Are polls lies?

The recent recent election has prompted a lot of comments like, “all polls are lies”. I disagree. Polls are a very fuzzy take on a moment in time. A poll two weeks before election day can’t tell you how the election will turn out, only how people feel about it two weeks before the event. And even for its moment in time it is fuzzy – sample size, etc. Most have a 5% margin of error. The polls, at least...

Conspiracy Theories

I don’t have much use for conspiracy theories. Most of what happens in the world can be explained with basic sociology and economic analysis. Positing that some secret group is pulling the strings and always getting exactly what they want is a kind of intellectual short-cut that serves to make sense of the world without doing all the work of mastering the detail of how things actually function. This is not to say that...

Obamacare is not easily repealed

The NY Times headline, “Trump says he may keep parts of Obamacare”. This is more or less what the experts I was reading in the last two days predicted. He’s going to keep those parts that would require overcoming a Democratic filibuster to repeal, and repeal the parts the can be done in a reconciliation process with a simple majority. Additional benefit: he can have it both ways – he...