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Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of Freakonomics, the book / blog sensation of the year, paid Fat Politics by J. Eric Oliver their “very highest compliment” over the weekend, saying: “This reads like something that we could have written!” They also include some substance of the Oliver’s argument via a Publisher’s Weekly review: Arguing […]
Richard Davis, author of Electing Justice, and Michael Comiskey certainly chose a propitious time to debate the judicial confirmation process. Last week, as the Bush Administration lost a nominee, Davis and Comiskey debated the limitations of the SCOTUS nomination and confirmation process, the reluctance of nominees to answer the thorniest questions for fear of revealing […]
Even though his book is now shipping, Tim Harford and the good folks at the Financial Times know you just can’t get enough of The Undercover Economist. So, yesterday they launched Harford’s new weekly column in the paper, ‘The Undercover Economist.’ Here is the beginning of the inaugural UE column, which addresses the mysteries of […]
The Undercover Economist appeared on the Radio Economics podcast website on Thursday (click on the post title to listen to the interview). It is an engaging 30 minute dialogue between Tim Harford (‘The Undercover Economist’) and the host of the Radio Economics site, Dr. James Reese. It includes a wonderful discussion of Harford’s growth as […]
In studying two centuries of Washington reporting, I found only one instance where journalists came forward to name their anonymous sources. It occurred in 1846 after the Washington Daily Times (no relation to the current paper) printed sensational allegations that Whigs were plotting with the British minister to bring about a settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute. When the Senate investigated the charges, the paper’s editor and publisher voluntarily divulged the sources of the story: a naval officer, a Senate doorkeeper, several lobbyists, and a few other journalists. Since those sources had everything to lose and nothing to gain by corroborating the Times’ allegations, every witness, under oath, denied knowledge of a plot. The committee branded the story “utterly and entirely false,” and banned anyone from the newspaper from the Senate galleries. The Washington Daily Times promptly went out of business, creating an object lesson that the rest of the press corps took very much to heart.
Despite the tremendous importance of politics in Supreme Court nominations, the single most important determinant of a successful confirmation is the qualifications of the nominee. We have measured the qualifications of all nominees since Hugo Black (1937) by content analyzing newspaper editorials from leading newspapers at the time of their nominations [see table below]. By this standard, Miers falls near the bottom of the stack. Thus, her withdrawal is not surprising.
With the “leak inquiry” grand jury adjouned for the day, it’s time for a breather. Gary Hart offers a fresh perspective in a piece in Tuesday’s Denver Post. Responding to the oft-repeated conservative defense that is, essentially, ‘no harm, no foul,’ Hart offers some historical context to the scene: The federal statute making it a […]
Some bloggers have declared today to be “Blog Quake Day” and are calling for online donations to agencies assisting the relief effort in Pakistan. Oxfam declared today that “rich countries” are “failing to respond generously to the UN South Asian Earthquake appeal.” In related news, Anatol Lieven, author of America Right or Wrong, wrote a […]
“…one of their clearest duties is to keep a wary eye on the gentlemen who operate this great nation, and only too often slip into the assumption that they own it.” — H.L. Mencken
That New Yorker article on the use of phony words to protect a dictionary’s copyright got some belated play on the seminal weblog Boing-Boing today. The article focuses on the search for the phony word in the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition (NOAD). Erin McKean, the editor-in-chief of NOAD, whimsically likens a lexicographer’s copyright […]
Joseph Stiglitz: As the income distribution becomes increasingly skewed, with an increasing share of the wealth and income in the hands of those at the top, the median falls further and further below the mean. That is why, even as per capita GDP has been increasing in the United States, U.S. median household income has actually been falling.
The Financial Times has published a great excerpt of the forthcoming book from Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist. Here is a representative graph from the excerpt and the book that Steven Levitt called “required reading”: Supermarkets will often produce an own-brand “value” range, displaying crude designs that don’t vary whether the product is lemonade or […]
President Bush’s nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court has politicians and pundits questioning her qualifications for the job. But in the hyper-partisan world of Supreme Court nominations, do qualifications really matter? The answer—which may surprise those who claim the appointment process is a “mess,” “badly broken,” and “unpredictable”—is absolutely.
David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman in the Lives and Legacies series, responded to J.M. Coetzee in the “Letters” section of the New York Review of Books this week: J.M. Coetzee concludes his review of my new book Walt Whitman [NYR, September 22] with what is evidently meant as a criticism. He writes, “Reynolds’s […]
Philip Pullman took a breather from the ‘Narnia-gate’ media frenzy yesterday to respond to the other big literature-goes-to-Hollywood story of last week: Paradise Lost will be coming to a theatre near you in 2007! “There have been rumours about a film of Paradise Lost for a long time,” Pullman says. “There was even talk of […]
In Friday’s ‘Dear Economist’ column for the Financial Times, Tim Harford bravely answered this puzzler from one of his loyal readers: Is the value of a British person’s life greater than the value of an Iraqi person’s life? And, speaking of bravery, check out Harford’s reaction to this terrible situation – from the ‘what would […]