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The Loneliness of the Long Dissertation Writer

Posted by  on Wednesday, May 16th 2012     

At this time of year I find myself talking to students considering PhD programs who are interested in my own advice on whether or not pursuing a PhD is a good idea. One question that has come up repeatedly has to do with the psychological challenges of completing a PhD in the social sciences. Specifically, that it’s lonely. One very bright student asked me specifically about this issue last week; she had been told by another of my colleagues that writing a dissertation is a very lonely process. Coincidentally, that night I came across a post by Robert Kelly which makes an identical point in the context of 7 general gripes about being an academic.

My response to that student was that I don’t think it’s right to say that completing a PhD is lonely. I think that it’s more accurate to describe completing a PhD as intensely personal. That may produce feelings of loneliness, but it need not.

My own experience was that writing my dissertation (which, at one point, reached 550 manuscript pages…so it was long) was personally challenging because every morning (at 8:30 AM) and evening (at 9PM) I would open up my word processing program and stare at an empty screen with the understanding that after a couple of hours that document needed to have words on it. There was no one else who was going to write them but me.

…And there was no one else who was going to bug me to write them every day but me.

…And there was no one else to blame if they weren’t written but me.

…And at every moment there were plenty of things that seemed more interesting than writing, and no one to tell myself to keep on task but me.

This was an unpleasant feeling. I managed to get over it, but only after about 3 months of serious writer’s block in which developed an incredibly precise system for organizing notes and did a lot of unnecessary teaching preparation. (I remember this urge to convert my section syllabus from Word into LaTeX. Yes, that was a way to waste time.)

But at least in my own case, it would be a mistake to call that feeling loneliness. I had plenty of professional interactions with faculty, worked at the Statlab, attended lots of talks, discussed dissertation issues with friends, taught, etc. In most graduate programs, there are plenty of things that you can do to keep yourself active and busy. The problem, in fact, is that there are too many seemingly useful and inherently social things to do that distract you from the task of writing.

My sense is that in terms of the personal nature of the dissertation, political science tends to be more like the humanities than like economics and psychology, two social science discipline in which co-authoring throughout your graduate career is normal. This is different in some poli sci programs, but these are exceptional cases. My general point is that I wouldn’t worry about loneliness per se, I would worry a lot more about dealing with the more nagging issues of motivation, stamina, self-direction, etc. Conceivably, loneliness is cured by socialization; the others are conditions which have no easy solutions of which I am aware.

category: Research, Teaching

SMBC Linguistics Error

Posted by  on Tuesday, May 8th 2012     

Ahem. Today’s SMBC contains a linguistics error.

There is no glottal stop in “pet dog,” “mint condition,” “rat trap,” “internet porn,” or “elephant gun.” Those are unreleased alveolar stops. I do think that there’s a glottal stop in “Bat Man.”

UPDATE: Language Log commenter Mike Aubrey comes to the same conclusion.

category: Language

What is Implementation Bias?

Posted by  on Monday, May 7th 2012     

Via Marc Bellemare, an interesting paper (PDF) by Bold et al. on “scaling up” randomized controlled trials, with an application to educational reform in Kenya. The general problem here is that RCTs are a great way to identify the effects of particular interventions on particular outcomes, but armed with a finding that, say, “exposure to a contract teacher in government schools in Western Kenya raises test scores by 0.21 standard deviations relative to being taught by civil service teachers,” we often have a difficult time “scaling up” this outcome to the national level. The problems are both practical (how to get the entire country to do something?) and conceptual (should we expect that the Western Kenya findings are applicable across Kenya? To say nothing about Uganda, India, Bolivia, etc.). We call latter a question about external validity.

Marc describes another problem, which he labels implementation bias:”with only one implementing partner, it is impossible to tell whether the success or failure of any intervention is due to the perception people in the treatment group have of the implementing partner.” I have no disagreement that that’s an issue, and Bold et al.’s paper is a great way to explore it, but I never thought about calling that implementation bias. To me, the term implementation bias conjures up two other problems.

  1. An intervention may only be possible in the very places where it’s most (or perhaps least) likely to be successful. If you want to generalize about the effects of an public accountability intervention in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, you ought to wonder if that intervention could have been implemented in the first place in Solo. This is related to the “OMFG exogenous variation” syndrome: we seize on findings that we can find using the techniques we prefer, and ignore ones that we cannot. The danger is that there is some feature of Yogya that allows public accountability to be manipulated and which is related to the outcome we want to measure.
  2. We may only implement things that are relatively uncontroversial to implement. Take the classic paper (PDF) by Miguel and Kremer on deworming. The authors find (once again in Kenya) that where “school-based mass treatment with deworming drugs was randomly phased into schools” there are large externalities to deworming: the benefits spill over to some children who did not experience the treatment. This is a great finding and a great paper, and we can think of its findings as evidence that public health interventions are investments in human capital, but I wonder how many minds it changed. Take something a lot more expensive and a lot more controversial—something like forced sterilization of people with low IQs, which I of course do not support—could we ever know if that would be a cost-effective investment in human capital? Probably not, because we can’t implement it. Between the two extremes of deworming and forced sterilization there are lots of public health interventions that are more or less controversial but which may or may not be good investments. We might only implement the ones that are probably the most likely to yield good outcomes.
Are all of these things implementation bias? Or are there other proper names for them? I don’t know, and I suppose that it doesn’t matter substantively, but as an interested observer I’d like to know.
category: Research

Three in One, Almost Done

Posted by  on Thursday, May 3rd 2012     

This is my job!

It’s early May, and that means that this semester’s teaching is finally done. Phew. This has been the heaviest teaching semester that I’ve ever had: one 65+ person lecture plus two 15-person seminars (both of which are “new preps,” which means that I had never taught them before). I know that for most faculty, three courses in a semester is the norm: among the invisible professoriate three in one with two new preps is normal, even light. JMP once taught FIVE courses in one semester. But among regular faculty in research-oriented departments in research-intensive universities, it is not the norm.

But I have a confession. Right now I may have the bleary-eyed look of Donald Sutherland in Animal House (and I actually do have that jacket) but unlike his Jennings, teaching isn’t “just a way to pay the bills until I finish my novel.” I like teaching, and I don’t care who knows it. Of course I don’t like everything about teaching, but I do like the basics: I like to talk about Southeast Asian politics to people who are eager to learn about it, and I like to debate basic questions about, say, why Asia’s material prosperity has grown over the past half century, or how we ought to go about learning how politics works around the world. On the whole, I’ve had a good time this semester. I’ll be glad to turn my attention to research again, but not because I haven’t enjoyed what I’ve been doing.

The costs of teaching this much are that I have had scarcely any time to do any research or writing since January. I have, though, done a lot of productive thinking. I have a couple of ideas saved up on multimethod research, for example, that I’ll share here in coming weeks. Some of these ideas are going into a new paper on context and method in Southeast Asian politics, which I’ll be presenting in three short weeks at Uni Freiburg (this conference program can only be described as bad-ass…MacIntyre, Malesky, von Luebke, Shair-Rosenfield, Kuhonta, Tajima, and the great Emmerson too).

However, before that happens, we have to have Slope Day here at Cornell. I have a couple of other Animal House images that I could post in honor of Slope Day, but I leave that to your imaginations.

category: Teaching

Wikis as Teaching Tools: A Reflection

Posted by  on Friday, April 27th 2012     

A confession: I tend to have quite a bit of disdain for “teaching with technology.” Call me old fashioned, but I don’t see the point in many of the teaching innovations that technology is supposed to have brought us. No doubt there are exceptions: electronic lecture slides are easier to manage than overhead projector slides, Clickers are great for giant introductory classes, and I am happy to use Blackboard for announcements and virtual course packets (although I use only about 5% of its functionality).

Yet with the possible exception of the clicker, I don’t see these things as changing teaching so much as making my job more convenient. That’s what Blackboard does: I just have an easier way to communicate with students than I would otherwise have. Clearly I need to attend more education-technology fora to learn how stodgy old me can get with the program for connecting with today’s modern active learners. I’m so old fashioned in my insistence that they do readings and then listen and ask questions in lecture.

All of this said, I embarked on a teaching-with-technology experiment for my Asian Political Economy seminar this semester. Here’s the background: this is a seminar which serves as a sort of introduction to contemporary research on political economy in Asia (essentially the India-Japan-Indonesia triangle). The problem I face is that no matter what sorts of pre-reqs I put on the course, I will never be able to find students who all have the same background as they need to have, or the same background as one another. Some will have lots of political science but no Asia; some will have lots of Asia but no political science; some will have lots of econ but not the kind that political scientists use. It’s a seminar-leader’s nightmare. To work, the seminar needs regular participation, but to participate, they have to read and digest the readings. Yet, few arrive able to do the readings the way that I want them to, so most of the seminar just consists of figuring out what terms mean.

My experiment, once I realized the gravity of the potential problem, was to make a course wiki that the students would edit themselves. I scanned each week’s readings beforehand, created a list of terms that they  needed to know, and then they filled them out on their own, defining them and (in the best cases) explaining where they show up in the readings and why they matter. I assigned the “wiki updating” task to each week’s discussion leader, so that 2-3 students collaborated in each week’s wiki page.

I didn’t really think this through, and my initial goals were modest. Basically, I figured that at least 2 students a week would be able to get the readings because they knew the terms. But there were other, unanticipated benefits.

  1. It turned out that all students (not just discussion leaders) would look at the list of terms each week before doing the reading. I think that this gave them a great head-start on the reading, prompting them to focus exactly on what I wanted them to get out of each reading. Very good stuff.
  2. We spent less time than we otherwise would have defining what basic terms meant, and more time debating whether the definitions made sense.
  3. There’s an opportunity for friendly competition and extra credit built right in. I made available some extra credit points for “wiki editing,” which can be done at any point in the semester and by any student on any entry. If they do this (some of them have) they can build competence by thinking hard about, for instance, if the initial definition provided by a classmate was a good one, or how to link various terms from different classes.
Of course, there are some downsides.
  1. Lots more work to create the wiki and pick the terms. I essentially had to do all the reading one more time. Then the wiki entries have to be graded. You can see how this adds up.
  2. I’m still not convinced that an unmotivated student cares about the course wiki or takes it seriously. This is a tool that’s most useful for a motivated and eager yet somehow underprepared student.
In all, I call it a success. But course evaluations have yet to come in yet, so perhaps they’ll all tell me that they hated the course wiki. If they do, I’ll update.

PS: In case you’re wondering, here are the terms that I thought most important for them to know. If you know all of these things and why they matter, you’re in a great position to understand why Asian economies look the way they do today.


Aggregate demand; Anglo-Saxon model; Asset stripping; Barter trade; Big Push; Budget constraint; Bureaucracy; Capital account; Capital controls; Capital specificity; Case control; Central bank; Central government transfers; Centralization; Chaebol; Civil society; Class compromise; Closed-list PR; Coasian bargaining; Collective bargaining; Colonialism; Command economy; Commercial paper; Confucianism; Constituency; Constructivist; Contagion; Contractionary macroeconomic policy; Cooptation; Corporatism; Corruption; Credible commitment; Credit allocation; Cronyism; Cultural Revolution; Currency peg; Current account; De facto versus de jure; Deadweight loss; Debt-to-reserves ratio; Decommodification; Decoupling; Delegation; Depoliticization; Devolution; Difference-in-difference; Distributive preferences; Doi moi; Double movement; Dual pricing; Efficiency; Electoral rules; Embedded autonomy; Emergence; Endogenous growth theory; Evolutionary reform; Exogenous technological change; Externalities; Factionalism; Factor endowments; Factor mobility; Federalism; Fence breaking; Financial repression; Fiscal contracting; Fiscal decentralization; Folklore of corruption; Foreign investment: horizontal, vertical, and conglomerate; Gaige kaifan; Globalization skeptic; Hedging; Holding company; Household responsibility system; Human capital; Import substitution; Incomplete contracts; Increasing returns; Industrial policy; Industrial relations; Informal institutions; Informal labor; Information; Institutional design; Integralist; Integration: horizontal and vertical; Interjurisdictional competition; Joint stock company; Keiretsu; Kuznets curve; Labor action; Late-late-industrialization; Legitimacy; Leverage; Liberalization; Line ministry; Liquidity crunch; Lost decade; Majoritarianism; Market confidence; Market failures and coordination problems; Marketization; Market-preserving federalism; Middleman; Minjung; Minority shareholder protections; MITI; Mixed economy; Modernization theory; Monetization; Money politics; Monitoring; Morselized public goods; Multiple equilibria; Natural experiment; Neoliberalism; Networks; New Left (in China); Nonperforming loans; Norm entrepreneur; Observational equivalence; Oligarchy; Overseas Chinese; Overseas development assistance; Ownership concentration; Pancasila; Panchayati raj; Pareto efficiency; Partial reform; Particularistic contracting; Path dependence; Patron-client relations; Personalism; Pluralism; Policy rigidity; Policy volatility; Political culture; Political decentralization; Populism; Primitive accumulation; Principal-agent relations; Profiteering; Programmatic policy; Public sector; Race to the bottom; Recapitalization; Regime type / political regime; Regulatory institutions; Rents; Reserved seats (India); Schumpeterian rent; Second-best world; Segmented labor market; Selectorate; Self-enforcing; Single nontransferable vote with multi-member electoral districts; Single-party regime; Soft budget constraint; Special Economic Zone; Speculation; Speculative attack; State autonomy; Stochastic; Structural adjustment; Subsidies; Systemic insolvency; Technical assistance; Technocrat; Total factor productivity; Tragedy of the commons; Transactions costs; Unitism; Upgrading; Veto point; Winning coalition; X-inefficiency; Zaibatsu

category: Teaching

Teaching Counterinsurgency to Undergraduates

Posted by  on Thursday, April 19th 2012     

Today is the counterinsurgency class in Southeast Asian Politics. I don’t relish teaching this class—even though I’m assigning my own work—because it is a sad topic. Here is a lecture slide that always gets me (image from here).

I can talk about the strategic difficulties that the U.S. and allied forces faced in the Second Indochina War, and that’s fine, but nothing delivers the message better than a picture. I leave it as an exercise for the class (and for Indolaysia readers) to apply these lessons to contemporary conflicts.

category: Asia, Teaching

Interview-Based Field Research for First-Timers

Posted by  on Tuesday, April 17th 2012     

At the request of the beginning PhD students here, I am giving a presentation on interview-based field research this morning. It’s really very sketchy—there is just no way that I can do this topic justice in an hour—but there are some very basic and practical questions that first-timers have about the process. Things like “how do I find people to interview” and “how do I convince them to talk to me” and things like that. I can’t pretend to be an expert, but I have muddled through first-time interview-based field research in two countries, so perhaps my experiences can be helpful.

For interested readers, I typed up answers to their specific questions. You can read them here.

I had literally zero training in how to do field research before I went to the field. I like to think that it’s possible to have a bit more direction than I had. I might have done a better job the first time around. Here are some sources that I wish that I had read:

  • Christopher B. Barrett and Jeffrey W. Cason (eds.) Overseas Research: A Practical Guide. Second edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
  • Jaber F. Gubrium, James A. Holstein, Amir B. Marvasti, and Karyn D. McKinney (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft. Second edition. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2012.
  • Chris Blattman’s field work notes: http://chrisblattman.com/tag/field-work/.
category: Research, Teaching

Language and Indonesian Regionalism

Posted by  on Saturday, April 14th 2012     

On Thursday, Joe Errington gave a fascinating presentation entitled “In Search of Middle Indonesian” at the SEAP Brown Bag. Joe is a linguist and an anthropologist, yet his presentation hit on a number of basic and enduring political science themes about the construction of national identity in the post-colonial world.

Alas, there is no recording, and no paper to circulate, but I did jot down some snippets that capture the message of the talk. The basic facts, which generate the fascinating puzzle, are these: On one hand, “everywhere you go people believe that [the language we know as Bahasa Indonesia is] self-evidently and legitimately the language of Indonesia and that everyone should speak it.” On the other hand, there is “no native-speaking models of Indonesian” which means that “when linguists want to characterize ‘colloquial Indonesian’ they must describe the language of a place.” Yet in common practice “non-standard language use is not understood to be different from some standard” even though there actually is a standard variety of formal Indonesian that Indonesians learn in school.

So the following linguistic repertoire is common for people who grow up outside of Jakarta or various provincial capitals.

LOCAL ETHNIC LANGUAGE: e.g. Javanese, or Sasak, or Uab-Meto, learned at home and used in everyday life

FORMAL LANGUAGE: “proper” Bahasa Indonesia, learned in school, seen on national TV

But when people like this move to a city (Joe’s example was Kupang in West Timor) they find that people do not speak either the local language or formal Indonesian. They speak something else, a regional koine with no official status but which usually cannot be easily understood by speakers of formal Indonesian yang baik dan benar (“which is good and proper”) even though it is clearly (like Indonesian) some outgrowth of a Malay-based lingua franca. I gather that this what Joe means by Middle Indonesian, and that the point is that there are many Middle Indonesians.

MIDDLE INDONESIAN: Jakarta Malay, Kupang Malay, etc., not formally recognized by most speakers as languages or even dialects but rather as some sort of diminished or improper thing, like a slang

This means that even when Indonesian census takers report that there are now people who speak Indonesian as their first language, what they really mean is that there are people who speak Jakarta Malay, Kupang Malay, etc. as their first language. Both JMP and I have some experience navigating this uneasy distinction between Jakarta Malay and the language that we learned in school. I often find myself hanging out with Jakartans and not being able really to follow what they are saying, at which point they consciously switch to standard Indonesian and apologize. Many times I have been told by Indonesians that my Indonesian is very good, and it took me awhile to realize that they don’t mean that I am good at speaking Indonesian, but rather that I am speaking a good kind of Indonesian adequately!

So why is this political? Because the standard story of Indonesian is that the entire idea of Bahasa Indonesia is political: Bahasa Indonesia means “Indonesia language” and can only be understood as something which emerged to reinforce the idea of Indonesia itself. Formal standard Indonesian is not the native language of anyone—Joe called it “un-native Indonesian”—even though more than 90% of Indonesians speak it fluently and it is “self evidently and legitimately the language of Indonesia.” It is not an “ethnic” or “regional” language, and notice that this means that “all ethnic languages are equivalent, and in an equivalent relationship to the standard language, because they are regional languages.” So Javanese = Uab-Meto, and both are subordinate to Indonesian. This only makes sense as part of a project to subordinate Javaneseness and Timoreseness to Indonesianness.

But Joe argues that in the same way that Indonesian generates a sense of we-ness for Indonesians, Middle Indonesians are generating senses of we-ness for regional communities too. We now see billboards, for example, written in Kupang Malay, which means that this mode of speaking is believed to be meaningful for the people who read it. And this means that there is a group of people who are excluded: all the non-local Indonesians who cannot easily use Kupang Malay.

Now here is where Joe’s presentation ends and my editorial comment begins. What remains to be seen is whether the “we-ness” that Jakarta Malay and Kupang Malay generate today has the same sorts of consequences for Indonesian regional identities that Indonesian had for the Indonesian national identity. We will see this especially in the cities, where a new generation is growing up speaking these Middle Indonesians—but not formal standard Indonesian—as their native language. It remains to be seen whether Kupang Malay and the other Middle Indonesians are merely interesting linguistic phenomena, or politically meaningful origins for regional identities.

My guess is that the latter is unlikely, at least in my lifetime. I bet that over the next two or three decades, Jakarta Malay will become the high-status register and that the other Middle Indonesians will be used in parallel as low-status registers in the regions, as markers of place and perhaps class, rather like Geordie or Scouse, but not of political identity in any consistent way.

category: Politics, Research

Culture and Development: Short Notes

Posted by  on Tuesday, April 10th 2012     

Just in time for today’s lecture on economic development in Southeast Asia, and a week after the Asian values (or “listing our stereotypes of Asians”) class, a beautifully sarcastic post by Noah Smith on culture as an explanation for Chinese development. My frustration with culture as an explanation for “how Asian politics looks” is similar, although I don’t express it quite this way.

To head off such problems in our discussion of the politics of economic development in modern Southeast Asia, I plan today to walk through the classic Solow growth model and then explain that if they want to deploy politics or culture (or anything else) as a fundamental cause of Southeast Asian economic development, their choices are to apply it to TFP, capital, or labor. (I know that this simplifies growth accounting, but for pedagogical purposes and political science/Asian studies undergrads, it’s necessary.) The “discovery” that I hope that they make is that when you think really hard about that, culture—if not necessarily politics—isn’t a good candidate for being a cause of economic development.

category: Research, Teaching

The Euro and Sovereign Debt

Posted by  on Wednesday, April 4th 2012     

My colleague Richard Swedberg sent me this wonderful graphic today. Very rarely do you see a visual presentation of data that so clearly illustrates so many things so beautifully. He first showed this at an event on the EU Financial Crisis last Friday in which we both participated.

10-Year Yield for Euro Zone Countries, 1993-2011

For Euro-skeptics (not Europe-skeptics, mind you, Euro-skeptics), this is powerful evidence that the adoption of the Euro may have papered over some fundamental differences across economies. For those skeptical of the wisdom of international financial markets, this is powerful evidence as well that, well, maybe those who lend to sovereign governments don’t think very hard about things. (Why wasn’t Greece charged a premium? It seems unlikely that differences in the capacity of Germans and Greeks to service their sovereign debts were unknowable.)

As JMP describes it, “so it looks like everyone thought Germany was just as creditworthy as Greece. Then, turns out, not so much.”

category: Uncategorized
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