Chapter 4 comments

What works about this chapter, and what does not? Do the sections with "Examples of Theory", "Major References", and "Challenges" help, or are they confusing? (Is this more or less effective than the parts in Chapter 3 where we summarized a single author as an example of each theory?)

Any comments are welcome.

Chapter 3 comments

Please feel free to leave comments. I am especially interested in whether you found the elements helpful where we summarized a single author as an example of a certain theory.

Examining correlations (economic development & performance)

For the purposes of week 2, some of you may be interested in examining the correlations between economic freedoms (or the degree to which markets are free) and economic performance.

What to do with the data is something you should figure out for yourselves, but the two sources here should give you a start:

Index of Economic Freedom
GDP/capita (from CIA World Factbook)
World Bank "Growth of Output" (GDP growth)

There are plenty of other sources that can help you as well. You may wish to use a website that has been set up by Mr. Grefe at the Library:

Politics 105 Course Guide

Not to Compare, but...

...see if you pick up on just a bit of the comparative method, as used by David Brooks.

Brooks is another New York Times columnist, and noticably more conservative than Krugman.

This little piece will bridge the week 1 and week 2 readings pretty nicely.

Sites for correlations

For the purposes of having an initial glance at some correlations, you might consider looking at the following:

Freedom House Map of Freedom
Human Development Index (HDI)

Chapter 2 comments

Open thread for comments on Chapter 2.

Chapter 1 Comments

Consider this an open thread to offer any comments or suggestions on chapter 1.

(To start things off, I will post a self-criticism I have in the comments.)

Update: Comments can be made by clicking on the small link just below any post.

Haiti

You probably have heard the news about the terrible earthquake in Haiti.

The tragic aspects of this event are too numerous to count. But one of them is that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. As some have said, this makes it almost "the worst place" this could have happened, in terms of the number of people affected and the extent of the anguish. I don't want to "use" the tragedy to make a "comparative analysis" point, but it is worth noting that the ability of the Haitian government to respond to the tragedy is probably less than any other country in our hemisphere where this might have happened. (It is noticeably less, for instance, than even in the Dominican Republic, which shares an island with Haiti.)

It goes to show, in a sense, that trying to understand the politics, economies, and societies of different countries does indeed have real-world impacts for real people: if this had happened somewhere else, it is likely the scope of the tragedy would have been somewhat less.

Comparative Politics - Europe and America

Jillian noted something the other day in class about the comparison of health care in the United States and Europe.

Someone who has been blogging about this at great length - Paul Krugman - will surely draw conflicting reviews from all of you. Krugman is a Princeton professor, a recent Nobel Prize winner in Economics, and a columnist for the New York Times. He is assertively liberal.

It may be worth having a look at his article on Tuesday. You need not agree - just notice how he begins to conduct comparison.