately characterize what we want to know about.

This is exactly the issue regarding the insistence that a rate–of-return calculation be made regarding aspects of academic science. Many years ago, in my first testimony before a congressional committee, I was asked what the rate of return was on university research. I answered that we did not know, that calculations of that could be all over the map, and that all the computational algorithms that I knew about were focused on only a small portion of how scientific research influences the human condition. That still strikes me as right. A good portion of what is important is not readily quantitative, indicators that are developed are likely to miss much of what we are interested in, and at the same time a considerable amount can be learned about those things by qualitative observation and analysis.

My argument, of course, is not that we shouldn’t try to develop quantitative indicators. But we should resist becoming their servants.

RICHARD NELSON

Columbia University
New York, New York
[email protected]

The article by Rahul Rekhi and Neal Lane (no relation) was very thoughtful and made a number of important points about science measurement. Indeed, they are almost exactly the same points that the Office of Science and Technology Policy Science of Science Policy interagency group made in our 2008 Roadmap, in which we concluded that “the data infrastructure is inadequate for decisionmaking.”

Rekhi and Lane are exactly right: There is increased pressure to document the results of federal investments regardless of whether those investments are in education, welfare, foreign aid, health, workforce, or science. The scientific community should take this pressure seriously; the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) reporting requirements are a likely harbinger of future requests. And scientists who landed men on the Moon and mapped the human genome should be the last group to argue that measurement is too hard to do or should not be done, particularly when there is ample literature that spells out how to do such measurement in a scientific manner in many other contexts. I will illustrate with comments on four of the key points made by Rekhi and Lane.

(1) Much of the benefit associated with science is in training students. Rekhi and Lane make the argument that it is “intuitive” that research opportunities provided to undergraduates have value, and cite the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. The 2012 budget for this program was $68 million. Intuition might well be supported by evidence. That evidence does not need to be in higher test scores or salaries. The point is made that it is “a critical aspect of the educational process of becoming a truly 21st-century–ready scientist or engineer.” How might that be determined? Here are some obvious and I hope noncontroversial steps fully in the spirit of Louis Pasteur’s swan flask experiment.

Define the population. NSF and other science agencies should be able to tell the public exactly how many students are supported by science funding at all levels. Our experience with ARRA reporting was that universities and science agencies were unable to provide that information in a consistent, reliable manner. Write down the outcome measures. What does it mean to be a truly 21st-century–ready scientist and engineer? These can be qualitative or quantitative, but we should be able to enunciate them clearly. Write down a theory of change. What do scientists think is the causal effect of the program on the outcome of interest? Write down a counterfactual. What would the results be if the program did not exist? This then leads to the next point.

(2) It is difficult to quantitatively measure the results of science. True. It is difficult to measure almost everything (including the human genome). But scientists use both quantitative and qualitative data routinely to make judgments about other scientists: in tenure and promotion decisions, whom to include in conferences, who is “good” and not good. Write down what those data are.

(3) The benefits are not just economic. This argument has not been made by the science of science policy community. In fact, the concern of that community is that if scientists do not develop their own scientifically grounded measures, the only measures that will be used will be economic, as we saw with ARRA reporting.

(4) The benefits take a long time to accrue. That is clearly the case, but is no less true than of investments in education, health, transportation, and many other areas of federal investment. The processes by which scientific ideas are created, transmitted, and adopted are as well understood and well studied as in any other field of human endeavor. Numerous trace studies have described the network processes in great detail, and the fact that the processes are not deterministic does not mean that there are no covariates (see points 1, 2, and 3 above).

Einstein was right; not everything can be counted. But we know better as scientists to take that argument to its full reductio ad absurdum extent. Scientists can, and do, attempt to measure almost all aspects of the universe. Science itself should be no exception.

JULIA LANE

Senior Managing Economist
American Institutes for Research
Washington, DC
[email protected]

Managing water

Water is perhaps the world’s most vital natural resource. All humans need clean fresh water for drinking, cooking, and washing. Modern society depends on adequate water supplies for agriculture and industry, fisheries and forestry, to generate power, and to eliminate wastes. As a result, the possible forms and motivations of potential social tensions and political frictions over water management are as varied as the societal benefits that are supplied by water.

Examining the links between water and social conflict, Ken Conca (“Decoupling Water and Violent Conflict,” Issues, Fall 2012) rightly emphasizes that the greatest risks of large-scale violence stem not from actual scarcity of water but from ineffective, illegitimate, ill-adapted, or even absent institutional arrangements to govern water, and that organizational structures and policy mechanisms that narrowly define the problem as physical water supplies ill-prepare decisionmakers to sustainably manage water resources.

Establishing and empowering effective and accepted water institutions, however, can be a herculean task. Freshwater sources and flows, river basins, groundwater aquifers, and lakes ignore political and bureaucratic boundaries. Yet responsibilities for managing water are typically divided internationally between riparian countries and fragmented domestically between rival agencies, often representing different interests. For the past two decades, much of the global water policy community has striven to tackle these challenges by developing strategies for integrated water resources management (IWRM). IWRM seeks to balance supply and demand dynamics, coordinating between multiple uses, constituencies, and ecosystem needs, as well as across geographic areas. IWRM recognizes water as both a social and an economic good, and so promotes participatory policy approaches engaging stakeholders at all levels in an effort to manage water resources both efficiently and equitably.

Despite this conceptual promise, however, many observers fear IWRM has proven more successful as an incantation than in implementation. Yemen, one of the world’s most water-stressed countries, provides a cautionary case in point. As recently as 2006, the fourth World Water Forum lauded Yemen for incorporating IWRM tenets into the letter of its national water policy. Behind this notional commitment, though, relevant agencies lack the human and technical capacities to administer and enforce water policy. Powerful vested interests in Yemeni state and society often oppose IWRM approaches. Perverse subsidies, for example, on diesel fuel for well pumps, have abetted the rampant expansion of groundwater irrigation. Critically, groundwater furnishes 70% of total water withdrawals in Yemen, but the country is now depleting its aquifers two to four times faster than nature can replenish them. At that rate, a 2010 World Bank assessment concluded that Yemen will essentially exhaust its groundwater reserves by 2025–2030. Although Yemen embraces IWRM in principle, in practice the country stands on the brink of water crisis.

Around the world, recent regional and global status reports reveal that many envisaged IWRM reforms have yet to be fully implemented, while progress in essential areas such as environmental monitoring and integration, climate change adaptation, stakeholder participation, knowledge-sharing programs, and sustainable financing is lagging. Meeting the world’s growing water needs will require rectifying these shortcomings. To ensure sustainable supplies of water, policymakers must ensure the supply of capable institutions.

DAVID MICHEL

Director, Environmental Security Program
The Stimson Center
Washington, DC
[email protected]

Ken Conca’s essay provides a sweeping overview of many issues pertinent to the global water situation. Unfortunately, it contains a number of internal inconsistencies and contradictions that leave the reader wondering what solutions Conca may actually be offering, or whether he believes that water and conflict are, in fact, coupled.

For instance, Conca cites a recent African study that found that ”deviations from normal rainfall patterns led to an increase in social conflict, including demonstrations, riots, strikes, antigovernment violence, and communal conflict between different social groups.“ He cites results from another study suggesting that water-related conflicts occur in the Middle East/ North Africa region every 2.5 days on average. Those studies seem to provide considerable evidence that water shortages can result in conflict. Yet Conca concludes that “efforts to correlate water scarcities or drought with the onset of civil war have for the most part not found a statistically significant link” and “If there is a risk of large-scale violence, it stems not from physical water scarcity but from the institutionalized arrangements that shape how actors govern water.” If Conca is suggesting that inadequate governance and not physical scarcity is at the root of water conflict, then he has inappropriately placed the governance cart before the water horse.

Some clarification and reinterpretation are warranted here. It is painfully clear that physical water scarcity—a result of water consumption approaching or exceeding the limits of water availability—can be a potent ignition source for conflict among those sharing the water resource. When a watershed community is collectively using more water than the watershed can bear, trouble and conflict are close at hand. It is also clear, given great disparities in water availability and water demands across the borderlines of local watersheds, that water conflicts are intensely localized in their origins. At the exact same moment, one watershed can be experiencing severe scarcity while an adjacent watershed has sufficient water to satisfy all demands. The primary issue with governance, then, is a rather personal one: Are we managing our demands within the limits imposed by local water availability?

With my son beginning his first semester of college, I am finding it exceedingly difficult not to draw parallels between the basic skills of managing a personal checking account and managing a local water resource. I have advised my son that he will experience all sorts of temptations to spend more than his monthly budget will allow, and that there will be plenty of surprises like parking tickets and library fines to pay. But ultimately, if my son or my local watershed community ends up in overdraft, they should not lay blame on the bank or their government or other external parties for causing the problem. We must look first to our own internal conflicts over our individual or collective lack of discipline for managing ourselves in ways that avoid scarcity and enable us to be highly functioning citizens of the world.

BRIAN RICHTER

Director, Global Freshwater Strategies
The Nature Conservancy
Crozet, Virginia
[email protected]

We’re not dopes

I share much of the communitarian emphasis and values that Amitai Etzioni has capably expressed in numerous writings. I also share Etzioni’s critical stance toward rational choice theory. That said, I find his article “The Limits of Knowledge: Personal and Public” (Issues, Fall 2012) disappointing.

The article begins by noting that one of the basic assumptions underlying much of Western thinking is that individuals are rational beings. Etzioni then introduces the relatively new field of behavioral economics, arguing that this field “has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that people are unable to act rationally and are hardwired to make erroneous judgments.”

I think Etzioni is too eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater (although imperialist rational choice theorists might need to take a bath of bounded rationality). The many laboratory experiments he cites of Kahneman, Thaler, and Ariely of course indicate limitations on the pure tenets of rational choice theory. When it comes to “real-life” studies, it is harder to interpret a finding: So on page 53, the case of Israeli parents arriving late to pick up their children at a daycare center with a 10-shekel fine might well be a rational action of having decided that their time was worth more than the price of the fine; similarly for the next example of the majority of participants turning down an annuity (depending on the costs of the annuity, a lump sum payment might be more advantageous). Too much of Etzioni’s arguments seem to view actors as cognitively limited cultural dopes with “limited capacity to digest data” (p. 54). I doubt that any behavioral economist would argue that humans only act irrationally.

I don’t see how with this rather bleak perspective, his benevolent communitarianism can hope for an intellectual shift “of a Copernican magnitude” (p. 55). I would highly recommend that Etzioni consider as a needed supplement the vigorous new economic thinking of 1998 Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen and especially 2009 Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom for her emphasis on developing “a more general theory of individual choice that recognized the central role of trust in coping with social dilemmas … The frameworks and empirical work that many scholars have undertaken in recent decades provide a better foundation for policy analysis.” That, it seems to me, is a more promising macro-oriented thrust to give new vigor to communitarian thinking.

EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
[email protected]

Energy and human behavior

In “What Makes U.S. Energy Consumers Tick?”, Kelly Gallagher and John Randell (Issues, Summer 2012) succinctly summarize a wide range of fundamental and applied research questions to which policymakers, consumers, governments, and energy producers/distributors will need clear answers, if the nation is to break from unsustainable and environmentally detrimental energy consumption habits.

The authors articulate key research questions and through their overview (1) highlight the immense and complex role of human behavior in energy production and consumption; (2) identify the critical need to better understand the most fundamental influences on individual, group, and societal behavior; (3) underscore science findings showing that behavior is inextricably integrated with economic prosperity, technology, and the health of civil society; and (4) emphasize the behavioral and economic implications for the shelf life of our standard of living and prospects for improving that of future generations.

Gallagher and Randell identify a monumental agenda for industry, policymakers, and science, generally. I say science, generally, because grand challenges such as these require “convergent science,” integrated responses across the full range of sciences; the challenges cannot be solved within one disciplinary framework. Diverse applied and interdisciplinary domains of physical, behavioral, and social research are necessary to ensure that we understand how we can take collective control of our energy practices.

Gallagher and Randell, however, do not address one critical issue affecting our ability to tackle this research agenda. Specifically, the community of behavioral and social scientists who are trained and interested in tackling these research questions is quite small. Our talent reservoir is shallow. A colleague at the November 2012 workshop on “Integrating Social and Behavioral Energy Research Activities,” organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, lamented facetiously that the number of research topics alone almost outstrips the number of current researchers. But the National Science Foundation (NSF) is helping expand this community through a number of innovative interdisciplinary programs. For example, the cross-agency SEES (Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability) initiative draws on every part of NSF’s research and education portfolio and engages physical, social, and behavioral sciences. NSF programs such as SEES Fellows, Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems, Sustainability Research Networks, and Interdisciplinary Research in Hazards and Disasters are developing the critically important interdisciplinary scientific talent pool.

NSF is also engaging the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in discussions on reducing technical and behavioral barriers to energy efficiency, while simultaneously helping to build convergent research communities and agendas through its support of SEES Research Coordination Networks and workshops. Numerous NSF programs support interdisciplinary energy-related research, training, and team development through graduate student support, Research Experiences for Undergraduates, INSPIRE (Integrated NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education), the Science of Organizations, Decision Making Under Uncertainty, and many other programs that play a critical role in addressing the human resource shortfall.

In this era of “big data” (for example, from electricity “smart meters”), a growing community of interdisciplinary social and behavioral scientists can develop a sound understanding of effective levers by which we can control our energy use and costs (personal and environmental), providing robust market-governed options that enable Americans to create their own energy future.

The energy-related behavioral and social science research agenda outlined by Kelly and Randell could well pave the way for a 21st century convergent science knowledge base that can inform effective policies to address other grand challenges (for example, waste generation and management and crime prevention). In addition, this agenda could serve as a model for the many domains in which an understanding of behavioral drivers, modulators, and influences is critical to the functional health, sustainability, and advancement of modern living standards.

CORA MARRETT

Deputy Director
National Science Foundation
Arlington, Virginia

Shortly before the nation’s centennial, the physicist Joseph Henry, long admired abroad as well as at home, a onetime Princeton professor and the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution for a quarter of a century, was stirred to reflect: The surprise is not “that science has made comparatively little advance among us, but that … it should have made so much.”

A good deal of what Henry noticed arose from the new dispensations for science by the federal government. The federal initiatives had begun in 1862, when the first Civil War Congress passed the Morrill Act, with its grant of lands to the states for colleges and universities that would offer studies in the agricultural and mechanical arts. In 1863, the same Congress created the National Academy of Sciences, a private agency with the public role of advising the government on policy-related technical issues.

No less important, in the years after the Civil War—the Gilded Age, as the era is known—the federal government authorized multiple new research efforts and agencies, enough to constitute a huge expansion in federally sponsored scientific research and scientific services to the American people, including four different topographical and geological surveys of the far West. By the mid-1880s, federal science had accumulated sufficient prominence and power to warrant that telltale hallmark of arrival in the capital: the scrutiny of a lengthy congressional investigation.

Henry’s surprise at the expansion was altogether understandable. Before the Civil War, astronomy, natural history, and natural philosophy (the term then used for physics and chemistry) were part of the required college curriculum. But science was in the main taught only at an elementary level along with the classics and theology as a tool of liberal education rather than for its own sake. In all but a few institutions—notably the two military service academies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and curricularly segregated parts of Harvard and Yale—its uses for practical purposes were by and large not only ignored but held in contempt.

Federal science was minuscule. It comprised only the U.S. Coast Survey, which had been established in Jefferson’s administration; the Army Corps of Engineers; the Naval Observatory; and an agricultural section in the Patent Office. All were devoted primarily to research for practical purposes. In contrast, the Smithsonian Institution, a hybrid of public and private enterprise, was committed to the advancement as well as the diffusion of knowledge, and Henry emphasized the progress of abstract knowledge as best he could within his severely limited budget. Notable among his achievements was to make the agency a center for the gathering of far-flung meteorological data by telegraph, the collation and analysis of the data, and the issuance of daily weather reports. Practical or abstract, government research was a pauper of national investment, and scientists were scarcely considered indispensable to the conduct of federal business.

Measured against its point of departure on the eve of the Civil War, the expansion of federal science in just the few decades after the firing on Fort Sumter was huge, and it was game-changing for the scientific enterprise in the United States.

Unlike the expansion that occurred after World War II, this 19th-century transformation had little to do with national defense. Its root cause was that the nation’s circumstances were changing in ways that established a mounting need for scientific and technological knowledge. Agriculture was growing ever more dependent on mechanization, chemistry, and biology. The United States had expanded to the Pacific at the end of the Mexican War in 1848, and the encouragement of settlement in the new territories entailed the mapping of the new lands and assessment of their natural resources, the establishment of military posts and transportation routes, the building of railroads, and the stringing of telegraph wires. An increasing number of Americans recognized the need for an infrastructure of technical education and research that would foster the progress of the emerging knowledge-based and technologically driven economy.

These Americans made up a loosely connected but determined coalition for training and knowledge. They included the educational reformers who found a champion in Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont, eager to invoke the resources of the federal government to democratize higher education and orient it toward meeting the needs of the emerging age. At the center of the coalition were the leaders of American science, a small, internationally respected group, among them, in addition to Joseph Henry, Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, a native of Switzerland and a brilliant student of rocks and fossils; and the geophysicist Alexander Dallas Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson, the head of the Coast Survey and an authority on terrestrial magnetism. In concert and separately, these men had shaped the course of American science since the 1830s, when Henry had returned from a kudos-filled tour of Europe vowing to Bache that “the real working men … of science in this country should make common cause … to raise their own scientific character.”

By the end of the 1850s, Henry and his allies had been further energized in their ambitions by the rising intellectual ferment in science, especially the recent theories about the evolution of the physical Earth and, in 1859, Charles Darwin’s extension of evolutionary theorizing to Earth’s living inhabitants. Eager to enlarge the contributions that Americans might make to these great subjects, the advocates of science wanted to improve its condition in institutions of higher learning and enlarge its opportunities in the federal government.

During the decade before the Civil War, defenders of limited government, especially Southerners, feared any expansion of federal power. They had resisted most initiatives along these lines, just as they had blocked federal investment in the building of transcontinental railroads, the promotion of industrial development, and Justin Morrill’s land-grant bill. But after the South’s secession from the Union in 1861, the way was cleared for the East and the burgeoning middle West to form an imposing alliance determined to satisfy pent-up demand for federal promotion of Western settlement and national economic development under the leadership of the recently formed Republican Party. This was a Republican Party that was committed to industrial and economic expansion and was comfortable with the federal government’s assisting the achievement of that goal across a broad spectrum of activities, including investment in human capital and the capital of knowledge.

The advocates of science, their agenda fully in resonance with Republican aims, found considerable support in Washington during the boom years of the Civil War and beyond. The Morrill Act sailed through Congress with large majorities and so, in 1862, did the elevation of the agricultural section from its subordinate place in the Patent Office into an independent department. In short order, training in the agricultural and mechanical arts formally became a part of public higher education in the United States, breaking apart the standard uniform curriculum for liberal education by allowing for specialized study at advanced levels in science and engineering, among other subjects.

The Morrill Act goaded all American colleges and universities into becoming democratically accessible “engines of modernity” in the apt phrase of a discerning student of their development. Indeed, private institutions of higher education, embracing a similar curricular reform after the Civil War, gave comparable new attention to the sciences and their uses—so much so that Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked “that a cleavage is occurring in the hitherto granite of the past and a new era is nearly arrived.”

Among the prime movers behind the creation of the National Academy of Sciences were Agassiz and Bache. Agassiz the academic saw in a national academy an institution that would raise the quality of science in the United States by granting the imprimatur of membership not to men of mere learning but only to men of original scientific achievement. Bache, the longtime federal scientist, felt the need for an institution of authoritative scientists that would safeguard public policymaking in an increasingly technical age from charlatans and pretenders.

Joseph Henry opposed the creation of a highly selective national academy, suspecting that it might be considered “at variance with our democratic institutions” and might become “perverted … to the support of partisan politics.” However, without Henry’s knowledge, Agassiz, Bache, and their like-minded allies drafted legislation to establish the academy and enlisted support for it from Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. A leader in the new Republican Party, Wilson was a passionate abolitionist, an ardent advocate of strengthening American prestige and progress, and chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. In all, he was a skilled and respected politico, who later became vice president in Ulysses S. Grant’s second term. If Wilson spoke, the Congress listened, and when he introduced the bill for the academy on March 3, 1863, the last day of the session, it cleared the House and Senate by voice vote.

Bache was elected the first president. Agassiz, elected foreign secretary, was thrilled, holding that the nation’s men of science now had a “standard for scientific excellence.” Henry was far from pleased, but he agreed to membership in the academy, attending its first regular meeting in January 1864 and joining 21 other members at a White House reception with Lincoln, whom he greatly admired. Lincoln returned the compliment, noting that the Smithsonian Institution “must be a grand school if it produces such thinkers as he is…. I wish we had a few thousand more such men.” Henry eventually came around to the idea of the academy, accepting the presidency in 1867, upon Bache’s death. As president, Henry did not press for federal funds and kept the academy scrupulously out of politics. The membership ceiling was removed so that five scientists could be added to the rolls each year. Patronizing research by rewarding success with titles and pensions was the European way and unacceptable in America, Henry noted. Still, he concluded that an “intelligent democracy” could properly bestow honors for achievement, and the creation of the academy had opened in America another “avenue for the aspirations of a laudable ambition.”

An inauspicious start

Henry, however, was overly optimistic. During the post–Civil War years, a variety of circumstances militated against the National Academy’s playing a significant role in American science. Its financial resources were severely limited, insufficient to publish more than an occasional proceedings and obituaries of its members. It met in the Smithsonian, having no headquarters of its own, and the meetings were poorly attended. American scientists were dispersed over the eastern and midwestern United States, and Californians felt hopelessly isolated. Federal scientists tended to dominate the academy’s affairs, particularly elections to the ranks. Scientists in Cambridge and New Haven, wary of the centralization of science, worried that it was developing into a Washington clique.

Federal requests for the academy’s advice were few and far between. But in mid-1878, Congress appropriated funds for the organization to prepare a report on the consolidation of the multiple territorial surveys and provide an overall plan for assessing and mapping the nation’s territories.

Within months, the academy submitted its recommendations. In one part, it called for the unification of the four geological and topographical surveys, two of which were run by the military, into a single civilian geological survey. In another part, it incorporated the scientifically informed proposals for management of the public lands in the West that had been advanced by the famed geologist John Wesley Powell in his Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States. Not yet a member of the academy, Powell had written his report for his superiors in the Department of the Interior. Nevertheless, by embracing its proposals, the academy found itself embroiled in a political firestorm, what amounted to the first contest over climate science and public policy in the nation’s history.

Fame had come to Powell as a result of his intrepid journeys as the head of several successive western surveys into territories hitherto unknown to most Americans. Despite having lost his right forearm at Shiloh during the Civil War, he had scaled Long’s Peak, braved the canyons of the Colorado River, and returned with valuable knowledge of the region, including maps. Powell was a staunch supporter of material development and economic opportunity, but he was also a social reformer. He empathized with the Native American tribes in the West and initiated what became a major program of ethnology to learn about their languages and customs. He was also convinced that scientific knowledge had to be deployed to accommodate democratic social progress to the realities of the land and its limits. Powell knew the American West well. Partly because of the Smithsonian’s meteorological and weather program, to which Joseph Henry had given him access, he was aware that the West beyond the 100th meridian—a region accounting for some 40% of the land in the continental United States—experienced too little rainfall to sustain the conventional 160-acre homesteading agriculture that had long marked public land policy. Drawing on these data, Powell knew, in short, that most of the good public land, the kind “a poor man could turn into a farm,” had already been sold.

However, a number of earth scientists, including some who were also veterans of the western surveys, thought differently. Drawing on European theories and their own experience, they contended that settlement and cultivation, especially the planting of trees, would transform arid regions, notably the Great Plains beyond the 100th meridian, into fertile, loamy expanses bathed in rain, like the agriculturally fecund Mississippi Valley. During the 1870s, as settlement spread westward through the Great Plains, rainfall happened to increase, providing these arguments with a seeming plausibility and later giving rise to the phrase: “Rain follows the plow.”

Powell dismissed these claims in his Report on the arid lands, noting the “many conjectures and hypotheses” that had been advanced to account for the increased rainfall. He went on: “Many have attributed the change to the laying of railroad tracks and construction of telegraph lines; others to the cultivation of the soil, and not a few to the interposition of Divine Providence in behalf of the Latter Day Saints.” But he had to add that “in what manner rainfall could be affected through the cultivation of the land, building of railroads, telegraph lines, etc., has not been shown.”

In his Report, Powell called for an end to the apportionment of public land in 160-acre tracts. He urged instead the scientific classification of the land in ways that allowed for large sections suitable for dry-land ranching and irrigation farming. Their contours would be shaped by their access to water and their size—up to 2,500 acres—and would be determined by the use to which the land could be put: mining, grazing, farming, or irrigation.

The academy’s recommendations, both for the consolidation of the surveys and Powell’s reform of the public land system in the arid region, were made the basis of a congressional bill in February 1879 that Representative Abram S. Hewitt, a respected iron manufacturer and friend of science, commended to the House, declaiming that the plan came from “the highest scientific authority of the land.” The measure was hailed by Easterners on both sides of the aisle as wise, realistic, and scientifically compelling.

But representatives from the western states and territories, ambitious inhabitants of a developing and settler-hungry region, ripped into the proposal. Had scientists said that the land was too arid for small farms? Congressman Martin Maginnis from the Montana Territory cried that theorists had pronounced the homestead system dead before, yet settlers had gone west and, “practical men” all, had “seen the capabilities of this land which had escaped the notice of our scientists and statesmen.” Did the proposal enjoy the imprimatur of the highest scientific authority in the land? Congressman Thomas MacDonald Patterson from Denver, Colorado, argued that the National Academy of Sciences had “never published but one work, and that was a very thin volume of memoirs of its departed members.” He added to the laughter of the House, “And if they are to continue to engage in practical legislation, it would have been very well for the country if that volume had been much thicker.”

In the end, Congress combined the surveys into a new U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), but it left the 160-acre-based public land system intact. Congressman Dudley C. Haskell, a Yale graduate from Lawrence, Kansas, did not mind giving science its “little appropriation,” but he had to say: “Now, if you want a geographical survey, if you want a lot of astronomical figures, if you want a lot of scientific material, then organize your geographical surveys and authorize them to get out there and dig and hunt bugs and investigate fossils and discover the rotundity of the earth and take astronomical observations. But if you please, while you are there acting in the interest of science and in the interest of professional bug-hunting, leave the settlers upon our frontier alone.”

In fact, time would prove that Macginnis and his settlers had the matter wrong and Powell and the academy had it essentially right. On the Great Plains during the 1880s, rain ceased to follow the plow, ruining numerous farmers; and irrigation would prove indispensable to agriculture in the region. The battle would not be the last to join contested theories of climate with passionate convictions about political economy.

Yet for all their disagreements with Powell and the academy, the congressmen from the West were not antiscience. What they objected to was the deployment of scientific authority to make a radical change in their region’s land-distribution system. Their interests were economic, based on expectant hopes for rapid population growth and development. Although they had their climatology wrong, they valued federal science highly for all the research, analysis, and information it was providing for the practice of agriculture and the exploitation of natural resources.

Indeed, there were multiple indicators of Congress’ ongoing enthusiasm for an expansive federal science enterprise. In 1871, it had authorized the Coast Survey to encompass geodesy by measuring the curvature and gravitational force of Earth at its surface throughout the continental United States, which meant along an arc equal to about a full eighth of the circumference of the globe; in 1878, it affirmed this sizable expansion of the agency’s activities and renamed it the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. A key contributor to this effort was Charles Sanders Peirce, the famed founder of philosophical pragmatism. During his 30 years with the survey, Peirce produced a stream of brilliant papers on formal logic and philosophy while earning an international reputation for his scientific work, especially the development of highly accurate methods for measuring gravity with a pendulum.

Congress also remained highly enthusiastic about an earlier initiative in the expansion of federal science, the U.S. Weather Service, which it had established in 1870 in the Army Signal Corps. The Weather Service, which took over the meteorological work and methods of the Smithsonian, served the needs of agriculture and the military, not to mention the American people in general. Army and civilian observers at stations around the country would wire reports of local conditions to the service’s Division of Telegrams and Reports, housed in the quarters of the Army Signal Corps on G Street in Washington. There, the next day’s predictions were drawn up, then telegraphed across the United States. The reports were published in newspapers and tacked up at local post offices. Many farmers learned of cold waves, sunshine, or storms from signal flags hoisted on a passing train or a public building (the flags would remain a commonplace of the American landscape until the days of radio). The service also supported research in meteorology, encouraging the enlistment of college graduates and hiring civilian scientists. To improve weather prediction, they explored the dynamics of storms and tornadoes and investigated the mysteries of the atmosphere.

Congress’s creation of the USGS, in 1879, was a clear vote of confidence for what the civilian surveys had done to date. Perhaps the best-known of them apart from Powell’s venture down the Colorado had been the Geological and Geographical Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, which followed one of the expected routes of the transcontinental railroad and was headed by Clarence King. Then only 25 years old, King was handsome, well connected, and in Henry Adams’ judgment “the best and brightest man of his generation.” King, who had studied at Yale under some of the country’s leading geologists, staffed the exploration with first-rate scientists. Their work was fruitful scientifically, and much of it was also economically pertinent, especially the geological investigation of the region in the neighborhood of the rich Comstock silver lode.

King’s survey included artists and photographers. Their work, displayed in popular lectures with stereopticons and published in handsome books, provided untold numbers of Americans with their first visual impressions of the West. The illustrations of the canyon country, the mesas, and the high peaks, by turns majestic, cathedral-like, and forbidding, held them in thrall, much as pictures from space would rivet Americans a century later.

King was appointed the first head of the new USGS, but he resigned the post in 1881 and was succeeded by John Wesley Powell. His exploring days over, his body paunchy but his beard still a bristling red, Powell fired the entire operation with enthusiasm. He employed topographers, geologists, and paleontologists; he farmed out work to university consultants, a number of them at the land-grant colleges and universities in the Midwest and the West. Through its consultantships and field expeditions, the survey provided important research opportunities for many American geologists. Its access to the Government Printing Office enabled it to publish hundreds of bulletins valuable to both basic and economic geology. No disdainer of Washington politics, Powell could usually find a position in the survey for the relative of a well-placed congressman. He also distributed the survey’s attractively, sometimes lavishly, illustrated publications around the capital. With its numerous publications and consultants spread through 19 states and territories, the survey made its influence felt in numerous academic localities, and its work gained world-class distinction.

By the mid-1880s, the federal government, with its venerable Naval Observatory, expanded Coast and Geodetic Survey, new Weather Service, and jewel of the USGS had become the home of much of American science. The Government Printing Office, which since 1870 had issued hundreds of memoirs for the scientific bureaus, was the nation’s principal publisher of research. Relative to population, more scientists were working in the capital than in any other city, including Cambridge, Massachusetts. Washington scientists formed a congenial community, gathering at meetings of the various scientific societies then proliferating in the capital and conjoining at the Cosmos Club, which Powell, Henry Adams, and friends had founded in 1878 for people devoted to science, art, and literature. It was an intellectually stimulating community, and its members felt secure in the knowledge that through their work under federal auspices they were contributing to the advancement of science, the nation’s economic and cultural development, and the overall welfare of the American people.

They were thus jolted in the mid-1880s when the showpieces of the expanded federal scientific establishment, including the USGS, were subjected to the scrutiny of congressional investigation. No mere formality, this was an extended inquiry by a joint bipartisan commission of the House and Senate headed by the Republican warhorse Senator William B. Allison of Iowa, the powerful chair of the Committee on Appropriations. The investigation had been prompted in part by charges of scandal, favoritism, and wastefulness in the scientific agencies. Treasury auditors were reportedly investigating claims that John Wesley Powell himself had been doing useless research, overpaying favorites, publishing lavish books on irrelevant subjects, buying his way into the National Academy with patronage, and giving away federally owned fossils to a paleontologist at Yale.

But the fundamental issue was not scandal. It was whether the scientific agencies had developed beyond the limits of what the federal government should support. Critics contended, variously, that the scope of federal science had grown too broad and that the scientific agencies were engaging in abstract work of no utility—for example, meteorological studies that might not lead to more reliable weather prediction or paleontological investigations that seemed to satisfy no public want. Such objections came from states-rights southern Democrats, newly returned to Congress from their exile, and from some northerners, including several leading scientists. In the outspoken view of the critics, much of the research done by agencies such as Powell’s should be left to the states and to private enterprise.

Federal scientists vigorously defended their work before the Allison Commission, insisting, as one put it, that they were “not fomenting science”; they were doing practical work for practical purposes. The National Academy, once again asked for an opinion, urged that federal research should be removed from politics by consolidating all of it under an apolitical Department of Science.The commission rejected that recommendation, but Senator Allison and his Republican allies remained strong friends of federal science, and after two years, federal research emerged from the probe unscathed.

A few years later, Powell and federal science would suffer severe cutbacks at the hands of southern Democrats, western Republicans angered again by his insistence on managing public lands in accord with the need for irrigation, and even some eastern Republicans in thrall to cost-cutting in the face of hard economic times. But the setbacks to federal science were temporary. At the opening of the 20th century, with the depression of the 1890s ended and the United States emerging as a world power, the expansion of federal science resumed. Within a half century, it would reach levels undreamed of by Powell, and the federal government would call on the advice of the academy to a degree that Alexander Dallas Bache could hardly have imagined.

The foundations of that future had been laid in the Civil War, when Congress established the academy, and during the Gilded Age, when the Allison Commission sanctioned the purposes and practices of an expansive federal role in science as proper functions of government. It was only a short step in time and principle from the affirmations of the Allison Commission to Congress’s passage of the Hatch Act, in 1887, which created federally funded agricultural experiment stations at the land-grant colleges and universities and marked the beginning of an explicit commitment to federal patronage for scientific research in the academic world. Powell had explicated the issue of the federal role in research before the commission with clarity and passion. Not even “a hundred millionaires” could support the current research of the federal agencies, he declared, adding that the progress of American civilization should not have to wait on the philanthropic inspiration of a hundred rich men. Surely, he insisted the national government should support and publish whatever science might advance the welfare of the American people.

To read the footnoted version of this article, click here for the PDF.

National Academy of Sciences Building, 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. © 2012 Maxwell MacKenzie.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, non-profit society of distinguished scholars. Established by an Act of Congress that was signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the NAS is charged with providing independent advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. The NAS celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2013.

The National Academy of Sciences Building, depicted here, opened in April 1924. It closed in 2010 for the restoration of its historic core, renovation of later additions, and installation of new communications networks, and electrical, heating and ventilation equipment. It reopened in April 2012.

When you’re watching Steven Spielberg’s terrific new movie Lincoln, remember that this was the same Congress that passed the Morrill Act and created the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Although many of them clearly harbored deeply racist beliefs and were not above narrowly self-interested politicking, they were also capable of tackling profound questions of human rights and the growing importance of science and education. Even in the midst of a battle for the nation’s survival, they were able to look beyond their current situation and maintain an ambitious vision of the future.

The contrast to today’s Congress is painful to see. It required an enormous effort to postpone the crisis that was created by its own decision a few months earlier to construct a fiscal cliff. And when members of Congress should be turning their attention to a long-term fiscal plan that balances government income, entitlements, and discretionary spending, we are likely instead to be subjected to a pointless debate about the debt ceiling in which our elected leaders ponder the difficult question of whether the nation should pay the bills it has already incurred.

Still, we should temper our praise for 19th century wisdom. As historian Daniel Kevles reveals in his enlightening article in this issue, the creation of the NAS did not mark the beginning of an enlightened age. Many members of Congress gleefully mocked the notion that scientific eggheads could provide practical guidance on important political questions, and many people preferred to be guided by what they wished to be true rather than what evidence and analysis indicated was reality. This archetypal drama has played out many times in the past 150 years, and it will certainly provide rueful entertainment in the future.

What is remarkable, nevertheless, is that the United States created an institution designed to incorporate scientific knowledge into government decisionmaking. And in spite of waves of reaction against specific scientific findings and an ever-present strain of anti-intellectualism, or at least anti-elitism, in the American character, the influence of the scientific community and of the NAS has grown. It certainly helps that science and technology have contributed to stunning advances in public health and economic productivity, but it also matters that some scientists, engineers, and physicians have accepted the responsibility to play a role in public debates and to accept roles of national leadership.

The NAS will be holding many commemorative events this year, and Daniel Kevles and others will be completing a history of the institution. This history includes much to be proud of, but we should also take this opportunity to learn from experience. The institution itself has grown, expanding from science to include engineering, medicine, and the social sciences. As science and technology have become increasingly prominent components of modern life, the scientific community has begun to understand how its members must also become more fully integrated into all aspects of civic life. No doubt there are other lessons we have learned and need to learn. Let’s make this year of celebration also a year of contemplation.

Federal Funding of Physical Sciences and Engineering Research

A major theme of the National Academies’ 2007 report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, and a major premise of the 2007 America COMPETES Act and its 2010 reauthorization was that the nation urgently needed to boost funding of research in the physical sciences and engineering (PS&E) after a decade-long decline precipitated by the end of the Cold War.

The COMPETES Act authorized a doubling of research funding over seven years (later extended to eleven years in the 2010 reauthorization) through the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science on the reasonable presumption that much of the increase would go into PS&E fields. Interestingly, on the same premise, Rising Above the Gathering Storm singled out only Department of Defense (DOD) research as meriting increased support. It was perhaps to be expected that Congress would focus on civilian agency rather than military service budgets to rectify the decade-long neglect of most PS&E fields, but shifting the attention had important consequences.

Although the COMPETES reauthorization has a year to run, it is not premature to assess progress in righting the “imbalance” in the federal research portfolio. The Congressional Research Service estimated that if current trends continue, the desired doubling will not take place in 7 years or 11 years or even 15 years. A review of actual funding from 2001 to 2011 (using data available from the National Science Foundation’s federal funds survey) reveals that funding of the physical sciences is virtually flat and funding of engineering has declined.

Stephen A. Merrill ([email protected]) is director of the National Academies’ Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy.

The dark years

Between FY 1993 and FY 1999 federal support of physics, chemical engineering, geological sciences, and electrical and mechanical engineering declined by more than 20% in real terms, while funding of the biological and medical sciences increased by more than 20% in the same period. Computer science funding was the major exception to the PS&E pattern, rising more than 60%.

Expectations unrealized

Funding of physical science research increased only slightly (0.3%) from 2001 to 2011, and engineering research has actually declined by 4.3%, while overall research expenditures rose 8.1%, and life sciences increased 7.0%.

These figures exclude the two years of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) research funding because the National Science Foundation decided not to add to agencies’ reporting burden for “stimulus” expenditures by asking them to disaggregate them by research field.

Stimulus funding not sufficient

But it turns out that three-quarters of the $13.1-billion (in 2005 dollars) ARRA boost to research spending in FY 2009 and 2010 went to the National Institutes of Health, primarily for research in the biological and medical sciences.

Engineering particularly hard hit

Less widely recognized is the continued steep decline (down 26% from FY 2001 to FY 2010) of engineering research support by DOD, which still accounts for one-third of all federal investment in engineering. DOD accounts for 28% of federal math/ computer science funding and 14% of federal physical science funding.

The energy sector is the world’s largest market. Reaching billions of users, it accounts for approximately $5 trillion of economic activity and $1.8 trillion of trade annually, representing trillions of dollars of accumulated long-lived capital investments. At the same time, the energy sector is under pressure to change to meet a variety of market and societal pressures. In particular, population and economic growth are driving up total demand; urbanization and industrialization are changing the end uses of energy (toward electrification and transportation); and social concerns about national security and the environment are causing many countries to revamp their primary sources of energy (toward domestic low-carbon options or sustainable options, or both).

Although it is a widely accepted idea that the pace of innovation is accelerating in many fields—especially in consumer electronics—it is not clear whether this phenomenon holds true for the energy industry. Understanding the vintage of the energy industry’s current technological configuration might provide a helpful indicator of its ability to adopt new technologies.

The mix of fuels for the global energy system has been closely tracked for decades by a number of agencies and through a variety of reports with precise records of energy prices, consumption by end-use sectors, and flows of primary energy resources. But the mix of technologies that convert those fuels into useful outcomes has not been quantified, nor are they routinely tracked by reporting agencies, analysts, or observers. Although fuels and end uses are important, it is our contention that conversion technologies also deserve attention.

We have tackled this knowledge gap using the United States as a case study to quantify the energy system’s dependence on discrete energy conversion technologies (by fuel and end-use sector). Although many of the underlying data that we used have been known for a long time, to our knowledge this analysis is the first that comprehensively sorts energy consumption by conversion technologies and quantitatively couples those technologies to the primary fuels and end-use sectors. This assessment leads to some forward-looking recommendations for policymakers and analysts.

Calculating the fuel mix

Four end-use sectors—transportation, industry, commercial, and residential—are responsible for U.S. energy consumption, which in 2010 totaled 98.01 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs), or quads, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). By sector, transportation was responsible for 27.51 quads, industry for 30.14 quads, commercial for 18.21 quads, and residential for 22.15 quads. Electricity generation, which accounts for approximately 40% of annual primary energy consumption, is sometimes separated out as its own sector. In this scenario, electricity was responsible for 39.58 quads, transportation for 27.43 quads, industry for 19.98 quads, commercial for 4.18 quads, and residential for 6.84 quads.

These end-use sectors consume various types of fuels, or primary energy sources. In 2010, fossil fuels provided 83% (81.44 quads) of the quads consumed. Among this group, petroleum provided 35.97 quads, natural gas 24.65 quads, and coal 20.82 quads. (Individual totals may not match the cumulative total because of rounding errors in the data.) Nuclear power provided another 8.44 quads. Renewable sources collectively provided 8.05 quads: 4.3 quads from bioenergy, 2.51 quads from hydroelectric, 0.92 quads from wind, 0.21 from geothermal, and 0.11 quads from solar thermal and photovoltaic (PV). From this spectrum, it is apparent that 92% of U.S. energy is produced from only four primary fuels: petroleum, natural gas, coal, and nuclear.

This information is depicted in Figure 1, which is the famous “spaghetti graph,” produced by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that charts the flows of energy consumption from the primary fuels to the end-use sectors. The graph quantitatively reveals many things about the U.S. energy system. For example, it illustrates that the transportation sector is predominately fueled by petroleum, that coal is closely coupled with power generation, and that a majority of energy consumption is released as rejected energy (or waste heat).

Missing information

Although the EIA’s data reveal a wealth of information about fuel sources and prices, no agency has focused specifically on summarizing annual energy use by conversion technology. However, EIA does publish some data about various conversion devices for the power sector and about various appliances in the commercial and residential sectors. Thus, by carefully reviewing, integrating, and synthesizing data from those and additional EIA reports, we were able to produce a reasonably complete picture of energy conversion technology deployment.

Technology-specific information is known in greatest detail for electricity generation. These technologies include steam turbines, combustion turbines, binary turbines (such as those used in geothermal applications), hydraulic turbines (used with hydroelectric dams), internal combustion engines (used primarily with gasoline and diesel fuel, but also with natural gas), wind turbines, and solar photovoltaic panels.

In other sectors, we had to comb through EIA reports and other data sources and make a number of logical assumptions about technology allocations. A few examples may be illustrative. For the transportation sector, we assumed that all gasoline and ethanol would be consumed in spark-ignition engines, whereas diesel and biodiesel would be consumed in compression-ignition engines. In the industrial sector, we focused on a number of key devices, including boilers, burners, and heaters, that use the most energy. At the commercial and residential scales, widely used appliances comprise such things as space heaters, water heaters, and ovens. Regarding solar energy, although many reports aggregate solar thermal and PV, we separated them, assigning PV (which makes electricity) to the power sector category and end-use solar thermal to the appliance category.

Given its diverse applications, allocating natural gas across the various technologies proved most complicated. Much of natural gas is consumed directly in appliances at the end-use sectors, but it also is consumed in boilers for use with steam turbines, in combustion turbines, and in combustion turbines as an intermediary with steam turbines for generating power in combined cycles. Determining the allocation of natural gas across these sectors required reconciling the information from the power sector data with other data on industrial and residential energy use. In addition, the combustion turbine has two distinct applications: consuming natural gas to generate electrical power (stationary) and consuming jet fuel to generate thrust for transportation (aviation).

The results of our analysis are summarized in Table 1 and illustrated in Figure 2.

As Table 1 and Figure 2 show, four conversion technologies—the steam turbine, combustion turbine, spark-ignition engine, and compression-ignition engine—are responsible for 65.4% of all energy consumption in the United States. The steam turbine (30.59 quads) for power generation and the spark-ignition engine (17.41 quads) for transportation are the two dominant technologies. These are followed by the combustion turbine (9.30 quads), which is primarily for power generation and transportation (aviation), and the compression-ignition engine (6.78 quads), which is primarily for transportation but also has some uses in power generation.

Another 25% of all energy consumption can be attributed to two other (relatively large) categories: industrial devices (primarily boilers, burners, and heaters), and a number of smaller and more varied appliances in the residential and commercial sectors. In addition, nearly 5 quads of energy are consumed as feedstock in making products and materials through a variety of chemical pathways. Rounding out the list are hydroelectric turbines, compressors, and pumps (for pipelines), wind turbines, binary turbines, and solar PV systems.

Within the power and transportation sectors, the dominance of the four leading conversion technologies is even more extensive. Of the 39.6 quads consumed for electricity generation, 90% is provided by the steam turbine (at 75%) and combustion turbine (at 15%) alone. Hydroelectric, wind, solar PV, and binary turbines make up the other 10%. Similarly, transportation is dominated by two technologies: of its 27.4 quads of consumption, 86% is provided by the spark-ignition engine (62%) and compression-ignition engine (24%).

Benchmarking vintage and efficiency

In contrast with the concept of accelerating innovation, the four leading technologies that we identified were, by and large, invented or first demonstrated well over a century ago. The combustion turbine for stationary applications was invented in 1791 by John Barber, the fuel cell in 1842 by Sir William Robert Grove, the spark-ignition engine in 1876 by Nicolaus Otto, the hydroelectric turbine in 1878 by William Armstrong, the solar PV cell in 1883 by Charles Fritts, the steam turbine in 1884 by Charles Parsons, the wind turbine in 1888 by Charles F. Bush, and the compression-engine engine in 1893 by Rudolph Diesel. The most recent is the combustion turbine for aviation applications, invented by Frank Whittle in 1930—still almost a century ago.

In other words, the electricity that powers the advanced hallmarks of the industrialized world (consumer electronics, medical diagnostics, and communications technologies) is generated predominately by late–19th-century technology: steam, hydroelectric, and combustion turbines. Specifically, there was a flurry of innovation over a two-decade span in the late 1870s to early 1890s that yielded most of the conversion devices that power the modern economy.

The modern transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy in the electric industry is primarily to wind and solar power (with biomass and geothermal looming on the horizon). Yet even the wind generator and solar cell technologies date back to the 19th century. Nuclear fission (first demonstrated in 1938, one year after the combustion turbine for aviation applications) is a newer fuel source compared with coal, but it still relies on the same old steam turbine. And the first nuclear power plant was connected to the grid in 1954, almost 60 years ago.

Solar and wind still meet just a small fraction of annual energy needs. Although improvements in efficiency have greatly increased the performance of these technologies, the fundamental conversions remain the same as in the first solar and wind demonstrations in the 1800s. Thus, even modern fuels such as nuclear still use old technology, and the modern technologies that are available for application in the near term are not as new as commonly thought.

It might therefore be concluded that fundamental innovation in power and transportation technology is slow: Power production does not appear to have an equivalent to the Moore’s Law pace of rapid innovation in the performance and efficiency of microprocessors. This difference has created a strategic problem for planners, who often seem to be betting on breakthroughs to solve the challenges of the energy system. In contrast, the historical record implies that innovation in energy conversion devices is actually quite slow and breakthroughs rare. Thus, the hope that a new technology will come along that suddenly solves the challenge of greenhouse gas emissions seems naive.

The dominance of four technologies makes the transition to an economy based on renewable energy even more challenging. The advances made in renewable energy power production to date have made little headway into the transportation sector. Although market penetration of electric vehicles into the markets for cars and light-duty trucks is growing exponentially in the United States, the major economic sectors of international shipping, freight railroads, and aviation are dependent on technologies that cannot be easily powered by wind or solar electricity generation. Although a push could be made for a fundamental technology change in transportation to displace the internal combustion engine or gas turbine, recent policy directives seem to prefer finding a renewable-based liquid fuel that can “drop in” to the existing technology mix.

A pathway ahead

If history can be any guide, then, it can be expected that the transition to a zero-carbon economy based on renewable energy sources using new conversion technologies will probably be slow, at best. Therefore, it would be unwise to expect new “breakthrough” technologies to suddenly solve the nation’s energy problems as society continues to depend heavily on incremental improvements to old technologies. Drop-in fuels might move faster because of compatibility with existing infrastructure that is typically slow to change, but those drop-in fuels have the downside of propagating older technologies.

Although the conversion devices listed in Table 1 have served the nation well for over a century, the most prevalent four systems involve a relatively inefficient step of converting thermal energy into motion. The relative inefficiency of that conversion yields significant waste heat and higher-than-necessary fossil fuel consumption. Thus, finding a way to bypass that step with some fundamentally different conversion approaches would be valuable. Today’s solar PV and wind turbines bypass the thermal conversion step, thereby avoiding the wasted heat, which is one reason why they are appealing. There are more potential pathways than can be comprehensively identified here, but a few are worth mentioning. The existence of bioelectric organisms, such as electric eels, that convert chemical energy into electrical energy directly presents an opportunity to harness this novel pathway through bioelectric power systems, such as microbial fuel cells, biological solar voltaic, piezoelectric protein skins, or photoactive fuel cells. Some people have even touted the controversial Casimir effect, which is claimed to convert atomic forces at submicrometer scale into forces that can induce motion. If proven, it could potentially be used as a pathway for using nuclear fuels to generate motion while bypassing the steam turbine.

In light of this analysis, we have several recommendations for energy policymakers in the United States and elsewhere:

• The EIA should track technology deployment as well as fuels. The EIA has remarkable capabilities for collecting data and performing analysis on energy consumption and flows. We recommend that the agency include in its Annual Energy Review a table and graph in the overview chapter similar to Table 1 and Figure 2 in this manuscript. Such information is already available in a disaggregated format throughout the rest of the annual report and could readily be assembled using reasonable assumptions (and inputs from a handful of other EIA reports) by EIA analysts. Although the existing body of information reported by the agency is already world-class, we believe these additions would yield additional insights about technology innovation in the energy sector.

• The United States should invest in R&D for new fundamental energy conversion technologies (in addition to fuels and incremental improvements in existing energy conversion technologies) and concentrate on energy conversion pathways that reduce waste heat. A vast preponderance of energy research has emphasized developing alternative fuels with the same old technologies, such as new biofuels for old spark-ignition engines, rather than seeking to reduce consumption through efficiency improvements or the development of alternative technologies. However, presumably there are many innovations in energy conversion waiting to be discovered, given the right support. These might be as simple as efficiency improvements to the existing technologies, innovations in the small-scale but newer conversion devices (including solar PV and solid-state devices such as fuel cells), the integration of existing systems (novel power cycles), or wholly new conversion pathways.

• Policies that can accelerate technology development and adoption at scale should be emphasized. Accelerating the deployment of renewable energy technology will be the key to making a nontrivial impact on global emissions and resource depletion before the end of this century. In particular, policies that focus on accelerating the transition and adoption of a more diverse set of conversion pathways should be encouraged.

Due to the nation’s continued dependence on 19th-century technology and the logical expectation that technology transitions will probably take many decades at best, it is imperative that policies to promote conversion technology development and commercialization be put in place soon. The transition is going to take a long time, so we might as well get started.

U.S. science policy since World War II has in large measure been driven by Vannevar Bush’s famous paper Science—The Endless Frontier. Bush’s separation of research into “basic” and “applied” domains has been enshrined in much of U.S. science and technology policy over the past seven decades, and this false dichotomy has become a barrier to the development of a coherent national innovation policy. Much of the debate centers on the appropriate federal role in innovation. Bush argued successfully that funding basic research was a necessary role for government, with the implication that applied research should be left to the auspices of markets. However, the original distinction does not reflect what actually happens in research, and its narrow focus on the stated goals of an individual research project prevents us from taking a more productive holistic view of the research enterprise.

By examining the evolution of the famous linear model of innovation, which holds that scientific research precedes technological innovation, and the problematic description of engineering as “applied science,” we seek to challenge the existing dichotomies between basic and applied research and between science and engineering. To illustrate our alternative view of the research enterprise, we will follow the path of knowledge development through a series of Nobel Prizes in Physics over several decades.

This mini-history reveals how knowledge grows through a richly interwoven system of scientific and technological research in which there is no clear hierarchy of importance and no straightforward linear trajectory. Accepting this reality has profound implications for the design of research institutions, the allocation of resources, and the national policies that guide research. This in turn can open the door to game-changing discoveries and inventions and put the nation on the path to a more sustainable science and technology ecosystem.

History of an idea

Although some observers cite Vannevar Bush as the source of the linear model of innovation, the concept actually has deep roots in long-held cultural assumptions that give priority to the work of the head over the work of the hand and thus to the creation of scientific knowledge over technical expertise. If one puts this assumption aside, it opens up a new way of understanding the entire innovation process. We will focus our attention on how it affects our understanding of research.

The question of whether understanding always precedes invention has long been a troubling one. For example, it is widely accepted that many technologies reached relatively advanced stages of development before detailed scientific explanations about how the technologies worked emerged. In one of the most famous examples, James Watt invented his steam engine before the laws of thermodynamics were postulated. In fact, the science of thermodynamics owes a great deal to the steam engine. This and other examples should make it clear that assumptions about what has been called basic and applied research do not accurately describe what actually happens in research.

In 1997, Donald Stokes’s book Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation was published posthumously. In this work, Stokes argued that scientific efforts were best carried out in what he termed “Pasteur’s Quadrant,” where researchers are motivated simultaneously by expanding understanding and increasing our abilities (technological, including medicine) to improve the world. Stokes’s primary contribution was in expanding the linear model into a two-dimensional plane that sought to integrate the idea of the unsullied quest for knowledge with the desire to solve a practical problem.

Stokes’s model comprises three quadrants, each exemplified by a historical figure in science and technology. The pure basic research quadrant exemplified by Niels Bohr represents the traditional view of scientific research as being inspired primarily by a desire to extend fundamental understanding. The pure applied research quadrant is exemplified in Edison, who represents the classical inventor, driven to solve a practical problem. Louis Pasteur’s quadrant is a perfect mix of the two, inventor and scientist in one, expanding knowledge in the pursuit of practical problems. Stokes described this final quadrant as “use-inspired basic research.” The fourth quadrant is not fully described in Stokes’ framework.

The publication of Stokes’s book excited many in the science policy and academic communities, who believed it would free us from the blinders of the linear model. A blurb on the back of the book quotes U.S. Congressman George E. Brown Jr.: “Stokes’s analysis will, one hopes, finally lay to rest the unhelpful separation between ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ research that has misinformed science policy for decades.” However, it has become clear that although Stokes’s analysis cleared the ground for future research, it did not go far enough, nor did his work result in sufficient change in how policymakers discuss and structure research. Whereas Stokes notes how “often technology is the inspiration of science rather than the other way around,” his revised dynamic model does not recognize the full complexity of innovation, preferring to keep science and technology in separate worlds that mix only in the shared agora of “use-inspired basic research.” It is also significant that Stokes’s framework preserves the language of the linear model in the continued use of the terms basic and applied as descriptors of research.

We see a need to jettison this conception of research in order to understand the complex interplay among the forces of innovation. We propose a more dynamic model in which radical innovation often arises only through the integration of science and technology.

Invention and discovery

A critical liability of the basic/applied categorization is that it is based on the motivation of the individual researcher at the time of the work. The efficacy and effectiveness of the research endeavor cannot be fully appreciated in the limited time frame captured by a singular attention to the motivations of the researchers in question. Admittedly, motivations are important. Aiming to find a cure for cancer or advance the frontiers of communications can be a powerful incentive, stimulating groundbreaking research. However, motivations are only one aspect of the research process. To more completely capture the full arc of research, it is important to consider a broader time scale than that implied by just considering the initial research motivations. Expanding the focus from research motivations to also include questions of how the research is taken up in the world and how it is connected to other science and technology allows us to escape the basic/applied dichotomy. The future-oriented aspects of research are as important as the initial motivation. Considering the implications of research in the long term requires an emphasis on visionary future technologies, taking into account the well-being of society, and not being content with a porous dichotomy between basic and applied research.

We propose using the terms “invention” and “discovery” to describe the twin channels of research practice. For us, invention is the “accumulation and creation of knowledge that results in a new tool, device, or process that accomplishes a specific purpose.” Discovery is the “creation of new knowledge and facts about the world.” Considering the phases of invention and discovery along with research motivations and institutional settings enables a much more holistic and long-term view of the research process. This allows us to examine the ways in which research generates innovation and leads to further research in a virtuous cycle.

Innovation is a complex, nonlinear process. Still, straightforward and sufficiently realized representations such as Stokes’s Pasteur’s quadrant are useful as analytical aids. We propose the model of the discovery-invention cycle, which will serve to illustrate the interconnectedness of the processes of invention and discovery, and the need for consideration of research effectiveness over longer time frames than is currently the case. Such a model allows for a more reliable consideration of innovation through time. The model could also aid in discerning possible bottlenecks in the functioning of the cycle of innovation, indicating possible avenues for policy intervention.

A family of Nobel Prizes

To illustrate this idea, consider Figure 1 below, in which we trace the evolution of the current information and communication age. What can be said about the research that has enabled the recent explosion of information and communication technologies? How does our model enable a deeper understanding of the multiplicity of research directions that have shaped the current information era? To fully answer this question, it is necessary to examine research snapshots over time, paying attention to the development of knowledge and the twin processes of invention and discovery, tracing their interconnections through time. To our mind, the clearest place for selecting snapshots that illustrate the evolution of invention and discovery that enables the information age is the Nobel Prize awards.

We have thus examined the Nobel Prizes in Physics from 1956, 1964, 1985, 1998, 2000, and 2009, which were all related to information technologies. We describe these kinds of clearly intersecting Nobels as a family of prizes in that they are all closely related. Similar families can be found in areas such as nuclear magnetic resonance and imaging.

The birth of the current information age can be traced to the invention of the transistor. This work was recognized with the 1956 Physics Nobel Prize awarded jointly to William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.” Building on early work on the effect of electric fields on metal semiconductor junctions, the interdisciplinary Bell Labs team built a working bipolar-contact transistor and clearly demonstrated (discovered) the transistor effect. This work and successive refinements enabled a class of devices that successfully replaced electromechanical switches, allowing for successive generations of smaller, more efficient, and more intricate circuits. Although the Nobel was awarded for the discovery of the transistor effect, the team of Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain had to invent the bipolar-contact transistor to demonstrate it. Their work was thus of a dual nature, encompassing both discovery and invention. The discovery of the transistor effect catalyzed a whole body of further research into semiconductor physics, increasing knowledge about this extremely important phenomenon. The invention of the bipolar contact transistor led to a new class of devices that effectively replaced vacuum tubes and catalyzed further research into new kinds of semiconductor devices. The 1956 Nobel is therefore exemplary of a particular kind of knowledge-making that affects both later discoveries and later inventions. We call this kind of research radical innovation. The 1956 prize is situated at the intersection of invention and discovery (see Figure 1), and it is from this prize that we begin to trace the innovation cycle for the prize family that describes critical moments in the information age.

The second prize in this family is the 1964 Nobel Prize, which was awarded jointly to Charles Townes and the other half to both Nicolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov. Most global communications traffic is carried by transcontinental fiber optic networks, which use light as the signal carrier. Townes’s work on the stimulated emission of microwave radiation earned him his half of the Nobel. This experimental work showed that it was possible to build amplifier oscillators with low noise characteristics capable of the spontaneous emission of microwaves with almost perfect amplification. The maser (microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation effect) was observed in his experiments. Later, Basov and Prokhorov, along with Townes, extended the maser effect to consideration of its application in the visible spectrum, and thus the laser was invented. Laser light allows for the transmission of very high-energy pulses of light at very high frequencies and is crucial for modern high-speed communication systems. This Nobel acknowledges critical work that was also simultaneously discovery (the maser effect) and invention (the maser and the laser), both central to the rise of the information and communication age. Thus, the 1964 Nobel is also situated at the intersection of invention and discovery. The work on lasers built directly on previous work by Einstein, but practical and operational masers and lasers were enabled by advancements in electronic amplifiers made possible by the solid-state electronics revolution, which began with the invention of the transistor.

Although scientists and engineers conducted a great deal of foundational work on the science of information technology in the 1960s, the next wave of Nobel recognition for this research did not come until the 1980s. Advancements in the semiconductor industry led to the development of new kinds of devices such as the metal oxide silicon field effect transistor (MOSFET). The two-dimensional nature of the conducting layer of the MOSFET provided a convenient avenue to study electrical conduction in reduced dimensions. Klaus von Klitzing discovered that under certain conditions, voltage across a current-carrying wire increased in uniform steps. Von Klitzing received the 1985 Nobel Prize for what is known as the quantized Hall effect. This work belongs in the discovery category, although it did have important useful applications.

The 2000 Nobel Prize was awarded jointly to Zhores Alferov and Herbert Kroemer for “developing semiconductor heterostructures” and to Jack Kilby for “his part in the invention of the integrated circuit.” Both of these achievements can be classified primarily as inventions, and both built on work done by Shockley et al. This research enabled a new class of semiconductor device that could be used in high-speed circuits and optoelectronics. Alferov and Kroemer showed that creating a double junction with a thin layer of semiconductors would allow for much higher concentrations of holes and electrons, enabling faster switching speeds and allowing for laser operation at practical temperatures. Their invention produced tangible improvements in lasers and light-emitting diodes. It was the work on heterostructures that enabled the modern room-temperature lasers used in fiber optic communication systems. Alferov and Kroemer’s work on heterostructures also led to the discovery of a new form of matter, as discussed below.

Jack Kilby’s work on integrated circuits at Texas Instruments earned him his half of the Nobel for showing that entire circuits could be realized with semiconductor substrates. Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain had invented semiconductor-based transistors, but these were discrete components and were used in circuits with components made from other materials. The genius of Kilby’s work was in realizing that semiconductors could be arranged in such a way that the entire circuit, not just the transistor, could be realized on a chip. This invention of a process of building entire circuits out of semiconductors allowed for economies of scale, bringing down the cost of circuits. Further research into process technologies allowed escalating progress on the shrinking of these circuits, so that in a few short years, chips containing billions of transistors were possible.

Alferov and Kroemer’s work was also valuable to Horst Stormer and his collaborators, who combined it with advancements in crystal growth techniques to produce two-dimensional electron layers with mobility orders of magnitude greater than in silicon MOSFETs. Stormer and Daniel Tsui then began exploring some observed unusual behavior that occurred in two-dimensional electrical conduction. They discovered a new kind of particle that appeared to have only one-third the charge of the previously thought-indivisible electron. Robert Laughlin then showed through calculations that what they had observed was a new form of quantum liquid where interactions between billions of electrons in the quantum liquid led to swirls in the liquid behaving like particles with a fractional electron charge. This phenomenon is clearly a new discovery, but it was enabled by previous inventions and resulted in important practical applications such as the high-frequency transistors used in cell phones. For their work, Laughlin, Stormer, and Tsui were awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics, an achieve ment situated firmly in the discovery category.

The 2009 Nobel was awarded to Charles Kao for “groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication” and to Willard Boyle and George Smith for “the invention of the imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD.” Both of these achievements were directly influenced by previous inventions and discoveries in this area. Kao was primarily concerned building a workable waveguide for light for use in communications systems. His inquiries led to astonishing process improvements in glass production, as he predicted that glass fibers of a certain purity would allow long-distance laser light communication. Of course, the work on heterostructures that allowed for room-temperature lasers was critical to assembling the technologies of fiber communication. Kao, however, not only created new processes for measuring the purity of glass but also actively encouraged various manufacturers to improve their processes in this respect. Working directly in industry, Kao’s work built on the work by Alferov and Kromer, enabling the physical infrastructure of the information age. Boyle and Smith continued the tradition of Bell Labs inquiry. Adding a brilliant twist to the work that Shockley et al. had done on the transistor, they designed and invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), a semiconductor circuit that enabled digital imagery and video. Kao’s work was clearly aimed at discovering the ideal conditions for the propagation of light in fibers of glass, but he also went further in shepherding the invention and development of the new fiber optic devices.

These six Nobel Prizes highlight the multiple kinds of knowledge that play into the innovations that have enabled the current information and communications age. From the discovery of the transistor effect, which relied on the invention of the bipolar junction transistor and led to all the marvelous processors and chips in everything from computers to cars, to the invention of the integrated circuit, which made the power of modern computers possible while shrinking their cost and increasing accessibility. The invention of fiber optics built on previous work on heterostructures and made the physical infrastructure and speed of the global communications networks possible. In fact, the desire to improve the electrical conductivity of heterostructures led to the unexpected discovery of fractional quantization in two-dimensional systems and a new form of quantum fluid. Each of these could probably be classified as “basic” or “applied” research, but that classification obscures the complexity and multiple nature of the research described above and does not help remove the prejudices of many against what is now labeled as “applied research.” Thinking in terms of invention and discovery through time helps reconstruct the many pathways that research travels along in the creation of radical innovations.

In our model, the discovery-invention cycle can be traversed in both directions, and research knowledge is seen as an integrated whole that mutates over time (as it traverses the cycle). The bidirectionality of the cycle reflects the reality that inventions are not always the product of discovery but can also be the product of other inventions. Simultaneously, important discoveries can arise from new inventions. Observing the cycle of research over time is essential to understanding how progress occurs.

Seeing with fresh eyes

The switch from a basic/applied nomenclature to discovery-invention is not a mere semantic refinement. It enables us to see the entire research enterprise in a new way.

First, it eliminates the tendency to see research proceeding on two fundamentally different and separate tracks. All types of research interact in complex and often surprising ways. To capitalize on these opportunities, we must be willing to see research holistically. Also, by introducing new language, we hope to escape the cognitive trap of thinking about research solely in terms of the researcher’s initial motivations. All results must be understood in their larger context.

Second, adopting a long time frame is essential to attaining a full understanding of the path of research. The network of interactions traced in the Nobel Prizes discussed above becomes clear only when one takes into account a 50-year history. This extended view is important to understanding the development of both novel science and novel technologies.

Third, the discovery-invention cycle could be useful in identifying problematic bottlenecks in research. Once we recognize the complex interrelationship of discovery and invention, we are more likely to see that problems can occur in many parts of the cycle and that we need to heed the interactions among a variety of institutions and types of research.

Bringing together the notions of research time horizons and bottlenecks, we argue that successful radical innovation arises from knowledge traveling the innovation cycle. If, as argued above, all parts of the innovation process must be adequately encouraged for the cycle to function effectively, then the notion of traveling also emphasizes that we should have deep and sustained communication between scientists and engineers, between theorists and practitioners. Rather than separating researchers according to their motivation, we must strive to bring all forms of research into deeper congress.

This fresh view of the research enterprise can lead us to rethinking the design of research institutions to align with the principles of long time frames, a premium on futuristic ideas, and the encouragement of interaction among different elements of the research ecosystem. This is especially pertinent in the case of the mission-oriented agencies such as the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health.

Implications for research policy

The pertinent question is how these insights play out in the messy world of policymaking. First, there is an obvious need to complicate the simple and unhelpful distinction between basic and applied research. The notion of the innovation cycle is a very useful aid in thinking about research holistically. It draws attention to the entirety of research practice and allows one to pose the question of public utility to an entire range of activities.

Second, the nature of the public good, and thus the appropriate role for the federal government, changes. The simple and clear notions of basic and applied were useful in one way: They provided a clear litmus test for limits to federal involvement in the research process. The idea that government funding is necessary to pursue research opportunities that aren’t able to attract private funding is a useful one that has contributed to the long-term well-being and productivity of the nation. But through the lens of the discovery-invention cycle, we can see that it would deny federal funding to some types of research that are essential to long-term progress. We suggest that federal support is most appropriate for research that focuses on long-term projects with clear public utility. The difference here is that such research could have its near-term focus on either new knowledge or new technology.

The public good must be understood over the long term, and the best way to ensure that the research enterprise contributes as much as possible to meeting our national goals is to make funding decisions about discovery and invention research in a long-term holistic context.

The United States defines itself as a nation where everyone has an opportunity to achieve a better life. Correspondingly, everyone should have the opportunity to succeed through talent, creativity, intelligence, and hard work, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. This meritocratic philosophy is one reason why U.S. residents have customarily shown relatively little objection to high levels of economic inequality—as long as those at the bottom have a fair chance to work their way up the ladder. Similarly, people are more comfortable with the idea of increasing opportunities for success than with reducing inequality.

It is critical, then, to identify and employ effective and affordable ways to provide children from every race and every social and income group with ample opportunities to succeed. Here, a considerable body of research points to a variety of promising interventions at various stages of life, from before birth through entry into adulthood.

Who succeeds and why?

One of the ways of thinking about opportunity is in terms of generational improvement in living standards. Among today’s middle-aged population, four in five households have higher incomes than their parents had at the same age, and three in five men have higher earnings than their fathers. The extent to which this will be true for today’s children remains to be seen. More importantly, if everyone grows richer over time, but the economic fates of individuals are bound up in their family origins, then in an important sense opportunities are still limited. If poor children have little reason to believe that they can grow up to be whatever they want, it may be of little comfort to them that they will probably make more than their similarly constrained parents. A better-off security guard may still have wanted to be a lawyer.

The reality is that economic success in the United States is not purely meritocratic. People do not have as much equality of opportunity as society would like to believe, and the United States offers less mobility than some other developed countries. Although cross-national comparisons are not always reliable, the available data suggest that the United States compares unfavorably with Canada, the Nordic countries, and some other advanced countries.

People do move up and down the ladder, over their careers and between generations, but it helps if you have the right parents. Children born into middle-income families have a roughly equal chance of moving up or down once they become adults, but those born into rich or poor families have a high probability of remaining rich or poor as adults. The chance that children born into families in the top income quintile will end up in one of the top three quintiles by the time they are in their forties is 82%, whereas the chance that children born into families in the bottom quintile will do so is only 30%. In short, a rich child is more than twice as likely as a poor child to end up in the middle class or above, according to data presented in 2012 by the Pew Economic Mobility Project.

Why do some children do so much better than others? And what will it take to create more opportunity?

In order to better understand the life course of children, especially those who are disadvantaged, we have developed, along with colleagues at the Brookings Center on Children and Families, a life-cycle model called the Social Genome Model. The model divides the life cycle into six stages and specifies a set of outcomes for each life stage that, according to the literature, are predictive of later outcomes and eventual economic success. The life stages are family formation, early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, transition to adulthood, and adulthood. The success indicators include being born to parents who are ready to raise a child, being school-ready by age 5, acquiring core competencies in academic and social skills by age 11, being college- or career-ready by age 19, living independently and either receiving a college degree or having an equivalent income by age 29, and finally being middle class by middle age.

The data we use, from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, follow children born primarily in the 1980s and 1990s, starting in 1986 through 2010. We have projected their adult incomes using a statistical model. The projections in childhood and adulthood in our final data set closely track estimates from independent sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau and other surveys.

Among our findings, 60% of the children we followed into adulthood (through age 40) live in a family with income greater than 300% of the poverty line set by the Census Bureau (about $68,000 for a married couple with two children). In short, they have achieved the middle-class dream. This means, however, that roughly 40% have not achieved this success. The reasons are many, but by looking at where children get off track earlier in life, it is possible to begin to see the roots of the problem.

As our data show, about two-thirds or more of all children get through early and middle childhood with the kinds of academic and social skills needed for later success. However, a large portion of adolescents falls short of achieving success even by a relatively low standard. Only a little over half manage to graduate from high school with a 2.5 grade point average during their final year (the only period for which we have data on grades) and have also not been convicted of a crime or become a parent before age 19.

Success is nevertheless more common a decade later. Sixty percent of children will live on their own at the end of their 20s, either with a college degree in hand or with family income of approximately $45,000, which is about 250% of the level at which a family is considered poor. It is roughly equivalent to what a college-educated individual of the same age can expect to earn working full time, according to a 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Education. People in their late 20s without a college degree might achieve this college-equivalent income through on-the-job training, living in a dual-earner household, or by other means.

Putting the adolescent and adult results together, it appears that F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. There are second acts in American lives; lots of people make it to the middle class in adulthood despite entering life inauspiciously. But they would almost certainly be better off if they had acquired more skills at an earlier age, and especially if they had navigated adolescence more wisely.

Another way to give meaning to the success probabilities is to look at how success varies by different segments of the population. Consider gender. Boys and girls enter the world on an equal footing, but they take different paths on the way to adulthood. By age 5, girls are much more likely than boys to be academically and behaviorally ready for school. That advantage persists into middle childhood and adolescence. Men catch up in early adulthood and then surpass women in terms of economic success. At age 40, 64% of men but just 57% of women have achieved middle-class status.

The finding that girls do better than boys during the school years is not new. Girls mature earlier than boys and are better able to sit still and follow directions, and thus benefit more from classroom learning at a young age. A number of studies have shown that girls are less likely to act out, drop out of school, or engage in behaviors such as delinquency, smoking, and substance abuse, even as they are more likely to experience depression and face the risk of a pregnancy during adolescence.

Women are not only much more likely to graduate from high school, but they now earn 57% of all college degrees and more graduate degrees, as well. Despite their educational advantages, once they are adults, women still earn less than men. Although this earnings gap has declined sharply during the past half century, women who work fulltime still earn about 80% of what men earn, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. The reasons for their lower earnings are related to the fact that, mainly as a result of their family responsibilities, women’s labor force participation and hours worked are still lower than men’s, and they are concentrated in occupations that pay less than those held by men. The extent to which these occupational differences reflect social constraints on women’s roles versus their own preferences has been hard to sort out. Single parenthood also accounts for some of the gender gap in adulthood. Single mothers are much more common than single fathers. Even if they work, many single mothers disproportionately bear the burden of feeding additional mouths with their paycheck as compared with noncustodial fathers, whose child support is often modest.

Other patterns of inequality are much stronger. In our study, 68% of white children are school-ready at kindergarten, compared with 56% of African American children and 61% of Hispanic children (although data on Hispanic children were limited). In middle childhood, black children fall farther behind, and by adolescence, both African Americans and Hispanics are far behind white children. By age 30, both are still lagging, although Hispanics have done some catching up. By age 40, a whopping 33–percentage-point difference between blacks and whites persists. Only one-third of African Americans have achieved middle-class status by middle age. Even among those who do reach the middle class, their children are much more likely to fall down the ladder than the children of white middle-class families. The black-white gaps, and to a lesser extent the Hispanic-white gaps, are sizable for both boys and girls, although they are bigger among boys at the start of school and at the end of the high-school years.

If success at each stage varies by gender and race, it varies even more by the income of one’s parents. Only 48% of children born to parents in the bottom quintile of family income are school-ready, compared with 78% of children in the top quintile at birth. The disparity is similar in middle childhood. Perhaps most stunning, only one in three children from the bottom quintile graduates from high school with a 2.5 grade point average and having not been convicted or become a parent. For children from the top quintile, this figure is 76%. Parental income also affects the likelihood of economic success in adulthood, with 75% of those born into the top quintile achieving middle-class status by age 40 versus 40% of those born into the bottom quintile.

Finally, we have examined success rates for children who are born into more or less advantaged circumstances, defined more broadly than by their income quintile. Among children born of normal birth weight to married mothers who have at least a high-school education and who were not poor at the time of the child’s birth, 72% can be expected to enter kindergarten ready for school, whereas the rate is only 59% for women outside of this group. This gap never narrows, and by the end of adolescence, children with less advantaged birth circumstances are 29 percentage points less likely to succeed. At age 40, there is a 22–percentage-point gap between these groups of children in the likelihood of being middle class.

Children born advantaged also retain a large advantage at the end of the next life stage, early childhood. The same pattern prevails for subsequent stages: success begets later success. In middle childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, those who succeeded in the previous stage are much more likely than those who did not to succeed again. For example, 82% of children in our sample who entered school ready to learn mastered basic skills by age 11, compared with 45% of children who were not school-ready. Acquiring basic academic and social skills by age 11 increases by a similar magnitude a child’s chances of completing high school with good grades and risk-free behavior, which, in turn, increases the chances that a young person will acquire a college degree or the equivalent in income. Finally, success by age 29 doubles the chances of being middle class by middle age. In short, success is very much a cumulative process. Although many children who get off track at an early age get back on track at a later age, and can be helped to do so, these findings point to the importance of early interventions that keep children on the right track.

These features of social mobility processes are captured in Table 1, which shows the chance of becoming middle class for eight paths through the transition to adulthood. These are the paths taken by 76% of the children in our sample. The table shows that success in all four stages before adulthood is actually the most common pathway for children to take between birth and age 29, with over one-quarter of children taking that route and 81% of them achieving middle-class status. Of those who fail in all four life stages, a group that is only 8% of our sample, just 24% become middle class by age 40.

Table 1 also shows how early success or failure can matter even among those succeeding in the transition to adulthood. If children consistently fail before succeeding at age 29, they have a 60% chance of being in the middle class at age 40. If they consistently succeed in the earlier stages, they have an 81% chance. Similarly, people failing during the transition to adulthood have only a 24% chance of making it to the middle class if they have a consistent history of failure, but a 51% chance if they have a consistent history of success.

On the other hand, early failures need not be determinative if children can get back on track. Children who are not school-ready have a similar chance of being middle class as those who are school-ready if they can get on track by age 10 and stay on track. Indeed, a striking feature of Table 1 is how well success at age 29 predicts success at age 40. This may be an artifact of the way we define success at age 29. Because it includes having an income of 250% of the poverty level, individuals need only increase their income by about 20% over the next decade to become middle class by middle age.

For this reason, in Table 2 we ignore the transition to adulthood and consider how well particular paths through age 19 predict middle-class status at age 40. These six paths through adolescence cover 88% of the children in our sample, and the two paths involving three consecutive successes or failures account for nearly half of all children. At first glance, success or failure in early childhood seems less important than in subsequent stages. Children who succeed in all three stages have a 74% chance of being middle class at age 40, whereas those who are not school-ready but succeed in middle childhood and adolescence have a 71% chance—essentially no difference. Comparing paths 2 and 4, which are identical except for early childhood, gives a similar impression.

It would be wrong to conclude, however, that early childhood success is unimportant. If the primary way that school readiness affects the likelihood of becoming middle class is by directing people into more successful paths, that fact would be obscured by comparisons such as these. If a child is school-ready, there is a good chance that he or she will continue to succeed in later stages. If a child is not ready, it is relatively unlikely that he or she will get on track. Paths 1 and 2 are much more common than paths 3 and 4; recovery from early failure is relatively rare.

To summarize the data further, we calculated the probability of reaching the middle class by middle age based on the number of life stages in which the individual experienced success. As already noted, an individual who experiences a successful outcome at every life stage has an 81% chance of achieving middle-class status. The probability of achieving this status decreases with each additional unsuccessful outcome. An individual who hits just one speed bump has a 67% chance of reaching the middle class, but this figure drops to 54% if there are two unsuccessful outcomes, 41% with three unsuccessful outcomes, and 24% for those who are not successful under our metrics at any earlier stages in life.

Who are the children who succeed throughout life? They are disproportionately from higher-income and white families, whereas those who are never on track are disproportionately from lower-income and African American families. For example, 19% of children from top-quintile families stay on track throughout their early life, while only 2% of children from bottom-quintile families do. The figures by race show that 32% of white children but only 10% of black children stay on track.

The fact that nearly one-quarter (24%) of our off-track individuals (those failing at every one of our metrics) manages to achieve middle-class status is a reminder that there are quite a few individuals who are economically successful despite a lack of success during school. Such individuals may be successful because of skills or personality traits that are not captured by our metrics, or by relying on support from another family member, or purely by luck.

Unfortunately, birth circumstances are highly predictive of the likelihood of achieving success in the four life stages preceding middle age. Children born at a low birth weight or who have a mother who is poor, unmarried, or a high-school dropout—circumstances we denote as less advantaged—have only a 17% chance of achieving all four interim markers of success. Figure 1 shows the likelihood that an individual achieves success at any particular number of life stages conditional on their circumstances at birth.

Although few children from less advantaged backgrounds succeed at every life stage through their 20s, it appears that when they do, they are nearly as likely to reach the middle class as children born into more advantaged families. Figure 2 indicates that children from less advantaged families who stay on track have a 75% chance of joining the middle class, compared with 83% for their more advantaged peers. On the other hand, although additional successes do increase the chances of ending up middle class for disadvantaged children, they often increase the chances more for advantaged children. Advantaged children are about as likely to end up middle class as disadvantaged children who have an additional success under their belt. For example, an advantaged child with no successes through their 20s is nearly as likely to end up middle class as a disadvantaged child with one success. Family background matters because it tends to affect childhood success at each stage of the life cycle, but also because it affects the likelihood of ending up middle class even for children experiencing similar trajectories through early adulthood.

Help on the ladder

Because a number of studies have demonstrated that the gaps between more and less advantaged children are large and getting larger, without a clear plan to prevent the less advantaged from getting stuck at the bottom, the nation risks developing a society permanently divided along class lines. But our results and those of other researchers reveal some good news: Although it may be difficult for many children to stay on track, especially disadvantaged children, birth circumstances do not have to become destiny.

When children stay on track at each life stage, adult outcomes change dramatically. Parents who tell their children to study hard and stay out of trouble are doing exactly the right thing. But government can play a role as well, even if limited. In particular, government at various levels can adopt policies to foster intervention programs targeting every life stage to help keep less advantaged children on track. The research community has now identified, using rigorous randomized controlled studies, any number of successful programs, some of which pass a cost/benefit test even under conservative assumptions about their eventual effects. The following descriptions of successful programs are illustrative, not exhaustive.

Family formation. The first responsibility of parents is to not have a child before they are ready. Yet 70% of pregnancies to women in their 20s are unplanned, and, partly as a consequence, more than half of births to women under age 30 occur outside of wedlock. In the past, most adults married before having children. Today, childbearing outside of marriage is becoming the norm for women without a college degree. To many people, this is an issue of values; to others, it is simple common sense to note that two parents are more likely to have the time and financial resources to raise a child well. Many young people in their 20s have children with a cohabiting partner, but these relationships have proven to be quite unstable, leading to a lot of turmoil for both the children and the adults in such households.

Government can help to ensure that more children are born into supportive circumstances by funding social-marketing campaigns and nongovernmental institutions that encourage young people to think and act responsibly. It can also help by providing access to effective forms of contraception, and by funding teen pregnancy prevention efforts that have had some success in reducing the nation’s high rates of very early pregnancies, abortions, and unwed births. A number of well-evaluated programs have accomplished these goals, and they easily pass a cost/benefit test and end up saving taxpayers money.

Early childhood. The early childhood period is critical, and home visiting programs and high-quality preschool programs, in particular, can affect readiness for school. Home visiting programs, such as the highly regarded Nurse Family Partnership, focus on the home environment. Eligible pregnant women are assigned a registered nurse who visits the mother weekly during pregnancy and then about once a month until the child turns age 2. Nurses teach proper pre-and postnatal health behaviors, skills for parenting young children, and strategies to help the mother improve her own prospects (family planning, education, work). The program is available to low-income first-time pregnant women, most of whom are young and unmarried and enroll during their second or third trimester. It has had impressive success in improving health, such as reductions in smoking during pregnancy, maternal hypertension, rates of pre-term and low-birth-weight births, and children’s emergency room visits, and also appears to affect the timing and number of subsequent births. Children whose mothers participate in the program see modest improvements in their school readiness.

Preschool programs emphasize improving children’s academic skills more than their health or home environments. Preschool attendance is one of the strongest predictors of school readiness. Income and racial gaps in academic and social competencies are evident as early as age 4 or 5, and compensating for what these more disadvantaged children do not learn at home is a highly effective strategy. These programs have an impact not only on school readiness but also on later outcomes. For example, a child who is school-ready is almost twice as likely to acquire core competencies by age 11 and, having achieved those competencies, to go on to graduate from high school and be successful as an adult. Some evidence also suggests that school-ready children go on to do better in the labor market even if their early experience does not affect their test scores in later grades, perhaps because it affects their social skills, their self-discipline, or their sense of control over their lives.

Middle childhood. The period from school entry, around age 5, until the end of elementary school, around age 11, is often overlooked by policymakers. Yet it is the time when most children master the basics—reading and math—as well as learn to navigate the world outside the home.

Scores on math and reading, especially the latter, have improved little in recent decades. Gaps by race have narrowed only modestly, whereas gaps by income have widened dramatically. These academic skills will be much more important in the future as the economy sheds routine production and administrative jobs and demands workers with higher-level critical thinking abilities. For these reasons, almost everyone agrees that the education system needs to be transformed. School reform could include more resources, more accountability for results, more effective teachers in the classroom, smaller class sizes, more effective curricula, longer school years or days, and more competition and choice via vouchers or charter schools.

However, most experts do not believe that more resources by themselves will have much impact unless they are targeted in effective ways. They also agree that accountability is important but must be combined with providing schools the capacity to do better, that teachers are critical but that it is hard to identify good teachers in advance, and that class size (holding teacher quality constant) matters but is a comparatively expensive intervention. Few curriculum reforms have been well evaluated or have demonstrated big effects. Finally, some charter schools and voucher experiments have produced positive results, but charters as a whole do not do a better job than the public schools.

In short, there is no simple solution. Most likely a combination of these or other reforms will be needed to improve children’s competencies in the middle years. Indeed, more-holistic approaches or “whole-school reforms,” such as Success For All, that involve simultaneously changing teacher training, curricula, testing, and the organization of learning have had some success. It is also encouraging that national benchmarks in the form of the Common Core State Standards have now been endorsed by 45 states. The Obama administration has pressed for tracking children’s progress in school, for rewarding teachers based in part on how much children learn, and for more innovation through charter schools. The nation is also going to need new experiments in the uses of technology and online learning. In the meantime, there are numerous more-limited efforts that have had some success at improving reading or math and that could be expanded to more schools.

It is not only academic skills that matter. Our data show that many children lack the behavioral skills that recent research indicates are important for later success. Interventions designed to improve children’s social-emotional competencies in the elementary-school years have produced promising results and need to be part of the solution. Social-emotional learning has five core elements: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decisionmaking. Learning to navigate these areas positively affects children’s behavior, reduces emotional distress, and can indirectly affect academic outcomes.

Finally, our analyses suggest that most children are reasonably healthy at age 11. For those who are not, access to health care is obviously important. It is likely that between Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, most children are (or will be) covered by public or private health insurance. But important exceptions may include illegal immigrants, children who live in rural areas, or children whose parents fail to bring them in for care. In the latter context, a recent experiment in New York City, the Family Rewards program, in which parents were offered a reward for making sure their children had insurance and regular checkups, found that there were only modest effects on the receipt of care, which is already quite high in the coverage area. But making sure that children get dental checkups, immunizations, and other preventive care is worth pursuing.

Adolescence. Our data show that just 57% of children graduate from high school with decent grades and having avoided teen parenthood and criminal conviction. Dropping out of high school, not learning very much during the high-school years, and engaging in risky behaviors are all barriers to later success. There has been a rise in incarceration during the past 30 years, driven by patterns among young men, particularly African American men. In contrast, and further reflecting the diverging trends for young men and women, teen births have declined to historically low levels—a consequence of historically low pregnancy rates, although rates remain high by international standards.

The teenage years have always been fraught with difficulty, but these data should be a wakeup call for parents, schools, community leaders, elected officials, and young people themselves. By the time they are teens, young people should begin to take some responsibility for their futures, and they need to be encouraged by parents and others to do so.

At the same time, school reforms can make a difference. In many studies, high-school dropouts report high levels of disengagement and lack of motivation. Education leaders and policymakers are attempting to respond to these issues of engagement with new types of high schools. One example, from New York City, is the conversion of a number of failing public high schools to small, academically nonselective, four-year high schools that emphasize innovation and strong relationships between students and faculty. The schools, dubbed “small schools of choice,” are intended to serve as alternatives to the neighborhood schools located in historically disadvantaged communities. Admission is determined by a lottery system after students across New York City select and rank the high schools they would like to attend.

The random assignment of students to these schools enabled researchers to study their effect on various student outcomes. The results indicate that enrollment in these schools had a substantial impact on student achievement. Throughout high school, these students earned more credits, failed fewer courses, attended school more dependably, and were more likely to be on track to graduate. They earned more New York State Regents diplomas, had a higher proportion of college-ready English exam scores, and had graduation rates nearly 15% higher than schools examined as controls.

Young adulthood. The transition to adulthood is increasingly lengthy, with more young adults living at home, fewer of them marrying, and more of them continuing their educations well into their 20s or beyond. This makes defining success during this period difficult. We look at what proportion of young adults are living independently and have graduated from college or are in a household with an income above 250% of poverty by the end of their 20s.

One very important barrier to college is inadequate preparation. As our data show, individuals who have graduated from high school with decent grades and no involvement in risky behavior are twice as likely to complete college and have a 71% chance of achieving success by the end of their 20s, whereas those who do not have only a 45% chance. But academic preparation is not all that matters. Research has shown that even among students with equal academic achievements, socioeconomic status has a large effect on who finishes college: 74% of high scorers who grew up in upper-income families completed college, compared with 29% of those who grew up in low-income families. Moreover, these income gaps in college attendance have widened in recent years.

There are a multitude of federal and state programs, tax credits, and loans that subsidize college attendance. One of the most important for closing gaps between more and less advantaged children is the Pell Grant program, because it is targeted to lower-income families (those with incomes below about $40,000 a year). The federal government spends about $36 billion on the program annually. The evidence on the effects of the grants is somewhat mixed. In part, this is because even if financial incentives matter (and they appear to, according to the best research), the process of applying for grants is daunting for lower-income families. Ongoing reforms to simplify the process should help. It has been estimated that for each additional $1,000 in subsidies, the chance of college enrollment increases by about 4 percentage points.

Whether enrollment leads to graduation is another matter. Although enrollment rates in postsecondary institutions, including community colleges, have shot up, graduation rates have increased very little. Efforts to improve retention and graduation rates by coupling tuition assistance with more personalized attention and services have had only modest effects to date.

Adulthood. Once individuals have completed schooling, left home, and entered the work force, the most important determinant of their success is the labor market. For those who reach adulthood without the academic and social skills to enter the middle class on their own, government policies should be linked to personal responsibility and opportunity-enhancing behaviors. This includes education subsidies tied to academic performance; income assistance that encourages and rewards work, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and child-care subsidies; career and technical education tied to growing sectors of the economy; and more apprenticeship and on-the-job training. Although important for all people during this aftermath of the Great Recession, such programs may be especially important for less-well-educated individuals, who have suffered not just a loss of employment opportunities but a decline in their earnings.

Putting the full responsibility on government to close all of these gaps across all of the life stages is, of course, unreasonable. But so is a heroic assumption that everyone can be a Horatio Alger with no help from society. By drawing on the lessons of science, government can put in place effective programs to boost the success of everyone striving to reach the middle-class dream, while also saving taxpayers money over the long run.

Recent years have been disappointing for U.S. advocates of aggressive action on climate change. Efforts to pass comprehensive cap-and-trade legislation, which would have promoted the deployment of clean energy by making dirty energy more expensive and thus cut U.S. emissions, failed spectacularly. Global climate change negotiations, expected by many to deliver a legally binding deal that would sharply constrain global greenhouse gas emissions, have done nothing of the sort. Meanwhile, warnings of dangerous risks in the climate system have mounted.

People who understand that the climate problem is serious have reacted by grasping for new ways that government can lead on this front. Out of this searching, a big new idea has emerged: The world can cut through the dead-end politics of climate policy by focusing on clean technology. At home, rather than penalizing dirty energy, government would step in to help make clean energy cheap, a much more positive agenda that its proponents argue would eventually encourage mass adoption of low-carbon energy sources. Internationally, virtuous competition to win a clean energy race would replace the tired and unproductive squabbling that has marked efforts to agree on emissions constraints. Cheaper clean technologies would also mean that developing countries, where most future energy demand will come from, will fuel their economies cleanly, since cheap low-carbon options will become the ones that also enhance economic growth.

Alas, the turn from regulation to innovation is not a magic recipe for eliminating conflict over domestic or international policy, or even for significantly reducing it. Instead, it will create new fights in new spheres. This is not a reason to reject a big technology push as part of a serious climate strategy; climate change needs to be confronted, and conflict is almost certainly endemic to serious climate policy. Nonetheless, before policymakers place their bets on technology policy, they would do well to better understand the opportunities for conflict that lurk there. If they do, they will realize the limits of technology policy and will more likely pursue a modest but constructive approach. If they do not, the more likely outcome is a drive that tries to do too much with technology policy. But just like the maximalist efforts to solve every climate problem with cap-and-trade and an international treaty, that overstretch is likely to beget failure.

Promise and problems

The political logic motivating calls for a new focus on technology in U.S. domestic policy is straightforward. Americans do not like regulation, as is evident in their reactions to cap-and-trade, but they are enthusiastic about innovation and technology. They are averse to constraints, and whereas cap-and-trade was squarely about limits, technology promotion is about expanding options and possibly stimulating economic growth. Moreover, many see greenhouse gas regulation as being about creating losers, most notably in fossil fuel industries and those who depend on those industries for energy; technology promotion, in the new narrative, is about creating new winning industries and large constituencies who can gain from the options they provide.

The international case for a focus on technology is similarly straightforward. Traditional climate negotiations are about spreading the pain of emissions reductions. Each country fights to ensure that it is spared onerous obligations and that others bear as much burden as possible. Focusing on technology would sidestep that fight. If clean technology becomes cheaper than dirty fuel, then all countries will want to adopt it, and there will be no burden to be shared. Climate diplomacy is also immensely complicated. Negotiations over rules for measuring emissions and schemes for trading greenhouse gas credits take diplomats deep into difficult details. Technology, by contrast, appears to harness markets straightforwardly to help spread low-emissions behavior without the need for major international coordination or technical negotiation.

Much of this appears persuasive, yet there is good reason to believe that it is wrong. Americans may not like regulation, but they do not appear to like government spending or taxes either. Yet without new taxes, spending, or regulation, government has no significant tools with which to promote clean energy innovation. Technology promotion can superficially appear to be purely about encouraging growth—cheaper energy should mean more economic activity—but that ignores the cost of promoting clean technology in the first place. Indeed, ill-conceived government efforts to cut the cost of clean energy would simply spend taxpayer funds without producing any real world payoff. In addition, technology policy, if it is to succeed in dealing with climate change, will inevitably create losers alongside its winners. Cutting emissions requires not only using more wind, solar, and nuclear power, it also requires using less coal and oil.

Further problems loom on the international front. Technology promotion, just like emissions cuts, requires dividing a pie. The only difference is that the pie is a new one. Only so many wind turbines, solar panels, and nuclear reactors can be sold into the international market, and countries (and their firms and workers) will fight to maximize the fraction that are theirs. Moreover, a race to develop clean energy will not necessarily spawn a race to deploy it. Technology policy can make clean energy cheaper, but not necessarily cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives, particularly existing coal power plants whose capital costs are already sunk. Policy interventions such as cap-and-trade or regulatory mandates, with all the political challenges they entail, will still be required to tip the scales.

None of this means that clean technology policy should be neglected. After all, it is not as if other dimensions of climate policy are problem free. Policymakers will need, however, to confront the challenges of crafting effective technology policy head on. They will also need to take special care to maximize the odds that their policies are well designed. The fact that people are skeptical of government efforts to promote economic and technological change increases the importance of ensuring that technology promotion efforts are seen to succeed.

Navigating the home front

Domestic policy design faces one central question: Where should government intervene? This question is easiest to settle at two extremes. Technology in the earliest stages of research will be hard pressed to find significant commercial support. Ideas are leaky even with robust protection of intellectual property; investments by one firm in creating knowledge will often redound to the benefit of others instead. Economists have thus long identified spending on research as a place where governments can and should intervene constructively in markets. Those making U.S. energy policy should take that advice.

At the other extreme is mature and commercially established technology. Here, government should largely avoid subsidizing deployment. Some will argue that intervention is justifiable on environmental grounds. Subsidies to deploy wind turbines, for example, may make sense because of the value of wind energy in reducing emissions. But this is not a fiscally feasible path in the long run. Subsidizing the deployment of clean technology at a scale that would actually create deep cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would eventually cost hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

It is much more difficult to determine what makes policy sense in between. That territory, where developers build full-scale first-of-a-kind projects to demonstrate the feasibility of new technologies, scale up their businesses, and learn how to reduce costs through early stage commercial deployment, is known as the “valley of death” for good reason. There are only so many investors willing to risk significant amounts of money on unproven technologies that might take many years to turn a profit, particularly when the long-term policy picture is so unsettled and the ultimate market is unknown. Without government intervention, many promising inventions inevitably wither here on the vine.

This problem has been recognized in many areas of technology, but it is particularly acute when it comes to energy. During the past 60 years, and particularly over the last 30, the venture capital industry has become critical to sheparding technologies through the valley of death, removing much of the need for government intervention. It has been particularly successful in areas such as information technology and biotechnology. Encouraged by the recent explosion of Silicon Valley interest in clean technology, many people who think about energy assume that venture capitalists will play the same role in clean energy as they have in other fields. But most areas of energy are a poor fit for the venture capital model. Venture capitalists deploy small to moderate amounts of capital over periods of about three to five years on technologies whose intellectual property can be protected through legal means such as patents and copyrights. This business model is a perfect fit for things like software development, which does not require extraordinary amounts of money, where product lifetimes are short and thus new products can penetrate markets quickly, and where intellectual property is relatively straightforward to protect.

Most types of energy technology, though, do not fit this bill. First-of-a-kind biofuels plants cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and new-design nuclear reactors or coal-fired power plants that incorporate carbon capture and sequestration cost billions. Capital stock turnover is slow, with vehicles lasting a decade or more and power plants lasting on the order of half a century, which makes rapid market penetration impossible. And intellectual property law is often poorly suited to protecting important advances, including demonstration of the commercial viability of well understood but heretofore undeployed technologies, or innovative business models that bring down the cost of deploying fuel and energy-saving technologies. All of this means that venture capital cannot be counted on to take energy technologies through the valley of death, and that government will need to consider intervening much more seriously.

Yet the prospect of substantial market intervention immediately sends the climate problem back whence technology was supposed to liberate it: the realm of grubby politics and ideology. Just as there are fundamental philosophical divides over the role of regulation in the U.S. economy, which shaped the cap-and-trade debate, there are big ideological differences over the legitimate role of the U.S. government in intervening deeply in markets for new technology. Indeed, the turn to technology may make ideological fights worse. One can plausibly argue that cap-and-trade does not pick winners and losers in the economy; it simply (and subtly) shifts the playing field. In contrast, an active effort to help technologies bridge the valley of death will inevitably require supporting individual firms and technologies, precisely the sort of behavior that opponents of government intervention often find most troubling. Remember the uproar when the Solyndra solar energy company defaulted on its $535-million federal loan. Moreover, just as the cap-and-trade debate set off a flurry of industry efforts to shape the system to their interests, so too will a big technology push; the only change will be in the set of supplicants. Indeed, the problem may be worse. With cap-and-trade, fights over the distribution of the spoils were largely inconsequential to the policy’s environmental effectiveness. In contrast, successful rent seeking from technology companies may mean that large amounts of capital are steered to dead end firms and ideas, leaving less for real prospects. That would hurt the policy’s performance.

New sources of international conflict

The challenges entailed in crafting effective technology policy do not end at the water’s edge. Any U.S. technology policy will inevitably need to have two international goals: blunting climate change by maximizing the global deployment of clean technology and strengthening U.S. competitiveness by maximizing the global deployment of U.S. clean technology. Anyone who believes that the second goal can be discarded is not taking domestic politics seriously; anyone who would neglect the first is not talking about climate policy. Yet the two directions will often conflict. Moreover, even when they don’t, fights over which country will get a bigger piece of the clean energy market will be inevitable, particularly if countries succeed in making that market grow.

Economists have a straightforward response to these dilemmas. Technology spreads through international trade and investment and by the free and secure flow of ideas. Consumers in one country buy new products made in another; firms set up factories overseas that use their new technology; companies license innovations developed elsewhere. Economists argue that if this international market for technology is allowed to work freely, the United States will maximize its economic gains while also protecting the climate. If that means that wind turbines are made in India, or solar panels are made in China, rather than both being made in the United States, that is simply the market telling the United States that it can make more productive use of its talent and resources. At the same time, the United States can benefit from cheaper clean technology made overseas.

There is much to this argument, but it has important limits. For starters, the decision to trade freely isn’t a unilateral one. U.S. policymakers may decide that a liberal system of trade and investment will help square their climate and economic objectives, but China may choose not to play along. U.S. policymakers will then be forced to select among unattractive alternatives, whether acceding to large market distortions or choosing to launch a trade war. Either way, free market dogma will not tell them what to do.

Moreover, the same market failures that exist domestically—underinvestment in R&D, a lack of capital and patience in the valley of death—also exist internationally, suggesting that optimal economic outcomes will require governments to correct those flaws. Yet there is no reason to assume that such interventions will make the United States better off. Just as policies that improve domestic economic efficiency need not benefit all firms, it is perfectly plausible that international policies that look sensible from a global economic standpoint will not be beneficial to all countries. For example, the most efficient policy for moving new energy technology through the valley of death may encourage U.S. inventions to be manufactured in China, which may not ultimately benefit the U.S. economy. Moreover, even if a given policy will ultimately benefit Americans, voters may distrust it and demand measures that more explicitly assure them a big slice of the pie. Alas, the results are unlikely to be ideal.

There is also a deeper problem that is peculiar to clean energy. Efforts that succeed in reducing barriers to international trade and investment, and hence greasing the wheels of technology diffusion, may end up gutting markets for clean energy. Why? As long as clean energy is more expensive than dirtier alternatives, other domestic policies will still need to tip the balance toward investments in clean options. Such policies, though, are often advocated on the grounds that they are good for national competitiveness. U.S. policymakers, for example, have often made the case for climate policy by arguing that it will strengthen U.S. industry. In India, the government has advocated efforts to massively increase the use of solar energy as a way to boost domestic solar firms and has set aside a large chunk of the solar market for them in order to make that point. In China, efforts to deploy large numbers of wind turbines are justified not only as helping with energy security, but also as providing a foundation for a strategic export industry.

Yet a successful effort to knock down trade and investment barriers may mean that domestic firms that would have benefited from policies that encourage clean energy deployment lose out. With those firms no longer poised to gain from domestic policy that promotes clean energy, the political forces advocating low-carbon policies would suffer. Ultimately, demand may be gutted. That would be a loss both for U.S. exporters—a big slice of a nonexistent market is not worth much—and for efforts to combat climate change.

A modest way forward

A shift from cap-and-trade and regulation to technology and innovation will not banish politics or diplomacy from the climate scene, either at home or abroad. But there are steps that prudent policymakers can take to insulate a technology strategy from the greatest risks and to maximize the odds that it will deliver significant payoffs. The key to a successful technology strategy is modesty. A maximalist strategy will run into far more roadblocks and conflicts—and is more likely to fail—than one that seeks to make serious contributions without attempting or claiming to solve the entire problem by itself.

There is no better place to learn this lesson than from the ill-fated climate strategies of the past few years that proponents of a new technology push want to replace. At home, cap-and-trade morphed from a modest attempt to control greenhouse gases into a core fix for a moribund U.S. economy and its dependence on foreign oil. This made for an implausible case. At a very basic level, Americans found it difficult to believe that charging them more for electricity could revive the U.S. economy. It also required advocates to make sweeping claims that turned off many voters. Many Americans instinctively recoil from claims that regulatory policy is the route to economic growth; they are far more conditioned to the more modest claim that regulation is necessary for the environment. To be certain, the death of cap-and-trade was overdetermined. Economic uncertainty and poisonous partisanship were leading factors in its demise. But overwrought claims that it could solve the entire U.S. emissions problem alone, all while delivering a critical blow to economic stagnation, did not help its fate.

The international drive for an all-encompasing treaty suffered from similar problems. A global treaty with commitments to big emissions cuts and significant penalties for noncompliance should have been recognized early on as a nonstarter. States have little certainty as to whether they will be able to deeply reduce their emissions over the coming decades, and since they do not know whether they can actually make deep emissions cuts, they have always been unlikely to make costly promises to that end. Moreover, by choosing the maximalist goal of negotiating a global agreement, states added additional and unnecessary complication. Twenty countries are responsible for about 80% of global emissions, but strategists sought a deal among 192, leaving themselves vulnerable to the machinations of states from Venezuela to Sudan.

A wise technology strategy should be robust yet restrained in its ambitions. At home, it should start with a push on research, while avoiding massive subsidies to the widespread deployment of mature or nearly-mature technologies, which would stretch the government’s mission and open it up to reasonable accusations of fiscal irresponsibility. The recently created Adavanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) is the sort of effort that makes sense in this vein; large economywide subsidies to the deployment of mature renewable energy or nuclear plants are the kind that do not.

Government funds should be used to help move technologies through the valley of death, since without them, the technologies needed to cost-effectively deal with the climate problem are unlikely to materialize. This argues in favor of some direct support for early deployment of technologies such as advanced biofuels and carbon capture and sequestration. But strategists should stop short of advocating federal government spending later in the technology development process, where government is more likely to merely be subsidizing private firms rather than constructively shifting the course of markets. As part of the economic stimulus, some of this was done in areas such as battery manufacturing, but this was done primarily in the context of economic policy, not energy policy. As policy turns to long-term transformation of the energy system rather than efforts to jumpstart a depressed economy, such interventions are harder to justify. Moreover, they have been tainted by public skepticism of the 2009 stimulus; anything that connects a new push on energy technology to that now unpopular policy will make a new energy strategy much harder to sell.

Many will ask how such a limited strategy can solve the U.S. emissions problem. That misses the point. It cannot and should not try to. Regulation and other incentives, including cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, or a clean energy standard, that do not cost the government massive sums of money will still need to play a critical role in promoting fundamental transformation in the energy system. These tools, particularly cap-and-trade, are politically toxic right now, but the climate problem is a multidecade challenge, and there is no reason to assume that the old toolkit is permanently useless. Indeed, a core goal of domestic technology policy should be to make regulation and other incentives easier. Anything that helps cut the cost of technology will reduce the economic burden of other policies when they are eventually pursued, making them more politically palatable. Seeing technology policy as part of a broader strategy, rather than something that must solve the entire climate problem alone, will allow policymakers to focus it on those areas where it can make the biggest contribution and avoid others that are most likely to get it into trouble.

A similar philosophy should shape U.S. technology strategy abroad. The United States is pursuing international cooperation on research with countries such as China and India, and should continue. In particular, its recent efforts to create joint clean energy research centers with both countries are laudable. It should complement that with a push for liberal markets for international trade and development in clean technologies (something that has been part of the Doha round and has been pursued through Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) and for more effective intellectual property protection. That task will be most difficult with China. The United States has already been forced to launch a controversial World Trade Organization suit against Chinese solar panel subsidies, but it should be attempted nonetheless. To maximize its odds of success, the United States will need to work with others since it is not the only country hurt by protectionist policies.

That said, as with the domestic front, the United States should draw limits. U.S. spending on big, near-commercial technology projects in other countries, such as full-scale clean coal plants in China, should be approached cautiously, as it is likely to raise political ire. It is also more likely to be a substantive bust, if only because the big price tags involved in individual projects will make it much tougher for the United States to spread its bets across multiple initiatives. U.S. diplomats should also stop short of opposing every barrier to trade and investment in clean energy that other countries throw up. Some of those barriers will be necessary to maintain demand for low-carbon technologies. For example, the United States can tolerate some local-content requirements in India’s solar initiative without suffering real economic harm. Moreover, by picking their fights, U.S. negotiators will be more successful in those that they choose to pursue.

Just as on the domestic front, technology strategy will need to be one piece of a broader international puzzle, lest policymakers try to do too much with it and inevitably fail. Yet unlike cap-and-trade and robust regulation at home, there is essentially no chance of revival for robust global treaty efforts complete with strict targets, timetables, and sanctions for noncompliance any time soon. Fortunately, there is also less need. Countries’ decisions about emissions have always been much more about domestic interests than foreign policy. A less formal approach that focuses on coordinating policies across borders, already under way as the result of some modest progress at the global climate talks, as well as innovative efforts to coordinate technology promotion such as the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) process, may be the best that is possible in the near future. More robust international efforts will eventually be required, but for now, maximizing room for domestic policy development, including through the right approach to technology, is the most important thing that can be done.

This approach to policy may leave those who worry most about climate change cold. When faced with a massive problem, people naturally grasp for an all-encompassing solution that promises salvation. Yet such schemes invariably reveal themselves to be mirages, and overwrought efforts to realize them too often backfire. Wiser policy will involve modest moves forward on multiple fronts, including technology. It would be tragic if policymakers chose a different course and replaced one overburdened climate strategy with another.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) recently reported that nearly three dozen countries designated as “alarming” or “serious” on its Global Hunger Index scale are leasing vast swaths of farmland to international investors. IFPRI revealed that these foreign investors are cultivating crops and then immediately spiriting them out of these hunger-riven nations. Seven countries with high hunger levels—Cambodia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Laos, Liberia, the Philippines, and Sierra Leone—have each agreed to deals that collectively constitute more than 10% of their total agricultural area (the figure approaches 20% in Sierra Leone). Oxfam just announced a similar finding: Two-thirds of large-scale land acquisitions have occurred in countries with “a serious hunger problem.”

Why are the world’s most food-insecure nations ceding precious food resources to outsiders? The answer requires a closer look at these land deals, which IFPRI has described as a new phase of the world food crisis.

According to Oxfam, since 2001 foreigners have acquired nearly 230 million hectares of farmland (the size of Western Europe), with most of this land being obtained since 2008. According to the World Bank, 60 million hectares’ worth of deals were announced in 2009 alone. The amount of relinquished land in poor nations, says Oxfam, equates to an area the size of London sold off every six days.

Asian (particularly Chinese, South Korean, and Indian), European, and Gulf governments and corporations, in pursuit of food and energy resources or simply seeking profits, are snapping up precious arable land in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. Most of these target areas are food-insecure (some are dependent on international food aid), impoverished, and corruption-prone, and few of their citizens enjoy robust land rights.

This is not to say, however, that large-scale land acquisitions are strictly a matter of wealthy investors preying on the developing world’s destitute. Africans and Asians are both investing intraregionally, and Australia and New Zealand have emerged as attractive investment destinations. The largest potential land deal announced to this point—a staggering 6 million hectares to grow soy and corn in Mozambique—has been pursued by Brazil.

This global land rush is not new. Several centuries ago, European colonialists and U.S. fruit corporations gobbled up enormous expanses of global farmland. However, several characteristics set today’s investments apart from their predecessors. One, suggested by the Brazil-Mozambique example, is sheer scale. Ten deals announced since 2007 involve at least 100,000 hectares of land, and there are five deals that constitute at least a million hectares. A study released this past summer by the United Nations and International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) concludes that 2.5 million hectares have been acquired in just five countries (Ghana, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mali, and Sudan), including almost 1.5 million hectares in Sudan alone. To get a sense of the magnitude, consider that the typical developing-world farmer has a plot of just two hectares.

Another difference from the past is product type. In previous centuries, the focus was on cash crops such as tea and bananas. Today, the emphasis is on grains and potential biofuels such as wheat, rice, sorghum, soy, corn, palm oil, and sugarcane. These are staples that meet the food and energy needs of millions.

Problematic deals

Given the need for greater investment in developing-world agriculture—a low-yield, inefficient sector whose struggles helped precipitate the 2007–2008 world food crisis—one may point to these land deals as an encouraging development that will boost agricultural productivity and benefit the local economy. Unfortunately, they are deeply problematic.

Generally speaking, they have not resulted in benefits for local communities, because most of the deals hire very few local laborers, transfer few agricultural technologies to local communities, and, most critically, sell few harvests to local markets. According to a study released by European researchers earlier this year, about two-thirds of foreign land investors operating in developing nations intend to export all of their production. Many investors don’t even bother to farm their land, instead preferring to sit on it for speculative purposes. A 2011 World Bank study found that farming has begun on only about 20% of publicly announced deals.

Projects that have been implemented pose considerable environmental threats. Land investors favor large-scale industrial agriculture, which emphasizes fossil fuel–based technologies, pesticides, and fertilizers. They also embrace deep plowing and heavy water use, which degrade land and tax natural resources. Deforestation is a major concern as well. Indigenous communities in Indonesia have lodged a formal complaint with the World Bank that accuses a palm oil company of destroying their forests. Yet the problem extends far beyond Indonesia. My new edited volume, The Global Farms Race, features research led by University of Georgia professor Laura German. She reveals that in both Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, forest conversions to oil palm production (one of the major crops figuring in land deals) have resulted in 100% deforestation rates. They have also caused extensive damage to indigenous animal species, including the elimination of 60% of a bird species in Malaysia.

Additionally, farmland investments imperil the basic needs of local communities by appropriating land they have long accessed for food, water, and medicine. In Ethiopia, an Indian agribusiness firm is growing food for export on land that previously cultivated teff, Ethiopia’s staple grain. Even worse, researchers and journalists have documented numerous cases of people suffering outright displacement. Land rights organizations allege that a Thai sugar company’s acquisition of 20,000 hectares in Cambodia uprooted hundreds of locals. According to Human Rights Watch, a resettlement program has “forcibly displaced” tens of thousands of Ethiopians in Gambella state, where more than 40% of the land has been set aside for investment. And in Uganda, a British firm’s seemingly benign project—the planting of new forest land—has displaced 20,000 people.

Some deals have sparked community unrest. In 2009, an unsuccessful attempt by a South Korean corporation to acquire 1.3 million hectares of farmland in Madagascar set off widespread national protests and helped oust the government that had championed the deal. More recently, in 2011, a Ugandan mob, angry about an Indian firm’s plan to clear rainforest for sugarcane production, killed an Indian man. That same year, furious Kenyans told the Guardian newspaper that they had been evicted from the Tana Delta to enable investors to construct a sugar plantation and vowed to respond with “guns and sticks … it will be war.” Another potential flashpoint is Papua, an Indonesian region wracked by a separatist insurgency led by indigenous Papuans. Here, a Saudi firm has acquired more than a million hectares on a Jakarta-controlled estate. With non-Papuans expected to be brought in as laborers, observers fear an exacerbation of strife.

Finally, large-scale land acquisitions could deliver a serious blow to a global food economy already hampered by sluggish harvests, high commodities prices, and recession. Imagine if major food-importing nations, spooked by volatile food markets and fearful of export bans, continue to undertake large-scale food production abroad instead of importing through commodities markets. This could mean lower market demand, reduced supplies, and, in all likelihood, even higher prices for those still dependent on food from market sources. (Food prices have risen by nearly 4% in poor countries since 2011, according to UN estimates.) The most vulnerable would be poor food importers, such as West African nations, with insufficient capital to follow the lead of wealthier importers and invest in farmland overseas.

The intention here is not to paint all land deals with a critical brush; there are undoubtedly success stories. Researchers from IIED have discovered contracts for several deals in Africa that apply international environmental standards and contain explicit investor commitments on employment and training. The World Bank has singled out several projects that generate employment for local smallholders. And New York Times reportage has described how Chinese acquisitions of Russian farmland are generating win-win results for both countries: China produces food and other resources desperately needed back home, yet also sells some of its harvests in local Russian markets, and even hands out free produce to those who happen to stop by its farms. Beijing also supplies scores of its own agricultural laborers, a boon for Russia’s land-rich yet sparsely populated rural regions. Such examples, however, represent exceptions, not norms.

Rising stakes

The race for farmland has no end in sight, because the drivers of large-scale land acquisitions promise to persevere in the years ahead. These include volatile commodities markets, extreme weather events, disappearing natural resources, population growth, and skyrocketing demand for food and biofuels.

Additionally, investors have powerful incentives to push forward. With food security under constant threat, food-importing governments must obtain food for their populations, and by producing it overseas, they bypass the perils of unpredictable markets. Meanwhile, private-sector financiers have compelling commercial reasons to continue to hoard land overseas, given high global demand for food (and biofuels) and the dwindling global supply of land and water resources needed for its production.

As long as the land deals continue, the threats outlined above will remain and could grow more acute as investments continue to proliferate. Imagine the long-term environmental implications of large-scale farming projects across central Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, regions that not only host many land deals but also are home to most of the world’s shrinking rainforests. Consider how the intensification of large-scale plantation agriculture could erode smallholder agriculture and snuff out local farming skills. And contemplate the possibility of long-time regional food export hubs, such as Southeast Asia’s rice production areas, becoming net importers, as outside investors devour local cropland and send their harvests back home, leaving the region with insufficient land to maintain its own export regime. Raul Montemayor, who runs a small farmers’ organization in the Philippines, warns in The Global Farms Race that large-scale land acquisitions, coupled with Asia’s rice demand, population growth, and expected climate change effects along the Mekong River, could well spark such a shift.

What can be done?

Because the chief motivations and incentives remain so strong, little can be done to halt large-scale land acquisitions. The international community has no ability (much less the right) to prevail on investors, most of them wealthy and powerful, to stop their activities. Therefore, Oxfam’s recent demand that the World Bank suspend its financial support for large-scale acquisitions is misguided.

Additionally, unlike in the past, host governments enthusiastically support these investments, because of the bridges, ports, and roads that investors promise to incorporate into their projects (large revenue boosts for host government coffers certainly don’t hurt either). Host officials have offered a range of inducements to foreign investors, from tax holidays to private security forces. Prevailing on host governments to stop signing off on such land projects, therefore, is unrealistic as well.

The most practical strategy is to accept the existence of the land deals and encourage policy changes that blunt their harmful effects. National governments seeking agricultural investments should tighten regulations governing foreign acquisitions of land, and they should make more vigorous efforts to limit the damage these deals cause to food security, livelihoods, and the environment. These governments should also establish greater protections for vulnerable smallholders. One example is to provide legal assistance to small farmers to ensure that their interests are better protected in contract negotiations. Another is facilitating the ability of citizens to secure land titles, which would make them less vulnerable to land predations. The charity Concern Worldwide recently helped 6,000 Tanzanians obtain such documents in a country where only 10% of the population holds them.

Several host governments are already taking such measures. Argentina and Brazil are passing laws to limit foreign land ownership. Cambodia and Laos have even declared freezes on new land concessions. Admittedly, however, there is no guarantee that these policies will achieve their intended goals. Additionally, they have yet to be established in most of the popular African targets of land acquisitions, such as Ethiopia, Sudan, and Kenya.

The international community also has an important role to play. Normative measures, such as the implementation of international codes of conduct to ensure equitable and sustainable land deals, have little utility, given that such efforts are unenforceable and unlikely to be heeded voluntarily. Instead, international nongovernmental organizations and the media should showcase success stories, such as those few deals that actually deliver on investor promises and those governments that have acted to mitigate the deleterious aspects of land deals. The international community should also seek to shame the most egregious investors by producing extensive reportage on the most damaging deals.

Even while establishing measures to minimize the harmful effects of these investments today, additional efforts should take a more long-term view and strengthen the alternatives to large-scale land acquisitions, so that nations have more-innocuous ways of securing food sources when commodities markets are too volatile. The private-sector firm Syngenta is developing genetically engineered drought-resistant wheat and corn crops. This innovation could eventually provide parched Gulf nations with an indigenous solution to food insecurity that makes forays abroad unnecessary. And in another major development, after years of political resistance, Southeast Asian nations have finally agreed to form a regional rice pool. If such plans are consummated, these countries may have less of an incentive to turn to outside investors to enhance food production.

Finally, efforts should be made to ramp up international investments in agriculture that focus less on large-scale production and more on small-scale, targeted initiatives. Investors can finance irrigation development, higher-yield farming technologies, and training courses that enhance local communities’ agricultural skills.

Natural resource doomsday?

Increasingly, natural resource experts warn that the world is entering a Hobbesian period of resource scarcity in which nations must fight for the precious resources that remain. This era represents, to quote the title of Michael T. Klare’s newest book, “the race for what’s left.” Lester Brown’s new book, Full Planet, Empty Plates, tells a similarly scary story of dwindling food stocks, crop yields, and water and land resources colliding with rapid population growth and soaring food demand. “We are moving into a new food era,” he recently told the Guardian, “one in which it is every country for itself.”

Some may dismiss this talk as needless alarmism, but the story of large-scale land acquisitions seems to foreshadow this desperate, no-holds-barred resource scramble. Food-needy nations are taking matters into their own hands by eschewing food markets and growing their own food abroad. In most host nations, smallholder communities can only watch helplessly as these outsiders voraciously consume their precious land and water resources. Meanwhile, less capital-rich food importers, or those simply unwilling to venture abroad to obtain food, must make do with volatile and expensive food markets, and worry about the ramifications for their restive and hungry populations.

The takeaway? The global farms race is freighted with significance—for its participants, its spectators, and even those who, at their own peril, pay it little mind.

Michael Kugelman ([email protected]) is the senior program associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He is the lead editor of The Global Farms Race: Land Grabs, Agricultural Investment, and the Scramble for Food Security. Follow him on Twitter @michaelkugelman.

The early part of my career was focused on the elusive notion of an idea and its economic power. I worked both at the theoretical level and the policy level in thinking through what we should do in our policies to take the full advantage of the power of ideas.

What makes ideas so remarkable is their capacity for shared use. A bottle of valuable medicine can heal one person, but the formula that is used to make the medicine is as valuable as the total number of people on Earth. Economists call this concept “non-rivalry.” Working through both the theoretical and policy implications of non-rivalry took up the first decade or more of my career.

There is a saying that you all know that we use to capture this character of non-rivalry: If you give someone a fish, you feed them for a day, but if you teach someone to fish, you destroy another aquatic ecosystem.

My new work really springs from this, from a recognition that progress, in the broadest sense, is a function not just of the development of new technologies, but also the development of rules that make sure that we use those technologies appropriately to make us all better off.

My goal is to explore this co-evolution of rules and technologies. In basic control theory, the distinction is made between control variables and state variables. The state variable could be the amount of water in the tank, and the control variable is the valve. The science policy community—and I certainly include myself in my early work—thinks of rules as control variables. We use legislative actions such as the Bayh-Dole Act to change the rules on patenting, or we make new rules about education subsidies to attract more people to science and engineering. If we just come up with a good rule and figure out how to get it implemented, that will have implications for the dynamics of technology.

The point I want to argue today is that we can step back and think of rules and technologies as state variables that influence each other and co-evolve. The deep control variables are something I am going to call metarules. The metarules are the rules by which we change the rules that we need to change on a day-to-day basis. In a dynamic world, we need to keep changing those rules all the time.

The Charter Cities initiative is an attempt on my part to propose a different metarule for changing the rules in developing countries, one that could, in some sense, circumvent many of the roadblocks that stop changes in rules. The underlying strategy behind Charter Cities is to use the power of a start-up in contrast to something like reform of an existing institution. The start-up firms are the way in which very important new innovations come into an industry. Perhaps, start-up political jurisdictions could have that same effect in the developing world. The Charter Cities Web site has information about the theory and its practical implications in Honduras, which is starting an entirely new political jurisdiction and city.

But my purpose here is not to address the political hurdles in developing countries but to examine the dynamic relationship between rules and technologies in the United States. To frame this, let me start with an example of a rule that we decided that we wanted to change decisively in the 1960s and 1970s: the rule that said that blacks should be treated differently than whites in the United States.

Calling that a rule highlights something that might not be obvious. Rules capture any social regularity. They can be created by legislation, regulation, and enforcement, but they can also be the result of social norms. Discrimination was the result of both of those processes.

The nation went about changing that rule in a variety of ways. One way was through the filing of lawsuits that eventually made their way to the Supreme Court. These lawsuits appealed to fundamental principles in the Constitution and led to the early steps in desegregation in schooling.

Another way was through congressional action that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This legislation is enforced by detailed rules, issued by organizations such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that stipulate what steps an employer must take to implement an affirmative action program.

A third way in which the nation changed these rules is illustrated by the actions taken by the U.S. Army after the Vietnam War, when it sought to eliminate discrimination and achieve better racial harmony as it made the transition to an all-volunteer army. Charles C. Moskos, a Northwestern University sociologist renowned for his study of the military, tells the story of a cafeteria at Fort Hood, where all the black soldiers would regularly eat together at one table. One day, a white sergeant went over to the black soldiers and told them to go sit at other tables and that in the future there would be no table that would be considered exclusively for black or white use. Moskos observed that this type of rule enforcement, which was appropriate for the military, would not be effective on his college campus.

Even though many people might object to the military system of enforcing rules, the fact is that the Army has been the most successful U.S. institution at abolishing formal discrimination, reducing informal discrimination, and achieving thorough integration. We should be open to the possibility that there are different ways to go about changing, rules. The familiar paths of elections, legislative action, and formal judicial procedures are not the only viable and legitimate options.

Consider another example that is more recent and more familiar: stabilizing an economy in the face of a dramatic crisis. The nation has two systems of metarules for responding to a crisis. One is that Congress can pass special legislation, as it did in 2008 with the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The other is that the Federal Reserve Board has the authority to take unilateral action on many financial matters, just as the Army can in managing its troops. The Fed responded much more quickly and aggressively than did Congress, and arguably, it deserves the credit for saving the United States and the world from a disastrous global financial panic.

We need to keep an open mind about metarules and to be rigorously scientific in identifying goals and assessing the mechanisms for achieving them.

The power of metarules

Having articulated this framework of the co-evolution of rules and technologies and certain metarules that define how rules are updated, what does it imply for the nation’s response to the Great Distress, the coming 5 to 10 years of economic turmoil into which the United States is heading? Can an understanding of metarules make it possible to understand this period in a longer historical context?

One possibility is that the legislative and regulatory process that the nation uses to set many of the rules for its economy may not be producing the desired outcomes. In particular, they may be giving too much power to the hierarchical organizations that collect net income from the government. Consider a few examples and their connection to the Great Distress.

The financial sector in this country is regulated by legislation and regulations passed by agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission. Congress recently completed a reform process of legislation and some reorganization of these agencies because of the evidence that existing rules and regulations were not effective in preventing the recent financial crisis. The nation is making a serious effort to update its rules, but it is far from certain that the current approach will be effective.

Look at the healthcare sector, which has just been through a major round of legislation designed to reform its rules, a task that has been on the national agenda for decades. A movement to revise the relationship between national and state governments and their employees is gaining strength. Several states are trying to limit the range of items that are subject to union collective bargaining agreements. Many states and local jurisdictions have eliminated elected school boards and given control of the schools to a governor, mayor, or other official. In higher education, the rapidly expanding for-profit institutions are trying to influence the legislation and the regulations that influence their industry.

What is common to these activities? In each case, they are well-organized entities in some kind of a hierarchical structure that have the opportunity to have significant increases in net income if the government makes one set of decisions or to have reductions in that income if the government makes a different set of decisions. In all cases one can argue that they have been too effective in promoting their own self-interest with the result that the national interest has suffered. All of these attempts at reform are trying to redress the balance.

For decades now, a background theme in economic discussions has been the increase in income inequality. Although economists are engaged in a long-running debate about the details of how best to measure income, the underlying fact about which there is no dispute is that income inequality has been growing in the United States. Even if technology has been improving rapidly enough to raise average income, somehow the benefits of that are being distributed in a way that favors those on the upper rungs of the economic ladder so that median income is not growing.

Tyler Cowen of George Mason University interprets the underlying problem as a problem in technology. He speculates that perhaps technology is not coming in fast enough or maybe it is not the right form of technology.

An alternative perspective illuminates the importance of rules. The key factor is that finance and health, the two sectors where concerns have arisen about the quality and effectiveness of their governing rules, have captured a rapidly increasing share of GDP.

Finance has grown from roughly 6% of GDP in the 1970s to more than 15% today. Healthcare has grown from 5-6 to 12-13%. The data for government are provided for reference. This measurement of government is essentially the workers that governments hire and the buildings that they build. This is not a measure of taxes collected to then return to consumers in the Medicare program. That is treated as a transfer. It might surprise many Americans to learn that government’s share of GDP has actually decreased during this period when shares of finance and healthcare were growing dramatically.

If there is something wrong with the rules in finance and healthcare and if those rules in some sense have actually grown worse since the 1970s, and these sectors are becoming much larger fractions of GDP, it is conceivable that they are behind some of the broader measures of distress in the economy.

For example, compensation and returns in finance are highly concentrated among a very small number of people. Having even more of GDP going to finance and having that be very concentrated among a few people is clearly contributing to increases in income inequality. Some of the compensation in healthcare, especially among medical professionals, is also concentrated at the upper end of the income scale and thus also may be contributing to inequality.

The most interesting question, however, is not the details of the forces behind income distribution but what is happening to the quality of the rules that govern finance and health care. Has quality been deteriorating, and if so, what are the implications?

In the recent healthcare debate little mention was made of the fact that most U.S. healthcare providers, such as the Blue Shields and the Blue Crosses, used to be nonprofits. Then in the 1990s, the country witnessed a massive wave of privatization of those organizations. At the time, there was concern about whether private organizations would provide the same charitable care as the nonprofits had, but other than that, no one raised any concern about the broader implications of this change. Instead of having a healthcare sector that looks primarily like Kaiser or the Mayo Clinic, we have these very large corporate interests in both insurance and in hospitals. The insurance part actually shows up in the finance curve. The employees of the hospital would show up in healthcare.

The possibility here is that having corporate entities with executives whose personal compensation is dependent on corporate profits created political pressures to adjust at the margin any law or any piece of legislation at the national level that influenced the profits of these organizations. They created very strong incentives to tweak those items in the direction of increasing the compensation for people in this sector. Some of the resistance to national healthcare reforms and some of the very effective political action right now to undermine the most recent healthcare reform may, in fact, be the long-run consequence of having switched from a nonprofit organization in this sector to a for-profit system of organization.

Failure to pay attention to the dynamics of rule-setting and the nature of the operative metarules could have blinded us to what was happening in areas such as setting compensation levels for Medicare. It may have allowed us to make what could end up being the biggest budgetary mistake in our nation’s history. It is not something that will be easy to roll back.

Why might the for-profit entity be problematic here? Part of it is just because so much of its compensation comes directly from the government or comes in ways that are influenced by government action, such as tax subsidies for employer-provided healthcare. But part of it may be because we have a system of metarules for setting the laws and regulations that relies so heavily on legislatures.

Remember, we could have had a system like the military that sets the rules. We could have had a system like the Supreme Court. But what we have is a Congress that passes bills and then agencies that implement those bills with regulations. That legislative process may be too vulnerable to manipulation by very well financed entities with an enormous amount of wealth and income at stake. Every dollar of cost savings in healthcare means a dollar in reduced income for somebody in that sector.

How would this show up? When Congress was at a budget impasse in Spring 2011 and in danger of shutting down, it managed to pass a bill at the very last minute. One measure in that complex legislation repealed a provision of the healthcare reform bill that provided free-choice vouchers even though these vouchers have no effect on the budget. Someone, and we don’t know who, inserted this repeal measure at the last minute.

There was also a rollback of $2.2 billion that had been set aside in the healthcare reform act to support the creation of a few private health cooperatives, which were designed precisely to rebuild some of the nonprofit providers in the healthcare sector that had been wiped out in the 1990s. But the funding for those was also wiped out as part of this budget compromise.

Healthcare interests, which have a huge stake in this area, managed to catch the government at this point of maximum vulnerability and extract a few key concessions for the industry. I think you can anticipate that we will see this scenario repeated in each of the next few crises that will take place in the Congress in the months to come.

Another example involves the for-profit higher education sector. Many of these institutions enroll large numbers of students who depend on government-guaranteed loans to pay their tuition. But students who attend these schools default on their loans at a higher rate than those who attend nonprofit institutions. Experts attribute this high default rate to the for-profits’ aggressive recruiting techniques that attract many unqualified students who do not pass their courses and therefore have trouble finding jobs or who find that the education they receive does not make them more employable.

The Department of Education is trying to promulgate regulations that would force disclosure of employment prospects for students, prohibit certain dishonest marketing tactics in recruiting students, and threaten a cutoff of the access to guaranteed student loans for institutions that have the worst default rates. Even though these regulations would clearly save the government money, a hundred members of Congress signed a letter to President Obama stating their disappointment that the budget legislation did not include language prohibiting the Department of Education from implementing its regulations.

This issue will not go away. We may be in the early stages of a shift toward for-profit provision of education, analogous to the 1990s shift to for-profit provision of healthcare. The budgetary and other social effects could be significant.

The one point to make about government employee unions is that this is not a left/right issue. These unions have a very big stake in net income from the government. Some observers worry that the unions have been able to use contract provisions such as defined-benefit retirement programs and disability benefits designed to extract payments that were not fully disclosed or that circumvented the usual accounting and budgetary mechanisms.

All of these examples go beyond the left and the right, Democrat and Republican. It is a general reflection of the vulnerability of legislative-like mechanisms to manipulation by these kinds of interests. A mayor, a governor, or a president is understood to be individually responsible for the outcome of decisions and policies, but members of elected bodies are able to elude this direct responsibility.

Rewriting the rules

So what are the possible responses to this? One that is fascinating is a move to change the role of the Congress. In the case of the Base Realignment and Closing Commission, Congress delegated a group of people to make the tough decisions and develop a comprehensive plan that would then receive an up or down vote. This insulated members of Congress from the back office negotiations, special deals, last-minute insertions, and other opportunities for organized special interests to exert undue influence.

One of the most important measures in the healthcare reform act is the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which will provide this kind of function for proposed cost reductions in the Medicare program. It will be very interesting to see if this survives the next few budget crises. If it does, there is a chance that it could lead to real change in how we make rules in the healthcare sector. The Greenspan commission was supposed to perform a similar function for Social Security, and the recent debt limit legislation creates a special congressional group to develop a budget plan that will be submitted for a simple up/down vote by the full Congress. Thus, we may see an evolution of the legislature to emphasize its investigatory functions and its up/down vote functions, but to have it much less involved in the detailed crafting of the legislation that influences the dollars that come in and out.

Another option is to try to rebuild the nonprofit sector in healthcare or to take steps to protect the nonprofit sector in higher education. It will be very interesting to watch how official policy goes in this direction.

One final point that is worth emphasizing is that top U.S. public officials are very poorly paid compared with their counterparts in other countries. The top civil servant in any department in Singapore receives a base salary of $1.5 million a year with the possibility of bonuses of as much as $500,000. There are promotion tournaments for the people who aspire to achieve those top positions. That means there is a serious financial incentive for talented people to stay in the government and work their way to the top.

An agency such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has to deal with pressure from the financial sector for regulations that let them earn profits at the expense of stability of the economy. If the SEC staff included people capable of earning millions of dollars in the private sector but who had devoted their entire careers to government service, the agency might have been better positioned to resist a very well organized campaign to adopt regulations that served the interests financial industry.

The critical point is that in trying to change the metarules we should not limit ourselves to the obvious paths of judicial action or legislative reform. The Army acts differently. The Fed acts differently. (And if these ill-conceived proposals to abolish the Fed succeed, the economy will encounter disasters we cannot even imagine.) All of these approaches have costs and benefits. Our responsibility is to be objective and scientific about what the goals are, what the data say, what the theory suggests, and to be willing to ask broader questions about what would be a good way to organize ourselves.

If we do that, we will make better progress. Progress there will be much more important for helping us get back to what we think of as the golden era in the United States than measures designed simply to speed up the rate of technological change.

Water is also the stuff of social conflict. Control of this strategic resource shapes global trade and investment in diverse sectors such as agriculture, minerals processing, apparel, and electronics. Reconciling the many uses of water is never easy, and as demand grows, competition among them heats up. Climate change, with its potential for profoundly affecting the water cycle globally and locally, adds a volatile new element to this mix.

Apparent intensified global competition around water has led some observers to foresee growing risks of violent conflict. The Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, warned the World Economic Forum in 2008 that “environmental stress, due to lack of water, may lead to conflict, and would be greater in poor nations. . . . As the global economy grows, so will its thirst. Many more conflicts lie just over the horizon.” In the United States, a report released by the National Intelligence Council in May 2012 also drew a stark picture, warning that “During the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems—shortages, poor water quality, or floods—that will risk instability and state failure, increase regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States on important U.S. policy objectives.” Although deeming it unlikely that countries would wage war over water in the near term, the assessment cautioned that “water problems—when combined with poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions—contribute to social disruptions that can result in state failure.”

Is there a looming threat of violence and instability around water? Are rival uses and growing demand for limited supplies poised to take a dangerous turn? What are the real risks, and what can be done to minimize them? Current knowledge about these questions is far from complete, and factors such as climate change and economic uncertainty confound confident forecasting. Nevertheless, what is known suggests important and perhaps surprising answers to these questions.

On the one hand, there is already extensive violence around water in today’s world, and little has been done to institutionalize the means to prevent or effectively manage water-related conflicts. On the other hand, the greatest risks come not from countries going to war over shared river basins or from rival factions launching civil wars to control water supplies. Rather, the danger is in a more complicated mix of bad water management, the marginalization of water-related livelihoods, and the undercutting of critical services provided by freshwater ecosystems, compounded by the inability of many governments to manage such challenges legitimately and effectively. These problems have little to do with growing water scarcity per se; rather, they are rooted in shortsighted, archaic, or unfair policies that affect water. The risks are real, but they are also fundamentally different than typically portrayed.

Is water growing scarce?

Obviously, water is scarce for anyone who lacks safe, affordable, and reliable access to it. Despite some progress in improving access, almost 1 billion people lack safe, reliable supplies of drinking water. More than 2 billion lack adequate sanitation. An estimated 2 million people die annually from preventable water-related diseases. The World Health Organization has estimated that 10% of the global disease burden could be eliminated simply by improving access to clean water and sanitation. Like people, ecosystems also face health risks when denied adequate supplies of water. Studies suggest that freshwater ecosystems, which provide vital goods and services such as clean water, biodiversity, flood protection, and recreation, are as endangered as any other type of ecosystem on the planet, given all the damming, dumping, draining, and diverting to which they have been subjected.

In global terms, freshwater availability is limited by the water cycle. Humans currently trap and use less than one-fifth of global runoff (the portion of the water cycle between rainfall and the sea), suggesting substantial possibilities for future growth. But after subtracting floodwaters that cannot be captured and the water in extremely remote river basins, the proportion trapped and used by humans rises to about half of what is realistically available. Tapping groundwater offers a temporary supplement, but those resources are being drawn down at unsustainable rates in many aquifers. Desalination of seawater is growing in some locales, but will probably remain a niche solution for the foreseeable future, given its cost and energy intensity. And none of this considers the substantial proportion of runoff that is best left alone to sustain the health of essential freshwater ecosystems. This combination of factors gives rise to what some experts have dubbed the gloomy arithmetic of water: growing populations and growing demand encounter a more or less fixed supply. Projections suggest that as much as one-third of the world’s people will live in river basins marked by significant water deficits within a few decades.

But before accepting these circumstances as a guarantor of scarcity and conflict, several cautions are in order. First, water is used with astonishing inefficiency in many agricultural, industrial, and municipal applications. The United States uses less water today than it did in 1980, despite a one-third increase in population and a more than doubling of gross national product, primarily by reducing some of the grossest inefficiencies, particularly in agriculture. Tightening supplies and rising prices can generate social conflict, to be sure. But they can also stimulate innovation and more efficient use. A recent study found that up to one-third of California’s urban water use could be saved with current technologies, and 85% of those savings are available at lower cost than that of securing new supplies.

Second, scarcity can be caused as much by the laws, policy decisions, and economic practices that govern water as by the physical limits of supply. Water supplies can be protected through water-quality measures and prudent landuse practices that keep watershed ecosystem services functioning. The failure to do so makes less water available for its most valuable uses. Inappropriate incentives, such as heavily subsidized electricity for pumping groundwater, can cause overuse of water. Unwise subsidies may also lead water users away from effective, longstanding practices that enhance supplies, such as rainwater harvesting or the maintenance of community water tanks.

Third, and more controversially, so-called “virtual water” must be considered in any assessment of water scarcity. The term refers to the water embodied in goods manufactured or harvested in one place but consumed in another. Simply put, many processes that use water can be accomplished with less water use, or with less pressure on scarce water supplies, simply by doing them elsewhere. For example, cotton grown in the deserts of Central Asia or the U.S. southwest relies on costly irrigation schemes and makes little sense in water terms when compared with, say, the rainfed cotton crops of West Africa. Relying on virtual water by importing water-intensive products promises its own tensions and conflicts, particularly when an imposed reliance on volatile world food markets hurts local food security, or when land grabs lock up large tracts of prime farmland for remote consumers. This practice offers a reminder, once again, that there are important social variables—laws, policies, economic incentives, and management decisions—that sit between how much water is physically available and how it is ultimately used.

The wild card in all of this is climate change, which promises profound, if sometimes hard to specify, consequences for the water cycle. Climate models generally agree that precipitation and evaporation will be accelerated with global warming; that current weather patterns will tend to shift toward the poles; and that, very roughly speaking, dry regions will tend to get dryer and wet ones wetter. Water supplies from glaciers and snow cover will see a net decrease in a warmer world, and precipitation patterns are projected to become more variable and more concentrated, with a higher proportion of total rainfall coming in storms of higher intensity. Climate science also suggests an increase in extreme weather events, although the evidence here is less clear-cut. The big message, of course, is that all of this will impose very difficult adjustments on water systems and uses around the world, even in places where water does not become less available.

The adjustment problem is complicated by the fact that water as a resource is already notoriously difficult to manage well. Water supplies are highly unevenly distributed across the landscape and can be highly variable from season to season and year to year. And because water flows, it is hard to capture and even harder to establish effective and enforceable rights to its access and use. Water can be moved beyond the river basins, lakes, and aquifers in which it resides, but often only at great economic, social, and political cost. Moreover, water is notoriously difficult to price properly, because of the many externalities that surround its production and the many public-goods aspects of its use. Managing water well is as difficult as it is essential.

Need for proper focus

Given all of these factors, fears about a future of violent conflict around water are not surprising. Most of the concern has centered on the specter of dangerous competition for water supplies in international river basins. Two-thirds of the world’s major rivers either cross borders or form borders between countries, and virtually all of the world’s non-island nations share at least one important river with one or more neighbors. This can create complex and difficult hydropolitical relations. Shared use by two or three countries can create stark asymmetries in the balance of power between upstream states that control the headwaters and downstream states in the floodplain or delta. In cases in which large numbers of countries share a river, such as the 6 countries arrayed along the Mekong, the 10 through which the Danube passes, or the 12 sitting in the Nile watershed, the complex challenges of collective action may inhibit cooperation and heighten tensions.

The good news is that although countries may sometimes use bellicose rhetoric when discussing water supplies, there are no significant examples in the historical record of countries going to war over water. The most comprehensive study to date, which looked at water-related events in shared river basins during the second half of the 20th century, found that cooperative events, such as treaties, scientific exchanges, or verbal declarations of cooperation, outnumbered instances of conflict, such as verbal hostility, coercive diplomacy, or troop mobilization, by roughly two to one; and that even the most severe episodes of conflict stopped short of outright warfare. Moreover, when conflict episodes did occur, they were typically not the result of water scarcity. Rather, the key factor was the inability of governments to adapt to rapid changes, such as when part of a country split off to become a new one or when a decision to build a large dam was made without consulting downstream neighbors.

The reasons for the lack of violent conflict are not surprising: War between nations is an increasingly rare event in world politics, water relations are embedded in broader relations between countries, and there are far less costly alternatives than war to improve water availability or efficiency of use. Well-designed cooperative agreements can go a long way toward managing shared rivers in a fair and peaceful manner.

But there is also bad news. First, the absence of historical water wars provides no guarantees about the future, especially if the world is entering an era of unprecedented competition for water supplies. Even if war is unlikely, there is a risk that governments will increasingly use water as a tool of coercive diplomacy, injecting tensions into international diplomacy and complicating opportunities to find cooperative water solutions. Second, well-institutionalized cooperation is not common and can be difficult to create. Fewer than half of the world’s shared rivers have a treaty in place governing water uses other than transportation, and many of the existing accords are archaic instruments that lack a foundation in best practices for water management. Catalyzed by the World Bank, the Nile basin states have been negotiating since 1999 but have not hit on a formula for a basinwide treaty. Several upstream states in the basin signed a separate deal in 2010, but it was vehemently opposed by downstream Egypt and Sudan.

There are some examples of enduring agreements in tense neighborhoods, including those on the Indus, Mekong, and Jordan rivers. But even among basins that do have modern agreements, few contain all countries in the basin, and many of the more impressive agreements on paper have not been implemented effectively. In 1997, the UN General Assembly approved a framework convention setting out core legal principles that should guide basin-level cooperation, including equitable water use, avoiding significant harm to other basin states, sound environmental management, information sharing, and peaceful dispute resolution. But the convention has languished, with only a handful of UN member states having ratified it.

Thus, there is a clear need to strengthen institutionalized cooperation. But the deeper problem is that some agreements may actually increase the risk of conflict. Most of the violence around water plays out on a local scale, such as a localized catchment, rather than on the scale of an international drainage basin. This means that many of the most immediate risks of escalating water conflict are found at the subnational level rather than in relations between nations. A mutually acceptable agreement may smooth tensions between countries (arguably, the smaller conflict risk). But if that agreement embraces poorly conceived water development plans or imposes unmanageable costs of adjustment on local communities, it may worsen the larger conflict risk of tensions within the watershed and complicate the challenge of managing water equitably and effectively.

The Mekong, which originates on the Tibetan Plateau and culminates some 4,000 kilometers downstream in the delta region of southern Vietnam, provides an important example. A cooperative arrangement among the four lower riparian countries (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam) was established in 1957, culminated in a treaty at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, and evolved into a stronger, modernized agreement in 1995. The agreement has been a vehicle for the exchange of information among participants and for efforts to engage upstream nonmembers China and Burma. Bringing those countries fully into the regime would certainly stabilize regional interstate relations. But what if the effect of doing so is an acceleration of poorly planned dam development throughout the basin? The consequences for the millions of people who live in the delta and depend on the river’s unique seasonal ebb and flow for their livelihoods in fishing and agriculture could be severe in terms of dislocation, human insecurity, and destabilizing social conflict.

Incentives for conflict

The emphasis on conflict risks in shared river basins also overlooks the changing character of violent conflict in world affairs in recent decades, with domestic or civil conflict outstripping interstate war as the primary threat to peace. Do a country’s water circumstances enhance the risk of civil war? Two decades of scholarly research and debate, although not resolving the issue, have reframed thinking about this important question. There are many documented instances in which scarcities of renewable resources, including water, but also forests, grazing land, and fisheries, have generated localized violent conflict. But efforts to correlate water scarcities or drought with the onset of civil war have for the most part not found a statistically significant link. Civil wars are driven primarily by factors such as political exclusion and economic marginalization, often accompanied by or channeled through ethnic, religious, or other forms of cultural bias. Although resource scarcities may be an element in creating those conditions, it is clear that important social variables, such as the quality of governance, the inclusiveness of institutional processes, and the equity of economic arrangements, play a key mediating role between environmental pressures and any social outcomes. Another way of stating the findings: Countries that have these properties have substantial ability to manage resource conflicts peacefully, whereas countries that lack them are already at much greater risk of civil conflict, irrespective of resource pressures.

Indeed, to the extent that there is a direct connection between natural resources and civil war, it seems to stem from resource abundance, not environmentally induced scarcity. According to the UN Environment Programme, at least 18 civil wars since 1990 have had a direct link to natural resources, either because the conflict was about control of the resource, or because control of the resource generated revenues that enabled combatants to sustain the conflict. The link between resource abundance and civil conflict—a variation of the so-called resource curse—is particularly pronounced for petroleum, but has also been documented with regard to high-value resources that are easily looted, such as alluvial diamonds or hardwood timber.

This link raises a provocative question about water. As demand growth and climate change make existing water supplies more valuable, perhaps dramatically so, could water become a conflict resource along the lines of oil, precious minerals, or hardwood timber? To answer this question requires understanding the causal mechanisms at work behind the association between resources and conflict. Much attention has been given to the idea that high-value resources can lead to civil violence by creating economic incentives for secession or insurgency: splitting off to create a new state if the resource is in a remote region, or seizing control of the state itself if necessary to control the resource. Here, the difficulty of capturing and controlling water resources suggests that there may be little in common with oil, although the salience of water in driving the burgeoning phenomenon of agricultural land grabs represents a different but no less troubling sort of resource capture.

However, the heart of the problem is not simply an incentive to struggle for control of economically useful resources, but rather the type of governance that springs up around such resources. The problem is not simply that revenues are large (in principle, a good thing for the host government and the nation). The problem is that such revenues fluctuate wildly in unstable world markets, breed corruption and patronage, and exempt governments from doing the hard political work of legitimate taxation, a critical source of broader political legitimacy. As researcher Michael Ross has put it, “States whose revenues are massive, unstable, opaque, and do not come from taxes, tend to have some strange qualities”—including proneness to civil conflict.

Although revenues from water are unlikely to rival those from oil any time soon, there are ways in which water projects can emulate some of the worst features of the resource curse. Dams and infrastructure for large-scale hydroelectric or irrigation schemes are vast capital-intensive public works projects that lend themselves to corruption and the cultivation of patronage networks. Moreover, an abundance of high-value resources can lure governments into embracing bad development models, with excessive borrowing against presumed revenues, social illegitimacy, and a failure to manage risk properly. And if the project is to export electricity or agricultural commodities, it links the country’s economic fate to highly volatile international markets in food and energy.

An example is the controversial Belo Monte dam project in the Brazilian Amazon. Although Brazil’s government has embraced Big Hydro as a centerpiece of the country’s energy future, the myriad uncertainties around projects designed to work for half a century or more make them highly risky ventures. An independent study that modeled plausible scenarios for the dam’s future, based on several key parameters that will shape its ultimate profitability, illustrates the problem. The researchers found that in less than one-third of the scenarios they modeled did Belo Monte turn out to be an economically rational undertaking over the full course of its usable life. In all of the other scenarios, profitability was derailed, sometimes disastrously, by some unfavorable combination of energy prices, inadequate stream flow, better economic uses of the river and surrounding land, and other uncontrollable factors. The dam has also fostered intense protest and dissent, not unlike the local controversies surrounding oil extraction in the Niger delta, the western Amazon, and elsewhere. Thus, rather than avoiding outright civil war over scarce water supplies, the larger problem is to avoid the toll of the resource curse on the political-economic capacity and social legitimacy of governments, by finding a prudent path of water development.

Finding a prudent path

The picture emerging from what is being learned about water and conflict, at both the international and national levels, is that the problem is more complex than simply zerosum competition for scarce water supplies. If there is a risk of large-scale violence, it stems not from physical water scarcity but from the institutionalized arrangements that shape how actors govern water. The risks—of destructive competition, failures of cooperation, and perhaps even violent conflict—increase when such arrangements are ineffective, illegitimate, or unable to adapt to changing circumstances. International cooperation initiatives and national policy reforms that frame the problem narrowly as water scarcity will not be effective conflict-management tools.

Indeed, poorly designed responses at the national or international level could easily make matters worse. Most of the expressions of grievance, confrontational events, and episodes of actual violence that occur around water take place on a local scale. Comprehensive data on episodes of water-related protest, rioting, strikes, and other forms of contention and confrontation are lacking, but accumulating evidence suggests that they are abundant. Globally, an estimated 40 million to 80 million people have been displaced as a result of dam construction, many forcibly and most without adequate compensation. A keyword search of world news coverage for any given month will turn up several episodes of protest around water pricing issues, poor water service delivery, contentious infrastructure projects, water pollution controversies, or land grabs that cut off water access. An events database compiled by researchers at the Peace Research Institute Oslo identified 1,850 “conflictive events” around water in the Middle East/North Africa region from 1997 to 2009, or one episode every 2.5 days.

Most contentious episodes around water are not violent. Nor are they necessarily a bad thing, because protest may be a healthy expression of citizen concerns and may provide a needed stimulus for positive change. But such episodes underscore the high stakes for people’s livelihoods and the health of communities and can be taken as early warning signals of failed or illegitimate policies. Nor is it enough to fall back on calls for broader political reform. Democratization does not by itself reduce the frequency of contentious episodes around water and may even increase them, because of the greater political space it affords for expressing dissent.

There is also worrisome evidence that water-related stresses, including but not limited to scarcity of supply, may stimulate more than just peaceful protest. One recent study, covering 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa over a 20-year period, found that deviations from normal rainfall patterns led to an increase in social conflict, including demonstrations, riots, strikes, antigovernment violence, and communal conflict between different social groups. The researchers found an upsurge during both unusually wet and unusually dry years, with the link to violent forms of conflict being stronger in unusually wet years. Another study, targeted more narrowly on East Africa, found a similar pattern of increased conflict around rainfall extremes, with higher rates of antigovernment rebel activity in unusually dry years and higher rates of intergroup conflict in unusually wet ones.

It remains unclear whether social tension and violence in these instances are triggered by the effects of extremely dry or wet years on people’s lives and livelihoods, by the grievances that result from how governments respond or fail to respond, by the perception that certain conditions are political opportunities to be exploited, or by all of the above. But again, the message is that the problem is not simply one of scarce water. The dangers lie in the turbulence of adjusting to change and in the risks that result when legitimate, welladapted responses are not forthcoming.

Moving ahead

Spurred by a fear of conflict over scarce water supplies, the international community, including bilateral donors, the World Bank, and nongovernmental organizations such as Green Cross International and the World Wildlife Fund, has sought to strengthen international water diplomacy in several ways. Efforts include promoting ratification of the UN Watercourses Convention and fostering dialogue efforts such as the Nile Basin Initiative, the German-funded River Basin Dialogue for Africa, and a host of basin-specific initiatives. To be helpful in managing water-related conflicts, such efforts must recognize the local and national dimensions of conflict risk, rather than simply the international dimension. And they must tackle the complex roots of a problem that cannot be reduced to preventing scarcity-induced water wars.

Perhaps the most important policy reform is to strengthen people’s rights to water and its benefits and give them a greater voice in water governance. In this light, the UN took an important step by recognizing the human right to water and the obligation of states to respect, protect, and fulfill water rights. The human right to water is also implicit in internationally recognized rights to food, survival, adequate living standards, and peoples’ right to manage their own resources. Although the strengthening of the rights-based approach to water needs is a welcome trend, it must be complemented by stronger participatory mechanisms that give stakeholders a clearer and more audible voice in water governance decisions. Most of the attention here has gone to national-level reforms in water law. Although such changes are important, they need to be reinforced at other scales, including local community-based natural resource management and international river basin negotiations.

Toward that end, the UN Watercourses Convention should not simply be ratified but improved. The convention provides a useful framework for guiding negotiations between governments to minimize conflict over shared basins, based on principles of information sharing, prior notification, dispute resolution mechanisms, and participation by all basin states. However, the convention lacks any commitments to the human security of local communities affected by international water dealmaking or provisions for voice and redress on the part of those communities (some of which were removed from the original draft articles when the convention came to the UN General Assembly). The convention is also inadequate in its environmental provisions, which stress pollution control but not ecological flows and ecosystem management. Without these innovations, the convention may facilitate better dividing of water supplies among nations but offers little guidance on genuinely cooperative watershed management for sustainability and human security. Without such reforms, the rush to promote international cooperation may simply accelerate poorly conceived exploitation of water resources.

There is also substantial room to improve water-related foreign aid. In terms of overall aid flows, water has been a second-tier priority as compared with other sectors, garnering only about 5% of total aid flows. Moreover, water aid tends to privilege drinking water over sanitation, new sources over existing systems, supply over demand, and resource development over ecosystem services and water quality.

Approaches to this problem must be flexible, especially given the highly uncertain climate ahead, financially as well as climatologically. Capital-intensive, large-scale water projects have had highly variable performance, often failing to return the benefits projected for them, and this has been the case even under more predictable financial and hydrologic conditions than those that lie ahead. Nor does it make sense to rely on silver-bullet solutions, be it desalinization, genetically engineered crops, or virtual water. These innovations may matter on the margins, but they probably will not be transformative during the next few decades, if ever. A diverse portfolio of responses, stressing demand management and locally adapted solutions, promises a more flexible, resilient approach. Moreover, this rule of thumb applies to policies and institutions as much as technologies. Much of the attention during the past decade has been devoted to institutional reform for better-integrated water resources management, in the sense of stronger coordination among different user sectors and different levels of governance. Although such reforms have been much needed, care must be taken that they do not create such inflexible, hard-wired structures of water decisionmaking as to be unable to adjust to a rapidly changing terrain.

Finally, it is critically important to tap water’s cooperative, peace-building potential, on scales ranging from local communities to international rivers. Strengthening dispute resolution mechanisms in shared international basins is of course a key element. But the lack of effective dispute-resolution tools is one of the weaker links in the chain of good water governance at all scales, national and subnational as well as international. There is also a need to link these levels more effectively, because transnational forces such as land acquisition or price fluctuations in global food and energy markets often drive local disputes. Current mechanisms, such as the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the World Bank’s inspection panel, or the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution process, are ill-suited to address transnational disputes that involve a wider cast of characters than just national governments.

Looking ahead, there are twin dangers. The first and more obvious is an inadequate response that fails to address water poverty, the onslaught facing freshwater ecosystems, and the weakly institutionalized cooperation concerning so many of the world’s rivers. The second peril—perhaps more subtle, but no less important—is the danger of doing the wrong things: sacrificing water sustainability to food and energy needs, using international cooperation in a way that forces the adjustment costs of poorly conceived development onto local communities, or rushing to replace Big Fossil with Big Hydro for a greenhouse future. If water governance is to be truly conflict-sensitive, it must navigate effectively between these two dangers.