International Relations

The idea of generativity in the realm of the social world expresses the notion that social phenomena are generated by the actions and thoughts of the individuals who constitute them, and nothing else ( link , link ). More specifically, the principle of generativity postulates that the properties and dynamic characteristics of social entities like structures, ideologies, knowledge systems, institutions, and economic systems are produced by the actions, thoughts, and dispositions of the set of individuals who make them up. There is no other kind of influence that contributes to the causal and dynamic properties of social entities. Begin with a population of individuals with such-and-so mental and behavioral characteristics; allow them to interact with each other over time; and the structures we observe emerge as a determinate consequence of these interactions. This view of the social world lends great ontological support to the methods associated with agent-based models ( link ). Here is...

According to David Halberstam in his outstanding history of the war in Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest , a prime cause of disastrous decision-making by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was an institutional imperative in the Defense Department to come up with a set of facts that conformed to what the President wanted to hear. Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were among the highest-level miscreants in Halberstam's account; they were determined to craft an assessment of the situation on the ground in Vietnam that conformed best with their strategic advice to the President. Ironically, a very similar dynamic led to one of modern China's greatest disasters, the Great Leap Forward famine in 1959. The Great Helmsman was certain that collective agriculture would be vastly more productive than private agriculture; and following the collectivization of agriculture, party officials in many provinces obliged this assumption by reporting inflated grain statistics throughout 1958 and 195...