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Report describes RAND contributions to Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan for policymakers in other coastal regions. It highlights the value of a solid technical foundation to support decision-making on strategies to protect and restore coastal regions.
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This report presents an economic framework for estimating a water agency's avoided costs and environmental benefits of increasing water-use efficiency. The report demonstrates this framework by evaluating the benefits of Denver Water's efficiency programs and utilizes an exploratory modeling approach to accommodate significant uncertainty. The analysis highlights the importance of considering both long- and short-run costs and benefits.
An examination of how an independent Palestinian state, if created, can be made successful. The authors describe options for strengthening governance, security, economic development, access to water, health and health care, and education, and estimate the financial resources needed for successful development over the first decade of independence.
The tragic science. The tragedy of economics ; Economic paternalism, heroic economics ; Harm's complexity -- The origins of econogenic harm. The unevenness of econogenic impact ; The specter of irreparable ignorance ; Counterfactual fictions in economic explanation and harm assessment -- Economic moral geometry. Managing harm via economic moral geometry ; Moral geometry: An assessment ; Beyond moral geometry: interests, social harm, capabilities -- Confronting econogenic harm responsibly. Economic harm profile analysis ; Decision making under deep uncertainty ; Conclusion: from reckless to responsible economics.
A host of catastrophes, natural and otherwise, as well as some pleasant surprises—like the sudden end of the cold war without a shot being fired—have caught governments and societies unprepared many times in recent decades. September 11 is only the most obvious recent example among many unforeseen events that have changed, even redefined our lives. We have every reason to expect more such events in future. Several kinds of unanticipated scenarios—particularly those of low probability and high impact—have the potential to escalate into systemic crises. Even positive surprises can be major policy challenges. Anticipating and managing low-probability events is a critically important cha...
How could producing 25 percent of U.S. electricity and motor-vehicle transportation fuels from renewables by the year 2025 affect U.S. consumer energy expenditures and CO2 emissions? This report finds that reaching 25 percent renewables with limited impact on expenditures requires significant progress in renewable-energy technologies and biomass production. Without substantial innovation in these areas, expenditures could increase considerably.
Defense planning faces significant uncertainties. This report applies robust decision making (RDM) to the munitions mix challenge, to demonstrate how RDM could help defense planners make plans more robust to a wide range of hard-to-predict futures.
This report extends research on using scenarios for strategic planning, with experiments in what can be called massive scenario generation (MSG), a computationally intensive technique that seeks to combine virtues of human- and model-based exploration of "the possibility space." The authors measure particular approaches to MSG against four metrics: not needing a good initial model; the dimensionality of the possibility space considered; the degree of exploration of that space; and the quality of resulting knowledge. The authors then describe two MSG experiments for contrasting cases, one that began with a reasonable but untested analytical model, and one that began without an analytical mode...
This second edition of Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology arrives at just the right time, as new advances in science increasingly affect anthropologists of all stripes. Lawrence Kuznar begins by reviewing the basic issues of scientific epistemology in anthropology as they have taken shape over the life of the discipline. He then describes postmodern and other critiques of both science and scientific anthropology, and he concludes with stringent analyses of these debates. This new edition brings this important text firmly into the 21st century; it not only updates the scholarly debates but it describes new research techniques—such as computer modeling systems—that could not have been imagined just a decade ago. In a field that has become increasingly divided over basic methods of reasearch and interpretation, Kuznar makes a powerful argument that anthropology should return to its roots in empirical science.