Six weeks ago I discussed -- as a dispassionate political scientist -- why the field of political science was good and truly f**ked when it came to Congress. Yesterday, Dave Weigel blogged about this at more length. The depressing parts version:

Attacking government-funded social science is popular, especially on the right. Last week, Texas Republican Rep. Ted Poe and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul introduced a bill that would change the American Community Survey, sent annually to a random selection of 3.2 million people, from mandatory to optional. If Americans didn’t want to fill it out, even if that would render it mostly useless as data, the private sector would do just fine.

When I asked Poe to explain how that information would be collected without the Community Survey, he said, “There are other ways to get the same information about the dynamics of business, and where to locate a business. You can do it through polling. You don’t have to force people to participate.”

Social scientists don’t agree, but it’s difficult for them to justify their own funding in a time of severe government cutbacks....

The new attempts to claw away at research have gone on for months, and the academics haven’t put up a compelling defense beyond one event on the Hill and the yeoman blogging of some professors like John Sides. “Going forward,” Sides wrote after Coburn’s win, “a coordinated lobbying effort is needed not only to roll back the restrictions on political science but to defend the NSF’s core mission as a promoter of scientific research in the public good, broadly defined.”

So far that lobbying effort doesn’t exist. Instead, Republicans are able to challenge NSF funding in order to pursue long-term political goals without too many people noticing.

To understand further why this will be so difficult, let's go to the video clip of the week, which right now is probably the revenge fantasy of every political scientist out there. Via the Military Times, this is General Ray Odierno chewing out House Representative Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), with the bemused permission of Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon. The chewing out part starts at around 3:30.  

Now, watching that clip, it's hard not to conclude that Hunter was taken to the woodshed by Odierno for being an ignorant jackass. That's certainly the conclusion that Gawker, Mediaite, and others came to in promoting the clip. 

Now, here's a fun exercise  -- what if Odierno had been an irate political scientist rather than a four-star general? I guarantee you that the exchange would have been framed and interpreted differently. Because of the high public respect for the military, when Odierno goes off, people will listen. Not so with academics. Instead of "General smacks down House representative," the headline would have looked more like "Snotty academic preens at elected official." 

In fact, we don't need to imagine. Remember this little exchange between House Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) and historian Douglas Brinkley from about 18 months ago? 

Now, Don Young has all the charisma and grace of a three-month old carton of milk. He's far more insulting and contemptuous of Brinkley in that clip than Duncan Hunter was in trying to walk away from Odierno. The overall effect, however, is different. First, Young's chairman, Doc Hastings, protected Young in a way that McKeon did not protect Hunter, thereby preventing Brinkley from going on a rant. 

Second, however, as bad as Young looks in that video, Brinkley doesn't look that much better. He comes off too much like a preening, stuffed-shirt academic. 

Unfortunately, that's an occupational hazard. We're trained in graduate school to eviscerate counterarguments and the people who make them. It might be the one sector in the world where Aaron Sorkin-rules of debate hold up. But it only works because everyone in the seminar room or lecture hall understands the context of the debate. That rarely happens when the public peeks in at a YouTube clip of a congressional hearing. 

Are there some political scientists who could pull off an Odierno-level smackdown? I suppose it's possible, but I confess to being dubious about its likelihood (suggestions welcomed in the comments section please).   

Now, as a political scientist, I should warn you that viral-video-friendly exchanges like the ones linked above rarely shift public opinion. They are one way to frame the stupidity of a particular Congressional jihad, however. And as much as I might fantasize about a Beth Simmons or a Scott Sagan sticking it to Tom Coburn, I'm not confident that it will ever happen. 

Am I missing anything? Please tell me I'm missing something...

UPDATE:  I received a call in the last hour from Representative Duncan Hunter's deputy chief of staff, who lodged a polite protest over the descriptive term "ignorant jackass," referencing this Politico story.  Which is fair enough, but this exchange suggests two things: 

1)  The staffer didn't read the blog post carefully, because I was using that term to describe how the video made Hunter look -- not whether that depiction was accurate or not. 

2)  Maybe political scientists blogging/writing for the press actually do have an effect on member of Congress. 

The George W. Bush presidential library is having its coming-out party this week. Five years after the end of the Bush administration, it's about time for a push to recalibrate our historical understanding of George W. Bush's legacy. In the Washington Post, Stephen Knott argues that the professional historians have it in for W., and that time will may vindicate his legacy:

In their hasty, partisan-tinged assessments of Bush, far too many scholars breached their professional obligations, engaging in a form of scholarly malpractice, by failing to do what historians are trained to do before pronouncing judgment on a presidency: conduct tedious archival research, undertake oral history interviews, plow through memoirs, interview foreign leaders and wait for the release of classified information.

There is a difference between punditry and scholarship. The latter requires biding one’s time and offering perspective as the evidence emerges and the passions of the day cool. An assessment of Harry Truman’s presidency looks quite different today than it did immediately after he left the White House in 1953. And no historian, especially Schlesinger, would have predicted in 1961 that 21st-century scholars would rank Dwight Eisenhower among the nation’s greatest presidents.

George W. Bush’s low standing among academics reflects, in part, the rise of partisan scholarship: the use of history as ideology and as a political weapon, which means the corruption of history as history. Bush may not have been a great president; he may even be considered an average or below-average president, but he and — more important — the nation deserve better than this partisan rush to judgment.

Meanwhile, over at the National Journal, Tom DeFrank details how the Bush library, and Bush himself, will push back against this historical bias:

This week’s two days of festivities on the campus of Southern Methodist University, Laura Bush’s alma mater, mark his somewhat reluctant re-emergence into the national spotlight since leaving Washington in 2009. President Obama and the three living Presidents will join 15,000 guests to celebrate the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

The center comprises a Presidential library housing 43,000 artifacts and millions of documents from the eight years of 43’s tenure. The adjoining think tank, informally known as the “freedom institute,” will preach the gospel of Bush’s conservative vision to future generations.

The institute is also designed by Bush as the vehicle to rehab and burnish his legacy with future historians and posterity....

While time is known to heal some wounds and Presidential legacies, money doesn't hurt, either. The institute is bulging with cash, allowing its board to hire like-minded academics and pay some executives more than $650,000 a year....

“As time goes by Bush will benefit from the comparison with Obama,” Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford’s Hoover Institution predicted. “If Obama had been a Bill Clinton-like figure he would have made Bush look like the caricature his opponents have suggested. But Obama has been a great gift for Bush - he’s as polarizing a figure as Bush was.”

OK, so, a few things:

1) The moment you trot out someone as partisan as Victor Davis Hanson to claim that Bush's legacy will outshine Obama's, you've abandoned the argument that Bush is merely the victim of partisan historians.   

2) It's good to know that those shameful historians who abandoned dispassionate analysis in favor of a partisan agenda will overwhelmed by the forces for good -- namely, a $500 million wad of cash. And I, for one, look forward to future Knott op-eds praising the nobility of historians who suckled on this teat as paragons of unbiased scholarship. 

3) That Truman analogy that Knott uses? Yeah, as Amy Zegart discussed back in 2008, that dog won't hunt.

4) Five years later, is there any dimension of George W. Bush's legacy that will improve with time? Actually, I think the answer is yes on a few fronts. 

First, he's been a great ex-president. For such a polarizing political figure, it's remarkable at how successfully Bush has receded into private life. Lest you think that this was his only option, let me introduce you to Dick Cheney's post-vice-presidential path. 

Second, ironically, Bush's legacy will be a bit more buoyant because the quality of post-Bush GOP thinking on foreign policy has been so piss-poor that Bush really does look good by comparison. It is worth remembering that, for all of the criticisms of Bush's foreign policy rhetoric, he kept anti-Muslim hysteria somewhat in check. He boosted foreign aid through PEPFAR, which might be his most significant foreign policy legacy. And the Bush foreign policy of 2008 looked dramatically different from the Bush foreign policy of 2003, which suggests some degree of adaptation and learning. 

Third, the performance of Bush's economic team in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis probably deserves more credit than it gets. Despite being a wildly unpopular lame-duck president, Bush still was able to implement a series of international moves (convening the G-20 rather than the G-8) and domestic moves (TARP, the auto bailout) that prevented the crisis from metastasizing into another Great Depression. 

All that said, however, there are some cold hard facts that cannot be erased. George W. Bush helmed a war of choice that proved, in the end, to impose powerful constraints (though perhaps not system-changing) for American foreign policy. He pursued his foreign policy aims in such a way as to dramatically lower U.S. standing abroad. He was at the helm when all of the pressures that triggered the 2008 financial crisis were building up and did next to nothing to stop them. And five years later, the GOP is still wrestling with the negative aspects of his political legacy. 

At best, George W. Bush was a well-meaning man who gave the occasional nice speech and was thoroughly overmatched by events. At worst, he was the most disastrous foreign policy president of the post-1945 era. 

Am I missing anything?

Yesterday an amendment to the continuing resolution funding the U.S. government, sponsored by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was passed by a voice vote in the Senate. Its purpose? 

To prohibit the use of funds to carry out the functions of the Political Science Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation, except for research projects that the Director of the National Science Foundation certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.

Now, from a pure material interest perspective, this should make me happy. I've never received a dime in NSF funding, and I'm sitting on a pretty good grant for the next 5-10 years, so from a strictly relative gains perspective, I acquire more influece in the discipline. Furthermore, the national security exemption means that whatever scraps the NSF throws to political science will go to my preferred subfields like international relations and comparative politics. 

The thing is, though, that I love political science. I want to see more quality research being done, and the NSF cutoff pushes things in the opposite direction. So I'm not happy. 

If I'm displeased, however, then I think it's safe to say that the American Political Science Association is galactically pissed off at this outcome: 

Adoption of this amendment is a gross intrusion into the widely-respected, independent scholarly agenda setting process at NSF that has supported our world-class national science enterprise for over sixty years.

The amendment creates an exceptionally dangerous slippery slope. While political science research is most immediately affected, at risk is any and all research in any and all disciplines funded by the NSF. The amendment makes all scientific research vulnerable to the whims of political pressure. 

Adoption of this amendment demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the breadth and importance of political science research for the national interest and its integral place on the nation's interdisciplinary scientific research agenda. 

Singling out any one field of science is short-sighted and misguided, and poses a serious threat to the independence and integrity of the National Science Foundation.

And shackling political science within the national science agenda is a remarkable embarrassment for the world's exemplary democracy.

I've blogged at length in the past on the substantive reasons why a cutoff of NSF funds for political science is really, really, stupid. Another post on that question won't change things. And I vented my frustration at the willful ignorance of Senator Coburn yesterday, so there's no reason to go there now. Yesterday, however, there was rollicking debate on Twitter about the need for political scientists to, well, be better at politics. Folks such as Phil Arena, Jay Ulfelder, William Winecoff, and Jacob Levy observed that APSA's tactical response to Coburn's folly -- encouraging APSA members to email Congress and so forth -- was pretty lame. Only if we used the Dark Arts of political science knowledge could we somehow stymie the Senator from Oklahoma. 

Here's the thing, though -- while I'm no expert in American politics, I think I know enough of the Dark Arts to know that we could have the best arguments in the world and still recognize that political science is good and truly f**ked. 

From a straight interest group perspective political scientists don't matter. At all. The NSF funding for political science is a $13 million appropriation spread out geographically. There is no concentrated interest in a particular congressional district or state to motivate a member of Congress to fight for this issue with as much ardor as Tom Coburn or Jeff Flake. 

Now, one could argue that if you believe in epistemic communities -- i.e., the power of collective expertise -- to influence uninformed members of Congress, then maybe political scientists could function as Weberian activists and educate members about the inherent value of political science. The thing is, as I've argued previously, politicians and pundits do not think of politics as a scientific enterprise. Maybe a few pundits developed a new appreciaion for statistics following the 2012 election, but that's not quite the same thing. So an epistemic community of political scientists won't cut it. Hell, all social scientists would be unlikely to persuade the Senate -- remember, this is a body that was copacetic with a Senator blocking a Nobel Prize winning economist from sitting on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Maybe we could logroll with all  the natural and physical sciences too, but if the past decade of climate change policy has proven anything, it's that this won't work terribly well. 

Another gambit would be to move public opinion on this issue to the point where Congress had no choice but to accede to the masses ... except the masses likely support the cuts. A mass public that believes the foreign aid budget is a thousand times larger than it actually is likely believes that cutting NSF funding of political science goes a long way toward tackling the deficit. Furthermore, as Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler's research shows, it's next to impossible to correct that misperception. 

There are three other ways for political scientists to alter the status quo -- but each of them has issues: 

1) A political scientist needs to come up with a killer scientific breakthrough that really advances knowledge in the field in an unambiguous manner. We're talking something Nobel-worthy. Oh, wait, Elinor Ostrom already did that, and it didn't matter. Never mind...

2) A political scientist needs to develop a predictive model that's so powerful that it yields substantial profit -- to the point where the political scientists can afford to set up an endowment that substitutes for NSF funding. The thing is, there already are political scientists who have thrived in the private sector -- but I'm not seeing enough cabbage being earned to create endowments. 

3) Finally, maybe a trained political scientist could just run for the Senate, get elected, and apply the necessary counterweight to Coburn et al ... except that one of Coburn's co-sponsors is Arizona freshman Senator Jeff Flake, who has -- wait for it -- an M.A. in political science. 

Am I missing anything, or is political science good and truly f**ked? 

UPDATE: OK, there's one other possibility that could theoretically shift the status quo. Suppose a rival great power -- say, a country that rhymes with "Dinah" -- were to suddenly throw around huge research $$$ to develop a comparative advantage in poli sci. Say that the money was so good that it started to attract the cream of the political science crop. That might spur Congress to freak out about the existence of a political science gap. 

So, any political scientists sitting on fat research offers from China -- now is the time to accept them. 

One of the lasting effects of the 2008 financial crisis was the belief that the distribution of economic power had radically shifted. China rising, West fading, yadda, yadda, yadda. A minor key in this argument has been the notion that a new and important measure of economic power is the size of a country's official reserves. This has led to the occasional panicked article that "China is buying gold!!" or "Russia is hoarding gold!!" or "Germany is moving gold!!" as a first step towards pushing the dollar out as the world's reserve currency. 

Which is just so much horses**t. 

Here are three facts to remember whenever you read any story about a BRIC economy hoarding gold: 

1) Buying gold would have been extremely savvy in 2008. Now it's just silly. The price of gold peaked at over $1900 in September 2011 -- and despite massive amounts of quantitative easing and numerous reports about central bank hoarding, it's fallen by $300 since and trending downward.

2) The BRIC economies did not have a lot of gold to begin with. As Bloomberg notes, "Russia’s total cache of about 958 tons is only the eighth largest [in the world]." 

3)  So who does have the largest reserves of gold?  Real Clear World posts the latest World Gold Council report. The biggest holders of gold are: 

1. The United States (8,134 tons)

2. Germany (3,391 tons)

3. The International Monetary Fund (2,814 tons)

4. Italy (2,451 tons)

5. France (2,435 tons)

So, to sum up: To believe that gold holdings really matter in the global political economy, you have to be willing to assert that Italy is a great power in global finance. I, for one, am not going there. 

Dear New York Times:

As the paper of record, your op-ed page is a natural target for snark, derision, and other forms of criticism.  I'll certainly plead guilty to these venial sins. I've found flaws in more than a few of your columnist's writings on foreign affairs.  Thomas Friedman, in particular, has invited a fair measure of scorn from your correspondent over the years -- though I'd note that I'm hardly the only one guilty of that sin.  Let me stipulate that I have no doubt that Mr. Friedman can polish off an accessible 800 word column on foreign affairs better than 99.5% of the foreign policy community.  And Friedman has locked down a certain Greatest Generation demographic, the one that emails their children with Ph.D.s in political science to say "Tom Friedman said something interesting in his column today.  You should read it." 

Friedman's prose style invites a certain kind of satire, which is occasionally unkind but pretty harmless.  I write now, however, because in his latest column he has migrated from the merely foolish to the ill-considered and dangerous.  This is his advice to incoming Secretary of State John Kerry:

[W]hat’s a secretary of state to do? I’d suggest trying something radically new: creating the conditions for diplomacy where they do not now exist by going around leaders and directly to the people. And I’d start with Iran, Israel and Palestine. We live in an age of social networks in which every leader outside of North Korea today is now forced to engage in a two-way conversation with their citizens. There’s no more just top-down. People everywhere are finding their voices and leaders are terrified. We need to turn this to our advantage to gain leverage in diplomacy.

Let’s break all the rules.

Rather than negotiating with Iran’s leaders in secret — which, so far, has produced nothing and allows the Iranian leaders to control the narrative and tell their people that they’re suffering sanctions because of U.S. intransigence — why not negotiate with the Iranian people? President Obama should put a simple offer on the table, in Farsi, for all Iranians to see: The U.S. and its allies will permit Iran to maintain a civil nuclear enrichment capability — which it claims is all it wants to meet power needs — provided it agrees to U.N. observers and restrictions that would prevent Tehran from ever assembling a nuclear bomb. We should not only make this offer public, but also say to the Iranian people over and over: “The only reason your currency is being crushed, your savings rapidly eroded by inflation, many of your college graduates unemployed and your global trade impeded and the risk of war hanging overhead, is because your leaders won’t accept a deal that would allow Iran to develop civil nuclear power but not a bomb.” Iran wants its people to think it has no partner for a civil nuclear deal. The U.S. can prove otherwise.  

He goes on to talk about Israel/Palestine, but let's keep the focus on Iran.  To put it kindly, there are some serious problems with Friedman's advice.  In no particular order: 

1)  There are many possible Secretaries of State who possess the necessary charisma, drive, and rhetorical skills to resonate with the ordinary citizens of other countries.  I think we can all safely agree that, capable as he might be,  John Kerry is not one of those diplomats. 

2)  Why not "negotiate with the Iranian people?"  Well, to get technical about it, they're not the ones controlling Iran's nuclear program.  That's not a minor issue.  For all this talk about how states are irrelevant in the 21st century, on matters of hard security not much has changed.  Lest Friedman or anyone else doubt this, recall that the Iranian state has proven itself more than capable of suppressing the Iranian people over the past four years.  Why Friedman thinks that the Ayatollah Khamenei would listen to ordinary Iranians on the nuclear question is beyond me. 

3)  Friedman seems to think that ordinary Iranians are implacably opposed to the nuclear program.  I have yet to read any analysis or on-the-ground reporting (including the NYT) that suggests this to be true.  Rather, the common theme is that Iranians take nationalist pride in the technological accomplishments of their national nuclear program.  Furthermore, in a propaganda war between the U.S. government and their own government, the U.S. is probably gonna lose even if it possesses the better argument.  For all of Friedman's loose talk about the power of social media in a digitized world, he elides the point that one of the sentiments that social media is best at magnifying is nationalism.  In the case of Iran, this would mean a more recalcitrant negotiating partner. 

4)  In the 35 years since the Iranian Revolution, and the 10+ years since Iran's nuclear program became a point of contention, is there any evidence that U.S. public diplomacy has had any positive effect in the country of Iran?  Any?  So why will it work now? 

5)  One last point.  Iran's regime has been obsessed with the belief that the United States is trying to foment a Velvet Revolution in the country.  They've been willing to arrest, repress, or harrass anyone vaguely associated with such a campaign.  Exactly how does Friedman think the government in Tehran would respond to the kind of public diplomacy initiative that he's suggesting? 

I could go on, but you see what I'm trying to say.  Friedman's "break all the rules" strategy is as transgressive as those dumb-ass Dr. Pepper commercials.  Worse, he's recommending a policy that would actually be counter-productive to any hope of reaching a deal with Iran.  This is the worst kind of "World is Flat" pablum, applied to nuclear diplomacy.  God forbid John Kerry were to read it and follow Friedman's advice. 

Sure, 99.5% of foreign policy wonks might write something less punchy, but I suspect most of them wouldn't write something so obviously wrong.  Friedman clearly needs a sabbatical from the rigors of column-writing to get his head back in the game.  In the interest of raising our country's foreign policy discourse, I beg you to put him on leave.

Sincerely,

Daniel W. Drezner

Your humble blogger was watching CNN late last night after the House of Representatives passed the fiscal cliff compromise, and was struck by the anchor's  Ali Velshi's complete and total disdain for what had just transpired.  He repeatedly said that this was, "an embarrassing moment for America," and that it was so frustrating because these wounds were self-inflicted.  This was surprising, since CNN is ostensibly the cable news netowrk that's the least partisan and most likely to maintain the detached, sonorous perspective that can only be incubated after prolonged exposure to Wolf Blitzer. 

Now I'm certainly not gonna defend what went down the past two months as the exemplar of Jeffersonian democracy or anything, but I do think some perspective is in order here.  The truth is that America's political institutions engage in self-destructive behavior on a fairly regular basis.  This holds even in the post-Vietnam era.  In the 1970s the country nearly tore itself apart because of Watergate.  In the 1980s it was Iran-Contra.  In the 1990s the federal government was shut down because Republicans and Democrats couldn't agree on the budget for a spell.  That was followed by the House of Representatives impeaching President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice.  In late 2000 the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling short-circuiting ballot recounts in Florida and making George W. Bush the next president using a legal logic that was so tortured that the Court said no one could ever use it again.  And last year U.S. debt was downgraded -- not because of any fundamental U.S. economic  weakness, but because of the U.S. political system.  All of these episodes were politically self-inficted wounds -- and the United States weathered all of them pretty easily.  Please bear this in mind the next time you read something about America going to hell. 

[But haven't things gotten worse?--ed.  Well, no, I think what's changed is that the Dems and the GOP are acting more like European parliamentary parties in a constitutional system that emphasizes the separation of powers.   That's a problem, and gerrymandering is exacerbating the situation.  But it's a situation that a few nonpartisan districting commissions would be able to solve.] 

Now, with this dose of perspective sauce, there also needs to be a recognition that elements of the United States have shifted in an ideological direction that makes them increasingly isolated in the world.  To see why, look at this Financial Times story by Hannah Kuchler on David Cameron's G8 priorities.  The salient part for this conversation:   

In a letter to the leaders, Mr Cameron said the world will continue to face “grave economic uncertainty” in 2013 but the rich countries must set “ambitious standards” to drive growth in their countries and across the globe.

The UK will push for action in three key areas: trade deals, including a potential EU-US trade agreement; measures to tackle tax evasion and open government; working with developing countries to fight corruption....

The British government has prioritised chasing tax evaders, with prosecutions for tax evasion up by 80 per cent and a treaty with Switzerland, its largest ever deal on tackling tax evasion. Mr Cameron wants to use the UK’s time at the top of the G8 to “galvanise collective international action”.

“We can lead the way in sharing information to tackle abuses of the system, including in developing countries, so that governments can collect taxes due to them,” he wrote in the letter. “We can work together to sign more countries up to international standards. And we can examine the case for strengthening those standards themselves.”

Now, international tax evasion has been an on-and-off G8 priority for the past 15 years, and there's actually been some progress on tax havens.  I guarantee you, however, that to the House GOP caucus this will look like some back-door globalist conspiracy by the Obama administration to raise taxes or enforce collection through jackbooted G8 thugs.  So anything that will require legislative approval ain't going anywhere.   

[Uh, isn't this kinda nuts?  Everyone knows that the G8 doesn't have any thugs, much less jackbooted ones!!--ed.  Yes, and everyone knows that Agenda 21 is a nonbinding plan of action for sustainable development, but that hasn't stopped a few deluded people from freaking  out about a U.N.-hatched global conspiracy.] 

So some things have changed, and for the time being there will be some issues on which legislative action is likely not gonna happen.  On the other hand -- much like Americans after New Years Eve parties -- the United States usually recovers from these bouts of temporary stupidity.  The federal government will muddle through, and I suspect even the 113th Congress will be interested in a U.S.-E.U. trade deal. 

Am I missing anything? 

I've blogged on occasion about the development of a sovereigntist lobby that reflexively opposes all treaties because they erode U.S. sovereignty.  For these people, any infringement on American sovereignty is a death blow to freedom, regardless of the benefits from joining.  This kind of reflexive opposition has caused even stalwart groups on the right to cringe in embarrassment. 

This hasn't slowed down the sovereigntists a bit, which led to a somewhat awkward day in the U.S. Senate: 

Former Senator Bob Dole of Kansas sat slightly slumped in his wheelchair on the Senate floor on Tuesday, staring intently as Senator John Kerry gave his most impassioned speech all year, in defense of a United Nations treaty that would ban discrimination against people with disabilities.

Senators from both parties went to greet Mr. Dole, leaning in to hear his wispy reply, as he sat in support of the treaty, which would require that people with disabilities have the same general rights as those without disabilities. Several members took the unusual step of voting aye while seated at their desks, out of respect for Mr. Dole, 89, a Republican who was the majority leader.

Then, after Mr. Dole’s wife, Elizabeth, rolled him off the floor, Republicans quietly voted down the treaty that the ailing Mr. Dole, recently released from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, so longed to see passed.

A majority of Republicans who voted against the treaty, which was modeled on the Americans With Disabilities Act, said they feared that it would infringe on American sovereignty.

The Cable's Josh Rogin has more on today's vote. 

Now to be fair to the Republicans who voted "nay," you don't approve a treaty just because Bob Dole favors it.   And to be more than fair, it's true that the United States has comparatively robust legislation in the form of the ADA and IDEA. 

On the other hand, the point of this convention is to ensure that other countries start embracing the rules and standards codified by the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act -- you'd think most Republicans would be super-keen on other countries embracing principles of U.S. law.  Furthermore,  the U.S. Chamber of Commerce also supports the treaty, and I hear that Republicans are pro-business, so that is a bit confusing.  I also read that "the treaty was negotiated by the George W. Bush administration," so, again, you can understand my confusion. 

If you want to see the arguments against the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, click here, here, here, here, and here.  As near as I can determine, critics don't like the treaty because... it's a treaty.  Most of the objections are either bogus or unsubstantiated by practice.  As Joshua Keating notes, "a perfectly reasonable treaty was just rejected based on a complete misreading of it."

Or, as Tim Fernholz explains: 

The treaty’s critics, like the conservative Heritage Foundation, were left arguing that the treaty shouldn’t be ratified if the US already complied with its intent, since endorsing the treaty could lead to problems down the road by unspecified means. That dismayed the treaty’s advocates, who see the treaty’s value in the message it sends to other countries about the importance of protecting disabled people. “It’s a treaty to change the world to be more like America,” protested John Kerry, the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, before the failed vote.

Dana Milbank notes that sometimes the treaty's opponents contradicted their own arguments: 

[O]pponents couldn’t agree on how this box would be opened. “Do I believe that states will pass laws or have to pass laws in conformity with the U.N. edict?” [Rick] Santorum asked himself. “Do we have to amend IDEA?” the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. “I don’t have any fear anytime soon that IDEA will be amended. But I do have concerns that people will go to courts and they will use this standard in this convention.”

This was contradicted by the next man at the microphone, home-schooling advocate Mike Farris, who pointed out that the document has a provision stating that “you can’t go to court automatically. You must have implementing legislation first” — the very thing Santorum says he does not expect to happen.

Still, their spurious theory of a U.N. takeover of parenting was enough to lead Lee and Santorum to oppose a treaty that would extend American values worldwide and guarantee disabled people equal treatment, and freedom from torture and exploitation.

Now I'm honestly pretty dubious about whether U.S. ratification of the treaty would accomplish all that.  Unlike Law of the Sea, not ratifying this treaty doesn't appreciably harm U.S. interests.  It does, however, make the United States look pretty dysfunctional.  In essence, the U.S. Senate just rejected a treaty on protecting the disabled that would have globalized the status quo in U.S. law on this issue.  To use the parlance of international relations scholars, this is dumber than a bag of hammers. 

Look, let's be blunt -- as a responsible foreign policy blogger, I should be trying to divert your attention away from the tawdriness that is the David Petraeus scandal.  There's no shortage of other interesting stuff happening in the world.  Things like Argentina's slow-moving debt debacle, or the discord between the EU and IMF over Greece, or even the possibility of the United States overtaking Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer. 

The thing is, I can't, I just can't.  I'm weak, and the way this scandal has metastasized is friggin' incredible.  The best summary of where things stand right now comes from Ace of Spades' Gabriel Malor: 

Jill Kelley, the woman who was (allegedly) threatened by Gen. Petraeus's squeeze Paula Broadwell and who (apparently) started the FBI investigation that led to Petraeus' ouster, who went to the FBI for help after the threats and then (allegedly) had a relationship with the FBI agent in charge of her own case, who (allegedly) sent her shirtless pics of himself, also (apparently, allegedly) had "compromising" communications with Gen. John Allen, the Big Damn Commander of our war effort in Afghanistan.

Yeah, that's about where we are now, and I'm afraid of checking my Twitter feed because there might have been new developments. 

Look, America's foreign policy community is gonna be transfixed on this for a spell.  Because it's got that car-crash quality that means it is just impossible to look away.  This is the kind of scandal that causes the Daily Beast's writing style to go so over the top that it actually published the following sentence:  "Broadwell may be able to run a six-minute mile with Petraeus, but Kelley looks like a woman who lets the guys do all the running—and in her direction."  I'm surprised they didn't embed a whip sound at the end of that sentence. 

And that's the interesting thing if one steps back for a second.  To repeat a theme, the American people by and large don't care much about foreign policy and national security.  But, based on my deep immersion into supermarket checkout literature, they do appear to be very interested in tawdry sex scandals and reality television.  Well, this scandal has copious amounts of this -- plus, you know, power. 

So unlike, say, questions about drone warfare or counterterrorism policy or homeland security or civil liberties, Americans will pay attention to this stuff.  Which is interesting, because over the past decade the military has been the one institution to inspire significant amounts of trust in Americans.  The less that the public trusts the military, the less that they will trust what the military is doing.  And as Thom Shanker notes in the New York Times, this scandal might affect that trust: 

[A] worrisomely large number of senior officers have been investigated and even fired for poor judgment, malfeasance and sexual improprieties or sexual violence — and that is just in the last year....

Long list of scandas involving top brass]

The episodes have prompted concern that something may be broken, or at least fractured, across the military’s culture of leadership. Some wonder whether its top officers have forgotten the lessons of Bathsheba: The crown of command should not be worn with arrogance, and while rank has its privileges, remember that infallibility and entitlement are not among them.

And this doesn't even get into other scandals at  various homeland security agencies *cough* Secret Servivce *cough*.

The military and intelligence communities have been doing a lot of things over the past decade that fall outside the bounds of traditional American foreign policy practices.  I'm not saying all of these things are bad -- it's a new century, new kinds of threats, and so forth.  But most Americans have passively gifted these agencies a lot of goodwill for them to do what they want.  I wonder whether a silly sex scandal will change all that.  

Developing...

Your humble blogg -- [Wait, screw that, you should be feeling pretty proud today!! -- ed.] 

Your proud blogger will be watching tonight's foreign policy debate despite his near-certainty that it's not going to be all that illuminating or informative. He has no choice, as he has a prior commitment to watch the damn thing. 

Now, in preparation for the debate, I could encourage you to read some excellent preparatory posts by Walter Russell Mead or Spencer Ackerman, or this essay on American incolvency in grand strategy by Michael Mazarr -- but that's no fun. 

I could suggest following one of the foreign policy debate drinking games out there -- see the National Journal or Duck of Minerva, for example -- but these drinking games look exceptionally dangerous. Drink when Obama mentions bin Laden? Really? Or when Romney says "resolve"? No one would be upright after the first twenty minutes. 

No, I think the only responsible thing to do is to suggest my own debate drinking game. The idea here is to sort the possible answer such that a true "black swan" event would have to occur for the participant to risk alcohol poisoning. 

So, in that spirit: 

THE OFFICIAL 2012 FOREIGN POLICY DEBATE DRINKING GAME

Take a sip of your drink if....

1. Either candidate makes a geographical mistake (like insisting that the West Bank borders Syria or something like that). 

2. Obama says "I'm the commander in chief." 

3. Romney says that the U.S. Navy is the smallest it's been since 1916 (a dubious claim).

4. Romney accuses Obama of turning the United States into Greece.

5. Anyone on the stage (including Bob Schieffer) mentions Australia, New Zealand or Canada.

Finish your drink if....

1. Either candidate mentions the benefits of trade with China.

2. Either candidate says that Latin America is a crucial strategic region for the United States.

3. Obama says that there's some wiggle room in the 2014 withdrawal date for U.S. combat forces for Afghanistan.

4. Romney says that that there's no wiggle room in the 2014 withdrawal date for U.S. combat forces for Afghanistan.

5. Anyone onstage acknowledges that China has pretty much stopped intervening to keep its currency undervalued. 

Finish your bottle if....

1. Romney says anything positive about the United Nations.

2. Either candidate says that the United States needs to push hard for democratization in Saudi Arabia. 

3. Either "Africa" or "Doha round" are mentioned.

4. Either candidate blasts Israel for keeping its currency severely undervalued. 

5. Obama accuses Romney of a "speak loudly and carry a magic wand" doctrine. 

DRINK YOURSELF TO OBLIVION IF AND ONLY IF....

1. Bob Schieffer asks the candidates what they would do in case of zombies. 

Now I'm pretty sure that if you follow these rules, you'll enjoy tonight's debate without regretting that enjoyment tomorrow. 

I suspect that most of today's foreign policy post-mortems about last night's town hall debate will focus on the Libya question, in which, according to Taegan Goddard, "Obama acted like a president in the exchange while Romney was much less. It was Romney's Gerald Ford moment."  He's not the only one to make this assessment.  I'm not sure I would go that far, but Romney did manage to convert a pretty strong initial response to the question into a bad, bad moment for him. 

But let's be honest:  regardless of whether you think Romney exaggerated in his description of Obama's Libya response or Obama exaggerated in his rejoinder, those were not the biggest foreign policy whoppers told during this debate.  Not by a long shot. 

If we're going to engage in real-keeping, then let's acknowledge that both candidates fudged, exaggerated, or flat-out lied on just about everything pertaining to foreign economic policy during last night's debate.  It was a truly bipartisan fib-fest.  I could go through the debate transcript line by line, but let's just hit the highlights.  At varous points, one or both of the candidates tried to convince undecided voters of the following: 

1)  Energy independence is the cure for what ails the U.S. economy;

2)  The U.S. loses from trade with China, and tougher trade enforcement will fix that;

3)  Free trade with Latin America will create millions and millions of jobs;

4)  The only reason China is doing well comparatively is that it's keeping its currency undervalued; and finally

5)  Illegal immigration is threatening the American economy. 

Let's inject a little reality here, shall we?  Repeat after me: 

1)  Because most energy sources are traded in global markets, energy independence has zero effect on the economy (though there might be a few security dividends).

2)  The United States benefits a great deal from trade with China and the rest of the world.

3)  Perfect trade enforcement would have only a marginal impact on employment;

4)  China's currency interventions have been slowing down for much of 2012.  Literally.

5)  Illegal immigration into the United States "has been in reverse for several years."

If the foreign policy debate next week has as much mendacity as this one on the global economy, your humble blogger will be passed out in a drunken stupor by 9:30 PM. 

So yesterday David Corn at Mother Jones made some waves when he released a video of Mitt Romney locking up the Ayn Rand Institute's vote explaining that he had no chance of winning the  "47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government."

Well, this morning, the foreign policy shoe dropped from the Romney video.  Here's the excerpt of Romney musing about the two-state situation for Israel and Palestine: 

I'm torn by two perspectives in this regard. One is the one which I've had for some time, which is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish. Now why do I say that? Some might say, well, let's let the Palestinians have the West Bank, and have security, and set up a separate nation for the Palestinians. And then come a couple of thorny questions. And I don't have a map here to look at the geography, but the border between Israel and the West Bank is obviously right there, right next to Tel Aviv, which is the financial capital, the industrial capital of Israel, the center of Israel. It's—what the border would be? Maybe seven miles from Tel Aviv to what would be the West Bank…The other side of the West Bank, the other side of what would be this new Palestinian state would either be Syria at one point, or Jordan. And of course the Iranians would want to do through the West Bank exactly what they did through Lebanon, what they did near Gaza. Which is that the Iranians would want to bring missiles and armament into the West Bank and potentially threaten Israel. So Israel of course would have to say, "That can't happen. We've got to keep the Iranians from bringing weaponry into the West Bank." Well, that means that—who? The Israelis are going to patrol the border between Jordan, Syria, and this new Palestinian nation? Well, the Palestinians would say, "Uh, no way! We're an independent country. You can't, you know, guard our border with other Arab nations." And now how about the airport? How about flying into this Palestinian nation? Are we gonna allow military aircraft to come in and weaponry to come in? And if not, who's going to keep it from coming in? Well, the Israelis. Well, the Palestinians are gonna say, "We're not an independent nation if Israel is able to come in and tell us what can land in our airport." These are problems—these are very hard to solve, all right? And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, "There's just no way." And so what you do is you say, "You move things along the best way you can." You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem. We live with that in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it. We don't go to war to try and resolve it imminently. On the other hand, I got a call from a former secretary of state. I won't mention which one it was, but this individual said to me, you know, I think there's a prospect for a settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis after the Palestinian elections. I said, "Really?" And, you know, his answer was, "Yes, I think there's some prospect." And I didn't delve into it (emphasis added).

Well, I'm tired of Mother Jones having all of the video exclusives!!  Here's my exclusive of how one Middle East expert responded to Romney's explanation: 

So I'm not a Middle East expert, but I do know a few things: 

1)  Neither all Palestinians not their leaders in the West Bank are committed to the destruction of Israael;

2)  Whatever contours a possible Palestinian state would have, it won't border Syria

3)  One of the best critiques that a GOP challenger can make of Barack Obama's administration is that he's made a hash of the Israeli/Palestinian peace process.  In this video, Romney pretty much revealed that he wouldn't be changing that policy anytime soon. 

David Brooks, in responding to the first part of the Romney video, concluded that Romney "really doesn't know much about the country he inhabits."  Unfortunately, with this video, Romney has demonstrated that the doesn't know that much about the world he inhabits either.

We've had a week where riots in the Middle East have raged against the United States, NATO's Afghanistan policy seems to be falling apart, and China seems bound and determined to foment crises in the Pacific Rim.  A smart presidential candidate could find a lot of material to criticize the Obama administration on foreign policy.  Instead we have a GOP nominee that can't manage his own campaign, much less deep thoughts on geopolitics. 

So if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna be doing a double face-palm for the rest of today. 

Dear Mr. Hiatt (and Mr. Pexton),

Sorry to be writing to you in such a public format.  I'm also sorry to bring up the rather touchy subject of your attempts to find a competent and authentically conservative blogger for the Post.  But can we talk about Jennifer Rubin for a second? 

As I blogged yesterday, Rubin demonstrated incompetence, laziness and/or mendacity in her "hackstabbing" of Robert Zoellick.  In particular, she seemed unable to understand the meaning of the "responsible stakeholder" language that Zoellick started using in 2005, and her weblink to that language wasn't even close to accurate. 

Today I wake up to see that she has offered a follow-up post on Zoellick and an update to the controversial post from yesterday.  Let me just reprint that update in full. 

UPDATE: To clarify, Zoellick in 2005 delivered a speech in which he encouraged China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs. From 2005 to the present in speeches, articles and interviews (asked in 2009 in Financial Times interview about China’s “scorecard” on acting as a responsible stakeholder he said “I think China has come a long way”), Zoellick repeatedly praised China’s conduct, despite ample signs China was anything but “responsible” and widespread criticism of the policy Zoellick had championed. Given Mitt Romney’s “take China to the WTO” stance and his unsparing criticism of China’s human rights abuses Romney could not be more different in his view of China.

Now this is a bit of an improvement.  Rubin has accurately described what Zoellick was saying in 2005 (as opposed to how it still appears in  her original post).  She also suggests that that Zoellick rubs some neoconservatives/China hardliners the wrong way on positions like human rights abuses.  That's a genuine policy disagreement. 

Still, there are some issues.  One problem is that even in the update, she's still screwing up her evidence.   Her quote from the FT interview of Zoellick is a somewhat out of context -- it seems more like Zoellick was talking about China's economic development in that particular phrase:

Zoellick:  I think China has come a very long long way. I have a special perspective because I was living in Hong Kong in 1980. I went to Guangdong province right after Deng Xiaoping started the reform process. All you have to do is compare the China of that era and the China of today. It’s so startling. 

As for her embedded links:  Rubin's URLs for the "widespread criticism" portion go to two different articles.  The first one is accurate, but, alas, Rubin only bats .500.  The "criticism" link goes to a paper by Jonathan Czin entitled "Dragon Slayer or Panda Hugger?  Chinese Perspectives on 'Responsible Stakeholder' Diplomacy."   Here's Czin's conclusion: 

Zoellick attempted to move U.S. thinking beyond the wholly inadequate dichotomous roles of friend and enemy to define the grey conceptual space that China occupies. To say that China is neither a friend nor an enemy of the United States is not only a truism; it has also become a cliché.  Neither China nor the United States wants to see China become part of a “hub and spokes” alliance system in East Asia. Yet the claim put forth by strategic thinkers such as John Mearsheimer that the changing material balance of power will inexorably and inevitably lead to Sino-American conflict is over-deterministic and threatens to engender a self-fulfilling prophecy. Moreover, it runs counter to the premise of U.S. China policy since Kissinger. Strategically, Zoellick’s “Third Way” offers the most reasonable and palatable option.

I do not think they anyone would characterize this as "criticism" of Zoellick's policy formulation.  I read through the whole article, and couldn't really find any criticism of the policy.  Between you, me and the lamppost, I suspect Rubin saw the "panda-hugger" headline and just put it in.  But I concede that's pure speculation on my part. 

Look, this is tedious stuff, and I don't like descending into the weeds all that much.  Still, if Rubin can't correct her earlier screw-up without making yet another screw-up, doesn't that suggest that something is seriously wrong here?  And don't you, as her publishers, bear just a wee bit of responsibility for this kind of mendacity and laziness? 

Sincerely,

Daniel W. Drezner

Readers of this blog are aware that I am not a fan of the Flake Amendment, a proposal by the House of Representatives to zero out the political science portion of the National Science Foundation  budget -- and only the political science portion of that budget -- so that the $9 million or so will go to the physical or natural sciences instead.  This is one of those populist measures that sounds peach but in fact relies on either a piss-poor understanding of how public goods work, a piss-poor understanding of how political science works, or both. 

Still, you'd expect that the natural and physical scientists would be at worst neutral about the Flake Amendment.  After all, in a restrictive budgetary environment, anything that plumps up their research dollars can't hurt, right? 

Via Steven Taylor , however, I see that the editors of Nature have a better grasp of political science than, well, some people who write about politics for a living.  I don't agree with everything in this editorial, but I do agree with their main points: 

The social sciences are an easy target for this type of attack because they are less cluttered with technical terminology and so seem easier for the layperson to assess. As social scientist Duncan Watts at Microsoft Research in New York City has pointed out: “Everyone has experience being human, and so the vast majority of findings in social science coincide with something that we have either experienced or can imagine experiencing.” This means that the Flakes of this world have little trouble proclaiming such findings obvious or insignificant.

Part of the blame must lie with the practice of labelling the social sciences as soft, which too readily translates as meaning woolly or soft-headed. Because they deal with systems that are highly complex, adaptive and not rigorously rule-bound, the social sciences are among the most difficult of disciplines, both methodologically and intellectually. They suffer because their findings do sometimes seem obvious. Yet, equally, the common-sense answer can prove to be false when subjected to scrutiny. There are countless examples of this, from economics to traffic planning. This is one reason that the social sciences probably unnerve some politicians...

So, what has political science ever done for us? We don't, after all, know why crime rates rise and fall. We cannot solve the financial crisis or stop civil wars, and we cannot agree on the state's role in systems of justice or taxation. As Washington Post columnist Charles Lane wrote in a recent article that called for the NSF not to fund any social science: “The 'larger' the social or political issue, the more difficult it is to illuminate definitively through the methods of 'hard science'.”.

In part, this just restates the fact that political science is difficult. To conclude that hard problems are better solved by not studying them is ludicrous. Should we slash the physics budget if the problems of dark-matter and dark-energy are not solved? Lane's statement falls for the very myth it wants to attack: that political science is ruled, like physics, by precise, unique, universal rules (emphasis added).

Indeed.  A tip of the cap from this social scientist to the natural sciences -- it's good when nerds unite. 

So in yesterday's New York Times, Northwestern University political science professor Jacqueline Stevens wrote something really stupid about whether the NSF should fund political science. 

I don't use the term "stupid" lightly.  Based on her blog, she has a philosophy of science that's about, oh, sixty years out of date.  She was (as she now acknowledges) sloppy with some of her facts.  One paragraph proudly trumps a John Lewis Gaddis essay that actually critiques the very kind of work Stevens claims to like.  And, after spending much of the essay indicting political scientists for getting in bed with an imperial state ("research money that comes with ideological strings attached"), she closes with:  

Government can — and should — assist political scientists, especially those who use history and theory to explain shifting political contexts, challenge our intuitions and help us see beyond daily newspaper headlines. Research aimed at political prediction is doomed to fail. At least if the idea is to predict more accurately than a dart-throwing chimp.

To shield research from disciplinary biases of the moment, the government should finance scholars through a lottery: anyone with a political science Ph.D. and a defensible budget could apply for grants at different financing levels.

So, in other words, state funding is pernicious and corrupting -- unless you and yours get the money. 

So yeah, there's a lot of stupidity contained in this essay.  But that's OK!!  I have been to many a seminar (and maybe, just maybe, presented at some) in which the paper du jour was horrible, but the discussion that the paper triggered was quite interesting.  And I think that happened in this case.  For robust deconstructions of Stevens' arguments, see Henry Farrell, Steve Saideman, Jim Johnson, and Jay Ulfelder.  

Two other responses are worthy of note, however.  At his blog, Phil Arena makes an interesting semi-serious suggestion:  

Here's a thought experiment -- if [the American Political Science Association] were to increase membership dues by $500 a year or so, and if most current members remained members, we'd have a pool of money a bit smaller than the current NSF budget for political science, but still one that could fund a good number of projects with the greatest potential for generating positive externalities.  The big data sets that lots of people use, like the NES, could continue.  And let's face it, many of the individual projects that are funded by the NSF do not generate significant positive externalities -- and even if they did, a great many of them would be carried out even if without external funding.  So the net loss wouldn't be that big.

Now, there are some obvious problems and not-so-obvious problems with this proposal.  Obvbiously, APSA membership wouldn't stay the same size.  Not-so-obviously,  the demographics of APSA membership would likely skewresearch dollars in ways that people like Stevens would find even more abhorrent. 

Still, I think a more modest version of this idea makes a great deal of sense.  It's entirely reasonable to, say, ask that tenured professors at R1 research universities to chip in $500 to a research fund.  It's also reasonable to ask other APSA members to chip in... something.   I'd want to see the International Studies Association do the same.  The result would not be a perfect substitute for NSF funding, but it would certainly be a good way of building up an appropriate research infrastructure free of Congressional interference.  

Second, Penn political science professor Michael Horowitz posts about  an ongoing research project with Official Blog Intellectual Crush Philip Tetlock.  This section contains some beguiling findings... and an invitation:

One of the main things we are interested in determining is the situations in which experts provide knowledge-added value when it comes to making predictions about the world. Evidence from the first year of the project (year 2 started on Monday, June 18) suggests that, contrary to Stevens’ argument, experts might actually have something useful to say after all. For example, we have some initial evidence on a small number of questions from year 1 suggesting that experts are better at updating faster than educated members of the general public – they are better at determining the full implications of changes in events on the ground and updating their beliefs in response to those events.

Over the course of the year, we will be exploring several topics of interest to the readers – and hopefully authors – of this blog. First, do experts potentially have advantages when it comes to making predictions that are based on process? In other words, does knowing when the next NATO Summit is occurring help you make a more accurate prediction about whether Macedonia will gain entry by 1 April 2013 (one of our open questions at the moment)? Alternatively, could it be that the advantage of experts is that they have a better understanding of world events when a question is asked, but then that advantage fades over time as the educated reader of the New York Times updates in response to world events?

Second, when you inform experts of the predictions derived from prediction markets, the wisdom of groups, or teams of forecasters working together, are they able to use this information to yield more accurate predictions than the markets, the crowd, or teams, or do they make it worse? In theory, we would expect experts to be able to assimilate that information and use it to more accurately determine what will happen in the world. Or, maybe we would expect an expert to be able to recognize when the non-experts are wrong and outperform them. In reality, will this just demonstrate the experts are stubborn – but not in a good way?

Finally, are there types of questions where experts are more or less able to make accurate predictions? Might experts outperform other methods when it comes to election forecasting in Venezuela or the fate of the Eurozone, but prove less capable when it comes to issues involving the use of military force? We hope to explore these and other issues over the course of the year and think this will raise many questions relevant for this blog. We will report back on how it is going. In the meantime, we need experts who are willing to participate. The workload will be light – promise. If you are interested in participating, expert or not, please contact me at horom (at) sas (dot) upenn (dot) edu and let’s see what you can do.

So, to sum up:  a stupid op-ed.  But lots of interesting things to read as a result of it.   Well done, other political scientists!!