punditry

[T]he "global community" didn't honor the American President; five Norwegians did.

Glenn Greenwald, "Accusing Obama critics of 'standing with the terrorists,'" October 10, 2009

It's not clear to me (the committee) speaks for the world. It speaks for five Norwegians.

William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, October 11, 2009. 

I'm not sure what scares me more:  Kristol and Greenwald agreeing with each other... or me agreeing with both of them at the same time. 

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. 

Philip Tetlock has a must-read review essay on political forecasting in the latest issue of The National Interest.  Tetlock is the author of Expert Political Judgment, one of my all-time favorite books in political science. 

Tetlock reviews books by three political prognosticators: Stratfor's George Friedman (who has been mocked just a bit by your humble blogger), FP and Eurasia's Ian Bremmer (who has been panned just a bit by your humble blogger) and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (who was on your humble blogger's dissertation committee and is therefore the source of much Good and Light in the world). 

You'll have to read Tetlock's essay to get his assessment of all three books -- but I do like this one-paragraph summary: 

The authors are all entrepreneurial futurists, but each offers a strikingly distinctive approach to prediction. I organize these approaches under three headings: the superpundit model in which readers take it, more or less on faith, that the forecaster has a pipeline into the future not available to ordinary mortals (a category into which I place George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years); the technocratic-pluralism model in which the authors never get around to making falsifiable predictions of their own but do offer readers a pretty comprehensive survey of forecasting mistakes and an inventory of tools for avoiding them (a category into which I place Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat’s The Fat Tail); and the scientific-reductionist model in which the author embraces a particular theory from the social sciences and shows how, if you apply that theory thoughtfully to real-world contexts, you can derive surprisingly accurate forecasts (a category into which I place Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s The Predictioneer’s Game).

What I found more intriguing was Tetlock's formulation for how to use pundits:

The best thing I can say for the superpundit model is likely to annoy virtually all of that ilk: they look a lot better when we blend them into a superpundit composite. Aggregation helps. As financial journalist James Surowiecki stressed in his insightful book The Wisdom of Crowds, if you average the predictions of many pundits, that average will typically outperform the individual predictions of the pundits from whom the averages were derived. This might sound magical, but averaging works when two fairly easily satisfied conditions are met: (1) the experts are mostly wrong, but they are wrong in different ways that tend to cancel out when you average; (2) the experts are right about some things, but they are right in partly overlapping ways that are amplified by averaging. Averaging improves the signal-to-noise ratio in a very noisy world.... From this perspective, if you want to improve your odds, you are better-off betting not on George Friedman but rather on a basket of averaged-out predictions from a broad ideological portfolio of George Friedman–style pundits. Diversification helps.

I wonder if such an exercise would actually work.  One of the accusations levied against the foreign policy community is that because they only talk to and read each other, they all generate the same blinkered analysis.  I'm not sure that's true, but it would be worth conducting this experiment to see whether a Village of Pundits does a better job than a single pundit. 

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. 

Part IV of a continuing series on the relationship between international relations scholars and policymakers (click here, here, and here for prior posts). 

William Easterly is not a political scientist, but he's a pretty good social scientist, so he gets a turn at FP's Speaker Corner: 

I think academic social scientists have had TOO MUCH influence on one policy area -- military intervention (with sub-branches Spreading Democracy, Peacekeeping, and Fixing Failed States, formerly known as Nation Building). Economists have used shoddy econometrics and shallow analysis to justify such interventions, while political scientists seem to climb on board for reasons that I don't entirely fathom. Military intervention is such a drastic intervention that the burden of proof lies on those who advocate it, and social scientists have done a lousy job bearing that burden -- not surprising since military stuff is so far away from the traditional areas of knowledge of social science. The politicians and generals that wanted to intervene anyway are delighted to get the spurious cover offered by the amateur military analysts from the social sciences.

Incidentally, Easterly how has his own blog called Aid Watch, which is worth checking out -- particularly when he wrestles with God Jeffrey Sachs. 

[Why didn't you continue the Star Wars theme in this post?--ed.  Because nothing I could ever write, ever, could top this.]

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.

 

Joe Nye has clearly touched a nerve.  

There's been a lot of e-mail chatter among international relations professors about Nye's Washington Post op-ed arguing that IR scholars are cloister-bound and not policy relevant.

Some of these scholars have some interesting points/objections to make, but where oh where can they voice these points?   

Why, this very blog!  If you want to respond to Nye but don't want to set up your own blog about it, feel free to e-mail me your response for publication here.  Assuming your response meets my personal standard of propriety (i.e., you don't personally insult Nye, myself, or Salma Hayek) I will publish it in the hallowed... er... website of Foreign Policy.  [Can a website be hallowed?--ed.  I'm announcing that policy, yes.] 

Without further ado, here's the first response, from Georgetown University's Raj M. Desai and James Raymond Vreeland: 

Coaching from the Sidelines

Professor Joseph Nye ("Scholars on the Sidelines"), who has a well-deserved reputation as both an eminent scholar of international relations and as a government official with experience in several previous administrations, laments a growing gap between academia and government. He asserts that the fault "lies not with the government but with the academics." This is unfair.

Nye complains about the methodological rigor in contemporary political science as an impediment to its relevance. This is ironic, given that it is precisely this rigor that has allowed modern political science to improve its forecasting power - something that is presumably vital to policymaking. We now have better statistical tools to predict, for example, the likelihood of state failure, civil conflict, democratic breakdown, and other changes in governments. Game-theoretic models can be used to analyze trade disputes and war, as well as the behavior of international organizations, terrorist movements, and nuclear states with greater precision and clarity than just a few decades before.

In our classes, we give students assignments designed to bridge what they learn in the classroom to the real world. There is certainly a connection, and our job is to teach our students to see it. We hope such a pedagogy is in the spirit of what Nye calls for, but we find his piece frustrating as he implies that such endeavors are fruitless because contemporary political science has nothing to say to the broader audience. This is just not true.

Nye is correct that much of this analysis does not get translated into policymaking. There is surely something to be said for the failure of some scholars to disseminate their research more broadly, and he is also right that academia does not provide strong incentives to do so. But a part of this fault may also lie within the halls of certain government agencies. Nye also points to a strong connection between economists and policy makers. No wonder. Staffers at the US Treasury, the Fed, the National Economic Council (to name a few places) are comfortable reading cutting-edge economic analyses because they have been trained to understand mathematical models and statistical results. If people at the State Department or the National Security Council have not been comparably trained, however, they will not understand contemporary political science or its capacity to inform policy. Academic political science can do a much better job of reaching out to policymakers. But governmental agencies need to focus some effort on recruiting individuals who have the background and skills needed to apply modern political science to their daily work. Both sides need to make an effort.

Raj M. Desai and James Raymond Vreeland
Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service
Georgetown University

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.