bjn39coble

A couple of months ago, Mitt Romney was a hapless would-be frontrunner who couldn’t stay ahead of a motley crew of unelectable cranks, extremists and vanity candidates. (There’s some overlap in these categories.) Then he won the first two states. Now, ahead in the polls in South Carolina and Florida, Romney is on track for […]

This is an interesting clash of worldviews that I wouldn’t have expected. I am not competent to evaluate the arguments made here, it’s just interesting to consider the political alignments. Perhaps a rough analogy is Paul Krugman’s disagreements with Obama in the 2008 primaries. If Santorum does somehow win the Republican nomination, I assume Hassett […]

In response to my post criticizing David Brooks for making a broad claim that seemed unsupported by the facts, several commenters rightly jumped on my for making my own sweeping statements about “quals” and “quants.” Let me briefly clarify. I think both qualitative and quantitative work is necessary. Just for example, The Road to Wigan […]

Where are the larger-than-life athletes? “Psychologically, men and women are almost a different species” Libertarians in space

Some background and discussion of my recent NYT blog column on conflicting interpretations of survey findings about economic inequality.

Gregg Easterbrook: Gingrich is a wild card. He probably would end up a flaming wreckage in electoral terms, but there’s a chance he could become seen as the man unafraid to bring sweeping change to an ossified Washington, D.C. There’s perhaps a 90 percent likelihood Obama would wipe the floor with Gingrich, versus a 10 […]

Andrew Sullivan passes on this amusing line from James Pethokoukis: We’ve had some eye-opening natural economic experiments: North and South Korea. East and West Germany. California and Texas. Enough is enough. I don’t quite see the parallel here. I’ve heard that North Korea isn’t such a fun place and neither was East Germany. But I’ve […]

BIlly Freeland writes: I recently came across a post you had in the NYT’s “Room for Debate” series, titled “Understanding Nonvoters.” I was wondering if you might be able to address a question I’ve had for a while. An organization called “Why Tuesday?” has proposed moving Election Day from Tuesday to Saturday and Sunday. This […]

It’s true! I read it in the Times.