David Sylvan

A Methodology for the Study of Historical Counterfactuals

Counterfactual reasoning is a component in much historical and political research. A proposal for exploring counterfactuals is elaborated, based on philosophical work on modal logic and possible worlds semantics. It is proposed that phenomena have essences which are unchanging in all possible worlds and that counterfactual analysis consists of making inferences about the contingent properties of these phenomena. Essential properties can be expressed as contingent relations bound, in different counterfactual situations, to different contingent properties. This methodology is applied to counterfactual explorations of a particular phenomenon: the “winnability” of high-level United States foreign policy recommendations. In two cases, the question is asked of whether “harder line” U.S. policies regarding Vietnam would have been adopted. Using the methodology elaborated in the first half of the article, it is found that as early as 1961, recommendations for the overt use of U.S. ground combat troops could have been accepted.

Simple Choices and Complex Calculations

Bruce Bueno de Mesquitas The War Trap (1981) is an ambitious attempt at putting forward a rational choice theory of war initiation. The book is subjected to a critical reading and found wanting on three criteria: concepts, measures, and empirical analysis.

How foreign policy recommendations are put together: A computational model with empirical applications

This paper presents and applies empirically a computational model of the way in which bona fide high level foreign policy recommendations by U.S. policy makers are assembled. We begin by pointing out that policy making can be seen as the connection of certain strings of words to other strings. We then discuss how these connections constitute certain types of foreign policy making phenomena as such. To theorize about such connections, one first needs to specify essential features of these phenomena, and we do so for one phenomenon: bona fide recommendations. We next turn to a discussion of the theory that links together the categories by which these features are represented. That theory explains how certain strings of words are assembled into new proximate goals, missions, and tools. The theory can be modeled computationally using the programming language Scheme, and we next present that model. We conclude by presenting a run of the model, showing the close fit between actual and generated strings.

Liberty, Economics, and Evidence*

Relationships in liberal theory between liberty and economic well-being are empirical propositions: (a) economic conditions can reach a level so low as to make the effective establishment of liberty impossible; (b) the marginal value of economic gain diminishes with respect to the value of liberty as economic conditions improve; and (c) the priority standing of liberty requires the development of social forms and conditions necessary for the establishment of liberty. Empirical data, however, do not support these assumptions. A more complex relationship between liberty and economic well-being is suggested, where (a) liberty is needed as a first condition to increase economic well-being, and (b) the very distinction between political values like liberty and economic values is jeopardized. A fusion of politics and economics may be required to account for these relationships, a point re-emphasizing the sensitivity of normative theory to empirical evidence.

Chapter 1 Global Internet Governance: Governance without Governors

The purpose of this paper is to discuss different ways by which governance can occur, both in general and with respect to the Internet in particular. My argument will be that although Internet governance is often conceived as a matter of designing or strengthening frameworks within which various activities will be facilitated, there is in fact another type of governance, based on everyday orders and “bottom-up” coordination.

State-Based Accumulation and Economic Dependence: Toward an Optimal Policy

This paper develops and evaluates an optimal strategy for the reduction of economic dependence in under developed countries where accumulation is solely under the control of the state. The paper is divided into several parts: 1) the derivation from the dependencia literature of criteria for assessing dependence reduc tion ; 2) the specification of a particular type of situation in which dependence reduction could be pursued, along with the likely constraints on such a situation on any regime attempting to implement such a goal; 3) the derivation and explication of the optimal strategy; 4) assessment of the validity and stability of the strat egy. It is concluded that for the specific type of country considered, the optimal strategy for dependence re duction would be beneficial to the peasants, but for that reason, unstable over the long run.

Organized All the Way Down

At least since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, it has been understood that social systems can be considered as having emergent properties not reducible to the actions of individuals. The appeal of this idea is obvious, no different now than in Smith’s time: that aggregates of persons can be ordered without such order being intended or enforced by any particular person or persons. A search for such an “invisible hand” is what brings many of us to the study of complexity and the construction of various types of computational models aimed at capturing it. However, in proceeding along these lines, we have tended to focus on particular types of social systems — what I will in this paper call “thin” systems, such as markets and populations — and ignored other types, such as groups, whose base interactions are “thick,” i.e., constructed as one of many possibilities, by the participants, at the moment in which they take place. These latter systems are not only ubiquitous but pose particular modeling problems for students of complexity: the local interactions are themselves complex and the systems display no strongly emergent features.