RAND

The RAND Corporation (Research ANd Developmentcite web | author=The Rand Corporation |url=http://www.rand.org/about/history/ |publisher="RAND Corporation" |title=History and Mission | accessdate=2008-04-15] ) is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. The organization has since expanded to working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations. It is known for rigorous, often-quantitative, and non-partisancite news | author=Nicole Lurie | title=PublicHealth Preparedness in the 21st Century: Testimony presented before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Subcommittee on Bioterrorism and Public Health Preparedness on March 28, 2006 (CT-257) | url=http://www.senate.gov/comm/labor/general/Hearings/2006_03_28_a/Lurie.pdf | date=2006-03-28 | accessdate=2007-03-19] analysis and policy recommendations. [Brigette Sarabi, [http://www.safetyandjustice.org/info/or/story/631 "Oregon: The Rand Report on Measure 11 is Finally Available"] , "Partnership for Safety and Justice" (formerly "Western Prison Project"), January 1, 2005. Retrieved on April 15, 2008.] [cite web | author=Harvard University Institute of Politics | url=http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/iop/students_internships_db.php?action=id&id=551 | title=Guide for Political Internships | publisher=Harvard University | accessdate=2008-04-18] Failed verification|date=December 2007

RAND has approximately 1,600 employees and five principal locations: Santa Monica, California (headquarters); Washington, D.C. (currently located in Arlington, Virginia); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (adjacent to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh); Cambridge, United Kingdom and Brussels, Belgium (RAND Europe [ [http://www.rand.org/randeurope/about/contact.html Rand Europe website: Contact addresses] ] ).

There are also several smaller offices of RAND in the United States, including the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute in Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2003, it opened the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute in Doha.

RAND is also the home to the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, one of the original graduate programs in public policy and the first to offer a Ph.D. The program is unique in that students work alongside RAND analysts on real-world problems. The campus is at RAND's Santa Monica research facility. The Pardee RAND School is the world's largest Ph.D.-granting program in policy analysis.

RAND publishes "The RAND Journal of Economics", a scholarly peer-reviewed journal of economics.

Project RAND

RAND was set up in 1946 by the United States Army Air Forces as Project RAND, under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in May 1946 they released the "Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship". In May 1948, Project RAND was separated from Douglas and became an independent non-profit organization. Initial capital for the split came from the Ford Foundation.

Mission statement

RAND was incorporated as a non-profit organization to "further promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America." Its self-declared mission is "to help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis", using its "core values of quality and objectivity."

Achievements and expertise

The achievements of RAND stem from its development of systems analysis. Important contributions are claimed in space systems and the United States' space program, in computing and in artificial intelligence. RAND researchers developed many of the principles that were used to build the Internet. Numerous analytical techniques were invented at RAND, including aspects of dynamic programming, game theory, the Delphi method, linear programming, systems analysis, and exploratory modeling. RAND also contributed to the development and use of wargaming.

Current areas of expertise include: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, environment and energy, health, international policy, labor markets, national security, infrastructure, energy, environment, corporate governance, economic development, intelligence policy, long-range planning, crisis management and disaster preparation, population and regional studies, science and technology, social welfare, terrorism, arts policy, and transportation.

RAND designed and conducted one of the largest and most important studies of health insurance between 1974 and 1982. The RAND Health Insurance Experiment, funded by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, established an insurance corporation to compare demand for health services with their cost to the patient.

According to the 2005 annual report, "about one-half of RAND's research involves national security issues."

Many of the events in which RAND plays a part are based on assumptions which are hard to verify because of the lack of detail on RAND's highly classified work for defense and intelligence agencies.

The RAND Corporation posts all of its unclassified reports, in full, on its official website.

Notable RAND participants

Over the last 60 years, more than 30 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the RAND Corporation at some point in their careers.

*Henry H. Arnold — General, United States Air Force — RAND founder
*Kenneth Arrow — economist, Nobel Laureate, developed the impossibility theorem in social choice theory
*Bruno Augenstein — V.P., physicist, mathematician and space scientist
*J. Paul Austin — Chairman of the Board, 1972-1981
*Paul Baran — one of the developers of packet switching which was used in Arpanet and later networks like the Internet
*Barry Boehm — software economics expert, inventor of COCOMO
*Harold L. Brode — physicist, leading nuclear weapons effects expert
*Bernard Brodie — Military strategist and nuclear architect
*Amir Farshad Ebrahimi — PhD, Researcher and Policy analyst
*Arthur C. Brooks — PhD Graduated from Pardee RAND Graduate School
*David S. C. Chu — Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, 2001–present
*Samuel Cohen — inventor of the neutron bomb in 1958
*Franklin R. Collbohm — Aviation Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder and former director and trustee
*George Dantzig — mathematician, creator of the simplex algorithm for linear programming
*Linda Darling-Hammond — co-director, School Redesign Network
*James F. Digby — American Military Strategist, author of first treatise on precision guided munitions 1949 - 2007
*Stephen H Dole — Author of the pivotal work "Habitable Planets for man." [cite web |url=http://rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB179-1/ |publisher=RAND Corporation (free PDFs)|title=Habitable Planets for man (6.4 MB PDF) ]
*Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. — President, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
*Daniel Ellsberg — leaker of the Pentagon Papers
*Francis Fukuyama — academic and author of "The End of History and the Last Man"
*H. Rowen Gaither, Jr. — Chairman of the Board, 1949-1959; 1960-1961
*David Galula, French officer and scholar
*James J. Gillogly — cryptographer and computer scientist
*Cecil Hastings — programmer, wrote software engineering classic, "Approximations for Digital Computers" (Princeton 1955)
*William E. Hoehn — Senior Policy Advisor to Senator Sam Nunn, Visiting Professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the Coca-Cola Foundation Eminent Practitioner in Residence at Georgia Institute of Technology
*Brian Michael Jenkins — terrorism expert, Senior Advisor to the President of the RAND Corporation, and author of "Unconquerable Nation"
*Herman Kahn — theorist on nuclear war and one of the founders of scenario planning
*Zalmay Khalilzad — U.S. Ambassador to United Nations
*Henry Kissinger— US Secretary of State (1973-1977); National Security Advisor (1969-1975); Nobel Peace Prize Winner (1973)
*Ann McLaughlin Korologos — Chairman of the Board, April 2004- present
*Lewis "Scooter" Libby — Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff
*Ray Mabus — Former ambassador, governor
*Harry Markowitz — economist, developed the Portfolio Selection model that is still widely used in modern finance
*Andrew W. Marshall — military strategist, director of the US DoD Office of Net Assessment
*Margaret Mead — U.S. anthropologist
*Douglas Merrill — Former Google CIO & President of EMI's digital music division
*Newton N. Minow — Chairman of the Board, 1970-1972
*Lloyd N. Morrisett — Chairman of the Board, 1986-1995
*John Forbes Nash, Jr. — Nobel prize-winning mathematician
*John von Neumann — mathematician, pioneer of the modern digital computer
*Allen Newell — artificial intelligence
*Paul O'Neill — Chairman of the Board, 1997-2000
*Ron Olson — Chairman of the Board, 2001-2004
*Edmund Phelps — winner of 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics
*W.V. Quine — philosopher
*Arthur E. Raymond — Chief Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
*Condoleezza Rice — former trustee 1991–1997 and current Secretary of State for the United States (as of May 2006), former intern
*Michael D. Rich — RAND Executive Vice President, 1993–present
*Leo Rosten — academic and humorist
*Donald Rumsfeld — Chairman of Board from 1981–1986; 1995-1996 and Secretary of Defense for the United States from 1975 to 1977 and 2001 to 2006.
*Robert F. Salter — advocate of the vactrain maglev train concept
*Paul Samuelson — economist, Nobel Laureate
*Thomas C. Schelling — economist, winner of 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics
*James Schlesinger — former Secretary of Defense and former Secretary of Energy
*Lloyd Shapley — mathematician and game theorist
*David A. Shephard — Chairman of the Board, 1967-1970
*Herbert Simon — Nobel prize-winning economist
*Frank Stanton — Chairman of the Board, 1961-1967
*James Steinberg — Deputy National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton
*Peter Szanton — the policy analyst and former President of New York Rand
*Katsuaki L. Terasawa — economist
*James Thomson — RAND CEO, 1989–present
*William Webster — Chairman of the Board, 1959-1960
*Albert Wohlstetter — Mathematician and Cold-War Strategist
*Roberta Wohlstetter — Policy analyst and military historian
*Ratan Tata — Chairman of Tata Sons

Governance

The organization's governance structure includes a board of trustees. Current members of the board include: Francis Fukuyama, Timothy Geithner, John W. Handy, Rita Hauser, Karen House, Jen-Hsun Huang, Paul Kaminski, John M. Keane, Lydia H. Kennard, Ann Korologos, Philip Lader, Peter Lowy, Charles N. Martin, Jr., Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, Ronald Olson, Paul O'Neill, Michael Powell, Donald Rice, James Rohr, James Rothenberg, Donald Tang, James Thomson, and Robert C. Wright.

Former members of the board include: Walter Mondale, Condoleezza Rice, Newton Minow, Brent Scowcroft, Amy Pascal, John Reed, Charles Townes, Caryl Haskins, Walter Wriston, Frank Stanton, Carl Bildt, Donald Rumsfeld, Harold Brown, Robert Curvin, Pedro Greer, Arthur Levitt, Lloyd Morrisett, Frank Carlucci, Lovida Coleman, Ratan Tata, Marta Tienda and Jerry Speyer.

Criticism

The RAND Corporation has been criticized as militarist. Due to the nature of its work, the RAND corporation also frequently plays a role in conspiracy theories.Fact|date=May 2007

In 1958, Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might strategically surrender to an enemy power. This led to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the US had demanded unconditional surrender of "its" enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to US interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been. [cite book
author = Poundstone, W.
year = 1992
title = Prisoner's Dilemma
publisher = Doubleday]

In April 1970, a Newhouse News Service story reported that Richard Nixon had commissioned RAND to study the feasibility of canceling the 1972 election. This was denied by RAND, which subsequently undertook a review of its recent work to see if there was anything that could have been misunderstood to spark the rumor. They didn't identify any actions as such, and so it is their claim that the review was fruitless. [cite book
author = Poundstone, W.
year = 1992
title = Prisoner's Dilemma
publisher = Doubleday]

ee also

*"A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" (published by RAND)
*Brookings Institution
*Council on Foreign Relations
*Hudson Institute
*Trilateral Commission
*James Q. Wilson (board of directors)
*Kepner-Tregoe
*Rational choice theory

Notes

References

*Abella, Alex. "Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire" (Harcourt, 2008). ISBN 978-0-15-101081-3.
*S.M. Amadae. "Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism" (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
* Martin Collins. "Cold War Laboratory: RAND, The Air Force and the American State" (Smithsonian Institute, 2002).
*Thomas and Agatha Hughes, eds. "Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering After World War II" (The MIT Press. Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology, 2000).
*Fred Kaplan. The Wizards of Armageddon" (Stanford University Press, 1991).
*Mark Trachtenberg. "History & Strategy" (Princeton University Press, 1991).
*Bruce R. Smith. The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation" (Harvard University Press, 1966).
*Clifford, Peggy, ed. [http://www.smmirror.com/Volume1/issue19/rand_and_the_city.html "RAND and The City: Part One"] . "Santa Monica Mirror", October 27, 1999 – November 2, 1999. Five-part series includes: [http://www.smmirror.com/Volume1/issue19/rand_and_the_city.html 1] ; [http://www.smmirror.com/Volume1/issue20/rand_and_the_city.html 2] ; [http://www.smmirror.com/volume1/issue21/rand_and_the_city.html 3] ; [http://www.smmirror.com/volume1/issue22/rand_and_the_city.html 4] ; & [http://www.smmirror.com/Volume1/issue23/rand_and_the_city.html 5] . Accessed April 15, 2008.

External links

* [http://www.prgs.edu/ Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School] .
* [http://www.rand.org RAND] Official Website.