Andrew Gelman

Notorious statistics professor (damn!) Ed Wegman has been caught in another case of copying-large-blocks-of-text-without-attribution. In his defense, he might try stealing inadvertently copying some lines from a famous historian: I failed to provide quotation marks for phrases that I had taken verbatim, having assumed that these phrases, drawn from my notes, were my words, not […]

After posting on David Rubinstein’s remarks on his “cushy life” as a sociology professor at a public university, I read these remarks by some of Rubinstein’s colleagues at the University of Illinois, along with a response from Rubinstein. To me, the underlying issue in Rubinstein’s article was his failure to find a purpose to his […]

I recently read an article by retired college professor David Rubinstein who argues that college professors are underworked and overpaid: After 34 years of teaching sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I [Rubinstein] recently retired at age 64 at 80 percent of my pay for life. . . . But that’s not all: […]

I was picking on Scott Adams earlier so I think it’s only fair to point out when he has an interesting idea. Adams writes: Before Ronald Reagan became governor of California, and then president of the United States, people wondered if an actor could become a good politician. It’s no surprise that actors are excellent […]

Under the headline, “A Raise Won’t Make You Work Harder,” Ray Fisman writes: To understand why it might be a bad idea to cut wages in recessions, it’s useful to know how workers respond to changes in pay—both positive and negative changes. Discussion on the topic goes back at least as far as Henry Ford’s […]

I’m a few weeks behind in my New Yorker reading and so just recently read this fascinating article by Ryan Lizza on the current administration’s foreign policy. He gives some insights into the transformation Obama from antiwar candidate to a president conducting three wars. Speaking as a statistician, though, what grabbed my eye was a […]

Ben Hyde sends me this: It’s even worse than it looks because the numbers are wrong too. Why, oh why, do people only send me the bad stuff? From “dporn” to chartjunk . . . [Cross-posted at the Monkey Cage]

I encountered this news article, “Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home”: At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. . . . students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served […]

A couple things in this interview by Andrew Goldman of Larry Summers currently irritated me. I’ll give the quotes and then explain my annoyance. 1. Goldman: What would the economy look like now if $1.2 trillion had been spent? Summers: I think it’s an artificial question because there would have been all kinds of problems […]

Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, wrote an article for the Boston Review on how Congress can’t function anymore. Several political scientists (including myself) and others wrote brief responses. (This seemed to me to be a rare chance to write something that would be read by at least one congressman.) U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper: Congress is […]