I don’t know if Build Back Better becomes law. It seems that if Democrats cut enough out of it, eventually Manchin will come on board and everyone will vote for whatever skeleton remains in order to save face. So I wouldn’t write the bill off for dead quite yet. But…

What are vibes? Most fundamentally, “vibes” is the idea that politics is rooted in and governed by mass psychology, which makes political behavior intrinsically difficult (and sometimes impossible) to model as a series of quantifiable inputs and predictable outputs, the approach favored by econometrically-inclined disciplines. Like any system in which…

First of all, let me say I’m not a doctor, not an epidemiologist, and I have no expertise in this subject matter at all. …

There’s an assumption in much of the media coverage of the Mueller report that has been nagging me for quite a while. With the report filed but not yet public, it’s the last opportunity to say something about that assumption, and lay out some standards for evaluating the report itself…

Although proposals for place-based affirmative action have been suggested for years, the last year has seen an explosion in the number and variety of such proposals. The following is a memorandum I authored in 2017, in response to Trump administration attacks on affirmative action, that suggests an affirmative action system…

In the original draft we summed up our findings as follows: Ultimately, our model suggests that the probability of a set of payments coincidentally coming so close to $130,000 is approximately .1%, or one out of one thousand. …

As is well-known by now, in late October 2016, Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen paid adult star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in order to purchase her silence about an alleged affair a decade earlier. …

Race-based affirmative action policies are likely to remain under threat through at least 2020. Fortunately, there is an alternative policy that could conceivably replicate the integrative effects of race-based affirmative action, while remaining on stronger legal and political footing: opportunity-based affirmative action. …

Because being depressed about the future is cool on the internet, many people are saying that Donald Trump will probably win reelection. In reality, we don’t know if Donald Trump will win reelection. The signs are bad for Trump. But predictions are hard. “But incumbents always win.” Since Clinton’s election…