By Robert E. Kelly

December 4, 2014

"So it's the end of the year: time for lazy bloggers and writers everywhere to crank out a "clip-show" column to prioritize events of the year. I actually rather enjoy these exercises. At first blush, "top five" lists seem rather facile. They leave far too much room for the writer's personal preferences; it's all-but-impossible to agree on a metric that would fairly rank events, personalities, and so on.

But on the other hand, trying to assign priority or causal weight is central to good social science, and hopefully, punditry. Every time you read someone say, X was "more" important than Y, or A was "of greater significance" than B, those locutions implicitly assigns weights. We do this all the time in common speech, even if we don't admit it."

Read more:

http://thediplomat.com/2014/12/2014-in-review-top-5-events-for-u-s-foreign-policy-in-asia/ 

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