How Realism Was Saved

The best account I have seen of why Kenneth Waltz was such an important figure:

In the 1960s and 70s, the classical realists were hounded by behaviouralists, systems analysts, game theorists, neo-functionalists and institutionalists, and pushed out of the theoretical mainstream. Thinkers like Morton Kaplan, Anatol Rapoport, Ernst Haas, Joseph Nye and Robert O. Keohane came to the fore, displacing the realists and shifting the core concerns of the field away from issues of human nature and power politics.

What Waltz did in this context was remarkable: almost single-handedly, he resuscitated realism, amputating those parts that were clearly dysfunctional, giving it the transfusions of new thinking that it needed, and returning it, revivified, to the fray.

Some complained he threw baby out with the bathwater.

Theory of International Politics shifted realism away from metaphysical speculation on human nature and onto firmer ground by removing any need for a philosophical anthropology to explain why international relations are as they are. Instead of a contentious account of ‘man’, Waltz substituted a structural account of the international system that borrowed heavily from the theory of the firm in classical economics.

There is another way of thinking about human nature: not metaphysical speculation or philosophical anthropology, but the evolutionary sciences.

Waltz’s structural realism attracted criticism from the start, and continues to do so today, almost twenty-five years after Theory of International Politics was published. But it is impossible not to acknowledge that it decisively shifted the terms of debate in international theory, returning realism to the mainstream, where it has remained ever since. In the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, the field was defined by a series of arguments between the realists and their critics, as first the neo-liberal institutionalists and then various bands of constructivists, feminists, postmodernists and critical theorists lined up to attack Waltz and his students.

Without Waltz and without structural realism, we would have seen no ‘offensive’ and ‘neo-classical’ realism, no ‘agent-structure’ debate, and no ‘anarchy is what states make of it’. Whatever one thinks about his revival of realism, and about the many responses to it, it is impossible to imagine what IR would have looked like without Theory of International Politics, as well as Waltz’s many other works. For that reason alone, he will be remembered as one of the great thinkers of the field.

It is by Ian Hall in e-ir.

What would have happened in a Waltzless world? I am inclined to think that the trajectory of IR would have been similar without Waltz. There would have been the rise of economistic liberalism (rationalism), and of cultural liberalism (constructivism), institutionalism, and the various kinds of critical theory – all are found beyond IR. What would have happened to realism? Would it really have been forced out of the mainstream? I think that is quite likely since realism has been marginalized in non-American IR. If so, then Waltz saved realism.

The Puzzle of Polygamy

Actually there are several puzzles about African polygamy:

1. Why is it relatively high in tropical Africa? Oddly, Madagascar is the great exception: tropical, near Africa, but little or no polygamy. This makes me think that polygamy has deep roots, since Madagascar was settled by a separate population of Austronesians.
2. There is a belt of high polygamy from West Africa to Tanzania, elsewhere in Africa it is present but at lower levels. Why does it vary? A paper by James Fenske* tests several hypotheses.
   • Inequality among men. It turns out that current inequalities among men are not predictive, but historical indicators of inequality on the eve of colonial rule (taken from the Ethnographic Atlas) do predict polygamy today.
   • Women supporting themselves by farming? It seems that polygamy is least common in those parts of Africa where women have historically been most important in agriculture. But I would add, even if it does not explain variation in Africa, this surely has to be part of the reason Africa as a whole has much polygamy compared to Eurasia.
   • The slave trade, taking men away, leaving more women. Correlation with the slave trade is not robust. Angola sent many slaves but has lowish polygamy.
3. Polygamy has declined over the past half century. Why? Fenske tests several hypotheses and concludes that falling child mortality explains much of the decline in polygamy across sub-Saharan Africa. The mechanism I suppose is that now women are more confident they can successfully raise children in a monogamous marriage. But is this cause or consequence? Monogamy means more paternal investment, which should lessen child mortality.

The puzzles multiply.

James Fenske, “African polygamy: past and present” (pdf here)

Burkina Faso Wins! (Polygamy Edition)

Emmanuel Todd has gathered some interesting data on polygamy (actually polygyny) rates.

The world champion is Burkina Faso! Over half of its married women have co-wives. (What do all the leftover men do?)

Arab and African Polygamy Rates

(% of married women with co-wife)

ARAB   COUNTRIES
Jordan	2002	6.8
Yemen	1997	7.1
Morocco	2003-04	4.7
BORDER   COUNTRIES
Sudan	1978-79	20.2
Sudan   (North)		9.3
Sudan   (Darfur)		37.9
Mauretania	2000-01	11.6
BLACK   AFRICA
Chad	1996-97	39.2
Chad   Muslims		35.6
Chad   Catholics		46.8
Chad   Animists		51.4
Mali	1996-97	44.3
Burkina   Faso	1998-99	54.7
Ivory   Coast	1994	36.6
Ivory   Coast Catholics		24.7
Ivory   Coast Muslims		44.5
Ivory   Coast Animists		47.2
Nigeria	1990	40.9

In Arab countries 5-10% of women are in polygamous marriages. In black Africa, 30-55% of women. The highest levels are in interior West Africa.

Another difference: Arab-style marriage of parallel cousins [father’s brother’s daughter] is uncommon in Africa. Instead cross-cousin [between the children of brother and sister] or exogamous marriage is the norm.

Reference:

Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd, A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies (Columbia UP, 2011) p. 44.

Myths of Evo-Politics

Evo-Politics appears to be growing, but it still attracts lots of misunderstandings and myths. John Hibbing has a Top Ten List of misconceptions about evolutionary political science (aka biopolitics, genopolitics, or evo-politics):

1. Biology is genetics (biology also includes epigenetic, in utero, and developmental influences)
2. Biology is deterministic
3. Biology is reductionist
4. It is useless to peer inside the body
5. Political culture is too idiosyncratic to succumb to biology
6. The study of biology and politics has a conservative bias
7. The study of biology and politics has a liberal bias
8. The study of biology and politics seeks to replace traditional political science
9. The study of biology and politics is devoid of policy implications
10. Political scientists are incapable of utilizing biological techniques and of appreciating problems with these techniques

I would add that there are other ones too. I hypothesize that such myths arise (at least partly) from ignorance and antipathy.

Reference

John R. Hibbing (2013). Ten Misconceptions Concerning Neurobiology and Politics. Perspectives on Politics, 11, pp 475-489. doi:10.1017/S1537592713000923.

Is Islamic Endogamy a Good Thing?

T. Greer calls Emmanuel Todd “the most under-rated “big idea” thinker in the field of world history.” Well, I thought I’d better take a look. Turns out that Todd is not the typical Parisian intellectual: he has a streak of Anglo empiricism. That’s all to the good.

His book A Convergence of Civilizations is mainly about how fertility rates in many Muslim countries are converging with Western and East Asian levels.

Endogamy, though, remains peculiar to many Islamic lands. Todd finds something good to say about it: a woman comes into the husband’s family as kin, not a stranger, hence she’s less likely to be tyrannized by the mother-in-law. The father does not control who the son marries, since the son has a right to his cousin.

But Todd does not mention the negatives of endogamy: the rule of cousins (cousinocracy), plus clannism (clanocracy). Oh, and the inbreeding depression.

The book has a useful table (p. 33):

Rates of Endogamy

(Muslim counries at the beginning of the 1990s)

Sudan 57

Pakistan 50

Mauretania 40

Tunisia 36

Saudi Arabia 36

Syria 35

Jordan 33

Oman 33

Yemen 31

Qatar 30

Kuwait 30

Algeria 27

Egypt 25

Morocco 25

UAE 25

Iran 25

Bahrain 23

Turkey 15

Bangladesh 10

 

Why these variations exist is a puzzle. Why is Pakistan high, but Bangladesh low?

Reference:

Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd, A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies (Columbia UP, 2011).

The Costco Lesson: Don’t Hire from Business Schools

Why is Costco is not only successful, but also decent?

It is decent to its customers. Almost everything is marked up 14-15 % or less over cost. Most of its profit comes from membership fees, so if you like buying in bulk you save. (I don’t, so I never go to Costco, but I see the attraction.)

And it is decent to its employees. Unlike the retail industry norm, the workers are well paid, with decent benefits. So they have low turnover, good morale, high productivity. Presumably this makes them helpful and cheerful with customers.

What’s the secret? I would nominate this remarkable fact as a clue to Costco: Managers work their way up from the warehouse floor. Costco does not hire business school graduates.

(From a BusinessWeek profile of the company, via The Browser).

Dennett’s Tips for Better Thinking

Daniel Dennett has a how-to list on better thinking in The Guardian. One thing about advice lists: they may be interesting to peruse, but I doubt they actually prompt sustained changes in how one behaves. In any case, here are some of Dennett’s tips that I found particularly interesting:

Try to acquire the weird practice of savouring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray.

It is hard to admit mistakes, so I am not sure this advice is ever going to be widely followed.

When criticizing others, do it charitably.

1. Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”

2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

This I think may be possible. But I would also like to see the art of polemical critique hang on.

Don’t waste your time on the mediocre

Sturgeon’s law is usually expressed thus: 90% of everything is crap. … A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticise a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don’t waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff or leave it alone.

Sturgeon’s law should be better expressed statistically: most of everything is not crap: it is average (the bulge of the bell curve); a bit is crap (the left tail); and a bit is very good (the right tail). So, focus on the right tail.

Dennett also recommends using Occam’s Razor (parsimony), being wary of “deepities” (they sound deep but mean nothing), answering rhetorical questions, and more.

Enlightening About the Enlightenment

Kenneth Minogue reviews Anthony Pagden’s The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters. He notes that Pagden stresses tolerance, forward-thinking, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and optimism as themes.

Minogue makes several pertinent criticisms.

First,

One problem … is the difficulty of deciding who, from the founding period, counts as belonging to the “club” of the enlightened.

Should the club include Robespierre, the Marxists (and hence Stalin or Pol Pot)?

One might ask whether the Enlightenment is a period or a party, an era or a faction.

Second, Minogue rightly objects that intellectual progress is much older. The growth of reliable knowledge long precedes the 18th century.

Mr. Pagden’s basic take on the Enlightenment is locked into secularist legendry—as if intellectual progress only began when philosophers questioned religious authority. … Our Western civilization is indeed remarkable, but the reason is that, well before the 18th century, it had been the only culture in the world exploring the possibilities of free inquiry and intellectual rigor.

Third, Enlightenment political ideologies were not all nice.

We do indeed owe some of our tolerant openness to the writers of the Enlightenment, but we also owe to them the nightmarish passion to meddle with human life and to attempt to create utopian societies…. the fashion for ideological enthusiasms to improve our world keeps on generating surprises. The thing about light is that it casts shadows.

That seems about right. The Enlightenment gave us some fine features, but also some annoying bugs.

Chagnon at Edge

Edge.org has a special event on anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. He’s in conversation with these luminaries:

L-R Daniel Dennett, Napoleon Chagnon, David Haig, Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, and John Brockman of edge.org

There are also comments on Chagnon’s ideas from anthropologist Lionel Tiger, economist Paul Seabright, international relations scholar Dominic Johnson, historian Azar Gat, and linguist Daniel Everett.

Combination, Unevenness, and the Riddle of the International

Thanks to a tip, I’m directed to a new paper by Justin Rosenberg proposing “combined and uneven development” as the solution to the riddle of … well the riddle of history, to be sure, but not just that. Also the riddle of the international, or the

question of why ‘the international’ exists in the first place – why there are multiple societies (191)

The answer is “C&UD” (the initiates acronym), or

the intrinsically uneven character of socio-historical development per se. (193)

This encapsulates his idea:

multiplicity itself is seen as an expression of the intrinsic unevenness of historical development and change. (225)

I applaud Rosenberg’s willingness to raise basic questions. But, I am not convinced by his answer.

You can find “combined and uneven development” among ant colonies. If one colony’s population grows greater than the next’s (uneven development), it is then able to kill the smaller colony and take over its territory (combined).

Maybe C&UD could serve as a shorthand description of this, but it does not explain what is going on. It does not explain why there is “multiplicity” or “the international” ie many separate ant colonies that cooperate within the colony but compete with, and sometimes fight with, others.

Logically, unevenness could lead not to multiplicity but to unity: if one society got such an advantage that it took over all the rest. (Arguably the peculiar uneven and combined development of China and the steppe led to unity, not multiplicity, there.)

I have a better theory of “the international.” It’s a product of two ultimate factors: human evolution (especially group selection) and the peculiar social evolution of Europe. But I’ll save it for another time.

Reference

Rosenberg, Justin (2013) Kenneth Waltz and Leon Trotsky: Anarchy in the mirror of ‘uneven and combined development’. International Politics, 50 (2). pp. 183-230. doi:10.1057/ip.2013.6 I cannot see an ungated version. Gated version here.