Author Archive | Ilya Somin

I have an election day op ed on political ignorance in The Jurist. A brief excerpt: Nancy Pelosi may soon become the new Speaker of the House of Representatives. But 67% of Americans admitted in a recent survey that they don’t know enough about her to have an opinion. Fifty-five percent say the same thing […]

One of the strongest traditional arguments for expanding government power in a democracy is that doing so can improve the lot of the poor by enabling them to use their voting power to promote redistributive policies. Yet numerous recent studies (primarily by left of center scholars) show that, in fact, the poor have very little […]

Jim Lindgren’s most recent post is a rejoinder to my original reply. To recap, I argued that Jim’s initial argument against my theory of rational voting doesn’t refute it because Jim assumes that, for my theory to be correct, there must be a linear relationship between “the amount of money you are willing to give […]

Co-blogger Jim Lindgren has a thoughtful response to my analysis of the rationality of voting. To briefly recap, I argue that voting is rational if 1) voters value the utility of their fellow citizens as well as their own, and 2) they perceive a big enough difference between the “right” candidate and his or her […]

Several commenters on my post on the rationality of voting brought up James Surowiecki’s interesting book, The Wisdom of Crowds. It so happens that I wrote a review of the Wisdom of Crowds last year, where I explained why his argument that large numbers of individually ignorant decision-makers can make seeemingly well-informed collective choices does […]

Sociologist E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman has an interesting article on women and role-playing games, trying to explain why so few women play RPGs. OK, the article may well be interesting primarily to those of us who spent a lot of time in high school playing Dungeons and Dragons. But I suspect that RPG veterans are, […]

From a New York trial court decision, May 15, 2006 (paragraph break added): This petition, to change the surname of a three-year-old minor and amend the child’s birth and baptismal certificates, by the child’s father, her non-custodial parent, is replete with accusations about the mother’s alleged reprehensible and irresponsible conduct, as contrasted with the father’s […]

from a Daily Bruin article: An isolated incident like this one of course doesn’t tell us much about the incidence of such attitudes. But it’s still good for those of us who — like me — have almost never encountered anti-Semitism in their Los Angeles lives to remember that this stuff is out there. Thanks […]

over publisher’s decision to raise the institutional subscription price to $1,665 for one year (six issues). The New York Sun reports on this. Thanks to Paul Caron (TaxProf) for the pointer.

Co-blogger Tyler Cowen has an excellent post on the looming crisis facing the Western European model of social democracy over at Crooked Timber. I agree with most of Tyler’s points. Unfortunately, however, I think that the risks posed by social democratic policies are in some respects even greater than he argues. The combination of high […]

until you fall to the ground, definitely don’t fight back with lethal force. After all, maybe he’s insane, and quite possibly not morally responsible for his actions. You wouldn’t want to kill someone like that. And maybe he’ll stop short of killing you or seriously injuring you while you’re lying there on the ground, right? […]

partly because it’s the sort of matter on which one needs to know a good deal of facts to have a sensible opinion. But this story struck me as quite odd; could any prosecutors among our readers comment on it? The district attorney prosecuting three Duke lacrosse players accused of raping a woman at a […]

Lauren Gelman of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School passes along this item: Lots of bloggers are planning to cover the 2006 general elections on November 7. But what are the legal issues that you need to understand? Such as: Can you be in the voting area except to vote? (Not […]

That’s what a Canadian judge told the jury in a marijuana possession case, where the defendant claimed he possessed the marijuana for medical reasons (though he apparently didn’t qualify for some reason for Canada’s medical marijuana exemption): The judge instructed the jurors “to retire to the jury room to consider what I have said, appoint […]

or at least Danish-speakers: Might anyone be kind to translate the key passages from today’s Danish court decision rejecting a libel lawsuit against the Jyllands-Posten newspaper over the newspaper’s publication of the Mohammed cartoons? Short excerpts are quoted in this BBC story, but I was hoping someone might be kind enough to provide a more […]