The girls have come back to the empty nest, there’s a fire in the fireplace, my wife threw me out of the kitchen to cook some surprise, the tree is glittering, and only I have escaped the family doings for a minute to wish the RBC family exactly the Christmas you are hoping for: Christian, secular; ascetic, overflowing with stuff; feeding each other, feeding the homeless down at the shelter; on the beach, on the slopes, or on the couch…whatever rings your silver bells. Be happy.
Author: Michael O'Hare
Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Michael O'Hare was raised in New York City and trained at Harvard as an architect and structural engineer. Diverted from an honest career designing buildings by the offer of a job in which he could think about anything he wanted to and spend his time with very smart and curious young people, he fell among economists and such like, and continues to benefit from their generosity with on-the-job social science training.
He has followed the process and principles of design into "nonphysical environments" such as production processes in organizations, regulation, and information management and published a variety of research in environmental policy, government policy towards the arts, and management, with special interests in energy, facility siting, information and perceptions in public choice and work environments, and policy design. His current research is focused on transportation biofuels and their effects on global land use, food security, and international trade; regulatory policy in the face of scientific uncertainty; and, after a three-decade hiatus, on NIMBY conflicts afflicting high speed rail right-of-way and nuclear waste disposal sites. He is also a regular writer on pedagogy, especially teaching in professional education, and co-edited the "Curriculum and Case Notes" section of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
Between faculty appointments at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he was director of policy analysis at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. He has had visiting appointments at Università Bocconi in Milan and the National University of Singapore and teaches regularly in the Goldman School's executive (mid-career) programs.
At GSPP, O'Hare has taught a studio course in Program and Policy Design, Arts and Cultural Policy, Public Management, the pedagogy course for graduate student instructors, Quantitative Methods, Environmental Policy, and the introduction to public policy for its undergraduate minor, which he supervises. Generally, he considers himself the school's resident expert in any subject in which there is no such thing as real expertise (a recent project concerned the governance and design of California county fairs), but is secure in the distinction of being the only faculty member with a metal lathe in his basement and a 4×5 Ebony view camera. At the moment, he would rather be making something with his hands than writing this blurb.
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Your post rings my silver bells. Thanks.
A wonderful Christmas here, my mother and sister drove down to spend, respectively, the month and the week with us. Everybody loved every gift they got, the dinner turned out well, and my 2 year old, Victor, was diving from the couch into the spent wrappings pile. My cancer(s) appear to be gone, and the chemo necessitated cataract surgery has left me seeing clearly without glasses for the first time in my life. (I tell people that if I'd known the results would be this good, I'd have gotten cataracts years ago!)
Hope you've all had as nice a year, and as nice a holiday.
Brett, that is excellent news. Well done your doctors, and well done your immune system etc.
To Brett and to everybody else here, a happy Christmas or whatever you're having. (Like a Jewish holiday in the Diaspora, where I live Christmas lasts 48 hours, so it's not even as though I'm late.)
Good news, Brett. Your audience waits breathlessly to observe the effect of this new "seeing clearly" in your forthcoming substantive comments 🙂 .
It should, at the very least, improve my spelling, as my peripheral neuropathy is starting to go away, (On schedule.) so I can type better, and my vision has improved to the point where I can *see* the mistakes I do make. I anticipate less stupid mistakes, as the "chemo-brain" is mostly gone, too. I don't, however, anticipate suddenly renouncing my life-long philosophical stances…
Don't worry, Brett - the liberal chemo will go through and remove your prior political beliefs:) Congratulations on the recovery, and thanks for the info on eye surgery (I hope to get a cataract removed this winter).
Michael, I hope that Christmas went as well as it looked like in your post.