The idea of a “permission structure” has attracted some attention this week. The basic idea of this phrase, it seems, is as follows: A doesn’t trust B to do some activity X because A fears that B does not have A’s best interests at heart in the “realm” of X. A good example of this … Read more
In light of this week’s horrific series of events in Boston, I (and many others) have been thinking a lot about what exactly the “Miranda warning”—or more specifically, “being Mirandized”—means. There are a lot of angles to this, and I will focus on only one. In the interest of full disclosure, I believe that the … Read more
The debate about gun control provides a great example of a collision between political issues and public policies. As I describe more below, most “political issues” are labels/shortcuts for describing preferences about multiple specific government policies/laws. The point of this post is that gun control, a political issue, is like a cookie. How I feel … Read more
Yesterday, the Senate—in line with expectations—rejected the most basic of gun control proposals. In light of the Newtown massacre—an event that shook all of us—this might seem shocking. For example, even leaving aside the emotional pull that perhaps we can as a nation call that horrible day back and make it right, the proposal arguably … Read more
[This is an installment in my irregular series of articles on the minutiae of what I do, “Inside Baseball.”] Lately I have been working on a couple of models with various signaling aspects. It has led me to think a lot more about both “testing models” and common knowledge of beliefs. Specifically, a central question … Read more
President Obama proposed his 2014 budget this week. A huge document, it contains a number of interesting policy proposals. One that is attracting a lot of attention concerns the “chained CPI.” In a nutshell, this change will reduce the rate of growth in social security payments over the next decade. Overall, the proposal arguably represents a compromise with … Read more
I have been thinking a lot lately about this very interesting post by Kristina Lerman. The post is excellent: succinct and well-written, data-centric, and relevant beyond the data’s idiosyncratic qualities. In a nutshell, Lerman’s central question is whether the rate of information production is outstripping the rate at which we (choose to or can) consume and … Read more
Note: This is the first of what might be an irregular “column” of sorts, “Inside Baseball,” focusing on the minutiae of my research, as opposed to current events. The heart of game theory is “what would everyone else think if I do what I am about to do differently?” This is slightly different than … Read more
So, dispensing with technicalities, the efforts to curtail NSF funding of political science research have apparently succeeded, at least for now. I think this is a good opportunity to post something that has bothered me over the past few years. In a nutshell, I am unsure that the “Coburn amendment” is a bad thing for … Read more
Just a quick post. Yesterday, the Senate voted to invoke cloture (63-35) on the Mikulski-Shelby substitute to (i.e., the Senate version of) the continuing resolution, HR 933. In a nutshell, this obviates threats to delay this funding bill, which I have discussed previously (here and here). I bring this up because it bolsters the case I … Read more