Erik authored a six-part series on punishing corporations (rather than people) for committing child abuse and neglect. This series argues that governments should give out the corporate death penalty in these cases, shutting down the organizations, seizing their assets, and compensating victims.
Erik has taught the course, "Nuclear Weapons Technology," in the Georgetown University Security Studies Program since the spring of 2018. A "radical pragmatist" by trade as a scientist, Erik supports fixing the Nuclear Weapons Complex out of recognition that the creation of nuclear weapons shut down the Great Powers wars that would have decimated billions of lives if allowed to occur after World War Two. As it stands, the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex is suffering from decades of deferred maintenance, mission drift, and loss of capacity. The result may be the first nuclear power to disarm through incompetence brought about by the overall, unwarranted attacks on the federal government that have characterized American politics since 1980.
Erik has published several columns related to the challenges posed by climate change including a four-part series that touches on many themes other experts now are exploring in much greater detail. Another series specifically discusses how the misplaced emphasis on recycling plastic is undermining efforts to address climate change.
Reacting to the legacy of the first Trump Administration, Erik wrote a series of columns connected to how the U.S. administrative state might persevere and seek to prevail against the rising tide of authoritarianism.
Erik has a longstanding involvement with professional graduate education in public policy that began when he joined the faculty of the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University in 1991 while completing his University of Texas PhD in Government. Erik eventually served as the program director the flagship professional degree at the Heinz School (1995-1998) before he left to be the executive director of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management in Washington, DC (1999-2010). Subsequently, Erik taught public policy analysis for the Carnegie Mellon DC program, the American University School of Public Affairs, and the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. Erik is the author of policy analysis textbook available in PDF for free download here.
Through his three decades of experience in public policy education, Erik became critical of the drift in the focus of U.S. public policy schools. Four columns on this topic are available through these links:
Erik wrote a series of four columns about strategies for addressing racial inequality and achieving social justice in the U.S. These columns in large part were inspired by his service for 22 months as the Interim Director of Research and Evaluation at the Center for Urban Families on the west side of Baltimore, Maryland.
Some of the columns specifically discuss issues related to poverty. Among these columns are two that single out issues in the U.S. South for special attention. The South is noteworthy for having tremendous political power yet that power has not been used to overcome longstanding, structure deficiencies involving poor economic and health outcomes for the residents in the region. This legacy is an absolute disgrace and those associated with achieving this disgrace should be criticized for their egregious lack of concern.
Many of the columns offer ideas and strategies for strengthening the U.S. public sector. Generally, these columns come from the perspective that the U.S. has a weak state that falls short of its obligations to the majority of the country.
Don Devereux (b. 1934) had a long, self-made career in social entrepreneurship predominately in New Mexico and Arizona. In these conversations with Erik Devereux, recorded in 2022, Don discusses this work and contributes to the body of knowledge in the field.
Part 1: Background. In the first of this series of conversations, Don Devereux discusses how he became involved with social entrepreneurship in his teen years through advocating for driver's education in high schools. The skills he exhibited then translated into how he managed a military installation in Greenland during the Korean War. All of this is background to the forthcoming episodes in this series that will delve into examples of social entpreneurship in New Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s, and Arizona in the 1970s and 1980s.
Part 2: The New Mexico Years. In this second conversation in the series, Don Devereux discusses his efforts at social entrepreneurship in New Mexico from 1963 to 1975. Among these efforts were opening a public library in El Rito, forming and operating agricultural and weaving cooperatives under the auspices of the federal Office of Economic Opportunity as supported by private philanthropy, and creating a heroin addiction clinic in Santa Fe. A 1972 Public Television documentary about the heroin clinic is available on YouTube here.
Part 3: Arizona Farm Labor, 1977-1986. In this third interview in the series, Don Devereux discusses with Erik Devereux his involvement in the Maricopa County Organizing Project and the Arizona Farmworkers Union that addressed terrible working conditions for Mexican Nationals working seasonal agricultural jobs in Central Arizona. The conversation also touches on founding a community health clinic that now is among the largest HMOs in Arizona. For more information about the investigative journalism that brought Don Devereux to the attention of labor organizers in Arizona, you can visit his websiteand watch the documentary on Amazon Prime Video, "Who Killed Don Bolles?"
Part 4: Lessons and Reflections. In this fourth and final interview in the series, Don Devereux looks back over 50 years of social activism, community organizing, and social entrepreneurship to discuss the lessons learned about achieving social change at the community level.
In this webinar recorded on the 110th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, Erik Devereux offers a new theory of how the ship broke up and fell to the seafloor that is based solely on the evidence in the wreckage. This theory stands in sharp contrast to existing explanations that attempt to reconcile the incontrovertible evidence (the wreckage) with highly unreliable survivor testimony.
In this webinar, live streamed on December 7, 2022 by the Ausherman Family Foundation, Erik Devereux presents the latest report based on shared grantmaking data in Frederick County, Maryland. This is the second annual report that seeks to identify gaps in funding through the careful coding and sharing of this data. Click here to read the full report (PDF format).
In this webinar, live streamed on August 10, 2022 through the auspices of The Community Foundation of Frederick County, Erik Devereux presents the 2022 update to the Human Needs Assessment originally completed by Devereux Consulting and Social Science Consultants in 2018. More information is found here.
In this webinar, live streamed on March 22, 2022 from the campus of Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, Erik Devereux discusses the content of this data visualization tool created by Devereux Consulting, Inc. for the purpose of informing conversations in Frederick County about human needs.
Erik Devereux has produced a YouTube video with a presentation about why poverty in the form of a persistent underclass can lead to a society's eventual decline. This is part of a forthcoming series of video presentations related to efforts to reduce poverty in advanced industrialized or post-industrial countries such as the U.S.
Here is a recent example of efforts to re-start a "war on poverty" in the U.S. that recognizes how intractable the problem has been but does not go so far as to recognize the societal/structural reasons for the persistence of the underclass: AEI/Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity - December 13, 2015 (PDF).
