State of the Nation After 9/11/09

Oh man, where to begin.  I think I’ve been a little frustrated lately because I haven’t written in a while.  So let’s get it out there so I can move on.
National Tea Party, 9/12
This last Saturday was the National Tea Party Day in DC.  The Tea Party is a rallying cry for essentially Jeffersonian anti-big [...]

Labor Costs

One of the topics I want to study more about is what we’re all going to do in the future for work and jobs.  Part of the sharp upheaval of the 20th century of rapid economic development was that a stable career was not sustainable except for certain professions.  It is true in the US [...]

Surpluses and Shortages

I’m moving out of my Georgetown rowhouse and just started my job, so I’ve been a little busy and haven’t been able to write much.  That’s one reason Twitter is so great — I’ve been able to just send some quick tweets (the other reason it’s so great is its generativity (see Jonathan Zittrain) — [...]

Big, Interesting, Mysterious Pragmatic Problems

I’ve just finished a master’s program full of amazing classmates seeking policy solutions to some of the toughest problems the US and international institutions have to currently deal with.  For my part, I deeply love to spend a lot of my recreational thinking time searching for gaps in solutions to problems — entrepreneurial thinking — [...]

Life Update Before Graduation

I am about to graduate from my master’s program but before I can do so, I have to write about 70 pages worth of papers.  25 for international negotiation (Iran), 20 for comparative democratization (Iraq), 15 for policies for poverty reduction (Ecuador’s conditional cash transfer program), and another 5-10 pages for a negotiation simulation after-action [...]

Spring Semester, 2009

Here are my classes for my final semester at Georgetown:
Comparative Democratization (GOVT-549)
This course will serve as an introduction to the vast literature on democratization in comparative politics. Democratization is studied here from the perspective of the transition and consolidation processes of the late 20th century. The principal goal of the course is to understand the [...]

Fall Semester, 2008

The fall semester was pretty grueling.
My classes weren’t hard in the same way that International Trade and Development Orthodoxies were for me.  That is, there wasn’t a ton of practicum to get tripped up on.  But there were a lot of moving parts.  I was doing research for the Yahoo!/ISD fellowship and was also doing [...]

Idea for a Georgetown MSFS Start-Up Fund

Hi.  I am currently a second-year student in the Masters of Science in Foreign Service program at Georgetown University.  The program is housed within the School of Foreign Service, one of the best international affairs programs and international development programs in the world.  A list of alumni is at Wikipedia.
I am considering an idea to [...]

Michael Porter on US Competitiveness

Michael Porter, the go-to-guy for studying firms’ competitiveness, wrote an article for Business Week about the need for a strategic economic policy in the US to maintain its competitiveness.
I’m not going to write too much on this but I thought for a few reasons that this article was important enough to blog about because:
1) I’m [...]

Why I Chose Development

When I tell people I’m studying development at grad school, their eyes glaze over.  What does this mean?
Are they confused as to whether I mean business development as in getting new clients?  Or as in employee training?  Do they only understand what I mean if I say “international development” instead?
Do they know what the field [...]