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It’s hard to know what audience members will ask the candidates in tonight’s debate, but here’s a prediction: Issues like gay marriage, abortion, crime, and affirmative action will barely come up, if at all. We are living in the twilight of the great culture war — a forty-year battle over social issues that helped separate […]

Second Presidential Debate To Be Held Tonight The second presidential debate will be held at Hofstra University on Long Island tonight. It will be a town hallformat, with an audience of likely but undecided voters chosen by Gallup. The moderator will be CNN’s Candy Crowley. President Obama is no doubt getting a lot of advice […]

The 4th OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Power begins tomorrow in New Delhi, India and will bring together roughly 1,000 participants to talk about alternative metrics beyond GDP. The theme of this year’s conference is, “Measuring Well-Being for Development and Policy Making.” The conference will build on the Better Life Initiative, which looks […]

As a politician who cut his teeth on the South Side of Chicago, Barack Obama was positioned to become the first urban president in decades, even since Teddy Roosevelt. His stimulus plan promised billions of dollars for infrastructure projects, including public transportation and multi-family housing, which are particularly beneficial to cities. Obama even went as […]

The Pew Research Center issued a deeply troubling study last year which found that black and hispanic households had suffered a much bigger decline in their net worth as a result of the Great Recession than white households. The net worth of hispanics went down by 66 percent between 2005 and 2009, blacks by 53 […]

But court-ordered “cost-benefit analyses” have given polluters a lever to turn it back. 

Romney and Ryan Move to Ohio Only a week ago, Ohio seemed outside their grasp, but Mitt Romneyand Paul Ryan have effectively moved to Ohio where they have been campaigning very hard to flip the state. They have taken different paths and been pushing different messages. Ryan has been in the industrial Northeast saying that […]

For those keeping score: Tea Party, 1. Occupy Wall Street, 0. We’re two debates in and we’ve yet to have a single question on inequality. In September the Census revealed that inequality rose in 2011 for its first statistically significant yearly gain since 1993. With the flood of corporate money elevating the deficit as the […]

Martha Raddatz was deservedly praised as a moderator at the vice-presidential debate in Kentucky last night. But, reading the transcript again, maybe that praise was a bit overdone. Raddatz may not have been another empty seat, but her question on Social Security perpetuated a frequent myth. Raddatz: Let’s talk about Medicare and entitlements. Both Medicare […]

The moral and practical case for preventative care.