Abandoned Footnotes

I know this blog has turned into the dictatorship channel recently (that's what I'm teaching at the moment; look out for it to turn ...

[In 1977] the Libyan leader suggested that in order to achieve self-sufficiency every Libyan family had to raise chickens in the home. The c...

(Continues the discussion in this post , with more graphs, more data, more theory, and more verbiage. Mostly exploratory, considering furthe...

In Leningrad, I met a man, no longer young, named Kolya Vasyn. He was a genuine dissident in the Brezhnev years, but his dissidence consiste...

From the department of perverse incentives, a new APSR paper by James Kai-Sing Kung and Shuo Chen ["The Tragedy of the Nomenklatura: C...

(Apropos of nothing in particular, though this article on Gaddafi’s cult of personality and this article on the indoctrination of children ...

(Sorry for the recent neglect of the blog. I just started teaching again, and that tends to absorb all my energy. So here’s a teaching-relat...

From a very interesting article in the NY Times : After a strike that March in the city of Mahalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called...

(Warning: an epically long post that meanders through the literature on inequality and democratization and comes to conclusions that probabl...