The Week in Policymaker Ignorance

Scott discusses two recent books, David Zweig's An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, and Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee's In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, through the lens of his own theoretical analysis of COVID-era policymaking, co-authored with Parker Crutchfield of Western Michigan University.

Scott discusses the key question about the war in Iran - decapitation operation or regime-change war? - through the lens of the problem of policymaker ignorance.

Scott discusses one of his works-in-progress, "Liberalism's Ouroboros: DOGE and the Liberal Transition Problem in Stark Relief," which argues that the failures of the Department of Government Efficiency evince the epistemic difficulties inherent in effective liberalization policies.

Scott considers the significance of policymaker ignorance for the recent removal of Nicholas Maduro and ICE protests in Minnesota.

In the sixth and final episode of the series on policymaker ignorance and the Vietnam War, Scott discusses the end of the War and the fall of Saigon, and provides an overview of the series.

Scott discusses the part that policymaker ignorance played in the Vietnam War during the Nixon-Kissinger years.

Your intrepid host examines the role that policymaker ignorance played in some of the crucial events of the Vietnam War between mid-1965 and Spring 1968.

Scott analyzes the series of events and decisions (and lies, lots of lies) that led to the United States taking over the task of fighting the Vietnam War from the South Vietnamese.

Scott analyzes DOGE's activities through the lens of the problem of policymaker ignorance and briefly considers Trump's tariff policies, whatever, exactly, they might be.

Scott discusses the catastrophic reign of Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, the emergence of the Viet Cong and development of the Ho Chi Minh trail, and the calamitous technocratic approach of the Kennedy administration to the Vietnam imbroglio.