Andrew Gelman

Ashok Rao writes: Paul Krugman’s pet insult – “Very Serious Person” – is more important to understanding America’s policy failures than most people realize, and goes well beyond economic illiteracy. More than anything, without understanding VSPness (henceforth “vispy”) – one can never comprehend how the Democratic Party screwed up so much in the past five […]

Reposted because it’s newsworthy. And our graphs (based on data from the late 1990s): [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

Nicholas Christakis, a medical scientist perhaps best known for his controversial claim (see also here), based on joint work with James Fowler, that obesity is contagious, writes: The social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and […]

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen brings up one of my research topics in his recent controversial column about race: In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news. Those […]

This has come up before and before, but I think it’s worth explaining again. In the context of a dispute with transit unions, public relations person Sarah Lacy writes: People in the tech industry feel like life is a meritocracy. You work really hard, you build something and you create something . . . Tell […]

Doug Almond, Hongbin Li, and Shuang Zhang write: Following the death of Mao in 1976, abandonment of collective farming lifted millions from poverty and heralded sweeping pro-market policies. How did China’s excess in male births respond to rural land reform? In newly-available data from over 1,000 counties, a second child following a daughter was 5.5 […]

How could these guys at Politico say such foolish things about how Politico gets caught up in promoting “total nonsense” but that’s all OK because of “the market”? The usual explanation for smart people acting stupid is love, religion, or political ideology. But in this case I don’t see John Harris and Jim VandeHei being […]

After posting this announcement about Civis Analytics, I wrote, “If a reconstituted Romney Analytics team is hiring, let me know and I’ll post that ad too.” Adam Schaeffer obliged: Not sure about Romney’s team, but Evolving Strategies is looking for sharp folks who lean right: Evolving Strategies is a political communications research firm specializing in […]

Just for fun I thought I’d illustrate a previous post about what these people do all day using a service on the web that allows you to make your own Venn diagram: Yeah, yeah, I know it could be done better (both in the content and the visuals) but I wanted to give it a […]

John Sides just posted some survey results comparing attitudes about secret National Security Agency wiretapping, comparing polls in 2006 and 2013. At first glance, support for the surveillance seems slightly higher than before, with 51% supporting it in 2006, and 56% supporting it now. But look carefully at the questions: In 2006: “secretly listening . […]