Andrew Gelman

Chris Schmid is a statistician at New England Medical Center who is an expert on evidence-based medicine. I invited him to present an introductory overview lecture on the topic at last year’s Joint Statistical Meetings, and here are his slides. All 123 of them. I don’t know how he expected to go though all of […]

In my NYT column on how to think about conflicting polls, I wrote: A vast majority of Americans — including half of all self-identified Republicans — think there is “too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations.” And a solid majority believes that “the country’s economic system unfairly favors […]

Be wary when mixing math, hyperbole, and election analysis.

One of these things is not like the other.

Ben HIghton writes: Failure to take into account ‘strategic retirement’ leads to inflated estimates of the incumbent electoral advantage. The one attempt to address this issue in the context of US House elections implies that much of the supposed incumbency advantage and most of its presumed increase over time are illusory (Cox and Katz, 2002). […]

See here. (Run it through Google translate if, like me, you don’t know any Russian.) I don’t know anything here, will defer to the experts on this one.

Conservatives hate him because he’s a liberal Democrat, liberals hate him because he’s a Wall Street leech. The funny thing is, if Corzine had stayed on in the Senate, he’d probably be an extremely well-respected figure, deferred to by his colleagues and the press as an expert on how to fix the financial mess. Corzine’s […]

Jonathan Livengood writes: I was reading a couple of your papers on voting (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/rational_final6.pdf and http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/probdecisive2.pdf), and I wondered whether the results apply when people vote for third-party candidates. In part, I was wondering what it would mean in your model for a third-party vote to be decisive. Is it rational (and under what conditions) […]

Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint. But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales: America became known as a land of […]

I enjoy the London Review of Books but I’m not a fan of their policy of hiring English people to write about U.S. politics. In theory it could work just fine but in practice there seem to be problems. Recall the notorious line from a couple years ago, “But viewed in retrospect, it is clear […]