Former Obama Science Advisor, John Holdren, Named 2018 Moynihan Prize Recipient

The Academy is pleased to announce that former Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), John P. Holdren, has been named the recipient of the 2018 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize.  He will deliver the annual Moynihan Lecture on May 17, 2018, at 4:00pm, at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C.

AAPSS President Kenneth Prewitt said of Holdren, “His commitment to  advocating for the social sciences from the very top of the federal policymaking apparatus has been most welcome, and his clear-eyed actions to bring social science fully into national science policymaking have earned him this recognition.  He is a uniquely suited Moynihan Prize winner.”
 
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AAPSS Fellow, Board Member James Jackson Receives Inaugural Distinguished Scholar Award

Academy Fellow and Board Member James Jackson has been awarded the University of Michigan’s Distinguished Diversity Scholar Career Award earlier this month.  The award recognizes a senior faculty member at the university that, “has made important contributions to understanding diversity, equity, and inclusion through research, scholarship, and creative endeavors, who has an outstanding record as an educator in teaching and mentoring, and whose work has focused on issues of importance to underrepresented communities.”  
 
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Krueger: Opiates Responsible for 20 Percent Drop in American Men in Labor Force 

Academy Fellow and 2017 Moynihan Prize recipient Alan Krueger has published a study showing the impact of the opioid epidemic on the U.S. economy.  Using data from the last 15 years of labor reports and prescription rates, Krueger concluded that opioid addiction accounts for a fifth of the reduction of men in the U.S. work force. Krueger found that this was especially true in areas with a shrinking workforce, such as Michigan and Maine, where the highest rates of painkiller prescriptions have been reported. 
 
“The opioid crisis and depressed labor-force participation are now intertwined in many parts of the U.S.,” Krueger said.  “Addressing the decades-long slide in labor force participation by prime-age men should be a national priority.”

AAPSS Fellow and Moynihan Winner, William Julius Wilson, Gives 2017 SAGE-CASBS Lecture

AAPSS to Host Webinar on Understanding America’s Rural/Urban Interface

On November 29, 2017, at 12pm EST, the AAPSS will join Social Science Space to host a webinar on America’s new rural/urban interface.  This free webinar will draw on the July 2017 volume of The ANNALS, which explores the various ways in which big cities and rural communities are tightly integrated while also remaining culturally divided, as was reinforced by the large geographical disparities in support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. 
 
You can find out more about and sign up for the webinar here.  

Coming up in The ANNALS

Released in 1966, the Coleman Report was a controversial study that assessed inequality in American schools and its consequences for student achievement. The report triggered debate and has continued to significantly influenced U.S. policy and educational research.
 
In this volume of The ANNALS, fifty years after the Coleman Report, special editors, Margot I. Jackson and Susan L. Moffitt (both of Brown University) bring together experts from across disciplines to explore some of the same issues that the Coleman Report discussed, while also moving forward, looking beyond the issues that Coleman and his colleagues took up. Articles examine families, schools, communities, immigration, and cross-national variation and how they relate to education and educational achievement, and they offer insights for today’s researchers and policy-makers.
 

President’s Corner
October 2017

This Dispatch announces presidential science advisor John Holdren as the 2018 Moynihan Prize Winner, who will be introduced at his lecture on the afternoon of May 17 by Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academies of Science. 
 
Wait a minute, though, isn’t the Moynihan Prize for a social scientist?  Why bring a natural scientist to the party?  The answer lies in the fact that our aim for this annual award is to advance the social sciences, not just celebrate them. In recognizing Holdren’s immense contributions, we emphasize that the boundaries between and among the sciences are blurring, and that the sciences intersect and intermingle, benefiting an enormous spread of research and policy—from arms control to babies in arms, from renewable energy to renewing civic life. 
 
Examples multiply, going far beyond that early, strong signal, “the human dimensions of climate change".  Climate change, rivaled only by public health, got policy, political, and public traction as its human dimensions were deeply investigated in tandem with its physical properties.  People, after all, cause it, suffer from it, and work to tame it.  A dedicated science partnership emerged to address it (Holdren being an early and influential leader), but it was not always so that such partnerships in the sciences could emerge at all.  After all, when the place of the social sciences at NSF was politically challenged in the 1980s, more than a few natural scientist colleagues were ready to throw us “soft scientists” under the bus: we were not “real science,” they believed, but excess baggage that might just as well be jettisoned by the nation’s primary funder of fundamental science. 
 
That mistaken notion is now buried, and today the social sciences are embraced. The embrace is of course a huge plus, but there is still a danger: that the natural scientists and engineers primarily, understandably, want us to illuminate and focus on matters their sciences are ill-equipped to explain. Why humans comply, or don’t (take pills, wear seatbelts) is not a question for biochemist or engineers.   Taken to excess, social scientists might become research assistants, or adjuncts to others’ science.  We watch with dismay the congressional gate-keepers argue that social and behavioral science is unnecessary—that the social sciences will be funded if, and only if, other NSF divisions vouch for their importance case by case.  The best of the natural scientists recognize the flaw in this, recognize that our basic science is sometimes their starting point—that our network theory, for instance, came before their search algorithms—but we clearly still have work to do.
 
We’ll resist the research assistant role, and with the natural scientists as our allies—not least John Holdren and Marcia McNutt—we will prevail.

Stay tuned for our December Dispatch, where we will announce the 2018 Fellows of the Academy.