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Project RAND |
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This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (April 2008) |
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This article or section includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2007) |
The RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development1) is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. The organization has since expanded to working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations. It is known for rigorous, often-quantitative, and non-partisan2 analysis and policy recommendations.134not in citation given
RAND has approximately 1,600 employees and five principal locations: Santa Monica, California (headquarters); Washington, D.C. (currently located in Arlington, Virginia); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (adjacent to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh); Cambridge, United Kingdom and Brussels, Belgium (RAND Europe 5).
There are also several smaller offices of RAND in the United States, including the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute in Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2003, it opened the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute in Doha.
RAND is also the home to the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, one of the original graduate programs in public policy and the first to offer a Ph.D. The program is unique in that students work alongside 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 Ph.D.-granting program in policy analysis.
RAND publishes The RAND Journal of Economics, a scholarly peer-reviewed journal of economics.
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RAND was set up in 1946 by the United States Army Air Forces as Project RAND, under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in May 1946 they released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship. In May 1948, Project RAND was separated from Douglas and became an independent non-profit organization. Initial capital for the split came from the Ford Foundation.
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."1
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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. Numerous analytical techniques were invented at RAND, including aspects of dynamic programming, game theory, the Delphi method, linear programming, systems analysis, and exploratory modeling. RAND also contributed to the development and use of wargaming.
Current areas of expertise include: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, environment and energy, 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 official website.
Over the last 60 years, more than 30 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the RAND Corporation at some point in their careers.1
The organization's governance structure includes a board of trustees. Current members of the board include: Francis Fukuyama, Timothy Geithner, John W. Handy, Rita Hauser, Carlos Slim Helu, Karen House, Jen-Hsun Huang, Paul Kaminski, John M. Keane, Lydia H. Kennard, Ann Korologos, Philip Lader, Peter Lowy, Charles N. Martin, Jr., Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, Ronald Olson, Paul O'Neill, Michael Powell, Donald Rice, James Rohr, James Rothenberg, Donald Tang, James Thomson, and Robert C. Wright.
Trustees Emeriti include: Harold Brown, Frank C. Carlucci
Former members of the board include: Walter Mondale, Condoleezza Rice, Newton Minow, Brent Scowcroft, Amy Pascal, John Reed, Charles Townes, Caryl Haskins, Walter Wriston, Frank Stanton, Carl Bildt, Donald Rumsfeld, Harold Brown, Robert Curvin, Pedro Greer, Arthur Levitt, Lloyd Morrisett, Lovida Coleman, Ratan Tata, Marta Tienda and Jerry Speyer.
The RAND Corporation has been criticized as militarist. Due to the nature of its work, the RAND corporation also frequently plays a role in conspiracy theories.citation needed
In 1958, Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might strategically surrender to an enemy power. This led to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the US had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to US interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been.7
In April 1970, a Newhouse News Service story reported that Richard Nixon had commissioned RAND to study the feasibility of canceling the 1972 election. This was denied by RAND, which subsequently undertook a review of its recent work to see if there was anything that could have been misunderstood to spark the rumor. They didn't identify any actions as such, and so it is their claim that the review was fruitless.8
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