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I just received this book by Arthur Brooks in the mail. I think he knows a lot about politics—he has a friend who’s a congressman (see p. 139). On page 160, Brooks writes: The retirement age is absurdly low. Unless you are in a heavy physical industry or have a health issue, why should you […]

I saw this graph posted my Tyler Cowen: and my first thought was that the bar plot should be replaced by a line plot: Six lines, one for each income category, with each line being a time series of these changes. With a line plot, you can more easily see each time series (these are […]

Sam Wang (who’s a biologist in his day job and analyzes surveys for fun) pointed me to his poll aggregates and predictions for the presidential race. Wang writes: My current view is that modelers who put in econometric assumptions face the challenge of ascertaining how much new information their additional variables (GDP, unemployment) add which […]

We all know about the power of defaults in everyday behavior and even in science. Here’s a fun example. The following appeared in my inbox the other day: Dear Dr. Gelman, *** greatly appreciates your service as a member of the ad hoc Committee that considered the appointment of ***. In recognition of your contribution, […]

Drezner on Zakaria: As one has more gobs of money tossed at them than they ever expected out of life approaches League [of Extraordinary Pundits] status, three factors dramatically increases the likelihood of this kind of thing happening. First, since the distribution of punditry assignments likely follows a power law distribution, superstars are asked to […]

Hibbs writes: The article also includes some fun bashing of other people’s models. I love that sort of thing! Hibbs concludes with a warning: Unless I’m missing something, Hibbs’s model does not include an incumbency advantage (which would give Obama a boost because he is running for reelection); that could make the difference between his […]

Jeff points me to this and this. There seems to be a perception that “economists, the people who will cooly explain why people will be completely corrupt if the marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost, see themselves as being completely not corrupt” (according to Atrios) and that “the economists who have decided to lend their […]

Jeff points me to this: Actually, my problem is not so much the Fox graphics team’s continuing ridiculous choices of lower bounds (particularly inappropriate when the data are presented as a set of bars rather than as a line) but rather that the starting point is so recent. Why not provide a bit of perspective […]

Jason Dempsey writes: Someone casually reading the news would have the right to be confused over seemingly contradictory stories on the political preferences of military service members and veterans. According to Gallup, “Veterans Give Romney Big Lead Over Obama,” while Reuters claims that “Weary Warriors Favor Obama.” Both are true. . . . The bulk […]