ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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Plenty of people still hate Yeltsin and find Putin much better in comparison.
GIGO.
Multiple Regression Analysis is destroying Economics. So many otherwise intelligent people waste so much time and energy creating bad models with bad data on useless subjects that do nothing except support previously held opinions. It's like they think its magic. Gather whatever crappy data you can get your hands on, wave your magic formula, and PRESTO! out comes our previously held opinion. There is no intellectual discipline.
Ask anyone who lived in Chicago in 1979 who Mayor Bilandic was, and why the city responds so quickly to blizzards these days.
Morgan you are so right. At best this guy found a weak correlation between weather and votes for incumbents. But considering that there are millions of different facts that you could search for correlations with voting patterns, so what?
The author, and I guess Caplan since he cites it as excellent, jumps right to the conclusion that some set of voters must actually believe that politicians control the weather. That fits the theory that voters aren't "rational."
The conclusion is that some people blame whoever is in office for whatever problem is occuring at the time, whether or not they had anything to do with it.
I would have to say that the conclusion of the article is much more specific than that. Some small percentage (2.6% I think it was, but only in rural areas) are specifically said to have blamed incumbent politicians for the bad weather that had occurred since the last election.
That's pretty weak tea. It is much more likely that the author has "uncovered" a random correlation, nothing more.
And another thing:
If its true that "State-level presidential election returns show that a moderate drought has cost the incumbent party about 1.3 percent of the vote in farm states," doesn't that mean that 98.7% of voters are rational, at least with respect to this issue?
It doesn't seem true that "voters do not measure up to simple benchmarks of rationality," even if the study is taken at face value. The vast majority do measure up, right?
One might even suspect that the poorer people who suffer the most in bad times might be more willing to try something different, anything different. If the status quo isn't working for you, as in you are starving and lost your home, is it not rational to try something new? The 1-2% of the people may in fact be motivated by extremely rational analysis, including promises made by challengers that specifically appeal to those hit hardest by the last natural disaster. "I promise to provide low-cost guaranteed loans to those who lost their homes in the last drought...."
The study doesn't know, and what irks me, pretends to know with statistical certainty facts which are outside its scope. That is poor economics.
Morgan, your last post offers a fair explanation of the results - very interesting. However, your explanation doesn't discredit the statistical evidence presented in the paper, only provides an alternative explanation. Papers like this are not, as you say, on useless subjects. They generate discussions regarding the underlying dynamics of what we are observing and can learn more about human nature and what drives decision-making.