At APSA today I attended a panel on what political scientists can offer to political journalists.  Mark Schmitt, Marc Ambinder, Matt Yglesias, Mark Blumenthal, and Ezra Klein all offered interesting advice.   Two messages that came through loud and clear: 

1)  Be willing to advertise one's research wares; and

2)  Mr. Gorbachev, tear down these paywalls Make the research accessible to people without a JSTOR account. 

So, in that spirit, let me announce that I have an article in the latest issue of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific entitled "Will Currency Follow The Flag?" It's on the future of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.  The abstract: 

The 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath have triggered uncertainty about the future of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. China and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region have voiced support for a new global monetary regime. There are both economic and geopolitical motivations at the root of these challenges. Going forward, what will the future hold for the international monetary system? Crudely put, will currency follow the flag?

This article addresses this question by considering the economic opportunity and geopolitical willingness of actors in the Pacific Rim to shift away from the current international monetary system – with a special emphasis on China as the most powerful actor in the region. While the dollar has shifted from being a top currency to a negotiated one, neither the opportunity nor the willingness to shift away from the dollar is particularly strong. The current window of opportunity for actors in the region to coordinate a shift in the monetary system is small and constrained. The geopolitical willingness to subordinate monetary politics to security concerns is muted.

The entire article is free for anyone to download and read.  So read the whole thing, political journalists!! 

Your humble blogger will not be blogging with great frequency over the next few days, as he'll be drinking power-schmoozing diligently going to panels attending the American Political Science Association (APSA) meetings in Washington.  I have to present at a few panels this year, so blogging will be on the lighter side (though if I have time, I want to revisit this question about millennials and foreign policy attitudes). 

Here's a topic for discussion.  Yesterday I had a disturbing dream involving some hybrid of a normal APSA meeting and The Highlander.  Today I finally went to see The Expendables with an IR colleague, which led us into a deep discussion of how much of a bad-ass Dolph Lundgren is how most movies that have any IR component are essentially idealist in their orientation.  This led my companion to ask me an interesting question:  "Has there ever been a film with an explicitly realist take on world politics?" 

I went back and consulted my list of top IR films and came up empty.  I then consulted Steve Walt's list and came up empty again.  In theory Independence Day has some very crude balancing behavior, but let's face it, that's pretty weak beer.  Both The Americanization of Emily (on my list) and Wag the Dog (on Steve's list) are very cynical movies, but I don't think the logic of realpolitik plays that big a role in either film.  The best example that comes to mind is an old Star Trek episode -- A Private Little War -- but that's not a movie. 

In the end, I can offer two proper film suggestions.  The lesser film would be No Way Out (1987), but I can't explain why this is a realist movie without spoiling the ending. 

The better example -- or, at a minimum, the better film -- would be The Godfather (1972), which is not exactly about international relations, but is about negotiating an anarchic environment.  For more on this selection, see John Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell's The Godfather Doctrine, which started as an article in The National Interest.  As they argue: 

Unlike Tom [Hagen], whose labors as family lawyer have produced an exaggerated devotion to negotiation, and Sonny [Corleone], whose position as untested heir apparent has produced a zeal for utilizing the family arsenal, Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument. Instead, his overriding goal is to protect the family's interests and save it from impending ruin by any and all means necessary. In today's foreign-policy terminology, Michael is a realist.

Still, this is a thin list.  Additional suggestions are welcomed in the comments. 

I see that, over the weekend, Megan McArdle, Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen all posted about stuff they've gotten wrong as bloggers.  This is an excellent topic to post about.  Bloggers are supposed to prvide real-time analysis on breaking events -- of course we're going to get a lot of stuff wrong.  As Brad correctly notes: 

f you don't mark your beliefs to market occasionally, and throw out worthless intellectual trash, you ossify--you become one of those demented old coots detached from reality ranting unintelligibly at the moon.

Looking back on my eighth (!!) year of blogging, here are the big things I think I got wrong over the past year: 

1)  The Green Movement did not cause Iran's regime to crack up.  Score one for the Leveretts -- Iran's regime has effectively silenced the Green movement, without any visible internal cost.  Indeed, the regime now seems entrenched enough so that the fundamentalists and conservatives can now ignore reformists and start turning on each other.  I confess, I though the Ashura protests marked an inflection point on Iran.  Nope.  The regime has suffered some serious costs from its internal repression, but Khamenei ain't going anywhere anytime soon. 

2)  Iceland was willing to pay the price of financial isolation.  I knew that Icelanders were outraged at the notion that they had to help bail out Icesave depositors in England and the Netherlands.  I also thought, however, that when the question was put to a referendum, Icelanders would pause for a moment and consider the ramifications of financial isolation.  Um... whoops. 

3)  The G-20 was been far less useful than I anticipated.  A year ago at this juncture I was pretty pessimistic about the prospects of G-20 macroeconomic policy coordination.  I was hopeful, however, that the G-20 could function effectively as a mechanism to pressure China into revaluing the yuan. 

And... things are worse on both fronts than I anticipated.  At Toronto, the G-20 encouraged contractionary fiscal policies way too early, helping to push the global economy into double3-dip territory.  On the yuan, China has niminally pledged to let the yuan float, but acual movement has been pretty meager.

It only took me about 15 minutes to come up with this short list.  I hereby invite and encourage all commenters to root through the archives to find other screw-ups. 

My National Interest review of finance books has provoked a few blog responses.  Actually, it's one paragraph in particular of that review that's sparked some discussion: 

[John] Quiggin thinks he’s only writing [in Zombie Economics] about the failure of free-market ideas, but he’s actually describing the intellectual life cycle of most ideas in political economy. All intellectual movements start with trenchant ways of understanding the world. As these ideas gain currency, they are used to explain more and more disparate phenomena, until the explanation starts to lose its predictive power. As time passes, the original ideas become obscured by ideology, caricature and ad hoc efforts to explain away emerging anomalies. Finally, enough contradictions build up to crash the paradigm, although current adherents often continue to advance the ideas in zombielike form. Quiggin demonstrates with great clarity how this happened to the Chicago school of economics. How he can think it won’t happen with whatever neo-Keynesian model emerges is truly puzzling.

Now, this point is not original to me -- this was a combination of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientificd Revolutions, with a dash of Alan Blinder's Hard Heads, Soft Hearts.   But it's prompted something of a blog kerfuffle. 

Tyler Cowen agrees with me.  Quiggin himself* thinks I'm too slanted in my take, though in a follow-up post he allows that, "there are some zombie ideas on the Keynesian side of the fence as well."  

Henry Farrell in particular takes me to task: 

I don’t buy Dan’s arguments here. As with most stage theories (not only Marx, but also Kuhn), the mechanisms of institutional reproduction and change in his account are sorely underspecified. ‘Contradictions accumulate’ isn’t a much more helpful empirical claim than ‘shit happens.’ To really understand what is happening, you need a proper theory of the underlying conditions for ideational retention and reproduction. Why do some ideas decay into self-parody, while others do not? After all – not all ideas decay (or at least: not all ideas decay at the same rate). Some economic ideas have continued for centuries (the limited liability corporation), while others have disappeared completely, while others yet have disappeared and reappeared. We don’t know why – but if we want to make the kinds of claim that Dan is making, we need to know why, or at the least, have some rough idea. Otherwise, what we have is at best a sometimes-observed empirical regularity melded to a smidgen of intuition, which is not enough (in my book at least) to dismiss a counter-claim (that one particular idea may have a longer shelf life than previous versions) out of hand.

I'm not sure that the idea of the limited liability corporation falls into the same category as ideas like Keynesianism or the Chicago school of economics.  The former is an institutional innovation that was designed to solve a well-defined problem limited in scope; the latter set of ideas address a fuzzier but more intellectually ambitious domain of how a national economy functions.  Still, Farrell makes a interesting observation.   

This is a blog and not an academic journal, so I'm not going to be able to satisfy all of Henry's criteria, but here goes: 

First, I do wonder if ideas in political economy function a bit like self-similarity in a Mandlebrot set, in that different sets of ideas have different lifespans but nevertheless follow roughly the same arc.  It is possible that some ideas that appear to persist indefinitely are merely slower-moving in their half-life than the macroeconomic paradigms that Quiggin discussed in Zombie Economics.  Now, that's just intuition -- I have no idea if it's true.  But I think it's an interesting intuition. 

Now, Farrell wants "a proper theory of the underlying conditions for ideational retention and reproduction."  OK, if I were to sketch this out, I'd assume that the demand for ideas comes from living in a causally complex world in which intellectuals and policymakers want cognitive road maps to provide some clarity about what to do and what to say.  I'd further assume that the political and social world in which we live is in a constant state of change, making it difficult to develop "timeless" theories of political economy. 

With those assumptions, I'd postulate the following: 

First, ideas in political economy are more likely to survive birth pangs when:

A)  The theory's predicted effects appear to hold -- not necessarily via causal mechanisms internal to the theory, but the outcome is nevertheless consistent with the theoretial predictions.

B)  The theory yields policy implications favorable to at least one important interest group.  In other words, there's a political incentive for at least one power bloc to support this particular model. 

Second, the longer the predicted effects of the theory appear to hold up, the more entrenched the idea becomes in intellectual and policy discourse.  There are path dependent effects to ideas.  The ones with longer pedigrees will have greater ideational power -- even if the initial conditions that led to the original theory no longer apply. 

Third, the longer that a particular idea appears to explain its particular domain, the greater the incentive for intellectuals to engage in ideational arbitrage and apply the idea to more disparate phenomena.  Indeed, Quiggin's book demonstrates this trend within the Chicago School, in which ideas that seemed to hold up pretty well in microeconomic price theory get applied to a whole range of other range of economic behavior. 

Fourth, the longer a theory stays in circulation and the more cultural cachet it acquires, the greater the incentive for political institutions to appropriate the idea -- and in the process, adjust the content of the idea to fit their own preferences. 

Fifth, the longer a theory stays in circulation, the more likely that propagandists will simplify the content and causal mechanisms of the idea.  This allows for a greater spread of the model beyond intellectuals to more powerful actors:  policymakers with actual line authority, journalists who write about said policymakers, etc. 

Sixth, the longer a theory stays in circulation, the greater the likelihood of underlying conditions in the real world shifting to the point where the original model's empirical claims do not hold up.  This will necessarily require the development of auxiliary hypotheses that might contradict some of the original arguments made in the paradigm. 

The third through sixth postulates increase the likelihood that, over time, an idea's explanatory power will erode to the point when new challengers can potentially overtake it. 

Now, a fully-fleshed theory of ideational change would need to state the conditions under which these dynamics are likely to be more or less powerful.  Some theorie, for example, might develop expectations and behaviors that reinforce the original hypotheses.  These theories would be expected to last longer.  That said, I will leave this part of the model to the commenters. 

*As an aside, I find it fascinating that, of all my book reviews, it's the ones when I provide a largely favorable review with a soupcon of criticism that provokes the author (click here for one past example).  I've also written some not-so-nice book reviews in my day -- but never heard a peep from those authors. 

Time to catch up on recent events in the zombieverse: 

1)  Data point #527 that zombies are moving up to the top of the cultural zeitgeist:  AMC will be airing a televised version of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic book series.  The Comic-Con trailer looks pretty cool. 

2)  In an effort to allay rising fears of a zombie apocalypse, Cracked proffers Seven Scientific Reasons a Zombie Attack Would Quickly Fail.  They're trying to be on the side of the angels with this piece, but I gotta say that I'm pretty unconvinced by most of their arguments.  They are correct to point out the myriad ways in which zombies are vulnerable to the elements, animals, and firearms.  What they don't talk about is that zombies are not likely to be as seriously affected by these countervailing effects as humans with, well, pain receptors.  It doesn't matter if a zombie destroys itself trying to get at live human flesh.  What matters is that by having this single-minded pursuit, they're pretty likely to succeed, guaranteeing that the zombie race can replicate even as individual zombies decay. 

3)  A few people in the blogosphere are pinging me about this Guardian story regarding zombie ants.  From the original story: 

The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists....

The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas.

The fungus, which is alive and well in forests today, latches on to carpenter ants as they cross the forest floor before returning to their nests high in the canopy.

The fungus grows inside the ants and releases chemicals that affect their behaviour. Some ants leave the colony and wander off to find fresh leaves on their own, while others fall from their tree-top havens on to leaves nearer the ground.

The final stage of the parasitic death sentence is the most macabre. In their last hours, infected ants move towards the underside of the leaf they are on and lock their mandibles in a "death grip" around the central vein, immobilising themselves and locking the fungus in position.

I hate to break it to tem, but this is hardly the first zombie insect story -- Greg Laden at ScienceBlogs was all over the zombie insect question earlier this summer.  It turns out that zombie hornets might exist, which sound way scarier to me than zombie ants.   

These creatures are more like the "old school" Haitian zombies, in which some evil master controls them, than the flesh-eating ghouls of post-Romero zombie cinema that have been my primary concern.  Still, Current Intelligence's Adam Weinstein is freaked out: 

A plant had one of nature's most industrial animals do its physical bidding, somehow bringing the neurons and synapses to heel in a coherent, productive way. The liberal arts major in me is mystified and repelled.

The armchair strategist in me thinks: How can our enemies use that?

I'm no chemical or biological weapons expert, so if you are, tell me if I'm crazy, please: Can you imagine a future powder solution, not unlike weaponizable anthrax or botulinum agent, that spreads a fungus capable of commandeering a human brain? Could particular strains be developed to direct hosts into this behavior or that: jumping out of windows, refusing to eat, choking strangers out? Could it even be used to turn reasonable, free-thinking individuals into PBIEDs -- that is, suicide bombers?

Well.... first of all, I refuse on principle to believe that an M. Night Shyamalan movie premise could ever constitute a real threat. 

Second of all, even if I violated that principle, I'm not sure that this is as serious a threat as the flesh-eating zombie.  What makes that strain particularly virulent is its ability to replicate itself.  These kind of zombies, at best, render themselves as total slaves.  What they can't seem to  do is spread the zombie virus beyond themselves to other agents. 

At worst, this kind of bioweapon could, in theory, be used to create a giant army of zombies.  Lacking free will, however, they'd be far less effective than the droids in The Phantom Menace. 

I think that's all the zombie news this week.  More updates as warranted. 

My latest bloggingheads diavlog is with National Security Network's Heather Hurlburt.  We talk about the Park51 controversy and its effect on national security, the prospect for direct talks between Israel and Palestine, Iran's nuclear program, and what the hell is going on at the Cato Institute: 

Watch the whole thing, but my favorite clip comes at the end, in which Heather and I envisage how VH1 would make a Behind the Think Tanks program sound compelling:  "Against all odds, Heather Hurlburt had achieved influence and gravitas at NSN.  Unfortunately, her addiction to cable TV appearances would also cause her tragic downfall....."

I have a review essay of four books about Big Finance in the latest issue of The National Interest entitled "First Bank of the Living Dead."  The books reviewed were:  Sebastian Mallaby's More Money Than God, Robert Reich's Aftershock, Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm's Crisis Economics, and John Quiggin's Zombie Economics.  Despite my obvious affinity for zombies, I tried to avoid any favortism towards Quiggin's awesome brilliant spot-on unorthodox metaphor. 

The opening paragraph: 

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein attempted to justify his professional existence, proclaiming, “We’re very important. We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. . . . We have a social purpose.” This all sounds good enough, except that finance went from being responsible for 2.5 percent of GDP in 1947 to 7.7 percent in 2005. And at the peak of the housing bubble, the financial sector comprised 40 percent of all the earnings in the Standard & Poor’s 500. The incomes of the country’s top-twenty-five hedge-fund managers exceeded the total income of all the CEOs in that index. And by 2007, just about half of all Harvard graduates headed into finance jobs. If capital markets merely serve as conduits from savers to entrepreneurs, then why does such a large slice get siphoned off to compensate people like Lloyd Blankfein? To put it more broadly, what is the role of finance in a good and just society?

And the thesis paragraph: 

Some of these books address some of the big questions some of the time. Most of the authors, however, focus on the retrospective at the expense of the prospective. With the partial exception of Roubini and Mihm’s Crisis Economics, these authors seem more concerned with looking back at the halcyon days of the postwar era than looking forward to the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, none of these books recognizes two important facts of life. First, at present, no economic model perfectly captures the interrelationship between the financial sector and the global economy. Second, no matter what regulatory arrangements are put in place, the next global financial order will last no longer than a generation—because whatever ideas replace the current ones will also prove fallible over time.

I fear that last paragraph reads a bit harsher than the rest of the essay.  I learned something from all four books, and enjoyed engaging with all of them. 

Go read the whole thing. 

I confess that I haven't yet read all of Robin Marantz Henig's 8,000 word New York Times Magazine essay on the extended adolescence of twentysomethings because I have a life I need to clip my toenails I don't care oh, OK, I care a little but I'm too inured to generational politics to read 8,000 words on it of a variety of reasons. Instead, I've been reading (and enjoying) Peter Beinart's The Icarus Syndrome:  A History of American Hubris [Hey, what the hell happened to your late summer reading list?--ed. I've read some of them, but since I've long ago left my twenties, I've determined that I'm allowed to discard any leisure book that does hold my interest after thirty pages.]

Henig's essay and Beinart's book are linked in that they both are talking about generational cohorts and how their experiences affect their thinking going forward. The Icarus Syndrome follows multiple generations of foreiogn policy thinkers who were seared by formative experiences (mostly wars) and how their initial enthusiasms and/or mistakes colored their foreign policy views going forward. 

I bring this up because I wonder whether the current generation of millennial twentysomethings will develop a worldview about international relations that transcends party and clique. If that happened, it would profoundly shape the contours of American foreign policy starting next decade. 

As I think about it, here are the Millennials' foundational foreign policy experiences: 

1)  An early childhood of peace and prosperity -- a.k.a., the Nineties;

2)  The September 11th attacks;

3)  Two Very Long Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq;

4)  One Financial Panic/Great Recession;

5)  The ascent of China under the shadow of U.S. hegemony. 

From these experiences, I would have to conclude that this generation should be anti-interventionist to the point of isolationism. Then again, I'm looking at this through my own irony-drenched Gen-X eyes. 

I'm curious to hear from twentysomethings in the comments -- what are the foreign policy lessons that you can draw from your upbringing? I'm also curious what lessons twentysomethings in other countries can draw from their own formative experiences.