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Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the big problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Intro (Jeremy Weinstein): I think about the different roles that I’ve had in my career, including my role as a scholar, as platforms and the question is: How do I use that platform to deepen our understanding of a particular problem that I care about in the world? And to help us make progress on that problem. And what’s unfolded over the course of my career—and in some sense this is a risky strategy if youÆre an academic—you could look at my resume and say: "This guy has a short attention span," because many academics will study one topic their entire career. But I’ve seen my career as a scholar and later as a policymaker as really a platform to deploy where I could mobilize my own energies, the resources that I have access to, the scholarly networks that I’m embedded in, to make progress on problems that I care about.

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Hi. It’s Ralph Ranalli. Welcome back to another episode of the Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast.  Jeremy Weinstein became the newest dean in the 88-year history of the Kennedy School this past June, arriving from Stanford University, where he was an award-winning political economist and the founding faculty director of the Stanford Impact Labs.  

The pursuit of both deep scholarly curiosity and roll-up-your-sleeves impact has been a theme of his professional and personal history, and an approach he intends to accelerate schoolwide at ����vlog���� under his leadership. Growing up, Weinstein experienced a family run-in with government policy gone horribly wrong—one that could have inspired deep cynicism about the role of government in people’s lives. Instead, he found inspiration. He embarked on a career that has encompassed field research on the ground in post-conflict countries including Uganda, Mozambique, and Peru; wide-ranging scholarship in areas including political violence, the political economy of development, migration, and technology’s proper role in society; and  government service at the National Security Council and as Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama administration. He has also been an academic leader who has led major initiatives including the Stanford Impact Labs and the Immigration Policy Lab.  

His new job marks a return to ����vlog����, where he earned both his master’s and PhD in political economy and government. He joins me to talk about his life experiences, how they shaped him as a scholar and leader, and what he believes the role of the Kennedy School should be in challenging times for academia, the United States, and the world.  

Ralph Ranalli: Jeremy, welcome to PolicyCast.  

Jeremy Weinstein: Thanks so much for having me.

Ralph Ranalli: Ever since I’ve been at the Kennedy School, I’ve been conscious of the duality that exists here between, on one hand, identifying and rigorously researching important problems and issues, and on the other, the school’s role in actually going out into the world and either helping create change or advising those who do. And reading about your career trajectory, it seems like you’ve worked on both sides of that line and crossed it numerous times—from the practical to the scholarly to the practical again and now you’re here. And I think you’ve said it yourself, that the Kennedy School is one of the very few places in the world where the passion for scholarship and science is combined with the pursuit of public impact. When do you think, along the way, you first realized that both of those things were equally important and that that dual pursuit would be something that would become a hallmark of your career?

Jeremy Weinstein: It’s a great question and it requires going back to the formative years of my childhood. Because I think as a young person I came of age in Palo Alto, California in the 1980s. And there were all these different influences on my identity at that point in time. One influence on my identity was I was the child of a professor of psychology at Berkeley. And my mom’s professional career as a psychologist was focused on science, but science in the pursuit of generating more equitable outcomes in under-resourced school districts. And the particular question that she was interested in was: How is it that teachers’ expectations of students’ performance actually impact that performance? That is, if you expect less of a student, do they underperform as a result of things that are communicated by the teacher, either explicitly or implicitly?

And she was one of the people who helped to build the evidence base for what’s called expectancy effects. But she didn’t stop at describing that problem. Core to her identity as a scholar was redesigning classrooms and redesigning schools to those insights about how to address disparities in performance often on the basis of race or socioeconomic background and to address them in a meaningful way so that all kids could achieve their full potential. So that was the part of me that was shaped by my mom’s identity as a scholar, but as a scholar who was interested in how science is used to make change.  

The other part of my identity—that part of me that is an activist or a change maker or someone who sees problems in the world and names them, but then wants to address them—was really shaped also by my father. And my father was a psychiatrist. He was the director of student health at Stanford. But a critical part of his own personal identity was work that he did throughout the 1980s as part of a kind of human rights lawsuit to bring justice for his father.  

And the short story is that my grandfather was a prominent businessman in Montreal who experienced a set of panic attacks and sought treatment from Canada’s most prominent psychiatrist. And unbeknownst to him, that psychiatrist was on the payroll of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency—this was during the Cold War—and was running experiments on human subjects that were unknown to the subjects. And this psychiatrist admitted my grandfather to the hospital and subjected him to an extraordinary array of treatments for years on end, in multi-month stints in the hospital that basically destroyed his life and destroyed his personality.  

All of this was in the spirit of what was called mind control experimentation, how the U. S. could gain the upper hand in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And there was a view that if we could master techniques of interrogation, if we could master the ability to influence people through the use of drugs, through the use of shock treatment, through the use of what was called psychic driving—sort of replaying messages while people were in a deep, almost-comatose sleep—that we could get them to behave on our orders. And for a reason that we will never understand, this doctor decided that my grandfather would be one of those subjects. And my father became a psychiatrist to figure out what had happened to his father. And it was in the mid 1970s when information was first revealed about the CIA-funded program called MK Ultra, and we discovered that one of those sites was in Canada.

So, my childhood was much of my dad having his professional career but being focused with so much of his energy on seeking justice for his father in a lawsuit against the U. S. government and the Central Intelligence Agency. And so, I was surrounded by a set of civil rights lawyers and human rights activists who were interested in these issues of the misuse of government power. And so there I was, a kid who had an academic parent who was in the business of generating science to improve the human condition and a clinician father who was engaged in a passionate pursuit of justice for his own father. And so I really saw my life and career as finding a way of integrating both of those paths, but I just didn’t know it was possible because at every turn people said: “But are you really a scholar or are you a practitioner?” Or they’d say: “Are you a practitioner or do you like to just think about things?”

And I never saw those two is distinct. I saw making progress on problems in the world is being driven by a deep understanding of those problems, and how human behavior and social systems evolve as a result of policy change or institutional design. So I wanted to bring the scholarly perspective, but I always struggled with aspects of academia that felt that understanding the problem was sufficient, because what motivated me to be a social scientist was actually making progress on the problems.

Ralph Ranalli: And I believe I’ve read that that influenced your decision to come to ����vlog����, because you saw ����vlog���� as the place where those two things would meet. And then, given its prominence in the world of policy, it’s a place that can really have an impact if its energies are applied well. So I’d like to talk about some of your early advocacy when you were in college, and then about the focus of your dissertation when you came to ����vlog���� for your PhD. You actually went out and you spent nine months in South Africa as an undergrad. And then much of your dissertation research work was spent in the field in Uganda, Mozambique, and also Peru. How did those experiences that you had on the ground—meeting the people whose lives were directly affected by government policies like yours had been when you were a kid—how did that also shape who you are as a scholar and a policy maker?  

Jeremy Weinstein: So I think you’re absolutely right that ����vlog���� was the place where I first found an institution that valued both of these parts of my identity and made me think that it was possible to pursue a career as a rigorous social scientist who would, in the best circumstances, make contributions that were on the frontier of knowledge, but also be valued for asking questions that are important to policymakers, for pursuing partnerships with policymakers so that my research was of use, and even for serving in the public interest as a public official. And for graduate school, I was looking for a place that valued both of those parts of my identity. And at that point in time, ����vlog���� was singular, I think, in that respect and still stands out as an institution that has this in its DNA.  

But how did I end up working on Africa? That’s a longer journey. Because I was a kid who, as I was growing up, shaped by the things that I described to you earlier, was really interested in issues of economic injustice and racial injustice in the United States. I was growing up in a rapidly transforming Silicon Valley—huge inequalities on display across geographic boundaries, across highways, different outcomes for people in different school districts. A lot of that was both about class and about race. And so I saw myself going down the path of a career in civil rights. I took this break from Swarthmore after my first year because I felt this incredible urgency as a 19-year-old to be involved in the world, and I felt like I’d done a lot of school, and I was ready to serve. And I know that sounds a little bit crazy and unusual, but Bill Clinton had been elected president, and I was really motivated and inspired by his call for leadership on national service, which is something that I had been deeply involved in as a high school student.  

So I went to Washington after my freshman year and worked on the team that helped to set up AmeriCorps. And it was my first experience as a federal government employee. It was my first experience being in the crush of the policy making process and the institution building that could happen in government. I’m extremely proud of AmeriCorps and what it represents now multiple decades later. It’s also where I met some of my most valued mentors and colleagues. But it was during my time there that a visiting delegation from South Africa showed up at the National Service team and said, we’re really interested in the National Service model and what it might mean in a context like post-apartheid South Africa, where Nelson Mandela had just been elected, and there was a real question about how do you energize young people to be engaged not simply in protesting the status quo, but to be partners in constructing the future of the country? And so I had a special scholarship at Swarthmore and used that scholarship to go spend nine months in South Africa. And that was an extraordinary experience for me because it took issues of inequality and discrimination and the role of political institutions in giving people voice and the possibility of pursuing better outcomes for them and their families. It gave me another context in which to think about those issues, a country that was at a moment of extraordinary transformation.  

But it wasn’t an intellectual exercise for me. It was one that I experienced through the human beings that I interacted with at the University of Western Cape, where I studied at the classrooms that I taught. I was teaching in a high school a set of courses that I designed around community-service learning and civic education, and it was those relationships that really shaped my own thinking about South Africa’s democratic transition. So, for example, the family that I lived with in the township in Guguletu where I stayed—a family whose educational aspirations and aspirations for income and wealth were shaped entirely by their identity and the color of their skin rather than their energy or intellect—they were navigating a transition from a system where they could only go certain places with a pass that was signed off on from the government to all of a sudden being free to move, and free to pursue things that were previously prohibited to them.  

My best friend at the University of the Western Cape was a student who rejected many aspects of the founding negotiated settlement of the post-apartheid government. He saw that the pursuit of political rights without grappling with the issues of economic redistribution was going to be the undoing of South Africa over the long run, and so was a big critic of the African National Congress. So, I tell you that story just to say that going to South Africa in that moment, I saw a society undergoing a transition in which the fundamental aspects of a democratic constitution were being designed from scratch with all the lessons of 200 years of democracy in the modern world behind it in other parts of the world to shape South Africa’s trajectory. I got to experience this transition through the lens of students, friends, the family that I was living with. And so their relationship to this evolving democracy was my lens, not an academic lens, not about reading it through an article. And I got the opportunity to also be engaged in the world of practice while I was there as a teacher helping to design a program at a school.

And so it put issues that I’d thought about in the U. S. in a much broader global context, and got me thinking about the fundamental things that I care about—the role of political institutions in delivering on what people need, the rights that people are entitled to by virtue of being human, by being a citizen of a place, by being a person on this planet, and what opportunities there might be in societies around the world to design political institutions and support the evolution of political institutions that serve people’s needs. And so for me that was eye opening, it led me down an entirely different trajectory than one would have expected at age 16, and it’s what ultimately led me to my dissertation topic. We can go down that path if you’d like now, but I wanted to give you the context for how I even got to Africa.

Ralph Ranalli: Your dissertation was about political violence and its causes, and it eventually led to your book “Inside Rebellion, The Politics of Insurgent Violence.” And there was a key point in the book that I found both fascinating and relevant to today, which was that access to external wealth played a role in making revolutionaries more or less accountable to the populations that they lived among, the people they said they were fighting for. I’m really interested in your lens as a political economist, because like a lot of people these days, I’m increasingly convinced that understanding politics and economics and how they affect each other is absolutely essential to understanding the world we’re living in today. Where did you find that desire to put economics and politics together?  

Jeremy Weinstein: So, as someone who was coming of age as a scholar and a practitioner, increasingly interested in transitions that were unfolding on the African continent in the mid 1990s, what motivated me was, at the end of the Cold War, an opening of political spaces. And the potential for that opening of political spaces, not only to give people the rights that they sought—rights to free assembly, rights to free speech, rights to have a say in who governed them—but also the possibility that that political opening would translate into better economic outcomes on what was and continues to be the poorest continent in the world. And so coming to graduate school, I didn’t see politics and economics as separable. I was interested in issues of extreme poverty, issues of underdevelopment, and I thought that an understanding of economic policy and understanding of the design of political institutions, that both of those were central to making progress on the problems that I cared about in the world.

Now, those two different lenses, those two different perspectives became an important part of the study of political violence, because there I was interested in a specific problem, which is in 1998 and 1999 when I was beginning my dissertation work, I was looking out on an African continent that was experiencing an extraordinary amount of political violence and civil war. People thought this was going to be a period of just transition to democracy and booming economic growth. And instead, at the end of the cold war, what we actually saw was an upsurge in civil wars, internal conflicts with dramatic implications for civilians and that generated enormous human suffering.  

And so what I wanted to understand was why were these civil wars… not just why were they happening, the many reasons that they were happening. But I was interested in those that were fighting for change, the insurgent groups, why were they committing such significant atrocities against the populations that they purported to represent? And for me that was a puzzle—often as scholars we’re looking for a puzzle—if you read their rhetoric, if you understand their own political origins, these were individuals who were challenging the autocracies, that had been in power before, who were condemning the human rights violations of the regimes that they wanted to displace, who saw those regimes as corrupt. Yet their own behavior vis-à-vis populations was much more like the governments that they were trying to replace than the revolutionaries I think that they saw themselves as.

Ralph Ranalli: Autocratic, repressive.  

Jeremy Weinstein: Exactly. So I wanted to understand why. And for me the beginning of exploring that was preliminary field work on the border of Zambia and Congo and on the border of Zambia and Angola, where tens of thousands of refugees had fled from two large, long-running civil wars. And so I would meet with these individuals, at their temporary homes in these refugee camps, to try and understand how they saw the insurgent movements and what motivated the insurgent movements and how they experienced the arrival of the insurgent movements, very much rooted in the lived experience of these political changes that were happening around these refugees.  

And that’s what motivated a focus on, in the book and in the dissertation project before it—how are rebel organizations built? Because ultimately, if you want to understand their behavior, you have to understand how they’re constructed. Imagine the task of a rebel leader: It’s to convince a set of people to take up arms against a powerful state where the risks to participation are incredibly high, the potential rewards are quite uncertain and may be limited and you have a real uphill battle to win. And so the literature on insurgency and people who’ve studied guerrilla warfare for a long time really focus on the dynamics of organizational development and change. And part of what I recognized and then thought to study through my own field work was why are there such different organizational trajectories?

And one of the central insights of my work was that it matters a lot the extent to which rebel leaders are dependent on the civilian population to raise the resources and support that they need to build their armies. And when they’re able to build an army—that is, to recruit people, to resource the army, to get the guns and ammunition that they need—in the absence of securing the social consent of the populations that they seek to govern, they then put in many fewer constraints on the use of force, on the use of coercive tactics, and put in many fewer mechanisms for voice and accountability, And then a lot of these wars that were characterized by horrific levels of violence against civilians were ones in which rebel armies were built either around external sponsorship or the mobilization of resources via natural resource wealth that enabled them to avoid the process of negotiating with citizens for the kind of consent that they need to govern.

Ralph Ranalli: So, Africa’s been one area of interest for you, but you’ve embraced a number of interesting and diverse research areas: civil wars and political violence, ethnic politics, the political economy of development, democracy and accountability, migration, immigration, more recently technology, democracy and society, and ethics. Is there a through line through all of those? Were they part of a plan? Because if you look at the result, you’re very well-rounded as a scholar and seemingly well prepared to lead an institution like ����vlog���� with its 12 different research centers that cover a wide range of governance and policy areas. Or am I over reading too much into that, and you were just going where your scholarly interest took you?

Jeremy Weinstein: So there was definitely no grand plan. I think what I would say is the through line is that I think about the different roles that I’ve had in my career, including my role as a scholar, as platforms and the question is: How do I use that platform to deepen our understanding of a particular problem that I care about in the world? And to help us make progress on that problem. And what’s unfolded over the course of my career—and in some sense this is a risky strategy if you’re an academic—you could look at my resume and say: “This guy has a short attention span,” because many academics will study one topic their entire career. But I’ve seen my career as a scholar and later as a policymaker as really a platform to deploy where I could mobilize my own energies, the resources that I have access to, the scholarly networks that I’m embedded in, to make progress on problems that I care about.

And the first set of problems were really around political violence and civil war. And it led not only to the first book, but to partnerships with the United Nations, with major international NGOs to think about not just mitigating the harms of conflict, but post-conflict reconstruction across Africa. But then I saw that ethnic identities were a really important part of what was shaping not only patterns of ethnic violence and political violence, but also shaping the ability of governments to make progress on the problems that constituents cared about. People were seeing themselves in ethnic categories, and unable to cooperate across them. So that led to a series of studies on how ethnic politics are designed and what are the conditions under which one can forge. cooperation across ethnic lines.  

And then, I just kept pursuing problems. The next problem became, okay, we have all these new democratic institutions, including parliaments and legislators and all of these countries that in Sub-Saharan Africa that don’t have a history with parliamentary governance in a meaningful way. What would it mean to strengthen the ties between citizens and parliamentarians, so that those who are elected to act on behalf of communities actually do so? And so it led to a set of field experiments on that front. Immigration was an issue that I focused on coming out of government in 2015 where I felt like after my last role in government as we were grappling with the global refugee crisis, this was a space where the quality of the social science evidence wasn’t where we needed it to be given the salience of the political issues. My work on policing, similarly. I did a book on policing because the kinds of issues that were being surfaced around police accountability, use of force, were issues not only in the United States, but around the world. And I thought: Here’s an area where scholarship can contribute.

And then technology and technology policy. I was teaching at Stanford. Stanford was training the technologists of the next generation. And all of the harmful social consequences of new technologies were on display. And I felt well, here’s a role for social scientists, here’s a role for an educator and a scholar to shape that conversation. So I think part of that regeneration for me is that I’ve been using this platform as different problems present themselves. But the theory of the case has always been the same. Use the tools of social science to more deeply understand the problem. Do it with an eye towards generating insights and solutions that are meaningful. Use the platform that a university provides to lean into things that otherwise wouldn’t be studied. Use research approaches that lift up voices that wouldn’t otherwise be heard in a scholarly setting, the voices of those with lived experience of these problems, to help us understand how we might approach them. That’s the through line. It’s not the topic. And in fact, the true blessing of my career is that I’ve had a position in a university that has enabled me to move from topic to topic so that I’m always interested in what I’m doing.  

Ralph Ranalli: And I guess the upside of that moving from topic to topic in the context here is that it probably makes you more relatable to a larger group of scholars who all have different interests. I have to say I watched you give remarks at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy’s launch dinner for their new global LGTBQI-plus advocacy program. And you were just able to pull three different stories —almost effortlessly—out of your background to discuss the importance of advocating for the rights of LGBTQ people and the times when you had been in a position to do it yourself. So do you think that your career trajectory makes you relatable in a way that’s going to help you do this job?  

Jeremy Weinstein: I mean, I think what I’d say is that what’s special about this institution, both with faculty and staff and students, is that it attracts a set of people who see problems in the world, who see injustices, want to name those injustices and then want to figure out how to act with others to make progress to address those injustices. And some people do that primarily through their research. Some people do that through their teaching. Some people do that, you know, through the world of practice. Some people do that by helping us to build and sustain this great institution. And so what I bring to this new role is curiosity about the problems that people are trying to solve in the world, and appreciation for the contributions, the different roles: whether you’re providing scholarship, whether you’re acting as public servants, whether you’re teaching in the classroom, as I’ve done throughout my entire career. And so when you bring together that mission and all of those roles, you see what’s possible in an environment like this. And so I come with curiosity. I come with an appreciation of all of these different roles. And I come with a sense of passion and urgency about the need for this institution to help us make progress on these issues, both in the United States and around the world. I hope that’s what makes me relatable. Because my own trajectory has been fed by that appreciation of different roles, that curiosity, that sense of urgency and passion, and I find that among my colleagues here.

Ralph Ranalli: So I want to switch gears for a second and talk about the times when you were actually in government service. You were at the National Security Council for a while in the Obama administration. And you also were at the UN with Ambassador Samantha Power, who was the founding executive director here at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. When you were actually working in government, what insights did you learn there about turning the insight gained from your scholarly pursuits, that diligent scholarship, into policy change at the government level?

Jeremy Weinstein: I’m going to answer this question by telling you first about my first stint in government. And it came in the summer after my first year in the PhD program at Harvard. I had this opportunity to go down to Washington and join the National Security Council staff working on Africa policy. Now I’d done my work in the classroom. I’d done my advanced microeconomics. I’d done my econometrics. I’d taken my basic political science courses. I still didn’t know what exactly I wanted to study. But most of the scholars of African politics that I was working with were really focused on what I described earlier—this transition from authoritarian rule, and what it represented for the politics and economics of African countries.

I moved down to Washington—I think it was the fourth week of May in 1998—and President Clinton had just made his first trip to Africa. It was a big deal. It got a lot of attention, and he was also focused in this very affirmative way on the trajectory of the African continent. What unfolded over the course of my 12 weeks in this internship before I came back was an introduction in a very serious way, not only to how policymaking works, but also to what was actually on the president’s agenda. Because over the course of that summer we experienced a civil war in Guinea Bissau, and we had to evacuate an embassy. We had the death of Sani Abacha, the dictator of Nigeria, followed by a political transition that unfolded. We had a civil war breakout in the Congo that multiple foreign governments got involved in. We had Ethiopia and Eritrea go to war with one another. We had the embassies bombed in Kenya and Tanzania. And then, of course, we had the first U. S. military action against Osama bin Laden. That all unfolded over 12 weeks.  

Now, I was staffed to work with two extraordinary individuals. My direct boss was Gail Smith, who was the senior director for Africa policy at the White House, later became USAID administrator in the Obama administration. I also worked closely with a young assistant secretary named Susan Rice, who was the assistant secretary of state for African affairs. And so on this small team, we were briefing the senior leadership and working these problems every day. And they were all problems around conflict. Not about political transition. Not about economic development. They were about violence and how violence was being used. So the first insight that I got from my time in government was that being closer to those who are solving problems or tackling problems in real time can shape in important ways the questions that we ask. And so I came back to the PhD program, and I said: “I think I need to work on the topic of civil war. I think I need to work on the topic of political violence.”

And for me, that lesson has played out over and over in my career—that proximity to the problem solvers is an important source of information about where science can be valuable and useful. It’s also an absolutely essential network if you want your science to be useful, in the sense that it’s those relationships that I forged in that first experience, that first internship at the National Security Council, that became one of my most important vehicles of policy impact, whether I was at a think tank, whether I was sitting in academia, and also my opportunities for public service all flowed directly from that internship. So that’s where it started. That’s where I began to have insights about the policymaking process.  

Ralph Ranalli: If you don’t mind, talk a bit about the insights that you gained later when you went back to the NSC and then also to the United Nations.  

Jeremy Weinstein: So I think one of the challenges for scholars is that, in the absence of a deep understanding of how the policymaking process works, we often operate with the view that our responsibility is to diagnose a problem from afar, to help people understand what it means to offer a set of policy recommendations, and then we push those policy recommendations out to the world in the hopes that those who are at the decision-making table can benefit from our insights. But as I referenced with my own experience of the first time at the National Security Council, often we’re not even asking the right questions. And so we need our questions and our use of science in important ways—especially at a place like the Kennedy school—to be really shaped and co-created by those who are at the decision-making table, whether the issues are domestic policy and foreign policy.

But as I took on a full-time job, I think other aspects of the policy making process that are often you know, not completely understood by those in the world of scholarship became fully visible to me. Of course, one important feature is that evidence—that is, what comes from science-—is one input into a decision-making process. It’s not the only input into a decision-making process. And ultimately, you need to think about politics, you need to think about capability, you need to think about the institutional constraints that exist. And when you’re solving for a policy problem in the world, you really do want to be shaped by the evidence that exists, but you have to recognize the imperfections of that evidence. The fact that that evidence doesn’t necessarily tell you what you should do in a particular situation that you’ve never confronted in the past. But it also doesn’t solve for all of the other constraints that you confront.  

And so, as a policymaker, all of a sudden, you’re grappling with the full complexity of a policymaker’s calculus. You then also come to understand that a policymaker’s calculus is something that’s embedded in a political process. And by that, I don’t even mean the political process writ large, democracy. I mean the process inside government in which decisions are made about what actions we take. And so, these are things that are shaped by who has power, who has authority, who has resources, how the process itself is structured and designed. And so, a policy recommendation that’s shot in from afar, that doesn’t take into account where authority rests where the budgetary resources exist, what the challenges are in securing additional appropriated resources from Congress, what the bandwidth might be of the United Nations to launch another peacekeeping mission. These are things that miss the actual practical real-world challenges that a policymaker confronts.

So I think my times in government, and we can talk about some of the specifics, were opportunities for me to live the reality of bringing my social scientist mind to the table. But not as the social scientist in the room, but as the policymaker in the room, so that I could be shaped and influenced by my own desire to benefit from the work of so many of my colleagues who helped me deeply understand some of the problems that we confront. But also be attuned to the politics of making policy, the politics of making change, which are often invisible to scholars, but really matter a lot to practitioners.

Ralph Ranalli: I’m interested particularly in your experiences at the United Nations. I had the chance to work and study at the UN for a semester in grad school, and to me it seemed like this wonderfully aspirational place, but also a place that routinely failed to live up to its promise. So it seems like it could be an incredibly frustrating place to work full time. Can you talk a little bit about what you learned at the UN, and maybe broader lessons about understanding the difference between what is possible and what is not possible, and how to achieve the best result in a difficult situation?  

Jeremy Weinstein: Well, I like the way that you framed the question, beginning with aspirations, because when I would meet high school students at the U. S. Mission to the United Nations, as people would often come through and visit they would bemoan the ineffectiveness of, of the United Nations in various ways and offer suggestions on how it could be reformed. And I would often stop to remind them just how extraordinary it is that human beings have created a platform in which all the countries of the world come together to deliberate and debate how we should solve collective challenges. And I think it was only in the aftermath of something as traumatic for the world as World War II that you could have that aspiration. And that aspiration has reshaped how Europe is structured, and that aspiration has also given life to something that had been envisioned for a long time but had never come into full form.

We’re at a moment that is challenging for what some have called the rules-based international order. The United Nations is one part of that, where the kind of alignment of the interests of the major powers in the world has broken down. And there are real questions about the efficacy of the United Nations as a platform going forward. But let us not forget its extraordinary aspirational potential and its very existence as being, in some sense, a tribute to the desire of human beings to find peaceful ways of living with one another.  

But you asked a more brass-tacks question, which is, how do you get anything done in that, in that place? And I think you need to recognize that the UN is not one entity. It’s not the Security Council. It’s not the General Assembly. It’s not peacekeeping missions. It’s not the World Food Program. It’s not the Human Rights Council. It’s all of these things. And so some of the frustration that people see, for example, the failure of the Security Council to agree on how, for example, to address the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Security Council isn’t going to be able to agree on that. It’s got veto wielding powers who will stand in the way of its ability to do anything meaningful on that front.  

On the other hand, by bringing that issue to the U. N. Security Council and making reference to the U. N. ’s founding documents and commitments, you bring attention to something like the violation of the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine. That’s the high stakes, high visibility stuff. And there, it’s not the failure of the U. N. It’s the failure of an alignment among member states to make progress on an issue.  

But what happens behind the scenes? Well, behind the scenes, you might have areas where cooperation is possible. One of the first things that Ambassador Power and I focused on after we got to New York was ethnic violence that was breaking out in the Central African Republic. And there was a question about how to deal with tens of thousands of people who were being massacred and killed. Sixty-plus percent of the business of the Security Council historically has been the authorization and deployment of peacekeeping missions. And so we were able to play a leadership role in that period in helping to architect a UN response, even though Russia and China and the United States and other members of the Security Council don’t also agree on things, lots of cooperation does happen. We also helped to drive extraordinary cooperation in the aftermath of Syria’s use of chemical weapons to remove significant quantities of chemical weapons from Syria in the midst of an ongoing civil war. That takes extraordinary logistical capability, extraordinary political will, resources being put to good use, and we could multiply this many times over when we think about the peacekeeping missions deployed around the world, the humanitarian relief around the world, the World Food Program to address food insecurity.

The UN is many things. We deployed those same capabilities in line with and alongside the United States as the Ebola epidemic roiled West Africa, where we needed to mobilize the attention of the world toward a potential epidemic that could spread. That was a preview of things that we then encountered years later with COVID, with something that was far more transmissible than Ebola was. When those things happen, you want a platform. You want a forum. You want to be able to bring countries together. You want to be able to deliberate collectively. And sometimes you’re going to be able to use the full force and influence of the United Nations because the major powers of the world unite. Sometimes you won’t. And when you can’t, then you figure out other strategies using your alliance, using networks that you build of like-minded countries at that particular moment in time.  

But I walked away inspired by the ambition of the founders of the United Nations, who in the aftermath of World War two saw the need for global cooperation. I was inspired every day by the work of United Nations officials and United Nations staff who, in all of the hardest environments around the world, are out there on the front lines. And then just recognizing the importance of politics and leadership and trying to forge the possibilities for global cooperation, whether it’s on the refugee crisis. Or climate or pandemic disease or global poverty. With the sustainable development goals. If we didn’t have such a forum, we would want it to exist, and it probably would be impossible to create now.  

Ralph Ranalli: So I wanted to pivot to something that I think we’re going to be dealing with for a long time, and it’s also very immediate, which is the intersection of technology and democracy. It’s causing so many issues, not just in the United States, but around the world. Where did the first germ of that idea that that needed to be a research focus for you, where did that come from?  

Jeremy Weinstein: So I was born in Palo Alto, and I was a scholar of African politics at Stanford as Silicon Valley took off. And technology happened around me. It wasn’t something that I was paying much attention to—I was interested in issues of politics, issues of economics, issues of justice, and it just wasn’t very high on my radar screen. And so it was really in government, in President Obama’s second term, when I really began to think great deal about the ways in which our democratic institutions are or are not fit for purpose in a technological age. Some of the roots of that were spurred in the early days of the Obama administration when we launched something called the Open Government Partnership, which was rooted in our sense that new technologies offered extraordinary opportunities for political voice and political organizing that could deepen democracy in the United States and around the world. And we wanted to create a platform for that richer civic engagement and greater connectivity between citizens and those who represent them.  

But it was also when I was deputy to the United Nations ambassador and in the kind of foreign policymaking process—something called the Principals Committee and the Deputies Committee—where it became clear that we were confronting a set of issues related to the advance of technology, that as a leadership team, we largely didn’t have the background or depth of understanding to navigate. Some of this stuff was apparent as there were debates about end-to-end encryption and the relationship between our desire to protect people’s privacy and our need to preserve public safety. Also, when we experienced this major cyber-attack on Sony after the movie “The Interview” came out, where it was an attack on a company in the United States. What was the role of the U. S. government in such a moment? Were foreign powers involved? How does this change the landscape of geopolitical competition?  

So I left Washington to go back to Stanford thinking about what was happening around technology and what my role might be at Stanford as I did my next reinvention. And the answer for me quite simply was that Stanford was at the forefront of training the next generation of technologists. That the kind of education that they needed couldn’t be something that simply taught them how to code and build. That they were going to need to demonstrate an ability to grapple with the normative issues that are at stake in new technologies, what values are at stake. To think about the social consequences of what they build and to be deeply steeped in the appropriate role of political institutions and democratic institutions in setting guardrails on technological change. So it became the focus of my teaching and the focus of my writing for the last eight years.  

Ralph Ranalli: And you co-taught a course at Stanford called “Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change.” You were the policy guy, but you also co-taught it with an ethicist and a legendary computer science professor at Stanford.

Jeremy Weinstein: The key thing was to get the legendary computer scientist, the most popular computer science professor, because that gave us a legitimacy to talk about issues of ethics and politics that otherwise I think most students maybe wouldn’t have been that interested in. But he helped us put this on the agenda of the computer science department and every graduate of that program during our time teaching this course. He also gave us the legitimacy to start offering the course in the evenings to professional engineers. So we were teaching 300 students a semester in the classroom and up to 300 engineers at night, giving them the opportunity to grapple with the challenging normative and policy issues that emerge from designing new technology.

Ralph Ranalli: And that course eventually became the book, “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.” One thing that caught my eye in the book was what you called the marriage of the engineers and the financiers, because it gets to an issue that I think we don’t acknowledge or talk about enough. And that issue is values—what are the different values that inform the decisions that are made? You talk in the book about what you call the optimization mindset—putting efficiency above all other considerations—which ends up substituting what the tech company executives care about for the values that we as a democratic society might want to prioritize. What do you see as the role of values in shaping policy? Do we need to start by, what, being more transparent about the role of values and maybe having conversations start there?  

Jeremy Weinstein: I think what I’d say is that some of the most ancient questions that human beings have asked about our identities, about our relationships with one another about how we live together are questions fundamentally about values. What does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to be a good life? What does it mean to be ruled in a way that is just? These are all questions about what we value. These are questions of political philosophy. These are questions that we call normative questions rather than positive questions. And there’s no policy issue that I’ve ever confronted that doesn’t have fundamental values at stake. And so even as scholars, what questions that we choose to answer in the world are shaped by our own values orientation. What hypotheses we want to test, they’re shaped by a set of intuitions that are often rooted in our values.

And so even when we bring a frame that is evidence based, what does the evidence say about the effect of X on Y? We have chosen to focus on Y, and we have chosen to focus on X and that is rooted in our own values. What I was trying to bring to the teaching of computer scientists was a recognition that there is nothing neutral, absolutely zero that’s neutral about the design and deployment of new technologies, and though we may dress things up in the precision of math and the beauty of coding and the construction of architecture, that everyday people who were operating in the world of computer science were making decisions about how to trade off different values.

Maybe the most, you know, easiest example for people to get their heads around is something like the app called Signal, which many people have on their phone which prioritizes privacy. And so those who designed Signal and deployed it in the world believe that privacy is extraordinarily important. Other people might think that there are conditions under which privacy at the individual level ought to be sacrificed for other goals—say, for example, if we want to prevent crime, if we want to prevent a terrorist attack. These are the debates that played out around end-to-end encryption. These are different things that we value, and they need to be traded off against one another, there’s no uniquely right answer about how much privacy we should have and how much security we should have. The question that motivated our teaching in the book was who should be making that trade off. And I think the challenge of the last two decades is that we have largely left it to technologists to make those value tradeoffs on our behalf.

And my own view is that the right place to referee those value tensions is through our democratic institutions. Because our democratic institutions are not solving for the bottom line of a company. They’re solving for a collective representation of our interests. And I taught for many years in a place that is often seen as quite libertarian and anti-regulation. And I would often say to the students, let’s stop using the word regulation and let’s start using the word democracy. Because democracy is itself a technology. It’s the best technology that we’ve come up with for helping people who have highly different and varied perspectives and often disagree with one another to live together without killing one another. And solving that fundamental aspect of the human condition was key to everything that came after. Democracy was a tool for doing so, and so when regulations are set in place, they’re the expression of a democratic will, a view that the right way to balance the advances and innovations that are made possible by the market is with an eye towards protecting other values that might be at stake. That is what regulation is an expression of.  

And so when one criticizes regulation in a knee-jerk way, one is saying we don’t need democracy. And that is a much deeper statement that people should grapple with. Because in some sense it’s an argument for technocracy. It’s an argument for Plato’s philosopher kings. There’s ancient political theory that helps us think about the pros and cons of entrusting our fortunes to technocracy in some important way and that’s what I wanted our computer scientists to engage.  

Ralph Ranalli: So, Jeremy, toward the end of every PolicyCast episode, we take time to be solutions-oriented and talk about specific policy recommendations. Now you’ve said that you truly believe that public institutions—when they act on behalf of citizens and are accountable to those they serve—can do an extraordinary amount of good in the world. Yet right now we’re dealing with very high levels of general distrust in public institutions, in expertise, in scholarship. What would your recommendations be for some ways to help restore that trust?  

Jeremy Weinstein: I think it’s such an important question. And it’s an important question not only for the Harvard Kennedy School, but also for higher education in general. This issue of declining trust in science, declining trust in expertise, is something that we have to grapple with—that a gulf has opened up for many people between their own sense of what it is that they need out of their government, what it is that they need out of those who represent them, and what institutions that offer expertise that’s informed by science, that’s informed by a deep understanding of problems, that’s informed by rigorous thinking. Skepticism that those institutions, whether in health, whether in social science, whether in public policy, are serving the public good.

So where do we start? In part, we start by reconnecting ourselves in meaningful ways to the problems that people are experiencing. Making sure that the questions that we’re asking and answering—like the ones that I discovered during my first stint at the National Security Council focused on Africa—are ones where the science that we bring to the table offers the meaningful prospect of helping our public institutions make progress.

That requires some realigning of incentives and some allocation of resources in different ways to really position higher education and ����vlog���� as a partner to those who are on the front lines of doing this problem-solving work. And often that’s going to be not at the federal level. Our federal politics are deeply polarized. But many of the most important problems that people experience in their daily lives—it’s really governors, it’s mayors, county boards of supervisors that are spending the vast majority of their resources designing the policy interventions and the programmatic changes that can help them make progress.  

And at the Kennedy School and in higher education more broadly, we need to reclaim that commitment to the civic purpose of higher education. We saw it historically in the land grant institutions. We see it in so much of the leadership of our public institutions of higher education around the country. And it’s important for all of us to see the science that we do as in service of solving the problems that are democratic institutions confront. We know how to do this. We do it extremely well in health. We do it extremely well in technology. We see higher education is the font of new insights and innovations that improve the human condition and that make our lives more productive and easier. We need to harness these institutions in the same way to help us grapple with the issues that are the major pain points for people, whether it’s economic insecurity, whether it’s housing insecurity, whether it’s a lack of access to food, whether it’s mental health, whether it’s issues of the geographic disparities in economic development.  

The great thing about being at ����vlog���� is that I’m surrounded by a set of colleagues, faculty, staff, and students who share that ambition, for the role that higher education can play. Who are here to produce research, to be trained, to contribute to the training of others. And I think recentering ourselves in that mission and building trust by example, building trust by being out there on the ground doing this work and recognizing that there’s trust to be rebuilt here. We have to prove the case. We have to demonstrate the value of the work that we do, that the value proposition of investing in expertise, investing in a policy innovation ecosystem is one that’s going to yield enormous social returns. Because in the absence of expertise, I really worry about how it is that our democratic institutions will function, how we’ll approach solving these problems. I want to get the most out of every federal dollar, or state dollar, or county dollar that’s spent. I want to make sure it delivers the outcomes that we care about. Science is inevitably going to be a part of doing that, but we need to do it in a way that people can see and in which they feel the benefits.

Ralph Ranalli: Well, Jeremy, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate you telling us your story and sharing your insights and I sincerely wish you good luck in leading the school into a very interesting and challenging time.  

Jeremy Weinstein: Thanks so much for a great conversation.  

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe to PolicyCast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app, so you don’t miss any of our important upcoming episodes. And please leave us a review while you’re there. And until next time, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.