Policy in Progress — Caltech Magazine

By Katie Neith

There is a long tradition of HSS scholars—motivated by social, economic, and political problems and opportunities—conducting research that has an impact on public policy. Starting in the mid-1960s, most of this important work was done by individuals or in small collaborations. But as of 2023, the new Center for Science, Society, and Public Policy is bringing a more formalized framework and collective focus to such efforts, amplifying the interplay between science and society.

CSSPP builds on former achievements to help develop larger collaborations, facilitate contact between policymakers and HSS, and ensure that policy-relevant work that happens at Caltech has the largest possible impact.

As policy work in HSS becomes more of an emphasis, building on decades of foundational work and drawing new faculty and students into applied research, the potential for positive impact is vast, says Tracy Dennison, the Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Social Science History and Ronald and Maxine Linde Leadership Chair of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

“So many of the more recent advances in science have policy implications, from the rapid advances in AI to strategies for mitigation or adaptation to climate change,” Dennison said. “The CSSPP aims to bring together scientists, social scientists, and policymakers so that they can share their expertise and work together on solutions to some of modern society’s biggest challenges.”

As we approach the end of CSSPP’s first year, we reflect on the history and range of policy work across HSS over the past six decades that set the stage for today’s advances and highlight examples of current research that could soon affect policy.

Investigating Impacts of Resettlement

Thayer “Ted” Scudder, professor of anthropology, emeritus, arrived on the Caltech campus before HSS existed in its current form. In 1964, when he joined the division, the social sciences arm was still a year from being formally added to what was then the Division of Humanities.

An anthropologist, Scudder brought his pioneering work on dams and their long-term effects on communities and global ecosystems to the Institute, helping to solidify a focus on the social sciences. Over his career, he conducted numerous studies, spanning multiple generations, to predict the environmental, economic, and sociocultural effects of relocating populations for river basin development. For many years, it looked as if policies based on his work had helped to preserve the lands and livelihoods of millions of people across Africa and in nations elsewhere.

“The magic sentence back then was, ‘The dams are a wonderful way to carry out integrated river basin development and improve the lives of the people who live in that river basin,’” Scudder explained in a 2018 Caltech News story about his early work in Zambia and Zimbabwe, which was done in collaboration with another trailblazing anthropologist, the late Elizabeth Colson. “Our baseline study began in 1956. We went back in 1962 to see what was happening to these people who had been displaced, and it looked pretty good.”

The uniqueness of his professional experience investigating the potential effects of dams and resettlement projects led to consultancies and advisory positions with the UN Development Programme, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, among other organizations. But his comparative analysis of how communities along dammed rivers responded to the construction of large dams in places like Nigeria, India, China, and Laos eventually made him question the long-term impacts of some of his policy work.

By the early 2010s, Scudder had reversed his stance on dams, and he now believes they do more harm than good. In his 2019 book Large Dams: Long Term Impacts on Riverine Communities and Free Flowing Rivers, he estimated that about half a billion people downstream from large dams were worse off because of the dams, with another 40 to 50 million forcibly relocated.

“That’s a significant number of people who are being disadvantaged by these projects,” said Scudder in the 2018 Caltech News article. “The people displaced by these dams are often ethnic minorities with their own religious and social systems. These were people who were very poor to begin with, but they were self-sufficient. It turned out the governments weren’t really that interested in the welfare of the very poor, rural people displaced by the dams.”

Expanding Voting Rights

Morgan Kousser, professor of history and social science, emeritus, knows a thing or two about the role of governments—both good and bad—in influencing and enacting policy changes. He joined the Caltech faculty in 1969, and a large portion of his work has concerned minority voting rights.

As a graduate student at Yale taking political science courses, Kousser learned regression analysis, which is a type of statistical modeling that can help find the cause-andeffect relationship between variables.

“Once I had chosen to work on disenfranchisement, I realized that method would allow me to look at sequential elections and see the proportion of Black people who voted,” he explained. “If you have one election where 60 or 70 percent of Black people voted, but in the next it’s only 20 or 30 percent, you can see when they stopped voting.” Kousser then took that data and began to view voting outcomes through the lens of history.

“If you knew what else was going on—for example, a change in the laws—then you could logically connect it to find out when and why a population stopped voting,” he said. “You could tell all these things using a combination of quantitative methods and qualitative methods like reading newspapers and looking at legislative sources. Nobody else had ever been able to do that. I was perfectly trained to work on the intent of voting rights laws.”

Kousser first served as an expert witness for a voting rights case in 1979. Since then, he’s been involved in dozens of cases and has testified twice before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives about the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. Kousser explained that “there have been times when my public policy work turns into the basis for a new academic focus. Both of those things are connected in a way that’s circular.”

One of his favorite cases involved working for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund in Garza v. County of Los Angeles in 1990. Garza resulted in the election of Gloria Molina, the first Latina politician in 115 years to be elected to the nation’s largest county governing body, after Kousser helped show that the county had engaged in intentional discrimination in the drawing of district lines.

“Gloria Molina was elected to the Board of County Supervisors, and it made a huge difference,” said Kousser. “She helped settle a case that got a lot of unhoused people off the streets for a time, at least, and that was an immediate impact of a case I helped resolve.”

Kousser retired from teaching in 2020 but is still very active in research and continues to testify, most recently in a Florida redistricting case and a Texas voter suppression case. “One of the things that I wish that Caltech had done more was involve students in policy activities, so I think the formalization of CSSPP will be very good for the Institute’s contribution to public policy and for its education of students,” Kousser said.

Creating a Laboratory for Economic Policy

In the early 1970s, Charles R. Plott, the William D. Hacker Professor of Economics and Political Science, Emeritus, pioneered the field of experimental economics at Caltech. He developed methods to test and better understand economic and political theories by creating scenarios under controlled lab conditions to study how people behave in situations that involve, say, group decision-making and the use of incentives.

From the start of his career through his retirement last year, Plott has been at the center of the use of experimental economics to validate complex mechanisms designed by theorists, including himself, to allocate a wide variety of resources. His groundbreaking work informed the distribution of everything from radio waves to fishing rights to airport landing slots and transportation services for children in need. In each case, Plott provided experimental proofs of concept and then, after deployment, demonstrated that these allocation systems both increased efficiency and improved welfare.

His research has produced some of the most fundamental discoveries in the behavioral foundations of economics and political science, including principles governing the stability of multiple market systems and voting processes. Plott was the first person to conduct experiments in which people from around the globe participated in a single market, and his political science investigations tested predictions of formal theories related to the effect of agendas and voting procedures on committee decision-making using controlled laboratory experimentation.

Plott’s work in testing theories has translated to real-world applications for resource allocation in complex markets, including markets for pollution permits in Southern California, auctions for electric power in California, access to natural gas pipelines, the combinatorial sale of fleets of vehicles, and more.

“Charlie has had major impacts on several fields within economics and politics. The key to his success is that he is both scientist and engineer: he attacks the fundamentals and develops new theories and paradigms while at the same time creating applications that solve real problems,” said Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, the Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics and director of The Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences, in a 2019 Caltech News story celebrating Plott’s five-decade career. “He does not just dream up policies. He subjects them to rigorous experimentation in his laboratory. It’s a hard furrow to plow, but a half-century in, it has been an extremely bountiful one.”

Developing Powerful Incentives

It was the work of Plott, among others, that sparked an interest in Caltech for John O. Ledyard, the Allen and Lenabelle Davis Professor of Economics and Social Sciences, Emeritus, who first came to the Institute as a Fairchild Scholar in the late 1970s.

“That visit gave me an opportunity to see the glimmers of the beginnings of Charlie’s experimental work,” Ledyard recalled, noting that the processes reminded him, metaphorically, of engineering tools. “I saw Charlie’s lab, and thought it looked a little bit like a towing tank—which is used to test boat designs—where I could test my theories and also create new, viable market and organizational designs to solve problems.”

Ledyard joined the faculty in 1985, and while his research centered on the theoretical foundations of game theory and mechanism design—that is, how incentives and information influence organizations, markets, and political systems—he began to dabble in applied work, often with Plott.

“Having the tools that Charlie designed meant that I was not stuck arguing for changes in policies just on the basis of economics and political science theories,” Ledyard said. “I could actually demonstrate in a lab with human subjects that what I was saying had merit.”

One of the first projects Ledyard got called to work on was related to allocating space for instruments on JPL’s Cassini mission to Saturn.

“We suggested for the Cassini project that each instrument developer be given a maximum amount of mass, power, et cetera, that they could expect to use on the spacecraft,” Ledyard explained. “If you designed to the parameters, we would let you fly. The proposal followed obvious economic principles applied to the ‘commons dilemma’ that the Cassini project faced. It was sold to skeptics by demonstrations using the lab. The project came in under budget, and every instrument flew successfully.”

He went on to apply similar experiments to help solve allocation problems in many other industries, including combinatorial auctions for logistics management, fishery permits, bond markets, and environmental markets.

In the early 2000s, Ledyard and colleagues founded the Social and Information Sciences Laboratory (SISL) at Caltech to address the growing need for economists and computer scientists to share information and collaborate on solutions for computer-based economic problems in areas as varied as power grids, kidney donor waiting lists, and online privacy. Now called the Center for Social Information Sciences (CSIS) and housed within The Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences, it’s a place where an interdisciplinary group of researchers is studying how markets and other social systems function in an increasingly complex, technology-driven world.

“I’ll be blunt: when I was division chair [from 1992 to 2002], I resisted pressures to create policy centers, instead favoring basic, foundational research,” Ledyard admitted. “But things change. The key is getting a small group of the faculty to collaborate across disciplines, and that’s what Caltech is really good at. That’s my hope for the CSSPP, too. I think it’s a great idea with a lot of possibilities.”

Tackling Corruption

Like Plott and Ledyard, Jean Ensminger, the Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Social Sciences, has done research in market economies, but hers has been from a very different point of view. Ensminger is an economic anthropologist whose research sits at the interface of anthropology, economics, political science, and development. She has conducted four decades of research in one African society, the Orma people of Kenya, and her early work traced the origins of a market economy from the field.

“I was interested in understanding, as things changed, what the relationship was between political systems and institutions and the level of economic performance,” Ensminger said. “I wanted to know what made the Orma economy tick, and why it wasn’t doing better than other parts of Kenya.”

When the World Bank, an international money-lending organization charged with reducing poverty, brought a goatrestocking project to her Kenyan research area in 2004, Ensminger began to hear stories of corruption from the locals. She started to investigate and eventually uncovered a complex web of fraud, theft, and even violence.

“I was really off in the wilderness on this World Bank project, and it would not have been easy to get funded by traditional means because it was so exploratory,” she said. “There really was no precedent for what I was trying to do. Consequently, the resources that I had in my Caltech research account were absolutely central to getting this project off the ground.”

Her work caught the attention of the World Bank and eventually the U.S. government, which asked Ensminger to testify before the House Financial Services Committee Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade in 2017.

She says the experience validated the idea that watchdogs and outside experts are needed to help inform policy. “We need academic specialists, journalists, and others with a great deal of knowledge in specific sectors to be watching over these organizations and government at all times,” Ensminger said.

Since she first encountered corruption in World Bank projects, she’s done work to compare more successful development projects with those that failed.

“In the end, it was easy to pick apart exactly what the policies were that made a big difference and provide that information to the World Bank,” she said. “There are people who run things on the ground who absolutely want to do a better job. I will never know how many I was able to reach, but I’ve been led to believe that it got quite a bit of traction.” Today, Ensminger continues to investigate corruption in World Bank projects by developing new statistical tests to uncover strategic data manipulation in expenditure reports.

“The notion in our division has been that economists and political scientists will often naturally gravitate to policy work later in their careers,” she said. “And I sort of followed that pattern. There’s more openness to policy research than there was when I arrived, and I think that’s good. The fact that CSSPP exists is testament to the fact that things are changing.”

Looking to the Future

Hannah Druckenmiller, assistant professor of economics and a William H. Hurt Scholar, represents change, too, as the first environmental economist to be hired at Caltech.

“I spent years looking for an environmental economist, and they seem to have found somebody who’s going to fit in,” said Ledyard. “This is a good sign for policy.”

Druckenmiller’s research focus is on natural lands and the value that ecosystems like forests and wetlands provide to society: “I try and understand the cost and benefits of natural resource production. And within that, I focus on developing new tools and data that can help to put the benefits on the same footing as cost so that people can make decisions about when they think resource protection is worth it and when it’s not.”

To move the needle, though, Druckenmiller believes that it’s up to academia to both generate a strong evidence base for policy recommendations and relay those research findings to policymakers.

“That engagement piece is what’s really been missing historically at universities,” she said. “You see your job as producing the research and teaching, but teaching the policymaker is something that we need to focus more on, along with being able to communicate research transparently to inform decision-making.”

Recognizing CSSPP’s potential to bridge the gap between the first-rate science being done at Caltech and decision-makers, Druckenmiller noted: “I think the center is all about recognizing and facilitating that bridge, and that’s something I want to be a part of.”

Dean Mobbs, professor of cognitive neuroscience and the Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair and director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, has just started to explore the potential policy implications of his work. Much of his research focuses on fear and anxiety, which he is now beginning to look at in the context of social media.

“Social media creates this cycle of a type of interaction that we don’t normally have in the real world,” said Mobbs, who is leading a new project that uses social psychology and neuroscience to explore the relationship between social media use and mental health. “We’ve developed experiments where we’re looking at positive and negative interactions online and recording brain activity while people are communicating using MRI-compatible keyboards.”

He and his lab members hope to elucidate the role that anxiety plays in the way that people engage with social media. Insights gleaned from the project may help inform health professionals who are designing interventions, as well as influence policy changes that could be adopted by social media companies to reduce harm.

“The gap between understanding how social media negatively affects people and how to build interventions to mitigate risk is actually quite close—it’s something that I can see, all the way from the basic science to the real-world applications,” said Mobbs. “There’s a clear path, and it’s the right time to do it, so I’m really excited.”