iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

New website is now up at jfearon4.github.io. I hadn’t updated the old one in embarrassingly many years. Lots of new and old unpublished stuff on the new site.

jfearon4.github.io

James D. Fearon

James Fearon academic stuff

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Yes, see esp Harrison Wagner, “What was bipolarity”

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Roxy Music The Clash piL James Brown Buzzcocks Mission of Burma Neats Big star The Cramps Chocolate Watchband

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

Small comment: at least in the case of Africa, the argument for struc adj predates Volcker shock in the form of the Bank’s 1981 (so called) Berg report. Berg was btw an old school on the ground institutionalist economist.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 13/06/2024

Here's another way to show the same thing: Suppose senators votes in the Senate were weighted by state population. Also showing how much more liberal median senator would be if use DW-Nominate ranking. (did this a while ago so it is a little out of date.)

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 16/04/2024

This was also Nelson Polsby’s m.o., though without tuna/onion sandwiches as best I can recall. Nice touch.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 09/03/2024

110%. And highly relevant/ on target not only for political economy of development.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 07/02/2024

Jervis chapter 8, Perceptions of Centralization? I wudda thought FAE was perceiving self to be rationally responding to circumstance and constraints and others as character/disposition-driven, no?

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 31/12/2023

DMZ You’re gonna miss me. Yardbirds I’m a man.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 16/12/2023

don't know about now, but way, way back in the day this was THE place (for about 6-7 of us). Glad it's still there.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 10/12/2023

Also, even given an assignment, there is still a distributional/fairness issue over which efficient bargain.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 10/12/2023

The bargain is "the same" independent of initial property rights in terms of efficiency (externality is efficiently internalized), but not distribution, which does depend on assignment of property rights. I didn't understand Coase to be defending the claim that any and all assignments were just.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 10/12/2023

maybe missing something here, but "Coasean" does not imply just, or having no distributional consequences, or not reflecting power relations (encoded in the property rights that shape who pays whom, eg).

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 17/11/2023

Q sort of related to Keith's comment: In Wittman-Calvert models, politicians take positions that are more moderate than what they themselves prefer. What do AP folk think about whether/when/how much this is true in real life?

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

are more equal is an example of such an argument. Or eg Bas and Schub ISQ 2016. I suspect that there is a lot more that could be done here, but would agree that there is not a whole lot as of now.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

(2) there are also in principle ways you can try to directly measure shocks that would be expected to increase p.i. between parties to a dispute, or factors that are expected correlate with more or less p.i. Blainey's arguments about mutual optimism being more likely when observable measures

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

more possible, in some cases. Also, while you may not be able to point predict for above and many other reasons, you may well be able to test the theory against broad empirical patterns that it does or doesn't imply. Alex Weisiger's Logics of War is terrific here.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

are out of luck on that front. It's like predicting what will happen in a poker game if you are just watching it and can't see the cards. You can explain after the fact but not predict. There are other situations, eg, preventive war where shifts in power can be anticipated, where prediction may be

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

a couple of thoughts here: (1) we are not going to be able to "predict war" the way we can predict where Saturn will be in X years, for all kinds of reasons. Including that when p.i. is important (eg, someone's true willingness to use force on some matter), it is privately known so third parties

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

increasing the variance of 1's beliefs about c2 implies weakly increasing risk that the eqm offer is rejected (war, here). (At least, I think this is true -- I work it out in course notes and could have made a mistake.)

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

Concerning comparative statics directly on "amount" of private information, there are some fairly though not totally generally implications. eg: In tili model where state 2 has p.i. about own costs c2, which state 1 thinks is distributed by a log concave distribution (which covers a lot),

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

Then any comparative statics on any exogenous parameter of the model (e.g., observable indices of relative power) gives you testable implications.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

Re your earlier claim: Take any model in which war occurs for some parameter values, due to p.i. and incentives to misrepresent it (in the sense that if had complete info war doesn't occur).

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 22/10/2023

I would think that "theory" would typically refer to the arguments for _why_ "X causes Y" rather than the proposition alone, and those arguments are in turn what one needs to consider to interpret or set up the regression formula. But maybe that's a long-winded way of saying what you said.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 22/10/2023

So not just empirical claim but causal claim, which I guess is what is meant by "->".

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 22/10/2023

yes. Or consider a theory that has as an implication that both x and z should be positively correlated with y in the data, but that the coefficient on x should diminish or go to zero if one adjusts for z.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 21/10/2023

Because these are not theories. (And don’t there exist actual theories such that y ~ x + z would be fine?)

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 16/10/2023

No idea how important this is in this case, but the organizational design problem of “connecting the dots” produced by a huge number of intel sources is usually underrated. This problem is not about psychology or deception.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 10/10/2023

LfL but always thought New Values was underappreciated.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 07/10/2023

Partly motivated by concern about Saudi-China relations. Not endorsing this at all, just saying.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 04/10/2023

I think that’s the 80s hanging on.

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 26/09/2023

That happened to me yesterday. Maybe they fixed it?

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Jim Fearon @jfearon.bsky.social · 20/09/2023

This is maybe the best how-to-use-a-hyphen I have seen.

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