Lecture: World Political Health

We humans have learned to think about our personal long-term health and about the long-term health of the global economy. We are finally, perhaps too late, starting to think about the long-term health of the biosphere. Yet, in an era of increasingly casual talk of using nuclear weapons as a rational policy option and a rising tendency toward a clash of civilizations as fundamentalist, violence-addicted forces gain power on all sides, incredibly, we give little thought to the quality of global governance.

• What is the quality of global governance?
• What is the direction of change?
• What is the rate of change?
• How do our actions affect the answers?
• How would we measure quality of governance?

This lecture advocates the creation of a new subfield of political science devoted to diagnosing the quality of global governance and provides some examples of new analytical methods for conducting such a “medical” exam.