Deeper state intervention in an economy means that bureaucratic waste, inefficiency and corruption are more likely to hold back growth.

I think political science is bad at prediction. We don't gaze into a crystal ball. I do not believe that we predict things.

The government has to be on the side of the people if the corporations take too much power.

I think it's fantastically narcissistic to believe that in the entire universe, with all of the planetary systems that we've already discovered and the countless others that are out there, that we are the only forms of life.

It's very hard for someone who makes $1,000 a year or some who makes less than $1 a day to care about the environment.

The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regime's safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins.

I would rather people not smoke. I certainly appreciate the fact that smoking is not legal in restaurants and bars. That used to stop me from going out at night because you'd go someplace and your clothes would reek and you wouldn't enjoy the experience and that affects your rights. It's always a question.