Earlier this week Walter Russell Mead blogged about the mortal danger facing a prominent international relations theory:

American fast food continues to worm its way ever deeper into Pakistani affections. Hardee’s recently joined McDonald’s in Islamabad and both are doing well, says the Washington Post.

Since McDonald’s is also thriving in India, an IR theory is about to be put to a test. The “McDonald’s theory” holds that no two countries with McDonald’s in them will ever go to war. Once you have a middle class big enough to support hamburger franchises, the theory runs, war is a thing of the past.

I wish. The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia dealt the theory a blow; an India-Pakistan war would be the end.

Whether or not that happens, the theory is a bust. Countries often become more militaristic as their middle classes rise.

A touch a touch, I do confess it!! It appears that the collective reputation of international relations theory has been tarnished, yet -- wait a second, who came up with that theory in the first place?

As it turns out, it was not some academic IR theorist like me, but rather a Prominent Foreign Affairs Columnist of Some Renown … kinda like Mead (but not really). Yes, it was indeed Tom Friedman who first suggested "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention."

Mead concludes that the theory is a bust, and Wikipedia appears to back him up:

[T]he NATO bombing of Serbia proved the theory wrong, though in a later edition Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule: the war ended quickly, he argued, partly because the Serbian population did not want to lose their place in a global system "symbolised by McDonald's" (Friedman 2000: 252–253).... In 1998, McDonald's host countries India and Pakistan fought a border war over Kashmir. While not a full scale war, both countries flaunted their nuclear capabilities. At least two wars between McDonald's hosting nations have occurred since the NATO bombing of Serbia: the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon; and the 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia.

(Actually, Wikipedia is underestimating how many times the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention has been falsified … according to Wikipedia. The Kargil War was in 1999, not 1998, and according to casualty estimates, there were more than 1,000 battle deaths, which meets the standard definition of a war.)

Empirical quibbles aside, this certainly falsifies Friedman's original "strong" hypothesis of "no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other." The thing is, international relations theories are kinda like … er … zombies. Even if you think you've killed them off, they can be revived.

Let's water down Friedman's strong hypothesis a bit. Is it true that, "two countries that both have a McDonald's are significantly less likely to fight a war against each other?" Mead thinks the answer is no, but my hunch is that it would be yes. A cursory glance at the scholarly literature suggests that no one has actually tested it, so … get to it, aspiring MA thesis writers!!

That said, even if the weaker version was true, would it be useful from either a theoretical or policy perspective? I think the answer here is no, and this is one important way in which academic IR theorists do better than, say, Tom Friedman. The comparative advantage of the Golden Arches Theory is pedagogical -- it's easy to explain to anyone. The problem is that McDonald's is really an intervening variable and not the actual cause of any peace. And while IR scholars sometimes roll their eyes at democratic peace theory, the literature has produced significant progress about the ways in which that hypothesis is constrained (in a world of democratizing states, for example).

Mead is correct to observe that this particular IR theory is in trouble. I'm marginally more sanguine about the state of academic IR theory overall, however.

[Note to readers: Because Dan was upgraded to business class on his trip to Beijing, he was exposed to a serious viral infection in the food called metaphoricus overloadus, known more commonly as Friedman's Disease. Rest assured, it is far from fatal -- it usually passes after 24 hours of no travel. As near as we can determine, all the facts in the blog post below are accurate. While suffering from Friedman's Disease, however, side effects do include rapid-fire, over-the-top metaphors. Remember: You've been warned!! --ed.]

To truly understand the phenomenon that is China, you need to fly into Beijing's airport and then try to get into the city. That's it; that's all you need. Just that adventure alone will tell you all you need to know about the contradictions of the Middle Kingdom.

First you enter a glittering, modern airport, with helpful signs in Mandarin and English. It's sheer scale and modernity telegraphs the ways in which China has already entered modernity. The monorail from my terminal to baggage claim was a pointed reminder of how much the United States lags behind in infrastructure investment in recent years.

And yet, there's the traffic. Summer in Beijing is a confusing miasma of traffic and smog and traffic. As my compatriot and I clambered into our taxi at Beijing's immaculately clean and modern airport, we knew that the ride to the hotel could take anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes depending on the traffic. Just as we Americans don't know when exactly China will catch up, the Chinese are not sure how long it will take to get there.

We might like to think that driving in a New York City taxi is as exciting as a carnival ride, but that's nothing compared with a taxi ride on a Beijing superhighway. In New York, there's always that sense that, in the end, the taxi driver won't risk an actual collision. On the road to Beijing, however, I witnessed at least two last-minute swerves and road rage that would have made Los Angelenos blush. Using an accent that an old-style New York cabbie would have admired in its sheer swarthiness, my cabbie kept honking for at least two minutes after a car viciously cut him off.

It's a fantastical engineering problem, getting so many cars and motorcycles and trucks and buses to merge and move in the same direction. And that's when it hit me like a thunderbolt -- China itself is like this superhighway. It's massive in size, 10 lanes easy. It's filled with an array of vehicles determined to get ahead. The problem is that when you combine all the vehicles together, the real possibility of a two-week-long traffic jam in which everyone wants to go somewhere but nobody gets anywhere is clearly a possibility. Predicting China's future is like predicting the traffic:  You know there will be some stop-and-go, but you just don't know how much of it there will be.

When we got to the hotel, I paid my cabbie and he signaled that I owed him four more yuan. I was suffering from ATM disease, so I took out a single U.S. dollar bill and a 100-yuan note, looked at him, and said, "You choose." He paused, and then took the yuan note and made the necessary change. Clearly, all of us participating in this hyperaccelerated, globalized economy are going to have to make the necessary change soon enough.

Events in Egypt are now officially happening Too Fast to Blog About While Egyptians are Still Awake. 

Sooo... in the meantime, I have a review of George Friedman's The Next Decade:  Where We've Been... and Where We're Going  in the latest issue of Texas Monthly.  Friedman is the founder and CEO of Stratfor, which is based in Austin, Texas. 

Here's how the review opens and closes:

As a rule, those who predict the future of world events should be viewed the same way Hermione Granger viewed Hogwarts’s divination classes—with unremitting skepticism. Social scientists may have something to offer in the way of explanation or short-term speculation, but there are serious limits to any kind of global soothsaying. World politics are simply too complex to forecast anything precisely in the medium term; it’s like asking a meteorologist to predict the weather a decade from now....

Perhaps I exaggerated Hermione’s skepticism of divination a bit. An otherwise stellar student, she was clearly frustrated that she was simply no good at it. Similarly, I should confess a smidgen of envy at Friedman’s conviction that he will be proved right about everything. Some writers are so sure of their beliefs that their assuredness has a viral quality, infecting the reader even if their logic fails. Friedman possesses that certainty in truckloads, and The Next Decade contains a few nuggets of insight as well. But make no mistake: Things will happen over the course of the next decade—and the next year and the next week—that will completely rock George Friedman’s world. (emphasis added)

Hey, are my predictive powers amazing or what??!!  OK, those predictive powers were really the result of an excellent editor at Texas Monthly, but you get the idea. 

I believe you can read the whole thing.  Incidentally, his key insight into Egypt comes on page 92:  "Even if the secular Nasserite regime fell, it would be a generation before Egypt could be a threat, and then only if it gained the patronage of a major power."  Ah, that explains why Israel is handling these events so calmly.  Oh, wait...

For a fun exercise, see if Friedman's current analysis jibes with how he predicts the next decade. 

Your humble blogger has a very long day-job to-do list the first half of this week.  Still I can't resist not linking to this John Sides post from The Monkey Cage about why there's been a decline in  in trust in government. 

There was a secular decline in trust in government that levelled off after the Vietnam War started winding down.  Since then?  It's the economy, stupid: 

What drives the trend in political trust? By and large, it is the economy. People trust government when times are good. They don’t trust it when times are bad. For the presidential election years from 1964-2008, I merged the trust measure with the change in per capita disposable income, courtesy of Douglas Hibbs. Here is the relationship between trust and the economy:

The relationship is striking. The economy explains about 75% of the variance in trust. If you delete 1964, which looks like a potential outlier, the economy still explains 73% of the variance.

Of course the economy is not the only important factor. But it gets far less attention than it deserves when the hand-wringing begins.

I suspect it gets less attention because its a structural factor that is largely beyond the control of politicians.  It's also boring.  It's like a diet guru simply saing "eat less and exercise more" when asked what the trendy explanation is for how to lose weight. 

I wonder how generalizable the relationship is between trust and the economy.  For example, would a booming economy make Americans more likely to trust business, the academy, and other institutions?  Would it make Americans more likely to accept the evidence for global warming? 

What do you think?

Maureen Dowd has a column today entitled "Stung by the Perfect Sting."  We're going to run much of this column through a little MoDo translator, partially inspired by Josh Chafetz's still-relevant discussion of the Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd, and helped by a few other bloggers. 

Here we go....

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

Translation:  "I read everything about me on the Interwebs.  Everything.  And despite my bravado act, it hurts me sometimes.  I'm brave for putting up with it, though.  Ah, the first graf and I've already checked off the Fourth Immutable Law of Dowd:  'The particulars of my consumer-driven, self-involved life are of universal interest and reveal universal truths.' 

Say, the militia crack was pretty funny, right?  Right?"

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Translation: "You know how, later on in this essay, I say that insulting individuals on the Internet is rude? That's only if you do it badly. If you insult broad swathes of people in a charming manner, that's just witty banter." 

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Translation: "Hah!  Less than a third of the way through, and I've already checked off the First Immutable Law of Dowd: 'All political phenomena can be reduced to caricatures of the personalities involved.' Suck on that, Tom Friedman!!" 

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

Translation: "Did you like how I subtly compared the physical attacker to the blogger? That was pretty deft of me, right?" 

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.

“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Translation: "A judge is on my side!  I'm going to quote her at length!"

[Side note here:  will individuals also be able to sue those who write anonymously about them on bathroom walls soon?--DD]

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

Translation:  "I bet no one knew about this phenomenon before I discovered it today.  God, my insights into this -- some anonymous blogging is good, some bad -- are really stunning." 

Dowd conveniently ignores a few important facts. First, there are power disparities going on here. If, say, the New York Times published a story calling Cohen a "skank," I can see the need for a lawsuit. Same thing if the Huffington Post had done it. But who the hell read this post before the lawsuit commanded everyon'es attention? As Laura McKenna puts it:

This just feels like a lot of whining to me. If you're on the opinion page of the New York Times, you have to be able to take the heat. It's part of the game. If you're not up for it, then I've got a waitress job for you.

Second, in Dowd's closing grafs she manages to conflate and tar all anonymous commentary because some act rudely on the Internet. This is the functional equivalent of me saying that because George Will is occasionally shoddy with his fact-checking, the entire op-ed profession is worthless and slanderous. Attacking an entire medium because of what some individuals are doing seems logically incoherent to me -- and yet far too many media commentators do this when talking about the blogosphere. 

In my experience, anonymous or not, the quality of one's insights and shrewdness of one's observations are the things that tend to push a blogger up through the ranks. 

If only that were still true of New York Times columnists. 

UPDATE: For more on the legal intricacies of the motivating case, see this Dan Solove post. 

Though I've been obsessed interested in the topic of a policy-relevant academy, I was reluctant to respond to Mark C. Taylor's op-ed in the New York Times on this topic because of a fear of personal bias.  Taylor was a professor at Williams College when I was an undergraduate.  I took a course called Religion and Modern Secularism there, which assigned Taylor's book Erring:  A Postmodern A/theology.  I found Taylor's application of deconstructionist thought to theology to be completely inpenetrable somewhat difficult to absorb.  So my first thought when I read Taylor's plea for interdisciplinarity and accessibility in the academy to be along the lines of, "Great, 20 years late and $17 short." 

Because Taylor's op-ed contains such a unique combination of useful ideas and complete and utter silliness not-so-useful ideas, however, a lot of people are talking about it. 

Part of the problem lies in Taylor's inexact writing.  Let's "deconstruct" it a bit, shall we?  Here's how he opens the op-ed:   

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

See, with the $100,000 line, you'd think Taylor is talking about either professional schools or undergraduate degrees, but I don't think that's right.  He's talking about doctoral programs.  And, at this point, while graduate students in doctoral programs might earn meager to no stipends, the only debt they accumulate comes through living expenses.  Say what you will about the job market for Ph.D.s, but at this point, the only way for a Ph.D. student to rack up a hundred grand in debt is to develop some serious gambling and drug problems while procrastinating (grad students of the world, feel free to disabuse me of this notion in the comments). 

Similarly, the Detroit analogy implies that America's Ph.D. programs are somehow uncompetitive vis-à-vis foreign Ph.D. programs.  This is patently false.  Indeed, American higher education continues to outperform other university systems in attracting foreign students.  So, again, inexact language muddies the waters.  See TNR's David Bell for more on this point. 

Taylor goes on to criticize my own field: 

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems.

Methinks Taylor is exaggerating the role that the humanities can play in problem-solving.  That said, I have little problem with interdisciplinariy.  Last I checked, however, neither do most policy schools.   

Taylor makes some other concrete proposals - let's run through them:

1.  "Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs."  I partially agree with the first point.  I'm all in favor of encouaging Ph.D. students to take courses that overlap with their substantive interests but might be outside their department.  As for undergraduate programs, well, that's just silly.  Undergrads have majors, not specialties -- they're quite capable of diversifying their own corsework, thank you very much. 

2.  "Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs."  Among the "problem-focused programs" he suggests are, "Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water." 

Hey, this is a fun idea -- let's try to come up with other one-word concentrations!

• Power 
• Earth
• Love
• Mud
• Chocolate
• Nothing
• Puppies!

Let's be clear -- this idea is crap.  Utter, complete, ridiculous crap.  There are plenty of interdisciplinary majors, and more are being created as new problems arise.  Taylor's topics are so silly that I began to wonder if he was purposefully self-sabotaging here.   

3.  "Increase collaboration among institutions."  Taylor implies here that universities could specialize, promoting learning "through teleconferencing and the Internet."  At this point, I think it would behoove Taylor to chat with some of the people who study the relationship between computers and education.  Long story short, distance learning has some serious constraints.

4.  "Transform the traditional dissertation." Into something with "analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games."  Note to Fletcher Ph.D. students:  don't even think of trying to argue that your blog can substitute for a dissertation.  Not gonna happen.   

5.  "Expand the range of professional options for graduate students."  This is a good idea.  Seriously.  No mockery on this point. 

6.  "Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure."  You know how Democrats/Republicans were convinced that regulating money/imposing term limits would improve democracy?  That's kind of like this proposal.  It's not going to happen, but even if it did, tenure would re-emerge in a different form. 

To sum up:  this is a mostly silly, badly written op-ed that seems designed to provoke peals of laughter in order to scuttle the few good ideas contained in it. 

A few more academic reactions to Joe Nye's essay (click here for Part I, and here for Part II). 

First, a response from... well, let's call him/her "Political Scientist X," as this person wishes to remain anonymous.  I can confirm that Political Scientist X has worked in both the academic and policy communities, and is well-versed in the kind of academic analysis that appeals to policymakers: 

In my experience, rigor is a big selling point [to policymakers] It's what differentiates knowledge from conjecture and speculation, and many analysts and policy-makers are sensitive to that distinction. I think the real problem is that those analysts and policy-makers don't have the time to keep up with and consider the implications of the good work that's out there, because they are always so busy answering today's mail.

That said, I do agree with Dr. Nye that academia could and should put more effort into reaching out to and staying connected with the policy world. Scholars interested in shaping policy shouldn't wait for government to call; they should take time to write and talk about the policy implications of their work, and more journals and publishers should encourage them to do so.

Moreover, these implications have to be made explicit. It's not enough to write about something that's current and leave it to the policy people to figure out how to use the findings. Academics who want to shape policy also have to do the heavy lifting of saying what they think their research says about real policy choices. There's an obvious risk in doing that of being wrong in public or bearing some responsibility for the consequences of the policies that ensue. But the policy people have to take those risks every day, so why can't the scholars who want to influence policy shoulder a little more of the burden?

Another blog post response from James Walsh that's worth a look.  His closing paragraph: 

Policy relevance is important. But do we really want the academy stuffed with people who are up to date on the latest developments in country x? No. That's what think tanks and CIAs are for. We (by which I mean I, of course) want an academy with people that are interested in the bigger causes and consequences, and are trained to think about these things in a systematic way. How come? One of the best ways that academics can be policy relevant is to poke holes in dumb ideas. Every academic I know (bar one, and he was Canadian of all things) thought the invasion of Iraq was a dumb idea. They knew this based on their knowledge of the history of preventive war, positive theories about preventive war, and long thought about the normative implications of the use of force to make the world a better place. This is all stuff that gets downplayed in "policy circles," but if it was taken more seriously might at least prevent us from making the worst mistakes over and over again.

 

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.   

Major League Baseball starts in earnest today.  As longtime readers of this blog are aware, I am a diehard Red Sox fan.  They are playing in what everyone acknowledges to be the toughest division in baseball, with three teams -- the Sox, Rays and Yankees -- fully capable of winning a World Series this year. 

What will be odd, this time around, is that during this offseason the Red Sox did something really, really astonishing -- they followed a lot of the unsolicited recommendations I made 3 1/2 months ago (just to be clear, I'm arguing coincidence and not causation here). 

Still, this raises an existential question as a fan -- what happens if your team does almost exactly what you recommend they do, but they don't win?  Who can you blame then? 

[Um, what if they do win?--ed.  I'm a Red Sox fan.  Times have changed, but I can still go to the dark place.] 

Both the Hardball Times and Baseball Prospectus like these movies, so I'm hardly alone here.  When comparing the Red Sox to the Yankees and Rays, what strikes me about the Sox is the (on paper) relative strength of their bullpen, bench, and farm system.  Over a 162 game season, that has to count for something. 

Of course, no matter what Moneyball says, you don't play games on paper.  Play ball!!

Since I'm apparently picking on the New York Times op-ed page today, it's worth linking and quoting from George Packer's one-paragraph evisceration of how the Times' columnists have weathered the financial crisis: 

These days, it’s striking that the Times’s columnists seem unable to contend with the earthquake rolling under our feet. With the whole world undergoing a once-in-a-lifetime upheaval, the stars of the Op-Ed page have almost without exception fallen back on the comfort of well-worn stances and personality tics, which are the habitual danger of publishing one’s thoughts every week for years. Friedman, who knows a lot about economics but has too much faith in elites, calls for a summit of “the country’s 20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate,” as if these very individuals are not the main agents of the catastrophe. Dowd publishes a column of inadvertent self-parody whose subject is Michelle Obama’s arms, and whose sum total of reporting is a conversation in a Washington taxi with her fellow columnist David Brooks. Kristof continues to call necessary attention to chronic, less-noticed disasters, but he does it more and more by making himself the hero of a moral drama and, in a recent series of columns from Darfur, insulting his readers with the suggestion that they’re too shallow to read on unless he bribes them with celebrity gossip. Rich never challenges his own side, and the result is a weekly display of rhetorical bravura and cheap shots. Bob Herbert has one tone of voice, and as often as outrage is called for, it’s also tiresome. Only Brooks and Krugman seem to be registering the earthquake in a meaningful way, asking themselves difficult questions on a regular basis and struggling out in the open with the answers, which is why the page is at its best on Friday.

Indeed. 

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!!!

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Thomas P.M. Barnett is a wee bit nervous about the impending release of his book: 

I am not feeling very optimistic about the book's reception. I just don't sense any buzz. Maybe that's because I'm living in Indiana under a foot and a half of snow, but it does haunt me. Far more than passing kidney stones, I feel like waiting on a book release is like a woman waiting for labor--mostly it's dread and regret and the inability to get a decent night's sleep.

I know that's being self-absorbed, but--again--that's why it's like heading toward labor: there is this all-consuming sense of an onrush of something either very good or very bad and you have a hard time sensing the possibility of anything in between those two extremes.

As someone who is also waiting on a book to come out, I sympathize with Barnett's pain.  I suspect, however, that his agita is actually worse than a garden-variety book author. 

This has to do with the nature of book publishing and the state of the world.  When publishing a book, all international relations authors not named Bob Woodward must endure a 3-12 month window during which the book is copyedited, typeset, and then published.  During this period, an author can make limited changes to the text -- but nothing significant. 

This gap doesn't matter all that much -- unless, of course, one is writing about world politics in a time of flux.  In that case, authors feel like a hostage to current events.  And because of the financial crisis, I've read an awful lot of first chapters recently that seemed out of date the moment they were published. 

Christopher Beam has an entertaining story in Slate about the various backroom machinations TV bookers must undergo in order to get the right set of talking heads.  

There are some guests who simply refuse to go on the air with other particular people or with anyone at all. Likewise, there are some people who no one else wants to appear with. It's rarely discussed, because the bookers who mediate these ego wars are bound by contract—and their own interests—to keep quiet. And hosts rarely mention the snubs on-air, since they want guests to come back. But snubbing happens all the time, and conversations with bookers, producers, and guests reveal that some divas are especially notorious.

This part stood out for me: 

The biggest offenders are usually the ones whose egos are too big to accommodate any company: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Haig, and others who figure they have better uses for their time than debating some flack on the air. "They would only go on if they could do the show alone," says a former producer for Crossfire. "Brzezinski won't debase his cable currency by being a two-box," explained a current booker, referring to the practice of displaying guests on a split screen. Another booker cited Brzezinski's refusal to go on with Pat Buchanan—"probably because he thinks he's an anti-Semite." (An assistant to Brzezinski says: "It isn't true that he will only appear alone. He has appeared many, many times with other guests." Maybe so. But bookers say he doesn't do so willingly.)

Here's a piece of advice to TV bookers -- surprise these mooseheads with another guest just before they're going to go on.  Why?  Because, in my experience, when mooseheads at the Kissinger-Brzezinski level are alllowed to pontificate at will, they are unbelievably boring and rote.  On the other hand, they are at their best precisely when they are challenged by someone.  Maybe they get riled up at having their authority questioned, or maybe they want to smack down the young whippersnapper tring to unseat the Pundit King.  All I know is, when they are poked and prodded, the analytical sharpness that got them to their exalted position comes out, and then the fun starts.  I've seen this in person -- but Josh Marshall David Kurtz captures an example of this on video.  Zbigniew Brzezinski doesn't like it when he's challenged on the Middle East -- watch what happens: 

 

Oh, and it makes for good TV -- though in this case it has the added frisson of Mika Brzezinski's uncomfortable body language. 

Following up on my last post, a good source of comedy reading this holiday season will be the various prognostications and predictions made in the past year that now seem foolish.  One could blame the prognosticators for being fools, and in some cases that's true.  In other instances, however, it's just what people see as rational extrapolation from the past.  Just to pick an example out of a hat, here's what the McKinsey Global Institute wrote in June of this year: 

Four new power brokers—Asian sovereign investors, petrodollars, hedge funds, and private equity firms—are having a growing impact on global capital markets. In this update to a 2007 report, MGI examines how the new power brokers have fared since then, during the turmoil of skyrocketing oil prices, evaporating liquidity, and disappearing leverage.

MGI finds that the financial and economic events since mid-2007 have, if anything, accelerated the trends identified earlier: The power brokers' wealth and clout have grown. They have adapted by expanding their investment strategies. And they have increased the use of private financing as an alternative to public markets. Their actions have brought clear benefits in containing the financial market crisis but also have highlighted the risks associated with their rise....

Despite the financial crisis, MGI projects that the power brokers will continue to grow in wealth and clout. Under a conservative, base–case scenario, their combined assets will grow to $21 trillion (excluding overlap between them) by 2013. If, instead, they grow more briskly, at their 2000 to 2007 pace, their wealth would rise to $31 trillion, equivalent to roughly 60 percent the expected size of global pension funds or mutual funds in 2013.

The rapid rise of the new power brokers also poses potential risks. The report examines four main concerns: that the additional liquidity might foster asset price inflation; that state investors might use their wealth for political purposes; that hedge fund failures might destabilize the financial system; and that private equity firms' heavy leverage might increase credit defaults. MGI concludes these concerns remain on the table and justify careful consideration and monitoring. But overall, the rise of these new power brokers has been largely beneficial to global capital markets.

The possibility of hedge funds destabilizing the system certainly remains in play, but most of the rest of this looks pretty silly.  Of MGI's four new power brokers, only Asian sovereign investors still look like their power will be growing. 

I really don't mean to pick on McKinsey.  In fact, readers are strongly encouraged to comb through the archives of danieldrezner.com to see what I got wrong.  Here's my prediction post from the end of last year -- I only batted .500, but I do think I got the big things right.