Wouldn't it be quite a coincidence for this to be the moment public opinion got it right?
It's tempting for the moderate to strut. Isn't it enlightened to see truth in both sides? To calmly rise above the squabbling? But there's a strong argument against moderation: Public opinion has been evolving for hundreds of years. Many things that are moderate today were 'extreme' very recently. Isn't it...
Rich countries are not monolithic. However, outside the US and a few microstates, they vary in a limited range.
With abortion in flux in the US, I realized I didn’t have a clear picture of how things looked in the rest of the rich world. When I searched, I found lots of maps, like the following from Politico and Wikipedia:
If culture war is intractable, what should we do instead?
The Guadalcanal campaign was the first major offensive operation by the Allies in the Pacific theater of World War 2. This nightmarish battle ran for six months and—while an Allied victory—involved losses so high the US Navy refused to release casualty figures for years afterward. When this campaign ended in...
How polarized are we? An overview of what people of different political parties, education levels, races, and political engagement think about politics.
We’re here on Earth for such a short time. So, I often wonder—what do people spend their days thinking about? Judging from the ever-increasing amount of screaming everywhere, the answer would seem to be politics. But is that right? What opinions do normal people really have?
Some claims that test scores don't predict college success don't add up.
Here are some claims about how grades (GPA) and test scores (ACT) predict success in college. "In a study released this month, the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found—after surveying more than 55,000 public high school graduates—that grade point averages were five times as strong at predicting college...
There's many suggested policies to address police violence. What do we know about if they actually work?
You can’t measure police bias using simple population ratios. A better idea is to check if police behave differently when it’s dark, but this doesn’t give any firm conclusions either. What else can we do?