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
The Democratic and Republican Parties each use a weighted voting system to choose their presidential nominees. This only matters when no candidate has a majority of the delegates, and the details are complicated because the weight a particular candidate has is actually a number of (possibly independent) delegates. Leaving those details to the side, let’s consider how much … Read more
I posted earlier about truels and how the current GOP nomination approximates one. In that post, I laid out the basics of the simple truel (i.e., a three person duel), assuming that the three shooters shoot sequentially. Things can be different when the three shooters shoot simultaneously.[1] Short version: Trump and Rubio aren’t allies, but game theory suggests they … Read more
A truel is a three person duel. There are lots of ways to play this type of thing, but the basic idea is this: three people must each choose which of the other two to try to kill. They could shoot simultaneously or in sequence. The details matter…a lot. I won’t get into the weeds on this, but let’s … Read more
This is math, but it isn’t politics. This is serious business. This is the NFL. The New England Patriots won the coin toss to begin today’s AFC championship game against the Denver Broncos. With that, the Patriots have won 28 out of their last 38 coin tosses. To flip a fair coin 38 times and have … Read more
In response to the concerns raised by colleagues (principally and initially in this petition, but see also Chris Blattman’s take and other responses from both sides), I wanted to clarify why I think that delaying implementation of the Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement (JETS) is a poorly thought out goal, one that will differentially disadvantage some … Read more
Hey, long time no see. While we’ve been apart, there’s arisen a bit of a dustup in my little corner of the world about the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) initiative. In a nutshell, DA-RT represents a movement to continued discussion, implementation, and fine-tuning of standards regarding how social science research is produced and shared amongst scholars and … Read more