by Dan Nexon | 5 Feb 2007 |
The Super Bowl score is the AP's lead story right now; needless to say, I dropped down through the wire reports. I discovered that India not only leads the US in cheap call centers, but that the country also enjoys a capital/labor comparative advantage in surrogate motherhood. Surrogate motherhood is among the latest in a long list of roles being outsourced to India, where rent-a-womb services are far cheaper than in the West."In the U.S. a...
by Dan Nexon | 3 Feb 2007 |
You have nothing to lose but those pesky questions about whether your methods actually prove anything....[Warning: what follows will likely only be of interest to practitioners and students of academic IR][UPDATED 2/4/07]Almost a year ago, but two months after the conversation had moved on, "IR scholar not philosopher"--who, to his/her credit included an amusing false email address (empiricist@empiricist.com)--posted an interesting comment in...
by Dan Nexon | 2 Feb 2007 |
I share Daniel Drezner's puzzlement concerning Jacques Chirac's retraction of pretty reasonable claims about the implications of Iranian nuclear proliferation for the Middle East. Example:Mr. Chirac said it would be an act of self-destruction for Iran to use a nuclear weapon against another country.“Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?” Mr. Chirac asked. “It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be...
by Dan Nexon | 2 Feb 2007 |
Mark of Zenpundit, one of my favorite people in the blogsphere, recently announced that he's joined some outfit called "Chicagoboyz." Now, I'd never heard of them, but they're clearly much higher up on the foodchain than the Duck. If I read Reynolds I would, apparently, find many links to them.Their politics? I quote from the masthead:Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in...
by Peter | 31 Jan 2007 |
I was actually intending to do a more thoughtful post inspired by this, (or maybe a more sarcastic one inspired by this), but, as I scanned over the NYT website, I actually gawked--out loud--in disbelief as I read this:President Bush took aim Wednesday at lavish salaries and bonuses for corporate executives, standing on Wall Street to issue a sharp warning for corporate boards to "step up to their responsibilities" and tie compensation packages...
by Rodger Payne | 31 Jan 2007 |
Much of my academic scholarship is concerned with the idea of deliberative democracy. Nayef Samhat and I have argued, for instance, that norms of transparency (or openness) and participation (or inclusion) promote public deliberation.By contrast, secrecy and exclusion distort public debate.Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists, together with the Government Accountability Project, told a House Committee about their survey of nearly 300...
by Peter | 25 Jan 2007 |
I actually did watch the SOTU on Tuesday, in part because there was nothing else on television, and in part because I figured it might be a good topic to discuss in class. Wednesday night I was the substitute teacher for a colleague's graduate seminar on the Domestic Sources of US Foreign Policy. We ended up talking about the ideals that put the "American" in American Foreign Policy, and the assigned reading for the day was Samuel Huntington's...
by Rodger Payne | 24 Jan 2007 |
I didn't watch the "State of the Union," but I skimmed much of it already and will read it soon. I noticed that President Bush has again somewhat ambiguously suggested that Iran has provided "support" for Shia militias in Iraq. Rumors have been flying in Washington that the administration is making the case for war against Iran -- and preparing for it militarily too.Here's the kind of hearsay the President has apparently heard about Iran in...
by Dan Nexon | 23 Jan 2007 |
I haven't been posting much lately. I blame many developments for my paucity of quality commentary here. I've been grinding away at my book manuscript, maintaining blogs for my classes, dealing with some final revisions to various articles and chapters, getting a series of research assistants up and running on what will probably be my next major project, and so forth. For the last week, however, I've had a new excuse: the premature seizure of...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 18 Jan 2007 |
One of my graduate students e-mailed me recently with the following question:"Yesterday I got an email asking me to be a discussant at ISA. I've never done this before and I want to do a good job. Do you have any tips on being a good discussant?" [ISA, for our non-IR readers, is the International Studies Association, and their annual meeting is the central annual professional conference for IR scholars.]With the student's permission, I am...
by Peter | 17 Jan 2007 |
Yesterday as I was driving home, I caught the better part of President Bush's interview with The News Hour's Jim Lehrer (full transcript here).I found it quite interesting-- a very different Bush than I had heard before. Different in tone, different in style, and somewhat different in substance. Here, Bush admitted openly and honestly that he and his administration made real mistakes in Iraq: Part of the failure for our reaction was ourselves....
by Rodger Payne | 15 Jan 2007 |
How many innocent people have died in Iraq as a result of the war?That number is a political hot potato -- and not merely for the reasons you probably think.The Bush administration asserts that the violence in Iraq, "particularly in Baghdad," has reversed the political gains that were reflected in the 2005 elections. By stabilizing the situation in and around the capital, they assert, the U.S. can help the current government control Iraq -- and...