RAND Corporation ("Research ANd Development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations, universities and private individuals. The company has grown to assist other governments, international organizations, private companies and foundations, with a host of defense and non-defense issues, including healthcare. RAND aims for interdisciplinary and quantitative problem solving by translating theoretical concepts from formal economics and the physical sciences into novel applications in other areas, using applied science and operations research.
RAND has approximately 1,700 employees. Its American locations include: Santa Monica, California (headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the San Francisco Bay Area; and Boston, Massachusetts. The RAND Gulf States Policy Institute has an office in New Orleans, Louisiana. RAND Europe is located in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and Brussels, Belgium. RAND Australia is located in Canberra, Australia.
RAND is home to the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, one of eight original graduate programs in public policy and the first to offer a PhD. The program aims to provide practical experience for its students, who work with 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 PhD-granting program in policy analysis. Unlike many other universities, all Pardee RAND Graduate School students receive fellowships to cover their education costs. This allows them to dedicate their time to engage in research projects and provides them on-the-job training. RAND also offers a number of internship and fellowship programs allowing students and outsiders to assist in conducting research for RAND projects. Most of these projects are short-term and are worked on independently with the mentoring of a RAND staff member.
RAND publishes the RAND Journal of Economics, a peer-reviewed journal of economics.
Thirty-two recipients of the Nobel Prize, primarily in the fields of economics and physics, have been associated with RAND at some point in their career.
Video RAND Corporation
Project RAND
General Henry H. Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces, established Project RAND with the objective of looking into long-range planning of future weapons. In March 1946 Douglas Aircraft Company was granted a contract for research on intercontinental warfare, using operations research. In May 1946 the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship was released. In May 1948, Project RAND separated from Douglas and became an independent non-profit organization as Douglas Aircraft feared it would create conflicts of interest jeopardizing future hardware contracts. Initial capital for the spin-off was provided by the Ford Foundation.
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History
RAND was created after individuals in the War Department, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and industry began to discuss the need for a private organization to connect military planning with research and development decisions. On 1 October 1945, Project RAND was set up under special contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company and began operations in December 1945. By late 1947, Project RAND considered operating as a separate organization from Douglas and in February 1948, the Chief of Staff of the newly created United States Air Force wrote a letter to the president of the Douglas Aircraft Company that approved the evolution of Project RAND into a nonprofit corporation, independent of Douglas. On 14 May 1948, RAND was incorporated as a nonprofit corporation under the laws of the State of California and on 1 November 1948, the Project RAND contract was formally transferred from the Douglas Aircraft Company to the RAND Corporation.
Since the 1950s, RAND research has helped inform United States policy decisions on a wide variety of issues, including the space race, the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms confrontation, the creation of the Great Society social welfare programs, the digital revolution, and national health care. Its most visible contribution may be the doctrine of nuclear deterrence by mutually assured destruction (MAD), developed under the guidance of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and based upon their work with game theory. Chief strategist Herman Kahn also posited the idea of a "winnable" nuclear exchange in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War. This led to Kahn being one of the models for the titular character of the film Dr. Strangelove, in which RAND is spoofed as the "BLAND Corporation".
Mission
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".
Achievements
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. RAND also contributed to the development and use of wargaming.
Current areas of expertise include: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, 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 between 1974 and 1982. 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". 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. The RAND Corporation posts all of its unclassified reports in full on its website.
Notable participants
- Henry H. "Hap" Arnold: General, United States Air Force
- Kenneth Arrow: economist, won the Nobel Prize in Economics, developed the impossibility theorem in social choice theory
- Bruno Augenstein: V.P., physicist, mathematician and space scientist
- Robert Aumann: mathematician, game theorist, won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
- J. Paul Austin: Chairman of the Board, 1972-1981
- Paul Baran: one of the developers of packet switching which was used in Arpanet and later networks like the Internet
- Richard Bellman: Mathematician known for his work on dynamic programming
- Barry Boehm: worked in interactive computer graphics with the RAND Corporation in the 1960s and had helped define the Arpanet in the early phases of that program
- Harold L. Brode: physicist, leading nuclear weapons effects expert
- Bernard Brodie: Military strategist and nuclear architect
- Samuel Cohen: inventor of the neutron bomb in 1958
- Franklin R. Collbohm: Aviation engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company, RAND founder and former director and trustee.
- Walter Cunningham: astronaut
- George Dantzig: mathematician, creator of the simplex algorithm for linear programming
- Linda Darling-Hammond: co-director, School Redesign Network
- Stephen H. Dole: Author of the book Habitable Planets for Man and head of Rand's Human Engineering Group
- Donald Wills Douglas, Sr.: President, Douglas Aircraft Company, RAND founder
- Hubert Dreyfus: philosopher and critic of artificial intelligence
- Karen Elliott House: Chairman of the Board, 2009-present, former publisher, The Wall Street Journal; Former Senior Vice President, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
- Daniel Ellsberg: economist and leaker of the Pentagon Papers
- Alain Enthoven: economist, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1965, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis from 1965-1969
- Francis Fukuyama: academic and author of The End of History and the Last Man
- Horace Rowan Gaither: Chairman of the Board, 1949-1959, 1960-1961; known for the Gaither Report.
- David Galula, French officer and scholar
- James J. Gillogly: cryptographer and computer scientist
- Anthony C. Hearn: developed the REDUCE computer algebra system, the oldest such system still in active use; co-founded the CSNET computer network
- Fred Iklé: US nuclear policy researcher
- 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
- Amrom Harry Katz
- Konrad Kellen: research analyst and author, co-wrote open letter to U.S. government in 1969 recommending withdrawal from Vietnam war
- Zalmay Khalilzad: U.S. ambassador to United Nations
- Henry Kissinger: United States Secretary of State (1973-1977); National Security Advisor (1969-1975); Nobel Peace Prize Winner (1973)
- Kevin N. Lewis
- Ann McLaughlin Korologos: Chairman of the Board, April 2004 - 2009; Chairman Emeritus, The Aspen Institute
- Lewis "Scooter" Libby: United States Vice-President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff
- Ray Mabus: Former ambassador, governor
- Harry Markowitz: economist, greatly advanced financial portfolio theory by devising mean variance analysis, Nobel Prize in Economics
- Andrew W. Marshall: military strategist, director of the U.S. DoD Office of Net Assessment
- Margaret Mead: U.S. anthropologist
- Douglas Merrill: former Google CIO & President of EMI's digital music division
- Newton N. Minow: Chairman of the board, 1970-1972
- Lloyd N. Morrisett: Chairman of the board, 1986-1995
- John Forbes Nash, Jr.: mathematician, won the Nobel Prize in Economics
- John von Neumann: mathematician, pioneer of the modern digital computer
- Allen Newell: artificial intelligence
- Paul O'Neill: Chairman of the board, 1997-2000
- Edmund Phelps: winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics
- Arthur E. Raymond: Chief engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company, RAND founder
- Condoleezza Rice: former intern, former trustee (1991-1997), and former Secretary of State for the United States
- Michael D. Rich: RAND President and Chief Executive Officer, 1 November 2011-present
- Leo Rosten: academic and humorist, helped set up the social sciences division of RAND
- Donald Rumsfeld: Chairman of board from 1981 to 1986; 1995-1996 and secretary of defense for the United States from 1975 to 1977 and 2001 to 2006.
- Robert M. Salter: advocate of the vactrain maglev train concept
- Paul Samuelson: economist, Nobel Prize in Economics
- Thomas C. Schelling: economist, won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics
- James Schlesinger: former secretary of defense and former secretary of energy
- Dov Seidman: lawyer, businessman and CEO of LRN
- Norman Shapiro: mathematician, co-author of the Rice-Shapiro theorem, MH Email and RAND-Abel co-designer
- Lloyd Shapley: mathematician and game theorist, won the Nobel Prize in Economics
- Cliff Shaw: inventor of the linked list and co-author of the first artificial intelligence program
- Abram Shulsky: former Director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
- Herbert Simon: Political scientist, psychologist, won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics
- James Steinberg: Deputy National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton
- Ratan Tata: Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons
- James Thomson: RAND president and CEO, 1989 - 31 October 2011
- Willis Ware: JOHNNIAC co-designer, and early computer privacy pioneer
- William H. Webster: Chairman of the Board, 1959-1960
- Oliver Williamson: economist, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics
- Albert Wohlstetter: mathematician and Cold-War strategist
- Roberta Wohlstetter: policy analyst and military historian
Over the last 60 years, more than 30 Nobel Prize winners have been involved or associated with the RAND Corporation at some point in their careers.
See also
- A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (published by RAND)
References
Further reading
Books
- Alex Abella. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (2008, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover; ISBN 0-15-101081-1 / 2009, Mariner Books paperback reprint edition; ISBN 0-15-603344-5).
- S.M. Amadae. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (2003, University Of Chicago Press paperback; ISBN 0-226-01654-4 / hardcover; ISBN 0-226-01653-6).
- Martin J. Collins. Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945-1950 (2002, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press hardcover, part of the Smithsonian History of Aviation and Spaceflight Series; ISBN 1-58834-086-4)
- Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes (editors). Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (2000, The MIT Press hardcover, part of the Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology; ISBN 0-262-08285-3 / 2011, paperback reprint edition; ISBN 0-262-51604-7).
- David Jardini. Thinking Through the Cold War: RAND, National Security and Domestic Policy, 1945-1975 (2013, Smashwords; Amazon Kindle; ISBN 9781301158515).
- Fred Kaplan. The Wizards of Armageddon (1983, Simon & Schuster hardcover, first printing; ISBN 0-671-42444-0 / 1991, Stanford University Press paperback, part of the Stanford Nuclear Age Series; ISBN 0-8047-1884-9).
- Edward S. Quade and Wayne I. Boucher (editors), Systems Analysis and Policy Planning: Applications in Defense (1968, American Elsevier hardcover).
- Bruce L.R. Smith. The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation (1966, Harvard University Press / 1969; ISBN 0-674-74850-6).
- Marc Trachtenberg. History and Strategy (1991, Princeton University Press paperback; ISBN 0-691-02343-3 / hardcover; ISBN 0-691-07881-5).
- Jean Loup Samaan. La Rand Corporation (2013, Cestudec Press)
Articles
- Clifford, Peggy, ed. "RAND and The City: Part One". Santa Monica Mirror, 27 October 1999 - 2 November 1999. Five-part series includes: 1; 2; 3; 4; & 5. Retrieved 15 April 2008.
- Specht, R.D. "Rand: A Personal View of Its History," Operations Research, vol. 8, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1960), pp. 825-839. In JSTOR
External links
- Official website
- RAND Corporation at Curlie (based on DMOZ)
- The Research and Development (RAND) Corporation from the Smithsonian Institution Archives
Source of article : Wikipedia
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