In December, the Tobin Project convened an interdisciplinary group of over 30 top scholars, along with key policymakers, to explore how how the U.S. can sustainably pursue its national security interests when faced with a decade of costly foreign wars, a devastating global financial crisis, mounting public debt, and profound realignments in international political and economic power.
Core questions included:
On August 23, the Tobin Project hosted a workshop with a group of Tobin's National Security Scholars and the National Intelligence Council (NIC) to provide feedback on a draft version of the Global Trends 2030 report. The report will be published this winter and will outline the intelligence community’s predictions for international political, economic, and social trends that could affect the U.S.’s power and prosperity over next two decades.
In June, the International Centre for Financial Regulation (ICFR), a non-profit and non-partisan research organization based in London, published a report: “The Making of Good Financial Regulation: Toward a Policy Response to Regulatory Capture.” Recognizing the import of the Tobin Project’s forthcoming work on the issue, the ICFR asked the editors of Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It to contribute an essay to the report.
What has been the role of the corporation in the history of the American democracy? The Tobin Project has begun to gather a group of scholars to study this critical question. Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale, Economics and History) and Bill Novak (University of Michigan Law School) have signed on to lead this research effort and on May 16th convened an initial group of scholars for a Tobin Project workshop.
In May, the Tobin Project experimented with a new method of connecting policymakers and scholars by holding a virtual meeting between five policymakers— from the State Department, Defense Department, National Security Council, and Senate Committee on Foreign Relations—and Tobin Project national security scholars Stephen Van Evera (initiative chair), Jeremi Suri (initiative co-chair), and
Tobin Project graduate fellow Vincent Pons (MIT, Economics) has been featured in the New York Times, the Financial Times, Slate, and NBC for his elections research and work on François Hollande's presidential campaign in France. Along with Arthur Muller and Guillaume Liegey, two other French students who studied in the U.S., Vincent initiated a research project in 2010 to compare different voter registration interventions and their effectiveness in mobilizing unregistered voters to participate.
On April 23, 2012, Michael Sandel (Harvard University, Government) will discuss his new book, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. In the book, Professor Sandel argues that markets have not only become disconnected from morals, but have also extended too deeply into new and potentially inappropriate spheres of life. Citing examples like for-profit hospitals and advertising in schools, Professor Sandel suggests a need for setting moral limits on the reach of market-thinking.
A recent article in DukeTODAY reports on a Duke University research initiative on "Rethinking Regulation," led by Ed Balleisen (Duke University, History) and Duke's Kenan Institute for Ethics, with support from the Tobin Project. The article highlights the power of the Tobin Project model for catalyzing research in the social sciences: