A lot has happened since I last reported on my surveillance drone. My fleet has grown to three drones: in addition to the DJI quadcopter, I have a Bixler Sky Surfer equipped with a GoPro camera that can send a live video feed back to a base station. This is what’s called FPV, or “first […]

The second leg of my recent trip took me from Mongolia to Myanmar (it’s not an easy itinerary getting from Ulaan Baator to Naypyidaw, believe me). I was there to teach a short course on private sector development with my former SAIS colleague Roger Leeds. This curriculum, which Roger and I have developed under the […]

I recently returned from a trip to Mongolia and Myanmar. The linking of these countries on the same itinerary was accidental, though they both actually have a lot in common: they border China and much of their recent foreign policy has been driven by a desire to get out from under Chinese domination. It’s not […]

The HBO television series The Wire, which aired between 2002 and 2008, brought Americans face-to-face with the stubborn and disturbing reality of inner-city life.

When I was asked by the editors of the Financial Times to contribute to a series on the future of conservatism, I hesitated because it seemed to me that in both the US and Europe what was most needed was not a new form of conservatism but rather a reinvention of the left. For more […]

President Obama’s signing of a strategic partnership agreement with President Karzai on May 1 and the ratification of a wind-down plan by NATO at its recent summit in Chicago in theory set the terms for the kind of presence the US will have after the “withdrawal” of US forces from that country in 2014. Of […]

For more than 2000 years, the Chinese political system has been built around a highly sophisticated centralized bureaucracy, which has run what has always been a vast society through top-down methods.  What China never developed was a rule of law, that is, an independent legal institution that would limit the discretion of the government, or […]

The Greek election on Sunday was a predictable disaster: the two mainstream parties, the socialist PASOK and the center-right New Democracy (ND), were displaced by new extremist parties that appeared on their right and left, including the left-wing Syriza and KKE (Communist) parties which won a quarter of the vote between them, and the right-wing […]

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have just published Why Nations Fail, a big book on development that will attract a lot of attention. The latest fad in development studies has been to conduct controlled randomized experiments on a host of micro-questions, such as whether co-payments for mosquito bed nets improves their uptake. Whether such studies […]

I never studied with Jim Wilson while getting my degree in the Harvard Government Department, though he was there at the time. My contacts with him came later, when we served together on the President’s Council on Bioethics in the early 2000s, and as fellow members of the Board of Governors of the Rand Graduate […]