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There’s something arguably wrong with every sport; how could it not be so? Soccer doesn’t have enough scoring for game scores to be a good indicator of relative performance, football and flat racing hurt their players, NASCAR is climate-hostile, and on and on. The rules of life – laws – are perpetually flawed too, but [...]
Archive for the ‘Policy Analysis’ Category
April 17th, 2013
Category: Policy Analysis
I’ve been going around the country trying to convince people that knowing the unsatisfactory results of cannabis prohibition doesn’t prove that any specific implementation of legal cannabis will turn out to be an improvement. This brings me back to a principle I learned from one of my Kennedy School teachers, Francis Bator, who was honored [...]
February 17th, 2013
Category: Policy Analysis, Politics and Leadership
Hume on not fighting on the wrong ground.
January 9th, 2013
Category: 2013 Democratic Agenda, Debt ceiling, Journalism (Online and Otherwise), Policy Analysis, Republican Party, Uncategorized
Although I sometimes disagree with Jonathan Chait (as in this RBC post), I’ve been a big fan since his days at The New Republic. He now writes for New York Magazine, which published his remarkably prescient mid-October essay about the fiscal cliff. Directly or indirectly, that essay shaped much of the subsequent public debate on [...]
November 23rd, 2012
Want to cut wasteful federal spending? Negotiate drug prices under Medicare Part D.
November 8th, 2012
John Boehner has committed the house majority to accept new revenues under the “right conditions”. The California legislature has a 2/3 D majority in both houses, which means it can actually raise taxes, and the CA electorate that pulled the legs out from under its government a third of a century ago voted to increase [...]
September 6th, 2012
Why is there no Republican who can explain policy as well as Bill Clinton does? Jonathan Bernstein knows the answer: if there were, Republicans wouldn’t want to hear it. And this explains a lot about Romney.
August 12th, 2012
Category: Film, Policy Analysis
After watching the documentary “Home”, long-time RBC commenter Eli Rector meditates on how individual agency and personal responsibility require particular social structures to emerge. It’s a thoughtful essay, well worth a read (and the film sounds very good too).
July 30th, 2012
Category: Policy Analysis, Teaching
What authority may I legitimately claim, standing at the head of a classroom with a piece of chalk in my hand, when I teach a course on the methods of policy analysis? One possible answer: the authority to say what counts as a valid argument within that specific discipline of thought.
July 29th, 2012
Category: Drug Policy, Policy Analysis
Even when I was critiquing it for the authors in draft form, Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know was very good. The final version, which I have just finished devouring, is even better. It’s the best book on cannabis in many years and a fine example of public policy analysis more generally. I am [...]