Category Archives: General
James Q. Wilson, 1931-2012
I never studied with Jim Wilson while getting my degree in the Harvard Government Department, though he was there at the time. My contacts with him came later, when we served together on the President’s Council on Bioethics in the … Continue reading
Surveillance Drone, Maiden Flight
I’ve promised to write about the surveillance drone that I’ve been building over the past couple of months. I have always wanted to have my own drone that could send back a live video feed. This is partly inspired by … Continue reading
What’s Wrong with Hungary?
I have, to put it mildly, been somewhat astonished at the heated reaction that my blog post “Do Institutions Matter?” has provoked, culminating in a letter from the Hungarian State Secretary for Communication, Zoltán Kovács, to The American Interest complaining … Continue reading
Hungary Responds
My earlier blog post on Hungary’s new constitution has elicited a large and often angry response from some Hungarians, and now the Hungarian State Secretary for Communication, Zoltán Kovács, has written a critical letter to The American Interest that you … Continue reading
What is Governance?
I’m beginning a new project at Stanford/CDDRL called “The Governance Project.” The intention is to focus on conceptualizing and measuring governance, and applying those measures to two specific countries, China and the United States. The beginning point of the project … Continue reading
Do Institutions Really Matter?
Over the past decade the mantra in both development studies and comparative politics has been “institutions matter”—that is, you aren’t going to get economic growth or other human development objectives in the absence of institutions like rule of law, transparent … Continue reading
Symbolic Animals
I have been reading Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species at the recommendation of David Sloan Wilson, who has been one of the leading proponents of group selection (or more properly, multi-level selection) in evolutionary theory over the last few years. … Continue reading
European Identities Part II
This is a continuation of the extract of the talk I gave at the University of Geneva in Nov. 2011 on “European Identities.” This part deals with the failure to create an identity at a European level: Let me turn … Continue reading
European Identities Part I
I’m reproducing the transcript of parts of a talk I gave in Geneva last November at the Latsis Foundation Prize Ceremony on “European Identities.” This excerpt deals with how different European countries have dealt with Muslim immigrant assimilation, and the … Continue reading
American Exceptionalism
In this campaign season, a lot of Republican candidates, particularly Newt Gingrich, have been talking about American Exceptionalism. When Gingrich says that President Obama doesn’t understand how exceptional the United States is, he means this in only a positive sense: … Continue reading
