Baltimore police officer Edward Nero, one of six being tried separately in relation to the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, has been acquitted on all counts. The outcome for officer Nero was widely expected, but officials are nonetheless aware of the level of frustration and anger that remains in the city. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake said: "We once again ask the citizens to be patient and to allow the entire process to come to a conclusion."

Since Baltimore came to national attention, Brookings scholars have probed the city’s challenges and opportunities, as well addressing broader questions of place, race and opportunity.

• In this podcast, Jennifer Vey describes how, for parts of Baltimore, economic growth has been largely a spectator sport: "1/5 people in Baltimore lives in a neighborhood of extreme poverty, and yet these communities are located in a relatively affluent metro area, in a city with many vibrant and growing neighborhoods."
• Vey and her colleague Alan Berube, in this piece on the "Two Baltimores," reinforce the point about the distribution of economic opportunity and resources in the city:
  

  In 2013, 40,000 Baltimore households earned at least $100,000. Compare that to Milwaukee, a similar-sized city where only half as many households have such high incomes. As our analysis uncovered, jobs in Baltimore pay about $7,000 more on average than those nationally. The increasing presence of high-earning households and good jobs in Baltimore City helps explain why, as the piece itself notes, the city’s bond rating has improved and property values are rising at a healthy clip."

• Groundbreaking work by Raj Chetty, which we summarized here, shows that Baltimore City is the worst place for a boy to grow up in the U.S. in terms of their likely adult earnings:

• Here Amy Liu offered some advice to the new mayor of the city: "I commend the much-needed focus on equity but…the mayoral candidates should not lose sight of another critical piece of the equity equation: economic growth."
• Following an event focused on race, place and opportunity, in this piece I drew out "Six policies to improve social mobility," including better targeting of housing vouchers, more incentives to build affordable homes in better-off neighborhoods, and looser zoning restrictions.
• Frederick C. Harris assessed President Obama’s initiative to help young men of color, "My Brother’s Keeper," praising many policy shifts and calling for a renewed focus on social capital and educational access. But Harris also warned that rhetoric counts and that a priority for policymakers is to "challenge some misconceptions about the shortcomings of black men, which have become a part of the negative public discourse."
• Malcolm Sparrow has a Brookings book on policing reform, "Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform" (there is a selection here on Medium). Sparrow writes:
  

  Citizens of any mature democracy can expect and should demand police services that are responsive to their needs, tolerant of diversity, and skillful in unraveling and tackling crime and other community problems. They should expect and demand that police officers are decent, courteous, humane, sparing and skillful in the use of force, respectful of citizens’ rights, disciplined, and professional. These are ordinary, reasonable expectations."

Five more police officers await their verdicts. But the city of Baltimore should not have to wait much longer for stronger governance, and more inclusive growth.

      

       

On Valentine’s Day, even a dismal scientist’s mind turns to love. It’s a powerful feeling, with a value that goes far beyond the millions of chocolate boxes and bouquets that will be delivered this Feb. 14.

Survey data from the Gallup Organization, where Justin works as a senior scientist, allow us to take a uniquely deep look at the state of love around the world. In 2006 and 2007, Gallup went to 136 countries and asked people, “Did you experience love for a lot of the day yesterday?” It’s the largest such dataset ever collected.

The good news: Ours is a loving world. On a typical day, about 70 percent of people worldwide reported a love-filled day. In the U.S., 81 percent felt love, as did 81 percent of Canadians and 79 percent of Italians. Germany and the U.K. were less loving, with slightly less than 3 in 4 people reporting feeling loved. Surprisingly, the same was true of the supposedly romantic French. And if you’re in Japan, please hug someone: Only 59 percent of Japanese said they had experienced love the previous day.

Across the world as a whole, the widowed and divorced are the least likely to experience love. Married folks feel more of it than singles. People who live together out of wedlock report getting even more love than married spouses -- an interesting factoid for conservatives worried about the effects of cohabitation. Women get more love than men, particularly in the U.S.

Young Love

If you’re young and not feeling all that loved this Valentine’s Day, don’t despair: You’re not alone. Young adults are among the least likely to experience love. It gets better with age, ultimately peaking in the mid-30s or mid-40s in most countries before fading again into the twilight years.

Money is related to love. Those with more household income are slightly more likely to experience the feeling. Roughly speaking, doubling your income is associated with being about 4 percentage points more likely to be loved. Perhaps having more money makes it easier to find time for love.

That said, the data aren’t necessarily telling us that money can buy you love. It’s possible that other factors correlated with income, such as height or appearance, are the real source of attraction. Or maybe being loved gives you a boost in the labor market.

What’s perhaps more striking is how little money matters on a global level. True, the populations of richer countries are, on average, slightly more likely to feel loved than those of poorer countries. But love is still abundant in the poorer countries: People in Rwanda and the Philippines enjoyed the highest love ratios, with more than 9 in 10 people providing positive responses. Armenia, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan, with economic output per person in the middle of the range, all had love ratios of less than 4 in 10.

Fun facts aside, we think there is a deeper and more consequential purpose to the study of love. Think about what love means to you. To us, it means caring about others and being cared for. Love is valuable, even if it is absent from both our national accounts and our political discourse.

In the language of economics, love is a form of insurance. It involves bonds of reciprocity that provide support when we’re feeling down, when we’re sick and when times are tough.

More broadly, love has the power to mitigate the free-rider and moral hazard problems associated with social (and private) insurance. Bailing out a bank might encourage executives to take bigger risks in the future, but helping loved ones down on their luck has fewer incentive problems because our loved ones typically care for us in return. Such mutually beneficial relationships make us all more resilient in times of crisis. This is why the household remains one of the most powerful institutions for organizing not just families but also our economic lives.

If we can find more love for our fellow citizens, our society will function better. Hard as this may be to achieve in an era when trust in government, business and one another is low, it’s worth the effort. When you expand the boundaries of trust and reciprocity, you expand the boundaries of what is possible.

Note: This content was first published on Bloomberg View on February 13, 2013.

      

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Student enrollment and expenditures per student have been on the rise in sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade. Yet, financing gaps still exist for achieving universal quality education throughout the region, especially in countries with strong demographic pressures. Many African countries are facing a dilemma of how best to balance scarce resources and the growing demands to improve education quality for their children and youth.

On April 27, the Center for Universal Education and the Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings hosted a discussion of the state of education financing in sub-Saharan Africa. Albert Motivans of UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics presented the main findings of a new report "Financing Education in sub-Saharan Africa," which focuses on the new challenges related to expanding access, equity and quality education. Shantayanan Devarajan of the World Bank and Brookings Senior Fellow Jacques van der Gaag provided commentary, and Senior Fellow Mwangi Kimenyi, director of the Africa Growth Initiative, moderated the discussion.

After the discussion, the panelists took audience questions.

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• Africa’s Education Financing Challenge

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• Motivans UNESCO presentation (.pdf)
• Financing Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (.pdf)

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A conversation with Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken

One year after the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, the United States continues to adapt its efforts to blunt the appeal of violent extremism. As part of this effort, the State Department is launching a series of new initiatives to better coordinate the U.S. response to terrorist propaganda and recruitment.

On February 16, the Foreign Policy program at Brookings hosted The Honorable Antony J. Blinken, deputy secretary of state, for a discussion of the United States’ civilian-led initiatives to counter the spread of the Islamic State and other violent extremist groups. Blinken will chart the path forward, to include partnerships with industry and civil society, and outlined the challenges that lie ahead.

Brookings President Strobe Talbott offered welcoming remarks. General John Allen, senior fellow and co-director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings, introduced Deputy Secretary Blinken, and Tamara Cofman Wittes, senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, joined Deputy Secretary Blinken in conversation following his remarks.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #CVE

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• New frameworks for countering terrorism and violent extremism
• American diplomacy best instrument against extremism
• Islamic State numbers lowest since 2014
• Common denominators of violent extremists
• Progress in Syria against Islamic State

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• New frameworks for countering terrorism and violent extremism

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Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey's new Prime Minister, is a familiar name in Western capitals. It is also a name that generates mixed feelings among his peers.

What most agree is that he is was an incredibly ambitious and hardworking foreign minister, always willing to travel wherever necessary, even when the outcome of such visits generated little concrete results. There is also consensus about his willingness to lecture his counterparts. He probably believed that his academic background and the relative ignorance of his counterparts entitled him to do so. But in most cases he had a tendency to forget that he was dealing with fellow foreign ministers and not students of history. This tendency generated only a begrudging sense of respect, even among his most graceful and objective peers.

It is also clear for people who knew him when he was an academic that politics has changed him. In the eyes of most his students, he was a reluctant policymaker when he began his political life. He often mentioned that his real goal was to go back to academia, where he could once again enjoy the intellectual life of an analytical thinker who can keep a healthy distance from events. Yet, in a matter of few years he discovered the irresistible pull of power. It was maybe "Kissinger syndrome" — realizing that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Perhaps most important is the question of Davutoğlu's ideology. There are numerous articles written about this question, and the emerging consensus is that he is an incurable idealist. It may be reductionist to argue that he is an Islamist, but it is undeniably true that he has focused on parts of the world where Muslims are facing injustice with much enthusiasm. Although he rejects being labeled neo-Ottoman, it is also undeniably true that he speaks of Ottoman tradition, tolerance and governance with great nostalgia. As most of his students, he is very critical of the West and its Orientalism. His years in Malaysia as a professor bring a colorful interpretation to his critic of colonialism and imperialism. Yet, what he often fails to realize is that in his criticisms of the West, he often repeats the methodological fallacy of Orientalism. The result is what can be best labeled "Occidentalism" — a tendency to generalize and construct a Western civilization with a prejudice similar to the one displayed by Orientalists.

Finally, there is the issue of missing modesty. Although Davutoğlu appears to be very modest and unpretentious, he often displays a stubborn resistance in admitting mistakes. This is perhaps a defense mechanism in dealing with the press. But combined with his unabashed sense of idealism, his reluctance to recognize failure and to see the world as it is rather than how it should be is very troubling for a policymaker. The reluctance to admit policy failures creates two major problems: a disconnect from reality and an inability for course-correction.

In short, there is a lot of ambivalence towards Davutoğlu in the West. He is coming to his new position with a lot of baggage and the looming shadow of a powerful president. Newly elected President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wanted someone who would follow his lead without hesitation. His choice speaks volumes about Davutoğlu's new persona and about how much he has changed since the early days of his political career.

This article was originally published in Today's Zaman.

      

       

       

       

       

       

Tuesday night, President Obama presented four critical questions about the future of America and I should like to comment on the first two:

1. How to produce equal opportunity, emphasizing economic security for all.
2. In his words, “how do we make technology work for us, and not against us,” particularly to meet the “urgent challenges” of our days.

The challenges the president wishes to meet by means of technological development are climate change and cancer. Let’s consider cancer first. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical: this is not the first presidential war against cancer, President Nixon tried that once and, alas cancer still has the upper hand. It is ironic that Mr. Obama chose this particular ”moonshot”, because not only are the technical aspects of cancer more uncertain than those of space travel, political support for the project is vastly different and we cannot be sure that even another Democrat in the White House would see this project to fruition. In effect, neither Mr. Obama nor his appointed “mission control”, Vice President Biden, have time in office to see fruits from their efforts on this front.

The second challenge the president wishes to address with technology is problematic beyond technical and economic feasibility (producing renewable energy at competitive prices); curbing carbon emissions has become politically intractable. The president correctly suggested that being leaders in the renewable energy markets of the future makes perfect business sense, even for global warming skeptics. Nevertheless, markets have a political economy, and current energy giants have a material interest in not allowing any changes to the rules that so favor them (including significant federal subsidies). Only when the costs of exploration, extraction, and distribution of fossil fuels rise above those of renewable sources, we can expect policy changes enabling an energy transition to become feasible. When renewables are competitive on a large scale, it is not very likely that their production will be controlled by new industrial players. Such is the political economy of free markets. What’s more, progressives should be wary of standard solutions that would raise the cost of energy (such as a tax on carbon emissions), because low income families are quite sensitive to energy prices; the cost of electricity, gas, and transportation is a far larger proportion of their income than that of their wealthier neighbors.

It’s odd that the president proposes technological solutions to challenges that call for a political solution. Again, in saying this, I’m allowing for the assumption that the technical side is manageable, which is not necessarily a sound assumption to make. The technical and economic complexity of these problems should only compound political hurdles. If I’m skeptical that technological fixes would curb carbon emissions or cure cancer, I am simply vexed by the president’s answer to the question on economic opportunity and security: expand the safety net. It is not that it wouldn’t work; it worked wonders creating prosperity and enlarging the middle-class in the post-World War II period. The problem is that enacting welfare state policies promises to be a hard political battle that, even if won, could result in pyrrhic victories. The greatest achievement of Mr. Obama expanding the safety net was, of course, the Affordable Care Act. But his policy success came at a very high cost: a majority of the voters have questions about the legitimacy of that policy. Even its eponymous name, Obamacare, was coined as a term of derision. It is bizarre that opposition to this reform is often found amidst people who benefit from it. We can blame the systematic campaign against it in every electoral contest, the legal subterfuges brought up to dismantle it (that ACA survived severely bruised), and the AM radio vitriol, but even controlling for the dirty war on healthcare reform, passing such as monumental legislation strictly across party lines has made it the lighting rod of distrust in government.

Progressives are free to try to increase economic opportunity following the welfare state textbook. They will meet the same opposition that Mr. Obama encountered. However, where progressives and conservatives could agree is about increasing opportunities for entrepreneurs, and nothing gives an edge to free enterprise more than innovation. Market competition is the selection mechanism by which an elite of enterprises rises from a legion created any given year; this elite, equipped with a new productive platform, can arm-wrestle markets from the old guard of incumbents. This is not the only way innovation takes place: monopolies and cartels can produce innovation, but with different outcomes. In competitive markets, innovation is the instrument of product differentiation; therefore, it improves quality and cuts consumer prices. In monopolistic markets, innovation also takes place, but generally as a monopolist’s effort to raise barriers to entry and secure high profits. Innovation can take place preserving social protections to the employees of the new industries, or it can undermine job security of its labor force (a concern with the sharing economy). These different modes of innovation are a function of the institutions that govern innovation, including industrial organization, labor and consumer protections.

What the President did not mention is that question two can answer question one: technological development can improve economic opportunity and security, and that is likely to be more politically feasible than addressing the challenges of climate change and cancer. Shaping the institutions that govern innovative activity to favor modes of innovation that benefit a broad base of society is an achievable goal, and could indeed be a standard by which his and future administrations are measured. This is so because these are not the province of the welfare state. They are policy domains that have historically enjoyed bipartisan consensus (such as federal R&D funding, private R&D tax credits) or low contestation (support for small business, tech transfer, loan guarantees).

As Mr. Obama himself suggested, technology can be indeed be made to work for us, all of us.

       

It has been hailed as the most significant discovery in biology since polymerase chain reaction allowed for the mass replication of DNA samples. CRISPR-Cas9 is an inexpensive and easy-to-use gene-editing method that promises applications ranging from medicine to industrial agriculture to biofuels. Currently, applications to treat leukemia, HIV, and cancer are under experimental development.¹ However, new technical solutions tend to be fraught with old problems, and in this case, ethical and legal questions loom large over the future.

Disagreements on ethics

The uptake of this method has been so fast that many scientists have started to worry about inadequate regulation of research and its unanticipated consequences.² Consider, for instance, the disagreement on research on human germ cells (eggs, sperm, or embryos) where an edited gene is passed onto offspring. Since the emergence of bioengineering applications in the 1970s, the scientific community has eschewed experiments to alter human germline and some governments have even banned them.³ The regulation regimes are expectedly not uniform: for instance, China bans the implantation of genetically modified embryos in women but not the research with embryos.

Last year, a group of Chinese researchers conducted gene-editing experiments on non-viable human zygotes (fertilized eggs) using CRISPR.⁴ News that these experiments were underway prompted a group of leading U.S. geneticists to meet in March 2015 in Napa, California, to begin a serious consideration of ethical and legal dimensions of CRISPR and called for a moratorium on research editing genes in human germline.⁵ Disregarding that call, the Chinese researchers published their results later in the year largely reporting a failure to precisely edit targeted genes without accidentally editing non-targets. CRISPR is not yet sufficiently precise.

CRISPR reignited an old debate on human germline research that is one of the central motivations (but surely not the only one) for an international summit on gene editing hosted by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the U.K.'s Royal Society in December 2015. About 500 scientists as well as experts in the legal and ethical aspects of bioengineering attended.⁶ Rather than consensus, the meeting highlighted the significant contrasts among participants about the ethics of inquiry, and more generally, about the governance of science. Illustrative of these contrasts are the views of prominent geneticists Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, and George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard. Collins argues that the “balance of the debate leans overwhelmingly against human germline engineering.” In turn, Church, while a signatory of the moratorium called by the Napa group, has nevertheless suggested reasons why CRISPR is shifting the balance in favor of lifting the ban on human germline experiments.⁷

The desire to speed up discovery of cures for heritable diseases is laudable. But tinkering with human germline is truly a human concern and cannot be presumed to be the exclusive jurisdictions of scientists, clinicians, or patients. All members of society have a stake in the evolution of CRISPR and must be part of the conversation about what kind of research should be permitted, what should be discouraged, and what disallowed. To relegate lay citizens to react to CRISPR applications—i.e. to vote with their wallets once applications hit the market—is to reduce their citizenship to consumer rights, and public participation to purchasing power.⁸ Yet, neither the NAS summit nor the earlier Napa meeting sought to solicit the perspectives of citizens, groups, and associations other than those already tuned in the CRISPR debates.⁹

The scientific community has a bond to the larger society in which it operates that in its most basic form is the bond of the scientist to her national community, is the notion that the scientist is a citizen of society before she is a denizen of science. This bond entails liberties and responsibilities that transcend the ethos and telos of science and, consequently, subordinates science to the social compact. It is worth recalling this old lesson from the history of science as we continue the public debate on gene editing. Scientists are free to hold specific moral views and prescriptions about the proper conduct of research and the ethical limits of that conduct, but they are not free to exclude the rest of society from weighing in on the debate with their own values and moral imaginations about what should be permitted and what should be banned in research. The governance of CRISPR is a question of collective choice that must be answered by means of democratic deliberation and, when irreconcilable differences arise, by the due process of democratic institutions.

Patent disputes

More heated than the ethical debate is the legal battle for key CRISPR patents that has embroiled prominent scientists involved in perfecting this method. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office initiated a formal contestation process, called interference, in March 2016 to adjudicate the dispute. The process is likely to take years and appeals are expected to extend further in time. Challenges are also expected to patents filed internationally, including those filed with the European Patent Office.

To put this dispute in perspective, it is instructive to consider the history of CRISPR authored by one of the celebrities in gene science, Eric Lander.¹⁰ This article ignited a controversy because it understated the role of one of the parties to the patent dispute (Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier), while casting the other party as truly culminating the development of this technology (Feng Zhang, who is affiliated to Lander’s Broad Institute). Some gene scientists accused Lander of tendentious inaccuracies and of trying to spin a story in a manner that favors the legal argument (and economic interest) of Zhang.

Ironically, the contentious article could be read as an argument against any particular claim to the CRISPR patents as it implicitly questions the fairness of granting exclusive rights to an invention. Lander tells the genesis of CRISPR that extends through a period of two decades and over various countries, where the protagonists are the many researchers who contributed to the cumulative knowledge in the ongoing development of the method. The very title of Lander’s piece, “The Heroes of CRISPR” highlights that the technology has not one but a plurality of authors.

A patent is a legal instrument that recognizes certain rights of the patent holder (individual, group, or organization) and at the same time denies those rights to everyone else, including those other contributors to the invention. Patent rights are thus arbitrary under the candle of history. I am not suggesting that the bureaucratic rules to grant a patent or to determine its validity are arbitrary; they have logical rationales anchored in practice and precedent. I am suggesting that in principle any exclusive assignation of rights that does not include the entire community responsible for the invention is arbitrary and thus unfair. The history of CRISPR highlights this old lesson from the history of technology: an invention does not belong to its patent holder, except in a court of law.

Some scientists may be willing to accept with resignation the unfair distribution of recognition granted by patents (or prizes like the Nobel) and find consolation in the fact that their contribution to science has real effects on people’s lives as it materializes in things like new therapies and drugs. Yet patents are also instrumental in distributing those real effects quite unevenly. Patents create monopolies that, selling their innovation at high prices, benefit only those who can afford them. The regular refrain to this charge is that without the promise of high profits, there would be no investments in innovation and no advances in life-saving medicine. What’s more, the biotech industry reminds us that start-ups will secure capital injections only if they have exclusive rights to the technologies they are developing. Yet, Editas Medicine, a biotech start-up that seeks to exploit commercial applications of CRISPR (Zhang is a stakeholder), was able to raise $94 million in its February 2016 initial public offering. That some of Editas’ key patents are disputed and were entering interference at USPTO was patently not a deterrent for those investors.

Towards a CRISPR democratic debate

Neither the governance of gene-editing research nor the management of CRISPR patents should be the exclusive responsibility of scientists. Yet, they do enjoy an advantage in public deliberations on gene editing that is derived from their technical competence and from the authority ascribed to them by society. They can use this advantage to close the public debate and monopolize its terms, or they could turn it into stewardship of a truly democratic debate about CRISPR.

The latter choice can benefit from three steps. A first step would be openness: a public willingness to consider and internalize public values that are not easily reconciled with research values. A second step would be self-restraint: publicly affirming a self-imposed ban on research with human germline and discouraging research practices that are contrary to received norms of prudence. A third useful step would be a public service orientation in the use of patents: scientists should pressure their universities, who hold title to their inventions, to preserve some degree of influence over research commercialization so that the dissemination and access to innovations is consonant with the noble aspirations of science and the public service mission of the university. Openness, self-restraint, and an orientation to service from scientists will go a long way to make of CRISPR a true servant of society and an instrument of democracy.

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Other reading: See media coverage compiled by the National Academies of Sciences.

¹Nature: an authoritative and accessible primer. A more technical description of applications in Hsu, P. D. et al. 2014. Cell, 157(6): 1262–1278.

²For instance, see this reflection in Science, and this in Nature.

³More about ethical concerns on gene editing here: http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=8711

⁴Liang, P. et al. 2015. Protein & Cell, 6, 363–372

⁵Science: A prudent path forward for genomic engineering and germline gene modification.

⁶Nature: NAS Gene Editing Summit.

⁷While Collins and Church participated in the summit, their views quoted here are from StatNews.com: A debate: Should we edit the human germline. See also Sciencenews.org: Editing human germline cells sparks ethics debate.

⁸Hurlbut, J. B. 2015. Limits of Responsibility, Hastings Center Report, 45(5): 11-14.

⁹This point is forcefully made by Sheila Jasanoff and colleagues: CRISPR Democracy, 2015 Issues in S&T, 22(1).

¹⁰Lander, E. 2016. The Heroes of CRISPR. Cell, 164(1-2): 18-28.

       

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The Center for 21st Century Security Intelligence seventh annual military and federal fellow research symposium

On March 1, the seventh annual military and federal fellow research symposium featured the independent research produced by members of the military services and federal agencies who are currently serving at think-tanks and universities across the nation. Organized by the fellows themselves, the symposium provides a platform for building greater awareness of the cutting-edge work that America’s military and governmental leaders are producing on key national security policy issues.

With presidential primary season well underway, it’s clear that whoever emerges in November 2016 as the next commander-in-chief will have their hands full with a number of foreign policy and national security choices. This year’s panels explored these developing issues and their prospects for resolution after the final votes have been counted. During their keynote conversation, the Honorable Michèle Flournoy discussed her assessment of the strategic threat environment with General John Allen, USMC (Ret.), who also provided opening remarks on strategic leadership and the importance of military and other federal fellowship experiences.

 

Video

• Opening remarks and The future of the All-Volunteer Force
• The next generation of terrorism
• Harnessing technology in the future force
• Keynote discussion: Assessing the strategic environment
• To intervene, or not to intervene?

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• Beyond 2016: Security challenges and opportunities for the next administration

       

What are the greatest dangers to citizens of the world's cities, as well as its towns, villages, and rural areas? This is an important issue to understand as we approach the general election season in the United States, when candidates for the highest office in the land will have to help voters make sense of the state of violence around the world—and tell us what they would do about it.

Headlines can be deceiving. We hear about China's rise, Russia's adventures, North Korea's nuclear misbehavior, the Iran nuclear deal, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and of course ISIS and civil war in the Middle East all the time. But it is also worth taking a step back to understand the broader state of violence on the planet today. Do so, and you might be surprised.

As part of a Brookings-JPMorgan Chase project that we call Securing Global Cities, we have attempted to map these trends in violence, benefiting greatly from ongoing work at European think tanks like the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the University of Maryland, and the United Nations. Here are some of the most salient facts and figures:

• Even with Russian President Vladimir Putin's activities from Ukraine to Syria in recent years, interstate conflict remains low and mild in intensity by historical standards, thankfully. China's activities in the South China Sea, however concerning, do not presently broach the threshold of interstate war.
• Unfortunately, the picture is more muddled for civil war. It remains less prevalent and less deadly than in the worst periods of the Cold War and the 1990s. But it has ticked up considerably since the beginning of the Arab spring in 2011, especially in the broad arc from the Sahel in Africa through the Middle East and to South Asia. Worldwide, perhaps 100,000 people a year are dying in civil wars.
• Yet war and terrorism are not the primary security threats to most people on the planet today. Notably, each year, more than 400,000 people are murdered around the globe, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
• Murder rates are highest in the Americas and in Africa, at least twice the global average. They are greatest in central and southern Africa, and from Brazil and Venezuela/Colombia to Central America and the Caribbean and Mexico.
• The least violent parts of the world include most of East Asia and Western Europe, despite the terrorism threat afflicting the latter region of late. 
• The “most improved” regions in recent decades include Colombia, former war-torn African states like Angola, Mozambique, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, as well as parts of Southeast Asia and a number major U.S. cities.
• If one broadens the lens on the definition of violence, motor vehicle accidents constitute an even bigger threat. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.2 million people a year die in such accidents worldwide.
• As cities and countries think about future security, they must bear in mind not just these current realities but the potential for catastrophe—from earthquakes, droughts, pandemics, nuclear reactor disasters, and massive infrastructural failures. In a worst case, tens of millions could suddenly be put at acute risk.

There is much to celebrate about the human condition today. Despite the headlines, life has actually never been safer or more prosperous for a higher fraction of the world's population. But our progress is fragile, and it is of course incomplete. 

The next U.S. president needs a plan for Syria, Libya, and Yemen, to be sure. But he or she also needs to address the broader challenges of urban and global security for a planet that is getting healthier and more secure but which still has a very long ways to go. A good first step is to collect and study what works in key cities and countries around the world so that we can all learn from each other, on topics ranging from breaking up gangs to corralling drug traffickers to stopping terrorism. A great deal has been learned; it is time to spread the knowledge, and emulate the best practices worldwide.

      

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Ukraine faces critical challenges on a range of questions: shaping foreign and national security policies appropriate for a medium-sized country located between Europe and Russia; developing a strategy and policies to promote energy security and contribute to sustainable economic growth; and designing educational and cultural policies suitable for advancing the country’s European aspirations and its own national identity. The Ukraine 2020 Policy Dialogue—an initiative of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation supported by the Democracy Grants Program of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv—convened four U.S.-Ukrainian task forces earlier this year to discuss these questions and develop policy recommendations for the Ukrainian and U.S. governments.

On September 28, the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings (CUSE) hosted a discussion of the recommendations developed by the Policy Dialogue. Panelists included four co-chairs of the Dialogue’s working groups: Edward Chow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; William Miller of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Robert Nurick of the Atlantic Council; and Brookings Senior Fellow Steven Pifer. Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Angela Stent moderated the discussion. Copies of the Policy Dialogue recommendations were available. 

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• Ukraine: Facing Critical Challenges

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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• ukraine_2020_recommendations
• 20120928_ukraine

       

       

       

       

The replenishment process for concessional resources of the multilateral development banks is broken. We have come to this conclusion after a review of the experience with recent replenishments of multilateral development funds. We also base it on first-hand observation, since one of us was responsible for the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) replenishment consultations 20 years ago and recently served as the external chair for the last two replenishment consultations of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which closely follow the common multilateral development bank (MDB) practice. As many of the banks and their donors are preparing for midterm reviews as a first step toward the next round of replenishment consultations, this is a good time to take stock and consider what needs to be done to fix the replenishment process.

So what’s the problem?

Most of all, the replenishment process does not serve its key intended function of setting overall operational strategy for the development funds and holding the institutions accountable for effectively implementing the strategy. Instead, the replenishment consultations have turned into a time-consuming and costly process in which donor representatives from their capitals get bogged down in the minutiae of institutional management that are better left to the boards of directors and the managements of the MDBs. There are other problems, including lack of adequate engagement of recipient countries in donors’ deliberations, the lack of full participation of the donors’ representatives on the boards of the institutions in the process, and inflexible governance structures that serve as a disincentive for non-traditional donors (from emerging countries and from private foundations) to contribute.

But let’s focus on the consultation process. What does it look like? Typically, donor representatives from capitals assemble every three years (or four, in the case of the Asian Development Bank) for a year-long consultation round, consisting of four two-day meetings (including the meeting devoted to the midterm review of the ongoing replenishment and to setting the agenda for the next consultation process). For these meetings, MDB staff prepare, per consultation round, some 20 substantive documents that are intended to delve into operational and institutional performance in great detail. Each consultation round produces a long list of specific commitments (around 40 commitments is not uncommon), which management is required to implement and monitor, and report on in the midterm review. In effect, however, this review covers only half the replenishment cycle, which leads to the reporting, monitoring, and accountability being limited to the delivery of committed outputs (e.g., a specific sector strategy) with little attention paid to implementation, let alone outcomes.

The process is eerily reminiscent of the much maligned “Christmas tree” approach of the World Bank’s structural adjustment loans in the 1980s and 1990s, with their detailed matrixes of conditionality; lack of strategic selectivity and country ownership; focus on inputs rather than outcomes; and lack of consideration of the borrowers’ capacity and costs of implementing the Bank-imposed measures. Ironically, the donors successfully pushed the MDBs to give up on such conditionality (without ownership of the recipient countries) in their loans, but they impose the same kind of conditionality (without full ownership of the recipient countries and institutions) on the MDBs themselves—replenishment after replenishment.

Aside from lack of selectivity, strategic focus, and ownership of the commitments, the consultation process is also burdensome and costly in terms of the MDBs’ senior management and staff time as well as time spent by ministerial staff in donor capitals, with literally thousands of management and staff hours spent on producing and reviewing documentation. And the recent innovation of having donor representatives meet between consultation rounds as working groups dealing with long-term strategic issues, while welcome in principle, has imposed further costs on the MDBs and capitals in terms of preparing documentation and meetings.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Twenty years ago the process was much simpler and less costly. Even today, recent MDB capital increases, which mobilized resources for the non-concessional windows of the MDBs, were achieved with much simpler processes, and the replenishment consultations for special purpose funds, such as the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria and for the GAVI Alliance, are more streamlined than those of the MDBs.

So what’s to be done?

We recommend the following measures to fix the replenishment consultation process:

1. Focus on a few strategic issues and reduce the number of commitments with an explicit consideration of the costs and capacity requirements they imply. Shift the balance of monitoring and accountability from delivery of outputs to implementation and outcomes.
2. Prepare no more than five documents for the consultation process: (i) a midterm review on the implementation of the previous replenishment and key issues for the future; (ii) a corporate strategy or strategy update; (iii) the substantive report on how the replenishment resources will contribute to achieve the strategy; (iv) a financial outlook and strategy document; and (v) the legal document of the replenishment resolution.
3. Reduce the number of meetings for each replenishment round to no more than three and lengthen the replenishment period from three to four years or more.
4. Use the newly established working group meetings between replenishment consultation rounds to focus on one or two long-term, strategic issues, including how to fix the replenishment process.

The initiative for such changes lies with the donor representatives in the capitals, and from our interviews with donor representatives we understand that many of them broadly share our concerns. So this is a good time—indeed it is high time!—for them to act.

       

       

       

Event Information

A conversation with Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Bohuslav Sobotka

Today, the European Union faces critical risks to its stability. The possibility of a Brexit. The ongoing Ukraine/Russia conflict. The strain of mass migration. ISIL and other terrorism threats. The lingering financial crisis in Greece and beyond. These issues pose distinct challenges for the EU, its 28 member countries, and their 500 million citizens. How will these developing problems affect Europe?          

On March 31, Governance Studies at Brookings hosted Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka to discuss the current status of the EU as seen through the lens of a Central European nation, close U.S. NATO ally and current Chair of the Visegrad Group. Prime Minister Sobotka offered insight into how the EU will address these issues, and where its future lies.

Video

• Challenges to the future of the EU: A Central European perspective

Audio

• Challenges to the future of the EU: A Central European perspective (English)

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160331_czech_eu_transcript

       

       

The 2016 Brown Center Report (BCR), which was published last week, presented a study of Common Core State Standards (CCSS).   In this post, I’d like to elaborate on a topic touched upon but deserving further attention: what to expect in Common Core’s immediate political future. I discuss four key challenges that CCSS will face between now and the end of the year.

Let’s set the stage for the discussion.  The BCR study produced two major findings.  First, several changes that CCSS promotes in curriculum and instruction appear to be taking place at the school level.  Second, states that adopted CCSS and have been implementing the standards have registered about the same gains and losses on NAEP as states that either adopted and rescinded CCSS or never adopted CCSS in the first place.  These are merely associations and cannot be interpreted as saying anything about CCSS’s causal impact.  Politically, that doesn’t really matter. The big story is that NAEP scores have been flat for six years, an unprecedented stagnation in national achievement that states have experienced regardless of their stance on CCSS.  Yes, it’s unfair, but CCSS is paying a political price for those disappointing NAEP scores.  No clear NAEP differences have emerged between CCSS adopters and non-adopters to reverse that political dynamic.

"Yes, it’s unfair, but CCSS is paying a political price for those disappointing NAEP scores. No clear NAEP differences have emerged between CCSS adopters and non-adopters to reverse that political dynamic."

TIMSS and PISA scores in November-December

NAEP has two separate test programs.  The scores released in 2015 were for the main NAEP, which began in 1990.  The long term trend (LTT) NAEP, a different test that was first given in 1969, has not been administered since 2012.  It was scheduled to be given in 2016, but was cancelled due to budgetary constraints.  It was next scheduled for 2020, but last fall officials cancelled that round of testing as well, meaning that the LTT NAEP won’t be given again until 2024.  

With the LTT NAEP on hold, only two international assessments will soon offer estimates of U.S. achievement that, like the two NAEP tests, are based on scientific sampling:  PISA and TIMSS.  Both tests were administered in 2015, and the new scores will be released around the Thanksgiving-Christmas period of 2016.  If PISA and TIMSS confirm the stagnant trend in U.S. achievement, expect CCSS to take another political hit.  America’s performance on international tests engenders a lot of hand wringing anyway, so the reaction to disappointing PISA or TIMSS scores may be even more pronounced than what the disappointing NAEP scores generated.

Is teacher support still declining?

Watch Education Next’s survey on Common Core (usually released in August/September) and pay close attention to teacher support for CCSS.  The trend line has been heading steadily south. In 2013, 76 percent of teachers said they supported CCSS and only 12 percent were opposed.  In 2014, teacher support fell to 43 percent and opposition grew to 37 percent.  In 2015, opponents outnumbered supporters for the first time, 50 percent to 37 percent.  Further erosion of teacher support will indicate that Common Core’s implementation is in trouble at the ground level.  Don’t forget: teachers are the final implementers of standards.

An effort by Common Core supporters to change NAEP

The 2015 NAEP math scores were disappointing.  Watch for an attempt by Common Core supporters to change the NAEP math tests. Michael Cohen, President of Achieve, a prominent pro-CCSS organization, released a statement about the 2015 NAEP scores that included the following: "The National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, should carefully review its frameworks and assessments in order to ensure that NAEP is in step with the leadership of the states. It appears that there is a mismatch between NAEP and all states' math standards, no matter if they are common standards or not.” 

Reviewing and potentially revising the NAEP math framework is long overdue.  The last adoption was in 2004.  The argument for changing NAEP to place greater emphasis on number and operations, revisions that would bring NAEP into closer alignment with Common Core, also has merit.  I have a longstanding position on the NAEP math framework. In 2001, I urged the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) to reject the draft 2004 framework because it was weak on numbers and operations—and especially weak on assessing student proficiency with whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percentages.  

Common Core’s math standards are right in line with my 2001 complaint.  Despite my sympathy for Common Core advocates’ position, a change in NAEP should not be made because of Common Core.  In that 2001 testimony, I urged NAGB to end the marriage of NAEP with the 1989 standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the math reform document that had guided the main NAEP since its inception.  Reform movements come and go, I argued.  NAGB’s job is to keep NAEP rigorously neutral.  The assessment’s integrity depends upon it.  NAEP was originally intended to function as a measuring stick, not as a PR device for one reform or another.  If NAEP is changed it must be done very carefully and should be rooted in the mathematics children must learn.  The political consequences of it appearing that powerful groups in Washington, DC are changing “The Nation’s Report Card” in order for Common Core to look better will hurt both Common Core and NAEP.

Will Opt Out grow?

Watch the Opt Out movement.  In 2015, several organized groups of parents refused to allow their children to take Common Core tests.  In New York state alone, about 60,000 opted out in 2014, skyrocketing to 200,000 in 2015.  Common Core testing for 2016 begins now and goes through May.  It will be important to see whether Opt Out can expand to other states, grow in numbers, and branch out beyond middle- and upper-income neighborhoods.

Conclusion

Common Core is now several years into implementation.  Supporters have had a difficult time persuading skeptics that any positive results have occurred. The best evidence has been mixed on that question.  CCSS advocates say it is too early to tell, and we’ll just have to wait to see the benefits.  That defense won’t work much longer.  Time is running out.  The political challenges that Common Core faces the remainder of this year may determine whether it survives.

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

Seven months have passed since Israel officially apologized to Turkey for the Mavi Marmara incident of May 2010, in which nine Turks were killed by Israeli fire. What seemed, at the time, to be a diplomatic breakthrough, capable of setting into motion a reconciliation process between America’s two greatest allies in the region, has been frustrated by a series of spiteful interactions.

The Turkish-Israeli alliance of the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s was viewed by senior U.S. officials as an anchor of stability in a changing region. The relationship between Ankara and Jerusalem served vital U.S. interests in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, and so it was therefore a U.S. priority to restore dialogue between the two former allies-turned-rivals. The Obama administration, throughout both terms, has made a continuous effort to rebuild the relationship and was ultimately successful in setting the stage for the Israeli apology and the Turkish acceptance of that apology. The U.S. was not the only party that stood to gain from reconciliation; both Turkey and Israel have many incentives for normalizing relations. For Turkey, the reestablishment of a dialogue with Israel has four main potential benefits: It would allow for greater involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, it would provide greater opportunity for information sharing on the developments of the Syrian civil war allowing Turkey to have a more comprehensive perspective, it would also provide more economic opportunities for Turkey especially with regard to cooperation in the field of natural gas (following Israel's High Court of Justice recent ruling that paves the way toward exports of natural gas), and finally it would remove an irritant from Turkey's relations with the United States. In turn, Israel would benefit from the reestablishment of dialogue in three major ways: the rebuilding of relations between senior Turkish and Israeli officials would facilitate intelligence sharing and help to gain a more complete picture of the Syrian crisis, Israel would have the opportunity to contain delegitimization efforts in the Muslim and Arab worlds, and Israel may be able to rejoin NATO related activities and maneuvers.

Despite these enticements, in recent weeks a series of news stories and revelations have put the Turkish-Israeli relationship, yet again, in the international spotlight, raising doubts whether reconciliation between the two countries is at all possible at this time. As the Obama administration struggles to deal with the fallout of allegations that the NSA has tapped the office and cellular phones of Western European leaders and as it focuses on more pressing issues in the Middle East, namely the P5+1 negotiations with Iran, the Syrian crisis, Egypt and negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, it finds itself with little time to chaperone the Turkish-Israeli reconciliation process. Nevertheless, despite tensions, direct talks are reportedly being held between senior Turkish and Israeli officials in an effort to reach a compensation agreement in the near future.

The Israeli apology and Turkish acceptance, orchestrated by Barack Obama during his trip to the region in March 2013, was an essential first step in a long process of reconciliation, aimed at normalizing relations between the two countries after a four year hiatus in their relationship. The next step was an agreement between the two sides in which Israel was to pay compensation to the families of the victims of the Mavi Marmara. Several rounds of talks between senior Turkish and Israeli representatives were reportedly held during the spring of 2013 in Ankara, Jerusalem and Washington, but to no avail. Disagreements over the amount of compensation to be paid by Israel were reported, but later, in July, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Arinc clarified that money was not the issue. He stated that the problem lay in Israel’s refusal to acknowledge that the payment was a result of its “wrongful act.” Arinc added that another point of contention was Turkey's demand that Israel cooperate in improving the living conditions of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Arinc emphasized that only when these two conditions were met could the countries move forward to discuss the specific amount of compensation.

The shadow cast over negotiations by Arinc’s comments was darkened by a string of comments made by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan against Israel. First, he blamed the “interests lobby” – perhaps a reference to the so-called “Israel Lobby” -- for the large protests that took place against him and his government in Istanbul’s Taksim square and across Turkey in June. Then, in August, Erdogan accused Israel of backing the military coup in Egypt, citing comments made in 2011 by the French Jewish philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, as proof of a long standing Israeli-Jewish plot to deny the Muslim Brotherhood power in Egypt. This drew sharp Israeli criticism, notably from former Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who compared Erdogan to the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Despite these setbacks, bilateral trade between Turkey and Israel has expanded since the official apology and the number of Israeli tourists returning to visit Turkey has risen dramatically. Yet it is clear that with such harsh rhetoric it will be difficult to effectively advance a reconciliation process. Among American, Turkish and Israeli experts, the prevailing view is that Erdogan and the AKP government, mainly due to domestic political considerations, are not interested in normalizing relations with Israel, and that the only reason Erdogan accepted Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s apology was to gain favor with U.S. President Obama.

At the end of August, as the plan for a U.S. military strike in Syria gained momentum, relative calm prevailed in the relations between Ankara and Jerusalem, both focusing on preparations and plans to address the fallout of such an attack. Yet, just when it seemed that tensions were reducing, and Turkish President Gul stated that negotiations "are getting on track," in a September interview with the Washington Post, a series of news stories and revelations injected a poisonous dimension to the already-strained ties.

In early October another round of Turkish-Israeli verbal attacks and counter-attacks was sparked by a Wall Street Journal profile of the Turkish Head of Intelligence, Hakan Fidan, which included a quote from an anonymous Israeli official stating, "It is clear he (Fidan) is not an enemy of Iran." Shortly after came the revelation by David Ignatius in the Washington Post that quoted reliable sources that pointed to Fidan as allegedly passing the names of 10 Iranians working for the Israeli Mossad on to the Iranian intelligence in early 2012. These ten people were later arrested by the Iranian authorities. Senior Turkish officials blamed Israel for leaking the story to Ignatius and the Turkish daily, Hurriyet, reported that Fidan was considering severing ties between Turkish and Israeli intelligence agencies. Reactions in Turkey and Israel to the Ignatius story were harsh and emotional. Turkish officials denied the report while Israeli officials refrained from any public comments. The Friday edition of Yediot's front page headline read, “Turkish Betrayal,” and former Foreign Minister Lieberman voiced his opposition to the apology made in March; he expressed his opinion that it weakened Israel’s stance and image in the region, and he attacked Erdogan for not being interested in a rapprochement.

In recent days Prime Minister Erdogan struck a more conciliatory tone, saying that if Israel is denying involvement in the leak then Turkey must accept it. Israeli media outlets reported over the weekend that Israeli and Turkish negotiators are again trying to reach a compensation agreement. Israeli experts, quoted in these reports, view November 6 as a possible target date to end negotiations over this agreement. The logic behind this being that former Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman’s verdict is expected that day. If acquitted of corruption charges Mr. Lieberman will return to the Foreign Minister’s job and will likely try and block any attempt to reach an agreement. Turkish experts however assess that Turkey is simply not ready to move forward at this time due to domestic political constraints, as Prime Minister Erdogan and the AKP are bracing for Presidential and local elections in 2014.

Notwithstanding, the next few weeks will be crucial in determining whether Turkey and Israel can move forward and finally put the Marmara incident behind them. Turkey and Israel both have separate disagreements with the U.S. - Turkey over Syria, Egypt and the Turkish decision to build a missile defense system with a Chinese firm under U.S. sanctions; Israel over the Iran nuclear issue. However, the lingering Syrian crisis and reported progress on the Israeli-Palestinian track, in addition to economic considerations such as trade, tourism and above all potential cooperation on natural gas may entice both sides to proceed. Undoubtedly, a final deal will require strong U.S. support.