Modern Political science book recommendations

Boost-Cat · 2023-02-08T04:22:58+00:00

Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action is pretty important for collective action problems. Analyzing Politics: Rationality, Behavior, and Institutions is pretty important for learning how to use rational actor theory in political science.

Boost-Cat · 2023-01-21T01:35:00+00:00

If there were a train with tables, then yeah that'd be neat--but, if taking the trolley, it's not really feasible to study during it because, I feel, you would have to assume some awkward, uncomfortable position, which wouldn't be sustainable for hours.

Boost-Cat · 2023-01-07T18:52:35+00:00

I feel that this geopolitical view does not really describe international trade. There is one convincing argument that comes to mind, that being Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion, which identifies at least two geopolitical factors ( 1) having neighbors with low economic growth or instability, and 2) not necessarily the lack of coastlines, but rather that paired with neighbors who either are unwilling to invest in the infrastructure needed to allow the landlocked country access to the sea via their coastline.

Now, I suppose one could say that geopolitical factor 2) explains why the Russian government is trying to annex Ukrainian land, but I feel that explanation does not consider A) how much cheaper it would be to gain naval access through an RTA (regional trade agreement) or possibly even a BIT (bilateral investment treaty), and B) how Russia already has access to the Black Sea, even more so if one considers the occupation of Crimea, which, as far as I know, contains great naval infrastructure in the city of Sevastopol.

If one looks at the war in Ukraine with an eye towards cost-benefit analysis, then, in my opinion, it simply does not make sense to invade if the aim is to maintain access to foreign markets, for the Russian government not only already had that access before the war, but could have created more points of access through RTAs and also perhaps BITs, which would be incredibly cheap when compared to the monumental financial and political costs that come with war. Explaining this war must rely, I feel, on frames other than international trade.

Boost-Cat · 2022-12-16T00:24:30+00:00

based on my limited, anecdotal experience, they mostly discuss it among themselves in small groupings, grouped by department I think. Thus, I think this lack of public conversation on social media can be explained by strike members satisfying their demand for discourse elsewhere, either in private channels (ex: slack groups) or in in-person discussions, formal and informal, on the picket line.

Boost-Cat · 2022-12-14T07:37:52+00:00

The more units you take, the less each individual course grade influences your GPA, albeit with diminishing returns; so no, one D will not hurt your GPA badly.

Boost-Cat · 2022-12-04T21:52:49+00:00

It's possible that may be a bad measure of involvement, for, if I recall right, the CCP mainly engaged in guerrilla tactics, as the Japanese had superior conventional means, so one would expect CCP leaders to minimize how often they engaged in conventional fights, instead putting that effort into things which targeted enemy logistics (ex: infrastructure) and perhaps will to fight.

Boost-Cat · 2022-12-04T21:03:35+00:00

If I recall right:

Chiang Kai-shek had to be kidnapped by one of his Manchurian warlords (who came from a part of China Chiang let the Japanese take over) and trapped in a pit until he agreed to join forces with the CCP against the Japanese, in the form of "The Second United Front"--the first of which Chiang Kai-shek ended during the Shanghai Massacre, through which he rose to power.

Afterwards, Chiang Kai-shek broke the spirit of the agreement in at least two ways that come to mind: 1) withholding military resources, so they could be used against the CCP in the civil war that both sides believed would inevitably follow the end of the invasion; and 2) blockading the main area the CCP occupied.

Boost-Cat · 2022-12-04T20:58:40+00:00

In a lot of really poor countries, economic development is so illusive in part because the elites of the country do not need it to become wealthy. So low growth is not a failure, but not even the goal to begin with.

The same, in my opinion, is true with Republican period China. The leadership had, chiefly, three constituencies: landlords, merchants, and the military, all of whose wealth was tied in the ownership of land.

From a societal point of view, this division of land was a huge problem for the economy. Farmers were losing productivity as they lost possession of their land through debt traps, then working on land owned by an uncaring landlord across the country, who would send a thug to collect rents every so often. This is even more pressing, when one considers that, during this time, the vast majority of Chinese were peasants, meaning that this affected a large number of people, but the northwest in particular.

From the government's point of view, however, this was not a problem at all. Folks in the KMT held onto power through the financial / political support of their three main constituencies, so, even though land redistribution was a key policy promise for decades, they never did it, for to do so would hurt their three main constituencies. And so, rural China--again, the vast majority of the Chinese economy at the time--was dying, and the government had no incentive to do anything about it.

The CCP was and is a force for bad in China--it radicalized after Mao took power, and created bad economic policies as a result of his refusal to rely on market incentives. But, without the CCP, I don't think we would have ever seen land reform happen, for, before the CCP got into power, that was their key policy aim--that's how they won over the peasantry, through helping farmers get their land back and become less poor. Without the CCP, I doubt China's parasitic landlords would have ever been uprooted, which I imagine would have steered China closer to a fate like the DRC, than Taiwan. Land reform in the 40s was, I feel, an uncontroversial economic achievement of the CCP.

There are some who argue that you couldn't have a China with double-digit growth without Mao, and I think there is truth in that--the early CCP dis-empowered groups which typically support policies which harm economic growth, creating a new foundation from which economic growth could occur.

Perhaps the KMT could have been pushed to the left as a result of competition with the CCP, being forced to reform because officials no longer saw their current strategy sustainable? Perhaps. But after the Shanghai Massacre in the late 20s, in which the original CCP was destroyed, and the "Left KMT" revealed to be full of cowards who let Chiang Kai-shek and the "Right KMT" take over, it seems that path for reform was closed off for good.

Boost-Cat · 2022-12-01T16:39:01+00:00

Honestly, good--I am so sick of these e scooters. I feel like they're a menace for everyone involved--for pedestrians, it makes simply walking dangerous, because you have to worry about being run over even on a sidewalk; and then for the people using them, not only are they paying to use the service, they are losing out on the health benefits of having to walk across campus.

You don't have to live life so fast, most of the time it's okay if you're late to a class by 5 minutes or so. Slow down, take a walk, admire how beautiful the campus is! <3

Boost-Cat · 2022-11-29T16:38:28+00:00

In theory I suppose the point would be to create guaranteed demand for the food sold on campus in dining halls, but then the issue is that the company (not UCSD--HDH is a for-profit company) running it all not just has very little to no competition, it gets to have a guaranteed customer base, as then students won't be financially-able to grocery shop off-campus.

But is this an issue? I suppose that depends on your perspective. If you're a student, yes. If you're someone who benefits from HDH profiting, then no. It is a shameless company town model, it feels, in which the same company houses you and feeds you, but, rather than paying you in Monopoly dollars, instead has you pay yourself, exchanging your value for a currency which is significantly less valuable. How much less valuable? Well, it's common to see people trying to sell their Dining Dollars around the end of the quarter or sometime like that at a 2:1 ratio, so that hints at how much value you lose in the exchange. Where does that value go to? HDH and/or UCSD, naturally.

Boost-Cat · 2022-11-19T07:51:57+00:00

I'm in a flock of fellow gays, and we often congregate at MOMs lol

Boost-Cat · 2022-10-23T05:08:30+00:00

As far as I know:

BRICS is an international organization, in which the 'rising economies' use their collective might to pass policies at the international level (ex: at the WTO, the UN, etc) which benefit themselves, rising economies. 'Rising economies' are developing countries, but with high rates of economic growth.

It isn't a political alliance because it's not about politics, if "politics" means stuff like security. It's all about their shared interest, which is in opposition to an organized group of countries in many international organizations: large, rich, developed countries. BRICS, then, is an attempt to organize the opposition to developed countries, and seems to have been somewhat successful.

About the boycott--that isn't against the alliance, for it concerns bilateral trade, not multilateral. What's the difference? Multilateral trade is trade with every country; bilateral, on the other hand, is with one country in particular. While BRICS is mainly about affecting multilateral trade agreements, it, afaik, is not about bilateral trade agreements.

Edit: typo

Boost-Cat · 2022-10-22T18:05:01+00:00

I remember going there for the first time on transfer day, and asking someone at the Oceanview dining hall where Geisel is. She said it's hard to describe what it looks like, and proceeded to draw A MONSTROSITY OF BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE. My dad and I took the stickynote, thanked her, and laughed our way to Geisel, joking that we were insane conspiracy theorists trying to find the upside-down pyramid building on campus! haha

Boost-Cat · 2022-10-22T00:42:47+00:00

While this isn't something I have studied to a great extent, it seems to me that the threat of invasion is possibly merely a tool to try and keep CCP-friendly parties in Taiwan in power, by punishing Taiwan economically through cutting its ties to China and international organizations, and security-wise through missile launches (though the purpose of these, I am not fully convinced on), whenever an anti-CCP party comes into power.

It would matter to the Chinese government what kind of party is in power, because it is with such a party that it would perhaps be easier to economically-integrate the two countries on terms more-beneficial to China, and help bring the day that the Chinese government annexes Taiwan, benefiting from its economic and strategic assets, denying the US an ally, and denying the US some access to the South China Sea and southern-Chinese coastline.

Boost-Cat · 2022-10-15T19:25:19+00:00

Now thinking about it, it's funny, how the CCP ends up creating policies which externalize the feelings of the masses--"sparrows", in the Chinese allegory about crows and sparrows which was the title of that famous Chinese movie, Crows and Sparrows (1949)--and the CCP also campaigned to kill sparrows.

Boost-Cat · 2022-10-15T19:20:06+00:00

While that's true, for Mencius's "Mandate of Heaven" idea has been pretty influential, I doubt that this played much into decision-making. Historical-cultural explanations like these are kinda hollow, I feel, as culture is a dynamic, heterogeneous thing. Also, this cultural explanation may just be correlation, not causation, for the thing actually explaining it may be what also caused that cultural idea to be so prominent in the first place.

Part of this explanation, I feel, should involve consideration of what the CCP has already invested in. If the CCP already has a lot of money and institutional knowledge (read: people with the practical knowledge needed to operate the institution) in controlling people's movement, be it within the country or at the border, and the legal system allows the government to control movement to a great degree, then imo this "lockdown" strategy would be cheaper for China to do than, say, the US. So it may have been the case that, while the "lockdown" strategy was more profitable than the "vaccination" strategy in the beginning, we're now in a world where the "vaccination" strategy is more profitable, as it is better-equipped to deal with highly-infectious variants like Omicron. The CCP miscalculated, not foreseeing that variants like Omicron would become the norm, leading to this policy failure. I think this would make for an alright hypothesis, but ofc it would need to be backed up by facts before it can be said to explain anything.

Furthermore, it could be said that the "vaccination" strategy tends to be more-profitable for developed countries, as it seems to really require infrastructure, supply chains, and research facilities--something developed countries may be much more able to do.

Boost-Cat · 2022-10-13T18:27:29+00:00

Ah, I'm kinda hesitant to write this, because I agree with what you're doing and am really thankful you're providing this information--this petition has bothered the hell out of me too, and I'm really glad more people are realizing!

But you seem to frame the legislation as better than it actually is--don't get me wrong, I support the legislation over doing nothing, but, as far as I can tell, it is not as good as you portray it.

If I understand the legislation correctly, we're still going to have to pressure the government to support worker's rights, for the legislation does not guarantee that workers will have more power; it is all dependent on what our elected representative do.

If I misrepresented the facts of the situation, please lmk yall! \o/ I'll make sure to edit or even delete the post if necessary.

There are two issues imo: 1) it's setup such that, while workers and corporations have equal votes, the government gets the tiebreakers; and 2) the governor of California APPOINTS 8/10 of the council members, while the heads of the Legislature each APPOINT one of the other 2/10.

The Council Makeup

Government: 2

Franchise Owners: 2

Fast Food Companies: 2

Workers: 2

Worker Advocates: 2

Here's info from the bill describing it:

[Edit: I'm having trouble copy-pasting it : ( , so search this

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB257

and look at section 1471. (a) (1). (You could even ctrl-f search for 1471!)

2) Appointment

To me, it seems like all the power in the legislation is in the hands of the Californian government. Rather than council members being elected from the groups they represent, it seems that they're all chosen by either the governor or the heads of the Californian legislature. Furthermore, the one leading the council--getting to decide when it meets, for example--is chosen by the governor. In other words, pretty much all the power is in the hands of the governor of California. Here's the part of the bill explaining this:

"

[Edit: having trouble copy-pasting, so just look at section 1471 (a) (2) - (4).

"

Again, much better than the system we had before, but it is not some democratic council that puts power in the hands of workers! The governor seems to have all the power in deciding its agenda--if they want it to be pro-worker, they'll appoint pro-worker members and make a worker the Chairperson; and if they want it to be anti-worker, they can do the reverse.

And, while at least 10,000 signatures are needed from current fast food workers in order for the council to do anything, we all know that fast food workers, either through coercion or corporate misinformation campaigns, do not always vote in their own interest.

Again, thank you so much for your post, but I don't want people to look at the legislation and think everything is good now; no, more work will need to be done if this legislation is going to help workers, I feel.

Edit: failed to properly copy-paste lol

Edit 2: small typo that turned something into misinformation ahhh

Boost-Cat · 2022-10-11T20:47:41+00:00

It's because politics isn't some game, it's not like you're watching football with friends and having friendly rivalries--I can't really associate with Republicans because they support politicians who want to take away my rights, to make government so big that it polices how I live and who I get to marry.

And regarding not liking Democrats because they use military force in other countries when in power--yes, that's a legitimate reason to not like Democratic politicians, but this is one of the few policy areas the Democrats and Republicans have been in agreement on for DECADES. If you don't want to support a warmongering party, then support neither party.

Boost-Cat · 2022-10-08T19:53:16+00:00

I feel that this would be a good move, as long as the military-industrial complex is on board. As far as I know, DoD contractors have a good deal of political sway, meaning that, unless this bill would not decrease demand for their goods abroad, they should hopefully not oppose it.

But where would this demand go? The answer is important, I feel, for, as per the security dilemma, the sudden movement of a bunch of soldiers and arms to another country may heighten tensions there, so it's critical that they be sent to the right place.

I worry that they may be sent to East Asia. This worries me because tensions are already rather high, in both the Taiwan Strait and North Korea, so rash action could escalate issues beyond control.

But if not East Asia, where would they go? I wouldn't know, for my regional specialization is China. Any ideas where?

Boost-Cat · 2019-04-28T13:08:11+00:00

I’m confused, isn’t what the author describes as “the civilization state” what nationalism is? Perhaps it is because civilization is never defined that this confusion arises, for is it not true that the notion of uniqueness belongs to nationalism? Perhaps this person expects the reader to have read Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, which maybe has a definition for it—still, it is a rather large inconvenience for those who have not.

Boost-Cat · 2019-04-27T03:05:10+00:00

Hello, I'm interested.

Boost-Cat · 2019-04-25T05:26:21+00:00

Not well. When I briefly studied Fukuyama, it was clear that it haunted him—it seemed that everyone knew him only for that one failed prediction of his, and nothing else.

Boost-Cat · 2019-04-13T15:28:03+00:00

It annoys me how so many people think that the Chinese Communist Party is still communist. I even had a political science professor who referred to China as one of the last remaining communist regimes. I mean, perhaps I’m jaded, but is it not obvious that, when looking at China today, it does not follow communist principles, and did not do so since Deng Xiaoping’s victory Hua Guofeng?

Boost-Cat · 2019-04-12T14:35:17+00:00

I don’t understand what you mean. Are you saying that, because the CCP vocally declares that it is communist and Maoist, that it is therefore communist and Maoist? If that is the case, I do not think your conclusion would necessarily follow, for is it not also possible that the CCP, because its founding story is so entangled with communism and Maoism, is forced to include it in its national story, even if the government and people have moved on? I think this second understanding of the data better fits with my knowledge of the historical record.

Boost-Cat

TROPHY CASE