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American politics and the big picture
Where did America’s workers go? The future of the American economy may hinge on the answer. The US economy added 165,000 new jobs in April and the unemployment rate fell to 7.5%. But labor force participation remained low. In fact, the labor force participation rate fell three points since the ...
Imagine that the president of the United States could legally order the preemptive killing of any American citizen he deemed a potential threat to the country. A Justice Department white paper that was recently obtained by NBC News comes close to making that claim, if not in quite those words ...
We aren’t doing enough. The human race is in more danger than it might seem. The human race has always faced a certain amount of what Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom calls “existential risk.” Existential risk—or “x-risk”—is the risk that something might completely wipe out the human race or ...
Congress created the debt ceiling crisis almost entirely on its own. Article I of the Constitution gives Congress what’s known as the “the power of the purse”: Congress alone can authorize spending, collect taxes, borrow money, or print money. The president can propose a budget, but it’s Congress ...
In a 1930 essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that “assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years.” The Great ...
“Consider two companies that are each given a billion dollars and ten months to close a sale,” Mohan Kompella says. “One does, the other doesn’t. What should the losing side do? Re-think its products, its strategy, and its marketing campaign? Or blame dumb, incompetent, and worthless consumers for ...
Looking at the electoral college map, it’s easy to imagine that the U.S. is a sharply divided country. The northeastern and western coastal states are all blue, while a broad band across the country is mostly red. But that’s an artifact of our winner-take-all electoral system, which paints small ...
President Obama got 51.4% of the popular vote and won essentially every swing state. Democrats probably picked up two votes in the Senate, even though more Democrats had to defend their seats. Yet Republicans will likely end up with a 35-vote majority in the House, in spite of the fact they got ...
Sometimes what political science tells us is that we should pay less attention to politics. It’s easy to get caught up in the horse race aspect of the presidential election, especially since the news media has an incentive to exaggerate the importance of every gaffe and every piece of preliminary ...
Americans aren’t worth as much as they used to be. Last week, the Federal Reserve survey of consumer finances found that the net worth of U.S. households declined 15% on average between 2007 and 2010. Because of changes in the distribution of wealth, the net worth of the median household declined ...
On September 30, 2011, The New York Times reported that the C.I.A. had killed a fundamentalist iman named Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone strike over Yemen. Heralding the strike, President Obama called al-Awlaki “the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” Al-Awlaki was ...
Americans don’t drive as much as they used to. The Department of Transportation estimates that Americans drove 2.9 trillion miles in the year from April 2011 to March 2012. That’s still a lot of vehicle miles—more than 9,300 miles per person. But that number is down about 3% from its peak at the ...
Congress is apparently now speaking at a 10th grade level. The Sunlight Foundation recently analyzed the Congressional Record and found that the average member of Congress speaks at 10.6 grade reading level on the standard Flesch-Kincaid scale. That’s down almost a full grade level from 2005 ...
Last week the House voted 218-208 to block the National Science Foundation from funding political science research. No other type of research would be blocked by the NSF budget amendment. The NSF could still continue funding research in sociology, anthropology, and economics. The amendment would ...
On Wednesday, President Obama became the first sitting president to support marriage equality for gays and lesbians. The president’s support does nothing to alter the moral case for marriage equality. While Obama said he personally supported same-sex marriage, he didn't say he thought states should ...