The Duck of Minerva

Today I gave a lecture on the environment and the dilemmas of collective action in my course on Introduction to International Relations. Despite the best efforts of St. Elinor (the patron saint of political science and my alma mater), I'm still a fairly pessimistic adherent to Mancur Olson's diagnosis of public-goods provision. Consequently, the environmental lecture ("Saving the Sunlit Earth") is probably my most depressing canned talk. (The "sunlit earth" comes from a speech by Nobel laureate F. Sherwood Rowland, who co-discovered CFCs' harmful effects.)Simply put, unlike the Montreal...

Can China create the next Steve Jobs? The New Yorker discusses a quasi-official Chinese attempt to find the next Steve Jobs--a sort of Apprentice with less Donald Trump and more pseudo-Confucian standards. As the New Yorker reporter Jiayang Fan writes, there is something bizarre in the contest. But there is also something revealing about how countries partake of international relations in a world once presumed to be post-nationalist.The first oddity is the contest's presumption that there should have been a Chinese Jobs or Bill Gates, someone who represents a transformative genius who...

You don't understand the power of offensive realism. From Steve Coll's Private Empire:Vice President Cheney seemed particularly interested in China's vulnerability to U.S. naval power. His experience of the global oil market while running Halliburton had left him with a deep understanding of oil's fungible nature. But his thinking about national security was influenced, too, by historical narratives about the rise and fall of great powers, and particularly the history of control of the sas, which had been critical to Great Britain and the United States, in succession, as a means to ensure...

I'm totally not bitter that Tom Friedman'selementary correlations have 165citations on Google Scholar!Kindred Winecoff, who is both very smart and possessed of good taste in linking, discusses the value of social science.Winecoff discusses a recent splenetic venting by a philosopher claiming that social science has no role to play in policy debates, unlike physics or biology. I am unaware of any particular policy implications that flow obviously from any hard science. True, the atom bomb matters for policy, but the fact of the atomic bomb does not tell us what it means for international...