FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.
FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.
Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.
Spark Change from Within
Rye Barcott's signature presentation on social entrepreneurship takes audiences on a journey through the joy and heartbreak, the friendships and betrayals, and the failures and triumphs of creating a movement to spark change from within one of the world's largest and most volatile slums. As inspiring as it is informative, this presentation will spur you on your own quest to make a difference in the world, no matter your age or avocation.
"An unforgettable odyssey. We need more of these wonderful affirmative tales of how good can triumph in Africa, as it can anywhere."
-Alexander McCall Smith, author of The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency
"A tremendous story of the power of friendship, love, and the transforming grace of God."
-Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Rye Barcott co-founded the non-governmental organization Carolina for Kibera (CFK) with Salim Mohamed and Tabitha Atieno Festo while he was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill earning his B.A. in Peace, War, and Defense. CFK invests in local leaders in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya through its model of participatory development. After graduation, Barcott served in the U.S. Marine Corps for 5 years in Iraq, Bosnia, and the Horn of Africa. He then earned master's degrees in business and public administration from Harvard University, where he was a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow and a member of the Harvard Endowment's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility. In 2006, ABC World News named then Captain Barcott a ‘Person of the Year' for his dual service to Kibera and the Marine Corps. In 2009, he joined the inaugural class of TED Fellows. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter and works in the Sustainability Office at Duke Energy. His first book, It Happened On the Way to War, will be published by Bloomsbury on March 29th to coincide with the 10th Anniversary of CFK.
CO-SPONSORED BY THE HAAS CENTER FOR PUBLIC SERVICE
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Skilled Migration and Skill Creation: Evidence from Military Coups in the Fiji Islands
Conventional wisdom holds that the emigration of highly skilled workers depletes local human capital developing countries. But when the very prospect of emigration induces people to invest more in their education, the effects might not be so negative. We analyze a unique natural quasi-experiment in the Republic of Fiji Islands, where political shocks have provoked one of the largest recorded expoduses of skilled workers from a developing country. We use rich census and administrative microdata to show that high rates of emigration by tertiary-educated Fiji Islanders not only raised investment in tertiary education in Fiji, but also raised the stock of tertiary-educated people in Fiji - net departures.
Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development where he leads the Migration and Development initiatiave. His research focuses on the effects of international migration from and in developing countries. Michael joined the Center after completing his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard. His past writings have focused on the effects of foreign aid, determinants of capital flows and effects of tariff policy in the 19th century and the historical determinants of school system expansion. Michael has served as a consultant for the World Bank, Bain & Co., the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Development Program.
CISAC Conference Room
The Role of Political Strategy in Lebanon's Political Crisis
Lina Khatib is the manager and co-founder of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She is an expert on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, political media and conflict in the Arab world, and the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She is also a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School. She is currently writing a book titled Image Politics in the Middle East for IB Tauris, which examines the power struggles among states, political leaders, political parties, civil society groups, and citizens in the region. She has also recently led a research project on US public diplomacy towards the Arab world in the digital age. She is the author of two books, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (2006), and Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (2008) and has published widely on Middle East politics.
In this seminar, she will talk about how Lebanon reached the political crisis it is in right now, the political strategy that has led to it, and what this means for Lebanon's political future.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Physician Ownership of Non-Physician Medical Services
Dr. Brian Chen's research has examined the tradeoffs between moral hazard and efficiencies in the integration of physician and non-physician medical services in the presence of asymmetric information. He has looked at a policy intervention in Taiwan that prohibited self-referrals of patients to physician-owned pharmacies unless the physician group integrated pharmacy services into the clinic by hiring an onsite pharmacist. He found that the policy reduced drug expenditures by close to thirty percent among physicians that did not have an onsite pharmacist. However, these physicians responded by increasing the overprovision of diagnostic services not covered by the policy, thereby reducing the effectiveness of the policy. Forty-five percent of the clinics that did not have an onsite pharmacist prior to the policy hired one subsequent to the implementation of the policy. Overall, after integration, the policy applied to only seventeen percent of clinics, and only reduced average discretionary expenditures by about two-point-five percent. Chen's research also shows that despite the reduction in drug utilization, patients treated at clinics without an onsite pharmacist did not have greater observable adverse health events than patients treated at integrated clinics. His results show that moral hazard costs of self-referral incentives are large, that the “safe harbor” exemption severely reduces the effectiveness of the policy, and that the exemption explains much of the recent integration of ancillary services into physician offices.
Dr. Brian Chen recently completed his Ph.D. in business administration in the Business and Public Policy Group at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. He received a Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School in 1997, and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1992.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Is Ethical Consumerism a Form of Vigilante Justice?
Ethical consumerism has been around for a long time—during the revolution, many Americans protested against the Stamp Act of 1756 by refusing to buy tea and other Brit- ish goods. In recent years, ethical consumerism has become an increasingly prominent feature of social life, as new forms of technology have allowed consumers to use their choices in the marketplace to address various environmental, labor and trade concerns.
Surprisingly, relatively little attention has been paid to the moral issues raised by ethical consumerism. Suppose that consumers are morally permitted to use their buying power to pressure companies to treat animals better or to reduce carbon emissions. Does this mean that they can also pressure pharmacies not to stock the “morning after” pill? Can they pressure Wal-Mart not to sell books or music that they find offensive? Even in cases where consumers are pressuring companies to do the right thing, do their actions amount to a kind of vigilante justice?
Waheed Hussain is an assistant professor in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University and an A.B. in Philosophy from Princeton University. His main research interests lie in moral and political philosophy, particularly in those areas that bear on the morality of economic life.
One of his major research projects focuses on the philosophical debate about how best to understand the political concern for freedom. After formulating and defending an interpretation of this concern, he argues that the most attractive economic arrangements from the standpoint of freedom are those that extend democratic forms of decision making into economic life. An example of such an arrangement would be the codetermination system in Germany, which gives representatives of labor a significant role to play in economic decision making.
Other current projects include developing a more adequate understanding of the nature of personal autonomy and its significance in political contexts, examining the role of secondary associations in a capitalist democracy, formulating a moral contractualist account of the duties of corporations and their managers, and assessing the case for the corporation's right (and perhaps duty) to engage in civil disobedience.
At Wharton, Professor Hussain teaches Legal Studies 210, Corporate Responsibility and Ethics and Legal Studies 226, Markets, Morality and the Future of Capitalism, which is cross-listed in both the Philosophy Department at Penn and the Program in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
Graham Stuart Lounge
Ben Abdallah on Moroccan reform for "Le Monde"
On Sunday February 20, Morocco experienced its first encounter with the wave of democratic change that has been sweeping across the Arab world. In each of several major cities, tens of thousands of Moroccans demonstrated for the same kinds of demands that we have seen elsewhere: to replace arbitrary and absolute uses of power with real, open democracy, to end the corruption and clientalism that stifles economic life, and to assert the rights of citizens to be treated with dignity and respect and to have a decent life for themselves and their families. Like these other demonstrations, those in Morocco also give us a glimpse of a new kind of movement -- one that brings together disaffected youth, impoverished working people, Islamists, traditional political dissidents, human rights groups, and others, in a kind of "leaderless" movement without a fixed ideological agenda. Unlike some other movements, the Moroccan demonstrations were predominately oriented toward reform, not overthrow; they did not attack the person of the King or the institution of the monarchy, and - what is most likely to keep them on that path - they were not met with brutal repression.
It would be possible for the regime to ignore what this means - there, after all, is no occupation of a central square to contend with. It would be better, however, for everyone to heed what it means - there is, clearly, a widespread, persistent discontent, affecting a broad swath of the populace. We have only seen the beginning of a process through which that discontent will manifest itself and find its political expression. How things develop from here is not known or predictable, and will depend on how the different forces react and interact going forward, but, in the present context, it is unlikely that expressions of that discontent will simply disappear.
The welcome lack of bloody conflict has produced a curious uncertainty on both sides, a kind of double-double-bind situation that seems good for everyone: for the movement, the lack of fierce confrontation and overly radical demands helps legitimize the protest, and may make more people comfortable with and in it; but it may also be perceived as a sign of weakness. For the regime, the avoidance of brutal repression redounds to its credit, but it may also embolden the movement and help it grow. Neither side should underestimate the complexity of the pas de deux in which they are now engaged. For the regime, especially, to react with complacency and condescension - treating this movement as something that can either be ignored or absorbed in the usual ways, would be a very risky bet.
Much more productive, and much smarter, would be to heed the message of this movement - which, right now, is nothing else than to recapture the spirit of the new reign of Mohammed VI that the country had twelve years ago, to restart a hopeful process that so many feel has been rudely interrupted and replaced with disappointing new versions of business-as-usual. We started with the Justice and Reconciliation Authority (IER) and a promise of a new era of justice and accountability, and have arrived instead, post-16 May, with new waves of mass arrests, anti-"Islamist" fear-mongering, torture, and rendition [sous-traitance]. We started with a new era of freedom of the press, and have arrived at a state of censorship and legal harassment that has closed much of the independent press, and silenced or driven into exile many of its strongest voices. We began with a promise of economic transparency, and have ended in a state of economic predation, conducted by lobbies and vested interests in the name of the monarchy. We began with alternance, welcoming opposition parties and political dissidents into a new era of open democracy, and have passed through technocratic fixes to arrive at a return to "political normalcy," only to be undermined by ad-hoc commissions. The latest "new" political stratagem is a frankly royalist party, which may accrue more power to the monarchy in the short term, but, by bringing it further down into the arena of day-to-day political infighting, undermines the legitimacy it was recently accorded by all actors.
In short, many feel that the hopes and promises - the very spirit -- of the new reign have been abandoned. This is because they were not subject to a participatory process of constitutionalization and institutionalization, which is the only way that would have become permanent and irreversible. They were instead, once again, left discretionary. The monarchy has not submitted to a new, viable contract with the people. What the movement of February 20 is telling us is that these hopes and promises -- these rights -- can't be discretionary anymore. We have to return to them, and quickly begin a process that people can see is making them fixed and irrevocable. We have, that is, to revive and recast the spirit of the new reign with new urgency -- because there are new actors on the political stage who won't go away. Our nation has been put on notice: Change must and will come, and it will not be top-down anymore. The commander [commandant de bord] now has a co-pilot, the Moroccan people, who will not fall asleep at the wheel.