My monthly column in Newsweek International is up, and I really hope it's better than the movie name from which I've drawn this post title.

It's about the phenomenon of the hipster statesman -- i.e., ex-politicians trying to make a difference in the world, not by getting back into government, but through other means of policy entrepreneurship.

I'm not optimistic:

There are two very powerful constraints on ability of the hipster statesmen to get anything done. First, the policy-entrepreneur approach cannot work on all policy problems. To update Truman's aphorism for the 21st century, when you are a statesman, you can choose your issues; when you are a politician, the issues choose you. Real politicians do not always respond to the pleas of statesmen, because they are busy avoiding the fate of becoming a statesman. Wealth, popularity and glamour might be enticing, but as Henry Kissinger once observed, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Second, calling attention to a problem is not the same thing as solving it. The assumption underlying the hipster statesmen is that once people become aware of a problem, there will be a groundswell of support for direct action—what Gore labeled "an opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level" after winning the Nobel. This is not how politics usually works, particularly in the international realm. Any solution to a problem like global warming, for example, involves significant costs—and the distribution of those costs is a contentious issue. Even if more people become aware of a policy problem, it is far from guaranteed that a consensus or compromise will emerge about the best way to solve it.