Posts that are primarily about how we know what we think we know — statistical methodology, index construction, natural experiments, big data, and the ways empirical claims can mislead even when the numbers are right.
This great post by Nate Silver on fivethirtyeight.com prodded me to think again about how we measure residential segregation. As I am moving from St. Louis to Chicago,[1] this topic is of great personal interest to me. Silver’s post names Chicago as the most segregated major city in the United States, according to what one might call a “relative” measure. … Read more
We now live in a world of seemingly never-ending “data” and, relatedly, one of ever-cheaper computational resources. This has led to lots of really cool topics being (re)discovered. Text analysis, genetics, fMRI brain scans, (social and anti-social) networks, campaign finance data… these are all areas of analysis that, practically speaking were “doubly impossible” ten years ago: neither … Read more
This post by Ezra Klein discusses this study, entitled “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” by Dan M. Kahan, Erica Cantrell Dawson, Ellen Peters, and Paul Slovic. The gist of the post and the study is that people are less mathematically sophisticated when considering statistical evidence regarding a political issue. The study presented people with “data” from a (fake) experiment about the effect of a hand cream … Read more
For whatever reason, I’m on a “data is complicated kick.” So, this story is one of many today discussing the gender gap in wages in ‘Merica. In a nutshell, President Obama pointed out “that women make, on average, only 77 cents for every dollar that a man earns.” Critics (most notably the American Enterprise Institute) … Read more
It’s been too long since I prattled into cyberspace. This Monkey Cage post by Kyle Dropp Joshua D. Kertzer & Thomas Zeitzoff caught my contrarian attention. In a nutshell, it says that those who are less informed about the location of Ukraine are more likely to support US military intervention. This is an intriguing and policy-relevant finding … Read more
President Obama’s SOTU speech has revived interest in Presidential power. Erik Voeten (here) and Andrew Rudalevige (here) argue that Presidential unilateral action has declined in recent years, while Eric Posner argues here that “executive power has increased dramatically since World War II.” The question of presidential power is a classic one in political science. The recent debates illustrate three important … Read more
This Op-Ed in Forbes, “Almost Everything You Have Been Told About The Minimum Wage Is False,” by Jeffrey Dorfman, argues that increasing the federal minimum wage (1) would not affect as many people as you might think and (2) would not help the working poor as much as (say) teenagers. The first half of Dorfman’s Op-Ed … Read more
…but the notable is frequently unnoted. This post, along with the always thought-provoking repartee with my friend Chris Bonneau, inspires me to write a post about selection effects and their ability to magically turn a mountain into a molehill. The short version of the story is that a brouhaha was breaking out at the University … Read more
A fundamental consideration in decision- and policy-making is aggregation of competing/complementary goals. For example, consider the current debate about how to measure when the “border is secure” with respect to US immigration reform. (A nice, though short, piece alluding to these issues is here.) A recent GAO report discusses the state of border security, the variety … 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