Can WikiLeaks model work for the government

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange barricaded himself in a house near the university and began to work. In fits of creativity, he would write out flow diagrams for the system on the walls and doors, so as not to forget them. There was a bed in the kitchen, and he invited backpackers passing through campus to stay with him, in exchange for help building the site. “He wouldn’t sleep at all,” a person who was living in the house told me. “He wouldn’t eat.”

As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to “another country that has some beneficial laws,” Assange told me, where they are removed at “end-point machines” and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks “do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.” The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through “virtual tunnels” that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but “this is vastly more secure than any banking network.”

Before launching the site, Assange needed to show potential contributors that it was viable. One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”

-Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency

Related:
WikiLeaks on Twitter

Wikileaks and Iceland MPs propose 'journalism haven'

Now for something peaceful

Source: Embracing a Life of Solitude

“I have to collect firewood, rather than do some job that I have no idea what is the point, which I hate, and from which I am completely alienated,” he said. “Everything in my life feels full of meaning.”

Why is Mr Tufte going to Washington

I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I'll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.

-Mr Tufte

So Obama hired Edward Tufte;

Though often cast as a free-floating information guru, Mr. Tufte has a highly specific mission: on March 5, he was appointed by President Obama to a panel to advise the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which monitors the way the $787 billion in the stimulus package is being spent...

“Political practice today too often skips right by evidence,” he said by e-mail. “When I listen to True Believers (left or right) talk about the problems that governments are seeking to solve, I keep muttering to myself, ‘How boring, it’s more complicated than that.’ And those who best know that it’s more complicated than that are public servants.”

The board has two missions: to root out waste, fraud and abuse in spending and to inform the American public how the stimulus money is being spent...

In an e-mail message, Mr. Tufte recalled the meeting and said that generally his advice had been to add more information to the site so that a visitor could see things in context. “It shouldn’t look like a government Web site, and it shouldn’t look like a corporate Web site,” he said. “This is a reporting thing — about factual, credible reporting.”...

Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at George Mason University, has been monitoring the stimulus at his site, stimuluswatch.org.

“What we want is the raw data. We don’t need a beautiful site,” Mr. Brito said.

In fact, he says that recovery.gov is too flashy and too crowded, and uses maps too much instead of simple tables. “Tufte can do a lot of good here,” he said. “There is a lot of low-hanging fruit.”

The Secret to Happiness?

David Brooks writes;

If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.

If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).

Further Reading;
The Hidden Wealth of Nations by David Halpern

The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being
Derek Bok

The Winston Wolf of Public Management

An interesting profile of US Defense Secretary;

In his memoir Speech-less, Matt Latimer, a speechwriter for both Rumsfeld and Bush, describes Gates as "our Winston Wolf," the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction who comes to dispose of the bodies and take care of the bloody mess after an accidental killing. "Wolf was a case study of robotic efficiency, overseeing an elaborate cleanup while calmly drinking a cup of coffee," writes Latimer. "That's what President Bush wanted — a cold-blooded competent cleaner."

The cleaner quickly went to work. He walked into the Pentagon alone. Inheriting many former Rumsfeld aides, Gates told them on his first day that he wouldn't be firing anyone. There was no time for confirmations, and he was leaving that day for Iraq. Gates brought a sense of relief, a feeling that an adult was back in charge...

One of the things his staffers love about him is his common sense, I-don't-get-it attitude toward the stupidity of bureaucracy. Now that he's past worrying about climbing within that bureaucracy, he has the confidence to break it. At the height of the Iraq surge in 2007, which Gates supported, more than 100 soldiers a month were dying. It's almost impossible as an outsider to understand why the Pentagon would not want to build the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, that would have saved many of those soldiers' lives. Instead of budgeting for MRAPs, the Pentagon was still spending money on outdated weapon systems. So Gates bypassed the normal procurement process, created a special task force, went to Congress and got the money to build them. "Those vehicles saved hundreds of lives and limbs," says a senior Pentagon official...

The list of mindless bureaucratic obstacles that were hampering the war effort was dizzying. For example: military officers complained that there were not enough drones, Predators and unmanned reconnaissance in the air to help target insurgent cells. The holdup? Air Force pilots are taught to fly real planes, not drones. Each pilot costs about $1 million to train. And yet some staff sergeants in the Army had started operating the drones at a fraction of the price, with far fewer crashes. "If the Army is doing it safer and cheaper and able to produce more pilots faster, why aren't we doing it to that standard?" Gates asked. "This requires a cultural revolution in the Air Force," explained one of his staffers — which it got in 2008, after Gates fired the civilian and military leaders of the service for other reasons. Now the Air Force licenses junior officers to fly unmanned aircraft, and Gates has tripled the number of drones operating in the war zones...

Gates is a man of old-school habits: a Grey Goose at the end of the day and preferably steak or bacon cheeseburgers for lunch and dinner. He doesn't use a cell phone. He asked me during our interview if there was tape in my digital recorder. Gates keeps a box filled with index cards of quotes and anecdotes and one-liners he's collected over the years. His favorite comedians are both dead — George Carlin and W.C. Fields. Their sensibilities suit Gates' own — taking down institutions, puncturing pomp. He's even adopted some of their style. He loves to tell the same jokes about egos in Washington — "where people say, I'll double-cross that bridge when I get to it," and "the only place in the world you can see a prominent person walking down lovers' lane holding his own hand."...

At the height of the Iraq surge, Gates gave a speech to the Marine Corps Association. He began in Johnny Carson fashion with a long, meticulously timed story about Nixon's Secretary of Defense Mel Laird on a trip to see the Pope.

Laird was smoking a cigar, and Henry Kissinger told him to at least put it out before they went inside. "A couple of minutes into the Pope's remarks, Kissinger heard this little patting sound, and he looked over, and there was a wisp of smoke coming out of Laird's pocket. The Secretary of Defense was on fire. The American party heard this slapping and thought they were being cued to applaud. And so they did. And Henry later told us, 'God only knows what His Holiness thought, seeing the American Secretary of Defense immolating himself, and the entire American party applauding the fact.' "...

Like Obama, Gates can consume reams of information. His photographic memory is legendary. He is a voracious reader of history, spy novels and pulp fiction. He's subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club for 50 years. And he is careful, meticulously so. One decades-long colleague told me Gates will cancel a briefing if he hasn't done his homework. "Preparation for him is a cathartic experience," says his spokesman Morrell. He vents brutal answers to imaginary questions so he can be more diplomatic on the Hill. He's vigilant about the stagecraft of statecraft, even taking his own messy handwritten notes to meetings so his preparation can be seen...

What did Gates ask the President-elect? "I asked him if he could trust me."

OECD vs Fund's Relationship Management

OECD (2008) compares OECD peer reviews with IMF Board discussions and describes differences in focus, in methods of analysis and consequently, in the nature of interactions. The IMF process is characterized as a higher frequency exercise with a shorter-term focus and notes that the country is not necessarily expected to endorse the policy recommendations of a surveillance report, nor does it have much latitude to change or remove topics from a Staff Report. The OECD, on the other hand, engages in a much more intensive exchange with country authorities, both in missions and at headquarters when finalizing its Economic Surveys. It engages in a full day of discussions with the authorities joined by officials from other countries who contribute to the debate with their policy experience, after which the Secretariat works with the country subject to peer review over the course of a full day to finalize the document for publication. Thygesen acknowledges that this buy-in may result in a reduction of clarity in issues or key messages in the report. He also suggests that the peer review process only works well if there is a high and matched level of expertise brought by country representatives around the table so that the authorities undergoing the peer review can truly benefit from the discussion. OECD (2007) discusses the prerequisites of value sharing, mutual trust and credibility in the process adding that the peer review is as effective as the “peer pressure” stemming from the reviewer countries, and the willingness of the reviewed country to accept it

-A Comparative Study on Relationship Management

Assorted

Landsburg's Heroes of All Time

66 percent of the time

And it also occurred me that while students see the professor while he or she is teaching, they only witness about 66% of what goes into teaching.

Medical Statistics Don't Always Mean What They Seem to Mean

Paul Romer's Errors

Experiments in industrial policy

As much as fixed costs matter, the real barrier to firm growth in poor countries could be management. A good manager is partly one with training, experience, and a sense of best practice. A lot of a factory’s success comes down to management as a technology, though. Organizing a production floor, ensuring quality and efficient production: these are less a product of a single manager’s talent and more the product of decades of trial and error in manufacturing plants around the world. The problem: if you are running a firm in India or Mexico or elsewhere, the best practices probably haven’t filtered through.

2009 Quality of Life Index

Balance of Payments

Book Recommendation- for Predictioneers

The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future

Latin America's Finance Minister of the Year

Velasco, 48, applied the lessons learned from decades of economic failure in Latin America -- ones he said could also help the U.S. The current crisis followed “a massive regulatory failure in many advanced financial markets over the last decade or so,” Velasco said in an interview April 21 in his office overlooking the presidential palace in downtown Santiago...

Velasco, who runs 30 miles (48.3 kilometers) a week, is the son and grandson of national politicians. He received his higher education while living in the U.S. after Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship exiled his father from Chile in 1976 for criticizing the regime. Velasco earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and economics in 1982 and a master’s in international relations in 1984 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, according to his resume. He received a doctorate in economics from Columbia University in New York in 1989....

Velasco taught economics for most of the 1990s at NYU, according to his resume. From 2000 to 2006 he was a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked with Lawrence Summers, now U.S. President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council director.

“In this world, there are some people who are smart. There are some that are practical,” said Summers. “Andres Velasco is both.”...

Velasco “was always looking for the policy implications of what he was doing, which is very unique,” said Guillermo Calvo, a Columbia macroeconomist who hired Velasco as a teaching assistant. “He was one of the best, but you always sensed that he was going to eventually converge to politics.”

Summers, Calvo and Velasco will be panelists tomorrow at a seminar in Washington examining the effects of the global economic meltdown on Latin America.

-Harvard Peso Doctor Vindicated as Chile Evades Slump

Qualities of a Budget Chief

Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) says of Orszag, "The No. 1 qualification for a budget chief is command of details. And he has that in spades. This is a man who doesn't just read a spreadsheet, he lives a spreadsheet."

-Budget Chief Peter Orszag: Obama's 'Super-Nerd'

Effective Habits from the Budget Man

A profile of Peter Orszag in NYT;

“He’s made nerdy sexy,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.

Mr. Orszag, who grew up in Lexington, Mass., has always worked himself punishingly hard — a legacy, he says, from a math-professor father who glanced at test scores of 98 and asked about the 2 other points. “It was always, ‘When I was your age, I was a tenured professor,’ ” he said.

When he won a Marshall scholarship, his father congratulated him by admitting that the award was “not trivial.” Later he discovered that his father had once been turned down for the prize, which finances graduate study in Britain. (Mr. Orszag earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the London School of Economics.)

In classic political fashion, Mr. Orszag trained for Washington rivalry through family rivalry, not just with his father but also with his economist brothers. Peter, Michael and Jonathan Orszag have worked and written papers together and still compare electronic gadgets and their Princeton grade-point averages...

Friends say his dinner parties are notable for the meticulously chosen wines and the senators who attend. (Mr. Orszag, a divorced father of two, is so cozy with the Capitol Hill crowd that Senator Ron Wyden and his wife, Nancy Bass Wyden, found him a girlfriend.)...

So far, his main project has been the budget, drafted in meetings that began before the inauguration. For weeks after Mr. Obama took office, Mr. Orszag sat directly across the table from him in the Roosevelt Room. He began each session with a series of PowerPoint slides, defined the president’s options and constantly jotted down requests on notecards.

For someone with two BlackBerrys — work and personal — clipped to the small of his back, Mr. Orszag seems governed by little cards: the ones in his breast pocket for notes, another that lists his meetings, a tiny hand-lettered one that materializes to summon him to the Oval Office....

His own health care conversion occurred when a doctor told him several years ago that he was at risk for cardiovascular problems. Mr. Orszag changed his diet. Each day he eats the same egg whites for breakfast and salad topped with chicken for dinner, all from the White House mess.

He also began training for marathons, sometimes startling colleagues by appearing in their offices at day’s end in head-to-toe spandex.

Now he keeps two books on his desk: the teachings of Epictetus, a Greek Stoic philosopher who espoused dispassion and self-discipline, and “The Strenuous Life,” by Theodore Roosevelt, an ode to pushing oneself as hard as possible.

Schumpeter quote of the day

On his own, he performed daily exercises in calculus and tried to master advanced techniques such as matrix algebra. He even raised the question of a new type of math that would capture the dynamic changes he saw as the heart of capitalism. One diary entry of 1948 mentions, with a question mark "Evolutionary math?" - a tool that could do for his own system what conventional math had done for Walras's static equilibrium. But there was no evolutionary math at that time in sense that Schumpeter meant, and there is still not enough today to "operationalize" his system thoroughly. Schumpeter knew that he had little talent in mathmenatics, but he continued to challenge himself and enjoy the chase. "Whatever other advantages math may have," he wrote in his diary, "it is certainly the purest of human pleasures."

via Twenty Cent Paradigms

The No.2 at White House

He woke as usual at 5 a.m., swam a mile at the Y, read papers and was in the office at 7 for the senior staff meeting at 7:30. There was a meeting in the Situation Room about Afghanistan; a leadership meeting; a conversation with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada; a meeting with Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah; budget meetings; several conversations with the president...

Mr. Obama had settled on his fellow Chicagoan to be his chief of staff well before he was elected. He was drawn to Mr. Emanuel’s experience in both the White House and Congress and called him “the whole package” of political acumen, policy chops and pragmatism. He is also a skilled compromiser. “He knows there is a time in this business to drop the switchblades and make a deal,” said Representative Adam H. Putnam, Republican of Florida.

Mr. Emanuel initially resisted taking the job. He came around after Mr. Obama insisted, saying these were momentous times and that the awesome tasks he faced required Mr. Emanuel’s help. The president-elect also assured Mr. Emanuel that the position would be the functional equivalent of “a No. 2” or “right-hand man,” according to a person familiar with their exchanges...

Mr. Emanuel has been equally solicitous of Republicans in Congress (who also have been given access to Mr. Emanuel’s private contact information). On days he does not swim, he works out, and conducts business, at the House gym: 25 minutes on the bike, 20 minutes on the elliptical, 120 situps, 55 push-ups and many sweaty conversations with his former colleagues. In a recent encounter there, for instance, with Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, Mr. Emanuel secured his support for Leon E. Panetta to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Emanuel has also served as the administration’s chief headhunter. When the Office of Management and Budget director, Peter R. Orszag, had doubts about taking the job, Mr. Emanuel went into his default mode — jackhammering away at him, tracking him down in Hong Kong. “You can’t sit on the sidelines; you’ve got to come inside,” Mr. Emanuel told him.

Asked if “relentless” would be a fair characterization of Mr. Emanuel’s recruitment method, Mr. Orszag said, simply: “He’s Rahm. Come on.”

-Obama’s Partisan, Profane Confidant Reins It In

Assorted

Cato Journal, Volume 28, Number 3, Fall 2008

Small States: Not Handicapped and Under-Aided, but Advantaged and Over-Aided

Cold Case Files: The Athenian Grain Merchants, 386 B.C.

Financial decisions are heavily influenced by early experiences

Ms Malmendier and Mr Nagel examined detailed survey data about American households’ finances between 1964 and 2004. Because they knew when the people in the sample were born, they could calculate the average stockmarket returns and inflation that individuals had experienced over the course of their lives. And because the data tracked financial choices over time, they could also control for factors like age, which matters because the composition of people’s portfolios is likely to change as they grow older.

Their work confirmed the Depression babies idea. Under identical market conditions, and controlling for age, people who had experienced lower stockmarket returns over the course of their lives put a smaller fraction of their money into stocks than people who had lived, on average, in times when stocks had done better.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
By Liaquat Ahamed

These early central bankers were an odd lot. Norman, who dabbled with spiritualism, apparently informed a colleague that he could walk through walls. He suffered regular nervous breakdowns, and was actually on sick leave when Britain left the gold standard again in 1931. Strong suffered from permanent ill health and was often affected by the generous use of morphine to control pain. He died in October 1928 before the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, but Mr Ahamed does not appear to believe that things would have turned out any differently had he lived: in a crushing conclusion, he writes that the Great Depression was “the direct result of a series of misjudgments by economic policymakers…by any measure the most dramatic series of collective blunders ever made by financial officials.” Looking back in 1948, Norman’s judgment was no less harsh. “We achieved absolutely nothing,” he said, “except that we collected a lot of money from a lot of poor devils and gave it to the four winds.”...

But the most original solution was that of President Franklin Roosevelt, soon after his inauguration in 1933. Mr Ahamed resurrects a 59-year-old agricultural economist from Cornell University by the name of George Warren, whose study of long-term trends in commodity prices led him to believe that, since falling prices were associated with depression, recovery ought to be encouraged by rising prices. The president liked the idea and decided to devalue the dollar—despite vigorous opposition from the gold bugs—simply by increasing the gold price. One of his own economic advisers lamented: “This is the end of Western civilisation.” For a number of weeks, the president would consult his advisers over boiled eggs at breakfast and randomly drive up the gold price, beginning at $31.36 an ounce until it settled at $35. By then a recovery was under way.

Financial Modelers' Manifesto

~ I will remember that I didn't make the world, and it doesn't satisfy my equations.

~ Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics.

~ I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so.

~ Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights.

~ I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension.

Fuzzy Inaugural Math;

In my print column this week, I examine whether president-elect Barack Obama will break the record for inaugural crowd size, and if he does, whether we’ll know for sure. The Washington, D.C., mayor publicly aired a projected crowd size of up to four million soon after the election, but today no government agency will get behind an official number, nor is anyone planning to produce an official count on Inauguration Day.

McKinsey on decision making

Take this new McKinsey survey on how companies make good decisions, on issues such as whether they should enter a new market or buy a competitor

Questioning Techniques for Productive Problem Solving

Obama at GMU;

Only government can break the cycle that is crippling our economy, where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs, which leads to even less spending, where an inability to lend and borrow stops growth and leads to even less credit.

Save or Spend: Connecting the Personal to the Macro

Memo to President-Elect Obama: Three Steps for Restoring Democracy to Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe's Funny Money and the Astrophysics of Hyperinflation

The Best Stimulus?

Electricity cost puzzles

Obama Nominees, Take Note;

Remember that most of the hearing will be more about the questioners than about you. Prepare a short opening statement -- no more than five minutes -- outlining the president's goals and your goals for the department. Submit a longer "think piece" for the record.

Practice over and over, even when talking with your spouse or neighbors, saying: "Mr. Chairman . . . if confirmed . . . working with this committee I will . . . ."

While prepping, develop an answer to the one question you do not want asked. Count on someone asking it. What in your background might haunt you if made public? That, too, surely will be raised.

Six critical competencies the new political appointees will need to succeed;

4. Leading Others

A presidential appointment is always about leadership. And leadership is about attracting and motivating followers. Author Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, "If you want people to build a ship, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." An appointee should build networks of career employees, stakeholders, members of Congress, Capitol Hill staffers and private citizens - and then inspire them to launch the ship of presidential goals.

Federal Reserve Assets Decline

Measuring the trilemma's configurations over time

Acemoglu: The Models are Broken

Memo to Self

Temptation Blocker: a Windows program to prevent you from using any other program (especially good to prevent you from opening your Email client or Web browser).

Time Tracker: An extension to the FireFox browser that tracks how much time you waste on various sites.

via Dan Goldstein

How to earn respect and be a great scholar

Stephen Malt's tributes to his mentor, Samuel P. Huntington;

Last but not least, Huntington was simply a great man. Not just because of his remarkable career as scholar, teacher, mentor, magazine-founder, academic administrator, foreign-policy practitioner, and public intellectual, but because he had a rare capacity to engage with ideas he didn’t share and to respect those who disagreed with him. I took issue with him on several occasions—and didn’t pull any punches when I did—his reaction was to answer my criticisms fairly and forcefully and then help recruit me to Harvard. Needless to say, this is not typical behavior in the thin-skinned world of academe. John Mearsheimer and I dedicated a book to him not because he agreed with our thesis (though some of his own writings contain similar warnings about the distorting influence that ethnic groups could have on U.S. foreign policy), but because his willingness to say what he thought even when it might be impolitic was an inspiration for anyone who tries to grapple with the complex political challenges of our era. I will miss him, and so will his admirers (and critics) around the world.

From an earlier tribute;

I was not Sam’s student, but came to know him first as an intellectual force through his writings, then as a rather intimidating presence when I was a research fellow at Harvard in the 1980s, and later as friend and eventual colleague. To me, Sam’s true greatness is not measured by his scholarly contributions alone—though they were vast—but by his deep commitment to the life of the mind and his conviction that scholars should focus their efforts on the core political and social problems of the day. His work was often (always?) controversial, because he invariably tackled big questions and wasn’t afraid to offer provocative and sometimes unfashionable answers. In a world where most academics shun controversy and thereby render themselves irrelevant, Sam stood out. He knew that writing about politics was not a popularity contest, and that spirited but civil debate was essential to a healthy democracy. And it was impossible not to be inspired by his dedication and discipline.

Perhaps most remarkably, Sam was among the most intellectually tolerant academics I have known. He held strong views and defended them vigorously, but unlike most people in my profession, he didn’t mind if you disagreed. I can testify to this personally: when his “Clash of Civilizations” thesis was first published in article form, I debated him on this topic at the annual meeting of the American Political Science and I subsequently wrote a sharply critical review of the book for Foreign Policy magazine. Because Sam always loved a good argument—particularly if it was about substance and not ad hominem—he never held this against me and we grew closer as a result. Indeed, he subsequently helped recruit me to Harvard and he and his wife Nancy made a special effort to welcome us here. One could hardly imagine a better role model.

People to Watch

Retired Army Lt. Col. John Nagl

Related:
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam

Quitting Smoking is not easy

Today, 21 percent of Americans smoke, down from 28 percent in 1988. Off-again-on-again smoking and serial quitting are common, as is the long-term use of nicotine gum and patches.

“It takes the average smoker 8 to 10 times before he is able to quit successfully,” said Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, director of the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the University of California, San Francisco.

-Lessons for Other Smokers in Obama’s Efforts to Quit

How to be a Mindful Leader

"The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others'

Mind Manager Tip of the Day