In Wake of Presidential Election, RAND Helps Set Politics Aside

In November 2012, RAND hosted its third Politics Aside event, which invites participants to take an informed and even-handed look at the serious issues facing society in the aftermath of hard-fought political campaigns. Sponsored in cooperation with Thomson Reuters, the gathering drew policymakers, business leaders, researchers, producers, and philanthropists into nonpartisan discourse on topics ranging from fiscal austerity and financial regulation to health care and Hollywood. Here is a collection of insights and images from the three-day event.

Click on each image to view a larger version and to read a quote.

"The customers in our health care system are insurers, Medicare, and state Medicaid agencies, and the system is perfectly designed to serve them. The difficulty we have with these issues is that we're trying to fix the system without trying to change the customers."

— David Goldhill, author, Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father — and How We Can Fix It

"There's no delete button on the Internet, and it's easy to lose your privacy. I'd argue that you should probably have the online talk even before you have the sex talk with your kid."

— Eric Schmidt, executive chairman, Google

"On the timing, it reminds me of St. Augustine: 'Make me pure, O Lord, but not yet.'"

— Sir Harold Evans, Reuters editor-at-large, on deferring most fiscal austerity until later

"When you understand how connected these diseases are, what scares me the most about traumatic brain injury in soldiers is not necessarily the traumatic brain injury and the cognitive issues. It's the number who will have early onset Alzheimer's, the number who will have Parkinson's disease. All the research is pointing to the fact that those who have had traumatic head injury, if they're genetically inclined to go there, are more likely to have Parkinson's disease and early onset Alzheimer's."

— General Peter Chiarelli, former U.S. Army vice chief of staff and current CEO of One Mind for Research, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the social and economic effects of mental illness and brain injury

"What keeps me up is picking up the newspaper every day and seeing that we don't seem to have any type of roadmap or agreed-upon blueprint that balances free-market forces with regulation in a way that gives confidence to the marketplace and the American people."

— Kenneth Feinberg, former administrator of the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Victim Compensation Fund and former special master for both the Troubled Asset Relief Program executive compensation and the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund

"Particularly in the United States, you have reached a level of information distribution and gathering that basically confuses rather than clarifies, with so many sources being quoted from various places, so getting a clear picture for the layman rather than the officials is always a problem here."

— Prince Turki Al Faisal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, former Saudi intelligence chief, regarding U.S. reactions to the September 11, 2012, assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya

His Royal Highness Prince Turki Al Faisal, of Saudi Arabia, confers with RAND trustee Karen Elliott House, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and author of On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines — and Future.

PHOTO BY DON REILLY

"If you helped get an institution in trouble and you're still insisting on being paid outsized salaries and bonuses to help fix problems you created, I say, 'Get rid of them.' Tell me you can't find somebody else to help. Why in the world do you want people like that in your institution? I just don't get that."

— Sheila Bair, former chair, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and author of Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself, shown with RAND trustee James Loy, former U.S. Coast Guard admiral

"Politics demonizes, and culture humanizes."

— Howard Gordon, co-creator and executive producer of the television series Homeland

RAND trustee Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Entertainment, Inc., and Sony Corporation of America, and Howard Gordon, television producer, spoke on a "Hollywood and Policy" panel with actor Michael Sheen and David Nevins, president of entertainment at Showtime Networks, Inc.

Photos by Diane Baldwin except as noted

Multimedia

Politics Aside 2012 Videos

This year's Politics Aside event focused on the theme Threats: Real and Imagined. Speakers included Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt, former Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair, former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, among others. Videos of many of the sessions were made possible through our partnership with Thomson Reuters.