The Duck of Minerva

PM

Recent Posts

A genuine revolutionary, part II

by PM | 6 October, 2011 |

Steve Jobs occupied a unique place in American business and culture; no other billionaire in my life has commanded genuine affection from the general public, and nobody deserved it more. The Financial Times reports that Jobs's passing has elicited similar responses in P.R. China. One Chinese academic wrote of Jobs:It is said Chinese people hate the rich. But all the Chinese are mourning for Jobs after he died. They don’t hate the rich. They respect the rich who accumulate their fortune via talents and innovation as well. What Chinese people hate are those get rich by monopoly, corruption and...

read more

Sunday Productivity Blogging: Sciral

by PM | 21 August, 2011 |

I procrastinate by reading productivity blogs, in the hopes that the Universe will somehow find the irony funny enough to let me avoid the consequences of procrastination. (In year ten of this experiment, I can only say so far that the results are not what I initially desired.) One happy consequence of this habit is that I have picked up a few tools which do actually make me more productive. So, in the spirit of Charli's nerd-bloggin' Fridays, let me fill up the dead space of Sunday afternoons with some productivity pr0n.First up: Sciral's Consistency, the simplest and most rigorous app I've...

read more

Zombie Objections

by PM | 19 August, 2011 |

Rodger's post about the commercial success of Dan Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies joins a long line of fellow Ducks' quacking about this book. I've been a part of the conversation, too, but I can write about the book from a perspective that I think is unique: I've just finished teaching an introductory course where I assigned the book. (Hence my complete lack of posting over the past several weeks.) In other words, not only have I read it, I've seen whether undergrads get anything from it.The verdict is clear: Zombies is a great complement for any introductory...

read more

It’s Coburn Clobberin’ Time

by PM | 26 May, 2011 |

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn has released a new report criticizing the National Science Foundation, in no small part because he is offended that the NSF funds political science.This new, lengthy-for-Congress report is a slick and well-produced piece of agit-prop. In it, Coburn claims to have found billions (!) in mismanagement at the NSF, including plenty of made-for-journalists "scandals" like jello wrestling at the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica and shrimp on treadmills. Drawn from inspector general reports and Coburn's staff's review of NSF grant awards, Coburn criticizes the agency...

read more

The Lighter Side of Public Opinion Work

by PM | 15 May, 2011 |

I have long thought that political science Ph.D. students should be required to watch all of Yes, Minister and some of the better parts of Yes, Prime Minister. Without beating a dead horse too much, prolonged exposure to the cynical-but-accurate view of politics the show presents (it is like a curdled West Wing--or, perhaps, what the post-hegemonic West Wing will look like) would prevent people from too easily assuming that the adoption of a policy by a democratically elected government is equivalent to the approval of that policy by the voters who selected the government. (Via Chris...

read more

Of Quals and Quants

by PM | 11 May, 2011 |

Qualitative scholars in political science are used to thinking of themselves as under threat from quantitative researchers. Yet qualitative scholars' responses to quantitative "imperialism" suggest that they misunderstand the nature of that threat. The increasing flow of data, the growing availability of computing power and easy-to-use software, and the relative ease of training new quantitative researchers make the position of qualitative scholars more precarious than they realize. Consequently, qualitative and multi-method researchers must not only stress the value of methodological...

read more

Good N’ Red Plenty

by PM | 11 February, 2011 |

Henry Farrell mentions Francis Spufford's new book Red Plenty. Before proceeding, you should know three things:I have no connection, social or otherwise, with Francis Spufford.I am a philistine made almost incapable of reading literary fiction by years of journal articles and serious journalism.I am in no way an expert in any aspect of Soviet culture, politics, or history.Bearing these facts in mind, let me give the book my highest recommendation. A colleague brought back a copy from the UK at my request, so I've read the book well in advance of its American release (which has still not...

read more

More on Zombies and Drezner

by PM | 8 February, 2011 |

Charli's post raises a number of good points about TIPZ. I've written elsewhere about how much I enjoyed Drezner's presentation about the book, but until today I hadn't confessed that I've taken my enjoyment one step further ... by assigning the book for my summer school Intro to IR course.This will be my first time teaching. I hope assigning TIPZ doesn't mean that it will be my last.Drezner's book, of course, is part of a balanced meal that includes Frieden, Lake, and Schultz's textbook and a great selection of accessible IS and Foreign Affairs articles, among other readings. But I really...

read more

#Opensocietyfail

by PM | 8 January, 2011 |

Glenn Greenwald reports on the case of Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP and former Wikileaks volunteer. The U.S. Department of Justice has subpoenaed Jonsdottir's Twitter records, as well as the records from many other users of the service, from November 2009 onward on the grounds that the department believes that the records may be used in a criminal investigation. What is newsworthy about this is not that the U.S. DoJ continues to investigate what the American government must, by definition, regard as a violation of its sovereign prerogative to release classified information. Rather,...

read more

In political economy, politics comes first

by PM | 3 December, 2010 |

Recent developments in Europe, and especially the ongoing meltdown in Ireland, should force political economists to reevaluate how well their theories can explain the perpetuation of current international regimes. The past twenty years of IPE theorizing has been exceptionally exciting and productive, but as Kathleen McNamara and others have argued the tendency toward intellectual monoculture may have left the discipline without a toolkit for understanding tectonic shifts in international actors' behavior.In the 1990s, the Washington consensus attained something of the status of divine writ....

read more