Andrew Gelman

We all know about the power of defaults in everyday behavior and even in science. Here’s a fun example. The following appeared in my inbox the other day: Dear Dr. Gelman, *** greatly appreciates your service as a member of the ad hoc Committee that considered the appointment of ***. In recognition of your contribution, […]

Drezner on Zakaria: As one has more gobs of money tossed at them than they ever expected out of life approaches League [of Extraordinary Pundits] status, three factors dramatically increases the likelihood of this kind of thing happening. First, since the distribution of punditry assignments likely follows a power law distribution, superstars are asked to […]

From David Brooks’s op-ed in NYT: People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. . . . none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers . . . Sociologist Jay Livingston, giving data from the 2009-2010 General Social Survey, which is the usual place people turn to for population data on happiness of […]

A colleague 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 […]

A colleague points me to this: Actually, my problem is not so much the Fox graphics team’s continuing ridiculous choices of lower bounds (particularly inappropriate when the data are presented as a set of bars rather than as a line) but rather that the starting point is so recent. Why not provide a bit of […]

I received the following (unsolicited) email: Dear ANDREW GELMAN, I have had an opportunity to read your paper entitled “WHAT IS THE PROBABILITY YOUR VOTE WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE?” published on the journal “Economic Inquiry”. I know you are an expert in this field. I am Daisy, the editor of Business and Economic Research (BER) […]

A few years ago Jared Diamond got in trouble for garbling facts and making up quotations in an article about Papua New Guinea. The other day, Diamond criticized Mitt Romney “because he misrepresented my [Diamond’s] views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.” Fair enough, but I think he should be […]

Jay Livingston posts this delight—-a graph that, instead of starting at 0, starts at the oddly-chosen value of 34%: What I’d really like to see is the Greg Mankiw version where the top tax rate fluctuates between 80 and 93 percent. P.S. In the interest of bipartisanship, I searched the web for a similar graph […]

The other day, in discussing the virtues of the electoral college compared to national popular vote election for president, Jonathan Bernstein wrote that “the big, urban states traditionally did very well in the electoral college. . . . all else equal, a presidential candidate would rather pander to a large state with lots of winner-take-all […]

Jonathan Bernstein writes: The big, urban states traditionally did very well in the electoral college. . . . New York used to be a major swing state; California also was very contested once it became large, and even Texas had a run as a competitive state with big cities for a while. For whatever reason, […]