Welcome to a new colleague

Jonathan Kulick, who will be posting from Tbilisi. That’s impressive to those of us who can’t even pronounce “Tbilisi.”

It’s a pleasure to welcome Jonathan Kulick to the Reality-Based Community. His inaugural post (the first of many, it is devoutly to be hoped) appears above. When I asked Jonathan for a brief bio, here’s what he sent:

Jonathan Kulick is the Director of Studies at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, in Tbilisi, Georgia. He was reared in East Africa, the Middle East, and Washington, DC. He is a lapsed Silicon Valley mechanical engineer, and can go on about hard-disk substrates and the Czochralski process, but prefers not to. At RAND, he wrote on the zero-emission-vehicle mandate, hospital-seismic-safety legislation, and military-operational decisionmaking. After commuting from LA to Tbilisi for five years, he moved to Georgia, where he runs the research and training programs at the region’s leading think tank, and publishes a daily analytical digest on Georgia. He thinks he’s qualified to comment on US foreign policy, energy economics, and punk rock, and is thinking about the nexus thereof. He’s not altogether comfortable referring to himself in the third person.

Author: Mark Kleiman

Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out. Books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993) Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989) UCLA Homepage Curriculum Vitae Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com