Claire Hunsaker, VP of Product Management and Strategy: Claire manages Samasource's microwork platform, worker training and management tools, and corporate websites. She is responsible for keeping Samasource at the leading edge of virtual work technologies and integrating Samasource products with clients and service partners. Prior to Samasource, Claire was Director of Virtual Agent Acquisition at LiveOps and she has also worked in rural Vietnam with ADAPT to combat anti-human trafficking on the Vietnam/Cambodia border. As a management consultant with Katzenbach Partners, she supported national technology companies and non-profits with strategic planning. Claire holds a BA in English with departmental honors from Columbia College, and an MA in English Literature from the University of London, and an MBA from Stanford.

Co-sponsored by Stanford Association for International Development (SAID).

As the United States struggles to emerge from recession, India and China's continued robust growth is the subject of much interest and concern. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Senior Fellow Adam Segal will talk about his new book Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge, analyzing Asia's technological rise, questioning assumptions about the United States inevitable decline, and explaining how America can preserve and improve its position in the global economy by optimizing its strength of moving ideas from the lab to the marketplace.

In his book, Segal argues that the emergence of India and China does not mean the end of American economic and technological power. Instead, the United States should now leverage its many advantages.

Through his research, Segal concludes the United States has an advantage over Asia in the realm of the software of innovation. “In America, your ideas can make you rich. Intellectual property is protected, and individual scientists are able to exploit their breakthroughs for commercial gains,” he writes. “It is time to realize that software in its most expansive sense offers the most opportunities for the United States to ensure its competitive place in the world.” The challenge is “to recover a culture of innovation that was driven underground, overshadowed by sexy credit default swaps and easy spending.”

Speaker

Adam Segal is the Ira A. Lipman senior fellow for counterterrorism and national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). An expert on security issues, technology development, and Chinese domestic and foreign policy, Dr. Segal currently leads study groups on cybersecurity and cyber conflict as well as Asian innovation and technological entrepreneurship. His new book Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge (W.W. Norton, 2011) looks at the technological rise of Asia. Dr. Segal is a research associate of the National Asia Research Program and was the project director for a CFR-sponsored independent task force on Chinese military modernization.

Before coming to CFR, Dr. Segal was an arms control analyst for the China Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. There, he wrote about missile defense, nuclear weapons, and Asian security issues. Dr. Segal has been a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has taught at Vassar College and Columbia University. Dr. Segal is the author of Digital Dragon: High-Technology Enterprises in China (Cornell University Press, 2003), as well as several articles and book chapters on Chinese technology policy. His work has recently appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Financial Times, Washington Quarterly, Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Affairs. Dr. Segal currently writes for the CFR blog, “Asia Unbound".

Dr. Segal has a BA and PhD in government from Cornell University, and an MA in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He reads and speaks Chinese.

Conventional wisdom holds that the emigration of highly skilled workers depletes local human capital developing countries.  But when the very prospect of emigration induces people to invest more in their education, the effects might not be so negative.  We analyze a unique natural quasi-experiment in the Republic of Fiji Islands, where political shocks have provoked one of the largest recorded expoduses of skilled workers from a developing country.  We use rich census and administrative microdata to show that high rates of emigration by tertiary-educated Fiji Islanders not only raised investment in tertiary education in Fiji, but also raised the stock of tertiary-educated people in Fiji - net departures.

Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development where he leads the Migration and Development initiatiave.  His research focuses on the effects of international migration from and in developing countries.  Michael joined the Center after completing his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard.  His past writings have focused on the effects of foreign aid, determinants of capital flows and effects of tariff policy in the 19th century and the historical determinants of school system expansion.  Michael has served as a consultant for the World Bank, Bain & Co., the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Development Program.

Lina Khatib is the manager and co-founder of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She is an expert on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, political media and conflict in the Arab world, and the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She is also a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School. She is currently writing a book titled Image Politics in the Middle East for IB Tauris, which examines the power struggles among states, political leaders, political parties, civil society groups, and citizens in the region. She has also recently led a research project on US public diplomacy towards the Arab world in the digital age. She is the author of two books, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (2006), and Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (2008) and has published widely on Middle East politics. 

In this seminar, she will talk about how Lebanon reached the political crisis it is in right now, the political strategy that has led to it, and what this means for Lebanon's political future.

Please join the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law as we celebrate the publication of Francis Fukuyama's latest book, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, which will be released in April by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This first of a major two-volume work provides a sweeping account of how today's basic political institutions developed. Professor's Morris and Weingast will provide commentary and reflections on the book to engage in a substantive conversation about the important insights that Fukuyama highlights tracing the evolution of human history through the 18th century.  

Book signing and reception to follow.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), resident in FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, effective July 2010.  He comes to Stanford from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, where he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and director of SAIS' International Development program.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy.  His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent books are America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, and Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap between Latin America and the United States.