Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen. – Leonardo Da Vinci

I decided to go to Rimini last Thursday to take a mini dissertation vacation. I highly recommend this practice to anyone working on a long-term creative task. It doesn’t really matter where you go, or even if you change your physical location. Diverting your attention from your work is the key. Take a twenty-four hour break and then hit the task all the harder afterwards. You’ll notice a certain lightness in your mood and quickness in your thinking. That’s how you know you’ve been rejuvenated.

If you’re a student at SAIS Bologna, get on the train and go to Rimini, Modena, Verona, Florence, Milan, Rome, Ravenna, or San Marino for the day. Book your tickets on www.trenitalia.com and plan your itinerary using Wikitravel. For restaurant recommendations, you can use the usual resources (Google, TripAdvisor, whatever) or simply pop into a cafe and while you’re sipping on an Earl Grey or espresso, ask the barista for his favorite restaurant in the area.

It might seem like you absolutely cannot miss a full day at the Bologna Center, but I’d venture that the efficiency gains from the rejuvenation of a mini vacation exceed the opportunity cost of a missed day of work. Consider this an investment in your future productivity. If you feel really guilty, just work on the weekends.

Anyways, Rimini is a beautiful beach town on the east coast of Italy, lots of cool Roman ruins, and fantastic seafood to boot. What more could you need? 

I promised my dissertation advisors that I would go on a blogging diet until I finally gave them a complete manuscript. My abstinence lasted a little over a year, and luckily, aside from a few relatives who have e-mailed me asking about why I haven’t spammed them with my diatribes recently, no one seems to have noticed.

So why am I falling off the wagon? Well, the selfish truth is that I think that blogging again might get my creative juices flowing to give me the writing energy I need to finish my dissertation on a strong note. I also think that blogging about my experiences in graduate school is a good way to pay some of the great advice I have received forward to subsequent generations of graduate students.

For those who might not know me, I am a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University SAIS. I’ve been affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, in one way or another, since August 2003, when I began my undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. I graduated from SAIS in 2008, and began my doctoral studies there in August 2009. In my Ph.D. program, I had the privilege of serving as a Visiting Scholar at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Spring 2012, and as a George Abernethy fellow at the SAIS Bologna Center for the academic year 2012-2013.

The one constant in my life at SAIS has been serving as the Teaching Assistant for classes in international economics and international relations. I’ve TA’ed some twenty-four semester-long courses, including the four “majors” in economics: micro, macro, trade, and money, along with introduction to economic development. I also have TA’ed Theories of IR and several political economy seminars for my advisors (which I think should be required coursework for every SAIS student, but that’s a blog post for another day.)

All this is a way for me to say that I’ve been around SAIS for a while and that I’ve seen thousands of students go through the institution. I know what works and what doesn’t in the SAIS classroom, and I’ve finally decided to distill some of my thoughts about how to make the most out of the SAIS degree on my blog. I can’t promise that I’ll blog with any degree of regularity, but I do have a list of topics that I’d like to cover by the end of 2013, including strategies for language learning, leading a successful internship hunt, addressing resume deficiencies head-on with SAIS’ tools, and beasting economics courses. Of course, my blog posts will be heavily influenced by the development of my own work habits over the past seven years, though I’ll try to generalize my idiosyncratic experiences to the broadest audience possible.

If you are a current SAIS student and would like to post on a specific topic, don’t hesitate to contact me.

I’m no cook. I’d go so far as to say I’m an anti-cook. But living in Italy has given me an appreciation for how great a simple meal with whole ingredients can taste.

While studying my Italian textbook, I noticed a ragu sauce recipe that I decided to try on a whim one day after class.

Turns out, this is one of the easiest and tastiest meals you can make. It has become a staple of my weekends in Bologna, and I usually make enough for leftovers throughout the week.

The ingredients are available basically anywhere in the developed (and most parts of the developing) world. They are also relatively inexpensive (#austerity). Total time prep to fork: 2 hours più o meno.

Neil’s Textbook Ragu:

Ingredients:

• Some meat: about two to three fist-sized portions of ground beef, pork, veal, work well. Fattier cuts are better
• Medium tomato, diced with seeds
• Medium white onion, diced
• Four cloves garlic, diced
• Large carrot, diced
• Large stalk of celery (i.e. a single rib), diced
• 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil
• 2 normal sized cans of diced tomatoes in water (approximately 14 ounces each, but you don’t need to be super precise with it)
• 2/3 cup of wine (again, approximate it. this is more art than science)

Steps:

1. In a large sauce pan, add the garlic and heat the olive oil on medium to high heat.
2. Add your meat, cook it 2-3 minutes until it’s darkened (some pink is OK). Make sure to break up the meat so there are no large chunks.
3. Add the veggies: onion, tomato, celery, carrot, let it cook 3-4 minutes until the onions start to sweat (good proxy for this is a lot of steam burning off. once you notice a thin layer of water envelop the meat after you add the vegetables, it’s time to move to the next step)
4. Add the tomatoes from the can and the wine, stir until the sauce is a homogenous mix.
5. Turn heat as low as you possibly can (so you see 1-2 bubbles pop from the sauce every 30 seconds. the lower the heat, the better results) and cook it uncovered until a bulk of the water has evaporated. Stir occasionally. This step should take anywhere from 70-90 minutes. It’s not uncommon for it to take under an hour if you don’t turn the heat down as far as you can. A fast-cooked ragu will suffice but the slower you cook it, the longer the melange of flavors can gestate together. Add salt to taste. Oh, and the best part of this stage is regularly eating the sauce to ‘check’ it.

Some tips:

• Press down on the garlic cloves with the flat side of a large knife until you hear it *pop*. This will make them easier to peel and will also release some of the garlic’s juices and natural sweetness.
• An easy and cheap way to source your meat is to buy discounted pork sausages (3 large ones ought to do it) and remove the skin and dump the contents into the pan.
• Use a sweeter red wine if you can; “two buck chuck” works well. In a pinch you can use beer but make sure it’s on the darker side.
• If you want to add an extra kick to it, add a half teaspoon of red pepper flakes to the sauce. The earlier you add the pepper flakes, the spicier the sauce will be. A teaspoon of chili powder also works.
• Vine ripened tomatoes work best. Also cherry tomatoes work as well.
• If you want to go gourmet, add a teaspoon of truffle oil with the wine and canned tomatoes.
• If you want to make it a little ‘fuller’, add a half tablespoon of unsalted butter.
• I’ve never tried this but if you’re a vegetarian, some type of faux meat or even beans might work in the sauce. I’m not making any promises, though
• Double the ingredients and freeze half of the sauce for a later time. The sauce always tastes better on the reheat.

Best served over tagliatelle al dente with generous amounts of shaved parmesan cheese and good company. Buon appetito!

The issue with Gilman’s view is that most Germans still do not feel like peripheral countries have done enough to merit successive bailouts. And yet the bailouts continue anyway. So are the Germans really getting their way in the Eurozone at the expense of the periphery, or are they in so deep because of their national banking system’s exposure to peripheral debt that while they might talk a tough game about structural reforms and austerity, they will eventually capitulate and unconditionally bailout the periphery?

Since the beginning of the crisis, I’ve argued about the need for a promise of unconditional bailouts of peripheral countries for the simple reason that the specter of unconditional support from a lender of last resort usually suffices to deter speculators from further shorting the debt of troubled borrowers (thus obviating the need of debt guarantees and unconditional bailouts in the first place). So the promise of unconditional bailouts tends to create the space necessary for further structural reform. As a case in point, look no further than the steady downward climb in peripheral bond yields after Mario Draghi announced that he would do “whatever it takes” to stabilize the Eurozone. In the United States, confidence returned to financial institutions only after the Federal Reserve and the Department of Treasury de facto (and in some cases, de jure) guaranteed the solvency of all financial institutions.

But here’s the rub (or coalitional struggle inherent to any bailout): debtors and “the market” want unconditional bailouts, lenders want unconditional bailouts, while states and taxpayers want to impose conditions on borrowers (be they structural reforms, changes in leadership, etc.) while simultaneously minimizing economic friction associated with banking crises. Since lenders do not want to see their borrowers fail, they accept unconditional bailouts in the near term, hoping to enact further reform down the road. Yet the political impetus to reform borrowers dissipates after the acute phase of the crisis passes. For instance, few people talk seriously about meaningful reform of financial institutions nowadays (this might mean little if you believe that Dodd-Frank constitutes such meaningful reforms, but that’s an argument for a later post). Have you seen any protests about A.I.G. bonuses recently?

Meanwhile, lender of last resort guarantees usually restore the perceived credit worthiness of feckless borrowers and diminish counter-party risk, thus restoring confidence to the financial system and beginning the cycle of borrowing anew.

This is why bailouts are the mother of all time inconsistency problems. Because bailouts have to come first, regulators tend to have the most leverage for reform precisely at the moment when reform threatens the health of borrowers. This problem is particularly acute in liberal democracies where public opinion is fickle, bold reform is institutionally and ideationally difficult, and in general, democracies have a tendency to prioritize short-term payoffs at the expense of long-term structural soundness.

Check out these vintage highlights from NFL Primetime with awesome commentary from Chris Berman and Tom Jackson.

Prior to the Asian Financial Crisis, the Bank of Korea had $194 per-person’s worth of foreign exchange reserves in their vaults. In 2011, they had about $6,000. By comparison, China’s per-capita income in 2008 was also $6,000. (Source: Bank of Korea, IMF)

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