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Nothing to do with economics, but...

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How to debunk an electoral fraud claim

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There are plenty of claims of US election fraud floating around this week. Most of them fall into three categories: Too vague to be meaningfully evaluated or investigated Too small to matter (a few individual ballots being challenged here and there, possibly valid but not enough to affect the results) Too wild to stand up to any kind of scrutiny Together, these claims are certainly problematic: they create a fog of doubt about the legitimacy of the democratic process. But a fourth category is more insidious. A twitter mutual retweeted the thread quoted below. You can click through to read the whole thread, but I have embedded the highlights. It's a well-told story, with several characteristics that make it effective - as well as dangerous. To start with, the data comes from an authoritative source, the New York Times. Even better in this case: a source associated with "the other side". Surely the liberals can't deny the truths from their own newspaper? The followin
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Am I the person Dominic Cummings is looking for? A followup to The Times

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For those interested in a bit more background to my Times article today , here are some details on how Cummings's topics have showed up in my cognitive economics research. You can judge for yourself if I have spotted what he is working towards. Starting with Judea Pearl's modelling of causality. Pearl developed a way of using graphs (a kind of diagram showing a network of relationships between objects – like the chocolate example below) to express and work out cause-and-effect relationships. For example, you might use them to determine whether smoking causes cancer, or carbon dioxide causes global warming – or more locally, whether cutting Universal Credit reduces unemployment. Quite often, we find that when scientists discover something about the structure of the world, the human brain has got there before us. The brain has evolved to seek out cause-and-effect relations in the world around us, and assemble them into a graph just like this. It learns the relationships by o
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The economics of Arsenal

Robert Peston highlights a nice, rather knotty, little economics problem for Arsenal Football Club . This conundrum highlights a number of areas of economic theory: Generalised agency problem . The interests of the different stakeholders in the club all, potentially, conflict with each other. The fans want maximum money spent on good players so they have a chance of winning something for the first time in years. The management of the club want (I guess) stability and a profitable business, which probably means accepting a lower probability of sporting success. The different shareholders want different outcomes: Usmanov may want an equity issue because, with more cash available than the other shareholders, it would probably allow him to increase his stake. Other shareholders want to preserve their stake relative to him, so they are less keen on the increase in investment. The players and manager presumably want to be successful on the pitch, well-paid and - in Wenger's case - to ha
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