Jeffrey Friedman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3938230 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey Friedman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Friedman |
| SIGNATURE | FRIEDMAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3013-3950 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 87 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 502 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 87 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Strategy Is Only Partly an Illusion: “Relative Foresight” as an Objective Standard for Evaluating Foreign Policy Competence
Foreign policymakers must grapple with complexity, uncertainty, and subjectivity. These challenges raise the possibility that “strategy is an illusion”: that there is no reliable method for assessing skill at managing international politics. By contrast, we show that researchers can objectively evaluate a critical component of foreign policy competence using a standard we call “relative foresight,” defined as decision-makers’ ability to anticipat…
The Myth of a Bipartisan Golden Age for U.S. Foreign Policy: The Truman-Eisenhower Consensus Remains
Scholars and practitioners of U.S. foreign policy commonly describe the early Cold War as a lost golden age of bipartisan consensus. This article uses public opinion data, congressional voting patterns, and party platform statements to refute this conventional wisdom. In fact, the core internationalist principles that enjoyed bipartisan agreement during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations retain widespread approval from Democrats and Republ…
Defining Rationality in Security Studies: Expected Utility, Theory-Driven Reasoning, and the Vietnam War
Obstacles to harnessing analytic innovations in foreign policy analysis: A case study of crowdsourcing in the U.S. intelligence community
We conducted interviews with national security professionals to examine why the U.S. Intelligence Community has not systematically incorporated prediction markets or prediction polls into its intelligence reporting. This behavior is surprising since crowdsourcing platforms often generate more accurate predictions than traditional forms of intelligence analysis. Our interviews suggest that three principal barriers to adopting these platforms invol…
Issue-Image Trade-Offs and the Politics of Foreign Policy: How Leaders Use Foreign Policy Positions to Shape Their Personal Images
This article explains how leaders can use foreign policy issues to shape their personal images. It argues, in particular, that presidents and presidential candidates can use hawkish foreign policies to craft valuable impressions of leadership strength. This dynamic can give leaders incentives to take foreign policy positions that are more hawkish than what voters actually want. The article documents the causal foundations of this argument with a …
Post-Truth and the Epistemological Crisis
Progressive Grand Strategy: A Synthesis and Critique
This article evaluates emerging progressive ideas about US grand strategy. Progressives’ distinctive analytic premise is that structural inequality undermines America's national interests. To combat this problem, progressives recommend retrenching US primacy in a manner that resembles the grand strategy of restraint. However, progressives also seek to build a more democratic international order that can facilitate new forms of global collective a…
Is US grand strategy dead? The political foundations of deep engagement after Donald Trump
International Relations scholars frequently warn that the American political system has become too fractured to sustain a coherent grand strategy. This perception generally rests on two premises: that President Donald Trump led an unprecedented assault on established principles of US foreign policy, and that Democrats and Republicans have become so polarized that they can no longer agree on a common vision for global leadership. By contrast, this…
Introduction: Intolerance, Power, and Epistemology
Is political irrationality a myth?
All too often, we explain political beliefs by ascribing them to irrational motives, biases, or forces. This irrationalist form of explanation generates uncharitable interpretations of others’ political beliefs: interpretations that fail to acknowledge the possibility that others have rational, although perhaps mistaken, grounds for their beliefs. Recognizing that between true beliefs and irrational ones is a middle ground, the ground of mistake,…
The Longing for Total Revolution as Critical But Ideational Genealogy
Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution is not just an important study of an extremely influential strain of post-Kantian philosophy, which according to Yack culminated in both Marx and Nietzsche. It also exemplifies an unusual approach to the history of thought: a form of critical genealogy that, unlike the Nietzschean and Foucauldian variants, seeks intellectual charity by ascribing mistaken ideas not to non-ideational psychological or …
Political Epistemology, Technocracy, and Political Anthropology: Reply to a Symposium on Power Without Knowledge
A political epistemology that enables us to determine if political actors are likely to know what they need to know must be rooted in an ontology of the actors and of the human objects of their knowledge; that is, a political anthropology. The political anthropology developed in Power Without Knowledge envisions human beings as creatures whose conscious actions are determined by their interpretations of what seem to them to be relevant circumstan…
Power without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy
Technocrats claim to know how to solve the social and economic problems of complex modern societies. But this would require predicting how people will act once technocrats impose their policy solutions. Power Without Knowledge argues that people’s ideas, w hich govern their deliberate actions, are too heterogeneous for their behavior to be reliably predicted. Thus, a technocracy of social-scientific experts cannot be expected to accomplish its ob…
War and Chance: Assessing Uncertainty in International Politics
Populists as Technocrats
An intellectually charitable understanding of populism might begin by recognizing that, since populist citizens tend to be politically uninformed and lacking in higher education, populist ideas are likely to be inarticulate reproductions of the tacit assumptions undergirding non-populist or “mainstream” culture rather than stemming from explicit theoretical constructs, such as an apotheosis of the unity or the will of “the people.” What features …
Priorities for Preventive Action: Explaining Americans’ Divergent Reactions to 100 Public Risks
Why do Americans’ priorities for combating risks like terrorism, climate change, and violent crime often seem so uncorrelated with the dangers that those risks objectively present? Many scholars believe the answer to this question is that heuristics, biases, and ignorance cause voters to misperceive risk magnitudes. By contrast, this article argues that Americans’ risk priorities primarily reflect judgments about the extent to which some victims …
Analytic Confidence and Political Decision‐Making: Theoretical Principles and Experimental Evidence From National Security Professionals
When making decisions under uncertainty, it is important to distinguish between the probability that a judgment is true and the confidence analysts possess in drawing their conclusions. Yet analysts and decision‐makers often struggle to define “confidence” in this context, and many ways that scholars use this term do not necessarily facilitate decision‐making under uncertainty. To help resolve this confusion, we argue for disaggregating analytic …
The Value of Precision in Probability Assessment: Evidence from a Large-Scale Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament
Scholars, practitioners, and pundits often leave their assessments of uncertainty vague when debating foreign policy, arguing that clearer probability estimates would provide arbitrary detail instead of useful insight. We provide the first systematic test of this claim using a data set containing 888,328 geopolitical forecasts. We find that coarsening numeric probability assessments in a manner consistent with common qualitative expressions—inclu…
Introduction: Economic Approaches to Politics
Behavioral Consequences of Probabilistic Precision: Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals
National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into fa…
The Problem of Epistocratic Identification and the (Possibly) Dysfunctional Division of Epistemic Labor
How can political actors identify which putative expert is truly expert, given that any putative expert may be wrong about a given policy question; given that experts may therefore disagree with one another; and given that other members of the polity, being non-expert, can neither reliably adjudicate inter-expert disagreement nor detect when a consensus of experts is misguided? This would not be an important question if the problems dealt with by…
Roundtable on Ideational Turns in the Four Subdisciplines of Political Science
On September 4, 2015, the Political Epistemology/Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on ideational turns in the four subdisciplines of political science as part of its annual meetings. Chairing the roundtable was Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin. The other participants were Jeffrey Checkel, Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser U…
English education in the era of Meiji Japan
This paper analyzes the origins and internationalization objectives of methodologies used for English pedagogy in Meiji Japan. Curriculum during this period was designed to reinforce analytical, rote methodologies that resulted in the separation of language from culture. Texts tested intellectual acumen and promoted nationalistic sentiments, rather than communication skills, thereby limiting direct communication with the West and access to foreig…
Using Power Laws to Estimate Conflict Size
Casualty counts are often controversial, and thorough research can only go so far in resolving such debates—there will almost always be missing data, and thus, a need to draw inferences about how comprehensively violence has been recorded. This article addresses that challenge by developing an estimation strategy based on the observation that violent events are generally distributed according to power laws, a pattern that structures expectations …
Roundtable on Political Epistemology
On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on political epistemology as part of its annual meetings. Co-chairing the roundtable were Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University. The other participants were Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Be…
Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007
Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many policymakers and scholars credit the “surge,” or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Sunni Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course with the end of a wave of sectarian cleansing; still others credit an interaction between the surge and the Awakening. The difference matters for p…
Democratic competence in normative and positive theory: Neglected implications of “the nature of belief systems in mass publics
The Nature of Belief Systems" sets forth a Hobson's choice between rule by the politically ignorant masses and rule by the ideologically constrained—which is to say, the doctrinaire—elites. On the one hand, lacking comprehensive cognitive structures, such as ideological "belief systems," with which to understand politics, most people learn distressingly little about it. On the other hand, a spiral of conviction seems to make it difficult for the …
Popper, Weber, and Hayek: The epistemology and politics of ignorance
Karl Popper's methodology highlights our scientific ignorance: hence the need to institutionalize open‐mindedness through controlled experiments that may falsify our fallible theories about the world. In his endorsement of “piecemeal social engineering,” Popper assumes that the social‐democratic state and its citizens are capable of detecting social problems, and of assessing the results of policies aimed at solving them, through a process of exp…
Public ignorance and democratic theory
1998). Public ignorance and democratic theory. Critical Review: Vol. 12, Public Ignorance and Democracy, pp. 397-411
A Crisis of Politics, Not Economics: Complexity, Ignorance, and Policy Failure
The financial crisis was caused by the complex, constantly growing web of regulations designed to constrain and redirect modern capitalism. This complexity made investors, bankers, and perhaps regulators themselves ignorant of regulations promulgated across decades and in different "fields" of regulation. These regulations interacted with each other to foster the issuance and securitization of subprime mortgages; their rating as AA or AAA; and pr…
What's wrong with Libertarianism
Libertarian arguments about the empirical benefits of capitalism are, as yet, inadequate to convince anyone who lacks libertarian philosophical convictions. Yet "philosophical" libertarianism founders on internal contradictions that render it unfit to make libertarians out of anyone who does not have strong consequentialist reasons for libertarian belief. The joint failure of these two approaches to libertarianism explains why they are both prese…
The Irrelevance of Economic Theory to Understanding Economic Ignorance
Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topics—public ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy error—from an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim …
Behavioral Consequences of Probabilistic Precision: Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals
National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into fa…
The new consensus: II. The democratic welfare state
The goal of the left has been predominantly libertarian: the realization of equal individual freedom. But now, with the demise of leftist hope for radical change that has followed the collapse of “really existing”; socialism, the world is converging on a compromise between capitalism and the leftist impulse. This compromise is the democratic, interventionist welfare state, which has gained new legitimacy by virtue of combining a “realistic”; acce…
A “Weapon in the Hands of the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical and Conceptual Context
The Tulis thesis becomes even more powerful when the constitutional revolution he describes is put in its Progressive‐Era context. The public had long demanded social reforms designed to curb or replace laissez‐faire capitalism, which was seen as antithetical to the interests of ordinary working people. But popular demands for social reform went largely unmet until the 1910s. Democratizing political reforms, such as the rhetorical presidency, wer…
The new consensus: I. The Fukuyama thesis
Fukuyama's argument that we have recently reached “The End of History”; is defended against writers who fail to appreciate the Hegelian meaning of Fukuyama's “Endism,”; but is criticized for using simplistic dichotomies that evade the economic and ideological convergence of East and West. Against Fukuyama, the economic critique of socialism, revisionist scholarship on early Soviet economic history, and the history of the libertarian ideas of Rous…
Priorities for Preventive Action: Explaining Americans’ Divergent Reactions to 100 Public Risks
Why do Americans’ priorities for combating risks like terrorism, climate change, and violent crime often seem so uncorrelated with the dangers that those risks objectively present? Many scholars believe the answer to this question is that heuristics, biases, and ignorance cause voters to misperceive risk magnitudes. By contrast, this article argues that Americans’ risk priorities primarily reflect judgments about the extent to which some victims …
Taking ignorance seriously: Rejoinder to critics
In "Popper, Weber, and Hayek," I claimed that the economic and political world governed by social democracy is too complex to offer hope for rational social‐democratic policy making. I extrapolated this conclusion from the claim, made by Austrian‐school economists in the 1920s and 30s, that central economic planning would face insurmountable "knowledge problems." Israel Kirzner's Reply indicates the need to keep the Austrians' cognitivist argumen…
Economic approaches to politics
The debate over Green and Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory sustains their contention that rational choice theory has not produced novel, empirically sustainable findings about politics—if one accepts their definition of empirically sustainable findings. Green and Shapiro show that rational choice research often resembles the empirically vacuous practices in which economists engage under the aegis of instrumentalism. Yet Green and S…
Manpower and Counterinsurgency: Empirical Foundations for Theory and Doctrine
How does manpower affect counterinsurgency? Important debates about counterinsurgency theory, military doctrine, force planning, and ongoing military operations revolve around assumptions about the role manpower plays in determining counterinsurgency outcomes. But these assumptions have not, by and large, been subjected to large-n analysis. This paper helps serve that role by examining new data on counterinsurgents’ deployments across 171 campaig…
The Value of Precision in Probability Assessment: Evidence from a Large-Scale Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament
Scholars, practitioners, and pundits often leave their assessments of uncertainty vague when debating foreign policy, arguing that clearer probability estimates would provide arbitrary detail instead of useful insight. We provide the first systematic test of this claim using a data set containing 888,328 geopolitical forecasts. We find that coarsening numeric probability assessments in a manner consistent with common qualitative expressions—inclu…
Civil War Intervention and the Problem of Iraq1: Civil War Intervention and the Problem of Iraq
Outside intervention in civil warfare is important for humanitarian, theoretical, and practical policy reasons—since 2006, much of the debate over the war in Iraq has turned on the danger of external intervention if the United States were to withdraw. Yet, the literature on intervention has been compartmented in ways that have made it theoretically incomplete and unsuitable as a guide to policy. We therefore integrate and expand upon the theoreti…
The politics of communitarianism
Taylor, Sandel, Walzer, and MacIntyre waver between granting the community authority over the individual and limiting this authority so severely that communitarianism becomes a dead letter. The reason for this vacillation can be found in the aspiration of each theorist to base liberal values‐equality and liberty—on particularism. Communitarians compound liberal formalism by adding to the liberal goal, individual autonomy, the equally abstract aim…
After libertarianism: Rejoinder to Narveson, McCloskey, Flew, and Machan
Postlibertarianism means abandoning defenses of the intrinsic justice of laissez‐faire capitalism, the better to investigate whether the systemic consequences of interfering with capitalism are severe enough to justify laissez‐faire. Any sound case for laissez‐faire is likely to build on postlibertarian research, for the conviction that laissez‐faire is intrinsically just rests upon unsound philosophical assumptions. Conversely, these assumptions…
Using Power Laws to Estimate Conflict Size
Casualty counts are often controversial, and thorough research can only go so far in resolving such debates—there will almost always be missing data, and thus, a need to draw inferences about how comprehensively violence has been recorded. This article addresses that challenge by developing an estimation strategy based on the observation that violent events are generally distributed according to power laws, a pattern that structures expectations …
Populists as Technocrats
An intellectually charitable understanding of populism might begin by recognizing that, since populist citizens tend to be politically uninformed and lacking in higher education, populist ideas are likely to be inarticulate reproductions of the tacit assumptions undergirding non-populist or “mainstream” culture rather than stemming from explicit theoretical constructs, such as an apotheosis of the unity or the will of “the people.” What features …
Postmodernism vs. Postlibertarianism
Postmodernism” denotes efforts to replace foundationalist philosophy with contextu‐alist, immanentist forms of reason. “Postlibertarianism” denotes efforts to transcend contemporary minimal statism, questioning both its “libertarian” moral superstructure and its underlying consequentialist claims and seeking to determine whether the latter can be generalized in a way that displaces the former. Efforts to reach minimal‐statist conclusions by postm…
Issue-Image Trade-Offs and the Politics of Foreign Policy: How Leaders Use Foreign Policy Positions to Shape Their Personal Images
This article explains how leaders can use foreign policy issues to shape their personal images. It argues, in particular, that presidents and presidential candidates can use hawkish foreign policies to craft valuable impressions of leadership strength. This dynamic can give leaders incentives to take foreign policy positions that are more hawkish than what voters actually want. The article documents the causal foundations of this argument with a …
Political Epistemology
Normative political epistemologists, such as epistemic democrats, study whether political decision makers can, in principle, be expected to know what they need to know if they are to make wise public policy. Empirical political epistemologists study the content and sources of real-world political actors' knowledge and interpretations of knowledge. In recent years, empirical political epistemologists have taken up the study of the ideas of politic…
Motivated Skepticism or Inevitable Conviction? Dogmatism and the Study of Politics
Taber and Lodge's 2006 paper provides powerful evidence that one's prior beliefs shape one's reception of new evidence in a manner that can best be described as “inadvertently dogmatic.” This is especially true for people who are well informed, which dovetails with findings going back to Converse (1964) showing political beliefs to be ideologically constrained (rigid) among the relatively well informed. What may explain the coincidence of dogmati…
Locke as politician
REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS AND LOCKE S TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT by Richard Ashcraft Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. 613 pp., $65.00, $15.00 (paper) LOCKE'S TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT by Richard Ashcraft London: Allen & Unwin, 1987. 316 pp., $34.95
Liberalism and post‐liberalism
Marxism and liberalism
F. A. Hayek's sociology
Liberalism and post‐structuralism
The new consensus: I. The Fukuyama thesis
Fukuyama's argument that we have recently reached “The End of History”; is defended against writers who fail to appreciate the Hegelian meaning of Fukuyama's “Endism,”; but is criticized for using simplistic dichotomies that evade the economic and ideological convergence of East and West. Against Fukuyama, the economic critique of socialism, revisionist scholarship on early Soviet economic history, and the history of the libertarian ideas of Rous…
Methodological vs. normative individualism
1990). Methodological vs. normative individualism. Critical Review: Vol. 4, No. 1-2, pp. 5-9
The new consensus: II. The democratic welfare state
The goal of the left has been predominantly libertarian: the realization of equal individual freedom. But now, with the demise of leftist hope for radical change that has followed the collapse of “really existing”; socialism, the world is converging on a compromise between capitalism and the leftist impulse. This compromise is the democratic, interventionist welfare state, which has gained new legitimacy by virtue of combining a “realistic”; acce…
J.G. Merquior 1941–1991
Postmodernism vs. Postlibertarianism
Postmodernism” denotes efforts to replace foundationalist philosophy with contextu‐alist, immanentist forms of reason. “Postlibertarianism” denotes efforts to transcend contemporary minimal statism, questioning both its “libertarian” moral superstructure and its underlying consequentialist claims and seeking to determine whether the latter can be generalized in a way that displaces the former. Efforts to reach minimal‐statist conclusions by postm…
Accounting for political preferences: Cultural theory vs. cultural history
Liberalism sanctifies the values chosen by the sovereign individual. This tends to rule out criticisms of an individual's "preference" for one value over another by, ironically, establishing a deterministic view of the self that protects the self's desires from scrutiny. Similarly, rational choice approaches to social theory begin with previously determined individual preferences and focus on the means by which they are pursued, concentrating on …
Postlibertarianism is not libertarianism: Rejoinder to Nove
After libertarianism: Rejoinder to Narveson, McCloskey, Flew, and Machan
Postlibertarianism means abandoning defenses of the intrinsic justice of laissez‐faire capitalism, the better to investigate whether the systemic consequences of interfering with capitalism are severe enough to justify laissez‐faire. Any sound case for laissez‐faire is likely to build on postlibertarian research, for the conviction that laissez‐faire is intrinsically just rests upon unsound philosophical assumptions. Conversely, these assumptions…
Politics or scholarship
Environmental issues imperil the libertarian utopia of a society in which the individual is completely sovereign over his or her private domain. Taken seriously, this aspiration would lead to an environmentalism so extreme that it would preclude human life, since most human activity entails incursions against the sovereign realms of other human beings. The fallback position many libertarians have adopted—free‐market environmentalism—retreats from…
Cultural theory as individualistic ideology: Rejoinder to Ellis
How can one examine the sources of people's beliefs, tastes, and preferences without falling into the self‐refuting determinism that has so often characterized the most systematic theory of preferences, Marxism? Cultural Theory's attempt to do so posits five anthropologically derived, competing “ways of life"— individualism, egalitarianism, hierarchism, fatalism, and withdrawal from social life—that are intended to apply to all forms of culture a…
On libertarian anti‐intellectualism: Rejoinder to Shaw and Anderson & Leal
Against my claim that free‐market environmentalism (FME) cannot solve major environmental problems, my critics deny that such problems exist. Against my contention that FME depends on the democratic policymaking it decries, they retreat from FME to libertarian environmentalism (LE). Against my argument that LE is incoherent, they resort to anti‐intellectualism. These responses stem from demonstrable precommitments to libertarian ideology, suggest…
Truth and liberation: Rejoinder to brooks, Sassower and Agassi, and Harris
My critics assume that the objectivity of moral truth is contingent on the discovery of some transcendent, nonhuman sanction for human values, but I contend that objective morality is a necessary feature of the situation faced by beings with freedom of choice, just as objective truth is a necessary feature of the situation faced by beings with the freedom to differ in their perceptions of the world around them. Both liberals and postmodernists ig…
Economic consequentialism and beyond
The politics of communitarianism
Taylor, Sandel, Walzer, and MacIntyre waver between granting the community authority over the individual and limiting this authority so severely that communitarianism becomes a dead letter. The reason for this vacillation can be found in the aspiration of each theorist to base liberal values‐equality and liberty—on particularism. Communitarians compound liberal formalism by adding to the liberal goal, individual autonomy, the equally abstract aim…
Economic approaches to politics
The debate over Green and Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory sustains their contention that rational choice theory has not produced novel, empirically sustainable findings about politics—if one accepts their definition of empirically sustainable findings. Green and Shapiro show that rational choice research often resembles the empirically vacuous practices in which economists engage under the aegis of instrumentalism. Yet Green and S…
Introduction: Public opinion and democracy
1996). Introduction: Public opinion and democracy. Critical Review: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 1-12
Nationalism in theory and reality
Preferences or happiness? Tibor Scitovsky's psychology of human needs
1996). Preferences or happiness? Tibor Scitovsky's psychology of human needs. Critical Review: Vol. 10, Tibor Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy after Twenty Years, pp. 471-480
Nature and culture
Pluralism or relativism
Political science (79 works) · Sociology (68 works) · Law (67 works) · Law (65 works) · Politics (56 works) · Economics (50 works) · Epistemology (41 works) · Philosophy (41 works) · Philosophy (40 works) · Positive economics (29 works)