Why is the United States the wealthiest country in the world? How can we understand the emergence of China and India in the last two decades? What explains growth disasters of countries such as Venezuela and Sub-Saharan Africa? Why has Brazil not emerged as a growth miracle despite its enormous potential? This class will develop quantitative analytical frameworks and use case studies to examine the role of institutional factors such as financial markets, labor market regulations, tax policy, and urban policy in understanding the performance of firms in emerging markets vs wealthy countries. We will examine the elements of successful and disastrous growth strategies in selected emerging markets. When relevant, we will examine challenges in emerging markets due to COVID.

This course is devoted to the political writings of Niccol Machiavelli. Readings include The Prince, Discourses on Livy, Florentine Histories and the “Discourses on Florentine Affairs.” Themes to be explored include: the relationship between the person and the polity; the compatibility of moral and political virtue; the utility of class conflict; the advantages of mixed institutions; the principles of self-government, deliberation, and participation; the meaning of liberty and the question of military conquest.

This course introduces topics in current applications of machine learning for Data Science students. Topics include machine learning models, supervised and unsupervised learning, loss functions, risk, empirical risk and overfitting, regression and classification, clustering, gradient boosting, decision trees and random forests, and (time permitting) a brief introduction to Neural Networks and deep learning.

Data science provides tools for gaining insight into specific problems using data, through computation, statistics and visualization. This course introduces students to all aspects of a data analysis process, from posing questions, designing data collection strategies, management+storing and processing of data, exploratory tools and visualization, statistical inference, prediction, interpretation and communication of results. Simple techniques for data analysis are used to illustrate both effective and fallacious uses of data science tools. Although this course is designed to be at the level of mathematical sciences courses in the Core, with little background required, we expect the students to develop computational skills that will allow them to analyze data. Computation will be done using Python and Jupyter Notebook.

Worldwide, women do about 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Women’s underpaid work at home and in industry subsidized the early stages of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain, early twentieth-century Japan, and contemporary China, and women’s unpaid contributions to their households enable employers worldwide to keep wages low. We know, at least in outline, how women came to carry double burdens in Europe and North America, but little research has been done so far about this process in East Asia. In this course, we will discuss when and how China, Japan, and Korea developed a division of labor in which most wage work was gendered male and reproductive work was marked female. This course will discuss about current divisions of labor between men and women rooted in local cultures, or are they the result of industrial capitalist development. Moreover, about how do divisions of labor differ between the three East Asian countries, and how did developments in one East Asian country affect others.

While issues arising from technologies that have both military and civilian applications are not new, the nearly incomprehensible destruction from exploding nuclear weapons focuses the mind as few other dual-use technologies can. This course will examine the development of national policies and the international regimes on the uses of nuclear energy. We will review military doctrine and the plans for nuclear war-fighting as well as the effects on societies of developing and using nuclear weapons. We will review the history of international proliferation of nuclear technology and fissile material and examine efforts to curtail the spread of weapons. In the second part of the course, we will focus on the development of civilian nuclear power and on current policy to prevent accidents and dispose of nuclear waste materials. Political leaders often face policy dilemmas because nuclear technology and materials offer great benefit, as well as presenting great danger. We will explore these dilemmas throughout the course.

This course examines the evolution of American grand strategy since 1900, when the United States first emerged on the world stage as a great power. The focus will be on assessing how its leaders have thought over time about: 1) which areas of the world are worth fighting and dying for, 2) when it is necessary to fight in those strategically important areas, and 3) what kinds of military forces are needed for deterrence and warfighting in those regions.

This course introduces students to some key texts in post and decolonial theory. Our goals in this class are three-fold. First, to familiarize students with foundational thinkers who have inspired both decolonial and postcolonial work. We draw attention to the different ways in which their ideas have been deployed in subsequent post and decolonial scholarship. Second, we ask questions oriented towards comparison of postcolonial and decolonial approaches: What, if any, are the points of overlap between decolonial and postcolonial thought? How do both bodies of work critique and contest the legacies of empire? Third, we investigate the present and possible futures of decolonial and postcolonial thought.

Death is a universal human experience relevant to all areas of social work practice. Through readings, films, discussions and exercises, students will develop an understanding of the dying experience, as well as the attitudes toward and the approach to death and dying in America. The medical system’s influence on end of life care and the rise of hospice and palliative care will be a focus of this course. The notion of a “good death” and the impact of ethnic, cultural, religious and spiritual influences will be explored, as well as advance care planning and the overarching ethical and moral dilemmas that can arise. While the topics of grief and bereavement are not explicitly covered, time will be devoted to exploring loss across the life course, as well as the impact of violent and sudden deaths on victims and their families. In addition, students will have the opportunity to develop a self-awareness of their own values and beliefs toward dying and death, and explore strategies for self-care.

There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of “normal” psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of “culture” and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.