, a fellow in the Governance Studies Program at Brookings, explains why the Iowa Caucuses matter so much in the presidential election. She also discusses what to expect from Congress this year for both congressional elections and the presidential election. “There are a lot of quirky details to the Iowa Caucus,” Reynolds says. In this interview, she explains what makes the Iowa Caucuses so important in the presidential nomination process and what to expect as the races continue. She also weighs i...
Feb 05, 2016•33 min
This episode features two of the leaders of the Brookings Institution: the co-chairs of the , John L. Thornton and David M. Rubenstein. They reflect on our first 100 years and share their thoughts on Brookings’s second century. The episode is the first in a series celebrating 100 years of the Brookings Institution. Later in this series, you’ll hear from former and current Brookings presidents as well as scholars.
Jan 28, 2016•21 min
In this week’s episode, , a senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program, assesses the potential role of several economic strategies in transforming Africa’s industrial development for the global economy. “Between now and about 2030, the estimates are that as many as 85 million jobs at [the] bottom end of manufacturing will migrate out of China. So the question is: where will they go?” In this podcast, Page explains that with policy change, great focus, and a cohesive implementati...
Jan 21, 2016•47 min
Tune in to hear , senior fellow in , and , senior fellow and the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in and former policy advisor to President Bill Clinton, review President Obama’s State of the Union address and look ahead to the 2016 presidential and congressional elections. In this episode, they assess policy issues from the Obama Administration and discuss how the presidential candidates will address these issues. They identify the political party of the next President as a determining characteristic in th...
Jan 15, 2016•36 min
, vice President and director of the Economic Studies Program at Brookings and the Joseph A. Pechman Senior Fellow, forecasts the top economic issues in the upcoming year. Tune in to hear more about the labor market, wages, and productivity growth in 2016. Gayer also outlines which economic issues the presidential candidates should be talking about in the elections and how much impact the president has in economic policy decisions. Also in this podcast: “What’s Happening in Congress” with , seni...
Jan 08, 2016•27 min
In this last episode of the Brookings Cafeteria podcast for 2015, you'll hear some of the best moments from the show selected from the year's episodes. Thanks to the team that makes this podcast possible: Zack Kulzer, Mark Hoelscher, Carissa Nitchy, Jessica Pavone, Rebecca Viser and Eric Abalahin. Also, special thanks to the leadership and support of David Nassar and Richard Fawal. And a very special thanks to our intern Karen WaelGirgis, who was instrumental in putting this episode and many oth...
Dec 31, 2015•31 min
, senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, discusses her new book (co-authored with Gene Sperling and Christina Kwauk) "" (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). “Girls’ education really is quite unique in terms of interventions you can do," she says. "Not because it’s a silver bullet; there are no such things as silver bullets. But, certainly in developing country contexts, it has so many high returns across such a wide variety of areas important for society.”...
Dec 22, 2015•22 min
“A lot of the issues that we focus on as crises on a daily basis—I think particularly of Syria—they are certainly crises in their own right,” says . “But to my mind the failure to deal with them does have a lot to do with the consequences of the breakdown in international order and the breakdown in the international capacity to create order.” , fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy and the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, gives his view on the top foreign ...
Dec 18, 2015•35 min
, director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies and holder of the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies and also the Michael H. Armacost Chair, talks about Hong Kong’s relationship to China, the umbrella movement of 2014, and the future of democracy in Hong Kong. “First of all,” Bush says, “there is the continuing challenge of how you make the Hong Kong economy competitive in a global economy that is … constantly changing technologically.” “On the political side, I personally...
Dec 11, 2015•36 min
, fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, tells us what’s missing in conventional college ranking systems like that of U.S. News & World Report. And using President Obama’s new college score card, Rothwell talks about his new value added approach to rankings. “I don’t actually think we need more college ranking systems. I think we need better ranking systems,” argues Rothwell. The “problems with U.S. News and some of the conventional rankings,” he continues, include “way too ...
Dec 03, 2015•39 min
, an expert on counterterrorism and Middle East Security, and research director for the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, explains what we know and don’t know about the ISIS terrorist attack in Paris and whether he thinks ISIS will strike the U.S. Also, part two of our Paris climate talk series on new technology from , senior fellow and policy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program. “The real danger to me is not taking care of the refugee problem,” argues Byman, “If these refugees...
Nov 19, 2015•22 min
, nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and Ittleson Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at Brown University discusses climate change and the upcoming global climate talks in Paris. “Scientists are telling us,” Roberts says, “that about 2 degrees Celsius is about the highest limit to stay safe... And in fact right now we’re just under 1 degree Celsius of warming and we’re already seeing these impacts of wildfires, droughts, heat waves, flooding, sea level rise, melting Greenland ic...
Nov 13, 2015•45 min
This week, talks presidential primaries, congressional primaries, and the problems facing our current nominating system. She also offers predictions on the likely GOP and Democratic presidential nominees. Listen to find out who she’s tapped to win. “Political parties are incredibly important,” says Kamarck, “They shape Americans’ behaviors. They are the best predictor of how Americans are going to vote. And there are in fact real and meaningful differences between the parties. You can’t really h...
Nov 06, 2015•26 min
, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and former CBS News Correspondent, discusses his new book "." “I think since 1991 at the end of the Soviet Union, the end of Communism as a global philosophy, Ukrainians have come to understand that they are an independent culture,” explains Kalb. “The shame of it is that though they are, they are locked into a history which may deny them the full expression of their politics and their culture. And they can’t escape that; it is simply a part of their hi...
Oct 30, 2015•32 min
and discuss their Ending Rural Hunger project, designed to help the world achieve one important facet of the “No Hunger” Sustainable Development Goal. “[P]robably about ¾ of the [food insecurity] problem that we’re dealing with globally is actually in rural areas,” Kharas says in this podcast. McArthur explains, “I think the first thing to note is that the world is making progress. So roughly speaking, undernourishment as a share of the world is dropping by about 1 percent every three years.” Al...
Oct 23, 2015•45 min
Fellows and from the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings debate the challenges facing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “In the long term, [Hamas] is not where peace lies… What doomed the disengagement in Gaza was the rise of Hamas and the continuation of the war from it… This reality, where war continues from a territory that is evacuated is perhaps the biggest [factor], except for the second intifada,… that has made Israelis skeptical of peace,” explains Natan. “The other two trend...
Oct 16, 2015•47 min
“To use some of the time honored clichés, ‘The enemy may get a vote too.’ Or the Bolshevik line, ‘You may not have an interest in war, but war may have an interest in you.’ I paraphrase that to say we may not, at the moment, have an interest in counterinsurgency and stabilization missions, but they may have an interest in us… we can’t be like the ostrich putting our head in the sand just because we’re tired of these kinds of wars. They might come back, whether we like it or not.” says Senior Fel...
Oct 08, 2015•34 min
“For someone who has followed these issues from 1989 ... it is a sad moment,” says in this podcast. “It is a sad moment because we feel that international solidarity is not there. And that solidarity was, ... for a fleeting moment, triggered by that little child ... on the beaches of Turkey.” Kirisci, TÜSİAD Senior Fellow at Brookings and an expert on Turkish foreign policy and migration studies, speaks on why Syrians are fleeing to Europe, the impact of Syrian displacement on neighboring countr...
Sep 25, 2015•55 min
“Iran gets out of jail free. I mean, they’re out of the penalty box at this point," says Senior Fellow in this podcast on Iran in a post-nuclear deal world. "The rest of the world will do business as usual with Iran. Iran will be welcomed to international fora. The ... stench of pariah-hood that had attached itself to Iran during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—both because of the nuclear escalation and because of Ahmadinejad’s proclivity for really provocative statements and reprehensible...
Sep 11, 2015•30 min
“Almost half of undergraduates in the United States start at a community college,” says Fellow in this podcast. Soliz, a new fellow in the at Brookings, identifies challenges faced by students looking to transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions, reacts to President Obama’s proposal to make community college free, and discusses the conflict between for-profit colleges and community colleges. Regarding the conflict between the two, she says, “From an institutional perspective, th...
Aug 21, 2015•19 min
“We have successfully built up our defenses so that here, at home in the United States, we’re probably safer than we were a decade ago but abroad our terrorist enemy is more numerous, more barbaric, more dangerous than ever before,” says Senior Fellow in this podcast. Riedel, director of the , and also a former CIA officer and senior policy official, identifies the catalysts of the global jihadist movement, discusses the rise of the Islamic State and its rivalry with al-Qaida, addresses the cris...
Aug 06, 2015•31 min
“Go and interview a restaurateur in central London near Piccadilly or go and interview a theatre manager in central London about how their business was in central London in August of 2012 [during the Summer Olympics] and they’ll say ‘It was awful. It was like the great depression,’” says economist in this podcast. Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College and the author of (Brookings Institution Press, 2015), reveals the real economic costs and benefits of hosting mega-sporting events...
Jul 13, 2015•44 min
“New Orleans is still in the middle of a major urban experiment,” says Senior Fellow in this podcast, the 50th episode of the Brookings Cafeteria. “It’s an urban experiment that is not so much just about responding to Katrina and the oil spill, but really is the great experiment of our time.” The central question within that experiment is, “regardless of any environmental or economic disaster—like the Great Recession, the loss of a manufacturing sector—how does an economic center, a population c...
Jul 07, 2015•28 min
“More and more we see that the separation between war and peace is not as clear-cut as it used to be,” says Jean-Marie Guéhenno in this podcast. Guéhenno, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, was head of United Nations peacekeeping operations from 2000 to 2008, the longest-serving person in that post. In this podcast, he talks about his toughest peacekeeping operation, his best results, and why a political process is so important to th...
Jun 18, 2015•25 min
“The European Union is, in a way, a treasure,” says Distinguished Brookings Fellow in this podcast. “It’s a treasure that really signifies peace, that signifies cooperation … the type of thing the global world of today needs.” Solana, former secretary general of NATO and EU foreign policy chief, describes how he started as a physics professor before turning to policy-making and reaching the highest levels of Spanish and European institutions; discusses how the EU negotiates the shoals of nationa...
Jun 04, 2015•28 min
What is happening in Ukraine is a tremendous threat to Putin’s Russia precisely because of the kinship that Russians feel with Ukraine,” says in this podcast. Freeland, a Member of Parliament in Canada and also a journalist and author, talks about her own family’s connection to Ukraine, why the Russian propaganda machine has been effective, and why the Russian-Ukrainian language divide is oversimplified. Listen to find out why she thinks that the “Maidan and what has followed is the most hopeful...
May 21, 2015•41 min
“Ten years from now college is going to look a lot different,” says Senior Fellow in this podcast. Butler, an expert on the future of higher education, economic mobility, budget process reform, and federal entitlement reform, explains how developments in education technology, such as MOOCs, are driving college costs down, changing university business models, and could have a dramatic effect on social mobility in this country. “If you have a higher education system that actually does provide stud...
May 07, 2015•42 min
“The Arab world has made huge progress in giving children access to school,” says , a nonresident fellow with the at Brookings. Yet even so, she calls the 2.6 million Syrian children out of school in the region “perhaps the biggest education crisis globally.” In the podcast, Jalbout—former CEO of the Queen Rania Foundation and a global leader on education in international development—discusses the challenges and solutions to educating children in the Arab world, why quality and not just access m...
Apr 23, 2015•26 min
“Anger at the IRS for the complexity of the tax system is misplaced,” says Senior Fellow in this podcast. “The IRS does not legislate the tax code; Congress does. And if the tax code is complicated, that is Congress’s fault.” Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, explains one reason why the complicated tax code might be a good thing. Gale also addresses a variety of issues, including: what tax reform means; whether reform is good for economic growth; what are meant by a fla...
Apr 13, 2015•21 min
“I know that California has got a nightmare on [its] hands right now,” says , former general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority and now a Brookings nonresident senior fellow, in this podcast taped just as California announced statewide water restrictions. Mulroy, who has been called “the water empress of Vegas,” discusses a path forward in California’s crisis; explains why criticizing the Bellagio fountain’s water use is misplaced; reflects on how she got into the water business in ...
Apr 09, 2015•29 min
