In preparing for my Asian Political Economy seminar tomorrow, I ran across this quote from Bruce Dickson’s Wealth into Power: The Communist Party’s Embrace of China’s Private Sector. (By the way, this is a very good book, and comes highly recommended.) China’s…
Indolaysia took a break from frigid upstate NY for a beach vacation in Punta Cana, D.R., last week. This is a new vacation concept to us: going somewhere without any intention of doing anything except for sitting around, getting sun, and…
ALERT: VENTING TO FOLLOW. In the past day, two colleagues have said in public forums that my understanding of Malaysian politics is superficial (and therefore misleading) because I live far away. One accused me of “parading.” By public forums I…
I’m in Toronto for AAS 2012. The vast majority of the people here are either Americans, or live in the U.S. A fun game is to watch people inadvertently insult all Canadians in the course of regular conversations. “Do you…
Over the past two weeks, the economics blogosphere has spent some time discussing microfoundations. The microfoundations approach means, at base, that all macroeconomic models should constructed from the behavior of individuals. This normally means optimizing agents, although it need not…
Today I’m responsible for what is normally the most difficult lecture in my Southeast Asian Politics class: Vietnam from the colonial era until reunification. There’s no better way to describe the issue than to reproduce two slides that I’ll be…
I’ve contributed a guest post over at New Mandala on the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) and Islam in a hypothetical post-BN world. The editors created more paragraphs than I had intended, so it’s choppier than I’d like, but my point…
The highly anticipated new blog by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson has an interesting new post on extractive institutions in Africa. It’s worth a read. Also worth a read are Kim Yi Dionne‘s reactions. I don’t know if there are…
One of the biggest pet peeves that I have—as someone who takes political science writing seriously—is the misuse of economics jargon. We’re not economists, so we should stop trying to talk like them. And when we do need to talk…
