The Gray Area with Sean Illing cover image

Francis Fukuyama on whether America's democracy is decaying

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

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The Importance of Causal Inference in Political Science

Social science has been trying to chase the natural sciences for decades and they really would like to turn what they do into a species of natural science where you can have causal inferences that are very very rigorously supported by empirical evidence. It turns out you can do this but only if you make the question that you're trying to answer extremely small and so that's really I think where the field is today. What did you learn from Ronald Reagan's presidency? The Iraq war was a terrible overestimation of American power and the American ability to shape events in a very culturally different part of the world.

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