Survivorship Bias, Sample Sizes, and the Oregon Medicaid Study
I think most coverage of the Oregon Medicaid Study [gated] has been bad. Very bad. I wanted to flag one way that it has been especially bad. We don’t do very much U.S. domestic politics on the...
View ArticleWhy Do We Hate Drones?
Whether it was democratization or WMDs, Iraq was the “pick a reason, love the policy” war. Conversely, drone strikes have become the “pick a reason, hate the policy” war. A consensus appears to be...
View ArticleWhat We’re Reading
In this new (regular) feature, we will be providing a round-up of what we at The Smoke-Filled Room have been reading that seems interesting and especially germane to the problems of contemporary...
View ArticleWhat We’re Reading
Fair and balanced: ”Over the past few months, the (state-run) People’s Daily in China has launched a lovely series called “Dishonest Americans.” Supposedly this is meant to give Chinese readers a...
View ArticleWhy More Violence Means Less Support For US Intervention in Syria
(Editor’s note: the following is a post from regular Smoke-Filled Room contributor Lionel Beehner at the always-excellent Political Violence at a Glance.) One puzzle about the conflict in Syria: as...
View ArticleWhat We’re Reading
Substitute political words for the medical words in this excerpt: “The current regime was built during a time of pervasive ignorance when the best we could do was throw a drug and a placebo against a...
View ArticleBringing the State Back In (to the discussion on redistribution and innovation)
In recent months, the New York Times has published a series of opinion pieces that read like an abbreviated syllabus in comparative political economy. An analytic piece from late April chronicling the...
View ArticleWhat We’re Reading
From the Monkey Cage: John Huber asks whether theory is getting lost in the “identification revolution.” David Ignatius with a great overview of the difficulties with Obama’s new approach to Syria....
View ArticleSnowden and Rawls
Edward Snowden continues his journey down the Freedom House ladder. He left the United States (56 on on Freedom House’s 60-point civil liberties scale) for Hong Kong (51) then on to Moscow (19). In the...
View ArticleA Case for Modest Military Force in Syria
I wanted to explicate briefly a case for the modest application of military force in Syria, just because it seems that the blogosphere and opinion pages are over-representing arguments to do a lot or...
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