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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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Book review: Alchemy, by Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland's new book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don't Make Sense  continues his 10-year campaign against the traditional, logical pursuit of business advantage, through a scientific lens that includes several cognitive economics themes. As ever, a curated series of amusing anecdotes about people or companies who took an unusual angle on marketing or product invention, fuel a philosophical wander. That philosophy could be summarised as: if it makes sense, someone's already tried it. So try something that doesn't . The ideas that underpin the book are broadly based on behavioural economics and cognitive science, with bits of evolutionary theory, statistics and old-fashioned advertising intuition thrown in. At first it doesn't look like a behavioural science book as such: the theoretical backbone takes a while to show. Rory's style is discursive: an after-dinner-talk of anecdotes, dismantling of conventional wisdom, ever-so-slightly outr
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