RAND encyclopedia topics

Places

Rand, New South Wales, a small town in Australia
Rand, Lincolnshire, a small village in Lincolnshire, England
Rand, Colorado, a small unincorporated community in Jackson County, Colorado, U.S.
Rand Mining District, an area in Kern County, California, containing, inter alia, the town of Randsburg, California
The Witwatersrand, a ridge that runs through Gauteng, South Africa, which includes the East Rand and West Rand

People

Ayn Rand, American writer and philosopher
Austin L. Rand, Canadian zoologist
Ivan Rand, Supreme Court of Canada justice who introduced the Rand formula
James Rand, Jr., American industrialist and president of Remington Rand
Mary Rand, British athlete and Olympic champion
Paul Rand, American graphic designer
Rose Rand, Logician and Philosopher, member of the Vienna Circle
Sally Rand, actor and dancer
Shuli Rand and Michal Batsheva Rand, husband and wife, Israeli actors
William H. Rand, founder of Rand McNally

Fictional characters

Rand al'Thor, the main character in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time fantasy fiction series
Rand (Robotech), a character from the fictional Third Robotech War
Atton Rand, a character from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II
Janice Rand, a character in the Star Trek universe
Iron Fist (comics) (Daniel Rand), a Marvel Comics character

Companies and organizations

The RAND Corporation, an American think tank
The Ayn Rand Institute, an American think tank
Remington Rand, an American computer firm and general manufacturer
Sperry Rand, an American equipment and electronics company
Ingersoll-Rand, a diversified American industrial firm
Rand McNally, an American map publisher and printer

Abbreviation or acronym

In computer science, any of a number of pseudorandom number generator functions
Reasonable and Non Discriminatory Licensing, a type of licensing used during a standardisation process

Other uses

South African rand, the national currency of South Africa (abbreviation: R, ISO-4217-Code: ZAR), the Rand is also widely accepted as currency in Namibia
Rand index, a technique for measuring the similarity between two data clusters
Rand formula, a formula in Canadian labor law

Project RAND

RAND was set up in 1946 by the United States Army Air Forces as Project RAND, under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in May 1946 they released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship. In May 1948, Project RAND was separated from Douglas and became an independent non-profit organization. Initial capital for the split came from the Ford Foundation.

Mission statement

RAND was incorporated as a non-profit organization to "further promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America." Its self-declared mission is "to help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis", using its "core values of quality and objectivity."

Achievements and expertise

The achievements of RAND stem from its development of systems analysis. Important contributions are claimed in space systems and the United States' space program, in computing and in artificial intelligence. RAND researchers developed many of the principles that were used to build the Internet. Numerous analytical techniques were invented at RAND, including aspects of dynamic programming, game theory, the Delphi method, linear programming, systems analysis, and exploratory modeling. RAND also pioneered the development and use of wargaming.

Current areas of expertise include: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, environment and energy, health, international policy, labor markets, national security, infrastructure, energy, environment, corporate governance, economic development, intelligence policy, long-range planning, crisis management and disaster preparation, population and regional studies, science and technology, social welfare, terrorism, arts policy, and transportation.

RAND designed and conducted one of the largest and most important studies of health insurance between 1974 and 1982. The RAND Health Insurance Experiment, funded by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, established an insurance corporation to compare demand for health services with their cost to the patient.

According to the 2005 annual report, "about one-half of RAND's research involves national security issues."

Many of the events in which RAND plays a part are based on assumptions which are hard to verify because of the lack of detail on RAND's highly classified work for defense and intelligence agencies. Some RAND participants who have gone on to large roles are often believed to have had a role in shaping RAND research.

The RAND Corporation posts all of its unclassified reports, in full, on its official website.

Notable RAND participants

Over the last 60 years, more than 30 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the RAND Corporation at some point in their careers.

David L. Aaron — Deputy National Security Advisor under Carter and drafter of the NATO treaty
Henry H. Arnold — General, United States Air Force — RAND founder
Kenneth Arrow — economist, Nobel Laureate, developed the impossibility theorem in social choice theory
Bruno Augenstein — V.P., physicist, mathematician and space scientist
J. Paul Austin — Chairman of the Board, 1972-1981
Paul Baran — one of the developers of packet switching which was used in Arpanet and later networks like the Internet
Barry Boehm — software economics expert, inventor of COCOMO
Harold L. Brode — physicist, leading nuclear weapons effects expert
Bernard Brodie — Military strategist and nuclear architect
Arthur C. Brooks — PhD Graduated from Pardee RAND Graduate School
David S. C. Chu — Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, 2001–present
Samuel Cohen — inventor of the neutron bomb in 1958
Franklin R. Collbohm — Aviation Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder and former director and trustee
George Dantzig — mathematician, creator of the simplex algorithm for linear programming
Linda Darling-Hammond — co-director, School Redesign Network
James F. Digby — American Military Strategist, author of first treatise on precision guided munitions 1949 - 2007
Stephen H Dole — Author of the pivotal work "Habitable Planets for man."
Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. — President, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
Daniel Ellsberg — leaker of the Pentagon Papers
Francis Fukuyama — academic and author of The End of History and the Last Man
H. Rowen Gaither, Jr. — Chairman of the Board, 1949-1959; 1960-1961
James J. Gillogly — cryptographer and computer scientist
Cecil Hastings — programmer, wrote software engineering classic, Approximations for Digital Computers (Princeton 1955)
William E. Hoehn — Senior Policy Advisor to Senator Sam Nunn, Visiting Professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the Coca-Cola Foundation Eminent Practitioner in Residence at Georgia Institute of Technology
Brian Michael Jenkins — terrorism expert, Senior Advisor to the President of the RAND Corporation, and author of Unconquerable Nation
Herman Kahn — theorist on nuclear war and one of the founders of scenario planning
Zalmay Khalilzad — U.S. Ambassador to United Nations
Henry Kissinger— US Secretary of State (1973-1977); National Security Advisor (1969-1975); Nobel Peace Prize Winner (1973)
Ann McLaughlin Korologos — Chairman of the Board, April 2004- present
Lewis "Scooter" Libby — Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff
Ray Mabus — Former ambassador, governor
Harry Markowitz — economist, developed the Portfolio Selection model that is still widely used in modern finance
Andrew W. Marshall — military strategist, director of the US DoD Office of Net Assessment
Margaret Mead — U.S. anthropologist
Douglas Merrill — Former Google CIO & President of EMI's digital music division
Newton N. Minow — Chairman of the Board, 1970-1972
Lloyd N. Morrisett — Chairman of the Board, 1986-1995
John Forbes Nash, Jr. — Nobel prize-winning mathematician
John von Neumann — mathematician, pioneer of the modern digital computer
Allen Newell — artificial intelligence
Paul O'Neill — Chairman of the Board, 1997-2000
Ron Olson — Chairman of the Board, 2001-2004
Edmund Phelps — winner of 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics
W.V. Quine — philosopher
Arthur E. Raymond — Chief Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
Condoleezza Rice — former trustee 1991–1997 and current Secretary of State for the United States (as of May 2006), former intern
Michael D. Rich — RAND Executive Vice President, 1993–present
Leo Rosten — academic and humorist
Donald Rumsfeld — Chairman of Board from 1981–1986; 1995-1996 and Secretary of Defense for the United States from 1975 to 1977 and 2001 to 2006.
Robert F. Salter — advocate of the vactrain maglev train concept
Paul Samuelson — economist, Nobel Laureate
Thomas C. Schelling — economist, winner of 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics
James Schlesinger — former Secretary of Defense and former Secretary of Energy
Lloyd Shapley — mathematician and game theorist
David A. Shephard — Chairman of the Board, 1967-1970
Herbert Simon — Nobel prize-winning economist
Frank Stanton — Chairman of the Board, 1961-1967
James Steinberg — Deputy National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton
Peter Szanton — the policy analyst and former President of New York Rand
Katsuaki L. Terasawa — economist
James Thomson — RAND CEO, 1989–present
William Webster — Chairman of the Board, 1959-1960
Albert Wohlstetter — Mathematician and Cold-War Strategist
Roberta Wohlstetter — Policy analyst and military historian
Ratan Tata — Chairman of Tata Sons

Governance

The organization's governance structure includes a board of trustees. Current members of the board include: Francis Fukuyama, Timothy Geithner, John W. Handy, Rita Hauser, Karen House, Jen-Hsun Huang, Paul Kaminski, John M. Keane, Lydia H. Kennard, Ann Korologos, Philip Lader, Peter Lowy, Charles N. Martin, Jr., Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, Ronald Olson, Paul O'Neill, Michael Powell, Donald Rice, James Rohr, James Rothenberg, Donald Tang, James Thomson, and Robert C. Wright.

Former members of the board include: Walter Mondale, Condoleezza Rice, Newton Minow, Brent Scowcroft, Amy Pascal, John Reed, Charles Townes, Caryl Haskins, Walter Wriston, Frank Stanton, Carl Bildt, Donald Rumsfeld, Harold Brown, Robert Curvin, Pedro Greer, Arthur Levitt, Lloyd Morrisett, Frank Carlucci, Lovida Coleman, Ratan Tata, Marta Tienda and Jerry Speyer.

Criticism

The RAND Corporation has been criticized as militarist. Due to the nature of its work, the RAND corporation also frequently plays a role in conspiracy theories.

In 1958, Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might strategically surrender to an enemy power. This led to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the US had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to US interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been.

In April 1970, a Newhouse News Service story reported that Richard Nixon had commissioned RAND to study the feasibility of canceling the 1972 election. This was denied by RAND, which subsequently undertook a review of its recent work to see if there was anything that could have been misunderstood to spark the rumor. They didn't identify any actions as such, and so it is their claim that the review was fruitless.

Notes

References

Abella, Alex. "Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire" (Harcourt, 2008). ISBN 978-0-15-101081-3.
S.M. Amadae. "Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism" (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Martin Collins. "Cold War Laboratory: RAND, The Air Force and the American State" (Smithsonian Institute, 2002).
Thomas and Agatha Hughes, eds. "Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering After World War II" (The MIT Press. Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology, 2000).
Fred Kaplan. The Wizards of Armageddon" (Stanford University Press, 1991).
Mark Trachtenberg. "History & Strategy" (Princeton University Press, 1991).
Bruce R. Smith. The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation" (Harvard University Press, 1966).
Clifford, Peggy, ed. "RAND and The City: Part One" Santa Monica Mirror, October 27, 1999 – November 2, 1999. Five-part series includes: 1; 2; 3; 4; & 5 Accessed April 15, 2008.