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In The Commander-in-Chief Test, Jeffrey A. Friedman offers a fresh explanation for why Americans are often frustrated by the cost and scope of US foreign policy-and how we can fix that for the future.Americans frequently criticize US foreign policy for being overly costly and excessively militaristic. With its rising defense budgets and open-ended "forever wars," US foreign policy often appears disconnected from public opinion, reflecting the views of elites and special interests rather than the attitudes of ordinary citizens.The Commander-in-Chief Test argues that this conventional wisdom underestimates the role public opinion plays in shaping foreign policy. Voters may prefer to elect leaders who share their policy views, but they prioritize selecting presidents who seem to have the right personal attributes to be an effective commander in chief. Leaders then use hawkish foreign policies as tools for showing that they are tough enough to defend America's interests on the international stage. This link between leaders' policy positions and their personal images steers US foreign policy in directions that are more hawkish than what voters actually want.Combining polling data with survey experiments and original archival research on cases from the Vietnam War through the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, Friedman demonstrates that public opinion plays a surprisingly extensive-and often problematic-role in shaping US international behavior. With the commander-in-chief test, a perennial point of debate in national elections, Friedman's insights offer important lessons on how the politics of image-making impacts foreign policy and how the public should choose its president

Do leading social-scientific experts, or technocrats, know what they are doing? In this text, Jeffrey Friedman maintains that they do not. Friedman shows that people are too heterogeneous to act as predictably as technocracy requires of them. Technocratic reason, then, entails a drastically oversimplified understanding of human decision making in modern society.

'War and Chance' analyzes the logic, psychology, and politics of assessing uncertainty in international affairs. It explains how the most important kinds of uncertainty in international politics are inherently subjective, and yet how scholars, practitioners, and pundits can still debate these issues in clear and structured ways. Altogether, the text shows how foreign policy analysts can assess uncertainty in a manner that is theoretically coherent, empirically meaningful, politically defensible, practically useful, and sometimes logically necessary for making sound choices. Each of these claims contradicts widespread skepticism about the value of probabilistic reasoning in international politics, and shows how placing greater emphasis on assessing uncertainty can improve nearly any kind of foreign policy analysis or decision.

Capitalism and the crisis : bankers, bonuses, ideology, and ignorance / Jeffrey Friedman -- An accident waiting to happen : securities regulation and financial deregulation / Amar Bhid -- Monetary policy, credit extension, and housing bubbles : 2008 and 1929 / Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith -- The anatomy of a murder : who killed the American economy? / Joseph E. Stiglitz -- Monetary policy, economic policy, and the financial crisis : an empirical analysis of what went wrong / John B. Taylor -- Housing initiatives and other policy factors / Peter J. Wallison -- How securitization concentrated risk in the financial sector / Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson -- A regulated meltdown : the Basel rules and banks' leverage / Juliusz Jablecki and Mateusz Machaj -- The credit-rating agencies and the subprime debacle / Lawrence J. White -- Credit-default swaps and the crisis / Peter J. Wallison -- The crisis of 2008 : lessons for and from economics / Daron Acemoglu -- The financial crisis and the systemic failure of the economics profession / David Colander ... [et al.] -- Afterword : the causes of the financial crisis / Richard A. Posner

This article evaluates emerging progressive ideas about US grand strategy. Progressives' distinctive analytic premise is that structural inequality undermines America's national interests. To combat this problem, progressives recommend retrenching US primacy in a manner that resembles the grand strategy of restraint. However, progressives also seek to build a more democratic international order that can facilitate new forms of global collective action. Progressives thus advocate ambitious international goals at the same time as they reject the institutional arrangements that the United States has traditionally used to promote its global agenda. No other grand strategy shares those attributes. After articulating the core elements of a progressive grand strategy, the article explores that strategy's unique risks and tradeoffs and raises several concerns about the theoretical and practical viability of progressive ideas.

AbstractThis article evaluates emerging progressive ideas about US grand strategy. Progressives' distinctive analytic premise is that structural inequality undermines America's national interests. To combat this problem, progressives recommend retrenching US primacy in a manner that resembles the grand strategy of restraint. However, progressives also seek to build a more democratic international order that can facilitate new forms of global collective action. Progressives thus advocate ambitious international goals at the same time as they reject the institutional arrangements that the United States has traditionally used to promote its global agenda. No other grand strategy shares those attributes. After articulating the core elements of a progressive grand strategy, the article explores that strategy's unique risks and tradeoffs and raises several concerns about the theoretical and practical viability of progressive ideas.