Cass Sunstein on “How to Humble a Wing Nut”

A provocative title from a known political liberal–but consider the research before you discount this–and remember that this works on cranky liberals and all sides of the political spectrum where thoughtless opinion (“the overproduction of opinionated opinion” according to Albert Hirschman–the definition of blogging ?) fills the air.  The University of Colorado study, “Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding,” conducted by Phillip Fernbach and a research team.

How does it work?  Here is the process that researchers asked participants to follow:

1. State your position on an issue:  gun control, climate change, etc.
2. Rate your understanding of the issue on a 7 point scale
3. Tell us everything you know, linking understanding and explaining causal relationships
4. Reiterate your understanding on a 7 point scale, restate your position

The key: Asking people to carefully consider step 3 tends to avoid them playing the advocacy role for their position, pushing them, perhaps, into a explanatory role rather than a defensive one.

For wing nuts and their many fellow travelers, however, there is a serious obstacle, and it goes by the name of “motivated reasoning.” When people have a strong emotional attachment to their initial convictions, they tend to heap ridicule on anything that runs counter to those convictions and to give a lot of weight to anything that supports them.

Motivated reasoning helps to account for two defining characteristics of wing nuts and their fellow travelers: a readiness to attack people’s good faith, rather than their actual arguments, and an eagerness to make the worst, rather than the best, of opposing positions.

via How to Humble a Wing Nut – Bloomberg.

Poll Illustrates European Discontent with Institutions

The political idea of Europe is losing popular support across several key countries–no surprise given the economic travails facing the region. Approximately 77 percent of French respondents see the economic integration as making “things worse for their country”:

The poll pointedly noted that, “No European country is becoming more dispirited and disillusioned faster than France.” Last year, 60 percent of the French surveyed said they had a favorable impression of the European Union. This year only 41 percent did, a decline of 19 percentage points that was the biggest annual drop among the countries surveyed.

The results corresponded to some degree to the health of a nation’s economy. Only Greeks and Italians professed less belief in the benefits of economic union than the French, according to Pew. In Germany, 60 percent held a favorable impression of the union.

That could have everything to do with the listless economy in France, which is on the verge of joining much of Southern Europe in recession and has an unemployment rate of 11 percent. The German economy has fared better and has a relatively low unemployment rate of 5.4 percent.

via Poll Shows European Union Loses Favor on Continent – NYTimes.com.

At the same time, Goldman Sachs issues a sober assessment on the economics of a hotly debated Brexit of the UK from the European Union:

He dismissed those who argue that Britain could negotiate a trade deal with the EU once it had left. “Given the size and importance of the UK economy, it is unlikely that the UK could negotiate the same access to the EU single market that Switzerland and Norway have achieved,” he said. “In particular, the UK’s ability to conduct business in financial services across the European Union is likely to be severely compromised by a departure from the EU.”

via UK exit from EU would be ‘loss/loss scenario’, warns Goldman Sachs – Telegraph.

Mental Health Break | Ryan Gosling IR Memes

 

If you get the jokes then you are doing your reading on IR theory and such.  via International Relations Ryan Gosling.

Kenneth N. Waltz, international relations neorealism theorist

Kenneth N. Waltz  (5/12/13) was a giant in the field of international relations theory (“the Darwin” according to Ken Booth)–who contributed to “structural realism”–and made the case, linking theory to contemporary policy issues, for Iran and  DPRK getting the bomb as a means to global peace and stability.

“Without a theory, we’re just lost,” said Robert Jervis, a political science professor at Columbia. “We just have all these random phenomena we can’t make any sense of.”One of Mr. Waltz’s propositions was that wars are not caused simply by human aggression or bad governments but by the anarchic, dog-eat-dog nature of international relations. Each nation-state, he said, will push as far as it can to advance its own self-interests.

He used as an example the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he said freed the United States to become a bully because it no longer had an opponent in its own weight class. In this new “unipolar” world, the United States “abuses its power, singling out poor, weak countries — that’s what we specialize in — and beating them up,” he said in 2011 in an oral history interview at the University of California, Berkeley.“It is sad,” he continued, “but this is a typical behavior of powers that are dominant, or used to be dominant in their regions, and now are globally dominant.

via Kenneth N. Waltz, Who Helped Shape International Relations as a Discipline, Dies at 88 – NYTimes.com.

Can the US Compete? The Realities of 2016

Our eight documentary film in the Beyond the Border series looks at the global automotive industry in an effort to explain supply chains.  But it also reveals the hyper-competetive and challenging manufacturing environment facing the US in a networked, trade-driven world.

More to this theme–also masterfully addressed in Edward Luce’s Time to Start Thinking and CFR’s Richard Haas new book:  Can the US accept these new realities and start planning to deal with what Harvard’s Jeffry Frieden calls “steady but far-too-slow-growth”?  Adam Davidson, the brilliant Planet Money explainer writes:

It’s useful to consider the framework of Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a political consultancy. American power during the past half century, Bremmer says, has been based on a strong military and an enormous market — one that can reward and punish. And while the former has maintained its standing, the rest of the world is becoming much less fixated on the latter. Romney and Barack Obama can promise to punish China all they want (Obama, in fact, made an identical point in 2008), but their statements merely suggest either that they don’t realize America’s economic power has diminished or (more likely) that they’re just too afraid to say it out loud. And that’s too bad. Those Rust Belt voters would be better served, Bremmer says, if the next president could persuade American businesses to stop complaining about China and instead focus on making goods that its consumers want to buy. For decades, Chinese businesses studied the American market. Now it’s time to play catch-up.

via Will We Be Better Off in 2016? – NYTimes.com.

 

 

Watch Edward Luce: It’s ‘Time to Start Thinking’ America on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Would Machiavelli Have Drawn a Red Line? – By Rosa Brooks | Foreign Policy

Not hard to see why this is trending on foreignpolicy.com–a contemporary discussion on the master political tactician, applied to U.S. diplomacy.

Somewhere along the line, this seems to have changed. Today, many of our senior-most diplomats (and I include the president in that general category) seem to substitute shrillness for suavity, hectoring intransigence for erudition, and prissy pomposity for persuasion.

The examples are too numerous to cite, but take that peculiarly popular word “unacceptable” (as in, “That is unacceptable to the United States”). The number of things the United States finds “unacceptable” is equaled only by the number of things it “will not tolerate.” And that is to say nothing of the multitude of “red lines” and “lines in the sand” that U.S. officials draw on a regular basis.

via Would Machiavelli Have Drawn a Red Line? – By Rosa Brooks | Foreign Policy.

Empty Seats at the State Department – Graphic – NYTimes.com

How bad is the personnel backlog?  This chart tells all  Empty Seats at the State Department – Graphic – NYTimes.com.