Henry Farrell

In a blogpost in July of last year, David Graeber talked about why he wrote Debt: The First 5,000 Years. The aim of the book was, indeed, to write the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate, but at […]

Matthew Yglesias proposes that employers should tackle problems of skill shortages themselves. On a firm level obviously one solution here is to just pay higher wages and hire away someone else’s machinist. But there are still only so many machinists to go around. At some point the reasonable thing to do is to find a […]

Stephen Budiansky, via Cosma Shalizi’s Pinboard feed. Back in ancient times when I worked at esteemed weekly newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report, I always loathed the annual college rankings report. Like all cash cows, however, the college guide was a sacred cow, so I just shut up about its obvious statistical absurdities and inherent […]

As a follow-up to my last post, and the comments thread thereon, I thought it would be useful to provide a kind of summary of the various arguments that otherwise-leftwing-academics come up to in order to argue against graduate student unionization. Obviously, the hostility of right wing academics to unionization is easier to explain. (1) […]

Likely not, according to Nils Petter Gledditsch, in the introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Peace Research on this topic. Research to date shows little evidence for systematic relationship between increased global warming, water shortages etc and violent conflict. Climate change is the world’s first truly global manmade environmental problem and a […]

Via a reader, this story about a grad student organization effort in Michigan, and a possible retaliation against a student, Jennifer Dibbern, who has lost her position as a researcher at the university. The university provost’s account, claiming that Dibbern was let go because of ‘poor reviews’ is here. The union’s response is here, with […]

John Sides posts some results suggesting that while voters mostly understand that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are rich, they are more likely to think that Mitt Romney doesn’t care about their interests because he is rich, than Barack Obama. The better one thinks “personally wealthy” describes Romney, the better one thinks that “cares about […]

at Esquire magazine I respect any reporters who go out and do the work of actually talking to ordinary people, and I especially respect any political reporters who do so, because too much of our elite political reporting takes place within the self-contained Beltway terrarium of politicians, consultants, think-tankers, and other relatively useless fauna. And […]

It may seem like a no-brainer that low corporate tax rates will attract investment from multinational corporations. However, the empirical evidence is surprisingly scanty, and in a forthcoming article in Comparative Political Studies (earlier non-paywalled version here), Nate Jensen finds no significant relationship across OECD countries, even when he tries to control for endogeneity. The […]

Matt Yglesias writing about how the now famous protest sign (below) went viral, argues that it’s not the quantity but the quality of your followers that matters. herein lies one of the secrets of the faux-meritocracy of the internet. [Ben] Furnas may appear to be a mild-mannered law student with only 325 Twitter followers. But […]