The Brookings Cafeteria

"Cyber issues have been too long been left only to the 'IT' crowd, ... when it's something—whether you are working in politics, in media, in military, in law, in business, or just frankly as a good citizen or as a good parent—you need to know more about. It connects to all of these different issues and yet most of us have been operating from this position of, frankly, ignorance. And we're being taken advantage of." So says Peter Singer, co-author of the new book, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know. In this podcast, Singer, a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings and director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, talks about how individuals, businesses and governments need to be thinking about cyber issues. Our conversation touched on a variety of issues covered in the book, including the utility of parallels to the Cold War; the role of nonstate actors; how Anonymous and the Zetas Mexican drug cartel mixed it up in cyber space; and how important individual cyber hygiene is.

"The intersection of politics and policy is a lonely place," writes Senior Fellow Elaine Kamarck in her new book How Change Happens—Or Doesn't: The Politics of U.S. Public Policy. In this podcast, Kamarck, founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management, touches on the ideas and examples in her book to explain why politics and policy have to come together for us to understand success and failure in U.S. politics. She talks about "surveying the policy battlefield" in trying to understand the complexity of change. For example, why did unpopular President Harry Truman manage to get the Marshall Plan passed "with a hostile Republican Congress," while Barack Obama, who "came into office on the heels of a robust political victory" with majorities in both houses of Congress, failed to enact climate change legislation? The conversation ranged from how FDR's social policies reflected American values, to whether the Affordable Care Act does, to the complexity and length of modern legislation, to whether or not elections matter and if mandates exist outside politician's own minds. Show notes: • Lessons from the Shutdown: Management Matters, Even for Presidents, by Elaine Kamarck• FixGov blog• The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America, by E.E. Schattschneider• Myth of the Presidential Mandate, by Robert Dahl

In this podcast, congressional expert Sarah Binder explains why the Senate filibuster is a historical mistake. She talks about her research on Congress’s relationship with the Federal Reserve and addresses whether Congress is more polarized today than it has been in the past. Binder, a senior fellow in Governance Studies, is also a professor of political science at George Washington University and contributor to the Monkey Cage blog. Show notes: • The Federal Reserve: Balancing Multiple Mandates (testimony by Alice Rivlin)• Boom! What the Senate Will Be Like When the Nuclear Dust Settles• Beyond the Horse Race to Lead the Fed• Droning on: Thoughts on the Rand Paul “Talking Filibuster”• Advice and Dissent: The Struggle to Shape the Federal Judiciary • The History of the Filibuster

Universal primary education by 2015 is one of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. While great progress has been made in expanding educational access, are children learning what they need to learn to succeed? Rebecca Winthrop, senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, talks about why access plus learning is important. In the podcast, Winthrop also describes her collaboration with the Learning Metrics Task Force, and addresses how to measure educational outcomes, the challenge of educating children in conflict-affected areas, and the significance of Malala Yousafzai to the global education movement. Show notes: • Learning Metrics Task Force• Seven Domains of Global Learning• Global Compact on Learning• Toward Universal Learning: Recommendations from the Learning Metrics Task Force • International Rescue Committee

The number of people worldwide living in extreme poverty—defined as living on $1.25 a day or less—was cut in half between 1990 and 2010. Yet more than one billion people still subsist at this level, and about three billion live at under $2.50 a day. Laurence Chandy, a fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at Brookings, discusses the possibility that by 2030 the world might eradicate the most extreme poverty. He explains how we measure the problem, what the private sector and aid agencies can do about it, whether or not current targeting approaches are effective, and talks about the poverty problem in the United States. Chandy, who is a scholar in the Development Assistance and Governance Initiative at Brookings, says that while a lot of progress has been made over the last decade in reducing poverty, continued progress is: going to require new approaches and new efforts to get us closer to that zero mark. That would include bringing to an end some of the persistent conflicts in low-income countries; bringing marginalized communities into the orbit of their economies; better targeting of the extreme poor. These are all things we haven’t done very well in the past and we’re going to have to do to get anywhere close to that goal of zero. Show notes: • The Final Countdown: Prospects for Ending Extreme Poverty by 2030 (Chandy)• Getting to Scale: How to Bring Development Solutions to Millions of Poor People (Chandy and others, eds.)• A World Free of Extreme Poverty – But by Which Path? (Chandy)• Is labor income responsible for poverty reduction? a decomposition approach (World Bank)• High Level Panel on the post-2015 Development Agenda • Millennium Development Goal: Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger by 2015 • Rapid decline in India's poverty numbers • Givedirectly.org• Extreme Poverty in the United States, 1996 to 2011 (Luke Shaefer and Kathryn Edin)