I appreciate Tim Groseclose’s reply below, but I fear his response only makes me more skeptical of the reasoning he uses. I’m going to hide most of my post “below the fold” because I don’t want to steal our guest’s thunder. (It’s his guest-blogging stint, not mine!) But for those interested, I’ll explain a bit […]
Archive | August, 2011
An Update on My UCLA-Admissions Controversy
In my post yesterday, when describing Chapter 6 of Left Turn, I discussed an L.A. Times article about UCLA admissions. I noted that the article had a liberal bias—not because of any false statements but because it omitted some important true statements. In general, it reported many facts that liberals would want people to learn […]
My Response to Prof. Kerr’s Reply to My Response
I think my and Milyo’s results in many ways support and are consistent with the points that Prof. Kerr made. To see this consider this fact: As surveys show, in a typical election, Washington correspondents tend to vote 93-7 for the Democrat. It happens that the district that contains Berkeley, California voted about 90-10 for […]
Fourth Amendment Rights in Stolen Computers
A few readers have flagged a new district court decision, Clements-Jeffrey v. City of Springfield, that raises an interesting Fourth Amendment question: When does a person have Fourth Amendment rights in the contents of a stolen computer? A few decisions have held that a person doesn’t have Fourth Amendment rights in the contents of a […]
The Compleat Lawyer
“No man can be a compleat Lawyer by universalitie of knowledge without experience in particular cases, nor by bare experience without universalitie of knowledge; he must be both speculative & active, for the science of the laws, I assure you, must joyne hands with experience.” –Edward Coke, Preface to A Book of Entries (1614).
Hurricane Irene:
As many of you know, I spend my summers (and as much time as possible in other seasons) up at our place in southern Vermont (Marlboro, to be precise). And as everyone knows by now, we got creamed by the storm on Sunday. It was an astonishing and awe-inspiring experience to go through — I’ve […]
“A New York Times Reporter Tips His Hand”
That’s the title of a post from Heather Mac Donald (Secular Right); here’s an excerpt, though you should read the whole post: In the course of a column blasting media entrepreneur Steven Brill’s new book on the school reform movement, New York Times reporter Michael Winerip inadvertently sets out his economic assumptions. A revelation of […]
The Tenth Amendment and Sovereignty
Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center writes: “The Tenth Amendment, like all other Amendments, is a binding part of the Constitution that should be fully respected…. [But w]hen the states ratified the Constitution, they renounced their status as fully-independent sovereigns and endowed the federal government with enumerated but substantial powers.” Kendall is correct. Anyone, […]
Case Study of an L.A. Times Article
Part 2 of my book is entitled “A Distortion Theory of Bias.” It begins with Chapter 6: “Lies, Damned Lies, and Omitted Statistics.” The following are the first several paragraphs of the chapter: In the previous chapter I applied an economic signaling model to the media. In particular, I suggested that the news reports of […]
$60,000 Damages for Blogging the Truth About Someone, Intending to Get the Person Fired
I blogged about the Johnny Northside case (Moore v. Hoff) when the verdict came down, but there’s now a moderately detailed trial court opinion refusing to set the verdict aside. Here’s an excerpt from a Minneapolis Star-Tribune article about this latest development: The jury ruled last March that [John] Hoff’s scathing blog post amounted to […]
Why Do Politicians Cite Think Tanks?: A Reply to Groseclose
Many thanks to Timothy Groseclose for confirming that I understand the basic methodology of the paper underlying his book. Here’s my follow-up question, if I may: Am I right that the paper assumes that politicians cite think tanks for the same basic reasons that journalists cite think tanks? Put another way, am I right that […]
My Reply to Orin Kerr
Professor Kerr: Everything you said is exactly right. Except, technically that was the methodology of my QJE paper with Milyo, not necessarily the methodology of my book. My book uses three (and if you count Ch. 14, four) methodologies. Only one of those is the QJE-article methodology. Here is a copy of the QJE paper. […]
Trying to Understand the Methodology of “Left Turn”
As a welcome to our guest-blogger Tim Groseclose, I’m hoping he won’t mind my effort to try to understand the methodology of the study behind his book Left Turn. As I understand the methodology, the main idea is to compare citations to think tanks by two groups, politicians and journalists. The study begins by looking […]
Non-Extremist American Muslims Worried About Extremism Among American Muslims
The Pew Center has an interesting new report on Muslim Americans. Some items from it: 1. The report estimates the Muslim population of the U.S., at 2.75 million, rather below the 5-to-7 million estimates that some have given and consistent with the “high-side estimates” from the 2001 National Opinion Research Center survey. 2. The overwhelming […]
An Unplanned Response to Comments about my book, Left Turn
If I had followed my plan for guest blogging, my second post would have discussed (i) my resignation from the UCLA admissions committee, (ii) when I resigned, why I suspected that UCLA—in violation of Prop. 209—was using race as a factor in admissions, and (iii) how an L.A. Times article distorted the truth about UCLA, […]