Andrew Gelman

Seema Mehta presents an amazing list of errors in recent speeches of congressmember and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. What’s scary here is not so much that there’s a U.S. congresswoman running around who can’t seem to distinguish between truth and fiction—-after all, my very own congressman is reportedly a criminal, and I can only assume […]

The editors of the famed liberal magazine write: How should liberals feel about Occupy Wall Street? . . . At first blush, it would be difficult not to cheer the protesters who have descended on lower Manhattan—and are massing in other cities across the United States—because they have chosen a deserving target. Wall Street should […]

The Freakonomics blog reports: [On] Oct. 3, 2011, the S&P 500 closed at 1,099.23. Exactly three years ago, on Oct. 3, 2008, the S&P 500 closed at 1,099.23. As if investors needed anymore reason to be nervous these days. Hmmm, that’s funny . . . what else can we dig up from three years ago? […]

Fred Bookstein writes: You could do a column on the figure on page A14 of today’s NYT national edition, the figure that correlates states’ 2008 Obama % to percentage of bachelor degrees among adults aged at least 25. The correlation is not news, but the graphic is nice, and I hadn’t realized how wide was […]

What really irritates me about this column (by John Steele Gordon) is not how stupid it is (an article about “millionaires” that switches within the very same paragraph between “a nest egg of $1 million” and “a $1 million annual income” without acknowledging the difference between these concepts) or the ignorance it displays (no, it’s […]

David Frum writes: Tip O’Neill, the former speaker of the House, was asked at his retirement in 1987 how Washington had changed since he arrived in 1953. He answered, “The people are better. The results are worse.” What he meant: There are many fewer drunks in government than there used to be. Fewer crooks. Fewer […]

The moon-loving talk show host announced: My corporations employ scores of people. They depend on me to do what I do so they can make a nice salary. If Barack Obama begins taxing me more than 50 percent, which is very possible, I don’t know how much longer I’m going to do this. I like […]

Seth Masket (link from Andrew Sullivan) writes: The upcoming presidential election is the most important election in a generation. . . . we are in the middle of (and hopefully on the tail end of) a truly catastrophic recession. The economy will recover, although that may not happen for several years. It seems fair to […]

Christopher Bryan, Gregory Walton, Todd Rogers, and Carol Dweck did two experiments in which they increased people’s voter turnout in real electionsby over 10 percentage points by simply asking them the following survey question on election day: How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election? In the comparison condition, […]

Writing in the Washington Post, Matt Miller wants a billionaire to run for president and “save the country.” We already have two billionaires running for president. (OK, not really. Romney has a mere quarter of a billion bucks, and it’s Huntsman’s dad, not Huntsman himself, who’s the billionaire in that family.) And, according to all […]