September 5, 2013
Written by: Natasha Somji
For some time now, I have been debating whether or not to stay within the world of academia. While I love theories and conducting analysis, there is a sense of discomfort I feel whenever I consider pursuing a PhD that is not entirely captured by the monumental monetary costs or confusion about what I want to study. Much of this squeamishness has to do with questioning whether I buy into the mainstream version of academia: a field that uses theories and models to predict outcomes and then validates these predictions through quantitative studies. I find myself sometimes doubting the purpose of academia and how it is executed. If models were constructed with a particular audience in mind and studies are run on certain samples, how can these be generalisable to new contexts? Can studies that employ quantitative techniques – widely hailed as being more credible in substantiating results – really capture the subjectivity of the human experience?
Much of academia relies on using numbers to validate theories and models. The problem comes in when these same studies view people as mere numbers and do not consider more qualitative aspects of an individual or the culture in which models are operating.
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Posted in Academia to Policy, Economics, Natasha Somji, Public Policy |
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July 25, 2013
Written by: Kathleen Walpole
Generation Y1 in the United States is less politically inclined than older generations. Compared to the Baby Boom Generation2 in the United States, Generation Y’s lack of civic engagement is often tied directly to the change in American social and family structures. Robert Putnam argued in his book, Bowling Alone, that compared to the Baby Boom Generation, the youth of America today are less likely to attend rallies, run for local public offices, or stay informed on issues that matter to their communities (Putnam, 2000). Other scholars and journalists have also expressed that Generation Y has become too lazy to care about the issues affecting the world. This concern has caused many to argue that civic engagement levels can be returned through the use of social media.
Firstly, the definition of civic engagement needs to be explored in this context. Good civic engagement is generally built on moral obligations from citizens in a democracy (Walpole, 2012). Citizens have a range of options they can do in order to be civically involved. Lester Milbrath, author of Political Participation, gave a brief sketch of what the various hierarchy levels of political involvement there are.
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Posted in American Politics, Civic Engagement, Internet, Katie Walpole |
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May 10, 2013
The “Academia to Policy” column seeks to bridge the debate in academia to the adoption of policy in practice. In this inaugural Academia to Policy article, Natasha Somji discusses the challenges present in the translation of academic work to policy.
Policymakers frequently turn to academics as consultants, who are able to conduct analysis and provide background when considering how to change existing laws or propose new policies. However, the ways in which academia is translated into politics can be rather problematic.
It is often the case that policymakers have little awareness about the tools used in quantitative studies carried out by academics. Indeed there is a need to ‘dumb down’ academia to make it more accessible to the masses. While this is not problematic in itself, if the methodology is flawed, policymakers may be proposing changes that are based on questionable assumptions. Consider Gary Kleck’s and Britt Patterson’s study entitled, The Impact of Gun Control and Gun Ownership Levels on Violence Rates which has been cited time and again in the policy world to justify repealing gun laws. The research finds that gun prevalence and most gun laws have no effect on violence rates.
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Posted in Academia to Policy, Canadian Politics, Natasha Somji, Public Policy |
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May 6, 2013
Written By: Rebecca Gu
Harmless Economics
Economics has rightfully earned a reputation for being abstract to the point of obscurity. Theoretical physics and mathematics also practice this same level of abstraction, but unlike economics, those fields also do not arrogantly claim that their usefulness lies in their applicability to real life. It is this combination of both asserting relevance and simultaneously reducing complexity of real applications that leads to some dangerous assumptions about how the world should work. For example, my research thus far;
The Many Facets of Carbon Emissions
Global climate change is an economic puzzle in that it involves a lot of different elements, that relate back to concepts of fairness and unfairness.
1) Historical Grudges
Given the amount of man-made emissions that have collectively been produced to date, it is arguably the currently rich countries that have benefited the most from this. Carbon emissions are a by-product of industrialisation, and industrialisation is associated with the economic development of most of the West. Thus, climate change treaties are saddled with the burden of how to distribute future obligations based on historical responsibility.
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Posted in Climate Change, Economics, Public Policy, Rebecca Gu |
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March 12, 2013
Nicholas Berggruen is an investor and founder of the Nicolas Berggruen Institute that studies the development of more effective systems of governance. Nathan Gardels is editor-in-chief of New Perspectives Quarterly, and senior advisor to the Nicolas Berggruen Institute. In Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century, Berggruen and Gardels critically compare the West’s liberal democracy and the East’s meritocracy. Can we learn from both?
Intelligent Governance For The 21st Century. Polity Press. 2013.
Reviewed by: Dennis Shen
Is there a middle way between China’s meritocratic single-party system and the United States’ multi-party liberal democracy? This is the question that authors’ Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels ask in their provocative book, Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century.
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Posted in American Politics, Book Reviews, Dennis Shen, Political Philosophy |
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January 29, 2013
Written By: Dennis Shen, Raktim Roy and Joséphine Gantois
The design of a global economic system that supports inclusive growth is central to today’s policy debate. The current global economic model has been in-place since the 1980s: the decade in which free market thinking revolutionized the world economy. The neoliberal system adopted since that time has engineered a world with less trade barriers, globalized markets, and minimal government intervention – based on the belief that a pro-market, anti-governance approach would support human welfare. Globalization has been an important outcome, and has re-shaped our lives.
Now, there exists an active debate on whether the neoliberal system has been a success. Proponents of globalization and free trade would say that the world is the better for it – proponents like Martin Wolf write that inequality and poverty are declining in large part due to globalization forces. But on the other end, outspoken voices like Robert Wade at the London School of Economics would say that rather than supporting lower inequality and improvements in welfare, the current system has in many ways held the rich countries up and the poor countries down.
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Posted in Dennis Shen, Economics, Global Economics, Globalization, Public Policy |
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November 29, 2012
Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology challenging the rational model of judgment and decision making, is seen by many as one of the world’s most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound impact on many fields – including business, medicine, and politics – and in Thinking, Fast and Slow he takes readers on a tour of the mind, explaining the two systems that drive the way we think and make choices. Joel Suss feels that the book should be made required reading for anyone who still holds fast to the notion that people make decisions rationally.
Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman. Allen Lane. November 2011.
Humans are hard-wired to be overconfident in their decision-making abilities, an evolutionary feature that allows us to instantaneously and comfortably make decisions and avoid the halting (and in the distant-past of human history, life-threatening) paralysis that would result from constant self-doubt.
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Posted in Book Reviews, Economics, Joel Suss |
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October 8, 2012
Written By: Dennis Shen
In academic circles, it has become commonly accepted that rapid economic growth can increase inequality. This has been supported by international developments in recent decades that show declining inequality between countries but increasing inequality within countries. China and the United States are just two examples. To explain the reason, some point to globalization as the natural conduit not only for high growth and inter-country convergence but also the agent for downward domestic pressures on working class payrolls, capping wage increases in response to international labor competition and resulting in intra-country divergence. Others have argued that unregulated laissez-faire economics is both an apparatus for rapid economic advances and the natural environment for the development of a Darwinian economy (see Robert Frank’s “The Darwin Economy”) of winners and losers across an increasingly segmented income distribution, requiring a strong state to intervene and re-balance.
In a recent article on Project Syndicate (link here), Columbia professor Alexander Stille acknowledged this accepted relationship between rapid economic growth and increasing inequality, but also interestingly pointed to a novel alternative hypothesis: in addition to rapid growth driving rising inequality, could times of relatively weak growth also be associated with the very same inequality phenomena? As Stille writes, “might slow growth and rising inequality – the two most salient characteristics of developed economies nowadays – also be connected?” At first, it would seem counter-intuitive that very weak growth be commonly associated.
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February 22, 2012
Written by: Dennis Shen
The crisis of the natural commons – our forests, our waterways, our skies, our marine fisheries, our biodiversity – is rooted in an existing failure of the international economic and regulatory system to internalize a critical externality. It reflects a system deficiency to place a price and regulate the use of the earth’s depletable and valuable natural ecosystems in a time in which continued freedom to over-use may pose real risk to the sustainability of these natural systems and in turn, the sustainability of our long-term economic path.
In 1776, Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations, stated that an individual, by pursuing his own interest, will be “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” And in the case of private, tradable goods – the invisible hand of competitive markets has, in testament, done wonders to foster the efficient exchange of assets and maximize the product of human labour. But the marketplace works under assigned boundaries and if the current rules state the goal to be maximum short-term exploitation at the cost of long-term consequences, then that is exactly what the markets will institute into practice.
The reason a sustainable architecture to our global economy (that internalizes the price of common goods) has been difficult to come by is in part due to the historical misconception that the natural ecosystems are so vast that they cannot possibly be significantly influenced by man – a misconception founded on a history of people in which exploitation of nature has seemingly taken place without boundary or repercussion.
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Posted in Dennis Shen, Economics, OTS, Politics, Public Policy |
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February 1, 2012
Written By: Dennis Shen
Capitalism and democracy are often characterized as the twin virtues that have defined America’s modern history and success. But capitalism and democracy do not exist in uniformity: to be more capitalistic does not invariably make us more democratic. Instead, there has always existed an intricate balance between free market principles and strong democratic governance, oftentimes counterbalancing one another, that has determined the long-run health and sustainability of a political and economic system. America’s past success in becoming the world’s leading nation was founded and sustained by its managing this balance between private markets and government better than perhaps any other country in history. The ingenuity and allocative efficiency of free markets in partnership with the vision and moral leadership of a strong American government helped design the modern world and make it in the image of a fair and decent people.
But this balance between markets and government can break down if not very carefully maintained. At the core of America’s problems today is an existing imbalance of too much dependence on unregulated, free market capitalism and too little government oversight and leadership.
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Posted in American Politics, Dennis Shen, Politics, Public Policy, Regulation |
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Off the Spectrum 