July 2009 Archives

All this week, TTLA runs an interview with Michael D. Rich. Rich is the executive vice president at the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation, the region's preeminent public policy institute.

Friday: An Introduction
Monday: A Brief History of RAND
Tuesday: Is RAND a Think Tank?
Wednesday: Complex Problems & Measuring Success
Thursday: From Santa Monica to Qatar
Friday: Success, Shareholders, and Wrestlers

TTLA: What are some of the things that have happened during your tenure here that you're personally the most proud of?

MR: I think a lot of people in sort of my era would start with something called the Health Insurance Experiment, which was one of two major social experiments launched, I think, in the Nixon administration, but continued long beyond that. That really laid the groundwork for a lot of the things that we now regard as important directions for reform and health care systems: measuring quality, being able to link the provision of different kinds of care to outcome measures. So that you know if you’re going to make a change, you know what the effect on a person’s life and lifestyle is.

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All this week, TTLA runs an interview with Michael D. Rich. Rich is the executive vice president at the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation, the region's preeminent public policy institute.

Friday: An Introduction
Monday: A Brief History of RAND
Tuesday: Is RAND a Think Tank?
Wednesday: Complex Problems & Measuring Success
Thursday: From Santa Monica to Qatar
Friday: Success, Shareholders, and Wrestlers

TTLA: Backing up a bit now, could you speak again about the scope of work RAND takes on?

MR: In the national security realm, our work typically falls into four broad categories. One, you might think of as geopolitics and broad national security and military strategy. The second one involves force – force structure, force employment; sort of tactical issues, how many of what kinds of equipment and that sort of thing. The third involves new technology. We don’t actually design or build anything, but we do a lot of the evaluations that help the military express requirements and make trade-offs and basically ask the industry to develop. And then the fourth and probably the largest area just in terms of the number of people is the collection of resource management activity. So, manpower, personnel and training, compensation, retirement policy, and military health care. Logistics, R&D policy, cost analysis methods and so on. Each year we’re trying to improve upon some of the things that we’ve done in the past. And so much of it – cost analysis methods, logistics concepts and techniques, certainly a lot of military manpower policy is based on RAND research methods.

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All this week, TTLA runs an archival interview with Michael D. Rich. Rich is the executive vice president at the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation, the region's preeminent public policy institute.

Friday: An Introduction
Monday: A Brief History of RAND
Tuesday: Is RAND a Think Tank?
Wednesday: Complex Problems & Measuring Success
Thursday: From Santa Monica to Qatar
Friday: Success, Shareholders, and Wrestlers

TTLA: In terms of the researchers and administrators who wind up working here, do you compete for talent with McKinsey & Co and the like?

MR: Yeah, all of the above, actually. It's a great question. One of the things that is tough, even for a trustee, they’ll ask the simple question like, "Who’s your competitor?" It’s very hard to answer, because in some areas we’re competing with McKinsey, no doubt about it. But in other areas, we are not competing with McKinsey over looking for people whose other options are university professorships. And in some cases its government service. So it’s really a very diverse group. It's a highly educated staff, but I don’t think it stands out that way in terms of numbers of PhD’s or those sorts of things. What’s very distinctive is the mix of disciplines represented on the staff. I think just about every single discipline is represented. And a lot of professional specialties like law. I started as a lawyer, and there’s an architect and, you know, a physician, and so on.

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All this week, TTLA runs an interview with Michael D. Rich. Rich is the executive vice president at the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation, the region's preeminent public policy institute.

Friday: An Introduction
Monday: A Brief History of RAND
Tuesday: Is RAND a Think Tank?
Wednesday: Complex Problems & Measuring Success
Thursday: From Santa Monica to Qatar
Friday: Success, Shareholders, and Wrestlers

Think Tank LA: Do you mind when people refer to RAND as a 'think tank?'

Michael D. Rich: I think I’ve heard that term was applied originally to RAND. And we’re still often referred to as a 'think tank,' and sometimes we’re called the original think tank, sometimes we’re called the quintessential think tank, so you know, we have to live with it. But I think we’re more uncomfortable about it these days because over time, other organizations were created and grew up and began calling themselves think tanks. And when you compare some of them to RAND, we’re sort of nothing like them. And in fact, some of the differences go to kind of the heart of what RAND is. And so it’s not as useful anymore to say think tank – it’s got a different meaning.

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All this week, TTLA runs an interview with Michael D. Rich. Rich is the executive vice president at the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation, the region's preeminent public policy institute.

Friday: An Introduction
Monday: A Brief History of RAND
Tuesday: Is RAND a Think Tank?
Wednesday: Complex Problems & Measuring Success
Thursday: From Santa Monica to Qatar
Friday: Success, Shareholders, and Wrestlers

TTLA: Could you take us back to the earliest days of RAND?

MR: I'll give you kind of a thumbnail history. Like a lot of R&D organizations or scientific organizations – a lot of laboratories and various places – RAND has its roots in World War II. It goes back to a single individual who had the idea, although he required other people to pull it off. But this guy’s name was Arnold, Hap Arnold. You know Hap Arnold? That’s amazing, because before I came to RAND, I never heard of Hap Arnold. He was a major military hero in the United States.

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Back when this blog was getting started, in October of 2008, TTLA headed over to Santa Monica in order to visit with Michael D. Rich and a few of his colleagues at the RAND Corporation.

Rich is the executive vice president of RAND. That's the #2 position in the orginization, behind president and CEO James A. Thompson, at this preeminent public policy institution that's ranked among the nation's leaders in areas such as international development, health policy, public policy research programs, domestic economy policy, security and international affairs, and environmental policy.

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TTLA didn't expect James Underdown, executive director of the Center for Inquiry - Los Angeles, to shed any tears over this week's major shake-up of the California Board of Registered Nursing.

(See, "Schwarzenegger Replaces Most of State Nursing Board," by the L.A. Times and ProPublica.)

Underdown and other members of the CFI have long been at odds with the Board regarding its oversight of mandatory continuing education programs for nurses.

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Scanning the World Wide Web for a handful of references to think tanks and Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor....

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For TTLA readers who dug -- or Digged -- this post or this post, here's a link to a month-old, related story from Slate.com that this blog missed out reading the first time around.

Written by Lydia DePillis, the piece -- "About Climate Change: Never Mind -- How One Think Tank Adapted When the Debated Moved on From its Favorite Issue" -- is about the Competitive Enterprise Institute, based in D.C.

The CEI's motto, by the way, is, "Advancing Liberty -- From the Economy to Ecology."

Updated: TTLA missed this Google Alert -- dated April 1 -- but here's another, more local variant of the same, this time scheduled to feature an Ayn Rand'er.

Reviled by many, unforgiven by the same, the architect of the Vietnam War has died.

Robert Strange McNamara's think tank interactions were legion.

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TTLA failed to find many think tanks posting about the life and death of Michael Jackson.

The best local bet figured to be the pop-culture-interested, Jay-Z quoting lads at the Prometheus Institute, which is headquartered downtown, a few blocks from Staples Center. No luck.

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The copy desk over at Mental Floss magazine and mentalfloss.com would seem to be enjoying themselves...

An article in that pub by Alex Abella (author of, Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire,) is headlined, "The Rand Corporation: The Think Tank That Controls America."

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More media and think tank-related fallout this week from recent climate change denial discourse...

Good magazine online posted this, linking to this original piece in the Guardian.

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