Blog: The Monkey Cage

Over at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver and the Monkey Cage’s own John Sides have an exchange about Nate’s evidence on the inaccuracy of Presidential election forecasts based on economic fundamentals.  The exchange puts a lot of valuable points on the table.  Still, I worry about what it might imply to readers outside our discipline about the […]

We’re pleased to have Matt Grossmann guest-blogging with us this week.  Matt is a political scientist at Michigan State, a co-author of mine, and the author of a new book, The Not-So-Special Interests: Interest Groups, Public Representation, and American Governance.  He’s been a useful source of notions for blog posts in the past (e.g., here).  […]

This is a guest host by my GW colleague Llewelyn Hughes and Francisco Flores-Macias. ***** Oil prices are in the headlines at the moment. This may not a big surprise given that gasoline is above four dollars a gallon in many parts of the country. (Although it could be worse, we could be in Germany.) […]

Several months ago, Sam Behseta, the new editor of Chance magazine, asked me if I’d like to have a column. I said yes, I’d like to write on ethics and statistics. My first column was called “Open Data and Open Methods” and I discussed the ethical obligation to share data and make our computations transparent […]

Having already been critiqued for my economics acumen by Andy earlier today, I figured I might as well wander even deeper into the lion’s den by trying my hand at probability theory. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but despite the flurry of articles about how buying a lottery ticket is inherently irrational, at this […]

Josh writes that a British government plan of “cutting taxes for the rich while simultaneously raising the prices on the cheapest lunch options” is “maybe good economics, but . . . probably not great politics.” I don’t know enough about economics or about British politics to evaluate either of these claims on their own, but […]

From the NY Times: A sales tax of 20 percent on pasties and other takeout snacks…. announced last week as part of the government’s austerity budget, was aimed at closing a loophole that exempted hot, freshly baked takeout foods, like pasties, pies, toasted sandwiches and rotisserie chickens, from the point-of-sale tax known in Britain as […]

Yesterday we had the pleasure of entertaining Thomas Pogge for a speaker series on global governance Kate McNamara and I have been running. Professor Pogge has been working for a while now on an exceptionally important question: how can you create incentives for pharmaceutical companies to invent and deliver medicines that most increase QALYs (Quality-Adjusted […]

I wanted to add another thought on the professionalization debate from yesterday. Professionalization does curtail creativity in the sense that it sets boundaries to what is and what is not accepted as a competent exercise of something. In some professions we think of this as an unmitigated good. No-one would decry the demise of creative […]