The Divorce Revolution: How a Social Tragedy Became a Personal Preference
A few female academics in the 1980s convinced the world that divorce is great, with little evidence. The result has been subtle but real—and heartbreaking.
research
A collection of 29 issues
Introducing Statistical On-Chain Analysis
Using blockchain network data to predict cryptocurrency price movements—aka “on-chain analysis”—is an exciting new discipline, but the room for improvement is vast. The main technique of leading on-chain analysts is still eyeballing line graphs. With years of professional experience in statistical forecasting, I see a massive opportunity to
How to know if you’re talking to a wokescold: A scientific method for preventing IRL flame wars
[FYI: If you’re interested in data-blogging like this, I’m offering a little free course on it.] We’ve all been there: You’ve had a couple drinks, you’re having fun talking with someone, then you blurt out a controversial opinion and everything goes belly up. Maybe your
The Two Meanings of Reaction (Excerpt from Based Deleuze)
The following is an excerpt from my short book Based Deleuze, which will be published on September 20th. Pre-order here and you’ll receive it by email as soon as it’s released. Discussing the ideological valence of great thinkers is difficult because they have little use for the crutches
Democrats wanted strongman rule way more than Republicans — until Trump arrived
That graph is from the new book by political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2019), Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Just finishing the book now. I'd call it a rigorous validation of the conventional wisdom of the moment. Certainly required reading for anyone with weirder theories about
If education is signaling, does moral signaling become a viable major?
In a recent post, I encountered an interesting empirical fact about the college wage premium accruing to low-ability college grads over the period 1979-1994. Looking at a 2003 article by Tobias, I wrote: "There is a lot of temporal volatility for the class of low-ability individuals. In fact, for low-ability
Study finds the relationship between genes and earnings increased after 1980
Someone sent me a recent NBER working paper by Nicholas W. Papageorge and Kevin Thom on polygenic scores and educational attainment/earnings. Most pertinent to my theoretical interests is that the link between genes and income appears to increase over recent decades. In my lectures on the politics of media
Are Politically Correct Students Better or Worse Students?
In my current book project, one of my goals is to provide the fullest possible empirical accounting of the strange new persona sometimes derisively called the "social justice warrior." Although the main contours of my argument are pretty well developed, there are various sub-hypotheses that I've had for a while
Now, wars start themselves
Major wars have become less frequent, but a curious feature of the wars we still observe is that almost nobody starts them. When wars occur today, they appear to start themselves, or are started by some unknown entity. I learned this from a new article by Hathaway et
Educated Errors? On Perceptions of Trump's Ideology
More educated individuals generally know more than less educated individuals. If you test what they know about any random political issue, for instance, uneducated individuals are more likely to give an incorrect answer, or say "I don't know," relative to more educated individuals. At first this sounds obvious, but what
Occupations and Their Ideologies
Occupations are strongly sorted by ideology. Political scientist Adam Bonica has produced reliable and consistent estimates of ideological placement for a huge number of individuals, politicians, and organizations. As he writes here, he was especially struck by how extreme are the mean ideology scores for various occupations: Although the ideological
The interaction of education and race on Trump approval
The correlation between education and support for Trump is very different across the black-white divide. The graphs below I have taken from Civiqs. For white people with no college degree, a small majority approves of Trump: For white postgraduates, a small majority disapproves of Trump. Interestingly, this is more Trump