Policy Punchline

Rachel Glennerster is the Chief Economist for the UK Department for International Development (DFID), which is the UK's ministry for international development cooperation. Previously, she was the Executive Director of J-PAL (the Jameel Poverty Action Lab) at MIT. This March, Prof. Glennerster gave the closing keynote remarks at the 2020 annual conference at Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Polic...

Scott Morris is a Senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he directs the US Development Policy Program and co-directs the Sustainable Development Finance Program. He previously served as deputy assistant secretary for development finance and debt at the Treasury Department under the Obama Administration. In that capacity, he led US engagement with the multilateral development ban...

Matt Arnold is the Global Head of ESG at J.P. Morgan Chase and has been a pivotal figurehead in integrating sustainable energy practices into large corporations. One important topic in light of the Covid-19 crisis and the recent Black Lives Matter protests is ESG – environmental, social, and corporate governance. ESG has been a discussion topic in the corporate world for a long time, but the topic...

Brad Setser is the Steven A. Tanenbaum Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served as the deputy assistant secretary for international economic analysis in the U.S. Treasury from 2011 to 2015. In this interview, Dr. Setser discusses how tax avoidance schemes by corporations could distort conventional understanding of cross-national capital fl...

Quantum computing is the latest “buzz-word” in the tech industry – with over $450 million of private funding investments made between 2017 and 2018 – but what are quantum computers and how will they spark the quantum revolution? Do they truly live up to the “hype” or are the challenges facing them not resolvable in the near future? In this episode, Tiger and aspiring physicist Harsh Babla intervie...

Robert Frank is the H. J. Louis Professor of Management and Economics at Cornell University. His newest book “Under the Influence, Putting Peer Pressure to Work” discusses how social environments profoundly shape our behaviors and how we can unlock the power of social influence – through fascinating ideas from behavioral contagion to consumption taxation. 

 In this interview, Prof. Frank explains...

IBM Chief Economist Martin Fleming discusses Covid-19’s immediate impacts on labor markets and the long-term trends for the future of work – from automation to artificial intelligence. Given how millions of people have to work from home today, there have been countless research reports springing up talking about “the end of work as we know it.” Some of us at Policy Punchline have always been skept...

Made popular by Nobel Laureate and economist Paul Romer, charter city is a new vision for building prosperous cities that can unlock economic potentials and solve common issues in urbanization and poverty for their citizens and countries they are part of. In this episode, Dr. Mark Lutter, Founder of the Charter Cities Institute, discusses what charter cities are, why they are unique compared to sp...

Nicholas Lemann’s recent book, “Transaction Man,” is an account of the United States economy in the 20th and 21st century, how it has transformed over time, and the impacts of such transformation on all of us. Specifically, Prof. Lemann examines three remarkable economic and social thinkers who he calls, “Institution/Organization Man,” “Transaction Man,” and “Network Man,” who epitomized and helpe...

Alan Blinder was the Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System under President Bill Clinton. In this episode, we seek to answer questions on the Fed’s unprecedented actions in light of the COVID-19 crisis and their long-term implications, from whether the injection of liquidity is propping up the financial markets in unhealthy ways, to whether the lack of coordination b...

What is gerrymandering and how does it affect people’s electoral rights? How can we use technology and data to empower communities to get the representation they deserve? More importantly, why is 2020 important besides the presidential elections, and how can it shape American politics for at least another decade? In this interview with Princeton professor Sam Wang, we explore what gerrymandering m...

“Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party” is the latest book of Princeton politics professor and historian Julian Zelizer. The book explores how the 50th House Speaker Newt Gingrich started an era where Republicans practiced a ruthless style of partisanship that ignored the conventional norms of Washington and continually tested how fa...

In late June 2020, Covid-19 claimed one of the largest giants in the energy industry: Chesapeake Energy. Chesapeake is a leader in the fracking industry that had been on the rocks for a few years now. In this episode, we detail the rapid rise of the fracking industry with Russell Gold, WSJ senior energy reporter in Texas. Gold’s first book, "The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revol...

Museums and galleries have been closed since March under lockdown rules, and there are growing fears among curators that many museums may never open again due to financial difficulties. James Steward is the Director of Princeton University Art Museum, where he leads a staff of 110 with an operating budget of $20 million and collections of over 110,000 works of art that span the globe and encompass...

How can we use evidence, not predetermined cultural scripts based on past pandemics, to evaluate the current Covid-19 crisis? This is the question Dr. Merle Eisenberg raised in his recent Washington Post op-ed. When we talk about coronavirus, we often hear anecdotes from the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Why do we focus so strongly on this particular historical example, and what do we miss out on whe...

Multiple tech companies (Amazon, IBM) have—in a rather surprising turn of events—pledged to stop providing facial recognition technology to police departments in light of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. In this episode, Dr. Annette Zimmerman of Princeton University gives context to the wider public debate on algorithmic justice and the biases of artificial intelligence technology that is rapidly u...

Jan Vogler from the University of Virginia analyzes the European Union as a polycentric governance system. He is particularly interested in the question of whether this institution with multiple layers of decision-making and a mix of shared and individual responsibilities of governments at different levels can effectively respond to the many challenges it faces today, from Brexit to the internatio...

Stadiums closed; mass sporting events canceled... tough days for the sports industry, which is projected to lose $61.1 billion in revenue in 2020 due to Covid-19, according to one new research study. The NFL is preparing for its season this Fall – how is the league navigating decision making and planning during this time? Tiger and Arjun invited Mr. Iwao Fusillo back on the show, who is Senior Vic...

On April 25th, the West Texas Intermediate price for oil futures delivered in May collapsed to -37 to -40 dollars a barrel at one point. It has never happened that oil prices fell into negative territory. While the oil crisis has seemingly stabilized, tons of questions remain. Prof. Jason Bordoff, the founding Director of Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, joins Tiger and Owen f...

Given the tragic incident of the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests, it’s probably the right time to talk about protests. What are the effective ways to protest? How have the shape and form of protests transformed throughout the past decades as black people fought for their rights? And certainly, how justified is violence or how effective is non-violence in protests? Unfortunately...

When we interviewed the famous and controversial Princeton ethics philosopher Peter Singer, he brought up an interesting study by economist Paul Frijters that claims the current set of economic lockdowns are causing 70 times more life years lost than Covid-19 otherwise would had we done nothing. It was surprising to hear such a perspective, since there has been almost unanimous consensus amongst t...

There has been so much hype about contact tracing technology and how it will be the key to reopening the country. Google and Apple, for example, are building a system to track contact between people who might spread the disease. The idea is simple: since Bluetooth is constantly scanning for other devices, your phone can use wireless signals to see who you’ve been near. Somebody who gets a positive...

Bruce Schneier is a public-interest technologist, and his latest book "Click Here to Kill Everybody" seeks to explore risk and security questions in today's hyper-connected world with smart thermostats, "Internet of Things" home devices, self-driving cars, and other "mini computers" that are easily hackable and pose grave security threats. In this interview, Mr. Schneier explains why tech today is...

Many studies have come out suggesting a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups during this Covid-19 crisis. And certainly one cannot attribute this phenomenon simply to the virus itself, but much due to the underlying structural fractures of the American society in its treatment of racial and ethnic minorities for years and decades. In this interview,...

What can we learn about all the misinformation about Covid-19? Are they mostly incorrect but uncorrelated health tips, or are there specific narratives behind those misinformation that seek to lay groundwork for the post-pandemic public discourse? Are they simply "fake news" spread around by well-meaning citizens, or perpetrated by state actors and organizations?... In this episode, Prof. Jacob Sh...