Valuing the Deep State Part II: The Origin of States
This is the second article in a series on bureaucratic autonomy; the first installment can be found here. My dissatisfaction with existing theories of political development in the early 2000s eventually led to the publication of my two volume series, The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and
January 6 and Ukraine
I haven’t posted to this blog for a while due to an extraordinarily heavy travel schedule related to Liberalism and Its Discontents [https://www.amazon.com/Liberalism-Its-Discontents-Francis-Fukuyama/dp/0374606714/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=] , but the book promotion phase is largely over now and the
Systemic Errors
Over the past few weeks, we have been treated to two major examples of disastrous decision-making by authoritarian great powers. The first was, clearly, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which to date has killed tens of thousands of innocent Ukrainian civilians. The cost to Russia has been enormous as well,
Ukraine’s Economic War
Since my relatively optimistic post of March 10, nothing has happened that fundamentally contradicts the analysis. Media coverage of the war has began to acknowledge the significant gains made by Ukrainian forces a week ago, and now the Russians are clearly pulling out from the area around Kyiv. You don’
Sanction Russia Now!
So it’s finally happened—after a slow, weeks-long build-up of forces, Russian troops on February 21 invaded Ukraine after Moscow recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Moscow is using words that normal countries use, like “genocide” and “fascist” and “peacekeepers,” in an Orwellian fashion to signify
Drone World
After a time-out of nearly ten years, I finally decided to return to building and flying drones. I had done this quite intensively after I first moved to California in 2010, getting help from Chris Anderson and his 3D Robotics colleagues, and wrote about how cheap drones would affect global
In Praise of Industrial Policy
My friend Steve Rhoads, emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, will be publishing through Cambridge University Press a 35th anniversary edition of his 1984 book The Economist's View of the World [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1108845940/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2]. The book reviews
Droning On in the Middle East
Back in the early 2010s when I first started playing with drones [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry9DRiIXcp0], I speculated in the FT [https://www.ft.com/content/9cc59dce-5e27-11e1-8c87-00144feabdc0]that if I could own a drone, anyone could, and that this would have big implications for global politics. At
