Australian Political Scientist
• ACSPRI has a Summer Program 2012 in Canberra, Australia, on statistics and research methods.
• Who Killed The Electric Car? (2006) explored the market failure of early hybrids and electric cars. Now there’s a sequel: Revenge of the Electric Car (NY Times video clip).
• The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy on the macroeconomist John Maynard Keynes.
• Vanity Fair‘s Michael Lewis on Californian local politics.
Harvard’s Stephen Walt has a well-argued case for valuing many different approaches to international relations:
But because academic disciplines are largely self-defining and self-policing (i.e., we determine the “criteria of merit” and success depends almost entirely on one’s reputation among fellow academics), there is the ever-present danger that academic disciplines spin off into solipsistic and self-regarding theorizing that is divorced from the real world (and therefore unlikely to be refuted by events) and of little value to our students, to policymakers, or even interested citizens. This tendency occurs primarily because proponents of one approach naturally tend to think that their way of doing business is superior, and some of them work overtime to promote people who look like them and to exclude people whose work is different. Anybody who has spent a few years in a contemporary political science department cannot fail to have observed this phenomenon at work; there just aren’t very many people who are genuinely catholic in their tastes and willing to embrace work that isn’t pretty much like their own.
I read Walt’s comment after re-reading Michael Desch‘s discussion of Waltzian structural neo-realism, constructivism, and strategic culture (PDF), which is shaped by how different proponents have approached their research programs.