In this New York Times opinion piece on the global implications of Trump's leadership, columnist Thomas L. Friedman quotes Larry Diamond who points out that Trump's presence in the White House encourages leader's in African countries, such as Museveni in Uganda, to rule as long and as brutally as they want.
Read it here.
Read an excerpt of an address delivered by Larry Summers, the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research on February 19, 2019.
Read it here.
Didi Kuo joins Thomas Carothers<, senior Vice President for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in outlining the ways in which ideas, experiences, and lessons from other countries can magnify reform in the United States.
Read it here.
The Partially Examined Life interviews Francis Fukuyama on his 2018 book 'Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.
Listen to part one here
Abstract:
Efforts are underway in South Africa to turn around a decade of governance reversal. But progress in addressing an underlying cause of the reversals remains very limited – extreme, racially-tinged inequality, with missing ladders of opportunity into the middle class. In this seminar, Brian Levy will explore some interactions between shortfalls in inclusion and institutional pressures, including an in-depth focus on one key challenge – improving the learning outcomes of South Africa’s poorly performing system of basic education. The findings from his recent co-authored book, The Politics and Governance of Basic Education: A Tale of Two South African Provinces suggest that a narrow focus on ‘fixing the bureaucracy’ can only go so far. Re-balancing focus away from narrowly top-down approaches towards the evocation of agency offers a variety of added possibilities for creative and constructive action.
Speaker Bio:
Goldman conference room
Encina Hall East, 4th floor
Room E409
Militaries around the world are racing to build robotic systems with increasing autonomy. What will happen when a Predator drone has as much autonomy as a Google car? Should machines be given the power to make life and death decisions in war? Paul Scharre, a former Army Ranger and Pentagon official, will talk on his new book, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. Army of None was named one of Bill Gates’ Top 5 Books of 2018. Scharre will explore the technology behind autonomous weapons and the legal, moral, ethical, and strategic dimensions of this evolving technology. Paul Scharre is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Drell Lecture Recording: https://youtu.be/ldvDjU1C4Qs
Drell Lecture Transcript: NA
Paul's Biography: Paul Scharre is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He is author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. Mr. Scharre formerly worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) where he played a leading role in establishing policies on emerging weapons technologies. He led the working group that drafted DOD Directive 3000.09, establishing DOD’s policy on autonomy in weapon systems. He is a former infantryman in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and completed multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Radha's Biography: Radha Iyengar is the head of Product Policy Research at Facebook and an adjunct economist at the RAND Corporation. Previously, she served in senior staff positions at the White House National Security Council, Department of Defense, and Department of Energy. Over the course of her government service, she was instrumental in executive actions on sexual assault and suicide prevention, budget and policy related to nuclear and energy infrastructure security and resilience, and security assistance and counterterrorism efforts in the the Middle East and North Africa. Her research has covered empirical evaluations of policies aimed at reducing violence including criminal violence, sexual assault, terrorist behavior, and sexual and intimate partner violence.
Jeremy's Biography: Jeremy is a Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on civil wars and political violence; ethnic politics and the political economy of development; and democracy, accountability, and political change. He is the author of Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge University Press), which received the William Riker Prize for the best book on political economy. He is also the co-author of Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage Foundation), which received the Gregory Luebbert Award for the best book in comparative politics. He has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Journal of Democracy, World Policy Journal, and the SAIS Review.
Stanford University CEMEX Auditorium (655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305)
The United States is the only country in the 35-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that offers no paid leave to new mothers. The U.S. also has relatively poor infant health ratings, particularly for preterm births and infant mortality.
So why has the federal government been so reluctant to join other industrialized nations in paying new mothers to stay at home so they can nurture and nourish these new citizens?
“There’s opposition from business interests arguing that any type of mandate on employers imposes too large costs, especially for small businesses,” said Stanford Health Policy’s Maya Rossin-Slater. “There’s not much empirical evidence supporting this argument, but I think the strong political opposition from business supporters may be a central reason for a lack of action on the federal level.”
In a policy brief published March 28 in Health Affairs, Rossin-Slater, an assistant professor of health research and policy, lays out the evidence that suggests the introduction of paid family leave (PFL) for up to one year in duration may yield significant child and maternal health benefits, both in the short and long term. Her co-author on the brief is Lindsey Uniat, a predoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
“Existing research suggests that when leave is paid, take-up rates are higher among low-income and disadvantaged families than when it is unpaid, which enables more families to benefit,” they wrote.
Some of the short- and long-term health benefits include decreased incidence of low birthweight and preterm births, increased breast-feeding, reduced rates of hospitalizations among infants and improved maternal health.
Family and Medical Leave Act
The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 provides 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave with continued health insurance coverage to attend to a newborn or adopted child, a family member, or an employee’s own serious health condition. There are strict eligibility requirements for the FMLA, such as needing to have worked at least 1,250 hours for an employer with 50 or more employees during the 12 months before the start of the leave.
The most recent data, according to the authors, indicate that only about 60 percent of private-sector workers are eligible for FMLA, and 46 percent of those eligible report not being able to afford taking unpaid time off work.
Six states and the District of Columbia have passed paid family leave policies, and the issue has been receiving attention at both state and federal levels in recent years. California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island, as well as Puerto Rico, have State Disability Insurance (SDI), which provides partial wage-replaced leave for workers with temporary disabilities and for mothers preparing for and recovering from childbirth. These policies offer up to six weeks of leave postpartum for vaginal deliveries and eight weeks for C-section deliveries.
“The majority of existing research on the health effects of PFL focuses on children’s outcomes,” the authors write. Earlier work on the impacts of unpaid leave provided through the FMLA shows that it led to small increases in birthweight and large reductions in infant mortality rates.
However, these health benefits were apparent only for children of relatively advantaged mothers, the authors wrote, which is consistent with prior evidence that such mothers were most likely to be eligible for, and able to afford to use, unpaid leave.
“In contrast, mothers and children from less advantaged backgrounds particularly benefit from access to paid leave,” they said, noting that one study showed that the introduction of paid maternity leave through the SDI system in five states led to a reduction in the share of low birthweight and preterm births, especially for unmarried and black mothers.
Rossin-Slater and Uniat believe paid family leave may affect population health through multiple channels:
The Labor Market
Finally, existing research indicates that paid family leave may benefit the labor market by leading to fewer high-school dropouts, thus an increase in children’s future wages.
“Several policy takeaways are evidence from the research to date,” the authors wrote. “Paid leave, in contrast to unpaid leave, increases leave usage and duration, especially among disadvantaged parents who are least able to afford unpaid time off.”
More research is needed, they said, to understand how paid family leave legislation could impact employers.
“We know little about how employers deal with work interruptions due to employees’ taking leave or whether employers respond to PFL mandates by changing their own benefits packages, hiring practices, or other aspects of jobs,” they said.
Abstract:
How do memory and forgetting shape politics in autocracies? We combine the logic of collective action with a theory of informational politics, in which autocrats have three instruments: propaganda, threats of violence embedded within propaganda, and censorship. For citizens, we argue that historical memory drives the calendar of protest. In turn, the likelihood of historical forgetting drives the informational strategy of repressive governments. We test our theory in the context of China. The most powerful focal points for protest, we find, are anniversaries of the regime's crimes against citizens. Those most likely to be forgotten -- those that occurred decades ago -- are subject to censorship, while those too fresh to be forgotten are subject to propaganda as well. Explicit threats of violence are reserved for China's ethnic minorities, and coincide with anniversaries of failed separatist movements. We conclude with evidence that propaganda-based threats of violence generate a short-term reduction in protest.
Speaker(s) Bio:
Erin Baggott Carter is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. She received a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and was previously a fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her research focuses on Chinese foreign policy and propaganda. She recently completed a book manuscript on autocratic propaganda in global perspective and is currently working on another on how the United States and China attempt to shape each other’s domestic politics.Image
Brett Carter is Assistant Professor in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, where he was a Graduate Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He was previously a fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, as well as the Hoover Institution. He recently finished a book about propaganda in the world’s autocracies and is currently working on another book project about autocratic survival in Central Africa.Image
Reuben Hills Conference room, E207
Scholars Corner is an ongoing SPICE initiative to share FSI’s cutting-edge social science research with high school and college classrooms nationwide and international schools abroad.
This week we released “The Rise and Implications of Identity Politics,” the latest installment in our ongoing Scholars Corner series. Each Scholars Corner episode features a short video discussion with a scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University sharing his or her latest research.
This Scholars Corner video features New York Times bestselling author Francis Fukuyama discussing the recent rise of identity politics, both in the United States and around the world. “In the 20th century we had a politics that was organized around an economic axis, primarily. You had a left that worried about inequality…and you had a right that was in favor of the greatest amount of freedom,” summarizes Fukuyama. “[N]ow we are seeing a shift in many countries away from this focus on economic issues to a polarization based on identity.”
According to Fukuyama, this shift in politics is reflected in such domestic social movements as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, as well as in international movements like the Catalan independence movement, white nationalism, and even the Islamic State.
The rise of identity politics may have troubling implications for modern democracies. “In the United States, for example, the Republican party increasingly has become a party of white people, and the Democratic party has become increasingly a party of minorities and women. In general, I think the problem for a democracy is that you’ve got these specific identities…[but] you need something more than that. You need an integrative sense of national identity [that’s] open to the existing diversity of the society that allows people to believe that they’re part of the same political community,” says Fukuyama.
“That, I think, is the challenge for modern democracy at the present moment.”
To hear more of Dr. Fukuyama’s analysis, view the video here: “The Rise and Implications of Identity Politics.” For other Scholars Corner episodes, visit our Scholars Corner webpage. Past videos have covered topics such as cybersecurity, immigration and integration, and climate change.
"Identity" hardcover book by Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at FSI and the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. This video is based on his recent book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, which was recognized as The Times (UK) Best Books of 2018, Politics, and Financial Times Best Books of 2018.
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