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A few months ago, we reported that Jim Campbell argues that Larry Bartels’s “Unequal Democracy” findings are not robust. Here’s the quick summary, which (I think) both Bartels and Campbell would agree with: – On average, the economy did a lot better under Democratic than Republican presidents in the first two years of the term. […]

The story of Tim Groseclose’s media bias story.

At least that’s what I think he means by saying that “we need to reboot our whole system.” Details here.

James Fowler and Mark Pletcher have a new research project on health and social networks. If more people join and the researchers get data from a broader and denser social network, the results should be more informative. I don’t know any more about the study than what’s on the website, but it looks interesting.

The general election for president is predictable from the fundamentals (for individuals and at the aggregate level), primaries not so much. Presidential general election campaigns have several distinct features that distinguish them from most other elections: 1. Two major candidates; 2. The candidates clearly differ in their political ideologies and in their positions on economic […]

Apparently I’m not the only person to question some of the political writing in the London Review of Books. But, the latest fight between author Niall Ferguson (encountered on this blog several years ago) and reviewer Pankaj Mishra (link from Tyler Cowen) is fascinating. Usually when I see one of these exchanges of letters, it’s […]

I’ve heard all sorts of scare stories of what it’s like to speak in an academic economics seminar: they’re rude, they interrupt constantly, they don’t let you get through three slides in an hour, etc. But whenever I’ve actually spoke in an economics department, the people have been polite and well-behaved, really it’s been like […]

Always check your evidence.

Lane Kenworthy writes: The book is full of graphs that support the above claims. One thing I like about Kenworthy’s approach is that he performs a separate analysis to examine each of his hypotheses. A lot of social scientists seem to think that the ideal analysis will conclude with a big regression where each coefficient […]