Ten years ago on this blog, I wrote about truels — three-person duels — and argued that the 2016 GOP primary was one. The basic insight: when three players are in a fight and only one can win, it matters enormously whom you shoot at, and the answer is usually counterintuitive. In particular, the two weaker players … Read more
The Financial Times ran a piece last week reporting that Senegal — yes, that Senegal — had borrowed €650 million through instruments it had not disclosed to the IMF, to its existing bondholders, or apparently to anyone who might have objected. Which, it turns out, is everyone. I clicked on it because it was about … Read more
The Department of Homeland Security has been shut down for 36 days. This is the third funding lapse in six months. More than 400 TSA officers have quit since February 14. On March 14, 55 percent of scheduled staff didn’t show up at Houston Hobby. Airlines are warning of chaos through Easter. On Saturday, President … Read more
Yesterday’s post argued that a national aggregate can accurately represent no one’s actual experience when the underlying data are structured the right way — or, more precisely, the wrong way. The incarceration example was instructive precisely because it was symmetrically uncomfortable: the same Simpson’s paradox that embarrasses the reform-is-working narrative also embarrasses the cities-are-dangerous one. … Read more
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