Shiping Tang is Fudan Distinguished Professor and Dr. Seaker Chan Chair Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
China has employed various industrial policies and science & technology (S&T) policies in its eff... more China has employed various industrial policies and science & technology (S&T) policies in its effort of catching up with the world technology frontier. This paper evaluates the effect of China's industrial policies and S&T policies with a newly constructed measurement of policy intensity and a national database of firm surveys. We argue that whether China's industrial policies and S&T policies contribute to productivity growth in an industry is conditioned by the relative development stage of that industry to that of the world frontier. Specifically, we argue that China's industrial policies and S&T policies contribute to greater productivity growth in globally emerging high-tech industries than in domestically catching-up and domestically mature industries. We then provide empirical evidence for our hypotheses. Our study identifies a new driver behind China's economic success in the past decades.
Challenging and improving upon existing studies, we develop a more integrated and fine-grained th... more Challenging and improving upon existing studies, we develop a more integrated and fine-grained theory regarding oil and the onset of ethnic war and present systematic quantitative evidences for our theory. We contend that it is the ethno-geographical location of oil rather than oil income, rent, or relative distribution/concentration that really connects oil with the onset of ethnic war. When the core territory of a minority group has a significant amount of oil, the minority group is more likely to rebel against a central state dominated by another group and oil is strongly associated with the onset of ethnic war. In contrast, when oil is located with the core territory of a dominant majority group or that a country has a fairly even distribution of ethnic groups and no group can lay an exclusive claim to oil, oil is not associated with a higher risk of ethnic war. We construct two new indicators regarding the ethno-geographical location of oil from two different sources and test our hypotheses with the two new indicators. Statistical results strongly support our hypotheses. Together with evidences from case studies with process-tracing that demonstrate the mechanisms singled out by our theory really did operate in driving ethnic wars in an accompanying paper, we provide a more complete and close-todefinitive answer to the question whether and how oil is associated with the onset of ethnic war. Our exercise also points to a broader theory regarding the ethnogeography of commodity-type mineral resource with the onset of ethnic war. Keywords Ethno-geography Á Oil Á Location Á Ethnic war Á Onset H. Li and S. Tang contribute equally to the paper and their names are listed alphabetically.
This article contributes both empirically and methodologically.
Empirically, we seek to advance o... more This article contributes both empirically and methodologically. Empirically, we seek to advance our understanding of an important puzzle: does oil cause ethnic war? Methodologically, we seek to identify more precisely the different weaknesses and strengths of the quantitative approach and case studies with process-tracing by explicitly comparing results from these two approaches on the same empirical question. We thus subject the statistical association between the ethnogeographical location of oil and the onset of ethnic war to test with process-tracing. Examining several pathway cases, we find that oil has rarely been a deep cause of ethnic war. Instead, the ethnogeographical location of oil either reignites dormant conflict that has deeper roots in ethnic resentment and hatred or intensifies ongoing conflict, mostly by facilitating the operation of two interconnectedmechanisms. Our study echoes the notion that quantitative exercises alone often cannot establish specific causal mechanisms or how contextual factors impact the operation of these mechanisms, and it is precisely on these two key fronts that qualitative exercises possess critical advantages. Hence, quantitative methods and qualitative methods are complementary rather than competitive. Our study also yields important policy implications for preventing and managing ethnic conflict in countries with richmineral resource.
The article develops a game theoretical model for the evolution of various regionalism projects. ... more The article develops a game theoretical model for the evolution of various regionalism projects. It contends that regionalism in the post-World War II (WWII) world has almost always evolved in the shadow of extraregional great powers (EGPs), with the United States being the principal, but not the only, EGP. As such, how regional great powers (RGPs) and small-to-medium states (SMSs) within a region interact with each other in the shadow of EGPs are critical to the evolution of different regionalism projects. This setup leads to a game theoretical framework. Among the various regionalism projects, regionalism in Central Asia is an intriguing case. The model developed in this article implies that the sometimes competitive and sometimes cooperative interaction among SMSs, EGPs, and RGPs can best explain the historical dynamics of the regionalism project in Central Asia. In particular, the model explains why the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the regionalism project that has been proclaimed to be dead or close to be dead by many pundits, has become the more resilient and visible among the many regionalism projects within the region. The model also applies to other regionalism projects.
The coming of the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (LUCA) was the singular watershed event in the... more The coming of the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (LUCA) was the singular watershed event in the making of the biotic world. If the coming of LUCA marked the crossing of the "Darwinian Threshold", then pre-LUCA evolution must have been Pre-Darwinian and at least partly non-Darwinian. But how did Pre-Darwinian evolution before LUCA actually operate? I broaden our understanding of the central mechanism of biological evolution (i.e., variation-selection-inheritance) and then extend this broadened understanding to its natural starting point: the origin(s) of the First Universal Cellular Ancestors (FUCAs) before LUCA. My hypothesis centers upon vesicles' making-and-remaking as variation and competition as selection. More specifically, I argue that vesicles' acquisition and merger, via breaking-and-repacking, proto-endocytosis, protoendosymbiosis, and other similar processes had been a central force of both variation and selection in the pre-Darwinian epoch. These new perspectives shed important new light upon the origin of FUCAs and their subsequent evolution into LUCA.
If the coming of the last universal cellular ancestor (LUCA) marks the crossing of the "Darwinian... more If the coming of the last universal cellular ancestor (LUCA) marks the crossing of the "Darwinian Threshold" (Woese in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99:8742-8747, 2002), pre-LUCA evolution must have been pre-Darwinian. But how did pre-Darwinian evolution actually operate? Bringing together and extending insights from both earlier and more recent contributions, this essay advances three principal arguments regarding the pre-Darwinian evolution. First, in the pre-Darwinian epoch, survival essentially meant persistence within the prebiotic system, and it depended mostly on chemical variation and interaction. Second, selection operated upon four different properties: chemical; chemical-physical; vesicles' capacities in absorbing, engulfing, and merging; and protocells' coupling of metabolism, replication, and division. Third, division evolved from a state without tight coupling of replication with division to a state of tight coupling. Eventually, protocells with a tight coupling of replication with division became the First Universal Cellular Ancestors (FUCAs) and then LUCA.
Election forecasting has been traditionally dominated by subjective surveys and polls or methods ... more Election forecasting has been traditionally dominated by subjective surveys and polls or methods centered upon them. We have developed a novel platform for forecasting elections based on agent-based modeling (ABM), and it is entirely independent from surveys and polls. The platform uses statistical results from objective data along with simulation models to capture how voters have voted in past elections and how they are likely to vote in an upcoming election. We then screen for models that can reproduce results that are very close to the actual results of past elections. Subsequently, we can then use these models to forecast an upcoming election by combining extrapolated data from historical demographic data and updated data on economic growth, employment, crime rate, and other factors. Here, we report the results of two experiments of live electoral forecasting in the past year: the 2020 general election in Taiwan and six states in the 2020 general election in the United States. Our mostly objective method may transform how elections are forecasted and studied.
The central mechanism of biological evolution, variation-selection-inheritance (VSI), is one of t... more The central mechanism of biological evolution, variation-selection-inheritance (VSI), is one of the most universal mechanisms known. Much of our understanding of VSI, however, has been dominated by the Neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis with a rather narrow understanding of what constitutes variation, selection, and inheritance. This unduly narrow understanding of VSI might have been a key cause behind our failure to adequately explain some critical puzzles in biological evolution, from the origin of the first cell to the origin of the eukaryotes, the puzzling biology of metabolism, apoptosis, aging, and cancer in metazoan. I broaden our understanding of VSI, in a spirit that is somewhat similar to several recent contributions and then extend this broadened view of VSI to its "natural" starting point: the origin of the First Universal Cell Ancestor (FUCA). I advance three principal arguments. First, survival comes before replication. Before the coming of reproducer and replicator, there must be survivors, to paraphrase Szathmary and Maynard Smith (1997). Second, natural selection, especially the non-Darwinian kind, can operate without replication or even metabolism, as long as different molecules, complexes, and vesicles have differential survival rate within a system. Third, merger and acquisition, via breaking-and-re-encapsulation, endocytosis, endosymbiosis, and processes similar to them, had been a far more powerful force of variation and selection in the pre-Darwinian period of evolution that led to LUCA and long before eukaryogenesis. Endosymbiosis therefore had been a far more foundational force than even Lynn Margulis and many of her supporters have appreciated. Our thesis thus goes beyond Woese's emphasis of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) and actually subsumes HGT with Margulis' emphasis of endosymbiosis. Combing these three new perspectives with other perspectives and evidence sheds important new light upon the origin of FUCA, the singular water-shedding moment in the evolution of life.
Two competing approaches, namely the New Mechanistic Philosophy (NMP) and the counterfactual and ... more Two competing approaches, namely the New Mechanistic Philosophy (NMP) and the counterfactual and interventionist ("CF+I") approach, have dominated recent debates in philosophy of science. This article argues that the two approaches are underpinned by two logics of experiment, especially in biology and medicine but also in chemistry. More concretely there are two types and hence two logics of experiment: a mechanism-oriented one and a populational one. The former seeks to identify and establish mechanisms or pathways (including entities and activities) behind biological phenomena, whereas the latter seeks to establish whether and how much a particular factor or variable impacts an outcome at the populational level. These two types of experiment actually operate upon and reflect two logics, and the word "experiment" means quite different things for them. Explicitly differentiating the two logics of experiment yields critical implications for a host of philosophical issues, from the role of counterfactuals in causal reasoning and explanations to whether natural selection is a mechanism and whether the Hodgkin-Huxley model is explanatory.
This article advances three principal projections about the future international order(s). First,... more This article advances three principal projections about the future international order(s). First, the more rule-based international order will persist, but it will be increasingly less West-centric. Second, the shaping of international order will become more bottom-up and contested, rather than mostly top-down and mostly imposed as it used to be. Third, regional orders will become more critical now that the momentum toward an Americanized global order has stalled and may never regain its lost momentum. In this sense, the future international order will become more regionalized and fragmented. If my projection is a valid possibility, its potential implications are profound. To begin with, there will be much more competition for making rules beyond the West, though with less violence. Second, interregional coordination and cooperation will become more critical. Third, the notion of the West as a unified bloc may no longer be sufficient or even always productive for moving toward a better governed international order.
I identify idea, action, and outcome as the three key objects of social sciences and explaining t... more I identify idea, action, and outcome as the three key objects of social sciences and explaining them as the three key tasks of social sciences. I show that our failure to grasp the ontological differences of the three objects and the fact that explaining them may require different epistemological stands and methodological tools has been a key cause behind the sterility of many of epistemological and methodological debates. Explicitly differentiating the three objects and grasping the fact that explaining them may require different epistemological stands and methodological tools therefore provides us with a better picture about the empirical challenges of social sciences and paves the way toward more scientific progresses. Our discussion also holds important pedagogical value.
Bringing together the classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarch... more Bringing together the classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy’s unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend that the channel of liberty-to-innovation is the most critical channel in which democracy holds a unique advantage over autocracy in promoting growth, especially during the stage of growth via innovation. Our theory thus predicts that democracy holds a positive but indirect effect upon growth via the channel of liberty-to-innovation, conditioned by the level of economic development. We then present quantitative evidence for our theory. To our best knowledge, we are the first to propose such an indirect and conditional effect of democracy upon economic development and provide systematic evidences. Our study promises to integrate and reconcile many seemingly unrelated and often contradictory theories and evidence regarding regime and growth, including providing a possible explanation for the inconclusive results from regressing overall regime score against the rate of economic growth or change in level of GDP per capita.
Bringing together classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, e... more Bringing together classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy’s unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend that the channel of liberty-to-innovation is the most critical channel in which democracy holds a unique advantage over autocracy in promoting growth, especially during the stage of growth via innovation. Because all human societies are hierarchical and hierarchy facilitates growth by bringing stability and order yet harms innovation and growth by demanding obedience to authority, an economy must strike a balance between maintaining stability and facilitating innovation. Democracy achieves this balance by protecting liberty whereas autocracy sacrifices innovation for stability. Democracy thus does hold a unique advantage in promoting growth over autocracy, but this advantage is indirect, channel-specific, and conditional. Evidences from three historical cases demonstrate that although key scientific breakthroughs can indeed pop up under autocracies, democracy is a necessary, though insufficient, condition for protecting major scientific breakthroughs that may challenge orthodoxies.
As an “East Asian Developmental State” (EADS) with a long socialist legacy, China regularly deplo... more As an “East Asian Developmental State” (EADS) with a long socialist legacy, China regularly deploys industrial and science & technology (S&T) policies in order to “create winners” in key industries. Combining an original dataset on China’s industrial and S&T policies with an original dataset on Chinese firms’ performance, we demonstrate that China’s industrial and S&T policies have indeed succeeded in creating winners in certain industries. By providing the EADS model with positive econometric evidence for the first time, our study also yields critical policy implications for medium to large developing countries to craft their industrial and S&T policies.
How the social system impacts agents is a central problématique in sociology. I argue that the so... more How the social system impacts agents is a central problématique in sociology. I argue that the social system impacts agents via six distinct though interacting channels: constraining and enabling by purely material forces, constraining/enabling by the interplay of material and ideational forces, learning, artificial selection, constituting/constructing, and " anti-socialization ". Explicitly identifying the six channels and underscoring their interactions adds clarity and coherence to our understanding about how the social system shapes agents. The discussion sheds new lights on old and new debates, from the poverty of structural functionalism and the rational choice approach to the promises of figurational/relational sociology. The framework also points to directions for future theoretical and empirical endeavors, from how to link the " macro " with the " micro " and the " (external) society " with the " (internal) individual " to how to synthesize the two theories of identity and how to appreciate the impact upon agents of mega-trends in the social system.
The wealth of nations must be regulated by two different circumstances; first, the skill, dexteri... more The wealth of nations must be regulated by two different circumstances; first, the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labor is generally applied; and secondly, the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labor, and that of those who are not so employed. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Economics growth depends both upon technological knowledge about things and living creatures, and also upon social knowledge about man and his relations with his fellowmen. Abstract The economics of growth centered on technological knowledge in endogenous growth models and the new institutional economics of growth centered on institutions have largely chartered their separate courses so far. In this paper, we construct a new growth model that brings the two economics of growth together by first bringing the quality of the stock of knowledge and the quality of economic institutions into an endogenous growth model and then making the model an evolutionary one via competition and selection of agents with different institutions. Our new model, illustrated with historical data and agent-based modeling (ABM) simulations, nicely accounts for two key stylized facts of economic growth: the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the " Great Divergences " thereafter. Our new model also makes it clear that the most critical factor shaping economic performance across time and space is the (mis-)allocation of production factors by political decisions: Who, under what institutions and power relationship, decides to deploy what knowledge and other production factors to make what. As such, the science of economic growth must be political economy with power/politics rather than neoclassical economics without power/politics.
Ashraf and Galor (2012) advanced the bold thesis that genetic diversity within different human po... more Ashraf and Galor (2012) advanced the bold thesis that genetic diversity within different human populations has been a foundational determinant of long-run economic development. We show that their results are not robust after controlling for a key missing variable –the Eurasia dummy. After controlling for the Eurasia dummy, all indicators of genetic diversity lose statistical significance in regressions with indicators of economic development as dependent variables. Ashraf and Galor’s statistical results merely “reflect” – literally – Eurasia’s unique advantage in supporting economic development that was mostly based on settled agriculture until about AD1500. Keywords: Eurasia Advantage, Jared Diamond, genetic diversity, economic development.
Ashraf and Galor (2012) advanced the bold thesis that genetic diversity within different human po... more Ashraf and Galor (2012) advanced the bold thesis that genetic diversity within different human populations has been a foundational determinant of long-run economic development. We show that their results are not robust after controlling for a key missing variable –the Eurasia dummy. After controlling for the Eurasia dummy, all indicators of genetic diversity lose statistical significance in regressions with indicators of economic development as dependent variables. Ashraf and Galor’s statistical results merely “reflect” – literally – Eurasia’s unique advantage in supporting economic development that was mostly based on settled agriculture until about AD1500. Keywords: Eurasia Advantage, Jared Diamond, genetic diversity, economic development.
President Acharya should be congratulated for advancing the agenda of " global International Rela... more President Acharya should be congratulated for advancing the agenda of " global International Relations (hereafter, IR) ". I have long shared Amitav's conviction that in order for IR to be more relevant for the real world, we need an IR enriched by a diversity of theoretical perspectives, a diversity of geographical focus, and a diversity of scholars from different ethnic, national, geographical background. Because the life blood of science is actually diversity or variation of ideas, I do not think that the scientific and the ethical ground for a global IR is really disputable. Below, I shall focus mostly on practical matters.
China has employed various industrial policies and science & technology (S&T) policies in its eff... more China has employed various industrial policies and science & technology (S&T) policies in its effort of catching up with the world technology frontier. This paper evaluates the effect of China's industrial policies and S&T policies with a newly constructed measurement of policy intensity and a national database of firm surveys. We argue that whether China's industrial policies and S&T policies contribute to productivity growth in an industry is conditioned by the relative development stage of that industry to that of the world frontier. Specifically, we argue that China's industrial policies and S&T policies contribute to greater productivity growth in globally emerging high-tech industries than in domestically catching-up and domestically mature industries. We then provide empirical evidence for our hypotheses. Our study identifies a new driver behind China's economic success in the past decades.
Challenging and improving upon existing studies, we develop a more integrated and fine-grained th... more Challenging and improving upon existing studies, we develop a more integrated and fine-grained theory regarding oil and the onset of ethnic war and present systematic quantitative evidences for our theory. We contend that it is the ethno-geographical location of oil rather than oil income, rent, or relative distribution/concentration that really connects oil with the onset of ethnic war. When the core territory of a minority group has a significant amount of oil, the minority group is more likely to rebel against a central state dominated by another group and oil is strongly associated with the onset of ethnic war. In contrast, when oil is located with the core territory of a dominant majority group or that a country has a fairly even distribution of ethnic groups and no group can lay an exclusive claim to oil, oil is not associated with a higher risk of ethnic war. We construct two new indicators regarding the ethno-geographical location of oil from two different sources and test our hypotheses with the two new indicators. Statistical results strongly support our hypotheses. Together with evidences from case studies with process-tracing that demonstrate the mechanisms singled out by our theory really did operate in driving ethnic wars in an accompanying paper, we provide a more complete and close-todefinitive answer to the question whether and how oil is associated with the onset of ethnic war. Our exercise also points to a broader theory regarding the ethnogeography of commodity-type mineral resource with the onset of ethnic war. Keywords Ethno-geography Á Oil Á Location Á Ethnic war Á Onset H. Li and S. Tang contribute equally to the paper and their names are listed alphabetically.
This article contributes both empirically and methodologically.
Empirically, we seek to advance o... more This article contributes both empirically and methodologically. Empirically, we seek to advance our understanding of an important puzzle: does oil cause ethnic war? Methodologically, we seek to identify more precisely the different weaknesses and strengths of the quantitative approach and case studies with process-tracing by explicitly comparing results from these two approaches on the same empirical question. We thus subject the statistical association between the ethnogeographical location of oil and the onset of ethnic war to test with process-tracing. Examining several pathway cases, we find that oil has rarely been a deep cause of ethnic war. Instead, the ethnogeographical location of oil either reignites dormant conflict that has deeper roots in ethnic resentment and hatred or intensifies ongoing conflict, mostly by facilitating the operation of two interconnectedmechanisms. Our study echoes the notion that quantitative exercises alone often cannot establish specific causal mechanisms or how contextual factors impact the operation of these mechanisms, and it is precisely on these two key fronts that qualitative exercises possess critical advantages. Hence, quantitative methods and qualitative methods are complementary rather than competitive. Our study also yields important policy implications for preventing and managing ethnic conflict in countries with richmineral resource.
The article develops a game theoretical model for the evolution of various regionalism projects. ... more The article develops a game theoretical model for the evolution of various regionalism projects. It contends that regionalism in the post-World War II (WWII) world has almost always evolved in the shadow of extraregional great powers (EGPs), with the United States being the principal, but not the only, EGP. As such, how regional great powers (RGPs) and small-to-medium states (SMSs) within a region interact with each other in the shadow of EGPs are critical to the evolution of different regionalism projects. This setup leads to a game theoretical framework. Among the various regionalism projects, regionalism in Central Asia is an intriguing case. The model developed in this article implies that the sometimes competitive and sometimes cooperative interaction among SMSs, EGPs, and RGPs can best explain the historical dynamics of the regionalism project in Central Asia. In particular, the model explains why the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the regionalism project that has been proclaimed to be dead or close to be dead by many pundits, has become the more resilient and visible among the many regionalism projects within the region. The model also applies to other regionalism projects.
The coming of the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (LUCA) was the singular watershed event in the... more The coming of the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (LUCA) was the singular watershed event in the making of the biotic world. If the coming of LUCA marked the crossing of the "Darwinian Threshold", then pre-LUCA evolution must have been Pre-Darwinian and at least partly non-Darwinian. But how did Pre-Darwinian evolution before LUCA actually operate? I broaden our understanding of the central mechanism of biological evolution (i.e., variation-selection-inheritance) and then extend this broadened understanding to its natural starting point: the origin(s) of the First Universal Cellular Ancestors (FUCAs) before LUCA. My hypothesis centers upon vesicles' making-and-remaking as variation and competition as selection. More specifically, I argue that vesicles' acquisition and merger, via breaking-and-repacking, proto-endocytosis, protoendosymbiosis, and other similar processes had been a central force of both variation and selection in the pre-Darwinian epoch. These new perspectives shed important new light upon the origin of FUCAs and their subsequent evolution into LUCA.
If the coming of the last universal cellular ancestor (LUCA) marks the crossing of the "Darwinian... more If the coming of the last universal cellular ancestor (LUCA) marks the crossing of the "Darwinian Threshold" (Woese in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99:8742-8747, 2002), pre-LUCA evolution must have been pre-Darwinian. But how did pre-Darwinian evolution actually operate? Bringing together and extending insights from both earlier and more recent contributions, this essay advances three principal arguments regarding the pre-Darwinian evolution. First, in the pre-Darwinian epoch, survival essentially meant persistence within the prebiotic system, and it depended mostly on chemical variation and interaction. Second, selection operated upon four different properties: chemical; chemical-physical; vesicles' capacities in absorbing, engulfing, and merging; and protocells' coupling of metabolism, replication, and division. Third, division evolved from a state without tight coupling of replication with division to a state of tight coupling. Eventually, protocells with a tight coupling of replication with division became the First Universal Cellular Ancestors (FUCAs) and then LUCA.
Election forecasting has been traditionally dominated by subjective surveys and polls or methods ... more Election forecasting has been traditionally dominated by subjective surveys and polls or methods centered upon them. We have developed a novel platform for forecasting elections based on agent-based modeling (ABM), and it is entirely independent from surveys and polls. The platform uses statistical results from objective data along with simulation models to capture how voters have voted in past elections and how they are likely to vote in an upcoming election. We then screen for models that can reproduce results that are very close to the actual results of past elections. Subsequently, we can then use these models to forecast an upcoming election by combining extrapolated data from historical demographic data and updated data on economic growth, employment, crime rate, and other factors. Here, we report the results of two experiments of live electoral forecasting in the past year: the 2020 general election in Taiwan and six states in the 2020 general election in the United States. Our mostly objective method may transform how elections are forecasted and studied.
The central mechanism of biological evolution, variation-selection-inheritance (VSI), is one of t... more The central mechanism of biological evolution, variation-selection-inheritance (VSI), is one of the most universal mechanisms known. Much of our understanding of VSI, however, has been dominated by the Neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis with a rather narrow understanding of what constitutes variation, selection, and inheritance. This unduly narrow understanding of VSI might have been a key cause behind our failure to adequately explain some critical puzzles in biological evolution, from the origin of the first cell to the origin of the eukaryotes, the puzzling biology of metabolism, apoptosis, aging, and cancer in metazoan. I broaden our understanding of VSI, in a spirit that is somewhat similar to several recent contributions and then extend this broadened view of VSI to its "natural" starting point: the origin of the First Universal Cell Ancestor (FUCA). I advance three principal arguments. First, survival comes before replication. Before the coming of reproducer and replicator, there must be survivors, to paraphrase Szathmary and Maynard Smith (1997). Second, natural selection, especially the non-Darwinian kind, can operate without replication or even metabolism, as long as different molecules, complexes, and vesicles have differential survival rate within a system. Third, merger and acquisition, via breaking-and-re-encapsulation, endocytosis, endosymbiosis, and processes similar to them, had been a far more powerful force of variation and selection in the pre-Darwinian period of evolution that led to LUCA and long before eukaryogenesis. Endosymbiosis therefore had been a far more foundational force than even Lynn Margulis and many of her supporters have appreciated. Our thesis thus goes beyond Woese's emphasis of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) and actually subsumes HGT with Margulis' emphasis of endosymbiosis. Combing these three new perspectives with other perspectives and evidence sheds important new light upon the origin of FUCA, the singular water-shedding moment in the evolution of life.
Two competing approaches, namely the New Mechanistic Philosophy (NMP) and the counterfactual and ... more Two competing approaches, namely the New Mechanistic Philosophy (NMP) and the counterfactual and interventionist ("CF+I") approach, have dominated recent debates in philosophy of science. This article argues that the two approaches are underpinned by two logics of experiment, especially in biology and medicine but also in chemistry. More concretely there are two types and hence two logics of experiment: a mechanism-oriented one and a populational one. The former seeks to identify and establish mechanisms or pathways (including entities and activities) behind biological phenomena, whereas the latter seeks to establish whether and how much a particular factor or variable impacts an outcome at the populational level. These two types of experiment actually operate upon and reflect two logics, and the word "experiment" means quite different things for them. Explicitly differentiating the two logics of experiment yields critical implications for a host of philosophical issues, from the role of counterfactuals in causal reasoning and explanations to whether natural selection is a mechanism and whether the Hodgkin-Huxley model is explanatory.
This article advances three principal projections about the future international order(s). First,... more This article advances three principal projections about the future international order(s). First, the more rule-based international order will persist, but it will be increasingly less West-centric. Second, the shaping of international order will become more bottom-up and contested, rather than mostly top-down and mostly imposed as it used to be. Third, regional orders will become more critical now that the momentum toward an Americanized global order has stalled and may never regain its lost momentum. In this sense, the future international order will become more regionalized and fragmented. If my projection is a valid possibility, its potential implications are profound. To begin with, there will be much more competition for making rules beyond the West, though with less violence. Second, interregional coordination and cooperation will become more critical. Third, the notion of the West as a unified bloc may no longer be sufficient or even always productive for moving toward a better governed international order.
I identify idea, action, and outcome as the three key objects of social sciences and explaining t... more I identify idea, action, and outcome as the three key objects of social sciences and explaining them as the three key tasks of social sciences. I show that our failure to grasp the ontological differences of the three objects and the fact that explaining them may require different epistemological stands and methodological tools has been a key cause behind the sterility of many of epistemological and methodological debates. Explicitly differentiating the three objects and grasping the fact that explaining them may require different epistemological stands and methodological tools therefore provides us with a better picture about the empirical challenges of social sciences and paves the way toward more scientific progresses. Our discussion also holds important pedagogical value.
Bringing together the classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarch... more Bringing together the classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy’s unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend that the channel of liberty-to-innovation is the most critical channel in which democracy holds a unique advantage over autocracy in promoting growth, especially during the stage of growth via innovation. Our theory thus predicts that democracy holds a positive but indirect effect upon growth via the channel of liberty-to-innovation, conditioned by the level of economic development. We then present quantitative evidence for our theory. To our best knowledge, we are the first to propose such an indirect and conditional effect of democracy upon economic development and provide systematic evidences. Our study promises to integrate and reconcile many seemingly unrelated and often contradictory theories and evidence regarding regime and growth, including providing a possible explanation for the inconclusive results from regressing overall regime score against the rate of economic growth or change in level of GDP per capita.
Bringing together classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, e... more Bringing together classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy’s unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend that the channel of liberty-to-innovation is the most critical channel in which democracy holds a unique advantage over autocracy in promoting growth, especially during the stage of growth via innovation. Because all human societies are hierarchical and hierarchy facilitates growth by bringing stability and order yet harms innovation and growth by demanding obedience to authority, an economy must strike a balance between maintaining stability and facilitating innovation. Democracy achieves this balance by protecting liberty whereas autocracy sacrifices innovation for stability. Democracy thus does hold a unique advantage in promoting growth over autocracy, but this advantage is indirect, channel-specific, and conditional. Evidences from three historical cases demonstrate that although key scientific breakthroughs can indeed pop up under autocracies, democracy is a necessary, though insufficient, condition for protecting major scientific breakthroughs that may challenge orthodoxies.
As an “East Asian Developmental State” (EADS) with a long socialist legacy, China regularly deplo... more As an “East Asian Developmental State” (EADS) with a long socialist legacy, China regularly deploys industrial and science & technology (S&T) policies in order to “create winners” in key industries. Combining an original dataset on China’s industrial and S&T policies with an original dataset on Chinese firms’ performance, we demonstrate that China’s industrial and S&T policies have indeed succeeded in creating winners in certain industries. By providing the EADS model with positive econometric evidence for the first time, our study also yields critical policy implications for medium to large developing countries to craft their industrial and S&T policies.
How the social system impacts agents is a central problématique in sociology. I argue that the so... more How the social system impacts agents is a central problématique in sociology. I argue that the social system impacts agents via six distinct though interacting channels: constraining and enabling by purely material forces, constraining/enabling by the interplay of material and ideational forces, learning, artificial selection, constituting/constructing, and " anti-socialization ". Explicitly identifying the six channels and underscoring their interactions adds clarity and coherence to our understanding about how the social system shapes agents. The discussion sheds new lights on old and new debates, from the poverty of structural functionalism and the rational choice approach to the promises of figurational/relational sociology. The framework also points to directions for future theoretical and empirical endeavors, from how to link the " macro " with the " micro " and the " (external) society " with the " (internal) individual " to how to synthesize the two theories of identity and how to appreciate the impact upon agents of mega-trends in the social system.
The wealth of nations must be regulated by two different circumstances; first, the skill, dexteri... more The wealth of nations must be regulated by two different circumstances; first, the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labor is generally applied; and secondly, the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labor, and that of those who are not so employed. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Economics growth depends both upon technological knowledge about things and living creatures, and also upon social knowledge about man and his relations with his fellowmen. Abstract The economics of growth centered on technological knowledge in endogenous growth models and the new institutional economics of growth centered on institutions have largely chartered their separate courses so far. In this paper, we construct a new growth model that brings the two economics of growth together by first bringing the quality of the stock of knowledge and the quality of economic institutions into an endogenous growth model and then making the model an evolutionary one via competition and selection of agents with different institutions. Our new model, illustrated with historical data and agent-based modeling (ABM) simulations, nicely accounts for two key stylized facts of economic growth: the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the " Great Divergences " thereafter. Our new model also makes it clear that the most critical factor shaping economic performance across time and space is the (mis-)allocation of production factors by political decisions: Who, under what institutions and power relationship, decides to deploy what knowledge and other production factors to make what. As such, the science of economic growth must be political economy with power/politics rather than neoclassical economics without power/politics.
Ashraf and Galor (2012) advanced the bold thesis that genetic diversity within different human po... more Ashraf and Galor (2012) advanced the bold thesis that genetic diversity within different human populations has been a foundational determinant of long-run economic development. We show that their results are not robust after controlling for a key missing variable –the Eurasia dummy. After controlling for the Eurasia dummy, all indicators of genetic diversity lose statistical significance in regressions with indicators of economic development as dependent variables. Ashraf and Galor’s statistical results merely “reflect” – literally – Eurasia’s unique advantage in supporting economic development that was mostly based on settled agriculture until about AD1500. Keywords: Eurasia Advantage, Jared Diamond, genetic diversity, economic development.
Ashraf and Galor (2012) advanced the bold thesis that genetic diversity within different human po... more Ashraf and Galor (2012) advanced the bold thesis that genetic diversity within different human populations has been a foundational determinant of long-run economic development. We show that their results are not robust after controlling for a key missing variable –the Eurasia dummy. After controlling for the Eurasia dummy, all indicators of genetic diversity lose statistical significance in regressions with indicators of economic development as dependent variables. Ashraf and Galor’s statistical results merely “reflect” – literally – Eurasia’s unique advantage in supporting economic development that was mostly based on settled agriculture until about AD1500. Keywords: Eurasia Advantage, Jared Diamond, genetic diversity, economic development.
President Acharya should be congratulated for advancing the agenda of " global International Rela... more President Acharya should be congratulated for advancing the agenda of " global International Relations (hereafter, IR) ". I have long shared Amitav's conviction that in order for IR to be more relevant for the real world, we need an IR enriched by a diversity of theoretical perspectives, a diversity of geographical focus, and a diversity of scholars from different ethnic, national, geographical background. Because the life blood of science is actually diversity or variation of ideas, I do not think that the scientific and the ethical ground for a global IR is really disputable. Below, I shall focus mostly on practical matters.
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Papers by Shiping Tang
Empirically, we seek to advance our understanding of an important
puzzle: does oil cause ethnic war? Methodologically, we seek to
identify more precisely the different weaknesses and strengths of
the quantitative approach and case studies with process-tracing by
explicitly comparing results from these two approaches on the same
empirical question. We thus subject the statistical association
between the ethnogeographical location of oil and the onset of
ethnic war to test with process-tracing. Examining several pathway
cases, we find that oil has rarely been a deep cause of ethnic war.
Instead, the ethnogeographical location of oil either reignites
dormant conflict that has deeper roots in ethnic resentment and
hatred or intensifies ongoing conflict, mostly by facilitating the
operation of two interconnectedmechanisms. Our study echoes the
notion that quantitative exercises alone often cannot establish
specific causal mechanisms or how contextual factors impact the
operation of these mechanisms, and it is precisely on these two key
fronts that qualitative exercises possess critical advantages. Hence,
quantitative methods and qualitative methods are complementary
rather than competitive. Our study also yields important policy
implications for preventing and managing ethnic conflict in
countries with richmineral resource.
economic development as dependent variables. Ashraf and Galor’s statistical results merely “reflect” – literally – Eurasia’s unique advantage in supporting economic development that was mostly based on settled agriculture until about AD1500.
Keywords: Eurasia Advantage, Jared Diamond, genetic diversity, economic development.
Keywords: Eurasia Advantage, Jared Diamond, genetic diversity, economic development.
Empirically, we seek to advance our understanding of an important
puzzle: does oil cause ethnic war? Methodologically, we seek to
identify more precisely the different weaknesses and strengths of
the quantitative approach and case studies with process-tracing by
explicitly comparing results from these two approaches on the same
empirical question. We thus subject the statistical association
between the ethnogeographical location of oil and the onset of
ethnic war to test with process-tracing. Examining several pathway
cases, we find that oil has rarely been a deep cause of ethnic war.
Instead, the ethnogeographical location of oil either reignites
dormant conflict that has deeper roots in ethnic resentment and
hatred or intensifies ongoing conflict, mostly by facilitating the
operation of two interconnectedmechanisms. Our study echoes the
notion that quantitative exercises alone often cannot establish
specific causal mechanisms or how contextual factors impact the
operation of these mechanisms, and it is precisely on these two key
fronts that qualitative exercises possess critical advantages. Hence,
quantitative methods and qualitative methods are complementary
rather than competitive. Our study also yields important policy
implications for preventing and managing ethnic conflict in
countries with richmineral resource.
economic development as dependent variables. Ashraf and Galor’s statistical results merely “reflect” – literally – Eurasia’s unique advantage in supporting economic development that was mostly based on settled agriculture until about AD1500.
Keywords: Eurasia Advantage, Jared Diamond, genetic diversity, economic development.
Keywords: Eurasia Advantage, Jared Diamond, genetic diversity, economic development.