Category Archives: General
Life in a G-Zero World
The nature of world politics has changed more rapidly in the past four years than anyone expected. From the fall of the Berlin Wall up to the financial crisis of 2008, the United States had enjoyed a unprecedented period of … Continue reading
Albert O. Hirschman, 1915-2012
2012 saw the passing of a great development economist, Albert O. Hirschman, at the age of 97. Development economists spend their time these days performing randomized controlled experiments, in which a particular intervention like co-payments for mosquito bed nets are … Continue reading
Democracy and Corruption
I want to make one correction to an assertion I made in my last blog post. In it, I said that delivery of services like education and health care is something that “states accomplish, and not the institutions that check … Continue reading
The Strange Absence of the State in Political Science
It is a curious fact that in contemporary American political science, very few people want to study the state, that is, the functioning of executive branches and their bureaucracies. Since the onset of the Third Wave of democratizations now more … Continue reading
Surveillance Drones, Take Two
A lot has happened since I last reported on my surveillance drone. My fleet has grown to three drones: in addition to the DJI quadcopter, I have a Bixler Sky Surfer equipped with a GoPro camera that can send a … Continue reading
What Myanmar Needs
The second leg of my recent trip took me from Mongolia to Myanmar (it’s not an easy itinerary getting from Ulaan Baator to Naypyidaw, believe me). I was there to teach a short course on private sector development with my … Continue reading
Mongolia, Mining, and Malfeasance
I recently returned from a trip to Mongolia and Myanmar. The linking of these countries on the same itinerary was accidental, though they both actually have a lot in common: they border China and much of their recent foreign policy … Continue reading
China’s ‘Bad Emperor’ Problem
For more than 2000 years, the Chinese political system has been built around a highly sophisticated centralized bureaucracy, which has run what has always been a vast society through top-down methods. What China never developed was a rule of law, … Continue reading
The Two Europes
The Greek election on Sunday was a predictable disaster: the two mainstream parties, the socialist PASOK and the center-right New Democracy (ND), were displaced by new extremist parties that appeared on their right and left, including the left-wing Syriza and … Continue reading
Acemoglu and Robinson on Why Nations Fail
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have just published Why Nations Fail, a big book on development that will attract a lot of attention. The latest fad in development studies has been to conduct controlled randomized experiments on a host of … Continue reading
