Piotr Lewandowski

Levitt on how then-President @BillClinton, Janet Reno and @RahmEmanuel in the 1990s read one of his papers he wrote while a graduate student which found more police causes less crime (the late Alan Krueger acting as an intermediary): "I wrote a paper on the effective police on crime, and I found, unlike other people before me, that looked like more police reduced crime. Perhaps not surprising, but it was very surprising to the criminologists. And Alan Krueger, I think, was somehow involved. And I think, if I remember correctly, and I might be confusing my stories, I think Alan Krueger put together a binder of papers for Bill Clinton every week. And Alan said that Bill was an amazing thinker, and he would really look at these papers. And he said, in particular, because they're trying to get this crime bill passed that would add 100,000 police officers, Bill Clinton had gone over my paper, and he said you could see all the notes in the margin and had lots of questions and then Janet Reno apparently carried my paper around in a briefcase dozens of copies and gave it to anyone she could because she was trying to influence the senators and the representatives to vote on behalf of the Bill Clinton's crime bill and I say I got completely the wrong idea. I had this idea that like you said wow the power of research and anyone can do it and you do good research and people recognize and it effects policy, I mean, I was so confused. It took me years and years to understand that, number one, usually nobody cares at all about your research. No matter how much you love it, it never gets any attention. Number two, the quality of my research had nothing to do with it being passed around. It was being passed around Washington because it was the only paper that supported the position that they had already chosen. Right, the policy outcome they want chosen first and then they went for papers. And I'm sure they were disappointed that the only article they could find that it all supported them was by some grad student, but they took what they could. And what I read, the real lesson I learned over time is that I don't actually think that my research or even my writing, more popular writing, has ever really fundamentally changed the way any politician thought about anything and that it's just, I've come to a different conclusion which is that it is incredibly hard to influence any policy or anyone's beliefs by doing research. Now then, Rahm Emanuel called me up after this it all transpired, trying to get me to come and work for him. But unfortunately for Rahm, I by that time had a little bit of common sense and so I asked around, "Hey, what's it like to work for Rahm Emanuel?" And he said, well if you love being screamed at and working 24 hours a day, it's a really good job, and I didn't like to be screamed at and I didn't really want to work 24 hours a day. So, I politely declined Rahm Emanuel's offer.”