Some years ago, Michael Kanell and I wrote a book called Presimetrics in which we tried to quantify the performance of Presidents along a range of issues objectively, using numbers. But what if we want a single measure of a Presidents performance? Put another way – how do we know whether a President was a […]
My wife has been enjoying the recent skits about the Trump administration on Saturday Night Live. I can see why. Even Melissa McCarthy has managed to be funny in her impressions of Sean Spicer. Until now I would have sworn that reports of McCarthy having a sense of humor were some sort of urban legend. […]
I saw three people wearing Tom Brady jerseys in the supermarket today. I don’t watch football and I am bad with faces, but I would venture a guess that not one of the three was the Tom Brady who will be playing in the Super Bowl today. For one, none of them looked the part. […]
I just finished Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith Richburg. Richburg spent three years in Africa while working for the Washington Post, and his tenure overlapped with the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, among other atrocities and outrages. Richburg is not a particularly good wordsmith, but […]
To cite myself:
Recently I put up a few graphs showing that the income of immigrants is correlated with the income of the country from which they hailed, and that this relationship is especially true for immigrants who have been in the US the longest Garrett Jones has been covering the same ground, and here he provides a […]
When Barack Obama became President, Republicans in Congress pledged to oppose him tooth and nail. That was a bad idea. It implied that they were hoping the President would fail. This implies one of two things: either they wished ill for the country, or they were completely convinced that Obama was wrong and they were […]
I was looking for information on how cultures affect growth and stumbled on this 12.5 year old article in The Economist: Diversity and development might seem to sit oddly together. But they are intimately linked, and the report seeks to show that they are not related in the way many people assume. The UNDP’s press […]
This email just arrived from the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD), where my son is currently enrolled in one of the elementary schools: Long Beach Unified is conducting a survey of all students, staff and parents on the culture and climate of our schools. The surveys, all of which are available for review on […]
In my last post, I used World Bank data to look at the effect of net migration on economic growth. Net migration is defined by the World Bank as the number of immigrants (coming into a country) less the number of emigrants (leaving the country). I showed that net migration as a share of the […]