What should be the future of our nuclear weapons policy? Should we seek a world in which nuclear weapons no longer exist or should we keep some weapons active for deterrence? Is "nuclear zero" even attainable? Does deterrence actually work? And how do we deal with non-state actors?

These are some of the questions addressed in last night's debate organized by the Alexander Hamilton Society between Hopkins Professor Daniel Deudney, who took the side of nuclear zero, and the Rand Corporation's Elbridge Colby, who took the side of nuclear deterrence. No matter which side of the debate you come down on, the discussion was likely to raise points and issues you hadn't thought of.

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On first glance, it is easy to dismiss the participants of Occupy Baltimore as a jumbled bunch of hipsters, anarchists, and college kids with too much time on their hands. True, their objectives are at times incoherent and the group has no leadership, but if you ask the protestors themselves, this ideological inconsistency is exactly the point; they are here because they want to be, and they don’t really care what you or I think about it.

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[Editor's Note: IPS Blogger Mary Nguyen '12 gives a firsthand account of the Baltimore City CEO's presentation on education reform and what stood out for her as a eduction policy student.]

On Sept. 21, I attended Baltimore City Schools CEO Dr. Andrés Alonso's presentation about education reform in Baltimore. His main message? Baltimore’s public schools can only go up.

Dr. Alonso began by giving the national context of education reform. He noted how just a promise of millions of dollars in the Race to the Top competition was enough to incentivize over 40 states to change their laws around accountability, charters, and teacher evaluations — even though only 10 states eventually won the money. This had prompted Maryland, for example, to update their data system two years ago to get personal student identifiers to measure value-added learning to gauge teacher effectiveness.

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Over the course of my summer with the National Academy for Social Insurance, I began to wonder if emerging tools in health information technology (IT) could be applied to problems facing long-term-care insurance. Among all of the hotly contested features of the Affordable Care Act, one issue seems insurmountable — how to finance an affordable long-term-care insurance plan. At the crux of the debate is how to increase revenue or lower health delivery costs enough to offset the often large expenses associated with long-term illness.

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Last winter, for the second time in two years, I volunteered with the Leatherback Trust, an organization dedicated to saving leatherback sea turtles. I had just finished my first semester of graduate school, six months of theory, classroom-based learning, and case studies. Albeit brief, time in the field with my human and animal friends in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, was crucial in reminding me of the on-the-ground work needed to achieve environmental conservation.

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With limited mainstream press coverage outside of New England, legislation to authorize and enact the nation’s first single-payer health care system by 2014 is currently moving through the Vermont state legislature.  The system was designed in consultation with Dr. William Hsiao of the Harvard School of Public Health, who also helped to develop single payer systems in Taiwan and China. Vermont’s single payer plan is intended to provide universal coverage for all state citizens. It aims to reduce spending through state centralization of health care administration, as well as economic incentives to align physician service provision with patient outcomes rather than numbers of services provided. Private insurance companies would bid against one another to offer health care services under state guidelines.

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In a political landscape increasingly dominated by wealthy interests, labor unions are one of the few institutions left that advocate for the economic security of middle and working-class Americans. Rising income inequality, stagnating wages, and record unemployment are not immutable facts of nature, or the workings of a “free market,” but rather the direct consequences of official economic policy. Crafting the policy solutions necessary to combat our economic malaise and rebuild the middle class is not difficult; constructing the political movement required for their implementation is exceedingly so. A revitalized labor movement, however, can provide the political foundation upon which to check the interests of corporate power and promote an economy that creates prosperity for all.

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The following is second year MPP student Sean Aten's response to Joseph Berger's blog post on the federal deficit.