Policy Punchline

Esteban Rossi-Hansberg is the Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He performs research in macroeconomics, international trade, and urban and regional economics. He has been appointed the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago where he will join the faculty of the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics in the Summer of 2021....

Sheldon Solomon is Professor of Psychology at Skidmore College. He is best known for developing terror management theory along with Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, which is concerned with how humans deal with their own sense of mortality. He studies the effects of the uniquely human awareness of death on human behaviors. He is co-author of several books, including the one we’ll be discussing t...

Austen Allred is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lambda School. It is an online platform that trains you remotely to become a web developer or a data scientist. The user pays no tuition until hired. Austen’s start-up journey began in 2017 with him living in his two-door Civic while participating in Y Combinator (YC), the famous San Francisco-based seed accelerator. This experience became the foundation...

Ian Jefferies is the President and CEO of the Association of American Railroads (AAR), an organization whose members include the major freight railroads of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and Amtrak. Chuck Baker joined American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association (ASLRRA) as President after a 15-year career in the railroad industry. In this interview, co-hosts Tiger Gao and Sullivan Meyer d...

Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies and Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is one of the most prominent financial and economist historians of our age, and his most recent book “Making a Modern Central Bank: The Bank of England, 1979–2003” was just published in the fall of 2020. In this interview, Prof. James discusses his...

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also head of the Global Economics and Management group. Prior to teaching, Professor Simon Johnson worked as the Chief Economist and Director of the Research Department at the IMF from 2007 to 2008. This interview discusses his most recent book "Jump-Starting America: How Breakthro...

Lee Cronin is a chemist and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and has published over 350 papers and given hundreds of lectures. He also heads the Cronin Group, a lab that is “motivated by the fascination for complex chemical systems, and the desire to construct complex...

Chris Wheat is the Co-President for the JPMorgan Chase Institute. Prior to joining JPMCI, he served as the Director of Analytics at a financial technology startup, where he led the development of advanced analytics algorithms. He previously was an Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and at the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development at Rutgers Business Scho...

George Church is Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT. He is known as the father of synthetic biology and the CRISPR-CAS9 gene editing technology, and he is widely recognized as one of the most important geneticists of our age. In 1984, he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method, which result...

Greg Lewis is an economist and the Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft and co-leads the ALICE (Automated Learning and Intelligence for Causation and Economics) and EconML projects, an effort to develop use AI and machine learning for economics research. He specializes in industrial organization, market design, applied econometrics and machine learning. His work is unified by the twin goals of...

Last October, the IEA declared that solar power is “the new King of Electricity.” But as it currently produces only 2% of the global electricity, the newly crowned energy royalty has a long way to go before it will reach full dominance. In Taming the Sun, Dr. Varun Sivaram outlines the financial, technological, and systemic innovations that could allow solar power to provide a third of our energy...

Mathias Risse is the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Administration at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. He also serves as the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs and Philosophy and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. His research questions the role of global justice in a wide range of topics like human right...

Robert Langer is an acclaimed chemical engineer, professor, and investor in biomedical technology. He is one of 10 Institute Professors at MIT, which is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member. He has written more than 1,500 articles, with 1,400 patents issued and pending worldwide that have been licensed to over 400 companies. He is the most cited engineer in history with an H-i...

Wingham Rowan has long been a leader in forecasting the interactions between technology and society. For instance, he created, produced, and presented cyber.cafe, Britain’s longest running TV series about the internet. He also was a presenter on his own program for children, Rowan’s Report. More recently, however, Mr. Rowan has been studying the future of labor and how technology can improve the u...

Stephen Roach is a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and a Senior Lecturer at Yale’s School of Management, where his research and teaching focus on the impacts of Asia on the global economy. One of Wall Street’s most influential economists, Prof. Roach spent more than 30 years at Morgan Stanley, where he was the Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the bank’s Chief Econom...

David Williams serves as the Director of Policy Outreach at Opportunity Insights, a research and public policy lab based at Harvard University dedicated to using big data to improve upward mobility in America. The lab is led by Professors Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Nathaniel Hendren. David is tasked with supporting research and evidence-based policy change by creating and leading partnerships...

Hunt Allcott is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research visiting the Economics Department at Harvard University in 2020-2021. An applied microeconomist who studies topics in behavioral economics, environmental economics, public economics, and industrial organization, Prof. Allcott is also a Co-Editor of the Journal of Public Economics and a Scientific Director of ideas42, a think tank...

Dave Wasserman is the House Editor for The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan polling and elections forecasting group. Before joining The Cook Political Report, Dave worked as the House Editor for another widely respected polling and elections forecasting firm, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. At The Cook Political Report, Wasserman is known as one of the nation’s prominent election forecasters. He succes...

Steven Kelts is a Lecturer at Princeton University’s Politics Department and University Center for Human Values. A historian of political thought, he is now teaching a seminar titled “Money, Markets, and Morals.” In this interview, Prof. Kelts explains the recent saga of GameStop trades, its connections with historical market fluctuations, and the important normative considerations about market fa...

David Yamane is Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University. For the first twenty years of his career, Prof. Yamane focused on the sociology of religion. Since 2011, he has researched the sociology of guns. As Prof. Yamane once explained, “there is no sociology of U.S. gun culture.” Most gun-related studies are epidemiological or criminological, and few people really study why, in many parts...

Ewan Kingston is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton High Meadows Environmental Institute and the University Center of Human Values. He works at the intersection of political philosophy, business ethics, and environmental ethics. He has focused on climate change and global supply chains, as well as on the interplay of markets and democracy to outline legitimate and effective institution...

Dr. Parminder K. Jassal is an educational researcher and reformer. While she is currently the CEO of Social Tech Inc., a public benefit corporation trying to increase educational access, her career has also taken her through the ACT Foundation, the Institute for the Future, and a number of large private corporations. Her own educational story traverses through both India as well as the American pu...

Hey everyone. This is your host Tiger speaking. Happy new year! I hope you’ve all had a very restful holidays season with your loved ones. I’ve been doing Policy Punchline for two years now and what a journey we’ve come along. We released our 100th episode last November, and in 2020, we built two special coverages – one on the Covid-19 crisis and another on the recent elections season. We’ve reall...

Rob Henderson is a Gates-Cambridge Scholar pursuing a PhD in social psychology at Cambridge University, UK. His experience led him to develop insights on the upper class, luxury beliefs, human nature, and other topics in social psychology that we discuss in this interview. Rob’s upbringing was turbulent to say the least and shaped him to be a conservative. He bounced around foster homes and experi...

Samuel George is a documentary filmmaker that has gone into each of his projects with the simple goal of listening. Sam describes himself as a filmmaker and analyst for the Bertelsmann Foundation focusing on the intersection of economics, politics, the digital revolution, and daily life. Filming on the ground from the Turkish – Syrian border to the factories of Juarez, Mexico, the films dive insid...