RAND Review, RAND's flagship magazine, showcases RAND research on a variety of timely and relevant issues facing the world today.

RAND Review is published periodically by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit institution. The mission of the RAND Corporation is to help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis. Opinions are those of the authors and do not reflect positions taken by RAND, its board, or its clients.

About RAND Corporation:

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.

For 60 years, the RAND Corporation has pursued its nonprofit mission by conducting research on important and complicated problems. Initially, RAND (the name of which was derived from a contraction of the term research and development) focused on issues of national security. Eventually, RAND expanded its intellectual reserves to offer insight into other areas, such as business, education health, law, and science. RAND's innovative approach to problem solving has become the benchmark for all other "think tanks" that followed. See History and Mission.

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Visit RAND Review Magazine, Summer 2008 Website

Contents:
Message from the Editor
An Antidote to Breaking News
RAND — Then, Now, and Tomorrow:
Time Travelers
A Storied Tradition of Peering into the Future
Perspectives:
Out of the Ashes
The Rise of the Bard Prison Initiative
Features:
Issues over the Horizon
Eleven Emerging Challenges

    * The Aging Couple
    * Corporate America’s Next Big Scandal
    * Innovative Infrastructure
    * The Day After: When Electronic Voting Machines Fail
    * Reality Check for Defense Spending
    * A New Anti-American Coalition
    * The Future of Diplomacy: Real Time or Real Estate?
    * Corporate Counterinsurgency
    * Beating the Germ Insurgency
    * A Second Reproductive Revolution
    * From Nation-State to Nexus-State

Stop Loss
A Nation Weighs the Tangible Consequences of Invisible Combat Wounds
By Terri Tanielian and Lisa H. Jaycox
Publisher’s Page:
Core Principles
With the Nonproliferation Regime Unraveling, a Refresher Course Is in Order
By James A. Thomson

Download RAND Review Magazine, Summer 2008

PDF format, 2.22MB, 32Pages.

Issues over the Horizon
Eleven Emerging Challenges

To celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the RAND Corporation and to uphold its tradition of taking on the big issues of tomorrow, a call went out to all RAND staff around the world, inviting them to propose essays on “important policy issues not currently receiving the attention they deserve in the public debate” — issues, in other words, that might be on the back burner today but will likely become front-burner issues within the next five years.

More than 100 issues were raised. The final product: the 11 essays published here. These were selected either because they highlight major public policy problems that have eluded the mainstream media radar or because they point toward major public policy solutions that have been likewise overlooked — or both.

Despite the wide range of topics, from corporate malfeasance to antimicrobial resistance, common themes emerge. The biggest one is the shaky financial footing that threatens to undermine several pillars of the public interest: Medicare, Social Security, roads, bridges, water systems, power grids, elections, military operations, diplomatic endeavors, and public health. At the same time, there are national and global reasons for hope. There is even a concluding vision of a new and better form of statecraft.

Readers might be tempted to connect the issues outlined here with those being debated on the U.S. presidential campaign trail, but that is not the intent. Our goal is to raise public awareness of several salient issues that will likely grow in prominence regardless of the election outcome.

Message from the Editor
An Antidote to Breaking News

In this era of immediacy, with its 24-hour news outlets dependent on “breaking news” and the swiftest and shrillest reactions to it, there is an old-fashioned charm in taking a step back, methodically uncovering the long-emergent patterns, and projecting where they might lead us well beyond the next few news cycles.

This issue of RAND Review salutes the unfashionable approach, first by paying homage to a man who foresaw much about today’s world more than 40 years ago and then by sharing the prognostications of those who aim to follow in his footsteps. Our opening story introduces you to Willis Ware and others who have upheld his tradition. The 11 “issues over the horizon” essays then identify current trends as harbingers of upcoming events, bringing to light several simmering but overlooked challenges and opportunities.

In a similar way, our story on the invisible wounds of war removes the veil from age-old scourges of combat and warns that they will haunt us for years to come. But this story, too, contains a message of hope, because wounds such as these must be exposed before they can become mended.

This entire issue of RAND Review offers the opposite of “breaking” news, the definition of which denotes interruption, disruption, and destruction. In marked contrast, this issue offers “mending” news and its promise: continuation, correction, and restoration.

—John Godges

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