The disconnect between academic political science and real-world policy is a topic of some concern in current discussions of the purpose and future of political science. Dan Drezner has insisted that even the most technical political science (or narrowly for…
I wrote several months ago about a long-term project on the colonial origins of local economic governance in Java, and in particular, on the importance of ethnicity and colonial migration. The first substantial output of that project is now available….
David Frum has an interesting article at the Daily Beast on the failure of the GOP “Plan B.” The basic argument is that most all Republicans wanted some sort of resolution, but to have voted against whatever resolution was passed….
Yesterday Cornell SEAP series welcomed a visiting scholar from the State University of Papua who presented on food insecurity in Papua on our weekly Brown Bag. The talk was grimly fascinating. Papua and West Papua, the two provinces at the eastern end…
As I polish up a first serious draft of a paper on decolonization, today I came across a discussion of “annexation.” I invite readers to peruse the following and imagine which tropical territory is being discussed. Many…who felt…that annexation was…
Today’s revealing quote, from the Philippine-American Chamber of Commerce in NYC in 1930. There is no great aggregation of American capital in the Philippines like there is in Porto Rico, Hawaii, and in Cuba. To attack the sugars coming from those quarters…
The ECB’s recent announcement that it would provide unlimited support for the sovereign bonds of struggling Euro economies through Outright Monetary Transactions (OMTs) is a big deal. A really big deal. Let me illustrate by borrowing the words of a European…
Internet debates on economic policy, economic thought, and current events are frustrating. Today’s exhibition: Tyler Cowen on Keynesians on China. Cowen, of Marginal Revolution fame, recently published a timely essay at the New York Times on how different schools of…
Let’s say that you’re a pessimist about global growth prospects. If so, you’re not alone: Q2 GDP growth in the U.S. is weak, the U.K. is in a double-dip recession, and there’s no end to the Eurozone crisis in sight….
Rationality has something of a bad name these days. Unlearning Economics has an interesting comment on the critique of rationality in economics, and Marc Bellemare has noticed as well. If rationality is problematic for economics, then it is doubly so…
