It's "top ten" week here at Foreign Policy, and the powers that be have asked me to chip in with a list of my own. 

The thing is, Steve Walt poached a lot of the books I would have named on my own list of top ten international relations books (if there's real demand for a "top 10" books in international political economy specifically, let me know in the comments and I'll put one up next week).   

So, rather than replicate Steve, let's have some fun -- what are the ten worst books in international relations?

In one sense, this question is difficult to answer, in that truly bad books are never read.  Smply putting down books by bad people -- Mein Kampf, etc. -- is kind of superfluous.  The books matter less than the person.

So, let's be clear on the criteria:  to earn a place on this list, we're talking about: 

• Books by prominent international policymakers that put you to sleep;
• Books that were influential in some way but also spectacularly wrong, leading to malign consequences.

In chronological order:

1. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion.  This book has been widely misinterpreted, so let's be clear about what Angell got right and got wrong.  He argued that the benefits from international trade vastly exceeded the economic benefits of empire, and therefore the economic motive for empire no longer existed.  He was mostly right about that.  He then argued that an enlightened citizenry would glom onto this fact and render war obsolete.  Writing this in 1908, he was historically, spectacularly wrong.

2.  E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After.  Carr's Twenty Years' Crisis is one of the best books about international relations ever written.  This is not that book.  Here, Carr argues that nationalism is a passing fad and that eventually the number of nation-states in the world will be reduced to less than twenty.  Since this book was published, U.N. membership has at least tripled. 

3.  Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb.  The first of many, many, many books in which Ehrlich argued that the world's population was growing at an unsustainable rate, outstripping global resources and leading to inevitable mass starvation.  Ehrlich's book committed a triple sin.  First, he was wrong on the specifics.  Second, by garnering so much attention by being wrong, he contributed to the belief that alarmism was the best way to get people to pay attention to the environment.  Third, by crying wolf so many times, Ehrlich numbed many into not buying actual, real environmental threats. 

4.  Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No:  Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals  Written at the peak of Japan's property bubble, Shintaro argued that Japan was destined to become the next great superpower.  Whoops. 

5.  Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies.  Plenty of management consultants have tried to write the Very Big Book.  And plenty of authors have predicted the demise of the nation-state in their books.  Ohmae encapsulates both of these trends. Still, there's something extra that puts him on this list -- over 90% of the footnotes in this book are to... other works by Kenichi Ohmae.  It's the most blatant use of the footnote as a marketing strategy that I have ever seen.   

6.  Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts.  Kaplan argued that "ancient hatreds" guaranteed perpetual conflict in the Balkans.  According to his aides, this book heavily influenced Bill Clinton's reluctance to intervene in the Balkans for the first two years of his presidency. 

7.  Caspar Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon.  Back when I was a grad student, I needed to check out the memoirs of Reagan cabinet officials to see if there was anything that could e gleaned about a particular case.  George Shultz's memoirs were chock-full of useful bits of information.  This book, on the other hand, was a vast wasteland of barren prose. 

8.  Warren Christopher, In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era. Makes Weinberger's memoirs seem exciting by comparison.  ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

9.  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire.  Ordinarily, this massive exercise in generating non-falsifiable arguments about an actorless empire would have slipped into obscurity a few months after publication.  In this case, however, Emily Eakin claimed in the New York Times that it was the "next big thing" in international relations.  Which meant this book was inflicted on a whole generation of poor, unsuspecting IR grad students. 

10.  Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm:  The Case For Invading Iraq.  In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Pollack's book became the intellectual justification for Democrats to support the invasion.  And we now know that result.

Philip Weiss posts today about an old bloggingheads exchange I had with Henry Farrell as follows: 

The Boston Globe has a little piece following up the bogus controversy started by Jonathan Chait when he wrote that Steve Walt did not hurt his career by writing, The Israel Lobby. Chait is wrong, and either foolishly misleading, or fraudulently so. A statement on this matter from the New Republic, which called Walt an antisemite, has the same authority as, say, Roy Cohn's opinion on whether there was a blacklist in Hollywood. Now Daniel Drezner has taken up the issue, in a further motion of deceiving the public about the power of the Israel lobby.

Some day maybe I'll tell these academics about New York journalism...

Weiss doesn't have any contact information on his blog, so I'll just ask him here.  Please do tell me about New York journalism.  Seriously.  I want to know what evidence Weiss has for his claims beyond mere assertion. 

And, in the process, I'd love for Weiss to describe exactly what I said in my bloggingheads exchange that was, "a further motion of deceiving the public about the power of the Israel lobby."  He seems to think that I was refuting the notion that The Israel Lobby cost Walt a DC job.  I'm pretty sure I said that Walt not getting a DC job is an overdetermined outcome, of which publishing The Israel Lobby is certainly one viable explanation.  Weiss' evidence for this explanation, a quote from Walt, is not particularly persuasive.  There are many other explanations, some of which might be less flattering to my esteemed co-blogger. 

Some day, maybe, I'll tell those New York journalists about the academic-policymaker pipeline...   

As much as I love doing bloggingheads, this is the second time in two months someone has twisted what I said way out in one of those diavlogs of context.  I attribute this to be an occupational hazard of moving to Foreignpolicy.com. 

Damn you, Moises Naim!!  Damn you to hell!!!

It's Oscar season, and the general consensus seems to the that the actual Oscar nominations mostly suck eggs. 

So, playing off this Tyler Cowen post about economists in the movies, I began to wonder if the problem is that movies need to have more political scientists in them.  After all, how many political scientists -- as opposed to politicians -- have been portrayed on film? 

The answer appears to be "not many."  Some of the people on Tyler's list -- Carl Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted, for example -- qualify for political science as well.  Independent of Cowen's list, however, I could only think of three movie characters who were clearly identified as political scientists: 

• Walter Matthau as Professor Groeteschele in Fail Safe (1964) 
• Coutney B. Vance as Luke in The Last Supper (1995)
• Kurt Russell as Dr. David Grant in Executive Decision (1996)

This is pretty thin gruel. 

Of course, that could be because our jobs are boring, or it could be because political scientists are "incredibly uncool, socially inept, and about as socially connected to high society as Gomer Pyle on crystal meth." 

Question to readers:  I'm sure that there are poli sci characters in movies that I am missing.  Who are they? 

Via Glenn Reynolds, I see that professors have something in common with administrative assistants, baristas and personal trainers:  they are all, "careers that have more sex appeal than you probably realize," according to Anthony Balderrama: 

Behold the power of intellect: Someone who wasn't even on your romantic radar suddenly becomes the target of your affection when you find out he or she is intelligent -- or at least could be. Being a professor doesn't make anyone an automatic genius, but chances are these academics have expertise in at least one field, can speak a second or third language and have ambition (seeing as they spent a hefty portion of their time earning a few degrees). Plus, if anyone can make glasses go from nerdy to sexy, they can.

This is all clearly true.  I would add that all professors are also snappy dressers and unusually punctual in their daily lives.  Our hygeine is impeccable as well. 

Seriously, however, if people underestimated the sexiness of "personal trainers," then maybe the misperception is not the fault of the professions, but the fault of people who use CareerBuilder.com. 

This has not been a good week for American intellectuals.  As I blogged before, Rabbi Arnold Wolf passed away earlier this week.  It turns out that Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington has died as well.  I got to know Huntington when I was a post-doctoral fellow at Huntington's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.  He might have been the most socially awkward political scientist I ever met -- not an easy task given my field.  This awkwardness disappeared in his writing, which was fluid, cogent, and usually disconcerting to accepted wisdom.   This is not to say I always agreed with Huntington -- I most certainly did not (here's me not agreeing with him yet again).  But I will miss pushing back at his ideas.  One could always debate Huntington's hypotheses, but only fools would dismiss them out of hand.  Here's a link to Harvard's press release, and here's a link to Robert D. Kaplan's excellent Atlantic profile of Huntington from 2001.  This paragraph of Kaplan's rings true: 

Sweeping and icy statements dominate Huntington's books. These blunt judgments contrast sharply with Huntington's unimposing physical presence and unaffected demeanor. He looks like a character from a John Cheever story, someone you might forget that you had ever met. He blinks. He plays nervously with keys. He is balding, and stares intently at his palms as he talks. The fragile exterior conceals a flinty core. "Sam is very shy," Brzezinski says. "He's not one of those guys who can shoot the breeze at a bar. But get him into a debate and he is confident and tenacious." A former student says, "Sam is a geek with a backbone of steel." Another of his students demurs: "Sam isn't a geek. He's a quintessential Victorian man of honor—very quiet and contained, yet extraordinarily tough when the occasion demands."

I don't know if there's an afterlife, but if there is I hope that Wolf and Huntington are having a rip-roaring debate.  UPDATE:  Here's the Boston Globe's obituary (surprisingly, the New York Times just runs the AP version).  As pointed out in the coments, most of the write-ups of Huntington focus on The Clash of Civilizations, which is unfortunate, since The Soldier and The State is probably his best book.  Of course, even if Soldier had the greatest effect on political science, Clash has probably had the greatest effect on world politics.  ANOTHER UPDATE:  Foreign Affairs has a nice tribute page to Huntington, consisting of his Foreign Affairs articls and reviews of his major books. 

As I blogged earlier this month, one of the unanticipated effects of the global recession will be the increased competitiveness of public universities.  Part of this is due to a narrowing of resources, as shrinking endowments constrain richer private schools.  The Boston Globe's Peter Schworm drops the other shoe in this narrative -- due to budget constraints, public universities are about to get an influx of better students: 

Students are applying to the state's public colleges and universities in record numbers, as the nation's financial crisis forces more families to consider less expensive schools. The new application figures confirm a widely forecast "flight to price" among students. They also follow a sharp increase in fall enrollment in the public system, which consists of 15 community colleges, nine state colleges, and the five University of Massachusetts campuses. The increase will sharpen competition for spots in this fall's freshman classes, bumping some students who in previous years could have counted on being admitted, college counselors say. Applications for early admission to UMass-Amherst, the state's flagship campus, rose 29 percent over last year, and applications for regular admission have climbed 23 percent at UMass-Lowell. Framingham State and Westfield State colleges have seen more than 40 percent increases in applicants from this time a year ago, while the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams has seen a 60 percent jump. Early-action applications at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston have risen 75 percent.... With most four-year public colleges unable to handle a significant increase in enrollment, the heightened competition will probably have a ripple effect across the state, college officials and high school guidance counselors say. The shift toward public colleges takes place as small private colleges in Massachusetts, which educate a sizable portion of the state's low- and moderate-income students, grapple with heavy financial losses from stock market declines, jeopardizing their ability to award financial aid. "You might have a perfect storm where public colleges will be the only place to get your foot in the door, and they don't have enough seats," said Bob Giannino-Racine, executive director of ACCESS, a Boston nonprofit that helps students find ways to afford college. "They've always been a fail-safe, but now they have a real challenge to remain places of access."

I seriously doubt that this phenomenon is limited to the state of Massachusetts. 

Both Matt Yglesias and Ryan Powers are going after Condoleezza Rice for the following comments she made in a CNN interview: 

QUESTION: Do you regret your role in the Iraq war? SECRETARY RICE: I absolutely am so proud that we liberated Iraq. QUESTION: Really? SECRETARY RICE: Absolutely. And I’m especially, as a political scientist, not as Secretary of State, not as National Security Advisor, but as somebody who knows that structurally it matters that a geostrategically important country like Iraq is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that this different Iraq under democratic leadership (emphasis added).

Both Matt and Ryan make the argument that since most political scientists opposed the war in Iraq -- and they did -- Rice is out of bounds here.  The CAP boys have half a point, but let's not go overboard.  First, their half-a-point --I agree with Matt and Ryan that Iraq was not a geostrategic threat.  It is worth remembering, however, that Iraq was causing some major strategic headaches at the time of the invasion.  That said, I also think Matt and Ryan are misreading Rice a little here.  In the follow-up to the excerpted portion above, Rice says, "we are at a place now where because of difficult decisions that the President took we have an Iraq that is well on its way to being a multiethnic, multiconfessional democracy."  So what Rice is talking about is the potential benefits of having a democracy spanning the Tigris and Euphrates.  And on this point, Rice is correct to assert that there were/are political science-y reasons for thinking that a stable, democratic Iraq was a Good Thing for the United States and the rest of the world.  Don't just take my word on this -- let's go to Shadi Hamid: 

Middle Eastern states, almost all of them dictatorships, constantly bicker amongst themselves and enter into relatively childish diplomatic rows over perceived and personal slights. There is no common Arab policy to any regional or international problem, because there seem to be little structural incentives to induce Arab leaders to make an effort to agree on big issues. Part of the problem is when foreign policy is largely determined by either one person, or a very small coterie of elites around the royal court, then foreign policy initiatives have less force of legitimacy and are less sustainable because they can always be reversed fairly easily. One could posit - as I will right now - that if Middle Eastern countries were relative democracies, they would be much more willing to cooperate with each other, and would be more willing to play strong, confident leadership roles in tacking difficult regional issues. Turkey, of course, is a good example of how this might look in practice. 

Now, let me stress that the political science consensus on this point is hardly uniform.  Most realists would dismiss the notion that regime type matters all that much.  And even some democratic peace proponents would point out that while consolidated democracies are just peachy, consolidating democracies are often more trouble than they are worth.  That said, however, based on these comments Condi Rice does not need to turn in her APSA card anytime soon. 

The Economist explains why the global recession is killing the budgets of higher education: 

Harvard will have to take a “hard look at hiring, staffing levels and compensation”, wrote Drew Faust, the university president, on December 2nd in a surprise letter to Harvard deans. The Harvard endowment, which was worth $36.9 billion at the end of June, has since lost at least 22%, says Ms Faust. The university should brace itself for losses of 30% in the fiscal year to next June, she adds, although even that may prove far too optimistic. Its ambitious plans for new buildings on the other side of the Charles river seem likely to be scaled back, or at least slowed down. Harvard is not alone. At Stanford University, the president, provost and other senior executives have taken a 10% pay cut. There is speculation that its endowment, which at $17 billion in June was third only to Harvard’s and Yale’s, has performed horribly since then. Many smaller endowments—only six were bigger than the $8 billion that Harvard says it has lost so far—have suffered too. Williams College has seen its endowment plunge by 27%, from $1.8 billion to $1.3 billion, while Wesleyan University’s has tumbled by 24% to $580m.

The scary thing about the article is that these schools did not follow the "Yale model" of portfolio investment -- a model that will sound familiar to those who know anything about sovereign wealth funds: 

The creator of the Yale model is David Swensen, who was persuaded by James Tobin, a Nobel-prize winning economist, to become the university’s chief investment officer in 1985, when the endowment stood at just over $1 billion, and increased it by June of this year to $22 billion. As Mr Swensen explains in his influential book, “Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment”, which was published in 2000, the “permanent” endowments of universities (and of some charitable foundations) meant that they could be the ultimate long-term investors, able to ride out market downturns and liquidity droughts. By investing heavily in illiquid assets, rather than the publicly traded shares and bonds preferred by shorter-term investors, an institution with an unlimited time horizon would earn a substantial illiquidity premium. By 2006, Yale was aiming to invest a staggering 69% of its endowment in illiquid alternative asset classes such as hedge funds, private equity, property and forests. Others followed. According to “Secrets of the Academy: The Drivers of University Endowment Success”, a new study by Josh Lerner, Antoinette Schoar and Jialan Wang in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Ivy League endowments increased their allocation to illiquid assets from 9.3% to 37.1% between 1993 and 2005. On average, universities raised their allocation from 1.1% to 8.1%. (emphasis added)

This suggest suggests another arena where the state is going to be playing a larger role than it has recently.  Until recently, the standard lament from the "public Ivies" on down had been that the endowment explosion from the elite private schools had opened up an appreciable gap in resourcesbetween public and private schols.  No longer.  The downturn is going to hammer the schools with the biggest endowments.  Those with the smallest -- that would be public schools -- should be better equipped to ride out the downturn. 

While on the subject of naming, Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias want to find another term of art to describe 'soft power," since, well, the word "soft" has negative political and psychosexual connotations.  I think they're fighting a massive uphill battle here, for two reasons.  First, the term 'soft power' is sufficiently vague to seem attractive, even though I bet no two people hold the exact same definition of the term.  Second, you're going to have to pry this concept from Joe Nye's cold, dead, oft-cited hands.  In the spirit of bipartisanship, however, I encourage my readers to help out Yglesias and Drum with possible substitutes.  Suzanne Nossel's "smart power" is pretty good, and I like one of Kevin's commenter's suggestion of "civil power."  In situations like these, however, I like to rely on the neologisms of international relations theory.  So, here are my suggestions: 

1. Neo-power
2. Neoclassical power (admittedly, doesn't really fit given the history of power)
3. Defensive power
4. Social power
5. Powerism
6. Post-powerism
7. Samantha Power (look, she's certainly an attractor) 
8. Power.com! (exclamation point required)
9. PowerAid
10. Butter

 

For The World in 2009, the Economist tackles the question of public intellectuals.  The essay closes by underscoring a point I made in my "Public Intellectials 2.0" essay -- um, but it's going to be a bit awkward for me to cite: 

The top tier of public intellectuals has come to speak mainly through upmarket news media such as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the New York Review of Books and the BBC. But the rise of blogs has greatly enlarged and confused the market. A disparager would say that anybody can be a blogger, and anything can be a blog: is this not proof of low standards? And yet, top bloggers include academics and commentators whose work would qualify them as public intellectuals by any traditional measure—for example, Tyler Cowen, Daniel Drezner, James Fallows, Steven Levitt, Lawrence Lessig and Andrew Sullivan. Indeed, it seems fair to say that if you have the quick wit and the pithy turn of phrase traditionally needed to succeed as a public intellectual, then you are one of nature’s bloggers. If you cannot quite imagine Berlin posting to Twitter, then think how well he would put, say, Hannah Arendt in her place, on bloggingheads.tv.... Whatever their provenance, the public intellectuals of 2009 will want to be fluent in the obvious issues of the moment: environment and energy, market turmoil, China, Russia, Islam. On that basis it looks like another good year for established stars such as Thomas Friedman, Martin Wolf, Bjorn Lomborg and Minxin Pei. But a rising generation of bloggers is terrifyingly young and bright: expect to hear more from Ezra Klein, Megan McArdle, Will Wilkinson and Matthew Yglesias.

Of course, the really funny thing about this is that Klein, McArdle, Wilkinson and Yglesias all dwarf my traffic flows. 

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee asked a bunch of people -- your humble blogger included -- to recommend the book that the next president should read before taking office.  I went old, old school: 

I’d probably advise the president to read the uber-source for international relations, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Too many people only read portions like the Melian Dialogue, which leads to a badly distorted view of world politics (the dialogue represents the high-water mark of Athenian power — it all goes downhill after that). The entire text demonstrates the complex and tragic features of international politics, the folly of populism, the occasional necessity of forceful action, the temptations and dangers of empire, and, most importantly, the ways in which external wars can transform domestic politics in unhealthy ways.

 I was torn between Thucydides and Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, but I figured -- correctly -- that Obama was already familiar with that work. I'll put the same question to you that Scott put to me:  what one book would you recommend to the president-elect? 

The Legatum Institute has released their 2008 Prosperity Index -- turns out Australia wins!  Seriously, check out the index and let me know what you think.  I was part of their "panel of academic experts" who reviewed their efforts. 

David Brooks voices concerns that have also been voiced by your humble blogger in his column today: 

Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said. But, especially in America, there has always been a separate, populist, strain. For those in this school, book knowledge is suspect but practical knowledge is respected. The city is corrupting and the universities are kindergartens for overeducated fools. The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.... I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice. And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

This is certainly one reason why the founders wanted a republic and not a democracy -- in republics, leaders do have the ability to resist the populist temptation a little more.  What's interesting is how this resistance to experts plays out in campaign tactics.  Consider, for example, this Washington Post story by Shamkar Vedantum (hat tip:  Kevin Drum):

[A]a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people's minds after it has been debunked -- even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information. In experiments conducted by political scientist John Bullock at Yale University, volunteers were given various items of political misinformation from real life. One group of volunteers was shown a transcript of an ad created by NARAL Pro-Choice America that accused John G. Roberts Jr., President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court at the time, of "supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber." A variety of psychological experiments have shown that political misinformation primarily works by feeding into people's preexisting views. People who did not like Roberts to begin with, then, ought to have been most receptive to the damaging allegation, and this is exactly what Bullock found. Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to disapprove of Roberts after hearing the allegation. Bullock then showed volunteers a refutation of the ad by abortion-rights supporters. He also told the volunteers that the advocacy group had withdrawn the ad. Although 56 percent of Democrats had originally disapproved of Roberts before hearing the misinformation, 80 percent of Democrats disapproved of the Supreme Court nominee afterward. Upon hearing the refutation, Democratic disapproval of Roberts dropped only to 72 percent. Republican disapproval of Roberts rose after hearing the misinformation but vanished upon hearing the correct information. The damaging charge, in other words, continued to have an effect even after it was debunked among precisely those people predisposed to buy the bad information in the first place.... Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse. A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

This suggests: 

• The Obama strategy of painting McCain as a liar won't improve perceptions of Obama -- at best they'll simply convince people McCain is a liar.
• There is a terrible incentive for any "expert" -- i.e., credentialed enough to merit press attention -- to make a wild-ass claim that makes the papers.  Since the first claimer apparently has first-mover advantage, refutation becomes irrelevant. 
• No one gives a flying f%$# what I think about this. 

   

Marc Ambinder is one of my must-click sites when I'm looking for good political insider gossip.  So I was surprised, yesterday, to see this post: 

[T]he gulf between academia and practitioners of politics is very wide. Too wide. So why the heck would the American Political Science Association hold their annual convention during the Democratic National Convention...  ... in Boston? Want to bridge the gap? Try holding the conference in the same city as a convention...the week before the convention.

There are some pretty good reasons for why this is the case, including:

1. Logistics
2. Not all political scientists study American politics
3. Logistics
4. Not all American politics people study the presidency and/or party politics 
5. Logistics
6. Which convention -- Democrat or Republican?  Both? 
7. Logistics
8. After attending a meeting in Honolulu, I've concluded that it's tough to hold a conference when all the conference-goers would be somewhere else

After the logistics problems were pointed out to Ambinder, he responded: 

That explains, but doesn't really excuse, from an institutional point of view, the idea that, in politics, theory and practice could not be more alienated from each other.

Here's my question to Ambinder -- what, exactly, does that mean?  Political scientists aren't providing better tactical or strategic advice to politicians?  Political scientists aren't studying real-world phenomena?  We're not making impassioned pleas for reform?  What?  I mean this seriously, because, from where I sit, a certain amount of alienation is a good thing.  It's not good for political scientists to disdain politics -- but it is a good thing for political scientists to be outside observers, beholden to no powerful interest, providing dispassionate (and occasionally passionate) commentary.  Seriously, Marc -- what do you want political scientists to do?  I'll throw that last question open to readers as well.