ChinaTalk: Moneyball and US State Department

By: Jordan Schneider, Jon Bateman, Dan Spokojny | August 22, 2022

Originally posted on Lawfare

A weekly conversation exploring China's economy and tech scene. Guests include a wide range of policy analysts, business professionals, journalists, and academics. ChinaTalk is hosted by Jordan Schneider, who also writes a weekly newsletter translating and analyzing Chinese-language sources.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a world where important policy decisions were decided based on evidence and data rather than narratives and turf battles? Dan Spokojny thought so too, and that's why he's the founder of fp21, a think tank dedicated to changing the processes and institutions of U.S. foreign policy.

Along with Jon Bateman, a senior fellow in the technology and international affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in this episode we talk about some of the failings of contemporary foreign policy decision making processes and what can be done to fix them, including:
    •    How to bring more rigorously to making policy decisions
    •    Why the current system loves a good storyteller
    •    What sort of training future foreign policy makers should be getting - but aren't

Outro music: Good Bayesian by Baba Brinkman, MC Lars and Mega Ran

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV6Wc_f1Cgo&t=195s

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Doctrine for Diplomacy: To Remain Relevant, the U.S. State Department Needs a New Statecraft