Don't call it a comeback!

Dear Spencer,

I have not been keeping up with this blog at all in the last few months.  I am involved in many projects and am still in the process of settling into my job at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.  I would like to make this blog more of a part of my process of writing and thinking through issues that I am working on, but I am still thinking of ways that I can do that meaningfully.

My job is to write and to produce content. That content needs to be peer reviewed and validated by gatekeepers.  The kind of writing that I am doing here - or  not doing here- is unfiltered and unfettered. I think that there is value in the interaction of both types of writing.  If there are any regular readers of this blog (not even my wife or mother read this, so I don't have a lot of hope), which is unlikely since there is no regular writer on this blog, please be patient as I get back into the swing of things.

Topics that I will be posting on in the future:

• Pedagogy - I am especially interested in incorporating undergraduates into the research process.
• Technology - My personal computer is now running UBUNTU.  My academic writing is done in a text editor and LaTeX.  I am moving from Stata to R for my statistical analysis work.  There are a lot of changes for me on the technology front.
• A new research area I am interested in: Covert Action by states.
• More on military issues and arms sales.
• Some work on role theory and network analysis - a new book project (from an ongoing paper project with my dissertation adviser and mentor, Cameron Thies).
• Russia-Ukraine stuff.  Because I lived in Donetsk for two years, and this is a pretty big deal.

That's the plan for the future.  I am aiming to have one or two short posts a week with maybe a longer piece up once a month or so.  I may be ambitious and work to get my longer pieces linked to, or re-posted on some of the blogs of the cool kids.  Wouldn't that be something!

Best,

Spencer

Russia's Defense Fraud is Larger than Most States' Defense Budges!

File this under horrifying comparisons.  A report today from Moscow (link to news story) about the amount of fraud in the defense industry is simply staggering.

The Russian Audit Chamber has identified waste and misappropriation totaling almost 117.5 billion rubles – just over $3.9 billion at today’s rate – in the area of national defense, the first deputy head of the State Duma's Defense Committee, Viktor Zavarzin, told reporters, after a closed-door committee meeting attended by officials from the Defense and Finance Ministries, the Prosecutor General’s Office and other agencies.

That is a lot of money.  In order to put this into context I put together a quick visual using 2011 defense spending data from SIPRI. I had to download the data in an excel file and clean it up a bit.

Russian corruption in the defense sector is more than the median military spending by most states in the international system.  Average military spending is highly skewed by the US and China, which are not included in the graph above because of the way they ruin the scale.

What does all of this mean?  It means that it can be very lucrative to be involved in the defense sector in Russia!

None of this information by itself is really surprising and I've alluded to problems of corruption in previous posts.  The sheer scale of that corruption when put into context is simply staggering.

*NOTE:
Click on this link to obtain a zip file that has the SIPRI data for 2011 in a CSV file along with the STATA .do file I used to create the graph.    -Replication Materials-

Putting Dollars in STATA Graphics Titles

This post is mostly so I remember how to do this.

There is a problem that I run into a lot when I am plotting in STATA.  The $ symbol is used by STATA to call up various macros.  When you try to add it as a currency symbol in a graph title it ends up disappearing. Take, for instance the following code and its associated graphical output:

twoway dot percapmil id, mlabel(description) mlabpos(12)
scheme(s1mono)
xlabel(0(1)5)
ylabel(, angle(0))
xtitle("")
ytitle("$1000 US Per Military Personnel")
title("Per Capita (Mil. Personell) Spending of US and Russian Customers", size(medium))
subtitle("1992-2000 and 2001-2002")

Notice the y-axis label is missing the dollar sign.  I really want to emphasize the fact that the y axis represents money spent by states for defense.  How can I add the dollar sign to the graph?  This requires using a STATA Markup Control Language (SMCL) workaround.  

The modified code looks like this (just taking the relevant line of code):

ytitle("{c $|}1000 US Per Military Personnel")

With this modification the graph looks the way that I want it to. 

It's a little bit inconvenient to have to add the extra code {c $|} just to get the symbol to show up like it should, but once you know what the workaround is you can get your work done instead of endlessly Googling.  Now back to work.