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The UN should call for total legalization, the only approach that will fully resolve the harms identified in its report.

Two libertarian experts on public ignorance continue a debate about conformism.

The Pros and Cons of Pseudonymous Publishing for Science and the Public.

The new tax reform bill includes a dramatic reduction in the U.S. corporate tax rate. Is this a hand-out to the rich or a necessary measure to spur the economy? Luigi and Kate debate the pros and cons and break down the law's impact on pass-through businesses.

Over the past year the landscape of academic social media has become increasingly complex, leaving researchers with the question of where best to spend their energies. Taking stock of the current platforms Andy Tattersall weighs up their pros and cons and how they might best be used by academic for social microblogging. Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter was … Continued

Theories of Change have become a popular mechanism for research funders to build impact into the design phase of research projects. Laurens Hessels, Fedes van Rijn, Stefan de Jong, Wendy Reijmerink, Jeroen van Houwelingen, Allison McIntosh, Gerald Jan Ellen and Gerben Koers weigh the pros and cons of Theory of Change models and suggest how … Continued

Companies like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash have brought the term "gig economy" into our lexicon. But what is the gig economy really? When you start digging into the data, you find it's a lot harder to define than you think. On this episode, Kate and Luigi investigate the pros, cons and myths of the gig economy.

In Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? Daniel Chandler considers how the work of twentieth-century philosopher John Rawls could inform policymaking to build a fairer society with reduced inequality and a more democratic political system. The book expounds Rawls’ theory in admirably clear prose but begs the question whether the work of other thinkers … Continued

Annamaria Bianco's contribution aims to show how Arab migration writings and future writings have increasingly ended up overlapping, in the wake of the "speculative turn" taken by contemporary fiction. Through a review of a few novels published after the so-called "refugee crisis" in 2015 and drawing on different studies as well as on the notion of "refugeedom", the author will show how this literary genre juxtaposes the documentary function of prose with narrative strategies of estrangement and defamiliarization that aim to generate in the reader a desire to act on the present, to redeem the past and change the future of hospitality worldwide.

From Joseph Epstien's oped in the July 13 WSJ on Biden v Trump (please, dear Lord, no)Each man has risen to the presidency thanks, mostly, to the unattractiveness of his electoral opponent. Each man was elected as a lesser-evil choice, yet both have succeeded in vastly polluting the tone of our country's political life. Lesser-evil choices sometimes turn out to be evil enough.Low and seedy are the corruptions of which Messrs. Trump and Biden have been accused: molesting women, entering into dubious financial dealings with foreign corporations and governments, cavalierly mishandling important documents, and more. My italics. I'm not here today on content, but just on writing. I make mental notes of little writing tricks that might embellish my prose.  I liked the first one, just because it's such a beautiful catchy phrase. I'm not sure what the general principle is, but I'd like to come up with more prose like that. The second one has a clearer lesson. The usual rule is, write your sentences forward. Or, more likely, edit your sentences to be forwards. You should quickly turn that one around to "The corruptions of which Messrs. Trump and Biden have been accused are low and seedy." Or, better, through it changes the subject a bit, "Messrs. Trump and Biden have been accused of low and seedy corruptions." 99% of the time you should do that. But not this time. Look how beautiful that backward sentence is. There must be some biblical quote it refers to. Maybe readers can come up with the allusions. Don't do it all the time. But rules are made to be broken, if you really know what you're doing. Which Epstein clearly does. 

There is a long running debate in political science: do we get better judges by letting the public vote in elections or by giving our leaders the power to appoint them? One side says that judges should be insulated from the influence of politics involved in elections, focusing entirely on the rule of law. The other side says that our judges should be accountable to the public for the decisions they make in office. Who is right?

In this episode, we're doing things a bit different. The Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, headed by our very own William Howell, has developed a series of primers that each focus on the available scholarship about the pros and cons of a particular governmental reform. Each primer is written by a scholar who has also done research in that area. On this episode, we speak with Sanford Gordon from the Politics Department at NYU who wrote a primer on this question: is it better to elect or appoint judges?

When it comes to our federal bureaucracy, there are two schools of thought. One says that an insulated group of career bureaucrats have created a deep state that corrupts the performance of government. The other says that our bureaucracy is dysfunctional because there is too much turnover or positions left vacant. Both rest on an underlying feature of our democracy: many of the positions in the federal bureaucracy are appointed by the President and approved by Congress. But, could having less politically selected appointments give us a more functional government?

In this episode, we're doing things a bit different. The Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, headed by our very own William Howell, has developed a series of primers that each focus on the available scholarship about the pros and cons of a particular governmental reform. Each primer is written by a scholar who has also done research in that area. On this episode, we speak with David Lewis from Vanderbilt University who wrote a primer on this question: should we have more politically appointed bureaucrats or less?

In the last episode of our podcast, we had a mini version of a never-ending debate on this show: whether private equity is good or bad. Afterward we talked about doing a full episode debating the pros and cons of PE until we realized, we'd already done it.

The debate features Jeff Hooke, author of the book "The Myth of Private Equity," and Chicago Booth Professor Steven Kaplan, once referred to by Fortune Magazine as "probably the foremost private equity scholar in the galaxy."

We're taking a short summer break as we put together some fascinating episodes on the past and future of antitrust, the shortcomings of neoliberalism, and whether science and law are for sale in our capitalist system. In the meantime, we thought we might re-share some of our most thought-provoking episodes that are still relevant, maybe even more relevant, today. Our prior debate on private equity seemed like the perfect place to start. I hope you get as much out of it on a second listen as we did, and we'll be back with brand new episodes soon. Thanks for listening.

Welcome to the new Responsible Statecraft website! If you're a new reader, we're delighted that you are checking us out and we hope you find the content engaging and enlightening. If you're a long-time fan of "realism and restraint," we know you'll find plenty here of interest. If you're a skeptic or even a critic of our work, we hope we can persuade you to consider the arguments here for a more sensible and successful foreign policy for the United States.
Here are three reasons why the content you'll find at Responsible Statecraft is so valuable.
First and foremost, U.S. foreign policy has been underperforming for decades. Instead of pursuing policies that made Americans more secure, more prosperous, and advanced core U.S. values, leaders from both political parties have repeatedly acted in ways that undermined each of these goals. They have waged long, costly, and unsuccessful wars based on dubious justifications and sustained by wishful thinking instead of hard-headed analysis. Ideologically-driven efforts to expand a U.S.-led order without limits have exacerbated great power tensions and unwittingly helped provoke a tragic conflict in Ukraine.
Responsible Statecraft is must-reading because it offers clear alternatives to the policies that have repeatedly failed, based on time-honored principles of realism and restraint.
Second, Responsible Statecraft and the Quincy Institute are committed to restoring a better balance between defense and diplomacy in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. The United States needs a strong defense, but it also needs well-funded, well-trained, and highly competent diplomatic institutions. Its leaders need to use that capability as often and as seriously as they employ the mailed fist.
Some of America's greatest foreign policy triumphs — the Marshall Plan, the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions, the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, the peaceful reunification of Germany, etc. — were won not on a battlefield but across a negotiating table, yet that lesson seems to have been lost on recent administrations. During the "unipolar moment," U.S. leaders tended to issue ultimatums, ratchet up sanctions, or reach for the sword, instead of engaging in the hard bargaining and empathy that can resolve conflicts without recourse to force.
At RS, we endeavor to showcase the work of staff and outside contributors — journalists, academics, former government officials and military — that seek this alternative vision.
Third, public policy is more successful when alternatives are widely and openly debated. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. foreign policy establishment (aka "the Blob") has embraced a set of orthodoxies that were rarely questioned no matter how often they failed. Those who embrace these ideas are rarely held accountable for the unhappy results that their decisions produced and top officials never seemed to learn from past mistakes. As Walter Lippmann once warned, "when all think alike, no one thinks very much."
RS and Quincy think differently. We are committed to publishing alternative perspectives on contemporary U.S. foreign policy, grounded in serious scholarship and a realistic understanding of the forces that shape state behavior and global outcomes. RS represents no special interests or political party but exists to give a platform for a wider range of discussion even when consensus remains elusive. Policymakers, pundits, and the public need to know that there are alternatives and be encouraged to weigh the pros and cons carefully. Open and honest debate makes it more likely that we will choose the right approach and makes it easier to identify and revise policies that aren't working as we hoped.
We now face an unprecedented set of global challenges, all of them occurring at once. We need ideas and approaches that are informed by past experience but are not mired in outdated conventional wisdoms. Responsible Statecraft is dedicated to providing these perspectives. Our impact is growing, requiring the new, dynamic platform you see today. I'm proud to be part of their team, and that's why you should keep reading. Enjoy!

I just got the sad news that Bob Lucas has passed away. He was truly a giant among economists, and a wonderful warm person. I will only pass on three remembrances that others will not likely mention. Bob was incredibly welcoming to me, a young brash and fairly untutored young economist from Berkeley.  In the fall of 1985 I gave what was no doubt the most disastrous first seminar by a new assistant professor in the Department's history. It was something about random walks and real business cycles, and was going nowhere. Bob stopped by my office, and expressed doubt about this random walk stuff. He said, if you look at longer and longer horizons, GNP volatility goes down. At least I had the wit to recognize what had just been handed to me on a silver platter, dropped everything and wrote the "Random walk in GNP," my first big paper. Without that, I doubt I would be where I am today. Thank you Bob.  He and Nancy were kind to us socially as well. The first Lucas paper that I recall reading, while I was still at Berkeley, was his review of a report to the OECD.  I don't think anyone else writing about Bob will mention this masterpiece. If you get annoyed by policy blather, read this article. Reading it as a grad student, I loved the way he sliced through loose prose like warm butter. No BS with Bob. Only clear thinking please. I mentioned it later, and he laughed saying he wrote it in a bad mood because he was getting divorced. Like "After Keynesian Macroeconomics," Bob could wield a pen. Much later,  I attended a revelatory money workshop. Bob presented an early version of, I think, "Ideas and growth."  In the model, people have ideas, and bump into each other randomly and share ideas. Questioner after questioner complained that there wasn't any economics in the model. Why not put in some incentive for people to bump in to each other, or something non mechanical. Time after time, Bob answered each suggestion that he had tried it, but it didn't make much difference to the outcome, so he stripped it out of the model. Clearly, he had been playing with this model over a year, working to eliminate  needless ingredients, not to add more generality. It's great to see the production function at work. Bob is known as a theorist, but he had a great handle on empirical work as well. His Carnegie Rochester money demand paper basically reinvented cointegration, and saw clearly what dozens of others missed. "Mechanics of economic development" starts by putting together facts. "International evidence on inflation-output tradeoffs" 1973 makes one stunning graph. And more. There is so much to say about Bob the great economist, superb colleague and tremendous human being, but I will stop here for now. RIP Bob. And thank you. Update:Ben Moll has a lovely twitter thread about Bob as a thesis adviser. Bob covered Ben's thesis draft with useful comments. Bob read my early papers and did the same thing. This encouraged a culture of comments. Though a young assistant professor, I took it as a duty to write comments on Bob's papers! And some of them actually helped. This was the culture of the economics department in the 1980s, not common. Bob helped quite a few people and JPE authors to see what their papers were really about, making dramatic improvements.  The outpouring on twitter is remarkable. More remarkable, here is a man for whom we could celebrate every single paper as pathbreaking. Yet the outpouring is all about his wonderful personal qualities. A correspondent reminds me of one last story. Bob's divorce agreement specified half of his Nobel prize, which he paid. Asked  by a reporter if he had regrets, he answered "A deal's a deal." Next post, focused on intellectual contributions.