Kennedy School Review

BY MERISSA KHURMA, PANGYRUS This article is being published in collaboration with Pangyrus. A Jordanian woman in the Northeastern city of Mafraq had been nagging her husband for weeks to take her to the Za’atari refugee camp. Her request was a simple one, Magdoos, baby eggplants stuffed with walnuts and sun-dried red peppers and pickled […]

BY FUAD HUSEYNOV The World Bank estimates the current demand for infrastructure investment in emerging and developing countries at above $1 trillion a year as of 2015. Meanwhile, the Asian Development Bank estimates a need for almost $169 billion in Central Asia alone from 2010-2020, of which $92 billion is needed for the development of […]

BY ROBERT REYNOLDS Nudging—the application of behavioral insights to public policy interventions—is among today’s fastest growing public policy fields. In the last few years, organizations from the White House to Google to the World Bank have launched behavioral science teams tasked with running randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that identify powerful nudges. During this time, Kennedy […]

BY BENJAMIN GILLIES This piece appeared in our 2016 print journal. You can order your copy here. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato argued that in order for a democratic society to function properly, the wealthiest members should never be more than five times as rich as its poorest.[i] Yet, in modern America, CEOs and other elites […]

BY ANDREA BLINKHORN AND JONATHAN HUI Driving down Puritan Avenue in the Martin Park neighborhood in northwest Detroit, it’s hard not to feel a sense of emptiness. Many houses are boarded up and crumbling, lying in a state of long-time disrepair that belies the ornate architectural styles that used to define the city. A short […]

BY PITICHOKE CHULAPAMORNSRI During the first week at the Harvard Kennedy School, my orientation leaders encouraged us to download Venmo, a peer-to-peer money transfer app, which allows users to easily split bills at restaurants. Rather than giving the server multiple credit cards, one person can pay the bill, and the rest can just “Venmo” the […]

BY MARINA ZHAVORONKOVA Last year, Netflix made headlines by allowing all employees up to a year of parental leave. In March, Salesforce adjusted the salaries of its employees to the tune of three million dollars to ensure salary equity across genders. Year after year, companies that fall on Fortune or Business Insider’s lists of “best […]

BY SAMIK ADHIKARI Kami Chiri Sherpa had high hopes for himself and his family. He dreamed of leaving his job as a trekking guide in the Solukhumbu region of Nepal for a job in Poland, where he could make more money and provide his family with a better life. A couple of years ago, he […]

BY TANIA DEL RIO The war on drugs is fueling conflict and destroying families. It is time for the global community to recognize that after 50 years of failure, the only practical and humane policy is to end the punitive approach by decriminalizing mild substances and controlling toxic ones. This week’s UN Special Session on […]

  BY CHANTE LANTOS-SWETT On Monday, March 7, at 11:30 a.m., more than 3,000 students from schools all across the Boston Public School District stood up from their desks and joined their peers in front of the State House to protest a proposed $50 million cut to the 2016-2017 school year budget. Armed with protest […]

BY JUSTIN REYNOLDS The bus trundled to a stop in front of a dismal looking barbed wire gate. The vodka from the previous night still featured prominently in my thoughts as I struggled to build a picture of a place I never thought I would visit: Russia.  It was the third day of a week-long […]

BY KATIE PARRY Over the last month Germany has quietly moved to make family reunification harder for many recently arrived migrants.  New rules will mean that migrants given “subsidiary protection” status, which includes at least one in five Syrians, will not be able to bring their families to join them in Germany for at least […]