Chicago Policy Review

26/10/2021

Reallocating funds to education from police budgets can lead to better future outcomes for students. https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/10/26/reallocating-funds-to-education-a-better-chance-for-youth/

Carly Domicolo is a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board and an alumna of the Writing Persuasive Public Policy Credential Program at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.Calls to defund the police are louder than ever since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis mor...

25/10/2021

Previously determined locally by school districts, Illinois passed a Bill that requires the use of National S*x Education Standards in the design and delivery of s*x education curricula across the state. Rukmini Bhugra writes:

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/10/05/illinois-mandates-comprehensive-s*x-education-in-schools/

An education should prepare students to engage in a meaningful, productive way with the world. While academic achievement takes center-stage in our approach to this education, we often fail to provide adequate support for social development. In the United States, this failure extends to the pursuit....

25/10/2021

Experts say that a third wave of COVID is inevitable in India. The second wave was marked by sudden high death counts and a scramble for oxygen tanks and hospital beds. Angelica Zocchi and Abhishek Yadav argue that the failure of India’s healthcare service delivery goes beyond the current administration, and that India is in dire need of a healthcare revolution starting by tackling the problem of human capital.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/09/28/managing-indias-covid-crisis-through-human-capital-reform/

Abhishek Yadav contributed to this article.After soldiering through the first COVID-19 wave with a national lockdown and a relatively low death count, India lost a devastating battle with the second wave. Total deaths, which peaked in April, have climbed up to nearly 400,000, but are likely grossly....

25/10/2021

Thousands of pregnant Venezuelan women cross borders into neighboring countries, in hopes of healthier births.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/10/18/venezuelas-shameful-secret/

Tamara Pilot is an Assistant Vice President at the University of Chicago, Global Initiatives and Strategy (Uchicago Global). The young woman covered her face with a shaking hand. She was exhausted and scared. The metal birthing chair did not have a cushion or vinyl covering, and she shivered in the....

25/10/2021

When discussing energy transition, what is at stake is much more than a technological dispute.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/10/19/china-us-dispute-on-clean-energy-economic-and-geopolitical-stakes/

Jean Vilbert is an academic in the La Follette School of Public Affairs and a Resident Fellow at the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program (University of Wisconsin).A recent report from the International Energy Agency shows that in 2020, renewable electricity production increased at....

25/10/2021

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Dobbs v. Jackson could have dire impacts on abortion rights around the country.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/10/25/abortion-rights-are-on-the-supreme-court-docket/

During his campaign for President, Donald Trump famously vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. However, at the end of his term, it remained the law of the land. This could soon change. While the Supreme Court upheld abortion rights in a 5-4 decision in Louisiana’s June M...

07/09/2021

"In 2014, [Layín] successfully ran for re-election, this time as an independent candidate. During that campaign he made the statement that made him famous, explaining that “what he stole with one hand, he gave to the poor with the other” and that if he had taken 150 million pesos, around 7 million dollars, as his rivals accused him, “he would have invested that money in public infrastructure.”"

Why do voters vote for politicians they know are corrupt? Our latest article explores why.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/09/07/why-do-people-forgive-corrupt-politicians/

The case of Hilario Ramírez, a Mexican politician who, amid a reelection campaign admitted to having stolen from the treasury, “just a bit,” he argued, is more than a simple piece of Latin American political folklore. “Layín”—as Ramírez is also known—was mayor of San Blas, a costal Me...

07/09/2021

Reopening schools in the fall will be a challenge for all districts, and the lack of uniformity last year has not made it simple. One thing that all schools should be considering: focusing on students’ mental health.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/09/06/addressing-mental-health-in-the-return-to-school/

With the imminent return to campus, several school systems have eliminated the remote learning option entirely for the 2021-2022 school year in order to maximize in-person learning and reduce last year’s learning loss. However, the rise of the delta variant and inconsistency in state governance ha...

24/07/2021

The last 30 years of American climate policy making have been marked by gridlock, inaction, and frustration. What went wrong? https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/07/24/labor-business-and-the-political-barriers-to-climate-action/

For a brief moment in 1988, America seemed ready to confront climate change. Scientist James Hansen’s senate testimony on rising temperatures received widespread media coverage, a Global Climate Protection Act passed with bipartisan support in Congress, and even incoming Republican president Georg...

24/07/2021

Negotiations on fishery subsidies have shown great progress in recent years. What would this mean for the global fish supply? https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/07/24/wto-negotiations-could-soon-end-exploitative-fishing-subsidies/

Open water fishery crisis is one of the greatest “tragedies of the commons. Although open water fish stocks are a public resource, governments have degraded their value by subsidizing fisheries. According to the World Trade Organization, governments spend between $14 and $54 billion on global fish...

24/07/2021

How do we really judge someone’s moral character? Research suggests it depends on our ability to see the world through their eyes, even before we can watch them act.
https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/07/24/why-good-policymakers-should-check-their-moral-judgements/

Consider bans of the headscarf, which stem from a moral objection to the object and the value system it symbolizes. A policymaker who advocates for the ban might believe that it would be for the “good” of the women affected by it in opposing a patriarchal symbol. However, for the women who ultim...

15/07/2021

GDP tells a profound story about who and what creates value, and therefore in whom we should invest or disinvest, but these subjective definitions systematically undervalue non-dominant groups in society. This drives disparate health outcomes, and therefore is in the purview of physicians.
https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/07/07/gdp-has-immense-consequences-for-health-equity-why-doctors-should-care/

Natalia Khosla ‘22 is a MS 4 at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected] one of my medical rotations, my team and I were taking care of a patient stuck in a vicious cycle: a 68-year-old with heart fai...

15/07/2021

200 million women experience gender-based violence in India — likely an underestimate because the government does not publish official statistics of non-partner s*xual violence. Can self-help groups help stop this?https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/07/07/gender-based-violence-can-self-help-groups-be-effective/

Vivek Kumar is a 2021 Graduate student from the Harris School of Public Policy. His policy interests lie around gender based empowerment in South Asia.“Even if I work outside as a laborer and bring home 200 rupees every day, I will still get a beating from my husband in the night”, said Vimla re...

15/07/2021

The IL 1115 Waiver would be a momentous stride toward lowering the number of Black women disproportionately dying from pregnancy-associated causes. Yet, the policy only addresses the issues of access related to the social determinants of health and not the heavily embedded biases rooted in anti-Black, structural racism.
https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/07/10/black-maternal-mortality-rates-in-chicago-why-the-recently-passed-il-1115-waiver-is-not-enough/

15/07/2021

What’s the best way to vaccinate the world? An interview with Michael Kremer.
https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/07/10/a-better-way-to-vaccinate-the-world-interview-with-professor-michael-kremer/

Michael Kremer is a development economist and University Professor in Economics at the College and the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. A 2019 Nobel Laureate in Economics, he joined the University of Chicago in 2020, and has since founded the Development Innovation Lab, a resea...

29/06/2021

China’s Ministry of Commerce's new Rules "should be a heads-up for foreign companies that China is trying to expand more control over their operation in the Chinese market". Learn more in Yihao Li's piece: https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/06/28/what-can-we-know-from-chinas-first-legal-order-of-2021/

19/06/2021

"The United States will continue to exemplify hypocrisy if it makes Juneteenth a national holiday while allowing states to ban the teaching of critical race theory in classrooms. We cannot live up to our founding ideals of “holding these truths to be self-evident,” without first telling the truth about our past and present with racial subjugation." David Johnson writes in Commentary: https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/06/19/juneteenth-transitional-justice-a-national-reckoning/

David Alan Johnson is a second-year MPP student and Pearson Fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy and Research Assistant at the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab at the University of Chicago.As the United States celebrates Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating enslaved African-A...

19/06/2021

The inaugural UC Juneteenth 2021 initiative is holding a commemoration to understand what this celebration represents to our community. Please join the initiative, UChicago Graduate Council, Office of Multicultural Student Affairs - The University of Chicago, U of C Black Grad Coalition & keynote speaker Angela Davis today at 4PM CST. Read more about the initiative here! https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/06/18/inaugural-university-of-chicago-juneteenth-commemoration/

The inaugural UC Juneteenth 2021 initiative comes in the wake of a global pandemic that exposed widespread health inequities in marginalized communities, political tumult, demand for an end to police brutality, and an overall resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement. It is thus fitting that thi...

17/03/2021

Large institutions with fewer minority students tend to have less robust support systems, there is less overall need and thus no financial priority.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/03/17/solving-the-issue-of-rising-college-drop-out-rates/

Over the past few decades, research has suggested that there exists a gap in access to higher education for low-income populations in the United States. The attention this problem has received has pushed many colleges to develop new programs to improve access. Recent data does indeed show an improve...

16/03/2021

With the most recent election taking place amidst a pandemic, it is common to consider how politics can make people sick, but data shows that even the elevated stress of normal political divisions can lead to serious health issues.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/03/15/do-elections-make-you-sick/

The current U.S. political system is deeply polarized, defined by partisan animus and infighting. A contentious election cycle culminated in an armed insurrection of the U.S. Capitol and a violent attack on U.S. democratic institutions. The political stakes of these events seem straightforward, but....

13/03/2021

Despite ICE having a zero-tolerance policy on s*xual abuse, reports of s*xual abuse in ICE detention facilities are often ignored. The data shows that the majority of complaints are against detention officers.
https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/03/12/a-zero-tolerance-policy-that-tolerates-99-of-s*xual-abuses-s*xual-abuse-in-ice-detention-facilities/

The afternoon before she was supposed to be deported to Mexico, “Jane Doe” was moved to a dark cell in an unfamiliar part of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Houston she had been detained at for three months. Two other women were placed in the cell with her...

13/03/2021

Funding missteps lead to new mental health facilities never being fully supported. Now, more than a third of the incarcerated population has a diagnosed mental illness, a figure that has been sharply rising for decades.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/03/12/community-mental-health-care-lessons-from-history/

More than a third of incarcerated individuals in the United States today have a diagnosed mental illness. In the 1960s, this population constituted fewer than 5% of all inmates. How did having a mental health condition become criminalized? A well-meaning policy intervention called the Community Ment...

10/03/2021

Recent elections at the WTO present a new opportunity to rethink old challenges.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/03/10/trading-places-the-future-of-the-wto/

In August 2020, the World Trade Organization (WTO) began the election process of its new Director General. The process started after the resignation of the Brazilian Roberto Azevedo, one year before the expected end of his term, and ended in February 2021 with the election of Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala...

10/03/2021

Campus police, commonly referred to as resource officers, drastically increase arrest rates, which inform lifetime consequences for students, without any clear benefits to school safety.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/03/09/over-criminalized-under-resourced/

The murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Elijah McClain have drawn national attention to policing issues throughout the U.S. One reform in the wake of these murders that is gaining attention is the Counseling Not Criminalization Act. This act proposes schools to replace school resource offic...

07/03/2021

Due to poor underlying municipal systems, most individual recycling efforts still result in unsustainable waste practices.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/03/03/the-coffee-cup-and-plastic-straw/

Introduction: A regular day in the life of an American Jennifer is on her way to work when she makes her daily stop at the local coffee shop in Chicago to pick up her iced coffee for the day, served in a coffee cup with a single-use plastic straw. As an American, Jennifer produces as much waste per....

07/03/2021

The argument for Puerto Rican self-determination is fairly clear. For too long, Puerto Rico has effectively been a colony of the United States without any say in its own future.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2021/03/04/the-case-for-puerto-rican-self-determination/

On February 3, 2020, I stood outside the Drake University building where one of the Iowa Caucuses was taking place. That morning, I had driven up from Humboldt Park, Chicago, squeezed into a rental van with a group of four other members of the Puerto Rican Agenda of Chicago, an advocacy group for Pu...