The APSA discussion on journalism and political science wound up focusing very heavily on work that’s done in the “American politics” subfield, but as Robert Farley points out there are questions to be asked about the lack of engagement with the other branches of political science as well:

The question of subfield prominence also bears more attention. By and large, IR and comparative haven’t had the same impact on the journalist community in either their quantitative or qualitative forms. I think that several major concepts/grand theories from both comparative and IR have found their way into the general policy conversation (deterrence theory, for example) but it’s more difficult to find uses of clear, sound political science research. IPE might be an exception to this. The immense political science literature on ethnic conflict seems utterly detached from the way that ethnic conflict is treated in the popular media.

I think you find almost no journalistic interest in comparative politics scholarship as just part and parcel of the overall solipsism of American popular political debates which take place in a kind of comparison-free void. The IR scholarship issue is quite different, since there’s tons and tons of journalistic work on subject matter to which scholarly IR research is plainly present. And the issue here, I think, is really primarily one of politics. The kinds of policy approaches that find support in the IR literature or can be usefully illuminated through it are just too far off the center of the American political consensus.

One reason that the field of economics plays a prominent role in popular discussions of politics is that you can find very credible academic economists with PhDs and everything on both sides of most of the big partisan battles in Washington. But that’s not really the case on the foreign policy side. The intellectual basis of modern-day rightwing foreign policy is DC think tanks and magazines and has nothing to do with scholarly controversies. This is a very very very bad thing for the world and leads us into some catastrophically misguided policy choices, and it also means that journalists attention tends to be focused on the bounds of the politicized DC debate which is unusually isolated from scholarly approaches to these topics.

A friend of mine was expressing amazement last night that Brad DeLong’s coauthor on The End of Influence had also managed to write Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War and do all this good work for the Brookings Institution.

I had to tell him those are actually three different people, Stephen S Cohen the economist, Stephen F Cohen the Russian historian, and Stephen P Cohen the Brookings South Asia analyst. It turns out to be even more confusing than that, because some of the work I’d mentally attributed to Stephen P Cohen is actually the work of the other Stephen P Cohen, who’s a mideast specialist.

Long story short: Too many guys with this name! It’s overtaken the “Romer”-complex in confusingness.

The only real surprise here is that it’s no surprise at all:

Syria always feared that the White House of George W Bush and Dick Cheney would invade Damascus once it had dispatched with Baghdad in 2003 and, in his newly released memoirs, the former British prime minister Tony Blair confirmed those fears were well founded.

Describing the former US vice president as an advocate of “hard, hard power”, Mr Blair said Damascus was next on Mr Cheney’s hit list.

“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hizbollah, Hamas, etc,” Mr Blair wrote in his autobiography, A Journey. “In other words, he thought the whole world had to be made anew, and that after September 11, it had to be done by force and with urgency.”

One of the aspects of the Iraq disaster that hasn’t really penetrated the American psyche in an adequate way is the degree to which this kind of erratic belligerence undermined global nonproliferation goals. In a world where the United States initiates aggressive wars unilaterally, nuclear weapons become a vital source of security and responsible and patriotic leaders of all sorts of countries are going to want to at least keep the door open to WMD acquisition.

The “body mass index” gauge of obesity is easy to calculate, but that very same simplicity means it has some obvious limitations as a metric. Still, it seems to me that it’s a very useful one and much of the criticism misguided for reasons that Monica Lastnameunknowntome explains well at Feministe:

Here’s my response: of course it is. It’s an index. This is what indexes do, they aggregate individual pieces of information to tell you something about a whole. The BMI was never intended to be used as a measure of personal health, but was instead meant to tell us something about entire populations. It’s usefulness on that score remains intact: you can broadly say that, if America’s BMI average is increasing, Americans are getting fatter. Unless it can be explained by something else, like a population-wide protein-shake/weight-training-routine frenzy, which is unlikely to happen.

Similarly, these international comparisons of BMI are telling us something meaningful:

It’s simply not the case that very-high BMI is so much more common in the United States than in France because Americans are all incredibly muscular compared to French people. Admittedly, it would be nice to have more sophisticated information on this subject, but public health is an important subject and it’s necessary to draw some conclusions based on available data.

As I said on Thursday, the most potent kind of stimulus is money-financed fiscal policy where you have the government print money and deploy the newly printed money to purchase goods and services. Our actual institutions don’t work that way, but contemplating such an effort is one of the quickest ways to see the problem with the fallacy of “the money has to come from somewhere”.

Greg Ip reports from the monetary policy at Jackson Hole on a more institutionally realistic variant of this idea:

If Q[uantitative] E[asing] cannot spur private demand on its own, combining it with looser fiscal policy may help. If the private sector will not spend, the government can do it instead, borrowing to cut taxes, send cheques to households, build infrastructure or even extinguish underwater mortgages. QE prevents all that borrowing from driving up long-term interest rates.

This kind of thing, incidentally, is why despite the operational independence of the central bank the wise president will still want to ensure that the Board of Governors is largely stocked with people who share his worldview. Re-appointing your much more conservative predecessor’s choice for Chair and then going all the way through the midterms without getting candidates for the other vacancies confirmed is not consistent with this approach.

I think that reading the Koch brothers’ contributions to political advocacy causes as solely motivated by narrow economic self-interest is both hard to fit with the facts and also grounded in a somewhat implausible view of human psychology. People prefer to situate their activities inside a principled worldview that naturally includes some elements that are unmoored from direct self-interest. That doesn’t mean, however, that self-interest is irrelevant. And it certainly doesn’t mean that people should accept Julian Sanchez’ contention that the Koch brothers’ backing of a broad libertarian ideology is something they do to the exclusion of conventional rent-seeking:

A company owned by oil billionaires Charles and David Koch has contributed $1 million to Proposition 23, a November ballot initiative to suspend California’s groundbreaking 2006 global-warming law.

The contribution came from Flint Hills Resources LP, based in Wichita, Kan., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, the nation’s second-largest private company, with estimated annual revenue of $100 billion. It was posted online Thursday by the California secretary of state.

At any rate, everyone I know who’s ever received Koch money is aghast at the suggestion that their integrity might in any way be compromised by said funding. But that’s just not how the world works. The point is that thanks in part funding dynamics, you couldn’t very well be working at the Cato Institute and start doing a lot of writing about how one reason libertarians ought to ally themselves with the progressive coalition in the United States is that unregulated carbon dioxide emissions constitute a massive violation of the property rights of the adversely effected politicians. Indeed, people get sacked for lesser offenses.