Is Obama The New Nixon?

That is, is he too obsessed with leaks and probably using the DoJ inappropriately?  I don't really know, although I do think that this is not Watergate.  Still, I find all of this a bit disturbing, so here's a good take on it:

Taking a Compliment is Hard

Despite constantly fishing for compliments, I have always felt awkward when receiving them.  I don't think this is entirely a gender thing, although it could be my feminine side:

Comparative Xenophobia, part III: The Quickening

Over the past couple of days, Max Fisher has posted a few maps and some commentary about global comparisons of ethnic tolerance  and diversity.  This led to as series of spews as I had more than a few thoughts about this stuff, which Fisher was kind enough to summarize back at his Washington Post blog.

I promised in the initial post to get to the relationship between economic freedom and tolerance that was a key issue raised in the first piece on tolerance.  I got distracted by the second post, but now I can try to remember what I was thinking two days ago.

Fisher reports that the study he is analyzing finds that economic freedom has no correlation with racial tolerance but does with tolerance of homosexuals.  So, we have two separate findings--do they have a common logic?  It depends on what one considers to be the sources of racism versus the sources of homophobia.  Do all forms of discrimination and animus have the same logic?  Maybe, maybe not. 

Some caveats:

• I am not an expert on homophobia, so I am going to have to speculate a bit.  Yes, I should do a heap of reading, but my blog is not my day job.  
• The data on tolerance may be flaky as the various Fisher and Spew posts suggest.
• The data on economic freedom is from institutes that are ideologically committed to less government.  It does not mean that their data is necessarily wrong, but it is something to keep in mind.

The Fisher posts do not include a map of the Economic Freedom stuff, so here it is:

Fraser Institute, www.freetheworld.com

So a few comments on this data.  Note that the US and the Scandinavian countries are in the same category.  This tends to run against what libertarians generally think--as the social democracies of Europe tend to have much more government intervention in the economy.  All I can say is that a map having Sweden and the US in the same category tells me that the economic freedom that is meant here is not that which tends to jibe with popular views of that concept.

Comparative Xenophobia, part II

I had intended to address the relationship between economic freedom and tolerance that was part of Max Fisher's post yesterday, but his post today pushed a couple of buttons that require a quick reaction.

To be clear, I am a big fan of Max Fisher and his infographics.  They make me think, and I could always use more of that.  He is quite judicious in today's post on ethnic diversity that the diversity and conflict (yesterday's map, sort of) do not line up neatly.  And he does deploy the key "money quote":

In general, it does not matter for our purposes whether ethnic differences reflect physical attributes of groups (skin color, facial features) or long-lasting social conventions (language, marriage within the group, cultural norms) or simple social definition (self-identification, identification by outsiders).* When people persistently identify with a particular group, they form potential interest groups that can be manipulated by political leaders, who often choose to mobilize some coalition of ethnic groups (“us”) to the exclusion of others (“them”). Politicians also sometimes can mobilize support by singling out some groups for persecution, where hatred of the minority group is complementary to some policy the politician wishes to pursue.

* I do appreciate the idea that the kind of identity does not matter so much (my view of ethnicity includes religion as well as race, language, and kinship as potential shared attributes that tie the group), although one could argue that certain kinds of divides have somewhat different dynamics.

This is why I show in my ethnic conflict classes both the classic Star Trek episode (black/white vs white/black and the Babylon 5 episode where ethnicity is randomly assigned (purple vs. green) via scarves pulled out of a box.  Ethnicity is not primordial (sorry, Robert Kaplan), but constructed with social and political meaning that is attached but changes over time due to politics and context.  This money paragraph that Fisher quotes basically sets up the puzzles of the contemporary study of ethnic conflict: when do people support politicians who use identity to divide and to coordinate and when do they not?  Not all appeals based on ethnicity work (David Duke, anyone?).

So, heaps of good stuff in this piece, especially the end.  I just want to address to conventional wisdoms that come up that are problematic.  That is, they are my pet peeves.

Comparative Xenophobia, part I

Yesterday, the Washington Post put up this map based on World Values data and other information:

The variable is "share that answered 'people of another race' when asked to pick from groups of people they would not want as neighbors."  This makes it appear that India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Nigeria are the most racist countries.  The article mentions a heap of appropriate caveats.  Mine is this: I could not find this question in the dataset quickly as the dataset is vast.*  Heaps and heaps of variables.  So, I am going to be guessing a bit here, but as a xenophobia kind of guy, I have a few thoughts:

*  Max Fisher, who wrote the WashPo piece responded to my tweets with more info about the data, so I may explore it further later today or tomorrow, depending on if I need to be distracted from the stuff that has actual deadlines.  Yet more proof that twitter rocks, as I would never have called up Fisher nor would have he have responded this quickly to a semi-random question.  

• The first thing is that the question is not so much whether people are more or less tolerant of different races but that among the various factors that might shape one's intolerance towards neighbors, race is the most cited.  It may be that a place is very racist but is even more homophobic or sectarian or whatever.  There are are many ways to hate or to target intolerance, so it may just be that a particularly hateful place is just somewhat more intolerant of groups who are distinct by a cleavage other than race.
• Second, in some places, when one is asked this question, they may think of a single race, perhaps the Vietnamese think of the Chinese but not of other races.  So, it may not be that the people are very racist in general--they just hate one group that is defined by race.
• Third, living nearby is a moderate test of the question of tolerance.  Can you work with group x? Can be friends?  Can have in the family?  Oh, yes, that is a tougher test of tolerance.  Check out the figure of a series of questions asked of Romanians:

Institutul pentru Politici Publica (Institute on Public Policy). 2003. Intoleranţă, Discriminare Autoritarism: În Opinia Publică (Intolerance, Discrimination and Authoritarianism in Public Opinion), Bucharest: Institute on Public Policy.  I had translation help and then used this figure in my book with Bill Ayres.

What this illustrates is there are varying degrees of tolerance.  And I wonder from looking at the WashPo infographic whether we would have seen very different results if the question had been friends/family rather than live nearby.  Still, given that the US did well on this despite much segregration, perhaps this question is a suitable test.

The larger point is that hate is a many, uh, splendored thing.  Ok, not so splendored.  But it is complex, so we cannot just look at it and say that Indians are the most racist folks.  Race, as we have been reminded in the past week thanks to a particularly problematic dissertation, is a very fuzzy thing.  So the WashPo graphic is interesting and provocative but not conclusive.

I will consider the second part of the article, the relationship between economic freedom and various kinds of tolerance, later (today or tomorrow).


 

Trek Travesty

Rankings are always so rank.  But they are blog-bait.  I liked Yglesias's post on the new movie versus the tv shows, and then he had to screw it up somewhat with his ranking of ST stuff.  So, let's get to the re-ranking:*

* Note, I am not involved in ST, so Wuffle's Law does not apply.

First, the movies. Y has ST II: Wrath of Khan first, which is indisputable, but ST VI Undiscovered Country before ST IV: Voyage Home?  Really?  I guess one can debate that, but ST: The Motion Picture deserves to be last for the simple fact that this slowest, most unoriginal, most boring Trek movie should have killed the re-birth of the franchise.  I dare anyone to watch the movie again.  Ug.

Second, the TV series. He has Next Generation > Deep Space Nine > Voyager > Original Series > Enterprise.  Really?  Voyager is better than Classic Trek?  I dare anyone to name an episode of Voyager that they can remember by name or even by description.  City on The Edge of Forever, Let that be Your Final Battlefield (a standard for my ethnic conflict classes), Naked Time, Trouble with Tribbles, Devil in the Dark, Amok Time, Omega Glory, and so on.  Sure, there was heaps of cheese and some truly awful (Spock's Brain), but many thoughtful, interesting, challenging episodes.  What do I remember about Voyager?  That it was damned annoying.  Next Generation had better acting and effects than the Original Trek, but its length meant that it had uneven parts, like whenever the writers got lazy and had a holodeck adventure.  One ep of that would have been fine.  Having the occasional B  or C plot would have been fine, but way too often it was used because writers were lacking in imagination. A mysterious but wise bartender?  Um, ok. DS9 was excellent most of the time.  Enterprise?  I stopped watching after a few episodes, but it apparently got better.  My ranking would be   Classic Trek for its highlights and not for its Spock Brain-iness > TNG (which took about two seasons to figure itself out, just remember how Troi started out) > DS9 (bonus points for Quark)  > Enterprise (because it caused me less pain) > Voyager.

Third, the Episode rankings is just wrong in so many ways.   Four of the best ten are Voyager or Enterprise?  I think not.

Fourth, villians.  Q was heaps of fun, and Gul Dukat and Khan were epic in their ways.  I actually think the Borg are over-rated.  Started out good but got over-used.  Lore?  Really?  Evil data?  Thanks but no thanks.

Fifth, best crew members: the list here is Spock > Data > Worf > Kira > McCoy > Riker > The Doctor > Hoshi Sato (?) > Geordi > Dax.  Ug.  The top five are probably right, although one could reorder them a bit.  Riker?  He was pretty vanilla until the last couple of seasons, if I remember correctly.  The Doctor?  Yes and no.  The actor was great and snarky, but the premise and then how he got used?  Not so much.  I think the list is missing one Scottie, is it not?  I would change the bottom five of this list to be Scottie > Dax > Odo > Geordi > the average of Sulu/Chekhov.

No ranking of the Captains?  Picard > Kirk > Sisko > Scott Bakula (for Quantum Leap street cred if nothing else) > Janeway.


Update: I caught my typo but so sad that my fingers typed work and not Worf at first.  Probably guilt-induced.

Double Blind or Doubly Annoying

Lots of people whine about the refereeing process of academic publications.  For most academics, to be published in a refereed journal or press is pretty much the focus of research efforts.  Refereed journals are seen as having higher standards and thus more prestige than those that just have editors make the decisions.  Grants work usually in a similar process where the committee relies on external reviewers.  Promotion as well depends on external letter writers.

Anyhow, why whine about it?  If you cannot persuade two or three scholars, then why should you expect the piece to persuade readers of the journal where you want the piece placed? 

Well, reviewers often do not read the stuff that closely so they end up asking you to do stuff that you have already addressed.  Or they have their own prejudices and are not willing to simply answer the key question: does this work provide a significant contribution?  Which breaks down into: does it ask a question that has not been answered adequately before, is the theory coherent, are the methods appropriate and well executed, do the findings make sense, etc.

You can get crappy reviewers, of course, as illustrated by this:

H/t to Justin Wolfers who found this in  "A model of lazy banks", by Manove, Padilla, and Pagano, RAND 32(4)]

Of course, often the problem is with oneself: that the reviewers could not discern the brilliance of my argument because I did not make it well enough.  That, of course, the topic is important because, well, it is, damn it! 

I just got back the evaluation of a big grant proposal that did not get funded.  The eval I got was just a score sheet and not with any real comments.  I would hope that the comments would have been useful.  The scoresheet?  Not much at all.

The reality is that being an academic, even a successful one, means a heap of rejection.   Science, social or otherwise, means trying, getting turned down, revising, and revising some more.  Most of the time, when one submits to a journal, one is hoping for a revise and resubmit [R&R].  I have had only one experience where I got an acceptance immediately, and that was for a paper that had been through the R&R process twice at another journal before it got shot down.

If one takes seriously the feedback, the work should improve, even if the feedback is sometimes lame.  My frustration this week is that I really did not get sufficient feedback to improve the grant application to try again.  Still, I will try again.  Oh, and if I got real feedback, I probably would have whined about it, but then I woudl ahve gone ahead with revising with the feedback in mind.

Trek Omissions

Matt Yglesias has written a great piece on the Trek universe.  He went further and bolder than I ever did, as I have seen all of the movies but missed some episodes of Deep Space Nine, gave up after a while on Voyager, and only watched a few episodes of Enterprise.  His views are not terribly controversial (the holodeck was lazy writer crack), but he puts all of the shows into a good context and one that raises a big challenge for the new movies.  The first JJ Abrams ST movie was thrilling but tossed aside the entire universe that had been previously created with the time travel stuff.  This led to fun stuff, like Spock + Uhura, but it means that this timeline lacks the richness of created by the decades of previous stuff. 

Yglesias calls for a new TV show: "It’s a scandal that the golden age of niche television is passing us by without any representation from the franchise that practically invented niche television."  And I agree, but now JJ Abrams may have screwed that up--if there were to be a TV show, in which universe would it exist?  How would a TV series fit with this on-going movie series?  I don't know. 

All I do know is this: I hope the third movie in the new series is not "Into More Darkness" because, as I have said before, darkness for the sake of darkness is just darkness.  I am already not looking forward to the fact that the next set of Marvel movies are covered in dark sauce--Thor: the Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (it is darker in winter, right?). 

So, if a new Trek series were to be Star Trek: The Dark Days, count me out.

Progress Report

I love a good infographic and this one shows how pathetic the US is in terms of women in Congress


Of course, the Democrats are way head of the GOP but still not that representative of the population.
H/T to Mrs Spew for putting it on her FB page and to this website for its origin.

Stunned into Silence?

I have not blogged about the various scandals/stories/whatevers plaguing the Obama administration.  I am more surprised by the IRS stuff than the Department of Justice stuff because I have long hated how DoJ has operated under Obama.  I had hoped/expected that Obama would reverse the trends under the various awful Attorney Generals that served Bush, but those hopes have been dashed. 

And, yes, I am using hope quite deliberately here.  I know that lots of stuff is constrained by a hostile Congress, but that is not an excuse for the misuse of prosecutorial discretion over the past four plus years.  Why not go after the bankers after they caused such economic harm?  Why the paranoia about leaks?  It is DC, shit happens, so just accept it and move on. 

This stuff is way outside of my expertise, so all I can do is gnash my teeth and look away.  I don't think most of this stuff is as bad as what the Bush folks did, but it is certainly not what I expect out of this or any President.  Count me among the severely disappointed.

The Grandest of Grand Theorists

Much debate these days about the place of grand theory in the scholarship of IR.  One thing we cannot debate is the centrality of Ken Waltz's work.  A few words about Waltz's work are in order since he passed away yesterday.*

*  See this post by Dan Nexon, which is an excellent start for the inevitable and much warranted appreciation of a great IR scholar.

He produced two of the most important books in the business.  One of the ways you can tell someone was truly terrific is how the ideas seem so much like common sense after the person wrote them but not so much before.  Man, The State, and War was a simple book that made a simple point--that we can look at different levels of analysis and see very different causes of war.  He gamed the book, of course, favoring the third level of analysis--the systemic level--setting the stage for the second book.  MSW was and still remains assigned in heaps of intro to IR classes, as it is quite readable, refers to heaps of political theory that students read for other reasons in other classes, and just gets one primed to think about IR.

The second book, Theory of International Politics, shaped the field ever since.  It is still relevant more than thirty years later, casting a huge shadow on all subsequent IR theory.  I think only Wendt's Social Theory has a similar level of ambition and impact.  Keohane and Nye's Power and Interdependence is almost as influential but not nearly as ambitious in terms of making us think differently about the world.

I realized in grad school when I did a supplementary reading course that Waltz was not creating stuff out of thin air but building on John Herz and others.  Still, Waltz's TIP is simply THE book that IR scholars must read if they want to be IR scholars.  I can think of many over-rated books that one can skip or just read the article version.  But you have to read TIP or read most of it as it appears in Neo-Realism and Its Critics.

My work has mostly been at the level of what Waltz would call Foreign Policy and not IR.  Why?  In part because I could see some of Waltz's limitations but had no clue how to do it better.  And, seriously, only one Realist has come close to Waltz in doing Realism at the systemic level as well as Waltz, and that would be Robert Gilpin and his book, War and Change.  The problem with Waltz is that he had a great theory for explaining continuity but not change.  Still, Waltz's arguments apply in a post-cold war world.

The one piece I always required in my Intro to IR classes were the latest versions of "hey, the spread of nuclear weapons might not be so bad" argument.  I didn't buy it, but the logic was fun to engage.

Four personal points:

1. Waltz got his undergrad degree from Oberlin, so I always found a bit more pride in my Obie id given that it was shared with the God of IR Theory.
2. When I prepared for my comprehensive exam in IR, I studied with a friend who was a political theorist. He  would simply ask of any reading we did: What Would Waltz Say?  And it was a very useful way for a non-IR person to see the entire field in a coherent way.
3. When I took my first IR class in grad school, it happened in my second quarter there.  The first quarter was methods and political theory and other stuff, and I was left wondering if I should stay in grad school.  Nothing interested me that much and I didn't feel competent.  But once I got my hands on MSW and TIP, I re-fell in love with IR and had fewer existential crises about my graduate school career.
4. I had dinner with Ken Waltz when he visited Montreal for a talk at Concordia (I think).  All I remember was that he was very kind and very engaged.  If I can be half as engaged at 80+, I will be most happy.  And if I can have 1/20th the influence that Waltz had, then I would be most thrilled indeed.

The Best Part of Publishing Is ....

The Best Part of Publishing is ... the Publication!  I just got six (!) copies of Nationalism and War, which is a volume edited by John Hall and Siniša Malešević.  I have a chapter: "When Nationalists Disagree: Who Should One Hate and Kill?"  It develops the xenophobia stuff that appeared in my 2008 book with Bill Ayres.  One of my regrets at McGill was that I didn't hang out enough with John Hall, an incredibly bright and erudite sociologist working on nationalism.  The nice thing about this project that produced this volume is that it gave me a chance to do hang out with him and his smart sociologist friends.

I often tell my students to avoid participating in edited volumes, as they are frequently a great deal of work that takes forever to get published (since they go at the speed of the slowest contributor) and rarely have any visibility.  I do tell them that if it gives you a chance to hang out with really interesting people, do it for that.   And voila!

Check it out--it is a very interesting read (and not as American-centric as the cover photo suggests).