Henry Farrell

Turns out the father of communism and Honest Abe were pen pals.

Give me 50 cent baked goods or give me death!

Climate change will lead to water shortages and other environmental problems, but probably not increased violence. 

Using The Princess Bride to explain Google’s corporate policies

Looking at American inequality through the lens of comparative politics.

Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz in a review essay (gated) in the most recent issue of Perspectives on Politics. Certainly there were many important welfare improvements in the United States from the 1930s to the late 1960s, linked to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Civil Rights movements, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. In fact, by […]

at Esquire magazine I respect any reporters who go out and do the work of actually talking to ordinary people, and I especially respect any political reporters who do so, because too much of our elite political reporting takes place within the self-contained Beltway terrarium of politicians, consultants, think-tankers, and other relatively useless fauna. And […]

It may seem like a no-brainer that low corporate tax rates will attract investment from multinational corporations. However, the empirical evidence is surprisingly scanty, and in a forthcoming article in Comparative Political Studies (earlier non-paywalled version here), Nate Jensen finds no significant relationship across OECD countries, even when he tries to control for endogeneity. The […]

Via Cosma in comments at the other place I hang out, this is a very nice teaching tool for the sole and single purpose of getting this point across to students. NB that you need to be logged into a Google ID to use it. My favorite so far is the .8222 correlation between my […]

Scott Page at University of Michigan is offering a free graded course on ‘thinking with models.’ We live in a complex world with diverse people, firms, and governments whose behaviors aggregate to produce novel, unexpected phenomena. We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense […]