Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Cleveland Plain Dullards

You’d think that, by now, people would understand that, once it is on the web, there is no point locking the barn door after the cat has gotten out of the bag. This is today’s hot meme The Cleveland Plain Dealer filmed (and posted) a joint interview with current (and likely re-elected) governor John Kasich […]

Two little comments on Matt O’Brien

The main point (if any) is that wonkblog without Ezra Klein is still excellent. Matt O’Brien wrote an excellent post on what’s wrong with Europe. It includes an excellent intro to Krugmanian macro and a description of the problem. I had two tiny comments. O’Brien discusses “structural reform” well, but accepts the German view that […]

Unskewing Polls

I clicked on this story at Daily Kos to have a laugh about how unskewing isn’t just for conservatives any more and am very alarmed to find myself almost partly convinced. I confess that I have fallen into at least the near occasion of unskewing. Can We Really Trust YouGov? by Tyler Yeargain If you […]

Read Jeff Madrik

Note to self: read more Jeff Madrik (hey he wrote books which I haven’t read) but for now read his very interesting and stimulating Op-ed “Our Misplaced Faith in Free Trade” do click the link. After the jump, I will steal fair use the whole op-ed with my comments (is that called fisking ?) but […]

Vulgar Empiricism Obama V Reagan

Just compare the graphs (reminder, mainly to myself, at least with Chrome, you have to click “read more” to see the graphs) Reagan Obama Overall Reagan saw a decline of 0.5% from 7.5% in January 1981 to 7.0% in September 1986, while Obama saw a decline of 1.9% from 7.8 % inJanuary 2009 to 5.9% […]

comment on Krugman

Most of what I type below is stuff I’ve typed at Angrybear many times. It’s here because I ran into the Krugman blog 1500 character limit over there. I’m commenting on two bits intertemporal equilibrium all the way, with consumers making lifetime consumption plans, prices set with the future rationally expected, and so on. That’s […]

What John DiIulio Said

I think this is too good to excerpt just read “Want better, smaller government? Hire another million federal bureaucrats.” by John DiIulio. He argues that the obsession with keeping the number of Federal civilian employees low has reduced efficiency and created powerful concentrated interests represented by powerful lobbies. The fact that he was “the first […]

History Quiz

I wonder what happens when a Democratic canidate for President campaigns on a proposal to increase taxes on high incomes and cut taxes on middle and lower class incomes (that is on the class warfare platform) ? IIRC what happens is that he gets elected. This is what Clinton did in 1992 and Obama did […]

Ballance at the New York Times

“Ballance” as defined by Chris Cillizza consists of choosing a metric such that it gives a balanced conclusion. The ur-example was his own corruption scorecard which assessed whether Republicans or Democrats were ahead in the corruption game. He defined rules for scoring which included only alleged corruption of current office holders counts. An editor (whose […]

Uncertainty for a Recovering Bayesian Fortune Teller

Attention conservation notice. This is a comment on a Five year old Cosma Shalizi post which begins “Attention conservation notice: 2300 words of technical” h/t Brad DeLong Shalizi argues that a Bayesian must have absolute confidence that he knows the probability of any event — a diffuse prior just means that the probability that variables […]