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by Greg Sanders Flickr photo by mafic used under a Creative Commons license.  While participants won’t often say so, civil conflict is often driven by profit motives rather than any larger ideals.  Control of a country’s key resources is often either a direct goal of warring parties or a secondary goal that gives them the income to pursue their main interests.  So what happens when prices of a country’s export rise on the world market?  Does the increased profitability mean wars will be fought more viciously and with better funding?  Alternately, does the chance to make a decent income through conventional work calm things down? Slate has an article on just that question, prompted by a new paper by economists Oeindrila Dube and Juan Vargas.  The answer seems to depend on how labor intensive the good is.  The paper specifically studied Colombia and found that goods which provide a lot of jobs, like raising coffee beans, tend to diminish conflict when prices go up.  “The researchers estimate that an additional 500 deaths may have resulted from the increased conflict that came from lower coffee prices.” By comparison, capital intensive goods which provide high paying jobs but in limited numbers, such as oil, tend to drive conflict when prices rise.

Do you ever think about the future?  Chances are you probably do as a reader of GSI’s blog.  In that case, have you ever thought that you have the solution to some looming global catastrophe?  If

A deal struck a few months ago between Bluewater Wind and Delmarva Power

I don’t know if it was planned to coincide with the eve of the Large Hadron Collider’s maiden launch or if it was pure coincidence, but last Tuesday CSIS hosted Judy Estrin for a discussion on her recent book, Closing the Innovation Gap, about the poor state of science and technology research and development in this country and how to fix it. Judy Estrin boasts a very successful career as both a scientist and a businesswoman; starting as a researcher at Stanford working with Vint Cerf, the father of the internet, she eventually landed herself in Fortune Magazine’s 50 most powerful women in American business on multiple occasions. Along the way she founded three successful technology companies and currently sits on the board of The Walt Disney Company and FedEx Corporation. Her credentials are truly astounding, but what makes her really special, in her opinion, is that she has no experience in Washington. She admittedly is not a policy wonk, so one can only imagine the anxiety she must have felt entering CSIS, home of some of the most influential and experienced minds in Washington -- like Daniel entering the lion’s den is probably a good guess.

Judy Estrin is also an unabashed idealist. She says that as a scientist she must be. She believes that solutions to our current problems are out there if we’re willing to devote time to search for them and to be patient enough to

Judy Estrin cites a culture of shortsightedness as part of the reason why America is suffering from an innovation gap (see September 11th post).

On Tuesday, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Judy Estrin paid CSIS a visit in order to discuss her new book,