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  Based on her blog, she has a philosophy of science that's about, oh, sixty years out of date.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!!  

I take my cues from the front page of the New York Times just like any other effete intellectual member of the Media Elite. And today, Jodi Kantor delves into the latest paroxysm of debate about women trying to "have it all," and, hey, whaddaya know, this time it's an Atlantic cover essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter that's set it off. I've had my friendly disagreements with Slaughter in the past, and I'm afraid I'm going to have another one after reading "Why Women Still Can't Have it All." But in this instance I want to stress the "friendly" part of the "disagreement."

Slaughter's title pretty much sums up her thesis: after spending two years in a hard-charging job as the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, she discovered that the opportunity costs to her home life were too great:

I realized that I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down, I wanted to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with my children in the last few years that they are likely to live at home, crucial years for their development into responsible, productive, happy, and caring adults.

The essay is worth reading, if not quite as groundbreaking as others would like it to be. It ceetainly references political minefields issues I've raised here in the past on women pursuing foreign policy careers. Rather than launch a full-blown critique, however, I'd just raise three questions:

1) Is this just about women? As multiple critics have pointed out, the issues Slaughter raises -- balancing work and home life, etc. -- are hardly unique to women. She suggests that women face this challenge more acutely because... well... they're moms:

From years of conversations and observations, however, I’ve come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.

Many factors determine this choice, of course. Men are still socialized to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver. But it may be more than that. When I described the choice between my children and my job to Senator Jeanne Shaheen, she said exactly what I felt: “There’s really no choice.” She wasn’t referring to social expectations, but to a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the “choice” is reflexive.

As someone in a more traditional marriage than Slaughter, I'd tweak this just a bit. First of all, unless someone is inheriting a trust fund, there's also really no choice in providing for a family either. Seriously, there isn't. Second of all, a difference between men and women is that when parenting issues come up, it's totally cool for women to anguish about it -- in print, no less -- while it's happening. For men, it's totally cool to drink Scotch, brood and repress feelings about the costs of careerism for years until it all boils to the surface at some family vacation when the kids are grown up and resentments can be aired. But trust me, men have to cope with this as well.

Third, I wonder if the choice is really that stark. There are hard-charging jobs and hard-charging jobs. There's being an active parent and then there's... American parenting in affluent zip codes. As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry noted:

YES, you can have it all. You can have a successful career and a good family. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, and there is absolutely no doubt about that.

What you CANNOT have is a successful career AND helicopter parenting. This “it” you cannot have. And if you want the best for your kids, you’ll choose the career and ditch the helicopter. They’ll be better off, and take it from me, they’ll be grateful.

2) Is it the international dimension? Slaughter was trying to write as general an essay as possible, but I was struck by how much of her anecdata consisted of women in foreign affairs/national security careers. I have no doubt that professionals in other sectors face this issue, but one of the biggest challenges with "international" careers is that they tend to spawn international travel.

I know and admire some professionals who go overseas and bring their families with them, but that's not for everyone. The one piece of advice I can proffer here is to cram intense foreign experiences early in one's life. One of the jumpstarts to my own career track was spending significant amounts of time in eastern Ukraine during a time when no Westerners wanted to be there. I was able to do that because at the time I was unattached and childless. There is no way -- no way -- I would have made the same choice if I was married and a father. Plan accordingly.

3) Are the solutions worse than the problem? Finally, I am skeptical that Slaughter's suggested reforms will really work. I like her suggestion that we reconceive our career arcs so that they peak in one's late sixties rather than twenty years earlier -- but that won't happen unless wages get less sticky. Older workers woiuld have to be comfortable with declining rather than rising wages, because otherwise Slaughter's suggestion would act as a massive barrier to hiring younger workers.

Furthermore, some of Slaughter's recommendations would likely have unanticipated consequences that would exacerbate the very problems she wants to solve. For example, one of the issues that she raises is family leave for raising children. Now, this is an innovation that has been cemented into the academy pretty well -- but the effects have been somewhat perverse. That's because after maternity leave, paternity leave got institutionalized. This sounds great, but I know from personal experience that women and men use these leaves differently. Women tend to use it by being moms. Men tend to use it by being more of a dad, but also by using it as a semi-sabbatical to publish more. I should know -- that's what I did. So an innovation that was designed to allow redress gender imbalances actually exacerbated them.

Now is ordinarily the time in the blog post when I offer my own suggestions, but I can't say I have any great ideas. So I'll leave it to the readers: what is to be done?

Here's a more complete transcript of my interview with Peterson Institute for International Economics founder C. Fred Bergsten that Foreign Policy excerpted earlier in the week.  I edited and abridged the transcript to clean up some of grammar.  Have at it -- Bergsten's discussion of his role in the Trans-Pacific Partnership should make for interesting reading!! 

DANIEL W. DREZNER: I guess the first question I would ask is, what do you think the [Peterson Institute for International Economics'] greatest accomplishment has been?

C. FRED BERGSTEN: I think our greatest accomplishment has been to educate Americans on the benefits of globalization. And the first calculation that tried to quantify the effects, namely a trillion dollar a year -- higher -- national income, the potential for further gains of another half-trillion a year could go all the way to reducing barriers to global trade. Um, it's been a tough battle. It started in earnest I'd say in the NAFTA fight in Congress, and it continued during every one of the trade policies at the time. It's of course come up repeatedly in the capital flows context as well with all the monetary crises going back to the 80s with the debt crisis, and the 90s with Asia, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, etc. And now, with the crises of the high-income countries...but I think, putting it in the broadest terms, we have been the people trying to expand understanding of globalization -- its benefits and costs, which there certainly are -- but how [on] balance, it's a positive force, both for the U.S. economy and for U.S. foreign policy. In doing that, we have never tried to cover up or short-change the costs, particularly the adjustment the cost to workers and [immobile] factors of production, but it's mainly workers. We've quantified that, about 50 billion a year to offset against the one trillion a year of gains --20/1 cost ratio -- pretty overwhelming but that is significant cost. So that has to be dealt with, and the U.S. has not dealt with it very well. Trade adjustment is miniscule --  one billion a year. We need to invest more to deal with the downside; the cost of losing, in order to keep the benefits of globalization on a stable basis. And we've argued that throughout, and I think our balance carried the day. But the battle rages on, as you know, so much work yet to be done.

DWD: Of course, I know you're a Fletcher alum, and I'm speaking right now from the Fletcher school, so I have to ask this question: In what ways did your Fletcher experience prepare you for going to DC and then sort of creating the Institute for International Economics?

CFB: Well, it prepared me really well because I learned really most of my international economics there, from the top professors of the day, [like] Charles Kindleberger.

DWD: Kindleberger was there when you were? Oh, I didn't know that.  

CFB: Charlie taught a couple of courses -- a course on Europe, Europe Economy, an economics course on development with Humphry called the Don and Charlie show -- that was one of the highlight performances on the campus. But their teaching gave me most of my roots in international economics, and always -- obviously in a global context -- but also in a real world context; a political economy context that was, of course, really useful then for going into the policy world, which I did, most immediately into government, and then with that of most of my 20 years of career then to creating the institute.

DWD: Do you think America's foreign policy establishment has become more or less economically literate since when you first started IIE?

CFB: I don't think there's been much change. They were not very literate then, and they're not very literate now. My first big job -- I had a couple of lesser jobs -- my first big job was becoming economic deputy to Kissinger when he was National Security Advisor under Nixon.

Read on

A few months ago, the Tobin Project sponsored a YouGov poll to be put in the field on American attitudes towards foreign policy and national security.  Dartmoth political science Benjamin Valentino conducted the poll, being so good as to solicit, collate and structure questions solicited from other political scientists, myself included. 

You can look at all of the topline results here, with party-line breakdowns to the responses.  The question I offered was Q53: "In thinking about a country's influence in the world, which single factor do you think matters most?"  The response:

25.9%  "The country's military strength"

45.0%  "The size of the country's economy"

8.2%  "The attractiveness of the country's culture"

21.0% "Don't know"

As for party line splits, Republicans stressed military strength almost as much as GDP (39.8% to 42.5%), which made them a bit of an outlier compared with Democrats or independents. 

Related to this is Q57, which asked respondents whether they preferred a high growth world in which "the average American's income doubles, but China grows faster than the United
States and China's economy becomes much larger than America's" or a low growth world, in which "the average American's income increases by only 10 percent, but the U.S. economy remains much larger than China's."  A majority (50.7%) preferred the low growth world, thus supporting my long-standing argument that Americans are stone-cold mercantilists. 

I also submitted a variant of Q21:  "In your opinion, what country is America's most important foreign ally?" to see whether Israel made it into the "super-special" ally status desired by a few neoconservatives and political leaders.  Again, the results and party splits are interesting.  Among the entire sample, Israel placed second, behind only Great Britain.  It was a much stronger second among the GOP respondents, however -- among Democrats, Israel actually came in third, below -- gasp! -- Canada.   

Readers are strongly encouraged to scan the the entire poll -- there's a lot of great stuff.  The responses to Q25 ("How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statement? 'The United States faces greater threats to its security today than it did during the Cold War.'") will make Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen want to bang their heads against a wall.  And the GOP responses to Q64 ("Which of the following statements best describes your views on whether Barack Obama was born in the United States or another country?") are, shall we say, disturbing. 

Your humble blogger is procrastinating his packing preparing for a family vacation.  So, according to Jonathan Bernstein, Kevin Drum and Brendan Nyhan, is the political press corps.  Bernstein explains:

[The summer] creates a whole lot of reporters with little to report on – and a whole lot of empty time on the cable news networks, the newspapers, the blogs, the new talk radio shows and the rest of it.

And what academic research tells us is that slow news days create scandals. That’s what Brendan Nyhan and other media researchers have found; indeed, Nyhan believes that the lack of scandal during Barack Obama’s first two years in the White House was caused, at least in part, by a series of very eventful news cycles. The mechanism, obviously, is that if there’s no major news, then minor news fills the hole, and if there’s no minor news, then we’ll hear plenty about stuff that if you squint just the right way might sort of pass for news....

It’s no surprise that mid-summer, when lots of newsmakers are on vacation (and when little is happening even in the sports world), is when stories such as the “ground zero mosque” or Shirley Sherrod’s supposed racism took off. Not just those; any kind of meaningless hype, whether it’s a supposed gaffe or some meaningless polling random variation, is going to get far more attention than it deserves.

Bernstein offers some suggestions for what political reporters could do with their surfeit of time besides explore stupid scandals.  Let me proffer a suggestion of my own:  cover the rest of the world.

Seriously.  World politics doesn't stop for the summer, and as I'm sure I heard someone smart once say, the world is not a boring place. Sure, it used to stop in Europe, but I'm betting a lot will happen on that continent as well.  Why shouldn't political reporters use the summer to earn their foreign correspondent bona fides? 

Now, I'm sure newspaper and television editors reading these scribblings will immediately protest that even though they think the world is interesting, their audience won't. Hogwash.  If there is anything the media excels at, it should be how to tart up stories that might otherwise pass under the radar.  Here are a few suggestions:

1)  The "where are they now?" gambit.  Remember how, in 2011, the world seemed liked it was kinda ending?  Earthquakes, revolutions, that kind of thing?  Wouldn't it be wacky to send reporters to these places to see how things are going now?  Think Fukushima, or Tunisia, or even states that didn't have full frontal revolutions, like Oman.  Do some follow-up journalism. 

2)   The "Olympic Hangover" stories.  The one big sporting event this summer will be the London Olympics.  How about sending some reporters to previous Olympic host countries and see what happened to those facilities?  I bet the Athens and Beijing reports would be interesting.

3)  Foreign superheroes.  This summer has seen a bumper crop of Hollywood blockbusters about men in tights and women in catsuits with extraordinary powers. While superheroes had their origins in American comic books, wouldn't it be cool to see if and how this genre has been adopted elsewhere in the globe?  Is there are Russian Superman?  A Chinese Iron Man?  An Indian Wonder Woman?  Go find out! 

Readers are welcomed to come up with their own foreign policy hooks in the comments below. 

Well, given this morning's headlines, I can't think of a better week for Foreign Policy to put excerpts of my interview with C. Fred Bergsten online.  Bergsten is the founder of the hugely influential Peterson Institute for International Economics.  At the end of this year, he will be stepping down as president of that institute.

Sometime this week I will post the full interview transcript.  In the meanwhile, I found this answer to be particularly interesting:

 I don't think there's been much change in the economic literacy of America's foreign-policy establishment since I first started. They were not very literate then, and they're not very literate now. The problem is that the individuals who are at the top of the foreign-policy hierarchy, both at State and at the National Security Council, tend to be less than sophisticated, shall we say, about economic issues. It's not part of their DNA to think about economic topics when they go about their business with Syria or Iran or Russia, not to mention Europe or China.

This observation is ironic, given recent reports that Tim Geithner suggested Hillary Clinton replace him as Treasury Secretary last year.  Still, I think Bergsten's proposition has held for quite some time.  I don't think it will be able to hold for much longer, however. 

Your humble blogger is not naive in the ways of punditry.  He is keenly aware that the only way to move up the punditry food chain is to bemoan the crumbling state of America's infrastructure while pining for better high-speed rail, better schools, and ORDER, dammit!! 

In the interest of serving the greater good, your humble blogger has decided to do the crucial pundit fieldwork necessary to adopt this position.  I am therefore taking the Acela "hi speed" train from Washington, DC, to New York City, and shall chronicle every moment of import along the way in this blog post.  So buckle your seat bekts -- it's going to be a bumpy ride:

8:10 AM:  Part of the pundit code is getting into a local taxi and getting colorful quotes from them.  Alas, my cabbie was not the chatty type.  Also, despire the morning rush-hour time, there wasn't a lot of sitting around time.  Oh, and his cab was clean too.  Clearly, Washington DC is receiving favored treatment in its infrastructure. 

8:35 AM:  I get to Union Station to find much of it being renovated.  There are cranes and construction equipment everywhere!  What is his, Shanghai?!  Of course, in the Far East, they're just building new things, whereas here in the decaying United States, we're trying to preserve our crumbling monuments to modernity [Oh, that is Pulitzer GOLD, baby!!--ed.]

8:40 AM:  I want to get coffee from Starbucks, but the Acela line has already started forming.  I bypass the coffee to make sure I get a good seat.  Anger at stupid American regulations... rising!!

9:00 AM:  On the train, I hold my breath as I try to access Acela's wifi.  Many an expeletive has been tweeted in anger at this unreliable system.  In my case, however, it opens with no difficulty.  There is a warning page informing me that, for myriad reasons, the wifi might cut in and out and it can't access certain pages.  Still, Amtrak's web service has jumped up a notch since the last time I took the Acela... or, again, the NYC-DC corridor gets preferential treatment compared with the Boston trains.  Note to self:  hire eager-beaver grad student to unearth Amtrak perfidy. 

9:10 AM:  I can't access YouTube.  That's it, this is the worst f***ing WiFi service I've ever encountered.  There's no WAY this would happen in China!!!

9:20 AM:  Well, the Acela reveals itself to be erratic, as it starts to slow down from its pathetically low "hi speed" -- oh, it's stopoing st the BWI station.  Never mind. 

9:33 AM:  Sure, I could have opted for the quiet car, but I wanted to mix with "the people," get a sense of what they're talking about amongst themselves.  So far, they're talking about... PowerPoint presentations.  There's a column in here somewhere...

10:00 AM:  So far, the train has been on time, the WiFi has worked, and even the non-quiet car has been pretty sedate.  Friedman's Rage is not building.  [Bye-bye Pulitzer!!--ed.] No, wait, the train ride is kinda bumpy.  Very bumpy at times.  Kind of like... like... the American body politic!!  [Atta boy!  You're back in the game!--ed.] 

10:20 AM:  The WiFi cut out for, like 10 minutes south of Wilmington.   How sad and pathetic for America.  Why, if this had happened in, say, Chongqing, at least one train bureaucrat would have been executed and one British hedge-fund manager would have been poisoned to set an example for other trains.  

10:39 AM: The WiFi is becoming erratic again, causing additional mutterings from other passengers in my car. One of them says "This would never happen in Michael Bloomberg's America!!" #notreally.

11:35 AM: The train has arrived in Newark. I look around. God, I miss China.

11:45 AM:   Your pundit's long morning nightmare has come to an end on a gorgeous day in Manhattan.  I learned a lot about America on this trip, but even more importantly... I learned a lot about myself.   [Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Aaron Sorkin!!--ed.]

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has quite the provocative op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal.  He argues that even though "every living former secretary of State" endorses it, the United States should withdraw from the World Trade Organization. 

Why?

The [WTO] proposes to create a new global governance institution that would regulate American citizens and businesses without being accountable politically to the American people. Some [WTO] proponents pay little attention to constitutional concerns about democratic legislative processes and principles of self-government, but I believe the American people take seriously such threats to the foundations of our nation.

The [WTO] creates a United Nations-style body called the "Dispute Settlement Mechanism." "The Mechanism," as U.N. bureaucrats call it in Orwellian shorthand, would be involved in all commercial activity...

Disagreements among [WTO] signatories are to be decided through mandatory dispute-resolution processes of uncertain integrity. Americans should be uncomfortable with unelected and unaccountable tribunals... serving as the final arbiter of such disagreements.

Oh, wait... you know what I did?  I misread Rumsfeld's op-ed.  Replace "WTO" with "Law of the Sea Treaty" and "Dispute Settlement Mechanism" with "International Seabed Authority."  That's what Rumsfeld is arguing against. 

But, hey, that totally innocent mistake on my part does a lovely job of demonstrating the hollowness of the best of a bad set of arguments.  [What are Rumsfeld's other bad arguments?--ed.  I believe, in order, 1) I worked with Reagan; 2)  Authoritarian states would also benefit; and 3) I smell socialism, no matter what the U.S. Navy says.]  The United States surrenders small parts of its sovereignty on a fairly regular basis.  America does this because the massive gains that come from every other country surrendering their sovereignty outweigh those costs and constraints.  Rumsfeld's argument, however, simply asserts that no sovereignty loss is tolerable -- which is gonna be news to our WTO and NATO partners, for starters.

What's especially impressive is that the former Secretary of Defense managed to write a whole op-ed weighing the costs and benefits of this treaty without ever once mentioning either "China" or "South China Sea."  By ratifying this treaty, the United States and its Pacific allies would put China into a corner on that and other disputes. 

Instead, Rumsfeld ignores that particular argument.  So, let's just come out and say it:  Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumfeld is soft on China. 

Am I missing anything?