Suchergebnisse

In 'The Commander-in-Chief Test', Jeffrey A. Friedman offers a fresh explanation for why Americans are often frustrated by the cost and scope of US foreign policy - and how we can fix that for the future. Americans frequently criticize US foreign policy for being overly costly and excessively militaristic. With its rising defense budgets and open-ended 'forever wars,' US foreign policy often appears disconnected from public opinion, reflecting the views of elites and special interests rather than the attitudes of ordinary citizens. 'The Commander-in-Chief Test' argues that this conventional wisdom underestimates the role public opinion plays in shaping foreign policy.

In The Commander-in-Chief Test, Jeffrey A. Friedman offers a fresh explanation for why Americans are often frustrated by the cost and scope of US foreign policy-and how we can fix that for the future.Americans frequently criticize US foreign policy for being overly costly and excessively militaristic. With its rising defense budgets and open-ended "forever wars," US foreign policy often appears disconnected from public opinion, reflecting the views of elites and special interests rather than the attitudes of ordinary citizens.The Commander-in-Chief Test argues that this conventional wisdom underestimates the role public opinion plays in shaping foreign policy. Voters may prefer to elect leaders who share their policy views, but they prioritize selecting presidents who seem to have the right personal attributes to be an effective commander in chief. Leaders then use hawkish foreign policies as tools for showing that they are tough enough to defend America's interests on the international stage. This link between leaders' policy positions and their personal images steers US foreign policy in directions that are more hawkish than what voters actually want.Combining polling data with survey experiments and original archival research on cases from the Vietnam War through the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, Friedman demonstrates that public opinion plays a surprisingly extensive-and often problematic-role in shaping US international behavior. With the commander-in-chief test, a perennial point of debate in national elections, Friedman's insights offer important lessons on how the politics of image-making impacts foreign policy and how the public should choose its president

Do leading social-scientific experts, or technocrats, know what they are doing? In this text, Jeffrey Friedman maintains that they do not. Friedman shows that people are too heterogeneous to act as predictably as technocracy requires of them. Technocratic reason, then, entails a drastically oversimplified understanding of human decision making in modern society.

Over the past two decades, the most serious problems with U.S. foreign policy have revolved around the challenge of assessing uncertainty. Past experiences have shown that there is an urgent need to find ways of improving the ways in which foreign policy analysts assess uncertainty, and the ways in which foreign policy decision makers account for risk when evaluating high-stakes choices. This book shows shows how foreign policy analysts can assess uncertainty in a manner that is theoretically coherent, empirically meaningful, politically defensible, practically useful, and sometimes logically necessary for making sound choices.

Capitalism and the crisis : bankers, bonuses, ideology, and ignorance / Jeffrey Friedman -- An accident waiting to happen : securities regulation and financial deregulation / Amar Bhid -- Monetary policy, credit extension, and housing bubbles : 2008 and 1929 / Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith -- The anatomy of a murder : who killed the American economy? / Joseph E. Stiglitz -- Monetary policy, economic policy, and the financial crisis : an empirical analysis of what went wrong / John B. Taylor -- Housing initiatives and other policy factors / Peter J. Wallison -- How securitization concentrated risk in the financial sector / Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson -- A regulated meltdown : the Basel rules and banks' leverage / Juliusz Jablecki and Mateusz Machaj -- The credit-rating agencies and the subprime debacle / Lawrence J. White -- Credit-default swaps and the crisis / Peter J. Wallison -- The crisis of 2008 : lessons for and from economics / Daron Acemoglu -- The financial crisis and the systemic failure of the economics profession / David Colander [and others] -- Afterword : the causes of the financial crisis / Richard A. Posner

Abstract
Scholars and practitioners of U.S. foreign policy commonly describe the early Cold War as a lost golden age of bipartisan consensus. This article uses public opinion data, congressional voting patterns, and party platform statements to refute this conventional wisdom. In fact, the core internationalist principles that enjoyed bipartisan agreement during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations retain widespread approval from Democrats and Republicans today. Enduring support for this Truman-Eisenhower consensus is concealed by the way that recent presidents have enlarged the United States' foreign policy agenda to pursue policies that historically did not generate bipartisanship, such as fighting climate change or conducting decades-long projects in armed nation-building. Rising political divisions in U.S. foreign policy are thus primarily a result of Democrats and Republicans deploying global influence in new ways rather than renouncing traditional international commitments. These findings refute widespread claims that political polarization has undermined traditional conceptions of U.S. global leadership or depleted Washington's usable power.