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• Winter 2024

  Living Computers

  Lisa Margonelli

  In 1967, the idea of computer science as a distinct discipline seemed outlandish enough that three leaders of the movement felt the need to write a letter to Science addressing the question,… Read More

• March 9, 2021

  America Needs a New Workforce Education System

  William B. Bonvillian, Sanjay E. Sarma

  The American dream promised that if you worked hard, you could move up, with well-paying, working-class jobs providing a gateway to an ever-growing middle class. Today, however, the nation is seeing increasing… Read More

• Fall 2022

  A Vision for Democratizing Government Data

  Julia Lane

  During the earliest weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a desperate need for data to respond to the worst labor market crisis in almost a century. State-administered unemployment claims skyrocketed. Jobseekers,… Read More

• February 10, 2022

  Sustaining Sustainable Chemistry

  Joel Tickner, Leah Rubin Shen, Carl Maxwell, Jim Jones, Mary Kirchhoff

  In 2021, after nearly 17 years of effort, Congress enacted the Sustainable Chemistry Research and Development Act as part of the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. The act… Read More

• Fall 2018

  The Quest for Quality Jobs

  Sanjay E. Sarma, William B. Bonvillian

  The United States lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs—5.8 million positions—between 2000 and 2010. Although the economy has strengthened significantly since then, only about 12% of these jobs have returned. Their disappearance… Read More

• Winter 2022

  Power’s Real Challenges

  Kai N. Lee

  Electricity is a quicksilver element of everyday life. Although essential for many day-to-day activities, power generation is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions; at the same time, electricity is at the… Read More

• November 17, 2022

  Pathways to More Rapidly Reduce Transportation’s Climate Change Impact

  Dave Foster, John Koszewnik, Wallace Wade, Ward Winer

  Current US energy policies are laser-focused on addressing climate change—as they should be. Meanwhile, this summer’s soaring gasoline prices show that US dependence on foreign oil continues to be a significant vulnerability… Read More

• May 26, 2022

  Walmart Coming to You … by Drone

  Tom Burroughs

  The retail giant Walmart is expanding its fledgling drone delivery service, expecting to reach 4 million households in parts of six states by year’s end. Eleanor Nelsen, Adeline Guthrie, and Lee Vinsel… Read More

• Summer 2021

  Everything You’ve Ever Learned

  Isabel Cardenas-Navia, Shalin Jyotishi

  Sofia spent 15 years as an active-duty member of the military. While deployed in Afghanistan and stationed in Georgia and Japan, she was involved in logistics planning and management as well as… Read More

• March 24, 2021

  Clean Firm Power is the Key to California’s Carbon-Free Energy Future

  Jane C.S. Long, Ejeong Baik, Jesse D. Jenkins, Clea Kolster, Kiran Chawla, Arne Olson, Armond Cohen, Michael Colvin, Sally M. Benson, Robert B. Jackson, David G. Victor, Steven P. Hamburg

  California’s government has set ambitious goals to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, starting with electricity. A 2018 law mandated that, by 2045, all retail sales of electricity in the state must derive from… Read More

• March 9, 2021

  Economics

  William E. Spriggs

  In the year 2020, under the tutelage of the novel coronavirus, we learned that many things we assumed could be ignored because we thought they were solid “givens” are really shaky and… Read More

• Winter 2021

  How “Multiple Breadbasket Failure” Became a Policy Issue

  Molly Jahn

  On December 12, 2017, the US Congress reauthorized the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2018. Every year, this massive bill authorizes spending for the Department of Defense. But this time, it… Read More

• Fall 2020

  Will Robotic Trucks Be “Sweatshops on Wheels”?

  Steve Viscelli

  The future of self-driving trucks is being shaped by today’s policy debates—not by advances in autonomous vehicle technology.

• Fall 2020

  “We Don’t Know What This Is Yet”

  Charles O. Holliday, William Kearney

  At Issues in Science and Technology we frequently speak with scientists and people doing public policy, but as the pandemic enters its seventh month, we wanted the perspective of someone in industry. … Read More

• September 16, 2020

  Who Believes in Hydroxychloroquine?

  David Adam

  There was a time when we journalists struggled to find meaty stories to cover during the late-summer doldrums. No longer. Amid the continuing deluge of pandemic news, scientists at Oxford University recently… Read More

• August 18, 2020

  A Patriot Act Moment for Science

  Tayyaba Jiwani

  As the world fights a historic pandemic, science has taken global center stage. Many governments made tough decisions following scientific advice, such as enforcing lockdowns and closing national borders, that ground the… Read More

• Summer 2020

  Save America’s Dying Cities

  Carl Schramm

  What accounts for the success and continued thriving of some cities, and the decline of others? During the decade when I ran the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, as we developed a data-based… Read More

• Summer 2020

  Complicating the Narrative

  Charles N. Herrick

  Recent books by David Michaels, an epidemiologist and former assistant secretary of labor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, address the… Read More

• Spring 2020

  Getting to Zero—and Beyond

  Roger D. Aines, George Peridas

  In response to mounting concerns about the consequences of unabated climate change, California established in 2018 an aspirational goal of achieving a completely carbon-neutral economy by 2045, and becoming carbon negative after… Read More

• April 13, 2020

  Ramping Up R&D to Kickstart the Global Economy

  Bruce R. Guile

  COVID-19 has brought much of the global economy to a standstill. The now-inevitable global recession is like nothing we have experienced before. Governments and businesses are starting to understand that recovery from… Read More

• Fall 2018

  Fixing an Imperfect Labor Market Information System

  Sanjay E. Sarma, William B. Bonvillian

  Adam Smith explained that market economies operate through an “invisible hand,” but what was that hand? In 1945 Friedrich Hayek argued that a market is an information system, and the challenge facing… Read More

• Spring 2019

  Selling AI: The Case of Fully Autonomous Vehicles

  Diane E. Bailey, Ingrid Erickson

  In the past several years, an array of technologists, economists, and technology pundits have predicted that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are poised to revolutionize our lives, changing how we work, play,… Read More

• Summer 2018

  Keeping the Lights On

  Kai N. Lee

  In September 2017, two hurricanes struck the US island of Puerto Rico, crippling its electric power grid. Because Puerto Rico is a major manufacturing site for medical supplies, the nation’s hospitals soon… Read More

• Fall 2018

  Research Universities and the Future of Work

  Mitchell L. Stevens

  Growing national concern about the future of work has three main causes. The first is technological: astonishingly rapid advances in artificial intelligence and the accompanying likelihood that it will supplant human tasks… Read More

• Fall 2018

  Rethinking the Race Between Education & Technology

  Ewart Keep, Phillip Brown

  Technological innovation is changing the nature of many jobs and the qualifications employers seek in their workers, convincing more young people to pursue a college education and other postsecondary credentials—at least according… Read More

• Fall 2018

  Overdetermined

  Kevin Finneran

  Widespread anxiety about the future nature of work, the number of jobs that will be available, the skills that will be needed, and the salaries they will command has roots in many… Read More

• July 26, 2018

  Self-Driving Vehicles for Your Shopping Trips

  Tom Burroughs

  Waymo, a company fast-forwarding the development of self-driving vehicles, just launched a trial program in the Phoenix area to team up with Walmart and four other firms to transport people between their… Read More

• Winter 2018

  Scaling Up Policy Innovations in the Federal Government: Lessons from the Trenches

  Jenn Gustetic

  Large bureaucracies such as those of the federal government are notoriously slow to innovate. But in recent years, new technology-enabled approaches to helping government meet its public obligations have begun to find… Read More

• Winter 2018

  What Drives Innovation?

  Richard R. Nelson, Irwin Feller, Sallie Keller, Stephanie Shipp

  In “What Does Innovation Today Tell Us about the US Economy Tomorrow?” (Issues, Fall 2017), Jeffrey Funk starts with an assertion that puzzles me, but after that he develops and… Read More

• Summer 2016

  Civil Society’s Role in a Public Health Crisis

  Jay Walker

  When the next major pandemic strikes, it will be accompanied by something never before seen in human history: an explosion of billions of texts, tweets, e-mails, blogs, photos, and videos rocketing across… Read More