This past week your humble blogger added another affiliation to his bio, as he has now joined the Brookings Institution as a... wait for it... nonresident senior fellow with the Managing Global Order project.

Now, those who live and breathe the mores and rhythms of DC's think tank community are already aware of the awesome rights, responsibilities and entitlements that comes with this honorific. Those not in the wonk priesthood, however, might wonder. Clearly, "nonresident" implies I'm not moving to DC. But what are the other perks of being a nonresident senior fellow?

The better way to phrase this query is -- what aren't the perks of being a nonresident senior fellow? It's almost as cool as being a full professor, for Pete's sake!! To list all the perks would take too long. Here are, in order, the top ten benefits to being a nonresident senior fellow at a think tanks, however:

10) Now all of my talks can be shorter. Before any academic or policy talk, a speaker usually receives an introduction in which the convenor reads the person's bio. If the speaker has lots of awards, affiliations, and publications, then this process can take a while, cutting into the speaker's allotted time. Secretly, all speakers want this, cause it means they don't have to remble on as long. Adding the Brookings affiliation will cut my talks by at least thirty seconds.

9) I'm now one affiliation away from the PACT. A key plot device in 30 Rock was Tracy Morgan's quest for the EGOT -- Emmy, Grammy, Tony and Oscar awards. Foreign policy wonks have a similar quest, except it operates by affiliations: Press, Academia, Consulting, and Think Tankery. Adding my nonresident senior fellow appellation to being a Fletcher professor and a contributing editor here at FP, I now have a PAT. The only thing missing is the for-profit consulting gig. I'm looking in your direction, Stonebridge Group and/or McKinsey!!

8) 50,000 frequent flyer miles with an airline of my choice. This sounds like a great perk, but really, it's just so that I can be conversant in frequent flyer-speak when bumping into other nonresident senior fellows at conferences:

ME: So did you get upgraded on this flight?

OTHER WONK: Oh, yeah, but that's because I'm Super Premium status. You?

ME: No, and I was willing to use miles too!!

OTHER WONK: Oh, no, never use your own miles!! See, what you should do it... [long disquisition about the art of frequent flyer mile management.]

You get the idea.

7) Officially one of the old boys now. The "senior" is a tipoff -- I can no longer declare "Young Turk" status. Instead, I'm clearly part of an old boy network of some kind or another. Which will, inevitably, lead to attacks from Glenn Greenwald.

6) Attract a much better class of groupies. Oh, sure, as a full professor I get the entreaty from a student willing to do just about anything to get an RAship/grad school admission/job. DC, however, attacts a much more desperate and stylish set of aspirants. Indeed, within 24 hours of becoming a nonresident senior fellow, my LinkedIn profile was beseiged with requests ranging from "I'm just dying to polish your memos" to "I feel like I'm the only research assistant who gets you -- I mean, really gets you!!"

5) One free black helicopter ride. I have every confidence that the sovereigntists in the crowd are already freaked out by the "Managing Global Order" moniker. AS YOU SHOULD BE!!! Who do you think supplies the black helicopetrs to the United Nations? Before we do, however, a nonresident fellow can pick where in the country the brand-spanking new black helicopter can buzz, just to freak out some locals. I, for one, am looking forward to a quick, below-the-radar trip through the Texas panhandle.

4) Playing the Lincoln card.  All nonresident senior fellows run into bureaucratic impediments at some point or another.  Once a year, I can pull the Lincoln card out of my wallet, and utter the following: "I am a nonresident senior fellow, clothed in IMMENSE POWER!  You will procure me these PowerPoint slides."

3) Preferential treatment at the Old Ebbitt Grill.  For years, I used to make reservations at this venerable DC establishment and still find myself cooling my heels and not impressing my date as more distinguished Beltway denizens would just waltz on in.  Not anymore!!  Now I just flash your "Nonresident Senior Fellow" gold card to the maitre d'hotel and -- KABLAMM!! -- my date and I are enjoying the finest champagnes in the land.  This is a much more civilized way of exerting power than the more old-fashioned method in which -- as I understand it -- the men simply unzipped their flies and compared penis sizes. 

2) At least ten more seconds of air time on CNN. Cable news nets will let senior nonresident fellows blather on for at least two more sentences before interrupting duing an interview.

1) "Nonresident Casual Fridays." One Friday, every other month, the nonresident fellows show up at the Brookings Institution very early, camp ourselves in the offices of the resident fellows, and scare the bejeezus out of them when they walk in. Alternatively, we prank call the senior resident fellows, pretending to be a White House flack asking for permission to vet them for a prominent subcabinet position.

Now is the time of year when students go to citadels of higher learning and hopefully learn some stuff instead of getting bogged down in weird cheating scandals.  Coincidentally enough, this past month there's also been a lot of talk about how impressionable young people often get enamored with Ayn Rand and isn't that awful or something. 

These laments this misses the point of how 18-year olds encountered the world of ideas in college.  That is the age when they are expected to seriously think about ideas for the first time.  They will crave ideas that will bake their noodle -- or at a minimum, that's the time when they should have their worldviews rocked ever few weeks or so.  If not Rand, then whom? 

In your blogger's humble opinion, there's another book that is celebrating it's 50th anniversary and remains far more earth-shattering in its intellectual effects.  A few weeks ago the Guardian's John Naughton celebrated Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with an astute essay on its significance.  The highlights: 

Kuhn's version of how science develops differed dramatically from the Whig version. Where the standard account saw steady, cumulative "progress", he saw discontinuities – a set of alternating "normal" and "revolutionary" phases in which communities of specialists in particular fields are plunged into periods of turmoil, uncertainty and angst. These revolutionary phases – for example the transition from Newtonian mechanics to quantum physics – correspond to great conceptual breakthroughs and lay the basis for a succeeding phase of business as usual. The fact that his version seems unremarkable now is, in a way, the greatest measure of his success. But in 1962 almost everything about it was controversial because of the challenge it posed to powerful, entrenched philosophical assumptions about how science did – and should – work....

Kuhn's central claim is that a careful study of the history of science reveals that development in any scientific field happens via a series of phases. The first he christened "normal science" – business as usual, if you like. In this phase, a community of researchers who share a common intellectual framework – called a paradigm or a "disciplinary matrix" – engage in solving puzzles thrown up by discrepancies (anomalies) between what the paradigm predicts and what is revealed by observation or experiment. Most of the time, the anomalies are resolved either by incremental changes to the paradigm or by uncovering observational or experimental error. As philosopher Ian Hacking puts it in his terrific preface to the new edition: "Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover."

The trouble is that over longer periods unresolved anomalies accumulate and eventually get to the point where some scientists begin to question the paradigm itself. At this point, the discipline enters a period of crisis characterised by, in Kuhn's words, "a proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals". In the end, the crisis is resolved by a revolutionary change in world-view in which the now-deficient paradigm is replaced by a newer one. This is the paradigm shift of modern parlance and after it has happened the scientific field returns to normal science, based on the new framework. And so it goes on.

This brutal summary of the revolutionary process does not do justice to the complexity and subtlety of Kuhn's thinking.

He's right -- read the whole thing.  I've blogged before about why Kuhn is equally important to social science here and here.  To put this into words that today's millenial generation can comprehend:  the effect of reading Thomas Kuhn to 18 year old is like the moment when Neo realizes there is no spoon. 

One's education about how science works shouldn't stop with Kuhn -- there have been some worthy responses to him -- but it's a great place to start. 

One could argue that the job of ambassador has been made obsolete by macrotrends in technology and politics.  Oh, sure, maybe traditional envoys from great powers still play an important role in smaller countries that don't normally capture much attention in major capitals.  Among the great powers, however, one  could posit that ambassadors are superfluous.  In a world in which heads of government and foreign ministers have multiple direct means of communication, in which you can't go a week without some big global summit, and in which leaders are wary of confiding with ambassadors because they'll quit and then run for head of government that's just another press leak waiting to happen, what can ambassadors really do?  Will we see the likes of Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, or even Anatoly Dobrynin ever again? 

Probably not, but even in the 21st century, great power ambassadors to other great powers still serve a purpose.  In the case of American ambassadors to Russia and China, they can excel at getting under the skin of their host country governments.  Gary Locke seems to be doing that pretty well in China, in no small part by being an ethnic Chinese politician that doesn't seem to be behaving like Chinese politicians. 

In the case of Russia, there's the new ambassador Michael McFaul, who before this was in Obama's National Security Council and one of the architects o the "reset" policy, and before that was a professor of political science at Stanford (full disclosure:  Mike's first year at Stanford as a professor was my last there as a grad student, and he's been a friend to me ever since). 

The New York Times' Ellen Barry, following up on the excellent reportage of FP's Josh Rogin, has a long story on how McFaul is really pissing off official Moscow.  The good parts version: 

 In the annals of American diplomacy, few honeymoons have been shorter than the one granted to Michael A. McFaul, who arrived in Russia on Jan. 14 as the new American ambassador.

Toward the end of the ambassador’s second full day at work, a commentator on state-controlled Channel 1 suggested during a prime-time newscast that Mr. McFaul was sent to Moscow to foment revolution. A columnist for the newspaper Izvestia chimed in the next day, saying his appointment signaled a return to the 18th century, when “an ambassador’s participation in intrigues and court conspiracies was ordinary business.”....

Mr. McFaul, 48, has arrived in a city churning with conjecture and paranoia. The public attack illustrates how edgy the Kremlin is about the protest movement that has taken shape, turning Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s re-election campaign into a nerve-racking test for the government. It also reveals how fragile relations are between Washington and Mr. Putin’s government, which has repeatedly accused the State Department of orchestrating the demonstrations.

If the blast of venom that greeted Mr. McFaul was intended as a warning to maintain a low profile in his new role, he seems unlikely to comply. At the end of his first week, he was exuberant, saying his goal was to “destroy cold war stereotypes,” especially misstatements about the United States’ intentions in Russia.

“I know I’m just going to go in full force, I’ve got nothing to hide, and we feel very confident in our policy and in selling our policy,” said Mr. McFaul, a native of Bozeman, Mont., who spent much of his career in academia. He does not need to fret over his next diplomatic posting, he added, because there will not be one.

“I ain’t going nowhere else,” he said, with a big smile. “This is it. I am not a career diplomat. And so I am here to do that in a very, very aggressive way.”

As someone who spent a short stint in DC, I recognize the sentiment McFaul expressed in that last paragraph.  The exit option is one of the greatest assets an academic has if they enter the foreign policymaking world.  Of course, that option can also encourage policymakers to stray way outside the reservation, so it kind of depends upon which academic has been appointed.  In the case of McFaul, I'm very confident he will use this power for the forces of good. 

Read the whole story -- and check out McFaul's (Russian language) blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube greeting to Russians.  Gonna be some interesting Web 2.0 diplomacy. 

Developing....

Late last month, Princeton University Press informed me that Theories of International Politics and Zombies had crossed the 10,000 sales mark just six months after its release.  By commercial publishing standards, this represents a modest successs.  By academic publishing standards, well, it's the kind of thing that makes this sort of behavior very tempting.  

Why has it dome so well?  Well, I was extraordinarily lucky it has been marketed in many unusual venues.  Still, I suspect the biggest reason for these numbers is that TIPZ is now being assigned in college courses (and in some rather disturbing instances, in lieu of college class sessions).   Indeed, its popularity has led to juuuuust a wee bit of blowback from a few students and faculty. 

Which leads me to the purpose of this blog post.  Consider this an open request to both students and faculty who are using the book ij their classes.  Is it useful?  Not so much?  Too many puns?  Not enough?  Are there ways to make it more useful for students?  I've already received some very positive pedagogical feedback, but negative feedback -- i.e., anything that needs to be changed -- is welcomed as well. 

I ask because, more likely than not, I'll be working on a revised revived edition of TIPZ in about a year or so.  Such a revision will, of course, add in more topical zombie references (Both comic book and TV versions of The Walking Dead, or MTV's Death Valley), recent policy developments (the CDC weighing in on the zombie menace), follow-on research, and a fleshing out of additional theoretical paradigms  as well.  Plus more drawings, because they're awesome. 

So, let me know what you'd like to see in the new edition to make it even more useful in a classroom setting.  And if you insist on telling me that the text is completely perfect as is, well, I can bear hearing that too.

I know I said I would post by book choices for aspiring senators/presidential candidates yesterday, but current events forced a slight delay.  So, you know the contest:  "if you had to pick three books for an ambitious U.S. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be?"  You now know (and are less than thrilled with) the readers' selections.  Below are my choices. 

My selections were based on three fundamental premises.  The first is that politicians do not lack in self-confidence.  This is an important leadership trait, but when it comes to foreign policy, some awareness of The Things That Can Go Wrong is really important.  So my choices try to stress the pitfalls of bad decision-making. 

The second assumption is that trying to force-feed social science principles onto a politico is a futile enterprise -- any decent advisor should provide that role.  What's more important is exposing politicians to the different schools of thought that they will encounter in foreign policy debates.  As with the zombie book, the idea is that by familiarizing individuals to the different theoretical approaches, they can recognize a realist or neoconservative argument when they hear it.  They should then be able to recall how well or how badly these approaches have done in the past, and think about the logical conclusions to each approach. 

Finally, these are American politicians, which means that they are genuinely interested in Americana and American history.  Books that can connect current foreign policy debates to past ones will resonate better. 

So, with that set-up, my three choices:

1)  Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence.  An excellent introduction to the myriad strains of thought that have permeated American foreign policy over the past two and a half centuries.  International relations theorists might quibble with Mead's different intellectual traditions, but I suspect politicians will immediately "get" them. 

2)  David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (for Democrats); James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (for Republicans).  Americans have a long and bipartisan history of Mongolian clusterf**ks in foreign policy.  Each side should read about their greatest foreign policy mistake of the past century to appreciate that even the best and smartest advisors in the world will not necessarily translate into wise foreign policies. 

3)  Richard Neustadt and Earnest May, Thinking in Time.  Politicians like to claim that they don't cotton to abstract academic theories of the world, that they rely on things like "common sense"  and "folk wisdom."  This is a horses**t answer that's code for, "if I encounter a new situation, I'll think about a historical parallel and use that to guide my thinking."  Neustadt and May's book does an excellent job of delineating the various ways that the history can be abused in presidential decision-making. 

 Obviously, I'd want politicians to read more books after these three -- but as a first set of foreign policy primers, I'm comfortable with these choices. 

If you want to hear more about this, go and listen to my bloggingheads exchange with NSN's Heather Hurlburt on this very question. 

There's one other nugget from Ryan Lizza's New Yorker essay that I didn't get around to yesterday.  In chronicling Barack Obama's foreign policy education, he damns him with faint praise:

[T]here was no mistaking the lightness of [Obama's foreign affairs] résumé. Just a year before coming to Washington, State Senator Obama was not immersed in the dangers of nuclear Pakistan or an ascendant China; as a provincial legislator, he was investigating the dangers of a toy known as the Yo-Yo Water Ball. (He tried, unsuccessfully, to have it banned.)

Obama had always read widely, and now he was determined to get a deeper education. He read popular books on foreign affairs by Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman.

Gasp!! 

That last sentence provoked a lot of titters on Twitter among the foreign policy community.  It's only a slight exaggeration to say that Tom Friedman's recent books have the same status among foreign policy wonks that John Grisham novels have in literary circles. 

This raises an interesting question, however -- if a newly-minted U.S. Senator did want to seriously bone up on foreign affairs, what books should he or she read? 

This is a harder question to answer that you might think.  Here is a rank ordering of what a typical Senator cares about:

1)  Getting re-elected;

2) Getting re-elected;

3)  Establishing a domestic policy niche in order to claim credit... in order to get re-elected;

4)  Starving the media of any opportunity to write a profile of their private lives... in order to get re-elected. 

5)  Foreign affairs

 There's a reason foreign  affairs is at the bottom -- in the post-Cold War world, the American public doesn't care and doesn't know much about international relations.  Short of the presidential level, developing expertise or interest in that area does nothing for a politician's electoral chances -- and even at the presidential leve it's a mixed bag. 

With this kind of mindset, giving a Senator a copy of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and assuming they'll get really hooked on the story is faintly absurd.  Many of my academic brethren might proffer up one of the more recent classics in international relations theory.  To which I say, "BWA HA HA HA HA!!!!"  Neither Kenneth Waltz nor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita would last as long in a politicians' hands as Thucydides. 

No, if you're educating a politician from scratch, you need something relatively pithy, accessible, relevant to current events, and America-centric.  Given those criteria, Friedman's oeuvre makes some kind of inuitive sense, no matter how wrong or ripe for satire it is.  I mean, what's the alternative -- Three Cups of Tea? 

Aspiring leaders of America can and should do better than Friedman, however.  I therefore call upon the readers of this blog to proffer up their suggestions -- if you had to pick three books for an ambitious U.S. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be? 

I have my own thoughts on the matter, but I'll hold off until Friday to post my selections.  My choices are hardy written in stone, so I'll be reading this comment thread with great interest. 

So I see the blog meme of the month is Tyler Cowen's "the top 10 books which have influenced your view of the world."  All the old cool bloggers are doing it. 

The hard-working staff here at the blog likes to keep up with all the latest internet traditions.  Having read and watched High Fidelity, I'm keenly aware of all the ways I'd be tempted to go all obscure-y in my references.  So, here are my "gut response" books, in roughly the chronological order I encountered them: 

1)  Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition.  My 11th grade U.S. history teacher assigned this book in addition to the standard textbook.  It certainly provided a more nuanced view of certain historical figures than you got in the textbook.  More importantly, Hofstadter knew how to write well.  This was the first book I ever read where it occurred to me that nonfiction could be as interesting to read as fiction. 

2)  Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation.  I didn't know anything about game theory before reading this book for a summer school course.  After reading this book I was fascinated by it. 

3)  Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  A sense of whimsy, of intellectual play, is a necessary condition for staying sane in the universe.  Douglas Adams is Whimsy 101 through Advanced Theory of Whimsy.  Plus, when I grow up I want to be Oolon Colluphid.   

4) Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A lot of people have put Genealogy of Morals on their lists because Nietzsche was the first person they read who pointed out that morals might have an instrumental and particularistic motivation.  I'm not sure Kuhn is completely correct in his vivisection of how science works, but it was only after reading this book that I began to recognize the instrumental, cognitive, and sociological dimensions of scientists.   

5)  P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell.  Click here to see why O'Rourke's first collection of essays was partly responsible for my decision to get a Ph.D. 

6)  Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.  Everyone focuses on the end of this book, with the exaggerated statements about U.S. "imperial overstretch."  What hooked me was the first 95% of the book, in which Kennedy went through 500 years of history to demonstrate the essential link between economic power and military power, and the ways in which hegemonic actors ineluctably overreach and overextend themselves.  The first chapter, which discusses why Europe and not China rose to global dominance from 1500 on, was what turned me onto economic history.  From here I went to David Landes' The Unbound Prometheus, Rosenberg & Birdzell's How the West Grew Rich, Joelk Mokyr's Lever of Riches, etc...

7)  Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker.  Lewis has expressed befuddlement that people still wanted to go into finance after reading his book -- which makes me wonder if he read what he wrote.  True, Liar's Poker is not exactly a paean to finance, but the book does capture the raw energy that comes with the good and the bad of financial innovation.  For my own intellectual development, the book was also surprisingly useful:  I'll now always be able to say that I got an A+ from Joe Stiglitz  for a game-theoretic explanation of some of the phenomena Lewis talked about in the book.  The lesson I drew from that; inspiration can come from even the most popular of books. 

8)  Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations.  This was Olson's sequel to The Logic of Collective Action, and basically argued that over time, political stability breeds interest group capture, which breeds economic sclerosis.  I don't quite buy the argument in the same way that I did when I first read it.  What was appealing about the book, however, was the elegance of the argument and evidence.  It's just a great, simple argument

9) Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.  In the early nineties I spent a year in eastern Ukraine, where sources of entertainment that did not involve vodka were extremely scarce .  So I brought two books that I knew I had to read at some point but had yet to finish:  the Old Testament and Thucydides.  The first one had a great beginning, but I confess that I got bogged down in Leviticus.  The second book has held my attention ever since.  It's analytical history rather than political science, but the entire tapestry of human behavior is on display in that book.  Far, far too many people who consider themselves experts in international relations have read nothing from Thucydides except the Melian Dialogue -- and they are poorer for it. 

10)  Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty.   I've mined Hirschman throughout my own professional career, and I could have put at least four of his books on this list.  This one makes the list for three reasons.  First, it's Hirschman's most wide-ranging in terms of its applicability -- it can apply to any organization at any level of society.  Second, I relied on it heavily when developing the domestic politics portion of All Politics Is Global.  Third, it's a great example of an idea that was simultaneously original but, once you thought about it, became completely intuitive. 

Looking at the list, I notice three trends:  1)  a lot more nonfiction than fiction; 2)  all of these books have clear prose styles -- they are accessible to both scholars and non-scholars; and 3) the books that captured my attention were interesting for their intellectual style as much as their content. 

Thomas Sowell has a new book out called Intellectuals and Society (here's a precis from his National Review essay on the topic from January). It sounds like a remix of Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, mixed with Hayek's "The Intellectuals and Socialism."  Those are pretty good source materials. And as someone who occasionally writes about this topic, I'm always intrigued by new arguments on this topic.

Sowell recently gave an interview to Investor's Business Daily that's worth excerpting, however:

IBD: How do you define intellectuals?

Sowell: I define intellectuals as persons whose occupations begin and end with ideas. I distinguish between intellectuals and other people who may have ideas but whose ideas end up producing some good or service, something that whether it's working or not working can be determined by third parties.

With intellectuals, one of the crucial factors is their work is largely judged by peer consensus, so it doesn't matter if their ideas work in the real world.

IBD: What incentives and constraints do intellectuals face?

Sowell: One of the incentives is that, to the extent that intellectuals stay in their specialty, they have little to gain in terms of either prestige or influence on events. Say, an authority in ancient Mayan civilization just writes about ancient Mayan civilization, then only other specialists in ancient Mayan civilization will know what he is talking about or even be aware of him.

So intellectuals have every incentive to go beyond their area of expertise and competence. But stepping beyond your area of competence is like stepping off a cliff — you may be a genius within that area, but an idiot outside it.

As far as the constraints, since their main constraint is peer consensus — that's a very weak constraint on the profession as a whole. Because what the peers believe as a group becomes the test of any new idea that comes along as to whether it's plausible or not.

I'm pretty sure that Sowell's answers contradict each other. If the primary means through which intellectuals assess their value is through peer assessment, then why is peer assessment such a weak constraint on intellectual activity?

Methinks Sowell is underestimating both the power of academic culture and the ways in which the marketplace of ideas has become more competitive. But this is certainly good fodder for debate.

What really caught my eye, however, was this section:

IBD: You say that intellectuals during Hitler's rise subordinated the mundane specifics of the nature of the German government to abstract principles about abstract nations, by which you meant the idea espoused at the time that "nations should be equal" and thus Germany had a right to rearm. Does that description apply to the Obama administration's approach to Iran?

Sowell: I hadn't thought of it, but it certainly does. In fact, there are other people who have said, "Some countries have nuclear weapons, why shouldn't other countries have nuclear weapons?" And they say it with an utter disregard for the nature of the countries and what those countries have been demonstrably doing for years and show every intention of doing in the future.

IBD: Do you think also that the Obama administration has abstract notions that you can negotiate with Iran the same way you can negotiate with, say, Australia?

Sowell: Oh, yes. And the question is not whether you should negotiate. We negotiate with all kinds of countries. The question is whether we think negotiations will be at all effective in carrying out what we want to do.

Give Sowell credit -- it's clear that he really hasn't thought about the question. Anyone who has paid any attention to the Obama administraion's Iran policy would be hard-pressed to characterize it as tolerant of Iran's right to arm itself with nuclear weapons. As Robert Kagan recently pointed out in FP:

Republicans may complain, along with many Democrats, that the administration has been too slow to support the Iranian opposition and took too long to pivot to sanctions. Yet some also realize that Obama's prolonged effort at engagement accomplished what George W. Bush never could: convincing most of the world, and most Democrats, that Iran is uninterested in any deal that threatens its nuclear weapons program. As a result, France, Britain, and even Germany appear more determined than at any time in the past decade to impose meaningful sanctions. A majority of Republicans, along with most Democrats, will support the administration as it toughens its approach to what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now calls the "military dictatorship" in Tehran.

In other words, the Obama administration's actual policy towards Iran bears no resemblance whatsoever to Sowell's characterization of it.

One should not be completely surprised by this; Sowell is an economist by training and should not be expected to know much about American foreign policy, as it's beyond his area of expertise. I do find it a little rich, however, that Sowell has written a book complaining about what happens when intellectuals leave their knowledge reservation to opine about events of the day -- and then proceeds to commit that precise sin during his book promotion.

There are two possibilities here. Either Sowell has no capacity for irony, or he's cleverly trying to add data points to support his argument.

The following question was on the final exam for my Global Political Economy class this fall.  If you're interested, provide a one paragraph answer in the comments.  I'll report back later in the week if these answers are better than the ones I'm about to grade:

"When China becomes the world's largest economy, the current era of globalization will come to an end.  The simple fact is that while Great Britain and the United States had open liberal polities, China does not.  This will foster mutual suspicion between China and the west, as well as discourage China from fully opening up its domestic market.  That, plus the geopolitical tensions that come from a hegemonic power transition, means we can expect a new era of mercantilism."

Do you agree or disagree with the above statement?  Why or why not? 

Hint:  you get absolutely no extra credit for agreeing or disagreeing with anything previously said on the subject on this blog. 

One of the biggest mistakes traditional academics make is to take all words equally seriously.  That is to say, academics who do not write for a non-scholarly audience tend to assume that it takes an equal length of time and effort to compose a journal article, an op-ed, or even a blog post.  In reality, it's kind of like circuit training -- each activity exercises a different set of writing muscles (that said, journal articles require way more reps than other forms of writing).

I bring this up because I have now joined Twitter, in a desperate, far-too-late-effort to catch up to my FP colleague Mark Lynch -- who is securely ensconced in the FP Twitterati Top 100.  Right now he's crushing me in terms of followers, so I warmly encourage all my readers to start following me on Twitter -- and then feel free to ignore my tweets. 

Somewhat more seriously, my Twitter postings will mostly be on matters that are other off-topic for Foreign Policy or things I don't have time to develop into the long, nuanced sentences required for blogging.  So, just to clarify for those academics in the audience, here is the official Hierarchy of Drezner Publications -- from highest degree of effort to lowest degree of effort: 

1. University press books
2. Peer-refereed journal articles
3. University press book chapters
4. Editor-refereed essays
5. Non-university press books and chapters
6. Op-ed essays
7. Commentaries for Marketplace
8. Blog posts about Salma Hayek and zombies
9. Other, lesser blog posts about trade, finance, etc.
10. Twitter tweets/Facebook status updates
11. Comments on friend's Facebook pages
12. Mutterings under my breath while waiting for airport security
13. Things I shout at the television during Red Sox-Yankee games
14. Things I say at the bar on the third day of the American Political Science Association annual meeting after I have three vodka tonics in me.
15. Things I say at the bar on the third day of the American Political Science Association annual meeting when completely sober. 

Also, just an FYI -- usually you can write off a technology the moment I embrace it.  So if tech stocks go down today, that's on me. 

There's a lovely passage in John Le Carré's The Secret Pilgrim in which George Smiley explains why governments don't simply rely on open source information instead of spending gazillions on their own intelligence operations:  "governments, like anyone else, trust what they pay for, and are suspicious of what they don't." 

Oddly enough, in studying the global political economy, the sentiment often works in reverse in the academy.  Scholars, understandably, tend to prefer open source research while looking askance at private sector work that requires $$$ to unlock. 

I'm genuinely on the fence about this kind of question.  In writing about sovereign wealth funds, for example, I found the private sector stuff far superior on the empirics to the open source research.  The private sector stuff is also usually published before academics enter the breach (a good rule of thumb for aspiring IPE types -- if your literature review consists mostly of corporate research, then you are ahead of the academic curve on a new issue area).  On the other hand, the private sector work often lacked the analytical bite of scholarly work.  For some of it, I could not escape the sense that someone was trying to sell me something. 

I raise this conundrum because Martin Wolf's latest column is essentially a precis of a Goldman Sachs report that requires cashy money to read.  Wolf's summary: 

The paper points to four salient features of the world economy during this decade: a huge increase in global current account imbalances (with, in particular, the emergence of huge surpluses in emerging economies); a global decline in nominal and real yields on all forms of debt; an increase in global returns on physical capital; and an increase in the “equity risk premium” – the gap between the earnings yield on equities and the real yield on bonds. I would add to this list the strong downward pressure on the dollar prices of many manufactured goods.

The paper argues that the standard “global savings glut” hypothesis helps explain the first two facts. Indeed, it notes that a popular alternative – a too loose monetary policy – fails to explain persistently low long-term real rates. But, it adds, this fails to explain the third and fourth (or my fifth) features.

The paper argues that a massive increase in the effective global labour supply and the extreme risk aversion of the emerging world’s new creditors explains the third and fourth feature. As the paper notes, “the accumulation of net overseas assets has been entirely accounted for by public sector acquisitions ... and has been principally channelled into reserves”. Asian emerging economies – China, above all – have dominated such flows....

The authors conclude that the low bond yields caused by newly emerging savings gluts drove the crazy lending whose results we now see. With better regulation, the mess would have been smaller, as the International Monetary Fund rightly argues in its recent World Economic Outlook. But someone had to borrow this money. If it had not been households, who would have done so – governments, so running larger fiscal deficits, or corporations already flush with profits? This is as much a macroeconomic story as one of folly, greed and mis-regulation.

I'm pretty sympathetic to this argument, but I can't fully embrace it unless I can read the friggin' paper. 

Question to readers:  compared to academic work, how reliable is private sector research? 

It's not easy being an international relations scholar [Cue world's smallest violin!--ed.]  When we're not being compared to AIG executives, we're being told that we are irrelevant to policymakers

Being  swamped with work yesterday, a typically out-of-touch academic, it took me 24 hours to notice Joseph Nye's Washington Post op-ed about out-of-touch international relations scholars (thanks to Laura for flagging it): 

While important American scholars such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski took high-level foreign policy positions in the past, that path has tended to be a one-way street. Not many top-ranked scholars of international relations are going into government, and even fewer return to contribute to academic theory. The 2008 Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) poll, by the Institute for Theory and Practice in International Relations, showed that of the 25 scholars rated as producing the most interesting scholarship during the past five years, only three had ever held policy positions (two in the U.S. government and one in the United Nations). The fault for this growing gap lies not with the government but with the academics.

But... but... but what about hip IR scholar-bloggers?!

Even when academics supplement their usual trickle-down approach to policy by writing in journals, newspapers or blogs, or by consulting for candidates or public officials, they face many competitors for attention. More than 1,200 think tanks in the United States provide not only ideas but also experts ready to comment or consult at a moment's notice. Some of these new transmission belts serve as translators and additional outlets for academic ideas, but many add a bias provided by their founders and funders. As a group, think tanks are heterogeneous in scope, funding, ideology and location, but universities generally offer a more neutral viewpoint. While pluralism of institutional pathways is good for democracy, the policy process is diminished by the withdrawal of the academic community.

The solutions must come via a reappraisal within the academy itself. Departments should give greater weight to real-world relevance and impact in hiring and promoting young scholars. Journals could place greater weight on relevance in evaluating submissions. Studies of specific regions deserve more attention. Universities could facilitate interest in the world by giving junior faculty members greater incentives to participate in it. That should include greater toleration of unpopular policy positions. One could multiply such useful suggestions, but young people should not hold their breath waiting for them to be implemented. If anything, the trends in academic life seem to be headed in the opposite direction.

Nye is -- mostly -- preaching to the converted here.  Right now, the strictures against junior faculty taking an interest in the policymaking world are very, very strong.  A decade ago, for example, I received a fellowship that allowed me to spend a year in the government.  At the time, a senior member of my old department flat-out advised me against taking it because it would taint my career with the whiff of policy.  I showed him.  Oh, wait...

That said, just to throw some sand in Nye's gears, I don't accept that this is only the academy's fault.  Even when IR scholars try to speak with one loud voice, the result is often a deafening silence in the policy world. 

As for individual scholars, the political barriers to government service by aspiring academics are pretty high at this point.  Academics have long paper trails that are easy to manipulate, and politicians are well aware of this Achilles Heel.  Exhibit A:  the Obama administration's vetting process.  Exhibit B:  Harold H. Koh. 

Note what I've just done here.  Rather than offer my full-throated support for Joe's eminently sensible advice, I thought about this critically and then offered some... criticisms.  This skill lets academics excel at cutting down other ideas to size.  It makes it far harder, however, for IR scholars to offer constructive, useful policy advice. 

Which is why Joe is so unique. 

See Henry Farrell and Peter Howard for further academic-y reflections on Nye.