Walking through the poli sci department the other day, I saw a pile of old books and magazines being thrown away, and happened to notice an article, “’Human Rights’: The Hidden Agenda,” by Irving Kristol in the Winter 1986/1987 issue of The National Interest. It’s amazing how times have changed, as I noticed upon reading […]
Andrew Gelman
Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University.
Posted inPolitics
Russia’s New ‘Good News — or Else’ Policy Idea
Tim Frye sends along this op-ed from Michael Bohm in the Moscow Times: State Duma Deputy Oleg Mikheyev from the Just Russia party came up with an original idea to lift the spirits of people depressed by all of the bad news they face every day from the country’s leading media outlets. Last week, he […]
Posted inPolitics
Money and the 2012 Elections
Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen write: Only hours after polls closed on Election Day, a revisionist wave began building that downplayed the role of big money. Analysts asked if the costly Republican failure to retake the White House and a handful of Senate reverses meant that all the handwringing about the torrent of […]
Posted inEducation, Higher Education
Should Harvard Start Admitting Kids at Random?
Now that the topic of discrimination in college admissions has hit the papers again, I thought I should repost this from the sister blog: Ron Unz provides evidence that Jews are way overrepresented at Ivy League colleges, with Asians-Americans and non-Jewish whites correspondingly underrepresented. Unz attributes this to bias and pressure in the admissions office […]
Posted inPolitics
It happened in Connecticut
After this latest school shooting, things seem different. I have no idea if we’ll end up with meaningful bullet control (as Chris Rock would say), but the translation of grief, anger, and frustration into policy seems more likely this time, compared to previous mass shootings in recent years. What’s special about this case? Some natural […]
Posted inPolitics
Puzzles of Criminal Justice
Four recent news stories about crime and punishment made me realize, yet again, how little I understand all this. 1. “HSBC to Pay $1.92 Billion to Settle Charges of Money Laundering”: State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest […]
Posted inEducation, Higher Education
Changing Times in Education Reform
In reading this article by David Denby on long-time education reformer Diane Ravitch, I was struck by how much things have changed. Around 1980, Ravitch was considered a conservative and was supporting the conservative cause of a national school curriculum. From the perspective of 2012, a national school curriculum doesn’t sound very conservative at all! […]
Posted inPolitics
Who Gets Blamed for Another Recession?
David Brooks writes in the New York Times: The Republicans may still blow it. If President Obama is flexible and they don’t meet him partway, Republicans would contribute to a recession that would discredit them for a decade. Is that right? My guess would that if the economy disintegrates in the next four years, this […]
Posted inPolitics
Voting Patterns of America’s Whites, from the Masses to the Elites
I am resurrecting this old post (sorry, no clean 2012 data yet, I’ll update when I have the numbers) because some people were asking about education and voting in a recent comment thread. Within any education category, richer people vote more Republican. In contrast, the pattern of education and voting is nonlinear. High school graduates […]
Posted inPolitics
Those Wacky Pundits
Joel Kotkin writes that the Republican party can win by moving to the left of the Democrats on economic issues: This aspirational element should be the centerpiece of the Republican message in this age of growing class bifurcation. . . . Without some unforeseen economic rebound, class issues will dominate our politics in the future […]
