A Conversation with RAND's CEO, Jason Matheny

Evan Banks

You are listening to Policy Currents, a weekly podcast from the RAND Corporation. I'm Evan Banks. Every Friday, we bring you new insights from RAND's latest research and commentary. It's January 4th. The new year is upon us and at RAND 2023 is going to be particularly special. It's our 75th anniversary. But rather than look back at the last 75 years, we're going to kick off the new year with a look ahead. On a personal note, I've dedicated my career to thought work and public policy, but I do want to say that I feel like working here in particular is an honor, and I'm consistently impressed by the breadth, quality and impact of the work we share every week on this show. That's a feeling that shared across the organization, including by RAND's president and CEO Jason Matheny. Today we'll be featuring a conversation with him. My colleague Emily Ashenfelter, who occasionally co-hosts this podcast recently sat down with Jason to discuss his vision for leading RAND into the future.

Emily Ashenfelter

So Jason, thank you so much for being on Policy Currents today. It's great to have you.

Jason Matheny

It's great to be here.

Emily Ashenfelter

So, Jason, everyone at RAND has their own unique story of how they first heard about the organization. Myself, I learned about RAND when I was studying and researching reports in graduate school. So I'm really curious to know how did you first hear about RAND and what was that experience like?

Jason Matheny

I think my first exposure to RAND was reading Roberta Wohlstetter. But after I found out about RAND, I really thought this is such a great approach to trying to figure out what are the right solutions to our biggest problems. And I really became excited that, like, maybe we just need more people to know more facts and that we can fix these problems. And I remember a group of friends and I made leaflets that included facts from RAND reports, facts about domestic policy, about international policy. And we just thought if we can get these facts into more people's hands, then things will get better. So we we passed out leaflets and then eventually we started putting slideshows together that we would project on the sides of public buildings at night using digital projectors that just had statistics about the world and about the country, problems that we had and their scale, their magnitude and what the evidence was for different solutions. And I was really convinced back then as as a teenager that if we can if we can present facts in an unbiased, nonpartisan way, we can contribute to finding solutions.

Emily Ashenfelter

So what you're saying is all I need is a bicycle and a projector. Is that right?

Jason Matheny

Yeah, I think it's a it's a good place to start. I'm really glad that in the 30 years hence I've found a place that that actually works on developing policy solutions at scale that reach policymakers. I don't think there were too many policymakers who were watching those those digital projections. But that's an advantage of a place like RAND, is that we we do the work and then we deliver that work directly to the most senior policymakers in the U.S. government and globally.

Emily Ashenfelter

A recent profile in RAND Review magazine revealed that friends describe you as an "apocaloptimist". What does that mean?

Jason Matheny

Yeah, a friend of mine made up that term to humorously describe a tendency to be optimistic while worrying about disasters. I'm generally an optimistic person, especially when I think about long timescales; the world has just been getting a lot better compared to life 200 years ago, the vast majority of humanity is healthier, we're wealthier, better educated and treated more fairly. Average income per person has increased by about a factor of 12. The percentage of humanity living in extreme poverty, which is about $2 per day in real purchasing power, has been reduced from 80% to 10% of humanity. It's pretty amazing. Life expectancy has increased by over 30 years. Infant mortality has dropped by over 90%. Literacy has gone from 10% to 90%. So, I mean, there's so much more that we could do to improve humanity's health and wealth and education and fairness. But the overall trend line is a positive story of progress in the world. So that's one reason to be optimistic. All that said, I'm increasingly worried about the small number of catastrophes that could derail that progress. And whether that's a nuclear war or a pandemic much worse than COVID. Whether that's natural, intentional or accidental, a climate disaster or a cyberattack that destroys critical infrastructure. I think there's a small number of catastrophic risks. But I think that they deserve a lot of attention because of how consequential they could be and also because of how vulnerable we might be to them.

Emily Ashenfelter

So it sounds like it's valuable to look to the past, not only to sort of gauge how much progress we've made, but also for clues as to how we might approach problems that we're facing now and will face in the future.

Jason Matheny

I think that's right. And one thing I really admire about RAND is that we do a lot of work on history that we think about how did we manage to navigate some of the biggest challenges that we've had in the last 75 years. How did we manage to skate through the Cold War without disaster? How did we make it through the Cuban Missile Crisis? How could we have averted the crisis to begin with? And how did we manage to navigate the crisis without it leading to to war?

Emily Ashenfelter

So "we solve the world's toughest policy challenges" is a bit of a rallying cry around here. From your perspective, what are those problems? Obviously, it's a long list, but have you identified some priorities?

Jason Matheny

So one way I try to think about this is if you imagine a world history textbook being written a century from now, what's likely to be in the summary of the 21st century? What are the big bullet points going to be? And I think that some of the big themes for the century will be how we manage the opportunities and risks for new technologies, how democracies successfully competed against China, Russia and other autocracies, but without going to war, how we defended democracies against disinformation and political polarization. How we addressed structural inequalities in the U.S. and around the world, and how we met the challenges of climate change through a transition to energy systems that are both more sustainable and more secure. And I think thinking about what are is going to be top of mind as challenges for policymakers over the next several decades. What are going to be the biggest themes that define this century is one way to set priorities for policy research of the type that RAND does.

Emily Ashenfelter

Very good. Yeah, absolutely. And some of these problems you've talked about, they're just big, huge, wicked problems. They're very complex. And RAND's interdisciplinary nature, that's going to come into play for how we approach solving those problems.

Jason Matheny

Yeah. One of the things that I really love about RAND is that we've got people from virtually every discipline at working together on projects. And I think for for some of these wicked problems that we have to tackle in the world today, whether that's climate and energy policy or technology policy or figuring out how to compete with China without catastrophe, that's going to require a multidisciplinary approach. And RAND has so much coverage across disciplines that are able to collaborate together in order to analyze complex problems. RAND also has this 75 year track record of making intractable problems tractable by analyzing complex systems, breaking down their key components, working with data and working from first principles to analyze the root causes of a problem, compare options and solutions. And we did this for strategic deterrence. We did it for health quality measurement. We did it for the foundations of the Internet and for dozens of other features of the modern world. And I think we can do the same kind of analysis for the new challenges that confront us today and tomorrow.

Emily Ashenfelter

Absolutely. So what's your advice for young people who want to make a difference in the world?

Jason Matheny

First, we need your help. The world has a lot of problems, and you probably underestimate how much impact you can have on them. Some of the most important problems have surprisingly few people working on them. So learn about what you think are the biggest problems in the world that need solving and look for analysis of root causes. Read a lot. Read widely. Read things that you might not necessarily agree with and figure out why you don't agree with them. Don't be afraid to cold call experts to learn more. I'm just regularly surprised by how many folks write back, even when they don't necessarily have a reason to. It's just sort of like basic decency among experts. Start earlier than I did on thinking about policy. Public policy just has a huge multiplier effect on some of the most consequential challenges of our time. And I think I realized that a couple decades later than I could have. I also suggest learning from histories of close calls of moments in time when having good people provide good policy advice, helps the world avoid catastrophe or when bad advice led us closer to catastrophe. So examples like histories of the Cuban Missile Crisis or of Able Archer. And then finally, please take care of yourself so that you can be productive for the long run. I think developing and sustaining close friendships, eating well, sleeping well, exercising, the usual stuff. Another piece of advice is just expressing gratitude often to the people around you who are also working to make a difference in the world. It can be hard work and we should just be grateful to each other. And if you're interested in doing that kind of work that RAND does, come work here. Or if you're interested in going to graduate school to learn how to do this kind of work, then go to school here. It's an amazing place.

Emily Ashenfelter

This year marks our 75th anniversary. For a moment, let's just jump ahead 25 years to RAND's centennial. What do you hope the organization has accomplished by then?

Jason Matheny

I hope and expect that we'll continue to be working on the world's biggest challenges. And I hope that through RAND and our school, that will continue to have trained some of the world's best policy minds. I hope that we'll have informed 25 years of technology policy, climate and energy, national security, health, education and economic policy that makes the world healthier and safer and more secure and more prosperous. And I also hope that as the country's largest and oldest think tank, that will have found some new models for what a 21st century think tank looks like. That we should continue to experiment with what the methods and organizations that we have can be used to solve the world's hardest analytic problems.

Emily Ashenfelter

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Jason, for joining us today. It was great to hear your thoughts about RAND and the priorities you've set for this organization moving forward.

Jason Matheny

It was great talking.

Emily Ashenfelter

Thank you.

Evan Banks

RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. As always, our show lives at rand.org/podcast. Happy New Year. We'll see you next week on Friday, January 13th.