Last updated January 20, 2025
U.S. public policy discourse has long been marred by partisanship. Expertise on various social, economic and educational issues has been shaped by the politics of individual specialists as well as institutional leanings. In a sense, it is only natural that policy experts have their respective biases: liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc. and cannot be separated from their worldviews. However, in the current age matters have worsened, given the intensifying political polarization over the last three decades, driven by the rise of the internet, social media and more recently, artificial intelligence.
These technological advancements together with the inability to solve the increasing number of social, political and economic problems are enabling the simultaneous rise of far-right and far-left forces. In turn, both trends are heavily skewing public conversations on a whole range of policy issues. Orthodoxies on both ends of the political spectrum are stifling the process of developing solutions to a growing number of policy challenges. The timing of this is not surprising as it comes when the U.S. government architecture is due for an overhaul considering that its existing structures and processes were established nearly 80 years ago.
No system can be expected to continue to provide policy solutions beyond a certain time frame – not without periodic revamping. The system that was put in place before, during and after World War II was meant to solve the problems that became evident with the Great Depression. It solved the problems of that era but over time created new ones. The 14th century social scientist Ibn Khaldoun described this dynamic as a natural phenomenon in his work on the rise and decline of political forces. In his celebrated work Muqaddimah (Prolegomena) he made a compelling case for how the social cohesion that leads to an advancement of a people contains within it the seeds of decay.
Because of his great contributions to understanding how polities evolve and the dire need for better policies on the domestic political front in the United States we are launching the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Human Advancement. The Ibn Khaldoun Center will offer a new paradigm that we hope will play a key role in improving the state of public policy conversations. It will be based on an approach that is driven by the pursuit of universal values and analytical excellence. While the focus of the Institute will be domestic policy (with a particular focus on social, economic, and education sectors) it will not do this in isolation of what is happening in the broader global environs and thus will be informed by geopolitical and foreign policy matters.