The Quantitative Peace

The Dark Knight Rises and the Economic Impact of Bane's Occupation of Gotham

I started working on this post a long time ago and, for whatever reason, never got around to finishing it. So please keep in mind that this was largely written shortly after the film first came out. I should also disclose at the outset that this post will contain spoilers, so if there is some sort of unbelievably powerful force that has kept you from seeing this fantastic movie, please be warned. For those still interested, there's more after the jump.

On Hegemons and Trade (Part I): Origins

I am currently in the process of entirely rewriting and redesigning one of my earliest academic papers that I want to update with the context of better data and methods in evaluating the hypotheses I initially proposed. That is, I am writing the same paper a second time.  As part of this process, I am revisiting some classic works on the topic of Hegemonic Stability Theory. Consequently, this is part one of a multi-stage blog post series.  Part 1 of the project deals with the origins of Hegemonic Stability Theory, Part 2 will dig into the advancements in the theory in the 1980s and 1990s, and Part 3 discusses the empirical record for the topic.  

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Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST) contains a set of different authors who propose that a state that is dominant internationally has the capacity to make particular rules, norms, and institutions that guide the course of international relations.  The theories often articulate that a unipolar system is unique and the enabling condition of unipolarity cannot, or is unlikely to, manifest in multipolar systems.  The outcomes of interest for theorists of global power preponderance theories vary with popular topics including trade, war, and the creation and maintenance of international regimes.  For the context of this series of posts, I am focusing on the trade-related theory of hegemony as it has been developed in political science and economics.

The concept of hegemony itself is a loaded term that has many different meanings for different scholars and schools of thought.  Rather than give a precise definition now, I will generally refer to it as a state that has global dominance in military, economic, and financial power. Throughout this post, I have included the CINC scores for major powers from 1816-2007.  Naturally, CINC scores are imperfect for several different reasons depending on the context in which they are used. In the case of hegemony, they may be best apt for gauging some level of military power, but are insufficient to capture the other aspects of global hegemony that are important. For the rest of this series, I will be using hegemon, unipolarity, and preponderance of power as synonyms.  Having a more refined sense of when we know we have hegemony and when we do not is a task better suited for the third part of this series. 

The idea that the hegemon under unipolarity is afforded special privileges that other states do not have is not unique to scholarship in the latter half of the 20th century (for example, Hirschman's 1945 book), nor the 20th century alone, but much of the principle tenants of the theory solidify under scholars examining the topic.  Specifically, the 1970s offered two major advancements in the theory in the work done by Kindleberger and Krasner. The former developing a thread of HST that is best described as "Leadership Theory" within HST and the latter offering a Structural Theory of HST. 

Kindleberger's (1979) foundational work, The World in Depression, is an ambitious scholarly undertaking to identify the key international and domestic causes of the great depression. Fundamentally, for Kindleberger, stability in the international system is provided by a dominant power that can maintain the rules of the system and provide the incentives necessary to encourage states to behave in a way that is conducive to liberalization and integration.  The interwar period offers a unique period of transition as there are two possible actors that could fulfill this role: Great Britain and the United States.  Great Britain has the willingness to be the leader, but lacks the capability to do so (Great Britain acts in the appropriate manner in the 1920s, but, according to Kindleberger, it becomes evident in 1931 that the British are unable to provide the necessary leadership to maintain stability). The United States has the capability, but lacks the domestic willingness to do what is necessary to prevent a race towards retrenchment in globalization.  Specifically, Kindleberger highlights five necessary behaviors for a hegemon to encourage stability (p. 289):

1. maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods;
2. providing countercyclical, or at least sable, long-term lending;
3. policing a relatively stable system of exchange rates;
4. ensuring the coordination of macroeconomic policies
5. acting as a lender of last resort by discounting or otherwise providing liquidity in financial crisis.

He follows this list with the explicit statment of "These functions, I believe, must be organized and carried out by a single coutnry that assumes responsibilty for the system" (Kindleberger 1973, p. 283). After going through each of these five points, Kindleberger comments on the contemporary hegemonic decline of the 1970s and prospects for US leadership in the 1980s and 1990s. 

 

 

Krasner's branch of HST comes from his 1976 article titled "State Power and the Structure of International Trade." The structural view of HST asserts that it is not a function of willingness that determines liberalizing behavior in regards to trade, but it is a product of a state's position in the international system.  Fundamentally, and contrary to Kindleberger, capability breeds willingness.  Explicitly, a state in a privileged position in the international system ought to seek global liberalization of trade policies as such policies necessarily advantage its strategic global position.  It becomes part of the state's national interest to encourage free trade.  Beyond having a national willingness for trade liberalization, it would necessarily have the ability to encourage the system as well. Krasner argues that the hegemon has an array of positive and negative incentives, including offering access to competitive markets, providing cheap goods, encouraging other states to outcompete and ruin the business recalcitrant states, and withholding aid/grants/loans (p. 322-323). 

Thus, for Krasner, the 19th century and post-WWII bouts of liberalization were products of hegemonic dominance while the interwar period was marked by uneven multipolarity.  For Kindleberger, leadership marks the 19th and latter half of the 20th century, while the interwar period lacked a state willing and capable of providing hegemonic leadership.  The two different veins of HST create a possible conundrum for empirical scholarship as deriving testable implications may rely on definitional issues of hegemony.  Since, as social scientists, we are interested in causal determinants of behavior, it becomes hard to pinpoint the effects of HST if part of knowing whether there is a hegemon in the first place is that a state is acting hegemonic.  Finding other measures to predict hegemonic behavior becomes part of the task. In the structural sense, we should expect a dominance of power to lead to a willingness for hegemonic behavior; however, for Kindleberger and leadership theory, we may not be able to predict willingness for hegemony until we see hegemony.  

 

A few notes. First, both authors are writing in a time where the decline of the United States seemed evident to scholars and non-scholars alike.  Powerful states, especially the winners of World War II, had created powerful institutions that seemed to guide world politics to a degree that transcended mere state-base perceptions of International Relations.  Naturally, with a perceived decline of the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, trying to figure out how the state of international affairs would change, warp, or collapse was important.  Would hegemonic institutions endure? Would a leader that was incentive-compatible with the United States emerge and lead to a peaceful transition?  Would Japan/Germany become the new global financial centers?  The debates surrounding hegemonic stability theory escalated from this point and remained healthy throughout the 1980s.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, questions about US decline halted for the unipolar moment and other questions of hegemony emerged.  We will turn to the expansions of both authors' work in the second installment of this discussion.

 

 

A second note: Krasner does allow for non-hegemonic configurations to encourage liberalization. A common misconception is that hegemony is conducive to trade, but other configurations are not, In the original 1976 piece, he argues "Let us consider a system composed of a large number of small, highly developed states.  Such a  system is likely to lead to an open international trading structure. The aggregate income and economic growth of each state are increased by an open system..." (p. 321). Thus, in a multipolar world dominated by highly industrialized states, a push for liberalization may emerge.  Of course, he goes on to argue that a system composed of a small number of large, asymmetrically developed states would lead to protectionist behavior and norms.  This creates the following table of possible system configurations on page 323: 

Finally, in Krasner's original article, he concludes, after examining qualitative and quantitative evidence of trade-related behavior under different configurations of world power, that a simple measure of power is insufficient to understand hegemonic pressures on liberalization. Instead, periods of increased integration occur after shocks to the system encourage a change in behavior by the dominant state. This clarification of temporal shocks does become become important when we evaluate attempts to test Hegemonic Stability Theory.

Peer Performance in the Review Process: Reviewer Elo

The peer review process is an imperfect construction that helps lend credibility to the publication of research. It is not the final arbiter of who is right, as cumulative research should encourage further discussion, but it is an important barrier that offers a check on research and also provides feedback as authors work to make their findings available to the scientific community and the public in general.  

Non-academic peer review exists in a variety of venues beyond just scientific research.  One such arena, online video games, may offer an insight of how to encourage active and meaningful participation in the peer review process by providing feedback to not just authors and editors, but to reviewers.  

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The game League of Legends, created and operated by Riot Games, is one of the most popular competitive video game across the globe. It boasts a userbase of tens of millions (stats from October, 2012) and will be having its third world championship in less than a month with over $8 million at stake. The event will have thousands watching live in California and be watched live online by millions. Of note, the North American and European teams are expected to fair quite poorly against teams from China and Korea.   

With this large community, one of the persistent problems the community deals with is toxic player behavior. That is, behavior that includes aggression, foul language, threats, and taking actions that ruin the experience of the game for other players.  Such behavior, done by individuals that are typically anonymous except for a username that can be changed, is detrimental to the health of the game and deters other players from continuing to participate in the game or community. In fact, Riot just released a video yesterday to try to combat the problem by appealing to statistics and performance.  In one of their multiple methods to try and combat this problem, Riot hired social scientists to see what inducements they can offer to curb poor behavior.  One strategy they have adopted is the Tribunal. In the tribunal, other players read through the logs of an individual, who has been reported repeatedly, and vote to either pardon the person or punish them for their behavior in the game. Once enough people vote to pardon or punish an individual, the majority decision holds and that person either has nothing done to them due to being pardoned or they receive punishment for their behavior.  This punishment escalates as the player is found guilty in front of multiple tribunals and includes punishments such as a warning, losing the ability to chat in game, being temporarily banned, or having their account permanently banned from the game.

Now, the part of this whole story that is related to academic peer review is that the users who participate in this process receive a score that changes with their voting in the majority or the minority.  This score, an Elo rating, goes up when they are in the majority, and down when they are in the minority. For the tribunal, the system is a modification of the same system that calculates an individual's chess rating based on their wins and losses.  Generally, a higher score indicates better performance as judge.  This gives feedback to the judge about their consistency in evaluations relative to the rest of the community and there are even leaderboards that rank the top few hundred judges. 

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This mechanism has potential for use within academic publishing.  Essentially, when a reviewer makes a recommendation to an editor about a particular manuscript, they are casting a vote for rejection, revise and resubmit, or some level of acceptance.  Naturally, these votes are not in isolation.  Given that any academic is likely to review multiple articles over the course of a year, as well as a lifetime, it would be possible to rank reviewers along a similar metric.  In academic publishing, I recommend two such scores to mark performance over binary outcomes: Reviewer agrees with Peers and Reviewer Agrees with Editor.  The first score is an indication as to whether or not a given reviewer is generally in the majority or minority on reviewing papers.  The second indication is a score that determines whether or not a reviewer is providing useful information to the editor.  Thus, it is plausible that generally a reviewer agrees with his or her peers and this informs the editor to their agreement. It is also possible that a reviewer consistently does not agree with his/her peers but editors use their views to inform their decisions.  

To provide an Elo system for reviewers would require the cooperation of one or more journals within a discipline. It is feasible for a journal to provide the scores of reviewers for just that journal if there were not cooperation within a discipline, though the sample and movement of those scores would be small as a result.  If several journals within a discipline worked together, then the information would be data rich.  Given that peer review is anonymized on two fronts, the data would likewise have to be anonymized in terms of which papers that reviewer reviewed, but this can be done by simply issuing a unique ID for a manuscript.  Then, all the journal would have to provide is a simple yes or no as to whether the reviewer was in the majority and if the reviewer was in line with the reviewers decision.  It is possible to make the data more informative if we included a range of possible deviations from the majority, but it would make sense to make the data collection as simple as possible.  Ultimately, after the scores have been computed, such scores should be made public to the discipline. 

Benefits:

To go through the process and provide such information requires some level of benefits to the discipline to be worth adopting.  There are a few different benefits for providing such data and assembling it.  First, it would provide a benchmark for newer members of the community to gauge how their decisions are related to other people in the community in a systematic way.  This is also true for members are established within a discipline.  As an Elo score goes up or down, the academic can gauge systematically how their decisions have related to others within the community.  This allows individuals to move beyond anecdotal evidence that could very well be filtered through confirmation bias and, instead, provide a direct assessment of their reviewing capabilities.

Second, it can offer a level of prestige.  Such Elo measurements can and should be broken down into lifetime and yearly scores.  These numbers then give participating reviewers a service-based metric of their performance.  If you are the highest Elo reviewer within a discipline for a given year, or over a lifetime, this would send a strong signal about your consistency. If your Elo is consistently low, this may be because you have a higher standard than your peers or, perhaps, a lower standard if you are often the lone wolf that recommends publication among two other rejection recommendations.

The third notable benefit would be to editors.  Editors have networks of reviewers that they request reviews from and have some idea of how those reviewers have performed in the past. This evaluation is generally based on memory as well as whether or not a particular article falls within the expertise domain of a reviewer and may be prone to error. In a ranking system as proposed above, a high Elo ranking on either metric (community or editor Elo) will give editors more information about whether or not they should approach new individuals (or old ones) for additional reviews.  A community wide Elo system would also give editors access to individuals within the discipline that they may not have known were active reviewers.  

There are other benefits to having a public Elo system, but I will stop at these three.

Costs:

Naturally, such Elo computations are not free.  There are two major costs I see associated with such a plan.

First is the task of data gathering as a literal cost of time and money. It would likely put another burden on editors to provide this information to those who calculate the Elo rankings.  Editors already have to tally up votes and read through decisions and convey this information to the author(s) of manuscripts. As such, I imagine this would be a small additional task for each reviewed article, but it still would be another task.  As such, editors would have to choose to take on this additional data reporting burden. However, it can be done on a case by case basis or a journal can give the data to the compiler in a lump sum. Likewise, an organization or individual would have to take the task of collecting this information and providing it publicly (likely online). 

The second potential drawback is that such a system may encourage conformity where we do not want it to exist. If reviewers become motivated to achieve a high Elo, their goal in critiquing an article may not be to determine if it is fit to be published, but may instead be to determine what their peers think of such a manuscript. This would depress individual incentives to strongly attack or defend an article.  

A more serious problem in this regard is a decision become a focal point for reviewers.  If it is common for articles to be rejected (as it is the norm for most peer reviewed journals), then reviewers that strongly care about their Elo score will reject articles as their default position.  In general, I am not convinced that such a system would override the other incentives reviewers have for reviewing scholarly work, but it is certainly possible. 

Along this line, there can be an incentive for discomformity.  If you really do not want to review articles, you can purposely tank your Elo to send a signal to Editors.  However, I imagine that people who would do this already send similar signals to editors in the present through how they review or comment on a manuscript.

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The review system is a standard of service within academia and is expected of scholars that publish within journals and books.  Having a systematic way of showcasing consistent reviewers, in effect, offering a public incentive for continued, strong reviewers may be an interesting experiment in providing systematized feedback to reviewers.  At the very least, it is an interesting thought experiment.

On the Utility of IR Research

At the Duck of Minerva, Josh Busby has a post on the gap between political science research/IR and the policymaking community. I don't have a whole lot to say about the specific content of Busby's post, aside from the fact that I think this is an interesting an important debate to have. (Also, please note that the links in the quotations were provided in Busby's original post).

Math's PR Problem OR Changing our Educational System

I was listening to the BBC's Global News Podast this morning and found an interesting segment on the utility of mathematical modeling. Professor John Adam's book (which can be found here) looks at how one can model various aspects of urban life—pollution, traffic congestion, number of dentists offices, etc. I've not read the book, but Adam's message in his interview was something that I can sympathize with. In particular, Adam talks about the degree to which the educational process divorces math from any kind of applied usage. Learning math in this way, he goes on, is partially responsible for why more children/people are not as interested in mathematics as they might otherwise be. 

Sure, there are the ubiquitous "if a train leaves city A at rate X, and a train leaves city B at rate Z, when will their paths cross," kind of examples. But seriously, is that the best we can do? Now, I recognize that I'm far from being the strongest, or the quickest, when it comes to picking up a lot of the methods that I've been taught over the past few years. I, like many people I suppose, was not the biggest fan of math class in high school. Some of this was laziness on my part, but some of it was also the framework in which the subject matter was taught. Even in college it was far from clear that any kind of math beyond balancing a checkbook would play as big a part in my life as it currently does. I did well enough in these classes, but it was not until graduate school that I really had to seriously engage math and statistics.  

As it turns out, I've really enjoyed the quantitative side of my training here at Binghamton, and I'm far more willing to work at developing my understanding and skills now than I was when I was 16. Had I known in high school that I this stuff could be used to study things like war, human rights, etc., I might have cared a bit more. These are things that I've always been interested in. And this is perfectly rational behavior, right? If the expected utility of learning this material is zero, or even negative, then why expend the effort? Where is the payoff? If this is the case, then a major part of the reason that the expected utility of learning this material is so low is because the people that should be able to provide you with the relevant information to update your expectations simply do not do a very good job of that. In fact, I'd say that I didn't really get that at all until grad school. And being able to make that initial connection between math and statistics, and the substantive topics that I care about, has subsequently led me to develop a greater appreciation for the math itself that underlies the models I often use. 

I don't have any answers for how the educational system could be modified to address this issue. I also realize that you would have to find a way to incorporate applied mathematics into most subject fields, as not everyone has the particular set of interests that would make more math in history or government class a sufficient solution to the problem. Still, there must be a better way. With folks like Neil deGrasse Tyson going around trying to promote greater scientific literacy, and the recent attacks on NSF funding for political science, it seems like there is a space for us to modify how we educate our younglings and how science, math, history, etc., can be better integrated in this process. Maybe if people developed a better understanding of science as a process, or math as something with real world and substantive applications, rather than something that existed strictly from 1pm to 1:45pm during 8th period, people would be better able to develop a more robust appreciation for how mathematics and science fit into, and matter for, our daily lives. This is fairly obvious when phrased like that, but the fact is that it's not really what we do currently, is it?

Am I missing something?

Also—and this is a total aside—Brian Rathbun at the Duck of Minerva has a discussion of how Iron Maiden material can be used to teach political science. This is perhaps a good example of what I was talking about above, so perhaps this is not a total aside, but what we have here is essentially "applied awesomeness."

NSF Funding Amendment, Part II

Erik Voeten at the Monkey Cage with an update on the amendment that cuts NSF funding for political science programs. A version of the amendment passed the House with a vote of 218-208. You can see the breakdown of the votes here (thanks for Erik for so conveniently providing the link to the votes). Erik also notes a couple of important points: 1) This is not the end of the issue, and 2) No other discipline was singled out in the same way as political science. 

Other interesting facts:

1. Jeff Flake has a BA in International Relations (see his official House bio page).
2. Jeff Flake has an MA in Political Science (see his official House bio page).
3. As described above, political science appears to have been singled out. In 2011 political science programs were awarded approximately $21 million dollars. Keep in mind these are awarded amounts, and do not reflect the actual amount spent in a given year. The Duck of Minerva makes reference to actual annual expenditures being something closer to $9 million. 
4. Economics programs were awarded $55 million in 2011. If we assume a similar pattern applies, that means econ programs are getting somewhere around $23 million per year in actual appropriations.
5. Sociology programs were awarded approximately $15.5 million, working out to be about $6.7million per year.

Political science awards do not even come close to what economics programs are awarded each year. Consequently, I'm not entirely sure what the fiscal justification for this cut can be. To single out only political science in this way would seem to indicate the gripe is more substantive than fiscal. If not, then why not make a flat cut of 10%-20% across all BSES programs? Spread the cuts evenly? You could cut the annual econ awards by half and that would be the equivalent of cutting all of the annual political science awards AND some of the sociology program. So, what gives?

There is probably a better/more efficient source for summary information than what I used, but you can search NSF records of programs and awards here. My estimates of yearly expenditures are extremely rough. Again, it's important to note that these are awarded amounts, not what is actually spent each year. There is going to be overlap from one year to the next as programs are often funded over the course of a couple of years. There is also some degree of overlap between programs as well. Accordingly, the figures provided should be taken as rough guidelines/comparisons, as well as with a healthy grain of salt. If anyone has a link to actual annual expenditure statistics by program, as opposed to awards, please share. I did a quick search this morning but didn't find anything more helpful than this particular source. 

Two Comics for Friday

If you are not subscribed to these two comics, then this will be new to you.  If you already have them on your RSS feed, well, you get to suffer their propagation.* 

The ever-linkable XKCD offers the rational incentives on leaving reviews for hotels (and other places). Poor reviews may drive demand down, which should lower the price of your consumption.

SMBC, often delving into philosophy, science, and economics, has offered two economics-related comics in the past two days. Yesterday's comic posits the economists value of humans versus other objects and today's comic offers a, perhaps obvious, comic on the incentives of self-cat-napping (the bad kind). 

 

*I'm directly linking to the comics so they will get the benefits of future readers, advertisment impressions, and the proper amount of web-traffic they deserve.

Bipartisanship and foreign policy

Kindred Winecoff has a post up regarding a post by Matt Yglesias on the level of partisanship in American politics.  I've some thoughts on the issue.  I should also stipulate that I'm coming at this from a strictly foreign policy-oriented perspective.  Some of this bleeds over into domestic politics, but I'm sure there's a lot that I'm not covering by approaching the topic from this point of view.

Jonathan's Card Has Ended

Penny Arcade, a comic that usually discusses video games and the video game industry, weighs in on Jonathan's Card--apparently, homo economicus can gain utility by not only defecting and receiving the largest share possible, but also gains utility purely by gaming the experiment. Unfortunately, it appears the test has come to an end (Starbucks deactivated the card) due to abuse and apparent fraud in the experiment (perhaps Tycho-types have won).  The premise of the project was to have a publicly available Starbuck's card that anyone could use. The card started with a balance and anyone with a smart phone could use it to pay for coffee at Starbuck's.  Likewise, anyone could add money to the card to buy coffee for strangers they would likely never meet.  The data of transactions was made publicly available, published on twitter, and some graphing has occurred.

It was suggested that this might have been a viral marketing campaign by Starbuck's, but it appears that this was not the case after all.  

A few sites have posted more detailed analysis on the card:

• Huffington Post's coverage
• Social Commerce
• Odio and theft from the experiment (original tweet)
• The official Facebook page where people share their stories of how the card impacted them.

The Future of Political Science (summary, short discussion)

I have mentioned, in a previous post, all of the books that fill up my summer reading list. As of now, I have at least one book completed and several more have been added to my list.  I have recently finished The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives, a collection of 100 short articles aimed at discussing what has not been properly analyzed or should be analyzed in political science.  The book ended up being more oriented towards the fields of American and Comparative than I had originally anticipated (mostly by the title); however, this is more my own fault than anything else. Quickly browsing the titles of the 100 articles and the authors or knowing that the book is a festshcrift for Sidney Verba easily conveys that information.

The book is not homogeneous.  For example, the two initial sections take opposing views with Arend Lijphart arguing that the United States is more unique than comparative scholars give it credit for and Russell Dalton taking the opposed position that US institutions have far more in common with other states than what has been examined previously. There are clusters of articles that deal with similar topics (e.g. elite behavior, institutions, voting, parties), but not all topics have a set of opposing viewpoints (nor should they necessarily). The introductory chapter offers a few rubrics for organization of the book that were ultimately rejected and provides some glimpse of the diversity of the subjects that are covered.

Beyond several substantive propositions, the book also has some focus on methodology. None of the articles that discuss political methodology were overly technical or beyond an average political scientist's comprehension of what is being discussed. The range of approaches vary form those who question the utility of quantitative political science in research to those who articulate more inclusion of qualitative methods or theoretical understandings of applying econometric techniques to political science.  For example, David Butler has a very short piece that argues "Everything happens in a historical context. It is wise to be sceptical about articles on politics that never mention individual politicians. Specific leaders do make a difference. What if Gore not Bush had been adjudged the winner in 2000? What if Blair had yielded precedence to Brown in 1994? No numerical approach will explain the impact of Churchill in 1940 or of Kennedy in the early 1960s The run of history is not inevitable."

The collection is diverse.  For Comparative and American scholars looking for potential dissertation topics or a new topic to work on, this might be an ideal book to thumb through and read. I will have to recommend some of the short pieces on elite behavior and third party representation to two different friends.