Recommended Reading
Foreign Affairs (Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Mark Blyth) –The Black Swan of Cairo:How Suppressing Volatility Makes the World Less Predictable and More Dangerous
Why is surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic elite? In 2007-8, when the global ?nancial system imploded, the cry that no one could have seen this coming was heard everywhere, despite the existence of numerous analyses showing that a crisis was unavoidable. It is no surprise that one hears precisely the same response today regarding the current turmoil in the Middle East. The critical issue in both cases is the arti?cial suppression of volatility — the ups and downs of life — in the name of stability. It is both misguided and dangerous to push unobserved risks further into the statistical tails of the probability distribution of outcomes and allow these high-impact, low-probability “tail risks” to disappear from policymakers’ ?elds of observation. What the world is witnessing in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya is simply what happens when highly constrained systems explode…
Hat tip to Crispin Burke
Thomas P.M. Barnett- Failed states keep neighborhoods bad, allowing AQ sanctuary, while rising states allow connections, but it’s civil strife that remains AQ’s bread-and-butter dynamic
Patrick is also right that AQ prefers up-and-comers, or states with just enough connectivity and technology and corruption to give them access to the Core. Pakistan is perfect in this regard, much better than Afghanistan (my column Monday). Under the right conditions, we need to worry far more about Pakistan than Afghanistan, which is a solution for locals.
National Defense Magazine –FBI Anticipates Terrorist Attacks on Soft Targets in the United States
This is an easy predicting, being inevitable. The fact that it has not happened yet speaks less to our inane TSA “security theater” than to the deep reluctance of state sponsors of terrorism to have an “American Beslan” traced back (perhaps erroneously) to their doorstep. It is not that Hezbollah or HAMAS or the LeT could not shoot up a shopping mall, elementary school or bomb a sports stadium – they could very easily – it’s a strategic choice not to do so as the extent of US retaliation is no longer predictable.
Moises Naim –Who Lost Mexico?
The Mexicans (Hat tip to John Sullivan)
Newshoggers.com (John Ballard)-Syria Links
Provocative collection.
SWJ Blog (Larry Goodson and Thomas H. Johnson)-How the Soviets Lost in Afghanistan, How the Americans are Losing
The Eagle goes over the mountain…..
That’s it!
Page 2 of 2 | Previous page
Dave Schuler:
April 25th, 2011 at 1:37 am
Why is surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic elite?
.
Let me take a stab at answering that question. The authors’ hypothesis may be correct but there’s a simpler answer. In the U. S. ideology has overwhelmed an understanding based on observation of human behavior. People aren’t behaving the way "political and economic elites" expect them to because their models of human behavior are ideological rather than empirical. Sort of the Pauline Kael phenomenon on a global scale.
zen:
April 25th, 2011 at 2:09 am
Hi Dave,
.
I agree. The troubling thing to me is this ideological fantasizing has trickled into the mainstream – I regularly hear the most bizarrely evidence-free assertions ( or, assertions that run contrary to known evidence) from normal ppl regarding politics, education, basic economics, health, rudimentary science, etc.. Sometimes on both sides of a given question I wil see ppl arguing about matters that are factually verifiable with neither side attempting to do so because neither is willing to accept facts that depart from a party line.
.
The intellectual climate in America reminds me of theological debates during the 14th century
morgan:
April 25th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
en, just posing a question as you are involved in education and I’m not: is this iseological fantasiing a result of our educational system not teaching people to think but to follow the ideological flavor of the moment?