Every four years, the race for the White House ends in accusations of deceit. Each side says the other spent millions of dollars to lie and skew the outcome. This year’s post-election accounts of backstage calculations and fateful turning points continue that tradition. But if you read these accounts carefully, you’ll find a happy surprise […]

Jim Manzi, curious as always (especially about how to evaluate government policies), tries to plumb the problem of causality. Here’s where he begins: Consider two questions: – Does A cause B? – If I take action A, will it cause outcome B? I don’t care about the first, or more precisely, I might care about […]

The GOP’s extortion demands: cut Social Security or we’ll shoot the country in the foot The GOP created the fiscal cliff beginning with the “temporary” tax cuts passed in 2001, 2003 and 2004 under the Bush administration, all as purportedly temporary provisions with sunset dates.  They hoped that the passage of the tax cuts would, […]

by Robert Waldmann    What has Nate Silver done for us lately ? This isn’t really about Nate Silver. It is about poll aggregators in general and just as much about the Huffington Post pollster, Real Clear Politics and Talking points Memo as about Silver, Wang Linzer and others who try to estimate outcome probabilities […]

by David Zetland   David Zetland is a senior water economist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and maintains a blog on water issues at Aguanomics Hurricane Sandy and choices for the future I live in the Netherlands, where living below sea level for many years has driven the Dutch to take flooding and storm surges […]

by Linda Beale Tax Relief for Victims of Sandy The IRS released several bulletins this week providing relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy.IR-2012-83 extends the return filing and tax payment deadline to Feb. 1, 2013 for hurricane  victims in Connecticut (Fairfield, Middlesex, New Haven, and New London Counties; the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and the […]

by run75441 Will the Reign of Witches end January 1st?(hat tip to Maggie Mahar at Health Beat blog) A little patience,” Jefferson wrote, “and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles. It is true, that in […]

A short video worth watching: (hat tip David Zetland)

Three writers point to the need to maintain energy and attention to the Obama Grand Bargain. Mark Weisbrot at The Guardian writes on Barack Obama’s carefully crafted economic populism carries the day: The media are a huge factor in most elections in the US, and outside of Fox News and the rightwing press, most of the […]