Blog: The Monkey Cage

Once again, we bring you Alastair Ruffles, with an insider’s view of the 2012 London Olympics: ********* Aside from the obvious things you find at the Olympic Park venue (sports stadia, merchandise sellers, overpriced beer) the London site at Stratford has incorporated a number of pieces of ‘art’ in to the design. Foremost amongst these […]

Global Trends 2030, a blog sponsored by the National Intelligence Council, has a series of blog posts scheduled this week on the persistence of the “long peace,” the idea that the post-World War II period has been unusually peaceful compared to other periods in world history. This should include plenty of interesting predictions on extremely […]

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 […]

In a democracy, all citizens—the rich, middle-class, poor alike—must have some ability to influence what their government does. Few people would expect that influence to be identical: those with higher incomes and better connections will always be more influential. But if influence becomes so unequal that the wishes of most citizens are ignored most of […]

This week we welcome guest-blogger Martin Gilens of Princeton.  He is the author of the recently published Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, which Larry has already noted and which has been getting some media attention.  See also Gilens’s essay in The Boston Review, as well as the responses, and an […]

One theory of why Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate is that Romney needs to build enthusiasm among conservatives—a.k.a. mobilize the Republican base.   As one journalist said to me via email: But based on what Ryan, himself, and others close to him have said, I think the theory is a base-mobilization one. […]

(This post is co-authored with Lynn Vavreck, featuring data from our forthcoming book.) With Mitt Romney having picked Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, we can shed some light on these questions: What do people know about Ryan?  And what do they think of him? A series of polls done by YouGov for […]

Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate puts fiscal policy—government spending, taxes, and debt—squarely in the center of this year’s presidential campaign. The latest YouGov survey suggests that expectations about future budget deficits under President Obama or President Romney were having a major impact on prospective voters’ choices even before Ryan joined […]

Ben Heineman, presidential troubleshooter and Lyndon Johnson confidant, has died at the age of 98. His NYT obit is here. Heineman was offered various jobs by LBJ, including the chance to become a department head or director of the Bureau of the Budget, but turned them down. However, he made an important study of the Budget Bureau in 1967 […]