A friend and colleague gave a talk today about incarceration trends in the United States (she knows who she is, and I owe her a coffee). The importance of the problem — and the genuine messiness of the data — got me thinking about how difficult it is to convey the right lessons from debates … Read more
On March 5, at 4:52 p.m. Mountain Time, Kurt Alme filed to run for the United States Senate in Montana. At 4:55 p.m., incumbent Senator Steve Daines withdrew from the same race. At 5:00 p.m., the filing deadline closed. At 5:02 p.m., Daines endorsed Alme. Jon Tester, Brian Schweitzer, Steve Bullock — none of them … Read more
Regular readers of this blog — yes, both of you — will know that I recently published a piece called “Can a Game Know Its Own Rules?” It was — and I say this as the person who wrote it — very long. I am told it has been read by dozens of people, some … Read more
Bismarck is credited with the observation that laws are like sausages: it is better not to see them being made. The remark is probably apocryphal, which is itself somehow on-brand for a quote about the virtues of not looking too closely at things. Either way, the folk wisdom it encodes is real and ancient: what … Read more
Let me tell you something you already know: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok — whatever flavor you’ve adopted — is very, very nice to you. Suspiciously nice. “Your presentation looks great, here are a few minor suggestions” nice. “That’s a fascinating question” nice. “I can see why you’d approach it that way” nice. You know this. You’ve … Read more
Hi again! The question I’m about to pose is one that, I’m reliably informed, clears rooms at cocktail parties. But I think it sits at the foundation of why institutions are so hard to reform — and why the people who try to reform them so often end up making things worse. That’s for next … Read more
It’s been almost ten years since I’ve written here. The last time I posted, Donald Trump had just clinched the GOP nomination, his Banzhaf power index had hit 1.0, and I was calculating the proportion of his campaign contributions that were unitemized.1 That was June 2016. I stopped writing because the general election demanded a … Read more
Much has been made today of Donald Trump’s lackluster fundraising productivity in May. I’m going to pile on here, because his campaign is an absolute fiasco in essentially every sense. In lieu of a full analysis of what this means in terms of inference and prediction, here are three simple rankings/comparisons. (For the full read … Read more
The Republican Party is in crisis. This year’s presidential campaign is arguably evidence enough for this conclusion, but it is important to remember that there are really (at least) two “Republican Parties”: one composed of voters and another composed of Members of Congress. A split in the broader GOP is troublesome for Republican elites because, … Read more
This is a guest post by David Epstein. Picture this: you are on a committee to hire a new CEO for a large, multinational firm. There are a number of qualified candidates, you are told, each of whom has many years of experience in the relevant field, and then you are handed a background folder … Read more