Policymakers Quotes

If climate change issues are not adequately addressed - if we keep running those nice energy subsidies, if the price on carbon is not adequately set, if policymakers don't have it on their radar screens - then financial stability in the medium and long-term is clearly at stake. ~ Christine Lagarde

With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy. ~ Michael Johns

The IPCC summary for policymakers is used to scare politicians and goad the public into action. The UN is all about politics. ~ Marc Morano

Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads of central banks. ~ James Surowiecki

I know why we can't have a frank discussion with our policymakers - if you're in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong. ~ Steven Soderbergh

U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control. ~ Noam Chomsky

Given the slow pace of Washington's bureaucracy, policymakers are often busy solving yesterday's problems. This rearview mirror approach afflicts Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress. ~ Fred Upton

The perspective that law enforcement is presenting seems to be a very narrow one that's focused very, very heavily on investigations of past crimes rather than on preventing future crimes. It's very important for policymakers to take that broader view because they're the ones who are trusted to look at the big picture. ~ Matt Blaze

Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses - a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame - will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion. ~ Zadie Smith

Bruno Bettelheim, a psychologist and educator at the University of Chicago, wrote one of the most perceptive articles about education in the aftermath of Sputnik. He observed that while liberal policymakers urged racial integration they simultaneously favored intellectual segregation. Writing in Commentary in 1958, he said that northern white liberals wanted to obliterate the color line while replacing it with a hierarchical caste system based on intelligence. The movement to the suburbs was one way to ensure that their own children had a leg up on everyone. But gifted programs (and the new Advanced Placement programs in high school) promised middle- and upper-class whites (and some blacks who made it out of poverty) greater access to the highest-quality education. Despite all the Jeffersonian talk about how talented inhered in all classes, the poor were unlikely to benefit from gifted programs or the new curriculum projects. A new caste system was in the making, parodied so brilliantly in Michael Young's 1958 fantasy, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Bettelheim sarcastically asked why elite liberals were so worried. "Have these so-called gifted been winding up in the coal mines, have so few of them managed to enter Harvard, Yale, City College, or the University of Chicago? ~ William J. Reese

The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

The mistake that many policymakers make is to believe that in education the best way to face the future is by improving what they did in the past. There are three major processes in education: the curriculum, which is what the school system expects students to learn; pedagogy, the process by which the system helps students to do it; and assessment, the process of judging how well they are doing. ~ Ken Robinson

A survey of more than three hundred international policymakers found that 90 per cent of them still believed that personal motivation – aka willpower – was a very strong cause of obesity.6 This is absurd.
It makes no sense to presume that there has been a sudden collapse in willpower across all ages and ethnic groups and each sex since the 1960s. What has changed most since the sixties is not our collective willpower but the marketing and availability of energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods. ~ Bee Wilson

During my nearly five years as director-general of WHO, high-level policymakers have increasingly recognized that health is central to sustainable development. ~ Gro Harlem Brundtland

If policymakers are serious about avoiding a society of TV 'haves and have-nots,' they should refrain from policies that favor pay-TV operators over the providers of our nation's only free and local communications system: over-the-air broadcasting. ~ Gordon Smith

Today, no less than five Supreme Court justices are on record, either through their opinions or speeches (or both), that they will consult foreign law and foreign-court rulings for guidance in certain circumstances. Of course, policymakers are free to consult whatever they want, but not justices. They're limited to the Constitution and the law. ~ Mark R. Levin

For policymakers, then, the question should not be whether to pick particular directions when it comes to innovation, since some governments are already doing that, and with good results. Rather, the question should be how to do so in a way that is democratically accountable and that solves the most pressing social and technological challenges. ~ Anonymous

As policymakers, we need to foster an environment that allows U.S.-based innovators and entrepreneurs to compete and to flourish. Excessive regulations and bureaucratic red tape dramatically increase the cost of doing business and create uncertainty for companies. ~ Ralph Hall

What I learned is that policymakers have to force consideration of actions that may not have occurred to them at the time. ~ Susan Rice

I'm fully aware of the intense political pressures bearing down on education. The policies through which these pressures exert themselves must be challenged and changed. Part of my appeal (as it were) is to policymakers themselves to embrace the need for radical change. But revolutions don't wait for legislation. They emerge from what people do at the ground level. Education doesn't happen in the committee rooms of the legislatures or in the rhetoric of politicians. It's what goes on between learners and teachers in actual schools. If you're a teacher, for your students you are the system. If you're a school principal, for your community you are the system. If you're a policymaker, for the schools you control you are the system. ~ Ken Robinson

Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much. ~ Ben Bernanke

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) new Summary for Policymakers is a political document that downplays assessments of uncertainty from the scientific reports. It omits much contrary evidence. In several cases, it even disagrees with the reports on which it is based. ~ Steven F. Hayward

If the intelligence we send forward support the views that the administration has, it is welcome and we are told what a great job it is. And if the intelligence that gos forward don't support the views of the policymakers, it is instantly condemned. ~ Bobby Ray Inman

A lot of the geeks in Silicon Valley will tell you they no longer believe in the ability of policymakers in Washington to accomplish anything. They don't understand why people end up in politics; they would do much more good for the world if they worked at Google or Facebook. ~ Evgeny Morozov

India's IP policy reflects the confusion in the minds of the policymakers . ~ Kalyan C. Kankanala

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers. ~ Ben Bernanke

Although there is much talk about small firms creating jobs, and increasingly a focus of policymakers, this is mainly a myth. ~ Mariana Mazzucato

It's clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health; they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices. ~ Daniel Kahneman

The problem is that many of our policymakers want to base sweeping laws on those feelings. ~ Melissa Harris-Perry

No work-family balance will ever fully take hold if the social conditions that might make it possible - men who are willing to share parenting and housework, communities that value work in the home as highly as work on the job, and policymakers and elected officials who are prepared to demand family-friendly reforms - remain out of reach. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

Over the course of a year - from January 2014 to March 2015 - millions of Americans, hundreds of businesses, and dozens of policymakers weighed in at the Federal Communications Commission in favor of net neutrality. ~ Marvin Ammori

The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of society by and for the micropolitics of insecurity ~ Gilles Deleuze

In the tradition of national income accounting, economic policymakers have typically focused on variables such as income, wealth, and consumption. ~ Ben Bernanke

Economist Peter Orszag witnessed the workings of vetocracy and its nefarious consequences. Writing in 2011, he reflected on what he had just witnessed as one of the top economic policymakers in the United States: "During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country's political polarization was growing worse - harming Washington's ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. . . . Radical as it sounds we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic. I know that such ideas carry risk. And I have arrived at these proposals reluctantly: they come more from frustration than from inspiration. But we need to confront the fact that a polarized, gridlocked government is doing real harm to our country. And we have to find some way out of it. ~ Moises Naim

Bureaucratic categories and organizational boxes do more than simply separate relevant from irrelevant information. They also produce the social optics that policymakers and bureaucrats use to see the world. Before policymakers can act, they first must come to create a definition and understanding of the situation, and that understanding is mediated by how the institution is organized to think. ...How organizations categorize and carve up the world has a profound impact on how policymakers see the world. ~ Michael Barnett

Policymakers think that if they get the abstractions right, that will drive behavior in the desired direction. But the world happens in real time. ~ Sendhil Mullainathan

We are in the midst of a protracted wage slump, ... a troubling trend that is largely going unnoticed by policymakers. ~ Jared Bernstein

I believe that the many administration officials, lawmakers, and regulatory policymakers - and their staffs - who poured a year and a half of prodigious work into the legislation had been guided, knowingly or not, by a simultaneously high-minded and pragmatic sentiment that Woodrow Wilson voiced before he launched the effort that would establish the Federal Reserve System. "We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be," Wilson said in his first inaugural address. Wilson's words continued to make good sense a century later. ~ Ben S. Bernanke

Policy-makers continue to discover that they cannot solve today's problems with yesterday's mindsets ~ Widad Akreyi

What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future. ~ Leonor Varela

Here's the teaching point, if you're teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions, and it doesn't absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions. ~ George Tenet

Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool. ~ Henry Kissinger

Policymakers have to make judgments based on the best intelligence they get. ~ Frank Carlucci

And that said, this [issues of comfort women] is important for reopening a conversation in both Japan and in Korea and on their respective understandings of history. Policymakers are going to be trumpeting this deal, but you know, as of now, we just don't know whether the women themselves who are actually victims will think this agreement is enough. ~ Elise Hu

Intellectual property, more than ever, is a line drawn around information, which asserts that despite having been set loose in the world - and having, inevitably, been created out of an individual's relationship with the world - that information retains some connection with its author that allows that person some control over how it is replicated and used.
In other words, the claim that lies beneath the notion of intellectual property is similar or identical to the one that underpins notions of privacy. It seems to me that the two are inseparable, because they are fundamentally aspects of the same issue, the need we have to be able to do something by convention that is impossible by force: the need to ringfence certain information. I believe that the most important unexamined notion - for policymakers and agitators both - in these debates is that they are one: you can't persuade people on the one hand to abandon intellectual property (a decision which, incidentally, would mean an even more massive upheaval in the way the world runs than we've seen so far since 1990) and hope to keep them interested in privacy. You can't trash privacy and hope to retain a sense of respect for IP. ~ Nick Harkaway

Year after year, we have had to explain from mid-year onwards why the global growth rate has been lower than predicted as little as two quarters back. This pattern of disappointment and downward revision sets up the first, and the basic, challenge on the list of issues policymakers face in moving ahead: restoring growth, if that is possible. ~ Stanley Fischer

President [Bush] believes that [high-energy consumption] is an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. ~ Ari Fleischer

Hence, when some members of the Iranian diaspora, especially women at the moment, use different tropes including the trope of the veil and the issue of gender to construct an image of oppression or to describe the 'silenced' Iranian woman, western intellectuals, policymakers, and publishing houses are all quick to introduce them as presenters of the authentic Iranian experience. ~ Mohammad Marandi

Doctrines don't govern policy. They provide a conceptual framework by which policymakers approach their decisions. But there is no such thing as a doctrine that controls policy in every way. ~ Barton Gellman

Good policy makes good things easy to do, and bad things hard to do. ~ Pearl Zhu

References to everybody just disturb me, and it also disturbs me that the people who make policy are not the same people who live policy. When we talk about everybody, we are leaving a whole lot of bodies out. ~ Julianne Malveaux

The world is better served by syncretic economists and policymakers who can hold multiple ideas in their heads than by 'one-handed' economists who promote one big idea regardless of context. ~ Dani Rodrik

What are the purposes of modern-day schools? The primary purpose is warehousing -- keeping children off the streets, out of the workplace, and out of the home for most of the day to the benefit of parents, some employers, and the general public. Call it the "jail function" as John Holt put it frankly. There is no attempt to cloak this fact. In a blog post bemoaning the number of days her children have off from school, one blogger's headline read: "November Is the Cruelest Month for Moms".

The second purpose is teaching children how to comply with orders, submit to authority, and fit into our consumerist, capitalist economy. This is not usually acknowledged. Schools, educators, and policymakers are not candidly saying that the objective of schools is to produce compliant students, but that's generally what happens.

The third purpose is ranking and sorting students based on their performance in school. It's an efficient way to determine who should be rewarded for her compliance, or in other words, who should go to the top colleges and universities and later hold positions of power and influence and society. As the eminent linguist Noam Chomsky once put it, "The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.

The fourth is a distor ~ Nikhil Goyal