RAND
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. The organization has since expanded to working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations. It is known for rigorous, often-quantitative, and non-partisan analysis and policy recommendations.[1] [2] [3]
RAND has approximately 1,600 employees and four principal locations: Santa Monica, California (headquarters); Washington, D.C. (currently located in Arlington, Virginia); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (adjacent to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh); and Cambridge, United Kingdom (RAND Europe). RAND has several smaller offices in the United States as well, including the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute in Jackson, Mississippi. In 2003, it opened the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute in Doha.
RAND is also the home to the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, one of the original graduate programs in public policy and the first to offer a Ph.D. The program is unique in that students work alongside RAND analysts on real-world problems. The campus is at RAND's Santa Monica research facility. The Pardee RAND School is the world's largest Ph.D.-granting program in policy analysis.
According to RAND's own account of its history, the corporation's acronymic name is a contraction of the phrase "Research ANd Development."[1]
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[edit] Project RAND
RAND was set up in 1946 by the United States Army Air Forces as Project RAND, under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in May 1946 they released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship. In May 1948, Project RAND was separated from Douglas and became an independent non-profit organization. Initial capital for the split came from the Ford Foundation.
[edit] Mission statement
RAND was incorporated as a non-profit organization to "further promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America." Its self-declared mission is "to help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis", using its "core values of quality and objectivity."
[edit] Achievements and expertise
The achievements of RAND stem from its development of systems analysis. Important contributions are claimed in space systems and the United States' space program, in computing and in artificial intelligence. RAND researchers developed many of the principles that were used to build the Internet. Numerous analytical techniques were invented at RAND, including dynamic programming, game theory, the Delphi method, linear programming, systems analysis, and exploratory modeling. RAND also pioneered the development and use of wargaming.
Current areas of expertise include: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, environment and energy, health, international policy, labor markets, national security, infrastructure, energy, environment, corporate governance, economic development, intelligence policy, long-range planning, crisis management and disaster preparation, population and regional studies, science and technology, social welfare, terrorism, arts policy, and transportation.
RAND designed and conducted one of the largest and most important studies of health insurance. The RAND Health Insurance Experiment, funded by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, established an insurance corporation to compare demand for health services with their cost to the patient.
According to the 2005 annual report, "about one-half of RAND's research involves national security issues."
The RAND Corporation posts all of its unclassified reports, in full, on its website www.rand.org.
[edit] Notable RAND participants
- David L. Aaron, Deputy National Security Advisor under Carter and drafter of the NATO treaty
- Henry H. Arnold — General, United States Air Force — RAND founder
- Kenneth Arrow — economist, Nobel Laureate, developed the impossibility theorem in social choice theory
- Bruno Augenstein — V.P., physicist, mathematician and space scientist
- Paul Baran — one of the developers of packet switching which was used in Arpanet and later networks like the Internet
- Barry Boehm — software economics expert, inventor of COCOMO
- Harold L. Brode — physicist, leading nuclear weapons effects expert
- Bernard Brodie — Military strategist and nuclear architect
- David S. C. Chu — Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, 2001-present
- Samuel Cohen — inventor of the neutron bomb in 1958
- Franklin R. Collbohm — Aviation Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder and former director and trustee
- George Dantzig — mathematician, creator of the simplex algorithm for linear programming
- Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. — President, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
- Daniel Ellsberg — leaker of the Pentagon Papers
- Francis Fukuyama — academic and author of The End of History and the Last Man
- James J. Gillogly, cryptographer and computer scientist
- Cecil Hastings — programmer, wrote software engineering classic, Approximations for Digital Computers (Princeton 1955)
- Brian Michael Jenkins — terrorism expert, Senior Advisor to the President of the RAND Corporation, and author of Unconquerable Nation
- Herman Kahn — theorist on nuclear war and one of the founders of scenario planning
- Zalmay Khalilzad — U.S. Ambassador to Iraq
- Lewis "Scooter" Libby, V.P. Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff
- Harry Markowitz — economist, developed the Portfolio Selection model that is still widely used in modern finance
- Margaret Mead — U.S. anthropologist
- John Forbes Nash, Jr. — Nobel prize-winning economist and mathematician
- John Von Neumann — mathematician, pioneer of the modern digital computer
- Allen Newell — artificial intelligence
- Paul O'Neill — Chairman in the late 1990s
- Edmund Phelps — winner of 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics
- W.V. Quine — famous philosopher
- Arthur E. Raymond — Chief Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
- Condoleezza Rice — former trustee 1991-1997 and current Secretary of State for the United States (as of May 2006), former intern
- Michael D. Rich — RAND Executive Vice President, 1993-present
- Leo Rosten — academic and humorist
- Donald Rumsfeld — Chairman of RAND Corporation from 1981-1986 and Secretary of Defense for the United States from 1975 to 1977 and 2001 to 2006.
- Robert F. Salter — advocate of the vactrain maglev train concept
- Thomas C. Schelling — economist, winner of 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics
- Herbert Simon — Nobel prize-winning economist
- Katsuaki L. Terasawa — economist
- James Thomson — RAND CEO, 1989-present
- Albert Wohlstetter — Mathematician and Cold-War Strategist
- Roberta Wohlstetter — Policy analyst and military historian
[edit] Governance
The organization's governance structure includes a board of trustees. Current members of the board include: Harold Brown, Frank Carlucci, Lovida Coleman, Robert Curvin, Timothy Geithner, Pedro Greer, Rita Hauser, Karen House, Jen-Hsun Huang, Paul Kaminski, Ann Korologos, Philip Lader, Arthur Levitt, Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, Lloyd Morrisett, Ronald Olson, Paul O'Neill, Michael Powell, Donald Rice, James Rohr, James Rothenberg, Jerry Speyer, Ratan Tata, James Thomson, and Marta Tienda.
Former members of the board include: Walter Mondale, Condoleezza Rice, Newton Minow, Brent Scowcroft, Amy Pascal, John Reed, Charles Townes, Caryl Haskins, Walter Wriston, Frank Stanton, Carl Bildt, and Donald Rumsfeld.
[edit] Criticisms of RAND
The RAND Corporation has been associated with militarism and the military-industrial complex.
Many of the events in which RAND plays a part are based on assumptions which are hard to verify because of the lack of detail on RAND's highly classified work for defense and intelligence agencies. Some RAND participants who have gone on to large roles in the military-industrial complex are often believed to have had a role in shaping RAND research. See Antimilitarism.
Due to the nature of its work, the RAND corporation also frequently plays a role in conspiracy theories.
[edit] Trivia
- U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay quipped that RAND meant "Research And No Development".
- The film Dr. Strangelove made a jab at RAND, with the title character mentioning a study conducted by the "BLAND Corporation."
- While the RAND Corporation has produced many notable publications, one of its best-selling books is A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.
- In the show The Simpsons (season 6, episode 2F07 "Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy"), the character Milhouse quotes the RAND Corporation as being involved in a conspiracy with other fictional groups to eliminate the meal of dinner.
- In the Marvel Universe, the BRAND Corporation is an organization dedicated to creating superhumans.
- Among the inventions emanating from the RAND Corporation are the windsurfer and packet switching.
- In the show King of the Hill, Dale Gribble says that the RAND corporation is involved with unknowingly tattooing barcodes on American citizens.
[edit] See also
- A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (published by RAND)
- Brookings Institution
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Trilateral Commission
- James Q. Wilson (board of directors)
[edit] References
- ^ Guide for Political Internships from Harvard University; URL accessed March 19, 2007
- ^ Oregon: The Rand Report on Measure 11 is Finally Available by Brigette Sarabi, 2005; URL accessed URL accessed March 19, 2007
- ^ Public Health Preparedness in the 21st Century, testimony by Nicole Lurie before the U.S. Senate, 2006; URL accessed March 19, 2007
[edit] External links
- RAND website
- Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School
- RAND And The City — a critical history of RAND from the Santa Monica Mirror. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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