Yesterday my 7-year-old daughter, Anya, was wearing a T-shirt I’d never seen before. It was a Barack Obama shirt. I asked where it came from. She said that someone gave it to her back in the fall, after he was elected. But why finally wear it now? Well, the kids are on spring break and Anya had a chance to . . .
Tom Hundley had a long piece in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday describing the influence of the University of Chicago on Barack Obama. The most interesting part comes near the end, where law professors Cass Sunstein and Richard Epstein spar over whether Obama really believes in free markets. Sunstein says, “As Nixon went to China, Obama will go to deregulation.” . . .
As a writer, I enjoy listening to people speak and, when they’re in the middle of a particularly interesting sentence, I try to imagine how I’d like to see it finished.
Usually I am disappointed. But with some select people, the payoff is far greater than I could have imagined. They have something to say that’s remarkably insightful or unexpected or even just articulate in a way that takes your breath away.
Following up on yesterday’s post about quantifying political speech, Dartmouth’s Michael Herron — who is a first-rate political scientist and data hound — points out that Obama was the first president to speak about “data” in his inaugural address, and only the second to mention “statistics.”
Doug Mills/The New York Times Our friends at speechwars.com have put together a really fun tool to help you mine their database of the full text of all State of the Union Addresses (even though this wasn’t technically such an address) as well as inaugurals. It’s a fun way of tracking which issues have occupied the minds of our leaders. . . .
So today is a two-fer: both Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer will not be joining the Obama administration, as planned, as Health and Human Services secretary and chief performance officer, respectively. They were both undone by failure to pay taxes.
Charles Whelan, author of Naked Economics and a lecturer in public policy at the University of Chicago, launched his bid for the U.S. House of Representatives.
I came home this evening and found five magazines waiting in the mailbox: Time, BusinessWeek, The Economist, Columbia (a university alumni magazine) and Natural History (from the Museum of Natural History). Four of the five magazines had the same guy on the cover. Yeah, that one, a.k.a. Barack Obama. I have read a lot of interesting things by and about . . .
Everyone seems to have advice for President-elect Obama these days: physicists, economists, Willie Nelson — even Freakonomics commenters are getting in on the act. Why are we always so eager to advise new presidents? Rarely do new congressmen, major league sports coaches, and corporate executives generate the same flood of unsolicited advice. So why are we so eager to share . . .
Last week, President-elect Obama dominated the news — and perhaps moved the markets — by spending the three days before Thanksgiving introducing one economist after another to the American public. There were Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, and Austan Goolsbee; and don’t forget Tim Geithner and Paul Volcker, neither of whom are Ph.D. economists, but neither of whom are . . .
Do you remember the following quote from Barack Obama? “I am like a Rorschach test,” Mr. Obama noted at one point during the campaign. “Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something.” That’s not quite what I think of as a Rorschach test. This is what I think of as a Rorschach test: From Caffeinated Politics Robin . . .
Photo: Darwin Bell Beets are the new broccoli. Or at least they will be after Obama takes office on January 20, as the president-elect recently revealed his distaste for this vitamin-laden root vegetable. And Obama is not alone: Even as beet salads have become popular in trendy eateries, most American kids I know also reject the mighty beet. It’s a . . .
Doug Mills/The New York Times I was struck by the photo above, which accompanied a Times article about President-elect Obama‘s first news conference. Not only does it give us a good look at many of Obama’s economic advisers, but it’s a great study of photo-taking body language. Many photographers I know have nicknames for the way people stand when they’re . . .
Photo: Terren in Virginia There were so many wild cards in this past presidential election that surely scholars will be poring over it for years to come. In light of Obama‘s victory, I had a thought that may already be on some scholar’s mind, although the proof of this thesis will hardly be simple. It goes like this. For years, . . .
My father has a lot of ideas. Some of them are pretty good. Others get me into a lot of trouble. Back in July of 2005, my dad had an idea I thought was interesting enough that I passed it along to the staff of Barack Obama. This is well before Obama was running for president — back when he . . .
How do you score a bruising fight like the Pennsylvania primary? In politics, it seems, expectations are everything. And regular readers will not be surprised to hear that I would argue that political prediction markets can help us understand which candidates actually exceeded pre-poll expectations. Some simple observations: Clinton‘s 9.5 point victory margin was roughly what one might expect from . . .
Justin Wolfers‘s recent post on “sounding presidential” reminded me that there is another sense in which a candidate might sound presidential. It turns out that almost all presidents have had first names with stressed first syllables – think WILL-iam, or RICH-ard. One-syllable names are also stressed when you say the candidate’s entire name – think BILL CLIN-ton or GEORGE BUSH. . . .
One of the really fun innovations in this election cycle is the extent to which the speech of the candidates has now become grist for statistical analysis. For instance, the Times’ “Caucus” blog reports that Reagan’s name was invoked 53 times last night, and by this measure Romney beat McCain 19 to 12. The Times has now set up a . . .
In today’s Washington Post, George Will profiles Austan Goolsbee, a colleague of Levitt’s at the University of Chicago and an economic adviser to Barack Obama. (You can see what we’ve written in the past about Goolsbee here.) Will’s piece contains Goolsbee’s interesting take on imports from China and elsewhere, with facts that I am sure most Americans don’t know: As . . .
Bruce Wydick, a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, has written an interesting OpEd in USA Today about sunk costs and the Iraq war. Here is his lead: Our inability to think clearly about sunk costs is impeding our ability to make clear decisions about our involvement in Iraq. Failing to correctly identify sunk costs (those that . . .
It sounds as if Barack Obama has been listening to some economists (maybe even Austan Goolsbee): he has come out in favor of merit pay for schoolteachers. From an A.P. article: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told the largest teachers union Thursday that performance-based merit pay ought to be considered in public schools. Teachers at the National Education Association’s annual . . .
I am in Vancouver for about 36 hours. Vancouver anytime is pretty great; in springtime, it is even greater. Snowcaps glimpsed between modern skyscrapers; people from everywhere; lots of green. And, of course, that spectacular meeting of mountain and water. A few random observations: 1. There seem to be more coffee shops per square block, including Starbucks, Blenz, and others, . . .
Here’s a really interesting article (albeit a few months old) from the Pew Research Center that concerns a point we’ve touched on before: Minority political candidates tend to do better in pre-election polls than in the actual elections, suggesting that voters want to sound color-blind to pollsters but in fact carry a strong racial preference into the booth. The article . . .
University of Chicago economists have a reputation for being outspoken, libertarian, and conservative. My good friend and Chicago colleague Austan Goolsbee, who has been advising Barack Obama on economic policy since his Senate campaign, is only the first of these. There is an article about economists advising presidential candidates that features Goolsbee in today’s New York Times. My guess is . . .