RAND at Fifty
Address Commemorating RAND's 50th Anniversary
The Library of Congress
April 8, 1998
James Q. Wilson
James A. Collins Professor of Management
Anderson Graduate School of Management
University of California at Los Angeles
Everyone wishes public policy to be rational. We prefer knowledge to ignorance and insight to superstition. To argue otherwise would seem to make us less than human. Of course, much of life is ruled as much by emotion and ambition as by inquiry and thought. We are humans, shaped by passions and interests as well as by reason and detachment. We cannot be otherwise.
The real enemies of knowledge are not passions, ignorance, or superstition, but the special kind of tunnel vision that arises from old habits, organizational loyalties, and personal commitments. As a wily bureaucratic veteran once said, where you stand depends on where you sit.
Many Americans criticize their government today, not because it is unwieldy, but because it decides matters on the basis of partisan advantage or bureaucratic interest rather than on the basis of clear facts and reasonable discourse.
Over the last fifty years an extraordinary effort has been made to meet that public demand by increasing the reach of reason in shaping our public life. RAND has been the leader in this effort, bringing about, by its own achievements and by the example it has set for others, a remarkable transformation in the way collective choices are shaped.
At one time, public policy was largely the product of the demands of organized interests, the perceptions of elected leaders, and the constraints of public opinion. Occasionally, new ideas would enter politics through university research. But outside of agriculture, scarcely any research centers existed that used systematic inquiry to suggest new policy options or to point out the failures of existing programs.
The Second World War changed that. University scholars here and abroad played a crucial role in winning the war by inventing radar, proximity fuses, and the atom bomb, and by staffing intelligence and code-breaking agencies. But when the war ended, this unique intellectual resource was in danger of being lost. In peacetime, most university scholars will neither join a Manhattan Project nor allow classified research to be done on their campuses. Government officials will be preoccupied with maintaining shrinking budgets and managing daily needs. Peace is better than war, but peace comes at a price--the end of a shared commitment to win.
General Hap Arnold of the Army Air Corps foresaw that price and tried to minimize it by creating in the mid-1940s a new way of mobilizing talent for research. He created RAND, a coined word that stood for "research and development." The goal was simple: to use smart people based in a relatively autonomous organization to think through air corps needs and problems. General Arnold's decision profoundly affected how the military would cope with Cold War problems.
In 1948 RAND became its own nonprofit corporation. In the half century that has followed its creation we have seen an explosion of organizations that share in some way the RAND approach. Today we call them think tanks. In 1948 there were scarcely any; now there are dozens. Some, like RAND, are nonpartisan; others are partisan. But whatever their political coloration, think tanks have largely replaced universities as the most influential way for bringing to policy choices the ideas of gifted thinkers and the discipline of hard facts.
The accomplishments of RAND are now legendary. We are familiar with earth-circling satellites, supplying us with communications, astrophysical research, and military detectors. The model for all this was set forth in a paper written at RAND over two decades before Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon. In 1946, RAND researchers proposed a "world-circling spaceship" that would have military value but would also aid research and provide for long-range communications. For decades after that paper was written, RAND helped guide the satellite development system.
Millions of people today use a computer. One of the first was built at RAND. It was called the Johnniac, after John von Neumann, the great mathematician who conceptualized the computer. He was a RAND consultant.
When you use a computer to send an e-mail, you are using a method created by Paul Baran, a RAND researcher, over three decades ago. Baran was trying to solve the problem of making communications secure in the aftermath of an enemy attack. Telephone systems and military radios were vulnerable to any attack that demolished the central stations that controlled these systems. Baran invented a system that had no central stations and required no fixed route. Messages would be broken into little pieces, or packets, and each would follow whatever electronic route that existed, being reassembled at the end into a coherent message. Today we call it the Internet.
When the Air Force had to decide where to base its strategic bombers, the choice was between putting them overseas, near the enemy they would attack, or at home, far from the attacker. RAND researchers, led by Albert Wohlstetter, showed that putting most of the bombers in the continental United States, not overseas, made them safer from a preemptive attack and thus easier to use.
When intercontinental ballistic missiles became feasible, RAND explained why they could replace parts of the manned bomber fleet.
When precision-guided munitions proved their ability to strike effectively at targets during Desert Storm, they were carrying out a mission recommended many years earlier by RAND researchers.
From my last three examples, veterans of RAND will know that not all advice, however objective, is welcomed by those who pay for it.
Basing bombers at home seemed to reflect a narrowly economic theory of military power, one that irritated some officers who thought that military forces should be close to their potential targets. Endorsing intercontinental ballistic missiles seemed to be an argument for not building a new bomber, an idea that did not captivate many bomber pilots. When RAND found good things to say about the Navy's version of the ballistic missile, the Polaris, some thought this implied having a smaller Air Force. When RAND endorsed precision-guided munitions, this struck some people as an argument for taking the pilot out of the plane.
Intensifying this tension was the increasingly important role that RAND researchers were playing as members of the expanded office of the Secretary of Defense. Robert McNamara had hired many RAND people who seemed to approach their Pentagon jobs with more intellectual skill than personal diplomacy. Economic analyses began to seem more important than military experience. The Air Force, which was paying RAND's bills, began to suspect that RAND was telling people to whom the Air Force reported how the Air Force should be run.
Neither the Air Force nor RAND had a single view on these matters. There were many Air Force officers who valued RAND's abilities and many RAND researchers who valued their relationship with the Air Force. Cooperation on many projects continued. But the tension was enough to induce RAND and the Air Force to go through a wrenching readjustment. Both sides slowly learned that speaking truth to power is harder than it may seem when people disagree about who has the truth and who has the power. These are lessons that every think tank and every sponsor, whether in the government, in business, or among foundations, must learn.
The sponsor must learn that there is a price to be paid for getting honest advice. Sometimes the think tank will give you answers to your questions that you do not like. Sometimes it will tell you that you are asking the wrong questions. And often it will take longer than you would like to do either. But in exchange for these costs, the sponsor gets something of great value: a disinterested voice with broad knowledge that analyzes choices on the basis of knowledge, however, imperfect, rather than on the basis of loyalty, however well-deserved.
At the same time, the think tank must learn that their government sponsors are not collections of graduate students eager to fill their notebooks with the received wisdom of professors. Sponsors--the Air Force, the Army, the Secretary of Defense, domestic agencies, and private corporations--are powerful human cultures shaped by decades, sometimes centuries, of shared risks, human experience, and learned behavior. Giving to such enterprises advice that ignores their culture is like telling a family how to spend its money without taking into account how husbands, wives, and children feel about each other.
RAND has become talented at understanding the human dimensions of organizational life. One example: Roberta Wohlstetter has shown that America failed to respond to the attack on Pearl Harbor or to be ready for the introduction of Soviet missiles into Cuba for two reasons. We underestimated the risks Japan and the USSR were willing to run, and we had no easy way of recognizing true information about an enemy's plans amidst the confusing noise of unrelated or false information. Japan and the USSR also erred because they underestimated our willingness to respond to these provocations.
Truth can be spoken to power when both the truth speakers and the power holders recognize that, at least on important matters, new information changes behavior only when it is linked to a shared view of the goals of the organization and the needs of its culture.
Both RAND and RAND's sponsors have learned these lessons. RAND understands that though a sponsor may, in RAND's opinion, ask the wrong question, RAND is ready to answer the question that was asked, and to do so promptly and clearly, even when it suggests new questions that ought to be asked later.
Sponsors understand that RAND represents an asset that no sponsor can create within itself--namely, an autonomous organization, committed to the public interest, that by its analyses will broaden the perspective and clarify the vision of the sponsor.
The number of these sponsors is today vastly larger than it was in 1947. RAND serves not only the Air Force, but the Army, the Secretary of Defense, private firms working in such areas as insurance, civil justice, health care, and pharmaceuticals, and agencies and foundations concerned about education, labor, population, immigration, drug abuse, and criminal justice. And these studies are done not only for American sponsors but also for many in Europe and elsewhere around the world.
Taking on these new clients has meant taking on intellectual tasks that pose even greater challenges to objectivity than do military ones. Many of the most important domestic disputes are about matters that defy mathematical estimation. It is not easy to measure good health or a good education. Moreover, disputes about health or education or crime are driven by profound differences of opinion about the kind of world in which we wish to live. By contrast, differing views about military tactics are often arguments about means to a shared goal. Everyone wants a secure America. The issue, then, is how best and most economically to achieve that goal. But arguments about domestic issues are often arguments about the kind of world in which we wish to live. Should drug use be opposed, tolerated, or made legal? What constitutes an educated person? These are not simply disputes about the means to a goal, but about the goal itself.
We cannot discuss how civil courts should handle liability claims or how criminal courts should deal with drug abuse or illegal behavior without recognizing that these courts do not exist simply to lower business costs or reduce the crime or drug use rate. They also exist--for many people, they chiefly exist--to apply principles of right conduct to human affairs. They exist in part to reward decency, punish wrongdoing, and maintain a concept of how society ought to be run. Americans have very different views about what constitutes decency and wrongdoing and how society ought to be run. In approaching these and similar issues, RAND must pick its steps carefully.
A fine example of how best to do this is the RAND health insurance experiment. In the 1970s, RAND used federal funds to find out how the kind of health insurance that people used would affect their health. Two thousand families living in several different cities were put into various insurance plans that differed in how much the insured family had to pay and in how the doctors were paid. These families were in the experiment for three to five years. A simplified summary of what RAND learned is this: For the great majority of people, the more they had to pay for health care, the less such care they used. No surprise. But the reduction in trips to the doctor or to the hospital had little or no effect on their health. There was, however, an important exception. The poorest people--about six percent of all of the families--got more benefits from more frequent visits. Their blood pressure was reduced, their dental cavities were filled, and new eyeglasses were prescribed. In his carefully written report, the director of the RAND experiment, Joseph Newhouse, provides strong evidence that giving free health care to everyone imposes costs without much in the way of benefits, but that providing something like free care to the poorest people does help them.
The RAND health experiment is a good example of how RAND can approach domestic policy disputes. It measured most costs and benefits, tested them by seeing how real people responded to policy changes, and concluded by answering the central policy question: Among several programs, what works?
Now, and increasingly in the future, RAND will try to provide such analyses to private firms as well as to the government. Indeed, RAND can often do more for a firm than for an agency, because a firm can often present a problem with fewer political features and more impact on real people than can an agency that is caught up in partisan political debates and has less reach into human lives.
Americans complain more about their government today than they did in 1948. At the same time, the government today makes more use of knowledge to make policy choices. The linkage is not always tight; after all. our government is a democracy, not a computer. But the linkage exists, and more so today than a half century ago.
In that transformation, RAND was the leader. It recruited the talent, helped define the issues, and maintained a strictly nonpartisan and objective posture. And it has done something else that enhances its unique stature.
It supplies new scholars to the world of government and think tanks. The RAND Graduate School of Policy Studies, founded in 1970 by Charles Wolf, Jr., and strongly supported by RAND presidents, has produced more Ph.D.s in public policy analysis than any other graduate school in America and, perhaps, in the world. Its distinctive feature is to link academic study, led by RAND researchers, with practical, on-the-job training on RAND projects. This academic opportunity, unique in America, is widely applauded by RGS students and graduates, the overwhelming majority of whom say they would come back to RAND for a Ph.D. if they were starting over, in part because RAND provides them with practical experience as well as scholarly knowledge. In short, RAND has not only founded the modern era of think tanks, it is now supplying trained young people to staff these research centers as well as the government.
RAND's accomplishments are clear but its future is not. The end of the Cold War, the reduction in the size of the military, the downsizing of business firms, and the increased competition for philanthropic dollars have made it harder to sustain any think tank. And today, unlike in 1948, there are many competitors to RAND, though few, if any, with so long or so distinguished a track record.
The challenges to RAND are clear. It must preserve its objectivity and retain its capacity for independent work in the public interest while becoming even more responsive to diverse clients and their immediate needs. It must either capture from sponsor funding or attract as endowment sufficient money to make certain that new talent can be recruited, new ideas can be pursued, and objectivity can be assured.
The leadership of RAND, starting with Jim Thomson, is committed to these goals. If they are successful, fifty years from now people will speak of a new RAND having been born out of the legacy of the old one, retaining all that the past has shown was good and adding what the future requires be done.
Washington, D.C.
April 8, 1998
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