cluelessresearch.com

Gelman linked to a post by Krugman on the red state blue state research. I followed the link to find this pearl in the comments to Krugman’s post:

Maybe more people reside in the lower third of income than in 68-72, taking in for inflation and stagnant wages.

— Posted by rpo choice li

There’s a great piece by Steven Pinker on why we curse. I do have a quibble though

He asks:

To take just one example, why do people use the ungrammatical Fuck you? And why does no one have a clear sense of what, exactly, Fuck you means?

and argues that

The most likely explanation is that these grammatically baffling curses originated in more intelligible religious curses during the transition from religious to sexual and scatological swearing in English-speaking countries

Is that so? What about in cursing in non-English-speaking countries? I know for a fact, having used the expression inumerous times, that there is nothing ungrammatical about “vá se fuder” (go fuck yourself) or “foda-se” (fuck yourself). I am willing to believe the religious to scatological swearing hypothesis, but the thesis would get much better support if studied comparatively.

The comparative study of swearing… now this is probably an open fucking field of study! Too bad I am not a linguist…

Nice piece on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his forecasting model. It calls game theoretic political science a “branch of mathematics”, but I guess that is a compliment. Not enough credit is given, however, for the inputs of whatever models one is using. You can’t reliably make good predictions out of crappy data.

I liked his solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

Ps. While there, check out their data visualization section.