Sunday, June 28, 2009

Modeling Everything, Public Plan Edition

Modeling Everything, Public Plan Edition is James Kwak talking about Nate Silver’s analysis of campaign contributions and the public health plan option and about Brendan Nyhan's counter-argument.

"So here we have: on the one hand, a quick-and-dirty model on this specific question by a guy without a Ph.D. in anything (I think), which correctly picks the positions of 87 out of 99 senators (but it’s possible that the model would have done just as well without campaign contributions); on the other hand, a guy with a Ph.D. in political science and a research fellowship in health policy at a very good university, citing a paper by three MIT professors that’s more or less on the same general topic, arguing that campaign contributions don’t affect policy."

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