trishgmevans

The key bit begins a little after 5:00. “I believe we find ourselves in a situation equivalent to the one the US found itself in with Russia, back during the days of the Cold War. Both sides had nuclear weapons in their hands and both sides threatened to push the button and activate. When you […]

Over the last couple of years, Cosma Shalizi and I have been working together on various things, including, inter alia, the relationship between complex systems, democracy and the Internet. These are big unwieldy topics, and trying to think about them systematically is hard. Even so, we’ve gotten to the point where we at least feel […]

A few months ago, Jacob Kirkegaard was congratulating the EU’s northern member states for having discovered how awesome brinkmanship was as a mode of bargaining over Greek policy reforms. As I noted then, brinkmanship, contra Kirkegaard, is a terrible way of making policy. It only works to the extent that the threat of catastrophe for […]

Amity Shlaes has some … interesting … views on the US and the euro crisis Start with the nightmare the U.S. fears replicating: Europe. That financial disaster wasn’t just a crisis about pension obligations. It was a crisis of trust. First, markets and individuals trusted European governments when they said their budgets balanced over the […]

Continuing Erik’s series on this, here’s a new article by Daniel Benjamin et al. from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. We study four fundamental economic preferences—risk aversion, patience, trust, and fair-mindedness—and five dimensions of political preferences, derived from a factor analysis of a comprehensive battery of attitudinal items. The five attitudinal dimensions […]

The Coase Theorem is of course famous and influential in both economics and political science. This critique, which suggests that it exemplifies the problems of economics, is rather less famous, despite its interesting source: I think the success of the Coase Theorem — because it’s discussed all over the place — is an interesting illustration […]

Via Kindred Winecoff, Chris Gandrud has come up with a quite striking graph. The partisan effect is less obvious than in the earlier graph, but is is clear that during this time period the big over estimations are during Democratic presidencies and the big (actually almost all) underestimations are during Republican ones. The effect would […]

APSA warns that Jeff Flake (R: Arizona) may introduce an amendment to the NSF funding bill today, to defund political science. Flake may introduce the amendment as early as tomorrow Wednesday May 9th. Please take steps right away that you feel appropriate to alert your Congressional Relations staff and to contact your Representative not to […]

The amusing letter that Andrew cites below is an example of a broader political phenomenon. Stathis Kalyvas’ The Logic of Violence in Civil War has already become a classic of the field – among its many interesting arguments is an account of malicious denunciations. the practice of denunciation exists to some extent in all organized […]

Daniel Gayo-Avello has strong feelings about the unpromising record of efforts to predict election results using Twitter data. “No, you cannot predict elections with Twitter” And shows that, despite various claims by academics in computer science, no-one seems to have actually tried. I don’t know whether the spelling mistake in this sentence – “In all […]