When the Positive to Normative Two-Step Goes Wrong: Scientists, Engineers, and Ideologues

Noah Smith has a nice post running down the history of modern macroeconomics through the lens of Greg Mankiw's "scientists vs. engineers" taxonomy. This is another way of framing the Saltwater vs. Freshwater debate, but instead of calling it a "debate" Mankiw wants to make it a division of labor. Smith, however, is having none of it:

Note that if the microfoundations are misspecified, it doesn't matter whether a model satisfies the Lucas Critique or not. Even if "tastes and technology" really are policy-invariant things, if tastes and technology don't really work the way the model says they work, the model will not give you useful advice about policy. 

Now, terrible microfoundations might not lead to a terrible model. But if by some lucky happenstance, crappy microfoundations produce a model that matches the macro facts, then it might as well be one of those "aggregate-only" models that Greg Mankiw labels "engineering". In this case, RBC has no theoretical advantage over a New Keyneisan model.

Emphasis added. On another day I might have wanted to get involved in this discussion on its own terms, but for now I'm interested in something else: the shift from positive argument to normative argument. It's a subtle two-step, but it happens all the time in the social sciences. Here's how it generally works. Some social scientist will say: "Given that the world works according to mechanism X (as I've just demonstrated), we should do Y." Often the "we should do Y" is masked by caveats, hedges, and other devices which allow one to walk back the initial claim; nevertheless it is almost always there in some form in almost every piece of social science research. Or if not in every particular research article, in the paradigm within which the article operates.

The problem arises when when the positive argument -- the part that goes "Given that the world works according to mechanism X" -- isn't true. And by "not true" I don't mean "not strictly true but true enough as an approximation of reality that the model works out alright". By "not true" I mean sufficiently false that the model doesn't actually work out alright. In that situation, the positive argument goes away and the normative argument is all that remains. When people advance normative arguments as if they had a valid positive argument underlying them, but they do not actually have such a positive argument, they are not doing anything like science, as Smith rightly notes:

So basically, I charge that the New Classical/RBC/freshwater macroeconomics paradigm is not really science, and not really like science...not yet, anyway. In science, evidence rules all; if a model doesn't fit the evidence you toss it out.

Once again, I'm less interested in the particulars of Smith's case than about the phenomenon he's highlighting. To go back to Mankiw's taxonomy, if the "scientists" aren't doing science and they're not doing engineering either, then what are they doing? Restated, once the foundation of the positive to normative two-step crumbles, what intellectual project remains? It is ideology, and its practitioners are ideologues.

Take an example closer to (my) home. Stephen Walt writes a blog with the grandiloquent subtitle "A Realist in an Ideological Age". This is meant to suggest that Walt recognizes the world as it actually is whereas his opponents are in denial or a state of intellectual confusion. It is a claim that the positive argument is on his side -- the world works according to mechanism X, which in this case means that (all) states pursue their national interest above all else, especially security as measured by relative power differentials -- therefore his normative prescriptions (and perhaps his frequent proscriptions as well) -- that therefore the United States should do Y, which is to also maximize its national interest, especially security as measured by relative power differentials -- are sound wisdom. This attitude is made clear by the William Arthur Ward quote at the top of his page:

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

Walt is clear on which of these he believes himself to be. The realist cannot change the wind. The realist can only adjust to it. And in fact the realist only should adjust to it, since complaint is wasted effort and optimism is folly. Yet in almost every one of his blog posts Walt writes something like this:

Instead of harping on our "global responsibilities," Americans ought to focus instead on their national interests. The litmus test of any foreign policy commitment is not what it will do for others, but rather what it will do for us.

Walt has spilled quite a lot of ink describing how and why the United States has lost its way, has forgotten its national interest, and how this has caused a series of catastrophic mistakes in both foreign and domestic policy. Can you tell the problem?

The problem, simply, is that if the United States is not pursuing its national interest, as defined by Walt, then there is no reason to believe everyone else is either. And if everyone else is not, then the "wind" is not blowing in the direction that the realist believes it is: the positive argument that supposedly justifies the normative claim is false. Perhaps some conception of "national interest" other than maximizing one's relative power is in operation. Perhaps states pursue a range of interests at different times and in different places. Perhaps the entire notion of a singular "national interest" is misguided. Perhaps different groups or individuals use the power of the state to pursue group or individual interest. Whatever. Something about Walt's foundational positive argument is not correct. As a result his normative advice is a non sequitur.

When this happens the positive to normative two-step is reduced to just one step: make a normative claim, advance it whenever you can, and defend it at all costs. This is not science and it is not engineering; it is ideology. For the purpose of this post I do not claim that ideology is inferior to science or engineering, but I do claim that ideology which masquerades as science or engineering should be resisted in order to preserve the latter two categories as distinct and worthwhile.

This is something that social scientists struggle with, because it involves admitting that we could be wrong. About everything. Nobody likes being wrong but intellectuals hate it because our status and income is predicated on our not being wrong. So, sometimes, we transition from scientist or engineer to ideologue -- probably without realizing it -- and once we've gotten there it's very hard to find our way back. Eventually we end up advancing arguments that are contradictory in order to defend our ideology, rather than casting aside the ideology in favor of science or engineering, all the while continuing to claim the mantle of science as our own. This is a grave mistake.

Why Teach "The Clash of Civilizations"?

Phil Arena says we shouldn't, because it's not very good:

When folks like me joke that Huntington's CoC has detracted from the sum total of human knowledge, that it shouldn't even be taught in Intro IR classes because exposing students to it does more harm than good, it's the part I'm about to turn to that we have in mind more so than his claim that economic globalization has shrunk the world, or that economic integration has proceeded more rapidly at the regional level than the global level, or that dictators in the Islamic world might be threatened by the degree to which young people in their countries embraced American pop culture.

No, the big problem here is that Huntington claims that identity is immutable (even though some aspects of his argument clearly imply the opposite!). The fundamental problem with any argument linking ideational cleavages with conflict is that identity is malleable, and we have just as much evidence that conflict -> identity cleavages as we do identity cleavages -> conflict.

Characteristically, Phil cites some literature and goes into detail explaining just why he thinks this aspect of Huntington's argument, and others, is bogus.

I just taught "The Clash of Civilizations" in class today. I agree with every criticism Phil made of the article, and could add several others too. So do I feel chastised? No. Here's why:

1. We need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because it's a terrible argument with no supporting evidence. That is, it is an object lesson in how not to think about global politics. It presents us with an 'in' to many issues of interest to us, including the one that Phil mentions -- identity is not immutable -- and is a good foil for alternative explanations of the ways global politics works. Because Huntington makes predictions which can be called into question empirically, it provides us with an opportunity to present an empirical depiction of the world as it actually is. Because we're examining claims with evidence, it gives us a good way to teach students how political scientists approach questions of interest.

2. We need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because everyone else is. Not just other political science classes, but sociology classes, global studies classes, etc. Because many of our students will encounter this idea in an academic setting either way, we should teach it in a way that provides them with good frameworks for rejecting it.

3. We need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because it is our job to give students a sense of the intellectual trajectory of political theory related to the study of international relations. I always assign "The Clash of Civilizations" along with "The End of History," not just because the two speak directly to each other, but also to give students a sense of how the end of Cold War begat a period of intellectual confusion that (I think) largely persists into the present.

4. We need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because it is frequently referenced by the popular media, by policymakers, and by lay-people. For whatever reason, the argument has traction in the broader culture. Many seem to find it intuitively appealing; I suspect that it reinforces some peoples' priors. In any case, if our students go home for Thanksgiving Break and a family member finds out that they're taking a course on international relations and asks them what they think of "The Clash of Civilizations" I want them to have an answer.

5. We need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because foreign policy discourse is frequently conducted in very crude "Us vs. Them" terms, and this provides us with an opportunity to question that entire mode of thought. Or at least to problematize exactly what we mean by "Us" and "Them": are these things defined by material interest? Identity? Ideals?

6. Finally, I think we need to teach "The Clash of Civilizations" because students seem to respond strongly to it, one way or the other. It is one of the few readings I routinely assign where this is the case.  It is, I think, something of a gateway drug: students either like it or don't like it, but they often aren't quite sure why. Teaching the article gives us a jumping-off point which we can use to engage many of the key concepts that will be developed in an introductory course.

Who Doesn't Love a Grand Theory Debate?

Well, me. Nevertheless, Nexon on Caverley, Caverley responds.

No deep thoughts from me, as I haven't read the article under discussion, but it seems that Caverley is arguing that neocons support democratization at least in part because it would weaken their (our?) enemies. Nexon argues that no neocons actually say that, nor do they have good reason to think it given their reliance on both neoclassical realism and some forms of (non-Wilsonian) liberalism, neither of which make that case. From where I sit that sounds right enough, and yet... even if neocons don't make that case, perhaps they should.

Academic IR writes all the time about how democracy can enfeeble states. And also about how it can strengthen them. Democracies supposedly constrain leaders by both making it difficult for them to go to war, but then make them try like hell to win once they get in one. Democracies are supposedly better are imposing audience costs, but that's a double-edged sword. Etc.

If we buy any of this*, then a statement like "democratization will strengthen states in some ways and weaken them in others" that is followed by a statement like "from the perspective of the United States vis-a-vis new democracies, the latter will usually out-weigh the former" is not implausible on its face**. Was Japan strengthened by post-WWII democratization, along with the economic integration that followed from it? I think so. Was Japan strengthened in its bilateral relationship with the U.S. by that process? Arguably no. It became completely dependent on the U.S. for its security, and to a large degree its economic prosperity. Relative to China, Japan got stronger. Relative to the U.S., perhaps not.

To think about it in another way: the neocon goal of a "league of democracies" would certainly have the U.S. as the most central node. Network externalities being what they are, the effect would be to reinforce American power. (Somewhat perversely, this isn't too far from Ikenberry's view.) It can then make an offer to other states: democratize and you'll get the benefits of being in the network, but only as a peripheral node. Such an arrangement could simultaneously increase America's relative power while improving material conditions for the new democracy. Thomas Friedman (does he count as a neocon?) would call it the "Golden Security Straitjacket". Speaking of the devil, Friedman has written a bunch about the benefits of authoritarianism.

So perhaps Nexon is right that neocons don't believe in "democratic enfeeblement". But maybe they should. It could follow from their other beliefs.

*I'm not necessarily saying we should. I hope Phil Arena chimes in.

**To be clear, Nexon doesn't argue that it is; only that Caverley's paper doesn't establish the claim that neocons actually believe this, despite using strange readings of cherry-picked texts.

Realism, the EU, and Germany

In response to this post, Stephen Walt writes:

Accordingly, a realist account of the EU would stress that these states agreed to constrain their own autonomy and sovereignty largely in response to an unusual power configuration (i.e., the Cold War), and as much for security reasons as for purely economic ones. The end of the Cold War removed that power configuration, and we have seen the EU both expand and fray ever since. Germany's unwillingness to keep subsidizing profligate countries and European concerns about the implications of Germany's increasingly dominant role (as highlighted in this NYT article) are consistent with that view.

I think this is an especially poor account of both the history of the EU, and what an appropriate realist view of it could be. On the first point, the majority of significant EU integration has happened since the end of the Cold War. Prior to that it was almost exclusively and economic community, not a security community. (That's what NATO was for.) Since then the political and economic ties have grown stronger. True, the move towards the constitutionalization of the federation failed in 2004, but both Maastricht and Lisbon have happened since 1989, as has the Stability and Growth Pact and indeed the creation of the Euro itself. 15 of the 27 EU members have joined since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. So there's been quite a lot of expansion in membership* and purpose. And to the extent that any fraying has gone on it's not because of power transitions or the dissolution of the USSR, but because the monetary union was built on the false premise that an accompanying fiscal union was unnecessary so long as countries pretended to abide by Maastricht. The fallout from the financial crisis has brought that illogic into sharp focus, but security concerns have absolutely nothing to do with it.

On the second point, it's right to emphasize Germany's dominant role, but wrong to think of it as only becoming salient recently. In fact, the best realist argument is the opposite: that the EU became more institutionalized post-Cold War -- including the establishment of the EMU -- in order to resolve the German question. The process of German reunification which, not coincidentally, corresponds to the period of increasing EU integration tilted power balance even further in Germany's direction. This also at a time when the US might have been assumed to draw down in Europe (Walt, like many others, expected and still expects NATO to dissolve any day now, or at least become a shell of its former self.) In other words, the EU serves a similar role with w/r/t Germany that NATO served with the US: by codifying and institutionalizing the relationships between more and less powerful states, the hope was that security dilemmas (including political economy security dilemmas) would dissipate. Or, as Ikenberry would put it, the EU integration project made Germany's commitment to "strategic restraint" credible.

I assume Walt would reject that argument, because a realist would (generally) argue that institutions are incapable of restraining great powers**, but if so then he has quite a lot left to explain.

*A lot of this is pure selection effect: many of the new entrants to the EU were part of the Warsaw Pact prior to 1991 and thus could not join the EU before. But that doesn't explain Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Cyprus. Nor Turkey's constant flirtations.

**This is why John Ikenberry isn't considered a realist, which is case-in-point of why realism is a dirty word these days.

Realism or Institutionalism? Wrong Question

So Henry Farrell got to this Stephen Walt piece before I could, and I agree with everything Farrell says. Especially this:

If (as Walt seems sometimes to be suggesting in this post), realism is nothing more than the claim that national interests predominate in explaining international outcomes, then realism is theoretically very nearly vacuous. Moreover, the candidate ‘rival paradigm’ explanations are, under this broad definition, actually realist too. They have quite as much to say about state interests, and perhaps more to say about power relations than Walt does. If Walt has an actual realist explanation of what is driving European states apart – one that would presumably be rooted in the security dilemma or some other systemic phenomenon – it would be very nice to know what it is. He certainly doesn’t tell us about it in the post as it stands.

Indeed, an institutionalism without interests makes no sense. Why else create institutions?

But Farrell missed one strand I'd like to emphasize. If Walt really wants to use the EU as a test of rival paradigms, he's going to lose. In fact, he's already lost. Realists (generally) claim that institutions are merely extensions of state power, and thus do not constrain the behavior of (powerful) states in any significant way.* And yet it's clear that membership in the EU has caused states to behave differently than they otherwise would. Rather than devalue and/or default, Greece and Ireland are engaged in austerity. Rather than let them devalue and/or default, Germany and France are bailing them out in the short-run, and are considering a range of Euro-wide fiscal policies that would bring policy convergence on a number of issues. None of these actions would be taken if the EU didn't exist. So the institution is something more than an extension of Franco-German power, even if Franco-German power is reflected in the institution. Saying that the EU will not do anything that France and Germany don't want it to do is not the same as saying that France and Germany would behave the same way if the EU did not exist.

Note that at least some of the old-school institutionalists that Walt seems to be referring to wouldn't like an argument like the previous sentence. But I don't know of anybody who still hews to a that functionalist of a line. Certainly not Keohane. So I'm not sure who Walt sees as his foil. As Farrell notes, he references Andrew Moravcsik and Barry Eichengreen but neither is really an institutionalist the way Walt seems to be describing.

(Moravcsik's book on the EU has "State Power" in the title, and in this paper and this paper Moravcsik attacks neofunctionalist approaches to the EU. Moravcsik is definitely a liberal, but not the sort Walt seems to be referring to.)

But all of this ignores the real problem, which is that neither dogmatic realism nor dogmatic institutionalism helps us understand what's going on. Of course power and national interests are important, and of course the institution is important too. The maintenance of the institution itself is of national interest to member states. Neither is it a question of whether deeper integration will occur; it already has occurred. Never before had anything like the EFSF -- fiscal transfers from some EU states to others -- existed. Never before had the ECB intervened in bond auctions. The question now is whether this new integration becomes legally codified, or whether the cost of it becomes unbearable, and it is abandoned. Neither realism nor institutionalism helps us understand which is more likely.

So it's not just that Walt has the wrong answer, although he does, it's also that he's asking the wrong question.

*It's probably better to say that realists generally think of institutions as intervening variables, but not important independent variables. Like much else in realism this begs a question -- why would rational states waste time creating institutions if that's all the were -- but there it is.

Misc.

Things have been busy around here lately, so in lieu of a substantive post here's some links:

-- Dani Rodrik vs. Turkey. This has been going on for awhile, but in light of the "democratic" revolutions spreading through the Middle East it's worth noting that democracy is a long, uneven process. Rodrik accuses some in Turkey of operating a "state within the state", that is anything but democratic. I'm in no position to evaluate his claims, but if true they are damning.

-- The paradoxical politics of credible commitment. The conclusion is "Neat economic theory trips over messy political reality once again", and it illustrates the importance, but difficulty, of accurately matching interests to actions. Among other things.

-- Paul Krugman's posting template, revealed. Brilliant.

-- Iraq's economy is not doing well.

-- I'm not sure why Stephen Walt is still so concerned with debates that everyone else abandoned two decades ago, but he is. Here he tries to stack the deck in favor of realism in the context of the EU's ongoing debt crisis. I hope to properly smack this down sometime soon.

No, We're Not Myopic

I recently read Benjamin Cohen's evisceration of American IPE in a recent issue of International Interactions (non-gated pdf here). Cohen has spent much of the past few years distinguishing between the American and British schools of IPE, first in this RIPE article [pdf] and later in his intellectual history of IPE, both of which I strongly recommend. In the International Interactions piece, however, Cohen goes beyond sketching out philosophical differences in the British and American schools and suggests that the recent financial crisis demonstrates that the American school has got it all wrong. I have a great deal of respect for Cohen, but I beg to differ.

It's worth mentioning Cohen's priors before getting into the specifics of the article. He sees American and British IPE as distinguished by differences in epistemology: American IPE is motivated primarily by envy of neoclassical economics and so emphasizes rigorous quantitative and formal testing of mid-level theories; British IPE, on the other hand, is more concerned with big-picture dynamics and power structures. Another way of phrasing the distinction is between positivism (for American IPE) vs. normativism (for British IPE), although I doubt practitioners of either school would be happy with that classification. I prefer to think that the American school emphasizes the scientific method, whereas the British school emphasizes more traditional concerns of political economy such as inequalities, power asymmetries, theories of justice, and structural dynamics.

These are generalizations, of course, and there are certainly scholars in both American and Britain (and elsewhere) that stand on either side of that fence or straddle it. I know that Emmanuel, for instance, can read a regression table, just as I am happy to discuss applications of Mill's conception of liberty in the context of international power dynamics. American IPE has normative priors, and British IPE makes positive assumptions. The two are inseparable; it's more a question of relative importance.

So I'm willing to walk this far down the road with Cohen. The problem is when he says that the recent financial crisis is a strong indictment of the American school. Near the beginning of his essay Cohen asks "Would this median [American IPE] scholar ... have been been given any reason in recent years to anticipate that we all would be soon engulfed in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? The answer is No. The question is: Why?" Cohen's answer is that American IPE scholars are asking the wrong questions, while British IPE scholars are asking the right ones. In his view, American IPE suffers from "A Grave Case of Myopia" (the title of his piece). He is wrong.

Why do I say so? Cohen begins by arguing that the median American IPE scholar would not have been able to predict the financial crisis. This is undoubtedly true. But the median American IPE scholar likely has no special knowledge of finance, regulatory structures, MBS, CDOs, CDS, risk-weighting of capital and its relationship to regulatory guidelines, the Recourse Rule, the incentives to regulatory arbitrage in international regulatory regimes, or the social construction of asset-price bubbles. All of these would be necessary to accurately predict the type, scope, and timing of this event. Very few people have that level of knowledge, and even fewer of them (perhaps none of them) are political scientists, since we study politics rather than exotic financial instruments that are difficult for even their creators to fully understand. Even among those who do have such knowledge, very few of them were able to predict the way this crisis occurred and when it would occur. Layna Mosley (of UNC) and David Andrew Singer make a similar point in another essay in the same volume as Cohen's piece: political scientists see the study of finance as having large barriers to entry, as it involves a language that they generally do not understand. This is true, but it's no more true for political scientists as it is for economists, sociologists, or other social observers.

In any case, it's simply not true that American IPE scholars were too busy learning how to panel-correct standard errors to make observations about pressures on the global economy. Many warned about global macroeconomic imbalances that were threatening the stability of the international system; others observed that this period of financial internationalization has led to greater volatility than earlier periods. These concerns were influenced by empirical work on financial history, exchange rates, sovereign debt, hegemony, currency crises, and regulation. All of these issues contributed to the fundamental causes of the crisis, and without prior empirical work the current crisis would be much more of a mystery than it now is (more on that point below).

It is true that not many (any?) American IPE scholars were able to predict the proximate causes of the crisis: the securitization of subprime mortgages, and mispricing of the underlying risk of those mortgages, that spread risk throughout the financial system. The lack of transparency in the financial system made it very difficult for anyone to see what was going on. But this blindness is not limited to IPE scholars operating in the American tradition; no British IPE scholars were able to predict the proximate causes of the crash either (and very few finance or economics academics or professionals performed any better). As Cohen writes, "This does not mean that British scholars were particularly prescient. Predictions were loosely framed and often maddingly imprecise. Few analysts foresaw the specific sequence of events that unfolded; many were downright wrong about the details; certainly none got the timing right." How is that something worth emulating? Is Cohen arguing that it is better to predict and be completely wrong in all particulars (as he claims the British school did) than to realize the limitations of one's capabilities and refrain from wild speculation (as the American school did)?

Apparently. Cohen insists that despite the easy "comparisons with the boy who repeatedly cried wolf," British IPE scholars performed better because the sense of a looming crisis was "palpable". I'll say: the sense of a looming crisis has rarely been absent from scholars in the British tradition. Cohen cites Susan Strange's 1986 book Casino Capitalism and the stream of literature predicting an imminent crisis it spawned over the following decades. Eventually they were bound to be right, as even a stopped clock tells the right time twice each day. But is that really to their credit? Tellingly, Cohen does not cite a single article or book from the British school that accurately described the circumstances leading up to this crisis, or the consequences of it. (He does mention some suggestive historical analyses by Blyth, Langley, and Watson, against whom I'd happily stack Eichengreen, Kindleberger, Reinhart/Rogoff, Leblang/Satyanath, Simmons, Singer, and others.)

Meanwhile, there is a question about what changes to the international system will come from the financial crisis. Cohen implies that these changes will be profound, and many in the British school have made similar claims. His indictment of the American school is that we don't think enough about dynamics. He compares the financial crisis to the sudden end of the Cold War. But is that an appropriate criticism? Does this financial crisis represent a systemic shift of that magnitude? While the events are still underway, I do not believe it is too early to declare some victories for American IPE orthodoxy. This crisis has not led to a collapse of the global capitalist system; on the contrary, the neoliberal institutions in place since the end of WWII have demonstrated amazing resilience. The crisis has not led to a replay of the chaos of the interwar years. No state has repudiated capitalism as a fundamental feature of their economy or shut off capital flows. Perhaps the most surprising response is the lack of major trade disputes and beggar-thy-neighbor policies.

So while there will be some tweaks to the system on the margin, it now seems clear that the structure will hold.

Between the American and British schools, which would have best predicted that?

Playing a Fool's Game

Scott Sumner asks what is the best social science prediction of the past 20 years, and frames the question thusly:

Before answering this question, let’s first examine what has happened over the past 20 years.

1. The world has gotten much more peaceful. I recall reading that the last couple years were the most peaceful in all of human history (and pre-history for that matter.) Perhaps someone can find the article.

2. The world has gotten much more democratic. The number of democratic countries has soared at the fastest rate in history, by far.

3. The world has gotten much more market-oriented. There has been a huge wave of privatization and deregulation of prices and market access. And this trend extends far beyond the formerly communist countries.

So who got it right? According to Sumner, it was the much-maligned Francis Fukuyama, who first considered the "end of history" in an article in 1989 (his book of the same title was published in 1992). Fukuyama basically argued that the era of major inter-state war had come to an end, the norm of democracy was entrenched and would only be strengthened, and that capitalism would triumph over communism. Despite some setbacks, the trends on all three have pointed in Fukuyama's direction.

Commenters at Sumner's place almost immediately cited Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" as a counter-point. Indeed, Huntington intended that article (also expanded to a book) as a rebuttal to Fukuyama, his former student. But despite the frictions and conflicts of the past two decades, Fukuyama's theory still holds up better than Huntington's: the world is still moving towards integration, not away from it, and overall violent conflict is still trending downward.

Of course history makes every prediction look foolish in the end, but that's part of Fukuyama's point: the "end of history" doesn't mean that conflict will never occur, or that the world order has permanently metastasized. Rather, Fukuyama argues the opposite, claiming that the old "great powers motivated by ideology" dynamics that dominated international politics for centuries has come to an end: ideological battles have been settled in favor of capitalism and democracy, the era of colonialism has come to an end, and great-power wars have been made obsolete by technology.

So is Fukuyama right? Probably not. But for several days I've been trying to think of a recent general theory that out-performs Fukuyama and I can't. Certainly not Chua. Not Barnett either, at least yet. Friedman? You gotta be kidding me. Putnam? I'm not at all convinced.

The floor is open to readers. Is Fukuyama's prediction really the best of the past 20 years? If not, what's better? If so does that say more about the goodness of Fukuyama or the badness of general theorizing?