Daniel Drezner, job creator

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Thursday, December 15, 2011 - 1:45 PM

You know, the one thing the people on the left and the right in this country seem to agree about is that everything must be done to enable America's "job creators."

I bring this up because The Fletcher School is, well, creating a job:

Assistant Professor of International Political Economy

Rank of assistant professor beginning September 2012. While we are open to specialty, consideration will be given to candidates with a substantive interest in emerging market economies or Europe and a methodological interest in quantitative approaches (emphasis added).

Review of applications will begin January 3, 2012. Questions relating to this search should be emailed to IPEsearch-at-Tufts.edu

Now I know there's just a booming market for junior IPE types, so I'm sure no one reading this will be interested in a tenure-track position in the Boston area. Still, I thought I'd put it out there.

And, now that my home institution is actually creating a job, I'd like all of the tax cuts and subsidies that politicians seem so eager to proffer nowadays. That, or a dedicated parking spot.

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This one is dedicated to those who were denied tenure

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, July 4, 2011 - 1:05 PM

To commemorate the fifth-year anniversary of being denied tenure, the Official Blog Wife and I have joint essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education today on the aftereffects of that decision. For most people who are denied tenure, the costs are financial, familial and emotional. In my own idiosyncratic case, I was fortunate enough to be spared the first two of the three, which allowed this to be a "controlled case" focusing solely on the emotional legacy.

My big takeaway:

Indulging in "What happened?" musings is inevitable—indeed, most social scientists are trained to search for underlying causes. But a good social scientist must also be wary of overdetermined outcomes. There is always the element of chance to any outcome. Get 20 tenured academics in a room, and that stochastic element explodes. After five years, I've grown comfortable with the idea that there is a limit to how much I will ever know about what happened. But it took nearly all five of those years to reach this point.

To be blunt, my wife's essay is much better than mine, and is chock-full of embarrassing anecdotes like this one:

My husband is one of the most confident people I know. This is both attractive and exasperating. We once had a disagreement about the meaning of a word. When I read the dictionary definition to him, he said the dictionary was wrong. The rabbi who married us compared him to Jacob in her sermon, saying, "Jacob argued with God."

So read all of her esaay, if nothing else. My only regret is that the Chronicle did not post her full tagline, which should have read, "Erika Drezner is a social worker and coordinator of teen services at the Asperger’s Association of New England. She has learned over time that when arguing with Dan she is right all of the time."

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This blog will be made in China

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Wednesday, June 8, 2011 - 12:38 PM

Your humble blogger is headed to China for the next few days as part of a conference sponsored by the MacArthur Asia Security Initiative and the School of International Studies at Peking University, at which we will be discussing "What roles do power, history, ideas, and other legacies and factors play in shaping the American and Chinese approaches to sovereignty?" and "What is distinctive about the American and Chinese orientations and what are the implications of their preferences for the international order?" and "Could I please have an extra serving of tripe?" OK, that last one will just be a personal quest for yours truly, but you get the idea.

We will also be "Meeting with high-rank officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the International Liaison Department of the Central Committee of the CPC" -- so with luck, I'll be able to post blog items that will impress Chinese readers more than, say, your average Tom Friedman column. Assuming, that is, that the interwebs are semi-friendly over there.

While I am ~~praying for an upgrade on my flight to Beijing~~ winging my way to the Middle Kingdom, go and contemplate Gideon Rachman's latest in the Financial Times. He points out that should China supplant the United States during this decade, it will be a very strange superpower indeed:

The ascent of China will change ideas of what it means to be a superpower. Over the course of the American century, the world has got used to the idea that the world’s largest economy was also the world’s most obviously affluent nation. The world’s biggest economy housed the world’s richest people.

As China emerges as an economic superpower, the connection between national and personal affluence is being broken. China is both richer and poorer than the western world. It is sitting on foreign reserves worth $3,000bn. And yet, measured at current exchange rates, the average American is about 10 times as wealthy as the average Chinese....

The power of China – combined with anxiety about the frightening public debts being built up in the US, the EU and Japan – will challenge western ideas about the relationship between democracy and economic success. Ever since the US became the world’s largest economy, towards the end of the 19th century, the most powerful economy in the world has been a democracy. But, if China remains a one-party state over the next decade, that will change. The confident western slogan that “freedom works” will come under challenge as authoritarianism becomes fashionable, once again.

What do you think? More tripe, or go for the chow fun instead?

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A little light housekeeping on the interwebs

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - 2:18 PM

Last year I discovered, to my embarrassment, that I had ~~not updated my online cv in four years~~ let my personal website atrophy just a wee bit.

Well, ~~my cv really rocks now~~ things have been spruced up a bit now, as you can see. Just as important, I've acquired a very valuable piece of online real estate -- www.theoriesofinternationalpoliticsandzombies.com. This site includes scheduled events, favorite zombie links, and, or course, ways to order the book.

In the spirit of full disclosure, however, I should point out that I might have taken a few liberties with my standard bio when I adapted it to the zombie site.

A hearty thank you to Brian Degenhart at bloggingheads for the spiffy new site.

Oh, speaking of which, my latest diavlog is with The American Prospect's Adam Serwer, and covers Wikileaks, assassinations, the debt ceiling, and, of course, The Walking Dead.

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What I learned at the National Security Forum

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Friday, May 21, 2010 - 4:17 AM

I spent the last two days in the great state of Alabama, giving a talk on the financial crisis and national security at the Air War College's National Security Forum. The audience consists of Air Force colonels and community leaders.

In theory, I was there to impart wisdom, but I always find that I learn more from these experiences than my audience. Now, most of what happens in Alabama stays in Alabama, but I can say I learned the following four things:

1) The rooms at the Air Force Inn on Maxwell Air Force Base are charming -- and they come equipped with clubs and golf balls for guests to practice putting.

2) It's a really big ego rush when you walk into the lecture hall and everyone stands at attention for your entrance -- until, of course, you realize that they're not standing for you, they're standing for the base commandant.

3) I would describe my audience as somewhat right of center -- so it was surprising to me that, when I gently suggested that the War on Drugs might be the most counterproductive policy in existence, there was some robust support from the audience.

4) It's going to take a lot longer for the public's anger at the financial sector to dissipate than anyone in either Washington or New York realizes.

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