A signal is only informative if it’s costly enough that it can’t be faked. The logic runs through Spence’s job market model, through deterrence theory, through free speech doctrine, through protest and repression, through campaign finance. Posts under this tag are about situations where the cost of the message is the message — and what happens when the cost structure changes.
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
The rise of mega-donors has been an important storyline in the unfolding drama of the 2016 presidential election (for example, see here). The presence of these donors in the political game (or at least their visibility) is partially the result of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. But more interesting is whether the rise of these mega-donors has caused the … Read more
[This is the first ever guest post on Math Of Politics. If you’re interested in posting on Math Of Politics, drop me an email.] By Scott Ainsworth. To understand the Cotton letter, we need to think about the operation of treaties. Treaties are like contracts, designed to solidify current behaviors or constrain future behaviors for some period of … Read more
The Greek Tragedy is a “thing.” And lately it has reemerged. The question at the heart of this post is how one should bargain when between a rock and hard place.[0] This point was raised and discussed very well by Henry Farrell in this piece, which was responding to this op-ed in the NY Times by Yanis Varoufakis, the … Read more
Like many people, especially here in St. Louis, the ongoing events in Ferguson have consumed my attention and, frankly, really shaken me. After much thought, I have possibly come up with a manageable take on one angle of “the math of” the situation. It is important to distinguish protest from rebellion. Protest is distinguished from rebellion on the basis … Read more
Thinking more about transparency (which I just wrote about), it occurred to me that I neglected two pieces (of many) that are relevant for the point about transparency of decision-making in bodies like the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in which expertise plays an important role in justifying the body’s authority. David Stasavage and Ellen … Read more
Sarah Binder, as usual, provides excellent insights into a difficult political problem in this post discussing the potential political and economic pitfalls of imposing greater transparency on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which essentially directs the Federal Reserve’s active participation in the economy, thereby having the most direct control over short-term interest rates and, accordingly, day-to-day … Read more
A recent paper by Joshua Kalla & David Broockman has attracted some attention (for example, in this Washington Post story, Monkey Cage post, and this excellent, reflective post on Mischiefs of Faction by Jennifer Victor). In a nutshell, the paper reports the results of a well-designed field experiment that provides evidence that donations to a Member of Congress “open doors” in the … Read more
This post by Michael Moynihan, responding in part to this post by Thane Rosenbaum, asks how “free” free speech should be. The question of discriminating between different forms of speech—based on questions such as “is it knowingly false,” “how likely is it to incite violence,” and “is it political”—is an instantiation of an aggregation problem, exactly the … Read more