Via Felix Salmon, I encountered an article, “Obama’s Blunder at the Bank,” by my Columbia colleague Jagdish Bhagwati. It’s a strange article. I know basically nothing about the World Bank, so my criticisms here are not of Bhagwati’s policy prescriptions but of his abilities to communicate with laypersons such as myself. Bhagwati begins by criticizing […]
Blog: The Monkey Cage
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Political scientists and proposed procedural reforms
John Sides gives some arguments (including citations to recent research) for why he thinks that term limits for Supreme Court judges would not have much effect on the politics of court nominations and confirmations. I respect where John is coming from, but at the same time I resist what I see as the occasional habit […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Supreme Court Term Limits, Redux
Term limits for Supreme Court justices are in the news again. See, for example, Timothy Noah and links therein. We had a go-round on this here in 2010. See my two posts, and links therein to Andy and Matt Yglesias. The piece of research to read is Justin Crowe and Chris Karpowitz’s article, “Where Have […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Veep Veep
During this lull in the campaign season, I’d like to repeat my recommend to presidential candidates that the best way to choose a vice-presidential nominee is to forget about ticket-balancing, shock value, winning the news cycle, and all the rest, and instead go for quality. As I wrote a couple years ago: John Edwards, Dan […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Clean Elections Make for Extremists?
Imagine, for a moment, that you didn’t need to raise money to run for office, that the government would pay you to run. Who would that help? Would it encourage more moderate candidates, who are usually pressured out of nomination contests by party money because they don’t stand for anything? Or would it enable the […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Forecasting by the Dashboard Light
Two interesting follow-ups to the discussion about presidential election forecasting models—e.g., Nate Silver, me. First, Lynn Vavreck: Election forecasts based on economic indicators are valuable not for their point-estimates, but for their overall predictions about which party is likely to win the election. They are valuable because they tell candidates what kinds of campaigns to […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
“Social policy in the richest nation in the history of the world”
On the second day of oral arguments over the Affordable Care Act, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., trying to explain what sets health care apart, told the Supreme Court, “This is a market in which you may be healthy one day and you may be a very unhealthy participant in that market the next […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Civic Engagement is a Cause of Special Interests, Not a Solution
The American public disdains interest groups. They complain that money corrupts Washington, with special interests securing policy at the expense of the public interest. As previously discussed here, Larry Lessig has a new book in a long line of popular complaints, arguing that campaign contributions buy policy influence. He ends with a familiar call for […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
How Interest Group Mobilization Explains Media Bias
In nearly every campaign and policy debate, at least one of the sides (and often both) make the claim that the news media is biased toward the other side. As previously discussed here, some political scientists measure media bias by comparing the citations of think tanks and advocacy groups in different media outlets with mentions […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Those of us who always use our turn signals have nothing to worry about!
If ya can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. (See paragraph 11 here.)
