Really, I was going to do some work tonight.... but then I kept thinking about this Brad DeLong post about canonical Star Trek episodes. That led to some web surfing, and before I knew it found this at Youtube:

I'll post again once I've regained some equilibrium.

UPDATE: Ah, a Youtube video that brings me (sort of) back to the real world.

Fareed Zakaria frets about this possibility in Newsweek after going to Davos:

We are certainly in a trough for America—with Bush in his last years, with the United States mired in Iraq, with hostility toward Washington still high almost everywhere. But if so, we might also be getting a glimpse of what a world without America would look like. It will be free of American domination, but perhaps also free of leadership—a world in which problems fester and the buck is endlessly passed, until problems explode.

Listen to the new powers. China, which in three years will likely become the world's biggest emitter of CO2, is determined not to be a leader in dealing with global environmental issues. "The ball is not in China's court," said Zhu Min, the executive vice president of the Bank of China and a former senior official in the government. "The ball is in everybody's court." India's brilliant planning czar, Montek Singh Alluwalliah, said that "every country should have the same per capita rights to pollution." In the abstract that's logical enough, but in the real world, if 2.3 billion people (the population of China plus India) pollute at average Western levels, you will have a global meltdown....

The ball for every problem is in everybody's court, which means that it is in nobody's court.

The problem is that this free ride probably can't last forever. The global system—economic, political, social—is not self-managing. Global economic growth has been a fantastic boon, but it produces stresses and strains that have to be handled. Without some coordination, or first mover—or, dare one say it, leader—such management is more difficult.

The world today bears some resemblance to the 1920s, when a newly globalized economy was booming, and science and technological change were utterly transforming life. (Think of the high-tech of the time—electricity, radio, movies and cars, among other recent inventions.) But with Britain declining and America isolationist, that was truly a world without political direction. Eventually protectionism, nationalism, xenophobia and war engulfed it.

In a provocative essay in Foreign Policy three years ago, the British historian Niall Ferguson speculated that the end of American hegemony might not fuel an orderly shift to a multipolar system but a descent into a world of highly fragmented powers, with no one exercising any global leadership. He called this "apolarity." "Apolarity could turn out to mean an anarchic new Dark Age," Ferguson wrote, "an era of waning empires and religious fanaticism, of economic plunder and pillage in the world's forgotten regions, of economic stagnation, and civilization's retreat into a few fortified enclaves." That might be a little farfetched. But for those who have been fondly waiting for the waning of American dominance—be careful what you wish for.

1) It's fascinating to contrast Zakaria's column with Gideon Rachman's take on Davos. Zakaria is gloomy because of the absence of U.S. policymakers; Rachman is (somewhat) more optimistic because of the optimish of American businessmen.

The fact that Rachman and Zakaria can draw such contrasting takes suggests that Davos is more of an IR Rorshach test than a place where consensus is created -- people take away from the conference the preconceptions they bring to it.

2) Zakaria -- and Ferguson -- exaggerate the lack of existing policy coordination and underestimate the extent to which China and India have been brought into important global governance structures. Pointing out that there's been little progress on global warming and only grudging progress on trade talks is not evidence of apolarity. A decade ago, when the US and EU more clearly held the levers of power.... there was grudging progress on global warming and little progress in advancing trade talks. This has little to do with the distribution of power and a lot to do with the thorny domestic politics of these issues.

Anthony Boadle writes a story for Reuters suggesting that Cuba under Raul Castro is somewhat different than Cuba under Fidel:

Six months after Cuba's sick leader Fidel Castro handed over power provisionally to his brother Raul, signs of an opening in public debate are emerging in the communist-run country.

Articles have appeared in the government-controlled media since October uncovering theft in state enterprises and other previously unmentionable deficiencies in Cuba's economy....

In unusual public statements, Cuban intellectuals have denounced the resurfacing of censors who were responsible for blacklisting writers and homosexuals 30 years ago.

The state conceded it made a mistake and allowed 400 writers and artists to hold an unprecedented meeting on Tuesday to discuss the Stalinist-style cultural purges of the 1970s....

The acting president has taken credit for stirring some of the debate, saying he has prodded the uncritical Cuban media to play a greater role in identifying economic shortcomings.

Raul surprised Cubans by encouraging greater discussion on government policies and more transparent state management. He said the country was tired of excuses and criticized delays in paying private farmers who provide 60 percent of its produce.

"Raul has made a point of abandoning Fidel's practice of scapegoating others. Instead, he is admitting that the revolution's problems are serious and home grown," said Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst and author of "After Fidel."

"The good thing about Raul is that he listens," said a Cuban economist who asked not to be named.

Raul has commissioned studies from think tanks on how to raise food production and stimulate the economy without ruling out private ownership of small business, he said....

"Each day there are more intellectuals speaking up, and that is new in Cuba," said dissident Espinosa Chepe.

But he said economic reforms wanted by most Cubans --the average monthly wage is $17-- are too slow in coming and Cuba may face turmoil without a leader of Fidel Castro's stature to contain it.

"Cuba is stable for the moment, but there is a lot of discontent on the streets," he said.

Mind you, Raul Castro might actually be going for perestroika rather than abertura. But I'm not holding my breath.

Developing.....

David Leonhardt has a near-excellent column in the New York Times today on why prizes are 1) A great way to foster innovation, but; 2) far less popular than grants or other compensation schemes:

in the 1700s, prizes were a fairly common way to reward innovation. Most famously, the British Parliament offered the Ł20,000 longitude prize to anyone who figured out how to pinpoint location on the open sea. Dava Sobel’s best-selling 1995 book “Longitude” told the story of the competition that ensued, and Mr. Hastings mentioned the longitude prize as a model at that meeting back in March.

Eventually, though, prizes began to be replaced by grants that awarded money upfront. Some of this was for good reason. As science became more advanced, scientists often needed to buy expensive equipment and hire a staff before having any chance of making a discovery.

But grants also became popular for a less worthy reason: they made life easier for the government bureaucrats who oversaw them and for the scientists who received them. Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University who has studied the history of prizes, points out that they create a lot of uncertainty — about who will receive money and when a government will have to pay it. Grants, on the other hand, allow a patron (and the scientists advising that patron) to choose who gets the money. “Bureaucracies like a steady flow of money, not uncertainty,” said Mr. Hanson, who worked as a physicist at NASA before becoming an economist. “But prizes are often more effective if what you want is scientific progress.”....

[There] are the two essential advantages of prizes. They pay for nothing but performance, and they ensure that anyone with a good idea — not just the usual experts — can take a crack at a tough problem. Much to the horror of the leading astronomers of the day, a clockmaker ultimately claimed the longitude prize.

Grants are still crucial. (Someone has to be paying those computer scientists while they’re trying to win the Netflix prize.) But it seems pretty clear that our research system doesn’t pay for results often enough.

Just look at how both political parties have so far tried to deal with global warming. They have handed out grants and subsidies for various alternative energy sources like ethanol, even though nobody knows what the best sources will ultimately be. A much smarter approach would be to mandate that the economy use less carbon. This would effectively set up a multibillion-dollar prize — in the form of new customers — for whichever companies came up with efficient energy sources.

Beyond global warming, this approach should be used far more frequently for health care as well. Indeed, this is one of those tasks where government intervention might improve upon the market -- because the government has sufficient resources to withstand the inherent budgetary uncertainty that comes with the prospect of awarding prizes in the billions or tens of billions.

If the federal government can offer $25 million for capturing Osama bin Laden, why can't it offer a $10 billion prize for an AIDS vaccine?

I look forward to readers explain why I'm wrong.

UPDATE: Robin Hanson --cited in the above article -- elaborates on the historical switch from prizes to grants here.

Gideon Rachman attended two conferences last week, and writes about the resulting conceptual whiplash:

I went to two international conferences last week. The Herzliya security conference took place on the Israeli coast and the World Economic Forum was held in the Swiss mountains. It felt as if they were taking place on different planets....

By the end of the week I was left wondering whether these two worlds – Davos and Herzliya – can continue running in parallel. Are they fated to collide? If so, which will prove the more powerful – conflict or capitalism?

Davos man does not seem to be particularly worried by the business implications of chaos in the Middle East. There were 17 sessions at the forum devoted to climate change – and just one to global political risk. A debate on “globalisation at the crossroads” considered three main threats to the world economy – failed trade talks, financial regulation and global economic imbalances. Nobody mentioned the war.

Perhaps Davos man is right not to worry. Even in Israel, war and globalisation have managed to coexist. The Israeli economy grew at 4.8 per cent last year, in spite of the country’s involvement in a war in Lebanon during the summer. Israel is very much part of the global high-tech economy. There are almost 100 Israeli technology companies listed on New York stock exchanges.

But the Israelis are also acutely aware that conflict threatens their prosperity. At the most basic level, many are genuinely frightened that if Iran develops nuclear weapons, it might actually use them on Israel. But there is also a subtler version of the “existential threat” that the development of an Iranian bomb is said to pose to Israel. The Israelis know that their most talented technology workers could get jobs anywhere in the world. They worry that if 20,000 decided to emigrate, rather than live under the shadow of an Iranian bomb, the damage to Israel’s economy would be irreparable. At that point, security really would have trumped globalisation....

It may be a long time before capitalism can ride to the rescue of the most troubled parts of the Middle East. In the meantime, the capitalists will just have to hope that conflict in the Middle East continues to leave them largely unmolested.

Steven Weisman has a story in the New York Times evaluating the transatlantic effort to squeeze Iran. There have been a few bumps in the road:

European governments are resisting Bush administration demands that they curtail support for exports to Iran and that they block transactions and freeze assets of some Iranian companies, officials on both sides say. The resistance threatens to open a new rift between Europe and the United States over Iran.

Administration officials say a new American drive to reduce exports to Iran and cut off its financial transactions is intended to further isolate Iran commercially amid the first signs that global pressure has hurt Iran’s oil production and its economy. There are also reports of rising political dissent in Iran....

One irony of the latest pressure, European and American officials say, is that on their own, many European banks have begun to cut back their transactions with Iran, partly because of a Treasury Department ban on using dollars in deals involving two leading Iranian banks.

American pressure on European governments, as opposed to banks, has been less successful, administration and European officials say....

The administration says that European governments provided $18 billion in government loan guarantees for Iran in 2005. The numbers have gone down in the last year, but not by much, American and European officials say.

American officials say that European governments may have facilitated illicit business and that European governments must do more to stop such transactions. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has said the United States has shared with Europeans the names of at least 30 front companies involved in terrorism or weapons programs.

“They’ve told us they don’t have the tools,” said a senior American official. “Our answer is: get them.”

“We want to squeeze the Iranians,” said a European official. “But there are varying degrees of political will in Europe about turning the thumbscrews. It’s not straightforward for the European Union to do what the United States wants.”

Another European official said: “We are going to be very cautious about what the Treasury Department wants us to do. We can see that banks are slowing their business with Iran. But because there are huge European business interests involved, we have to be very careful.”

European officials argue that beyond the political and business interests in Europe are legal problems, because European governments lack the tools used by the Treasury Department under various American statutes to freeze assets or block transactions based on secret intelligence information.

A week ago, on Jan. 22, European foreign ministers met in Brussels and adopted a measure that might lead to laws similar to the economic sanctions, laws and presidential directives used in the United States, various officials say. But it is not clear how far those laws will reach once they are adopted.

The question is.... why? Economic sanctions have been a popular policy tool for the past fifteen years or so. Economic power is the primary means through which the EU tries to exert its influence in world politics. A EuroOFAC would, one hopes, allow the Europeans to implemebnt sanctions more quickly, while at the same time allowing for more precise in their targeting.

So why hasn't it happened yet? Two possible reasons:

1) European countries are less sanctions-happy than the United States. This is true, but there's a chicken-egg problem with this story -- the EU doesn't sanction as often because the tools aren't there;

2) European countries don't want to cede more foreign policymaking power to the EU. This is undoubtedly true, but again, I think it's overblown. A EuroOFAC would not be in charge of deciding when to sanction, but implementing the decision after its been made. The memver countries would still hold that decision-making power. There might be a slippery-slope logic at work, though -- making sanctions easier to execute puts the onus on the countries to decide to act.

This is part and parcel of a larger question, however -- to what extent does the EU really want to be seen as a great power? Is it willing to develop the traditional tools of statecraft that befit the moniker?

Only 20 minutes left for Milton Friedman day, so here are a few salient links:

1) At Open U., Richard Stern reports on the memorial service at the University of Chicago:

2) Paul Krugman offers his take on Friedman in the New York Review of Books:

[A]lthough this essay argues that Friedman was wrong on some issues, and sometimes seemed less than honest with his readers, I regard him as a great economist and a great man.

Milton Friedman played three roles in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. There was Friedman the economist's economist, who wrote technical, more or less apolitical analyses of consumer behavior and inflation. There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism—finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later. Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine.

Did the same man play all these roles? Yes and no. All three roles were informed by Friedman's faith in the classical verities of free-market economics. Moreover, Friedman's effectiveness as a popularizer and propagandist rested in part on his well-deserved reputation as a profound economic theorist. But there's an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual. While Friedman's theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there's much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public.

It should be pointed out that Krugman has also played all three roles in his career -- I'll be intrigued to see whether he gets accused of similar flaws down the road.

3) Virginia Postrel has a nice round-up of links.

4) The Economist's Free Exchange offers an assessment of how far Friedman pushed policymakers:

And though he may not have achieved the low-government paradise he sought, he wrought a crucial change in the way that we expect government to serve us. Before Milton Friedman, progressives pursuing an idealised version of technocratic government bureaucrats running a vast government apparatus that would take over more and more of the functions of the economy. Milton Friedman's revolutionary idea was that, to the extent that government should help people, it should do so by giving them money, and the freedom to choose what was best for them. America's Earned Income Tax Credit, which has proven wildly successful at helping the poor into the workforce, is the most prominent programme along these lines, but by no means the only one.

There's something a bit odd about the contrast between a) economists debating the prospect of the euro supplanting the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and b) the fact that Europeans don't like the euro all that much. The Financial Times' Ralph Atkins explains:

An overwhelming majority of citizens in the big eurozone countries believe the euro has damaged their national economies, highlighting the popular scepticism that still surrounds Europe’s eight-year-old monetary union.

More than two-thirds of the French, Italians and Spanish – and more than half of Germans – believe the single currency has had a “negative impact”, according to an FT-Harris poll. In France, just 5 per cent said the euro has had a positive effect on the French economy....

[M]ore than half of citizens in countries using the euro say they prefer their former national currency, according to the poll of 5,314 adults in Germany, the UK, France, Spain and Italy, which was conducted between January 10 and January 22. Almost two-thirds of Germans say they preferred their former currency, the D-Mark.

Over at America Abroad, Earnest Wilson tells everyone what he knows about the foreign policy positions of the major Democratic candidates for president:

I don’t know. Other bloggers, journalists, policy wonks and usually talkative political pundits don’t know either. We have to assume the candidates know where they stand on the Big Issues. Maybe. But maybe not. They almost certainly don’t know all they really need to know on foreign affairs. (Except Biden. But he probably doesn’t know the other things.)

We know where the candidates stand on a small handful of Iraq-related issues – when to exit; whether they support the Baker/Hamilton report. But sitting in the Oval office requires more than a position on withdrawing American troops from Baghdad. Just doing Iraq isn’t enough....

If the Senators and governors now in the race don’t pay much attention to non-Iraq issues affairs, it’s not their fault. Having done foreign policy with a bunch of campaigns, I know the candidates’ handlers are telling them to concentrate on assembling a team that can win, with well-connected communications experts, experienced pollsters, a campaign chief who never sleeps, and so on. They need to get through the primaries where in most years (this one accepted) nobody cares about foreign policy. Even when the senator or governor or former Vice President finally makes it into the general election, there isn’t too much demand from the populace for details about Darfur and the Balkans. The foreign policy team is lucky if they get face time with the candidate, and a paragraph in the next speech. The system is designed to keep the candidate away from sticky issues abroad....

But at some point we begin to reflect on the kind of person who will end up with his or her finger on the launch button. With the authority to declare war and fight to keep American jobs from disappearing abroad. The person who will be America’s face to a disenchanted and skeptical, if not downright hostile, planet. Most of us really don’t care about the details. But we do want some insight into the moral character and basic human instincts that will guide the next president’s tough choices on tough global issues of life and death.

We can bet those basic instincts about the world will start to seep out during the campaign, well before the foreign policy ‘plan’ and the advisory groups and the position papers the candidate’s little foreign policy team will dutifully churn out. If George Bush has taught us anything, it is to look at those basic instincts and take them very seriously, because they tell us a lot more than the details offered up about Africa or global warming.

Tell me, informed readers: which presidential aspirant -- from either party -- seems the most well-grounded on matters of foreign policy?

Sure, an Oprah book club selection can net an author millions in book sales and royalties. However, according to the New York Times, Tom Stoppard might be the Oprah of the Long Tail:

“Russian Thinkers,” a 1978 collection of essays on 19th-century Russian intellectuals by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, has virtually disappeared from bookstores across the city, including Barnes & Noble, Labyrinth Books and Shakespeare & Company. The Internet is not much help either: the book is sold out on bn.com, and though it can be ordered from Amazon, the order won’t be shipped for two or three weeks.

The culprit behind this Berlin craze turns out to be none other than Tom Stoppard and his epic three-part play, “The Coast of Utopia,” which opened at Lincoln Center on Nov. 27. Tucked deep inside the show’s playbill is a list titled “For Audience Members Interested in Further Reading,” with “Russian Thinkers” at the top....

Mr. Berlin’s book is not only all but impossible to find in New York, it is also completely out of stock with its publisher, Penguin, which earlier this month quickly ordered two reprintings totaling 3,500 copies, the first time in 12 years the book has been printed, to satisfy more than 2,000 suddenly unfilled orders.

The Economist's Free Exchange manages to jam all of these topics -- plus Davos!! -- into one post. Go check it out.

Favorite quote that will cause rioting in London:

[What] about a Starbucks inside Buckingham Palace[?]. For all I know there may be one, years since I was there, but certainly there should be one. It wouldn't make much money inside the private quarters, I doubt the Queen does many skinny lattes, but in the Royal Gallery, which is the visitable part of the palace, a Starbucks would be an excellent fit.

Student-bloggers, take note -- there's now a Political Blogging Scholarship:

Do you maintain a political weblog and attend college? Would you like $2,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs? If so, read on.

We're giving away $2,000 this year to a college student who blogs about politics. Our scholarship is awarded annually.

The Winner Gets:

$2,000 immediately disbursed for their college expenses

Bragging rights

Admiration from fellow bloggers

Popularity

To write an acceptance speech consisted of 1000 words or less, which will be posted on this page....

What Happens to the Losers? Concession Speech!

In a written concession speech consisting of 350 words or less, the losers can say whatever they wish…completely unedited and uncensored. We will post the speeches on this page as we receive them.

Many moons ago, my wife and I were roped into a focus group that was viewing a proposed television pilot. At the end of the half hour, we were asked to fill out some demographic information, including education level.

At that point, my wife and I looked at each other, knowing that because we had post-graduate degrees, our reactions were not going to matter one whit -- we're not exactly the target demographic of profitable shows.

This memory came to mind when someone e-mailed me this Fortune story by Nina Easton on Newt Gingrich's quixotic run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008:

[T]his year, as he throws warm-up pitches for a 2008 presidential campaign, hoping that his big ideas, combined with his grass-roots popularity, will produce a "draft Newt" movement, even his most ardent loyalists doubt he can pull it off. "He's a better Moses, leading the party out of the wilderness, than he is a King David, running the show," says Frank Lavin, a veteran of Republican administrations who now serves as commerce undersecretary.

While Gingrich has plenty to say on national security and social issues, the core of his resurrection and unusual race for President are his ideas on health costs - a national migraine that has driven the likes of General Motors toward bankruptcy, put insurance out of reach for 46 million Americans, and now threatens to strangle the economy by ballooning entitlement costs. The problem is so severe that state governors - most recently California's Arnold Schwarzenegger - have given up on Washington and are promoting their own sweeping reform plans.

Gingrich got a headstart on the issue at the turn of the millennium, when he began building his credibility as the voice of free-market-style reform. He has preached his evolving message to business and health groups around the country. In Washington he has transformed his reputation from polarizing politico to business visionary who might strategize with Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt one day and Senator Hillary Clinton the next.

What Gingrich has to say is not so much a unified theory as a way of rearranging the way we look at things - a refusal to accept the cultural status quo. At the Tempe conference, Gingrich politely listens to such proposals as applying Toyota-style production-control techniques to the health system - and then slices through them with an alternative mantra of competition, deregulation, modernized information systems, and personal responsibility.

Leave the middleman out. Force doctors and hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid, to disclose pricing and compete with one another. Put all the latest information on databases so that American consumers can go online, plug in their personal health profile, and shop for the best prices on drugs and services.

In other words, in Gingrich's world consumer health care should look more like Travelocity....

For the next nine months Gingrich intends to promote sweeping solutions to difficult issues of the day - particularly health care and national security - and then, like Lincoln in 1860, see if the call comes.

While such other GOP candidates as Senator John McCain, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani are hiring consultants and building donor networks, Gingrich has formed a tax-exempt advocacy group to raise money and promote his policies. He will wait until September - the eve of primary season - to announce whether he has the support to make it official.

However, I can't shake the feeling that because I'm so interested in a Gingrich, he's doomed to fail. Can someone who scores well in the blogger wonk demographic really develop mainstream appeal?

Readers, help me out here.

Comment on the content of Bush's State of the Union address if you'd like.

Me, I don't see the point. With a 28% approval rating and both houses of Congress controlled by Congress Democrats, we know that:

1) Bush's domestic policy proposals are immaterial, since they are DOA unless they provide an opportunity for Democrats to toss some lard at their favored interests (see: energy policy, ethanol subsidies).

2) Reaction to Bush's foreign policy proposals are immaterial since Bush still controls the executive branch, Congress is really bad at directing foreign policy, and no one is going to successfully use the A-bomb of defunding a policy initiative.

Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Bob Kimmitt has an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post on the growth in job churn, and why it's a good thing:

More than 55 million Americans, or four out of every 10 workers, left their jobs in 2005. And this is good news, because there were over 57 million new hires that same year.

These statistics illustrate a recent and growing trend of dynamism in our job market, especially among younger workers. Data on labor demand in the United States, gathered for the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), show that the 12 months ending in November had the highest average of labor turnover since the U.S. government began tracking this information in 2000. But the data also show that our economy has maintained a consistently strong ratio of new hires to separations. Over the year ending in November, new hires in America exceeded employee separations by an average of 364,000 per month....

In fact, our workers lead the international marketplace in this trend. Job tenure averages 6.6 years for Americans, compared with an average of 8.2 years for Britons, 10.6 years for Germans, 11.2 years for the French and 12.2 years for the Japanese. Even more striking is that, on average, workers in the United States will have 10 different employers between ages 18 and 38.

This dynamism of our labor force strengthens the U.S. economy because each move to a new employer can involve greater responsibility, greater pay or both. And the time workers spend in search of employment is decreasing. In December, the average duration of a job search was the shortest in more than four years.

Unfortunately, what usually makes headlines is a big company's layoff of workers. What gets less coverage is the 40 months of job growth we have recently enjoyed, the historically low unemployment rate (4.5 percent), record tax revenue and an acceleration in real wage growth over the past year. This is good news for the generation preparing to graduate from high school and college. Unlike their grandparents, who built careers around companies rather than opportunities, members of the class of 2007 will enter the workforce with an understanding that change may be the only constant in their professional careers.

I also wonder, however, whether there is a generation gap in the reaction to this trend. My hunch is that the younger workers Kimmitt identifies in the piece already have accepted this new status quo, and will find objections to it puzzling.

My latest diavlog -- with Matthew Yglesias -- is now online. Obsessive fans of danieldrezner.com will delight in the fact that my "studio" has moved to my Fletcher office.

Among the topics discussed -- Iraq, what we thought about Iraq in 2003, Iran, Bush's grand strategy, the 2008 campaign, and the inevitable Peyton Manning endorsement for bloggingheads.

In my Los Angeles Times op-ed on the Davos forum, I wrote the following passage:

[Davos] is a useful place for politicians to launch new, grandiose initiatives that never quite live up to their billing. Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan launched the U.N.'s Global Compact there in 1999. The U.S. proposed a Middle East Free Trade Zone in 2003. And British Prime Minister Tony Blair used Davos in 2005 as the platform to launch the G8's climate-change initiative.

The following is a letter sent to the LA Times and myself from George Kell, the executive director of the UN Global Compact. I don't know if the LAT is running it, but it seems appropriate to run it here:

We take serious issue with Daniel Drezner’s characterization of the United Nations Global Compact as one of several “new, grandiose initiatives that never quite live up to their billing” (Davos’ downhill slide, 21 January 2007). What began as a call to action to global business leaders gathered in Davos eight years ago, has since grown to become the world’s largest voluntary corporate citizenship initiative with more than 3,000 participants in over 100 countries. The UN Global Compact has made a significant contribution to the emergence of corporate responsibility not only (and rightly so) as a moral obligation, but also as a management imperative. Every day, corporations around the globe are leading by example, aligning their strategies and operations with the Global Compact’s universal principles while driving value for their business and developing new opportunities.

While certainly much remains to be done, scores of projects have been implemented that are delivering very real and tangible benefits with regard to environmental and social issues. These are documented on our website (www.unglobalcompact.org) and include programs related to HIV/AIDS, child labour, climate change, anti-corruption and general poverty alleviation. In addition, the Global Compact has inspired several high-profile initiatives that are embedding principles and values in a number of important areas, ranging from financial market operations to the training and education of tomorrow’s business leaders. To many of our stakeholders and constituents, including a large number of early critics, the Global Compact has not just lived up to its billing - it has exceeded it.

The Financial Times' Rebecca Knight has a story on the Fletcher School and why it's better than sliced bread:

It may not have been on purpose, but the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy – the oldest graduate school of international relations in the US – has suddenly found itself in the executive education business.

Last year, Microsoft and Raytheon, as well as a non-profit group, approached the school, at Tufts University in Massachusetts, to develop customised programmes for their mid- to upper-level professionals.

The programmes, which involved courses on international political and economic affairs, were a big hit. This year, Fletcher has three repeat customers on its hands and is “quietly and cautiously” working to attract others, according to school officials.

Executive education programmes – which have in the past been the domain of business schools – are typically marketed to companies as a way to hone their workers’ skills with courses in finance, marketing, and sales. But, according to Stephen Bosworth, the dean of Fletcher, companies nowadays are in search of more than management refresher courses. Rather, they are looking for ways to boost their executives’ knowledge of international politics, culture and business.

Fletcher’s programmes are ideal for those companies seeking to “upgrade the globalisation skills” of key employees, says Mr Bosworth. “The rationale for all of this is the perceived need for a greater understanding of the political, economic, and cultural context within which these companies are operating,” he says.

The programmes, which are conducted by Fletcher and Tufts faculty, are individually tailored, depending on their varying needs and specifications of the companies.

For instance, Microsoft asked for a distillation of the school’s overall international curriculum, while Raytheon, the military contractor, requested a programme on political, economic and cultural issues for operating in the Middle East.

Deborah Nutter, senior associate dean and professor at Fletcher, says the school’s strength in diplomatic training is what gives it the edge in the executive education realm.

“From the beginning, we have educated global leaders in all sectors,” she says.

UPDATE: More good financial news for Tufts.

Pajamas Media is conducting a thoroughly unscientific but nevertheless intriguing online Presidential straw poll. You are allowed to vote once a week.

Vote here -- and the ongoing results can be viewed here.

Again, Rudy Giuliani is showing surprising strength (as is Barack Obama). The names that intrigue, however, are the ones in second place -- Dennis Kucinich and Newt Gingrich.

As I said, onlinew straw polls like this one don't have a lot of scientific value -- but I have to wonder if the first thing the nascent campaign staffs of all the candidates do in the morning is go to sites like this to boost their candidates' standing. Typical early morning list:

1) Make coffee
2) Check e-mail
3) Vote in every online straw poll imaginable

I have an essay in today's Los Angeles Times about the World Economic Forum -- otherwise known as the Davos forum. In the essay,I ask whether Davos is really significant, or whether it has jumped the shark:

Since Swiss business professor Klaus Schwab launched the forum in 1971, it has become the ne plus ultra of elite meetings, eclipsing such challengers as Renaissance Weekend, the British-American Project and the Trilateral Commission.

At least, that's what the rhetoric surrounding Davos suggests. According to the World Economic Forum's website, Davos is "an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas." Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington asserted that "Davos people control virtually all international institutions, many of the world's governments and the bulk of the world's economic and military capabilities."

Its critics hold a similar view. Anti-globalization protests have targeted the conference, causing its security budget to grow at an alarming rate. To many of them, Davos is the epitome of how globalization is managed by the elite to impoverish the many. One of the few scholarly studies of the Davos experience characterizes the meeting as "a polymorph platform of intermediations on the new frontiers of capitalism." I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it does not sound good....

There are signs that Davos may have jumped the shark. Activists used to demand a voice at the forum. In recent years, however, they have abandoned it altogether. Instead, they attend the rival World Social Forum, which is held at about the same time as Davos.

Even more disconcertingly, Davos sponsored a Gallup poll that found, across the globe, growing distrust of political and business leaders — the very people who attend Davos....

[T]he polling data could be a harbinger of Davos' irrelevance. This leads to an interesting existential question: What if they threw an elite meeting and no one cared?

The byline reads -- online at least -- as "Daniel W. Drezner is associate professor of international politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School and the author of "All Politics Is Global." He maintains a blog at danieldrezner.com/blog/."

Which is great, but the byline I submitted to them was, "Daniel W. Drezner is associate professor of international politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School and the author of "All Politics Is Global." He has never been invited to Davos, but is not bitter about that fact in the slightest."

I think I'd be less upset if I didn't fear that the deleted sentence was the best line in the piece.

Want to read more about Davos? You can check out the David Rothkopf's diary from last year's conference here. A precis of the polling results discussed in the piece can be found in this story. And here's a link to the official web site.

Finally, given that I was gently mocking it in the piece, I feel I owe a link to the one scholarly piece I found on Davos: Jean-Christophe Graz, "How Powerful are Transnational Elite Clubs? The Social Myth of the World Economic Forum." New Political Economy, Vol. 8, No. 3, November 2003. If you can get past the sections when Graz gets trapped in his own jargon, he makes an interesting argument about the inherent limits of these kind of fora.