Intersections

As part of the Brookings Election 2016 project, the Brookings Podcast Network brings you a special edition episode in which Indira Lakshmanan, Washington columnist for the Boston Globe and contributor to Politico, moderates a conversation with Isabel Sawhill, senior fellow in Economic Studies, Richard Reeves, senior fellow in Economic Studies and co-director of the Center on Children and Families, and Dayna Bowen Matthew, visiting fellow in the Center for Health Policy, on ways that the next president should address issues of race and economic mobility. Special thanks to the event moderator, Indira Lakshmanan, and the events team, Eric Bull, Adrianna Pita, and Camilo Ramirez. Additional thanks to audio producer Gaston Reboredo and producer Vanessa Sauter, and also thanks for additional support from Eric Abalahin, Jessica Pavone, Nawal Atallah, Basseem Maleki, and Rebecca Viser. Full show notes available here: http://brook.gs/2exzcE5 Subscribe to Brookings podcasts here or on iTunes, and send feedback email to

Guest interviewer Tanvi Madan, fellow and director of the India Project in Foreign Policy, Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, distinguished fellow in Foreign Policy, and Dhruva Jaishankar, fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings India, examine India's foreign policy, particularly toward the U.S. and China, as well as its counter-terrorism approach in the wake of a cross-border attack on an Indian military position in Kashmir. With thanks to audio producer Gaston Reboredo, Vanessa Sauter, Basseem Maleki, Fred Dews, and Richard Fawal. Find the full show notes here: http://brook.gs/2dLmoL1 Questions? Comments? Email us at intersections@brookings.edu.

Alice Rivlin, senior fellow in Economic Studies and the Center for Health Policy, and William Galston, senior fellow in Governance Studies, discuss the importance of bipartisanship in the United States and how current party divisions are detrimental to the economy. With thanks to audio producer Gaston Reboredo, Vanessa Sauter, Basseem Maleki, Fred Dews, and Richard Fawal. Full show notes available here: http://brook.gs/2cCAOyD  Questions? Comments? Email us at intersections@brookings.edu.  

In this episode of "Intersections," Richard Bush, senior fellow in Foreign Policy and the John L. Thornton China Center and director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies (CEAP), and Cheng Li, senior fellow in Foreign Policy and director of the John L. Thornton China Center, discuss the recent elections in Hong Kong, the independence movement, and China’s one country, two systems governance policy. With thanks to audio engineer Mark Hoelscher, Vanessa Sauter, Basseem Maleki, Fred Dews, and Richard Fawal. Questions? Comments? Email us at intersections@brookings.edu.  

Adie Tomer, fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program, and Jeff Gutman, senior fellow in Global Economy and Development, discuss how to transform transportation policy with a focus on accessibility and how cities around the world are grappling with improving infrastructure and increasing access for people of all incomes.  Full show notes: https://www.brookings.edu/podcast-episode/inclusive-cities-transportation-and-accessibility/ Thanks to audio engineer Mark Hoelscher, Vanessa Sauter, Fred Dews, and Richard Fawal. Questions? Comments? Email us at intersections@brookings.edu.

In this episode of “Intersections,” Kemal Kirişci, TÜSİAD senior fellow and director of the Center on the United States and Europe's Turkey Project, and Ted Piccone, senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program, examine Turkey’s history of democracy and military coups, its relationship with the Middle East and the European Union, and the Gülenist movement’s relationship with the Turkish government. They also discuss the future development of the country’s governance under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. For the full show notes, visit: https://www.brookings.edu/podcast-episode/democracy-in-turkey-before-and-after-the-coup/ With thanks to audio engineer Mark Hoelscher, Carisa Nietsche, Sara Abdel-Rahim, Fred Dews and Richard Fawal. Questions? Comments? Email us at intersections@brookings.edu 

In this episode of “Intersections,” Harold Trinkunas, senior fellow and director of the Latin America Initiative, and Dany Bahar, fellow in Global Economy and Development, discuss Venezuela’s political and economic crisis, and how it is the result not just of dropping oil prices, but of years of economic mismanagement.    For our full show notes, go to: http://www.brookings.edu/podcasts/2016/07/venezuela With thanks to audio engineer and producer Zack Kulzer, Mark Hoelscher, Carisa Nietsche, Sara Abdel-Rahim, Jacob Saliba, Fred Dews and Richard Fawal. Questions? Comments? Email us at intersections@brookings.edu 

"At the end of the day, we need to remember that Daesh is more a product of the civil wars than it is a cause of them. And the way that we’re behaving is we’re treating it as the cause.  And the problem is that in places like Syria, in Iraq, potentially in Libya, we are mounting these military campaigns to destroy Daesh and we’re not doing anything about the underlying civil wars.  And the real danger there is—we have a brilliant military and they may very well succeed in destroying Daesh—but if we haven’t dealt with the underlying civil wars, we’ll have Son of Daesh a year later." – Ken Pollack “Part of the problem is how we want the U.S. to be more engaged and more involved and what that requires in practice. We have to be honest about a different kind of American role in the Middle East. It means committing considerable economic and political resources to this region of the world that a lot of Americans are quite frankly sick of… There is this aspect of nation-building that is in part what we have to do in

“…A lot of the conversation around college education is that tuition is increasing very rapidly, debt is increasing very rapidly and what does that mean for everyone? If we take a bigger step back we want to reframe the discussion around higher education as the potential investment available to people in our economy to help them be more productive in the labor market and to help them have better financial lives themselves.  So when we think about higher education, rather than focusing all on the costs like we have been doing with the focus on the narrative about tuition and debt, I think it is important that we kind of refocus and talk about what students are getting from their college degrees. Basically encouraging people to think about this as cost-benefit analysis as they would with any other financial activity in their life. -- Beth Akers “People who have higher levels of education are far more likely to start or own a business, create jobs in that way; they are far more likely to file a patent, and do ot

“When I go to meetings today, I see more women, and I see many more younger women coming into the field.  But what’s really struck me, as I’ve been thinking about this issue of women in foreign policy in the last couple years, is the difference between presence and voice.  There are many more women working in foreign policy today, but you don’t see the same proportion of women prominent in foreign policy speaking in the media, in senior positions, or even when you’re all in the room together sitting at the table and speaking as the lead speaker at a conference.  It’s that distinction between presence and voice and what accounts for that gap.  That’s what I find both fascinating and frustrating.”—Tamara Wittes  “I think it is getting better. I think women are starting to see examples of other women who are  at the table, who are speaking up, who are volunteering, who are being more confident and starting to learn that just because you might not think you are the greatest expert on something, doesn’t mean you d

“If we think about the progress of getting people out of extreme poverty, it is really impressive. But it is actually a much slower trend then what we have seen in the spread of digital technology. The speed with which mobile phone ownership has spread around the world, access to bank accounts, biometric identification cards, people getting online – these trends are happening even faster. We are seeing 100-300 million people each year getting access to a phone or biometric ID for the first time. These trends in getting people digitally connected. . .are progressing at such speed that they’re starting to reach some of the poorest people in the world. Digital technology is changing what it means to be poor because it’s bringing poor people out of the margins.”- Laurence Chandy “The role of governments will continue to be central in improving education. At the end of the day, they’re the only ones who have the duty and the mandate to care about the poorest of the poor. But they will more and more have to partner

“We set out to make this game because we think that the national debt is an important issue that budget experts talk about all the time but it is very hard for the general public to really understand, so we thought to do it in a way that is more entertaining and more fun.” — Louise Sheiner “One of the goals of the game is to give people a big picture in their mind, so when some person runs for president or Congress they can say, ‘Hey this person’s numbers don’t add up.’” — David Wessel In this episode of “Intersections,” Brookings experts Louise Sheiner, senior fellow and policy director for the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, and David Wessel, senior fellow and director of the Hutchins Center, discuss their new interactive game “The Fiscal Ship.” This computer game allows players to pick from a menu of tax and spending options to reduce the debt from projected levels over the next 25 years. Sheiner and Wessel also discuss the long-term changes in policy that could potentially boost the economy

“People think poverty as a measure of income, but as a lived experience for what it means to be poor, it tends to involve a lot of other things as well. We have taken some other dimensions such as low education, lack of health insurance, being in an unemployed household, and being in an area with concentrated poverty, where 1 in 5 of your neighbors in below the poverty line. One of the interesting questions becomes, how do those different dimensions of disadvantage go together? Is it the same people experiencing all of those different kinds of disadvantage, or different people in different places experiencing different things?”—Richard Reeves “Policies need to be better integrated to work. To alleviate poverty, rarely is just increasing income going to be enough if you’re facing things like deep health disparities and concentrations of poverty that carry so many other barriers that make it much harder for people to move out of poverty. This sort of a lens just gives you that multidimensional look beyond incom

“I locate the common roots of the rise of right-wing populism in globalization and technological change. You have a lot of people in Europe and the United States displaced, in the sense that they had decent standards of living and could count on that happening for their children...but that is in danger now” --  E.J. Dionne, Jr.   “In my own country, Germany, the increasing amount of aggression and hate related to refugees, coming particularly from Eastern Germany, suggests that we underestimate the degree to which some people were taken along with reunification and globalization and some have felt stranded, not receiving some of the benefits of the last twenty or thirty years.” – Constanze Stelzenmüller In this episode of “Intersections,” scholars Constanze Stelzenmüller, the Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe and E.J. Dionne, Jr., a senior fellow in Governance Studies discuss how economic grievances and political fragmentation are fueling the rise of right-wing political

“We have to tackle a lot of problems to get Americans the jobs and standard of living that they want to get,” Elaine Kamarck says. In this inaugural episode of our new podcast series, “Intersections,” join scholars Elaine Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management and Michael O’ Hanlon, co-director of Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence as they sit down to discuss the real issues that the presidential candidates are and aren’t talking about during this election cycle. “All of us need the promise of growth and a better economic future, therefore we have to allocate our government resources and our government reforms towards servicing that central objective.” O’Hanlon and Kamarck address what presidential candidates should be focusing on in order to ensure they are responding to voters’ top concerns.  Show Notes Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates The Future of Land Warfare With thanks to audio engineer and pr

Economic recovery. Elections. Terrorism. Global poverty. Trade. Policy issues are complex and multi-faceted. Want more than the 30-second sound bite? Tune in to Intersections, a new podcast from the Brookings Institution, where two experts delve into the varying angles of the complicated issues facing our nation and the world. Subscribe now and be the first to hear new episodes.  Intersections is hosted by Adrianna Pita.