UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures (Audio)

Where did the American Dream of hard work equals upward mobility go? And what will it take to bring it back? In this talk, Raj Chetty, director of Opportunity Insights and professor of public economics at Harvard University, focuses on three policy levers to increase upward mobility: reducing racial and economic segregation through more effective affordable housing programs, investing in place-bas...

Children’s chances of earning more than their parents have fallen from 90% to 50% over the past half century in America. How can we restore the American Dream of upward mobility for all children? In this talk, Raj Chetty, director of Opportunity Insights and professor of public economics at Harvard University, shows how big data from varied sources ranging from anonymized tax records to Facebook s...

California’s deepest problems — the skyrocketing cost of housing, the lagging development of clean energy, the traffic choking the state — reflect an inability of Democratic governments to build real things in the real world quickly and affordably. The result is liberal governance that routinely fails to achieve liberal outcomes. New York Times opinion columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein talks w...

Modern slavery, which encompasses 45 million people around the world, is intricately linked to the economy, politics, violence and war, gender and the environment. In this panel discussion, Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery and research director of the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham, talks about the impact of contemporary slavery with three UC Berkeley professors, Arlie Ho...

There are 45 million enslaved people in the world today. The links between slavery, conflict, environmental destruction, economics and consumption began to strengthen and evolve in the 20th century. The availability of people who might be enslaved dramatically increased in line with population growth. According to Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery and research director of the Rights L...

As the delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia in 1789, there was no experience, anywhere in the world, of a successful republican executive over an extensive nation — one with sufficient authority and independence to make things work on a national scale, but without the risk of becoming a monarch. This Jefferson Memorial Lecture shows how the delegates, and especially...

The world has lived through 2+ years of the COVID-19 pandemic, heightening the awareness of the links between health and other aspects of life including education and the economy. Future pandemics are a real risk but there are a number of other threats to human health and well-being as well. These include climate change, the rise of obesity, inverted population pyramids, inter-state conflict, risi...

A hallmark of every developed nation is the provision of a social safety net – a collection of public programs that deliver aid to the poor. Because of their higher rates of poverty, children are often a major beneficiary of safety net programs. Compared to other countries, the U.S. spends less on antipoverty programs and, consequently, has higher child poverty rates. Professor Hilary Hoynes discu...

Disability rights activist Judy Heumann has been fighting for inclusion for over six decades, in ways that transformed legal and societal understandings of equality. Her life-long experience has included co-founding the organization Disabled in Action, working on Capitol Hill to shape landmark disability rights laws, co-organizing the extraordinary protest and advocacy efforts that spurred the imp...

The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) began in 1991 sponsored by the World Bank and the World Health Organization to fill a critical gap in global health information. It has grown steadily to become an active collaboration of more than 8,000 scientists, researchers and policy-makers from 156 countries working together to quantify health at the national and subnational level. In this program, Ch...

Philosophy almost alone among disciplines appears to lack a distinctive subject matter. The world has chemical, biological and political aspects, but no philosophical aspects. If subject matter does have a role to play here, it’s to do less with the field’s descriptive ambitions than the genealogy of philosophical problems. MIT's professor of philosophy's Stephen Yablo’s interests are wide-ranging...

The International System of Units (the SI), the modern metric system, has recently undergone its most revolutionary change since its origins during the French Revolution. The nature of this revolution is that all of the base units of the SI are now defined by fixing values of natural constants. Our measurement system is now, both philosophically and practically, strongly quantum. Nobel Prize recip...

At the beginning of the 20th century, Einstein changed the way we think about time. Now, early in the 21st century, the measurement of time is being revolutionized by the ability to cool a gas of atoms to temperatures millions of times lower than any naturally occurring temperature in the universe. Nobel Prize recipient William Phillips, Ph. D., a Distinguished University and College Park Professo...

There is a puzzle about counterfactuals that parallels a more familiar puzzle about free will. The familiar puzzle is the apparent incompatibility between free will and determinism. Robert Stalnaker, Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues, first, that the general puzzle gives us reason to look more closely at the details of the semantics for counterfactuals, and s...

If having a gun really made you safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world. It's not. Gary Younge (Manchester University) explains that while Americans consistently favor more gun control, gun laws have generally become more lax. That is partly due to the material resources of the gun lobby. But it is also about the central role of the gun, what it represents in the Amer...

Twentieth-Century African American Freedom Struggles transformed both US and World History. These seminal liberation struggles include the important yet relatively unknown series of early twentieth-century southern African American streetcar boycotts as well as the iconic Civil Rights-Black Power Insurgency (1935-75). First, Waldo Martin examines why and how these foundational freedom struggles pr...

This lecture by South African writer, playwright and academic Jane Taylor considers Ludwig Wittgenstein’s paper, “On Certainty” in which the philosopher engages with the taken-for-granted in everyday thought. Taylor notes, “In our contemporary context of the precarious, on one hand, and the political vehemence of conviction, on the other, it seems timely to pay attention to the faltering and tenta...

By virtually any measure, prisons have not worked. They are sites of cruelty, dehumanization, and violence, as well as subordination by race, class, and gender. Prisons traumatize virtually all who come into contact with them. Abolition of prison could be the ultimate reform. Georgetown Law Professor Paul Bulter explores what would replace prisons, how people who cause harm could be dealt with in...

It is widely held today on grounds of prudence if not realism that in designing public policy and legal systems, we should assume that people are entirely self-interested and amoral. But it is anything but prudent to let "Economic Man" be the behavioral assumption that underpins public policy. Samuel Bowles (Santa Fe Institute) supports his position using evidence from behavioral experiments mecha...

The view that the sciences make progress, while the arts do not, is extremely common. Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, challenges it. Scientific progress has social dimensions. A socially embedded notion of scientific progress then allows for a parallel concept of progress applicable to the arts. Kitcher specializes in the areas of pragmatism (especially D...

Jennifer Granholm, former Governor of Michigan, identifies some of the most interesting policy ideas to address the problems of displaced workers, the skills gap and resulting inequality in an age of robots and artificial intelligence. Granholm teaches Public Policy at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School and is the chair of the American Jobs Project, a multi-state research initiative on creating industri...

Myths symbolize ideas, values, history and other issues that are important to a people. They may be true or false, mundane or fantastic; their significance is their meaning, not their narrative content. Science is a way of knowing about the natural world. Its conclusions tentatively may be true or false, but its significance is its explanatory power: one has confidence in the process of science, e...

Scientists are often puzzled when members of the public reject what we consider to be well-founded explanations. They can’t understand why the presentation of scientific data and theory doesn’t suffice to convince others of the validity of “controversial” topics like evolution and climate change. Eugenie Scott, Founding Executive Director, National Center for Science Education, highlights the impo...

Deborah Tannen discusses how interacting via text messaging services challenges relationships. Tannen is on the faculty of Georgetown Universitys Department of Linguistics. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34069]

Sometimes the soul seems a more precise concept than the body. In this lecture Marilyn Strathern, goes to a place and time where all kinds of beings (including food plants) have souls and where the bodily basis of life is immortalized through cloning. She comments on the way present-day anthropology brings fresh illumination to what we thought we knew. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Huma...