The RAND Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition was established in 2001 through a generous $5 million pledge from RAND alumnus Frederick S. Pardee. The RAND Pardee Center aims to enhance the overall future quality and condition of human life by aggressively disseminating and applying new methods for long-term policy analysis in a wide variety of policy areas where they are needed most.
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 Pardee Center Workshop:
SHAPING TOMORROW TODAY: Near-Term Steps Toward Long-Term Goals. — 2008
RAND’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Policy Analysis and the Future Human Condition hosted a workshop on March 17-18, 2009 to identify the most important long-term decisions in several key international policy areas and to suggest the long-term policy analyses that can most usefully inform these decisions.
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 Workshop Materials (limited access - requires login)
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 Do Policy Makers Think Long-Term? — Mar. 2008
The RAND Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition seeks to improve understanding of how today’s actions can enhance humanity’s long-term future. In so many cases, decision-makers focus only on the near-term. Thus, we are compiling a list of examples where public and private sector organizations explicitly acted on a long-term view.
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Other News
Thinking inside the box: A participatory, computer-assisted approach to scenario discovery — Oct. 2009
Scenarios provide a commonly used and intuitively appealing means to communicate and characterize uncertainty in many decision support applications, but can fall short of their potential especially when used in broad public debates among participants with diverse interests and values. This paper in the journal Technology Forecasting and Social Change describes a new approach to participatory, computer-assisted scenario development that we call scenario discovery, which aims to address these challenges. This paper systematically describes the scenario discovery concept and its implementation, presents statistical tests to evaluate the resulting scenarios, and demonstrates the approach on an example policy problem involving the efficacy of a proposed U.S. renewable energy standard. The paper also describes how scenario discovery appears to address several outstanding challenges faced when applying traditional scenario approaches in contentious public debates.
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Shaping Tomorrow Today: Near-Term Steps Towards Long-Term Goals — Aug. 2009
In March 2009, the RAND Pardee Center hosted a workshop called “Shaping Tomorrow Today: Near-Term Steps Towards Long-Term Goals.” The workshop gave policymakers and analysts an opportunity to explore new methods and tools that can help improve long-term decisionmaking. The proceedings from this important event are now available.
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Pardee Center Helps European Environment Agency Review Evaluative Literature on Scenarios — June 2009
Scenarios are often used to facilitate long-term thinking. But are they effective? The Pardee Center helped the European Environmental Agency review the sparse literature examining the effectiveness of scenarios for long-term planning.
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Change in the List of 50 Books for Thinking About the Future — May 2009
More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, by Ramez Naam, has been added to the added to the list of 50 book for thinking about the future. It replaces Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman’s book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Fantastic Voyage concentrates on how to increase the life span of people living today while More Than Human concentrates more on the possibilities for biological enhancement in the coming decades through an understanding of experiments that have taken place and are taking place today.
50 Books: Health
Thinking Ahead: Let's Favor Long Term Over Short Run — Dec. 1, 2008
When most people make decisions, the distant future isn't a chief concern. Politicians are no different, seldom planning beyond the current election cycle. But when it comes to complex policy problems like climate change, nuclear waste storage and government science funding, such thinking may be shortsighted.
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How Leaders Make Policy Decisions— Sep. 15, 2008
Congress’ debates over the energy bill are only one example of near-term decisions with potentially significantly long-term impacts. In a recent article, the Associated Press’ AnalysisOnline points to the RAND Pardee Center as a leading source of methodologies to help improve policy makers’ long-term decisions.
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Book Review: The Handbook of Technology Foresight— Sep. 11, 2008
Excerp from a Book Review by Robert Lempert for Nature; During the past decade, many national governments have sponsored formal planning processes called technology foresight. Such exercises involve a wide range of stakeholders in anticipating long-term social, economic and technological developments, and then using the resulting vision to inform government policies.
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Comparing Alternative U.S. Counterterrorism Strategies: Can Assumption-Based Planning Help Elevate the Debate? — 2008
The United States faces the challenge of countering the terrorism threat. Frequently, both expert decisionmakers and lay citizens have trouble assessing alternative strategies to address such issues because of the emotions they engender and of the deep uncertainty involved. This briefing reports on two sets of workshops that attempted to use assumption-based planning (ABP) to help contentious groups more systematically debate alternative U.S. counterterrorism strategies.
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New Pardee Center Director - Robert Lempert — Feb. 2008
Robert Lempert, Senior Physical Scientist at RAND, has assumed the Director position for the RAND Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition. Professor Lempert is an expert in science and technology policy, with a special focus in climate change, energy, and the environment. He assumes this position from James Dewar, Senior Mathematician at RAND.
Expert Biography
Change in the List of 50 Books for Thinking About the Future — November 2007
Development expert Paul Collier’s book, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, was added to the list of 50 book for thinking about the future. It replaces Pierre Englebert’s book State Legitimacy and Development in Africa. While Englebert’s book presents an important approach to understanding the problems of development in Africa, Collier’s book is more comprehensive both about what classifies as a failed state and why those states have failed. In addition, Collier presents intervention tools for solving the problems of the failed states.
2007 Nobel Laureate: Robert Lempert — October 2007
Robert Lempert, Senior Physical Scientist at RAND was a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace along with Vice President Al Gore. Professor Lempert is an expert in science and technology policy, with a special focus in climate change, energy, and the environment
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The Nobel Prize and RAND
Popper Presents New Approach to Social Security Projections — September 2007
As part of the The Congressional Decisionmaking Project, Dr. Steven Popper presented a new approach to projecting the future of the Social Security Trust Fund. The project is funded by the John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress and the Smith Richardson Foundation, and is exploring how Congress and the Presidency can strengthen their capacity to address policy questions that have significant long-term impacts.
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