Author Archives: golsen@the-noble-polymath.com

TNSR, Science, and the Social Sciences

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The August 2019 edition of the the Texas National Security Review featured an editorial by Frank Gavin, the chair of the editorial board, in which he discussed his experience of working with a bunch of nuclear scientists and engineers on a faculty search for MIT.

He discussed how he as always felt out of place, being trained as a historian, yet always working in national security and social science circles. He attended conferences and never had an appropriate pithy label for what he did:

In the past, I have looked at this “identity crisis” as a problem. Who was I? At conferences, when people introduced themselves, I was unable to match their pithy, recognizable titles. “Ideologically-uncommitted, methodologically-promiscuous, historically-minded scholar who thinks about strategy and statecraft with an eye toward improving policy” was no match for “political scientist,” “comparativist,” “restrainer,” “neo-realist,” “post-modernist,” “constructivist,” “Europeanist,” “think-tanker,” “methodologist,” “liberal internationalist,” “progressive,” “never-Trumper,” or “national security professional.”

After initially feeling out of place on a search committee for an MIT faculty position, he came to appreciate the lack of disciplinary boundaries among the scientists:

They didn’t care about labels or even disciplines and demonstrated a strong curiosity and interest in how a historian analyzed the world. Their ranks included physicists, material scientists, computational experts, chemical engineers, and others whose expertise mixed and matched from a variety of fields. When judging candidates for the faculty position, their first question was not about disciplinary training or method. They focused on who asked the best questions and who could actually innovatively solve difficult, important problems.

[N]o one cared about advancing the “discipline” for its own purposes. To them, “disciplines” and academic fields were a means to an end — vehicles to better ask and answer important questions, and to advance understanding and resolving problems in the world. No MIT nuclear scientist was ever impressed by someone demonstrating theoretical or methodological prowess if it didn’t actually identify or solve a problem that mattered. And all of them felt quite comfortable moving between and fostering engagement between the academy, government and regulatory agencies, and the private sector.

What he has discovered is that scientists are scientists. Science and engineering lack the religious wars you find within the social sciences and humanities. They all have the same epistemological grounding, which means they are free to float between disciplines and mainly focus on asking good questions (i.e., making good hypotheses that can be tested and are falsifiable).

I came into social science (international relations) from science and engineering. Early in my career I worked as a geographer in the Ecosystem Science and Technology Branch at NASA Ames Research Center and an environmental engineering firm before switching to a more remunerative career in tech. The social science I practice is inveterately positivist as a result. This is because science is what scientists do. On the whole, they are unconcerned with philosophy.

My big complaint with the reading I was assigned in my social science research training is that it is philosophy, not training in how to do research. Of the four books assigned in my research training at University of Leicester in the Politics and International Relations department, each had a different philosophical axe to grind against science. If, as the old joke goes: political science is the discipline dedicated to refuting Huntington, then research training in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, sociology, and political science, is dedicated to eliminating the scientific method from the disciplines.

Science and engineering does not suffer this defect of competing epistemological grounds. An engineer wants to know if the bridge will stand up, not whether under some mathematical axiom systems the bridge will stand up and under some other axiom systems the bridge will fall down, or worse. What bridge? The bridge is an artifact of patriarchy and must not be built!

Gavin has discovered this distinction between the social sciences and hard sciences and engineering: there exists epistemological diversity within the social sciences that produces religious wars.

The Demise of the Full-Time MBA

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According to the Wall Street Journal, full-time MBA programs are on the decline and online programs are on the rise. This as categorically a good thing.

The MBA is an academic qualification that signals you have been trained in a body of knowledge in how business is conducted and managed: microeconomics; accounting; business law; human individual and group behavior; finance; supply chains, manufacturing, and distribution; information technology and information security; and social and environmental responsibility. The last two are fairly new to the standard MBA curriculum. You likely also received specialized training in something, such as accounting or international business. Mine was finance specifically banking and financial markets.

The curriculum is not unique to the MBA, but applies also to an undergraduate business degree. According to the AACSB, who accredits business schools, the graduate degree is distinguished by training in the following areas:

  • Leading in organizational situations
  • Managing in a diverse global context
  • Thinking creatively
  • Making sound decisions and exercising good judgment under uncertainty
  • Integrating knowledge across fields

Full-time MBA programs are targeted toward young college graduates. You can argue that they are too inexperienced to actually benefit from an MBA. They don’t know what they don’t know. When they arrive in the workplace, they arrive overconfident in their ability to actually perform in a specific role and can make good decisions. Their greatest weakness is the inability to actually assess the amount of uncertainty involved in a decision and the limitations of their ability to lead in a specific organizational context. In short, they are what we in my workplace call “MBA Weenies” arrogant noobs whose decision-making is formulaic–for example, making decisions based on accounting costs and not factoring in opportunity costs.

Another aspect of the MBA, which is cited in the article, is the belief in the magic “network” that the full-time MBA is supposed to provide. First, the concept of “network” is treating people as means, not ends in themselves. The instrumental use of classmates and alumni is a moral failing. Second, that network isn’t going to necessarily be all that useful when all your classmates are the same age and just starting out in a career. Alumni networks may be more valuable, but it is more related to prestige of the qualification than anything else. A Wharton School MBA is valuable, because it is a Wharton School MBA, not anything specific to the curriculum, which is mostly standardized across business schools. Prestige is expensive and may not return the investment. I can tell you that as a hiring manager in IT and a hiring manager in marketing, I didn’t care what school anyone went to. I valued job specific skills and/or the ability to learn, the ability to fit into our specific corporate culture, and communication skills–spoken and written–in that order.

If full-time MBA programs are declining in favor of part-time, executive, and distance programs, catering to people who are mid-career, this is a good thing. The students entering the program have some experience on which to draw, and a sense of what skills they need to improve. When I know a mid-career professional is considering getting an MBA, I invariably tell them the same advice I received: study what you don’t know. Business school is broad education, not deep, so studying what you already know just means that the schoolwork will be easy, but you won’t get the most out of the program.

As to the vaunted “network,” the network is more valuable when it is composed of experienced mid-career people (Directors, VPs) than it is with a bunch of junior people. Furthermore, it doesn’t necessarily require in person contact. I got my MBA at University of Nebraska online. It is considered one of the best online MBAs in the US. It was a program that attracted a lot Army and Air Force officers (mostly 1LT and CAPT ranks), who were looking for either job specific skills–for example, they work in logistics and supply–or a credential to help get a job after the military. I was older than many of my fellow students, who were usually about 30, whereas I was about 10-12 years older. Technology has helped with maintaining relationships. Social networking has allowed me to maintain a network of impressive fellow students who would be good to work with in the future.

Another aspect that was not touched on at all in the article is the benefit to using contingent faculty, which is who gets stuck teaching those night and weekend classes in part-time programs. Tenured faculty may not have had much business experience, since getting the PhD meant deferring work and spending 6-8 years in graduate school. Or they have left business for academia decades prior. Certain aspects of business education requires experience: entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, and logistics/supply chain. Things involving math, like finance; clear professional standards of practice, like accounting; and applied psychology, like organizational development, are easily taught by those who mastered the academic/regulatory literature but lack experience. On the other hand, things like product management (making decisions on product features, new product introductions, and pricing decisions under uncertainty) in marketing, how to sell things, launching new ventures, and managing global supply chains all require real world experience to be effective as an instructor. Contingent faculty is a way to get instructors with that real world experience. They can impart lessons learned in the real world.

The article highlights the attrition that MBA programs have suffered due to the introduction of specialized degrees. This is also a good thing. For example, work in banking and financial markets is highly specialized and computer-centric. MBAs may be good for some things, like selling securities and evaluating deals, but the domination of the industry by computerized quantitative analysis means that you need much more math and programming skills than an MBA provides. Indeed, it has been hypothesized that thee rise of quantitative finance was tied to the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider, which put lots of STEM PhDs on the job market, who ended up on Wall Street at banks and hedge funds.

So let’s get those 21 and 22-year-olds out on the job market and then back into school in their 30s and 40s for management education, rather than into a finishing school. There is a place for full-time MBA programs to allow students without degrees in business to get the skills needed for the job market, but for students who major in business, communications, economics, engineering, computer science, or accounting, they should not be entering business school, thinking they are going to learn what is needed to succeed in business (it is utterly redundant for a business major, and just gilding the lily with a required credential for advancement), or entry into a guild called a “network.” For that English or History major, it is really valuable training that, to quote Strother Martin’s character in Cool Hand Luke, “gets your mind right.” But full-time MBAs should not be how the bulk of business education gets delivered. The so-called non-traditional MBA programs offer much more value.

Deterrence Facile and Sophisticated

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A piece by Clifford D. May from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies that appeared in the Washington Times contained the following statement:

The paradox of deterrence is that the stronger we are, the less likely that our adversaries will provoke a conflict with us. By contrast, if we appear weak or wobbly, those who despise us will be emboldened to take their best shots.

This is a rather facile understanding of deterrence. Strength does not necessarily increase deterrence. Deterrence is a very difficult thing to achieve in international affairs because it is intimately tied to the level of analysis, information, perceptions, and the security dilemma.

The level of analysis matters greatly. For example, most of the work on nuclear deterrence, treats states as unitary rational actors. That is a state makes decisions doing costs-benefit analysis and chooses the option with the most gain (or least loss). That simplifying assumption appears to have worked well for theories of nuclear deterrence. Nuclear deterrence rests on the idea that having a viable second strike capability on both sides. It ensures that weapons will not be used, because the first use is guaranteed to result in a counter-strike. Given the destructive power of strategic nuclear weapons, the result is the destruction of both sides. For this reason, the so-called nuclear triad is very important. Possessing intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombers, and sea launched ballistic missiles ensures that a first strike could not knock out a state’s entire arsenal, and enough will survive for the counter strike. For nuclear deterrence to work, all that is required is rationality and information, the more perfect the better. Better information reduces the likelihood of miscalculation. Even so, during the Cuban Missile Crisis there was almost a nuclear weapon used by a Russian submarine under attack by US destroyers enforcing the quarantine of Cuba. Use of a nuclear weapon might in turn have set off an escalatory spiral. (Russia’s deployment of IRBMs in Cuba was to address an imbalance of forces because at the time Russia was struggling with its ICBM program and thought that the US advantage in interceptor fighters, made thee Russian bomber fleet insufficient to deter a US first strike. The Russians wanted to bring more of the continental United States under nuclear threat.

Deterrence has been less effective in conventional arms because it is tied to perceptions. The state as a unitary rational actor seems not to hold well. For example, whether offense or defense in war has the advantage has a bearing on the calculus of decision makers. Decision makers may “fight the last war” and misunderstand how technology has changed the nature of war. At a more tactical level, information problems abound. How good is the intelligence? After all, military decision makers disguise movements and behave in rationally irrational ways–for example, marching the army over the mountain and not down the road which would be faster, because it enhances surprise. Incentives to dissemble abound.

States themselves may not be unitary actors. Without strong civilian control of the military, actions may be undertaken that are detrimental to the state for parochial military reasons. When states leverage irregular war strategies such as proxies and militias, or in the case of Iran, parallel security institutions, the idea that a state will behave as a unitary actor are imperiled.

Deterrence rests upon credible threat. This is what May is getting to, but strength doesn’t necessarily make a threat credible. There are many ways of making threats more credible. I’ll refer you to Schelling’s classic analysis of threat for a more detailed discussion, including how weakness can actually enhance the credibility of threat. One of the key ways of making a threat more credible is to remove options for concessions thereby shrinking the policy space. Another key way is to use unpredictability for advantage. When a state behaves unpredictably, the state may be able to drive a harder bargain than were its true preferences known. Think of Nixon’s approach during the Vietnam War, when trying to extract concessions from North Vietnam, he cultivated the idea that he was irrational.

Strength can actually be a detriment to successful deterrence, because it can result in the security dilemma. A state feels threatened, so it increases its military capability, thereby increasing the costs associated with an attack, however, the military buildup makes the other state more insecure, resulting in an arms race, or a temptation to attack in order to preempt the state from getting stronger.

Finally there is the issue of crazy states. Yehezkel Dror in his Crazy States: A Counterconventional Strategic Problem, laid out a typology of ways states have preferences that are in his terminology “counter reasonable”. An extreme example: millenarianism produces preferences that are “counter reasonable” because willingness to destroy one’s self to destroy an enemy is counter reasonable, violating the basic principle of self preservation.

Thus, strength does not automatically increase the level of deterrence. Credible threats can be made even from positions of weakness. Perceptions of threat may activate a security dilemma–for example, it is possible that Iran embarked on a covert nuclear weapons program as a way of deterring the United States from pursuing regime change, ditto North Korea–and finally, the states themselves may not behave rationally. They may not do cost-benefit analyses and act as a utility maximizer, a prerequisite for analytical tools for understanding state behavior like game theory that has worked so well in developing doctrines of nuclear deterrence.

A European Aircraft Carrier

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Recently AKK advocated the EU build its own aircraft carrier. This is not as harebrained as it appears on its face. Per a report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), post-Brexit, the European Union would struggle to execute a humanitarian disaster response in its near abroad due to a lack of naval assets.

An aircraft carrier, I am not talking a behemoth like the American nuclear-powered floating cities with 80 aircraft and a crew of 5,000, but the typical modern carrier closer in size and capability to a flattop for VSTOL aircraft like an American Wasp-class amphibious assault ship (LHD), is an important asset to have in order to execute that kind of mission. This is not, as AKK said, “[A] symbolic project.” Rather, it addresses a real capability shortfall.

However, must it be European? For the following reasons it makes sense for a German to go the multilateral route:

  1. France is the only member of a post-Brexit EU with experience in naval aviation. Naval aviation is a hard capability to develop and Germany’s startup costs would be high and learning curve steep. Germany gets capability sooner, while paying the price of policy constraints imposed by the multilateral approach.
  2. The German public would likely never support a German independent naval aviation capability. Germany struggles with maintaining land and air capability to deter invasion today, let alone developing capability with offensive power projection potential.
  3. Any European aircraft carrier would still benefit Germany’s industry.

However, a European aircraft carrier would fail as a project for the same reason that an independent Chapter VII military failed to materialize at the UN. The EU is an intergovernmental organization (IGO) and as such most be looked at through the lens of principal-agent analysis. Member states delegate issue areas to the IGO and maintain constraints on the independence of the IGO (ask the southern members of the EU about the control Germany exercises on the European Central Bank viz. monetary policy). It is one thing for states to cooperate on security in the European Union, offering their own troops and materiel for collective defense and sharing intelligence, always retaining an implicit veto via withdrawal. It is another, to build the first ship of an independent European navy, which makes the EU more of an independent third-party actor than any member state would wish. Even if theoretically a veto still existed at the level of the Council of Ministers.

The Value of IR to the Citizen

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Steve Saideman recently blogged about how he conceived of his teaching mission, when teaching undergraduates: adding to an informed citizenry. This is is a noble endeavor.

It is precisely the need to be a better informed citizen that sent me on a now an 8 year journey towards a change of career, all inspired by Charles Hill’s excerpt from Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order in the Review Section of the Wall Street Journal.

After reading that article, I realized I was too ignorant to be an effective citizen of the republic in matters of war and peace and trade. And after learning he taught in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a non-degree program for training diplomats and would-be heads of state, a quick Google search yielded the syllabus for the program and I began to read.

The intellectual joy in studying the grand themes of the literature in IR had me thinking about a career change, which meant collecting a credential. Thus, I landed at Troy University for a masters degree and now University of Leicester for a PhD. My research interest, peacekeeping and civil war, came out of two courses at Troy. One on international organizations, a requirement, and one on Sub Saharan Africa.

I whole-heartedly agree with the value of undergraduate education in international relations, I wish I had been forced to take IR as part of breadth requirements as an undergraduate. UCSB at the time required a US government course in Political Science, but nothing dealing with relations among states.

Digression: If I had one criticism of the Brady-Johnson Program, it is that the syllabus I read from was too heavy on the diplomatic history approach and too light on theories. What I found most useful at Troy were the introductory course and the required ‘theory and ideology’ course, which prepared us for the exit exam. Those two courses gave me a large toolbox with which to conceptualize a given issue. (International political economy was less useful, mainly because I already had a background in micro and macro economics, accounting, finance, trade, supply chain management, and banking from an MBA. Although, I did appreciate the way the professor stressed the contradictions built into canonical developmental economics and the consequences for individual liberty in the standard policy prescriptions–i.e., Easterly’s critique.)

Diplomatic history is useful for context, but in the hands of policy maker–exactly whom they are training–it can lead to dangerous facile analogies. This is not to say that a policy maker needs Theory with a capital T, which is mostly useless academic abstraction, but an understanding of the claims of realism, liberalism, constructivism–although that ‘magic idea wand’ (Snyder 2002) can be rather dangerous in the hands of policy maker–will provide ways of conceptualizing issues.

Digression 2: The Brady-Johnson Program syllabus did include a book that became one of the most influential on my own thought: Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, which included a really helpful typology for understanding American foreign policy.

Higher Education for the Mid Career Professional

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Earning three masters degrees and a graduate certificate in four different subjects and currently completing a PhD as a mid career professional, I thought I would share some thoughts on the best way to deal with the very real phenomenon of credential inflation.  At some point in your career you will likely be faced with one of two issues: (1) a particular credential is needed for career advancement (e.g., an MBA) or (2) a desire or need to change careers (e.g., you want to start teaching in higher education or technological change has wiped out the industry you are in).  How do you go about getting the required credential and retraining/education while still employed?

Fortunately there are lots of options: night and weekend programs, MOOCs, online degree programs, blended programs.  Assuming that you are paying for education and not your employer there are some things to consider.

First, higher ed is expensive.  From a pure accounting perspective, does the net present value (NPV) of future cashflows justify the cash spent on the education?  This raises the issue of prestige.  Prestigious degrees are expensive.  If you’re looking at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, it is likely that the NPV is negative.  As a mid career professional, you are unlikely to see large enough increases in salary to justify spending $100,000-$200,000 for a masters degree.  Your payback period may be longer than the length of your career still ahead of you.  If you are merely acquiring a required credential, skip the prestige if you are footing the bill.  If a career change is in order, then prestige may be valuable in opening doors, but realize that the you will never get the return on investment in accounting terms, only in increased social status due to the prestigious qualification.  You can impress people with that Harvard sheepskin on the wall.

Second, will you learn something?  As I discovered in my own sojourn through higher ed, price does not equate to quality.  Of every university I have attended–University of California, Santa Barbara (BA), Gratz College (MA), Diablo Valley College (business school prerequisites), Oxford University Extension (archaeology classes for fun), University of Nebraska-Lincoln (MBA), Regent University (Certificate in New Testament, mainly to learn Koine Greek), Troy University (MS), and University of Leicester (PhD in progress)–the best education I received was at Troy University, a big state school in Montgomery Alabama whose mission is mainly teaching.  The training I received in International Relations there was top notch.  The strongest parts were the training in theories of international relations and in research methods, which are crucial for later success at the PhD level.  Second place has to go to the junior college on the list, Diablo Valley College.  Because DVC’s mission is teaching not research, the faculty are truly invested in student success.

Third, study what you don’t know.  This was advice I received from Rick Kreysar, former US professional soccer player and senior executive at Computer Associates.  Since I was getting my MBA as a required credential for advancement (or even a lateral move since at my level computerized resume screens weed out candidates without one), he suggested that study something I didn’t already know.  It was great advice.  I spent a decade in IT, sales and marketing.  Instead of studying sales and marketing, I studied finance for my MBA.  It gave me tools to (a) stop paying for financial advice, (b) increase risk adjusted returns of my retirement plan, and (c) taught me mathematical tools I apply regularly in my current role outside of finance.

So you need to learn something and do it on the cheap, how do you succeed?  Start with a self assessment.  Have you been out of school a really long time?  Academic work can be challenging at first.  Consider baby steps at a junior college.  I remember utterly flaming out on my first research paper at Gratz College because I was so inexperienced at ‘playing the game’ after 10 years out of school.  Are you a self starter or do you need to be coached and/or prodded to do things?  Distance education, MOOCs, and the UK tutorial system, require you to be very self-disciplined.  Do the reading, get the work done, stick to a schedule.  I frankly sucked at this as a 18-22 year old undergraduate, but was absolutely able to be disciplined as a 35 year old.  

A word about MOOCs: MOOCs open up education to the masses at a very low cost, but I personally found that the very low cost is an impediment to finishing.  The penalty for blowing off a class and not completing is low.  You’ve gotta really want it and not be easily distracted by life (work and family obligations especially).  It is hard to tell your spouse or kids you can’t do something because you have to study, when that class was $30 and not $1500.  That is at least my $0.02 on the subject.

My General Advice on choosing a distance program

Comparison shop.  Higher education is expensive, but you can find bargains.  Many big state schools in the Midwest and South offer in-state or discounted tuition for out-of-state students.

Choose a school people will have heard of.  To an extent reputation matters.  When I was looking at MBA programs, I narrowed my list of schools according to budget and eliminated schools that nobody has heard of.  For example, if all else being equal you’ve got a short list of a small liberal arts college, a directional school (universities with North, South, East, or West in the name) and a big school people have heard of, choose the bigger name.  It helps with the job applications, casual conversations and leveraging an alumni network.

I am a huge fan of accelerated programs.  Programs that cram 15 weeks of material into 9 or 10 weeks are a boon for somebody who works.  They will kill you on the reading and research papers are stressful due to time constraints, but I found that the drawbacks are more than offset by the benefits including: making progress while taking one class at the same time, which aids focus; fewer discussion board postings/problem sets per term; if the class sucks, you’re stuck with it for 33% less time.  I found that by going to school year round, it was easier to stay on the tread mill and finish.  Both Troy and Nebraska were accelerated: Troy 5 semester terms per year, Nebraska had 4 semester terms per year.

Accreditation matters.  Make sure any university in the US has regional accreditation if going for an MA or MS.  There are degree mills that prey on uninformed consumers.  Furthermore, avoid any MBA program that is not AACSB accredited.  Internationally, it isn’t a real MBA unless it is AACSB accredited.  Those schools offering one under their standard regional education are not conferring a real MBA.  It is the same deal with unaccredited law schools, by the way.  If it is not ABA accredited, you just wasted your money.

International programs

International education is fraught with peril but can be tremendously rewarding.  I did some exploration here, and for a US resident there are some gotchas.  First, while every nation has its own standards for accreditation, for a US resident, you should always consult the list of foreign schools eligible for student loans from the US Department of Education.  A qualification from a school on the list is likely to be considered a real qualification, when it comes time to evaluate it.  Most large US employers and all education institutions will use a transcript service to scrutinize your education to see if it meets the standard of the degree claimed.  You won’t have much trouble with degrees from the developed world, but you may with degrees from the Third World.  Furthermore, professional societies may have additional hoops to jump through for licensure.  Take law as an example.  In the United States you will take a 4 year undergraduate degree, then go to 3 years of law school, and sit for your state BAR exam.  In the UK, however, a law degree is an undergraduate qualification.  Plus you will still need to learn US law by completing an LLM degree in the US to learn US law before you sit for the BAR exam.  (Hint: this may be the cheaper and shorter option.)

Transfer from one system to another can also be almost impossible.  In the UK for example, for a bachelors degree there isn’t the US equivalent of general education requirements.  BA degrees are 3 year degrees in your field, not 4 years with half your course work outside your major area as in the US.  You study a subject for three years at two different levels, roughly equivalent to US lower division and upper division course work.  The actual number of modules studied is much lower since the modules themselves are much bigger in scope.  Thus transfer is almost impossible without either substantial bureaucratic hassles or almost starting over with a qualification or testing out of stuff with CLEP tests.

The way education is conducted is also very different.  It is a culture shock going from the US system to the UK system.  The first shock is that the quantity of work produced is much lower.  For example, in the US, written assignments have minimum word counts, in the UK, they have maximum word counts.  In the US prolixity is rewarded, but in the UK it is punished.  I actually found it very difficult to scale down arguments to fit the word counts.    There are also fewer assignments.  A typical module may have one seen and one unseen paper of less than 5,000 words.  Contrast that with a typical course in International Relations at Troy that had 2 or 3 seen papers of 7,500 words or more plus weekly question responses of 400 words or more.  Frankly, I am thankful that International Relations at Troy had an arduous exit exam process, because it prepared me for the type of unseen papers I would encounter in the UK.

Also, the UK makes a big distinction between research degrees and taught degrees.  Graduate school in the US has very different aims.  An MA or MS in the US is taught degree.  You do a bunch of course work, at least 30 semester units of it, and then do a small research project or, in the case of some MS degrees, more coursework and maybe an exit exam.  An MPhil is a research degree.  You are learning how to do research and along the way mastering the basics of a field.  It is a very different concept.  Think of the US and the Henry Ford model of graduate education and the UK as offering an artisanal model of higher education.  If you need structure, look to the US.  If you want freedom, look to the UK.

PhDs

The PhD is the way you enter the higher education guild and is also a required credential for some fields–e.g., policy work in Washington D.C. pretty much requires a PhD, working as a research scientist in industry requires a PhD.  Here is where reputation matters.  If you want to be a professor at a tier 1 research university your chances of being hired into a tenure track position is much greater with a prestigious degree (Ivy League, a ‘public Ivy’, Stanford, or Oxford/Cambridge).  For jobs in industry, what your research was and who you did it under is more important than reputation.

The PhD means you will most likely have to quit your job, although there are a small set of programs, mainly in professions like business and psychology, that are part-time.  Furthermore, there are more and more part time programs in the humanities and social sciences being launched in order to attract enrollment, even at really good schools.

I am currently doing a part-time low residency PhD in Politics and International Relations at University of Leicester in the UK, which was one of four programs in International Relations that I found: Manchester Metropolitan University, Birmingham, Leicester, and King’s College London.  King’s College London was my first choice because they have a famous expert in international peacekeeping, Mats Berdal, whom I wanted as my supervisor, but he was full up with students.  Because you are admitted on the strength of the research proposal in the UK (see below), you can get into disputes over relevant literature and methods (which nixed MMU).  That left Birmingham and Leicester.  Leicester was more eager to have me.  

The PhD is very, very, very different in the US and the UK.  In the UK, they are minting a person who knows how to do a substantive and original piece of research, full stop.  In the US, they are certifying you as an expert in the field, who also knows how to do research, hence 90 additional semester units of course work and comprehensive exams are required before you can even think of starting your research (essentially you will be doing two+ masters degrees worth of coursework before doing research).  Admission in the UK is based primarily on the strength of a research proposal and whether they have resources to supervise your research.  If you plan on returning to the US to work in US higher education, you will be more heavily scrutinized, because of the difference in the qualifications.  A UK PhD is generally looked down upon in the US, partly due to cultural factors–you haven’t ‘paid your dues’ in suffering through the sadistic US system–and partly because there is suspicion that you haven’t mastered your field.  

Let’s assume that already hold a masters degree or two.  In the US, you will likely not be able to transfer units from other schools (the reason cited will be ‘we issue {Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, Harvard, …} degrees here’), you will suffer through 3-4 additional years of coursework on top of what you have already done, sit for your comprehensive exams, then they will look for supervision for you in the department with no guarantee of continuing (it being contingent on their being space in a lab for you or a supervisor available; I know more than one person who got to this point and exited with an MPhil or MA because there was no supervision or lab available).  You write your research proposal and only then start your research.  Tack on a couple more years at a minimum for research and writing and you are finally done.  Except perhaps in Mathematics where the dissertation is usually short, this is a Bataan death march, doubly so in the humanities.  I remember having teaching assistants in classes at UCSB having already spent 7-8 years and weren’t done yet.

Contrast that with the UK: gain admission, which be definition means they have supervision for you and you have a decent research proposal; you take whatever modules you need to be able to be successful in your research, which at a minimum is a required research training module and required research ethics training (I’ve not had to register for modules beyond the required due to my own background and mainly do short seminars in skills I need); go before an internal review board after a year or two to show your progress to date and a finalized research proposal; they either accept is as worthy of a PhD and can be completed in a timely fashion or not.  Then you are advanced to do your research, you do it, write it up and an outside examination committee reviews the dissertation, examines you orally (the feared viva), and decides whether to confer the degree.  (External examiners are also a big difference between the US and UK systems.  It is how they ensure quality in the UK.)  You are done much faster with less pain, assuming you have quality supervision.  But you’ve got to be confident that you can work in this less structured environment to complete it.  

I chose the UK route because I already held 3 masters degrees and wasn’t going to waste time with the equivalent of 2 more, I was over 40, and needed a required credential for policy wonk work.  (Dream job is at RAND Corporation.)  There is a ton of unacknowledged age discrimination in the US.  US programs don’t want people past their 30s and certainly nobody who would be 50 when finished.  It makes sense from the perspective of the  guild because they will be investing resources in minting a new member of the higher education guild.  They want to make sure that you have a lot of time left in the guild before retirement, at least 30 years.  I did not encounter any of that in applications in the UK.  UC Berkeley and Stanford on the other hand–as they say in New York fuhgettaboutit.

I also lucked out in my supervision.  My supervisor himself is a non-traditional student who came back to higher ed mid career in order to make a career change and got his PhD in his 40s.  Since I am not trying to get a tenure track position in the US after graduation, I am less concerned about how a UK PhD is viewed.  Be advised, if you go the UK route and you are looking for a tenure track position in the US, I suggest you stick with Oxford/Cambridge due to reputation concerns, make sure you also teach undergraduate modules, network heavily in professional societies, and publish, publish, publish.  You’ll get interviews based on your reputation not the school’s.

Check back in with me at the end of 2020 to see how my UK PhD experience went at the end of the journey.

The Class Taboo on the Right

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Mingling in conservative circles I’ve noticed that some conservatives have an aversion to any references to class, as if class is the ideological equivalent of Voldemort, the concept which should not be named.  Class is a taboo.

Of course the conservative movement in America was vehemently anti-Communist.  In fact, it was the glue that held the libertarians in coalition with conservatives under the stewardship of William F. Buckley, Jr.

All of Marxism is predicated on class and class conflict.  It is reasonable to assume that the class taboo among conservatives is that they don’t want to validate a single element of Marxism.

This is taboo is really irrational.  Class does not have to be ontologically real, as it is in Marxism, to be useful.  Typologies, for example, are descriptive generalizations that involve set membership.  Based on some criterion, an observation may be placed in or out of a set.  Then based on those sets, you can make causal claims backed up by associations between set membership and an outcome.  It is fundamental to making generalizable claims about social phenomena.  

The conservative movement wasn’t always averse to using class as a concept.  For example, James Burnham, who would become an editor for National Review magazine, the house organ of movement conservatism, made much of the concept of the managerial classes in industry and government.  Neoliberal economists work with models using class, such as income quintiles, all the time.

Conservatives rightly shun bankrupt Marxist concepts like the labor theory of value and Marx’s teleological class conflict, but it is silly to shun the use of class typologically.

Peacekeeping as Imperialism

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Readers of this blog know that I tend to approach international relations from a realist perspective by default unless there is a reason to apply an alternative theoretical approach.  Readers also know that I am working on my PhD and researching the effectiveness of peacekeeping in civil wars.  As part of my research I recently read Philip Cunliffe’s Legions of Peace, since I am into my literature review of adjacencies, in this case on why troop contributing countries (TCCs) contribute.  I have a few remarks on the book.

First, I am blown away by the quality of the argument.  The book is based on Cunliffe’s PhD dissertation at King’s College London and I am really impressed with the quality of the research. I hope to deliver research of like quality as I finish my PhD in approximately 2020.

Second, I normally dismiss research in the social sciences labeled Critical with a capital C.  Usually such research is merely a cornucopia of tautologies, non sequiturs and trivialities couched in impenetrable jargon-laden prose.  Legions of Peace is an exception.  It is Critical without the baggage of high-Frankfurt School navel gazing.  It is empirical, concise, and pleasantly lacking in jargon.

Third, I finished it mostly agreeing with the main points of the book.  The basic argument of the book is that international peacekeeping since the end of the Cold War has become the “highest form of imperialism.”  It is a form of non-territorial imperialism exercised by the Western powers as a tool for maintaining the existing international order.   The United Nations itself has the second largest deployment of troops abroad after the United States, the current global hegemonic power.  The UN is supposed to be quintessentially anti-colonial, yet has troops in formally independent countries all over the globe.  The UN’s deployments are authorized by the United Nations Security Council, and therefore reflects the interests of the P-5 members.  That is evidence for the imperial nature of the institution.

The issue that Cunliffe addresses is why it is that, if PKOs reflect the interests of Western powers, most of the peacekeepers deployed come from the Global South and are deployed mostly to other countries in the Global South.  Why is it that former colonized powers behave as tools of imperialism?  Is there no Third World solidarity?  For pecuniary reasons, the Western powers use the United Nations and lesser developed TCCs as a way to execute a strategy of imperial policing on the cheap.  Under empire, the European metropole raised colonial armies and deployment around the empire to provide security an quell unrest–e.g., the King’s African Rifles and British Indian Army.  In a similar vein, the Western powers outsource the maintenance of order in the Global South to the UN that recruits its own sepoys and askaris to police the disorder from India, Pakistan, et al.  Cunliffe surveys the reasons why TCCs work as modern-day sepoys and askaris, and finds them inadequate on their own, but a constellation of factors that influence participation at the national level, such as idealpolitik, civil-military relations, mercenary capacity building, diversionary campaigning, plus the most important: status and leverage within the UN, which is seen as an important protector and guarantor of sovereignty in the Third World.  Contributing to millenarian democracy promotion is the highest good within the UN.  Democratic peace theory is an article of faith and the ground of legitimacy in UN use of illiberal means to achieve liberal ends.

Leslie Gelb had an article in Foreign Affairs called Quelling the Teacup Wars in which he made the case for intervention in the civil wars of the Third World, which he cleverly calls “wars of national debilitation,” playing on “wars of national liberation.”  In the interest of maintaining order as a platform to promote national interests and promote the betterment of humanity, he says:

The main strategic challenge for the United States is to develop plans for multilateral action to stem civil wars without drowning in them, and to do what it reasonably can to give victims of these wars a chance to live in peace without making them permanent wards.

Gelb was writing in 1994.  Legions of Peace explains how that new strategy was executed since.

I highly recommend the book to both academics and the interested lay reader.  Its eminent readability makes it appropriate for readers of middle-brow publications, like The Atlantic and Economist.

 

Realist Reductionism and MAGA

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The Washington Times featured a typical piece of MAGA cheerleading.  The United States is poised to withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.  The article is cheering the decision and dismissing the threat from Russia to start a new arms race: “bring it on.”  This is absurd to wish for.

First, let’s review the reasons behind the INF and how it fits into nuclear strategy.  The USSR developed an intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM), the SS-20, capable of delivering multiple nuclear warheads with a range of approximately 4,000-5,000 km, depending on warhead, using solid rocket fuel, from a road mobile launcher.  This meant that all of Western Europe was under threat from a strategic nuclear weapon (1+ megaton warheads), whose preparation and deployment could not be detected early.  The United States in response deployed its own mobile IRBMs to Western Europe, the Pershing II and the Ground Launched Cruise Missile (a variant of the Naval Tomahawk cruise missile), with 5-150 kiloton warheads.  Both systems were theater level tactical nuclear weapons and not directly analogous to the SS-20, but were what the US had.  IRBMs were not covered under the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT I and SALT II) which had a range of 5,500 km as the definition of an ICBM.  The INF eliminated the IRBM as a class of weapons.

There are several reasons why the INF Treaty is obsolete.  First, from Russia’s perspective, the United States’ withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in order to develop ballistic missile defense (BMD) technologies to handle the threat of rogue regimes has increased Russian anxieties over the viability of its own nuclear deterrent.  The argument is bogus, because the size of Russia’s ICBM arsenal could easily overwhelm any deployed BDM system, and Russia wants tools with which to coerce Western Europe and to counter China’s IRBM arsenal.  Second, China was not a party to the INF, and has a large arsenal of IRBMs that threaten both US and Russian interests in Asia.  IRBMs are a core piece of China’s security architecture given its geography.  China is a continental power bordered by two peer rivals, Russia and India, and is economically dependent on Pacific trade that must transit choke points defined by two rings of archipelagoes.  Therefore, deterring rivals by land and extending hegemony to the archipelagoes are crucial to Chinese security.  Furthermore, it reinforces the imperial ambitions of China as it emerges from its “century of humiliation” and remakes the world order.  It permits them to extend nuclear terror (or more kindly, a nuclear umbrella for allies) over the near abroad and is an important tool for denying US access to the Western Pacific.

Russia has already violated the INF with the testing of a new class of ground launched cruise missile.  The INF did not ban research and development, but did ban testing and deployment.  Thus, the United States is now threatening to formally withdraw from the agreement and a prelude to developing new capability, the most likely candidate is the reintroduction of an updated GLCM.

This is how we got here.  This is a development that should not be cheered.  As numerous analysts have pointed out (e.g., here, here, and here), it raises the risk of miscalculation and nuclear war in Europe, encourages proliferation, and wastes resources better spent elsewhere.  As long as nuclear weapons remain in the hands of normal states and not crazy states (Dror, Crazy States: A Counterconventional Strategic Problem), they are weapons designed never to be used.  Thus, an arsenal larger than a certain size is absurd.  The essence of nuclear strategy is having a reliable second strike capability.  The idea is that an adversary is deterred from attempting to eliminate your nuclear weapons with a first strike, because enough will survive to guarantee destruction of the adversary in a counter-strike, hence the so-called nuclear triad: (1) ICBMs, (2) aircraft delivered bombs, and (3) submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).

Arms control agreements, contrary to popular belief, are not tools towards the abolition of nuclear weapons, because they don’t eliminate the scientists and engineers necessary to have a nuclear weapons program.  They are tools nuclear powers use to prevent wasteful arms races.  IRBMs were never necessary to maintain a strategic deterrent, but they were destabilizing to European politics–for example, the fear of a limited first strike and abandonment by allies.  The elimination of IRBMs stabilized European politics.

Realist international relations theory says that due to the lack of a supranational authority to enforce agreements, states will abide by agreements as long as the benefits to remaining in the agreement outweigh the costs of abiding by the agreement.  It also predicts that cheating on the agreement is the best of all, which is why agreements need vigorous enforcement mechanisms and also why states tolerate spying rather than defining it as an act of war.  Spying reduces the amount of private information and therefore increases the knowledge of adversary intentions and capabilities.  It lowers the likelihood of miscalculation and war.

Some scholars in the realist tradition think that nuclear proliferation is a good thing, because it will reduce the likelihood of war.  For example, the father of structural realism–the idea that it is the structure of the interstate system itself that causes war–Kenneth Waltz speculated that more nuclear weapons may be better for stability.  And John Mearsheimer, who is the father of offensive realism theory, and whose The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a masterful analysis of the cause of World War I–essentially, German unification in 1862 destabilized the balance of power in Europe established after the Napoleonic wars, has advocated nuclear weapons as a means of securing the independence of small states.

On balance, however, the stability offered by proliferation is only evident when (a) all parties have a viable second-strike capability and (b) are normal states.  Viable second strike capabilities do not spring forth fully formed from the head of Zeus.  During the early phase, the system is not stable.  The Cuban Missile Crisis was in part caused by the lack of a viable Soviet second-strike capability.  At the time, the USSR was struggling with its SLBM and ICBM programs and they thought that the size of the US Air Force meant that its bombers may not reach their targets in the continental US.  Therefore, they undertook a plan to covertly deploy IRBMs in Cuba that could threaten the US eastern seaboard.  The US responded with a blockade of Cuba (called a quarantine for reasons of international law), that almost resulted in the use of a nuclear weapon by a Soviet submarine (surprisingly like the scenario of Crimson Tide).  Under conditions of bounded rationality is not at all clear that small states won’t always behave according to rational choice theory, hence normally.  It is always possible that a state would behave according to normal political considerations.  For example, the apocalyptic scenarios as a consequence of Iranian nuclear breakout are predicated on Shia millenarianism driving the decision to use nuclear weapons against rational calculations.

But L. Todd Wood doesn’t get this sophisticated.  He merely thinks that paleo-realist sources of power (cf., Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations) are determinative of the victor in an arms race.  US economic might well mean that Russia loses the arms race, which is a perversion of the theory that the Cold War was won because of Reagan’s military build up.  That victory in the Cold War was mainly a historical accident.  It hinged on Gorbachev.  Furthermore, L. Todd Wood, ignores how states other than the US and Russia will respond to a nuclear IRBM deployment in Europe.  Trump has already denigrated NATO Article 5 and it is entirely possible that you may see a European arms race to deal with the threat.  The likely scenario is a rejuvenation of the French nuclear arsenal to extend a European nuclear umbrella over Germany, but there is no guaranteeing that Germany might not decide to develop its own nuclear capability.  Either response, actually reduces US relative power over the postmodern multi ethnic empire in the making that is the European Union.  The tricky thing about European rearmament is that for the most part, weapons systems are not purely defensive and security dilemmas develop with potential for conflict.

The MAGA crowd may be tired of the United States underwriting European security, when the real conflict right now is with China, but the shift must be carefully managed and may not, in the long term, be in US interests.  Dependency gives the US influence in European affairs it wouldn’t otherwise have.

I happen to think that on balance withdrawal is justified viz. the contest with China, because deployment of a new conventional IRBM capability is needed to deter a forceful reunification of Taiwan with the PRC, which would be a geostrategic disaster for US hegemony in the Pacific, and to deter a preemptive attack by China on US bases in the region.  The development is to be lamented not cheered.  Lamented because it is precisely a tragedy of great power politics.

The Influence of Sci Fi Book Covers

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I’ve become hooked on The Expanse, a TV show that has run on the SyFy Channel until it was cancelled and picked up by Amazon for the up coming season. I have binge watched the first two seasons. It is truly a classic TV show.

I have not read the books (the first three are on order), but the TV show is distinguished by its plausible vision of the future when humanity has colonized the solar system, its complex characters, its plausible extension of current technology trends into the future, and its near-feature film production values. That last I want to dilate on.

The art of show is fantastic. The sets, costumes and CGI look great. Maybe it is because the double record album of the Star Wars soundtrack came with a poster by the noted artist John Berkey, which I had on my wall, but since childhood I have liked science fiction art. The look of The Expanse harkens back to classic science fiction book covers by Berkey, Chelsey Bonestell, and Chris Foss.

I really enjoyed reading this interview with the artists behind the show. I learned about the collaboration between artists and the writers, set designers, and graphics departments who turn concepts into realities. It also confirms for me the belief that it takes both talent and accident to get your big break.

There is so much artistic talent out there not working in high art.