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The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is investing heavily in the development of machine learning (ML) algorithms to assist in many decisionmaking processes. This report provides policymakers and developers of ML algorithms with a framework and tools to produce algorithms for personnel management that are consistent with DoD's equity priorities.
The Antarctic is becoming a zone of contested governance. Leveraging open-source literature and a tabletop exercise, the authors examine the possible implications that geostrategic manoeuvring and competition in the Antarctic in the coming decades might have on the longevity and resilience of the Antarctic Treaty System, a governance regime that seems increasingly ill-fitted to modern strategic dynamics.
Shooting incidents at kindergarten through grade 12 schools in the United States have sparked calls to increase school security or adopt new approaches to school safety. RAND researchers used the American Teacher Panel to learn what teachers think about school safety, including what they think about policies that would allow teachers to carry firearms in schools.
Radical groups find military members and veterans attractive potential recruits because of their skills and training. To help address concerns about the risk of radicalization among the U.S. veteran community, the authors conducted a nationally representative survey to examine the prevalence of support for specific extremist groups and ideologies, including support for political violence.
This Perspective provides an initial review of the metaverse concept and how it might be relevant to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The authors review current definitions and identify key practical characteristics, summarize primary missions and relevant objectives for DHS, demonstrate that metaverses are relevant to DHS, and identify specific threats and opportunities that DHS could manage proactively.
Little is known about how veteran-serving organizations promote veteran social connectedness and reduce the risk of isolation — or how organizations measure the effectiveness of those efforts. A national survey, interviews with veteran-serving organizations, and a first-of-its-kind program typology offer new insights into the support available to strengthen veterans' social connections and how organizations evaluate their programs' effectiveness.
To enhance the understanding of the role of local government in entrepreneurial ecosystems, RAND researchers reviewed available resources and interviewed local officials from six selected cities from February to April 2022. This research resulted in a description of four key roles local governments play in establishing and supporting entrepreneurial ecosystems.
A key component of mass atrocity prevention is understanding previous mass violence events, and the Holocaust serves as an unparalleled case study. This resource, developed by RAND experts in collaboration with subject-matter experts from the Crane Center for Mass Atrocity Prevention, provides an overview of Holocaust education and mass atrocity prevention and can help users develop empathy, critical thinking skills, and cultural awareness.
In making decisions about reconstruction, the Ukrainian people and their government will face trade-offs regarding timelines, prioritization of efforts, leadership, and funding. This report aims to advance the understanding of these trade-offs and their ramifications to improve the decisionmaking process.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's contributions to U.S. economic security are often undervalued. This Perspective describes the evolving strategic environment for and the department's critical role in economic security.
The authors of this Perspective explore how Truth Decay — the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life — affects U.S. national security, what should be done about it, and what future research on this topic should focus on. They highlight research gaps in this field, identify pathways to further discuss and explore in this overlap area, and encourage a shared foundation and framework for future research.
The summit convened a group of 15 top thinkers from industry, academia, and government to think broadly about how emerging technologies in the coming decade could change the balance of policymaking and decisionmaking between national governments and other actors, such as large technology companies.
Patterns and consequences of opioid use are changing dramatically. Unfortunately, efforts to address problems related to opioids are insufficient and sometimes contradictory. Researchers provide a nuanced assessment of America's opioid ecosystem, highlighting how leveraging system interactions can reduce addiction, overdose, suffering, and other harms. Findings will be of special interest to policymakers, researchers, and media outlets.
While there is a growing consensus that the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected countries' economies and may exacerbate socio-political unrest, understanding the dynamics of this process remains challenging. Our research suggests that COVID-19 will significantly increase the risk of civil conflict in African countries. We estimate this effect will, in turn, have negative global economic repercussions via international trade losses.
From 2001 to 2021, despite deteriorating conditions and no apparent hope of military victory, the United States pursued an unchanging policy objective in Afghanistan: to prevent a terrorist group from using the country as a haven in which to plan or launch an attack on the United States. The authors examined the reasons behind this policy inertia through interviews with the senior leaders involved in policy deliberations between 2001 and 2016.
Facial recognition technology has significant implications for legislators and policymakers, criminal justice officials, and society in general, and further developments should limit the potential risks in a way that maximizes the benefits of such technology. This report examines current and near-future uses of facial recognition by law enforcement and identifies the concerns and related policy domains that could be used to guide public policy.
This Perspective presents some proposed solutions, and potential data sources to evaluate policy solutions, to problems related to mis- and disinformation, election security, extremism, and immigration reform. The authors have synthesized workshop conversations and added citations from relevant research literature to provide scholarly context for the various policy facets they explored.
Despite post–Civil Rights era racial progress, middle-class African Americans continue to face more economic obstacles than white Americans. In this report, the author reviews research on the intergenerational downward mobility rates of middle-class African Americans; examines the impact of race, gender, and parental income on adult children's income; and discusses several factors that may contribute to the instability of the Black middle class.
This report presents several iterations of a stylized model of wealth accumulation that reflect historical patterns in income and wealth shown in prior research. This presentation provides the necessary context to understand the wealth differences among all Americans and those factors, in particular, that contribute to Black-white wealth differences.
Americans have called for historic policy interventions to address the incessant racial wealth gap between Black and white households that has resulted from a history of lost income and lost opportunity, compounded over time. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, the authors assess the sources of wealth disparity and analyze the potential impacts and trade-offs of four disparity-reducing wealth-allocation policies.
This report offers a framework for defining civic infrastructure, then presents measures that provide information to help monitor civic infrastructure across the nation, in individual states, in communities, and across diverse populations. The framework categorizes infrastructure aspects in terms of inputs (democratic governance, civic education, and civic spaces) and outputs (civic literacy, civic identity, and civic engagement).
Develops a Bayesian model that produces a posterior distribution of the marginal treatment effect function.
Machine learning (ML) can have a significant impact on public policy by modeling complex relationships and augmenting human decisionmaking. However, overconfidence in results and incorrectly interpreted algorithms can lead to peril, such as the perpetuation of structural inequities. In this Perspective, the authors discuss the importance of ML interpretability and offer recommendations that will help lead to better policy decisions.
Throughout its existence, Israel has faced security challenges and has struggled with how best to make decisions to address them. In this Perspective, the author examines the inherent flaws in the function of key Israeli decisionmaking entities and in the process as a whole, reflects on their underlying causes, and suggests avenues toward a decisionmaking apparatus that is better suited to the challenges the country faces today.
Despite the strong representation of Black Americans in the military, there is little research on the impact of military service on Black people. RAND researchers examined the ways that military service might be correlated with the postmilitary experiences of Black Americans and explored several factors that could be meaningful to their well-being, focusing on physical and behavioral health, economic stability, and interpersonal relationships.
