First Month at Fletcher

This week marks the completion of my first month at the Fletcher School, and I've done remarkably little blogging. In a way, that's a testament to the fact that I am happily consumed by the breadth and depth of whats happening at the school (and at the Berkman Center). The major task of the month was jump starting my right brain after a long dormancy. Taking Development Economics, Stats and International Political Economy means that I've had to do this in a hurry, and its been far more enjoyable than I've expected. However, I'm making sure I'm not running too far from my old haunts. I've got a paper coming on the factors that correlated mobile phone use and pro-poor growth in developing countries, and whether any of those factors can help predict the ability for computer use (a la OLPC) to have the same effect on growth.

During the first week of school, Dan Drezner, political economy expert and Fletcher's most prolific blogger, gave a convocation speech. The speech made light of how the blogosphere challenges the status quo of the professional foreign policy community, and then urged Fletcher students to also not passively accept the wisdom of foreign policy elders. It was a wonderful example of a difficult skill that many in Fletcher are quite good at: leveraging credentials to artfully take stabs at established ways of thinking. This is the type of school where one could, hypothetically, bring an erstwhile and inspired Harvard Law Professor to talk about using poker to better understand strategic thinking in international relations.