Using agricultural and economic characteristics in African nations as test cases, new research by David Lobell and Marshall Burke demonstrates the use of satellite data to address the long-standing problem of accurate data collection in developing countries. An often cited challenge in achieving development goals aimed at poverty and hunger reduction is the lack of reliable on-the-ground data. Limited or insuffiient data makes it difficult to establish baseline conditions and to assess effectiveness of various aid programs. In the past, researchers and policymakers had to rely on ground surveys, which are expensive, time-consuming, and rarely conducted. This has led to large data gaps in mapping sustainable development goal progress, such as in agricultural and poverty statistics.
CISAC's William J. Perryissued the following statement today (Aug. 9) on the North Korea crisis that urged a return to deterrence on the part of the U.S.:
On Aug. 8, President Trump appeared to threaten first use of nuclear weapons against North Korea. This is a dangerous departure from historical precedent. The policy and practice of the United States on threats to use nuclear weapons has been consistent for many decades, and for presidents of both political parties.
The threat to use nuclear weapons has always been tied to deterrence or extended deterrence; historical U.S. policy is that the use of nuclear weapons would only be in response to the first use of nuclear weapons against the United States or an ally covered by our extended deterrence.
We do not make empty threats, because empty threats weaken our credibility, and weaken the strength of threats that we do intend to carry out. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “speak softly but carry a big stick.”
During the early Cold War, the more shrill the language used by Premier Khrushchev against the United States, the more tempered was the response of President Eisenhower. Just as in those tense times, today’s crisis also calls for measured language.
William J. Perry lectures in a Stanford class during the winter term of 2014. On Aug. 9, Perry, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at CISAC, issued a statement on the North Korea crisis that urges a return to deterrence on the part of the U.S. | CISAC
This Stanford news release describes research by CISAC's Scott Sagan on American public opinion toward the use of nuclear weapons during wartime. He found that views on nuclear weapons usage has not fundamentally changed since 1945, and many people would support the use of such weapons to kill millions of civilians if the U.S. found itself in a similar wartime situation. Sagan and his co-author used a survey experiment to recreate the situation that the United States faced in 1945 in the Hiroshima nuclear bombing with a hypothetical American war with Iran today.
The results showed little support for the so-called “nuclear taboo” thesis, or that the principle of “noncombatant immunity” – civilian protection from such weapons – has become a deeply held norm in America. The conclusions are stark and disturbing, Sagan said.
“These findings highlight the limited extent to which the U.S. public has accepted the principles of just war doctrine and suggest that public opinion is unlikely to be a serious constraint on any president contemplating the use of nuclear weapons in the crucible of war,” wrote Sagan and his co-author, Benjamin Valentino, a Dartmouth College professor of government.
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Seven decades after the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, most Americans in a Stanford study were willing to consider use of a nuclear weapon against civilians under some circumstances. | Image credit: andipantz / Getty Images
Across the world, many democracies are sliding further and further toward authoritarianism. NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Larry Diamond of Stanford University about this "global democratic recession." Listen here.
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Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at FSI, speaks in the Bechtel Conference Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. | CDDRL
In this podcast with the Carnegie Council, CISAC's Scott Sagan says that major changes must be made if U.S. nuclear war plans are to conform to the principles of just war doctrine and the law of armed conflict. He proposes a new doctrine: "the nuclear necessity principle." In sum, the U.S. will not use nuclear weapons against any target that could be reliably destroyed by conventional means.
In 2016, Sagan co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post on this topic: "It is time to turn nuclear common sense into national policy. A declaration that the United States would never use nuclear weapons when conventional weapons could destroy the target could reduce the number of nuclear weapons we need for legitimate deterrence purposes. Placing conventional weapons at the center of debates about the future of deterrence would also help focus the policy discussion on plausible scenarios with realistic plans for the use of U.S. military power. And it would more faithfully honor the just-war principles of distinction, necessity and proportionality, by placing them at the heart of our deterrence and security policies, where our highest ideals belong."
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Scott Sagan speaks during a class simulation for "The Ethics and Law of War," a 2012 class he co-taught with Stanford law professor Allen Weiner. In a new podcast with the Carnegie Council, Sagan urges that major changes must be made if U.S. nuclear war plans are to conform to the principles of just war doctrine and the law of armed conflict. | CISAC
Stanford Health Policy’s newest faculty member, Joshua Salomon, believes that one urgent need in global health research is to improve forecasts of the patterns and trends that are the major causes of death and disease.
Salomon, who is leaving leaving his position as professor of global health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to join Stanford on Aug. 1, works on modeling of infectious and chronic diseases and their associated intervention strategies, as well as methods for economic evaluation of public health programs and ways to measure the global burden of disease.
And he looks at the potential impact and cost effectiveness of new health technologies.
“Projections of future trends in health are crucial to formulating policy,” said Salomon, who has a PhD from Harvard. “To think strategically about the technologies and policies that would make the biggest impact on health over the next 20 to 50 years, we really need to start by understanding the range of likely trends in major health challenges over the coming decades.”
Stanford, he said, offers him a “rich collaborative environment” to better learn from advances in forecasting across a range of other disciplines, such as economics, political science, and environmental science.
“With a better picture of what the world is likely to look like over the next 50 years — and what are going to be the most pressing health problems — we can invest wisely and put ourselves in a position to respond more effectively.”
Salomon is also the director of the Prevention Policy Modeling Lab, which is funded by a five-year award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The consortium represents the collaborative research of experts from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Medical Center, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Yale School of Public Health, Brown University School of Public Health, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and.
He will continue directing the lab from Stanford and intends to bring in new research threads from his colleagues here on the Farm. The lab works on a wide range of projects dealing with policy analysis for hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections and diseases such as HIV, and tuberculosis.
“It’s a rewarding grant for me to work on because, unlike a lot of modeling projects, the work that we do really starts from urgent public health questions that policymakers have,” he said. “All of the questions that we are working on are questions that originated directly from discussions with CDC and other public health partners.”
With Salomon’s move to Stanford, the university gains a dynamic duo.
Grace Lee joins Stanford as the Associate Chief Medical Officer at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in the fall, 2017.
His wife, Grace Lee, MD, MPH, joins in the fall as the Associate Chief Medical Officer at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. As a professor of population medicine at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute & Harvard Medical School, Lee has led research in vaccine safety in the FDA-funded Post-licensure Rapid Immunization Safety Monitoring (PRISM) program and the CDC-funded Vaccine Safety Datalink, which monitors the safety of vaccines and studies rare and adverse reactions from immunizations.
She has also examined the impact of financial penalties on rates of healthcare-associated infections, as the principal investigator of an AHRQ-funded study, as well as developed novel surveillance definitions for ventilator-related events in neonates and children.
While at Stanford, Lee said, she intends “to find opportunities to enhance the learning health system approach to improve patient outcomes and population health.”
Salomon has spent his entire career as a collaborator on the Global Burden of Disease project, the world’s most comprehensive epidemiological study commissioned by the World Bank in 1990, which tracks mortality and morbidity from major diseases, injuries and risks factors.
“The study has made a major contribution to global public health because before this study we just didn’t have a comprehensive, systematic understanding of the things that cause death and disability in low- and middle-income countries. But now we do,” he said. “It’s hugely ambitious and very sweeping in scope — and a lot of my work is around providing the evidence we need to inform policy.”
Much of Salomon’s work is global in nature. He’s most recently focused on older adults in one rural South African community, which has a high prevalence of HIV and one of the world’s highest levels of hypertension. His research there aims to inform urgent prevention initiatives tailored to older adults where HIV and cardiovascular risks are moderate or high, as in similar communities in sub-Saharan Africa.
“People don’t expect a high level of ongoing HIV transmission in older adults,” he said. “The double burden that we find, with a very high level of HIV, as well as the high prevalence of diabetes and heart disease, creates enormous strains on the health-care system.”
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Stanford Health Policy's Joshua Salomon believes forecasting new patterns and trends in global health is an urgent need. | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
The Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in conjunction with The Next World Program, is soliciting papers for a workshop, “Inequality & Aging,” held at the University of Hohenheim from May 4-5, 2018. The workshop will result in a special issue of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing, and aims to address topics such as:
Population dynamics and income distribution
The evolution of inequality over time and with respect to age
Health inequality in old age
The effects of social security systems and pension schemes on inequality
Policies to cope with demographic challenges and the challenges posed by inequality
Family backgrounds and equality of opportunities
Demographically induced poverty traps
Effects of automation and the digital economy in ageing societies
Flexible working time and careers, and their long-term implications
The dynamics of inheritances, etc.
Researchers who seek to attend the workshop are invited to submit a full paper or at least a 1-page extended abstract directly to Klaus Prettner and Alfonso Sousa-Poza by Sept. 30, 2017.
Authors of accepted papers will be notified by the end of October and completed draft papers will be expected by Jan. 31, 2018. Economy airfare and accommodation will be provided to one author associated with each accepted paper. A selection of the presented papers will be published in the special issue; the best paper by an author below the age of 35 will receive an award and be made available online as a working paper.
Researchers who do not seek to attend the workshop are also invited to submit papers for the special issue. Those papers can be submitted directly online under “SI Inequality & Ageing” by May 31, 2018.
For complete details, please click on the link below to view the PDF.
"The new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is an important step towards delegitimizing nuclear war as an acceptable risk of modern civilization. Though the treaty will not have the power to eliminate existing nuclear weapons, it provides a vision of a safer world, one that will require great purpose, persistence, and patience to make a reality. Nuclear catastrophe is one of the greatest existential threats facing society today, and we must dream in equal measure in order to imagine a world without these terrible weapons."
The UN treaty places a strong moral imperative against possessing nuclear weapons and gives a voice to some 130 non-nuclear weapons states who are equally affected by the existential risk of nuclear weapons. There is no one solution to this global threat, and there is much more work to be done beyond this treaty to reduce this risk. I call on nuclear-armed states to step up their participation in the fight against the nuclear threat by securing the eight remaining ratifications to enact the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, extending the New START agreement, continuing the critical work of the Nuclear Security Summits, and avoiding the unnecessary risk posed by introducing destabilizing new nuclear weapons. My hope is that this treaty will mark a sea change towards global support for the abolition of nuclear weapons. This global threat requires unified global action."
William J. Perry, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, recently joined other nuclear and diplomatic experts in writing a letter to President Trump urging diplomatic talks with North Korea; wrote a Politico op-ed on how to make a deal with North Korea; and delivered the 2017 Barnett-Oksenberg Lecture on issues between China and the United States. Perry is the director of the Preventive Defense Project at CISAC.
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In a July 7 statement, CISAC's William J. Perry strongly supported the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, describing it as "an important step towards delegitimizing nuclear war as an acceptable risk of modern civilization." | CISAC
Rising powers often seek to reshape the world order, triggering confrontations with those who seek to defend the status quo. In recent years, as international institutions have grown in prevalence and influence, they have increasingly become central arenas for international contestation. Phillip Y. Lipscy examines how international institutions evolve as countries seek to renegotiate the international order. He offers a new theory of institutional change and explains why some institutions change flexibly while others successfully resist or fall to the wayside. The book uses a wealth of empirical evidence - quantitative and qualitative - to evaluate the theory from international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Union, League of Nations, United Nations, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The book will be of particular interest to scholars interested in the historical and contemporary diplomacy of the United States, Japan, and China.
Grace Lee joins Stanford as the Associate Chief Medical Officer at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in the fall, 2017.
