Conor Clarke

Columnist Robert Novak is dead, from a malignant brain tumor, which by most accounts was a pretty terrible way to go. Just about everyone in Washington has a Novak story -- being a Washington institution will do that to you -- and I'm no exception. Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote a profile of Robert Novak for the Guardian newspaper. This, naturally, called for interviewing him, so I did.Novak was, to be perfectly honest about it, the least pleasant person…… More »

USA Today had a new poll out yesterday that found, among other things, that only 18% of the country says the Obama administration's stimulus "has done anything to help improve their personal situation." And I thought Matt Yglesias made a good point about this: The most widely dispersed elements of the stimulus -- the almost $300 billion in tax cuts, distributed to far more than 18% of the population -- were designed to be inconspicuous. Consumers were not supposed…… More »

USA Today had a new poll out yesterday that found, among other things, that only 18% of the country says the Obama administration's stimulus "has done anything to help improve their personal situation." And I thought Matt Yglesias made a good point about this: The most widely dispersed elements of the stimulus -- the almost $300 billion in tax cuts, distributed to far more than 18% of the population -- were designed to be inconspicuous. Consumers were not supposed…… More »

I am back from India, and am guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan this week. But I've worked out some kind of crossposting deal, where most of the things I write for the Daily Dish will be published here with a slight time lag. It'll be the same content, more or less. But the big advantage of reading here will be that when I write something stupid you can leave a mean comment, which I encourage you to do.… More »

Via Dave Weigel, I see Pew has a new poll reporting that 39 percent of self-identified Republicans believe there has been "too little" coverage of "allegations that President Obama was not born in the United States." Since I take the view that this issue deserves substantially less coverage (which is to say no coverage), I hope this teeny post isn't indulging the hopes and dreams of a plurality of the GOP. I just think the poll is a more direct refutation of the…… More »

In a Daily News op-ed, my friend and former colleague Jamie Kirchick argues that the birther movement says more about the left than it does about the right:You could be forgiven for thinking that a serious campaign is afoot -- aided and abetted by the national Republican Party -- to question Barack Obama's citizenship. Over the past two weeks, an inordinate amount of news coverage has been afforded to "birthers," conspiracy theorists who claim that the President…… More »

"Awesome liberal" Will Wilkinson was kind enough to respond to me and Matt Yglesias on the question of whether the diminishing marginal utility of consumption is a good argument in favor of redistribution, so I'd like to toss a couple of thoughts back in his direction.Here's the background: one of the points in Will's original paper is that inequality in the United States doesn't look so bad when you stop talking about income inequality and start talking about…… More »

Tonight I'm flying to Doha and then Hyderabad, India, where I'll be staying (and blogging!) for the next two weeks -- with a short train trip to the state of Kerala, on India's southwestern coast, thrown in for good measure. I am especially excited about seeing Kerala for the first time, in part because it's supposed to be jawdroppingly lush and in part because it's a bit of an economic mystery. I was looking for some good data on the state and found this old chart…… More »

[Update: Will responded and I responded to him here.]I emailed Will Wilkinson with a question about his new inequality paper a couple of weeks ago, but since he says he's open to taking questions on his blog, and since I see some of my concerns echoed in Jon Chait's latest New Republic column, I figured I would re-post my question here.One of the points Will makes in the paper -- a good point, and one that doesn't come up enough -- is that income is neither the…… More »

I enjoy much of the work that the Tax Foundation does, but I find this stuff (which has been picked up here, here, here and elsewhere) almost entirely irksome and unhelpful: Newly released data from the IRS clearly debunks the conventional Beltway rhetoric that the "rich" are not paying their fair share of taxes. Indeed, the IRS data shows that in 2007--the most recent data available--the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes…… More »

A day in which two big Obama polls have been released (NYT poll here and Pew poll here) seems like a decent enough excuse to revisit the question of the value of political polls. Mark Blumenthal, Ed Kilgore and John Sides (twice!) have all been kind enough to write detailed responses to my original thoughts on the subject. And I'm pretty sure they are winning the argument. Nonetheless, I don't think we're at Waterloo just yet, and I want to respond to some of…… More »

In a blog post-cum-interview about obesity and health savings, Megan McArdle writes:With health care in the news, everyone's looking for magic bullets to save money. Obesity seems to be a growing favorite: wouldn't it be great if we could make everyone look like Jennifer Anniston, and be cheaper to treat? There are a lot of holes in this theory--the morbidly obese are very sick, but die young, while lower levels of overweight/obesity aren't so well correlated…… More »

There were two interesting pieces this morning on the question of whether or not we should tax employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) benefits -- they are currently exempt from income and payroll taxes -- to help pay for universal health care. The first is a great New York Times column from David Leonhardt; the second is a piece in the Washington Post that offers some reasons to be skeptical of the claim that taxing health benefits will lower spending. I've written…… More »

One of the wackier developments in the recent health care debate has been the sudden return of Betsy McCaughey. Fifteen years ago McCaughey wrote an error-laden piece for the New Republic, a piece the magazine later recanted, that became a rallying cry of the successful effort to kill Clintoncare, and that McCaughey parlayed into a short-lived career as the lieutenant governor of New York. McCaughey's health-care shtick in 1994 was to brag about having read all…… More »

This is the third and final installment of my interview with Kenneth Arrow. Part one is here and part two is here. In the section below we discuss climate change: Dr. Arrow was a lead author on several of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, which are considered one of the most authoritative sources for estimating climate impacts. My questions are in bold.… More »

This is jumping back in time a bit, but I do want to respond at greater length to this post from Rob Harrison of Conservatives 4 Palin and this post from Stephen Spruiell of the National Review. They are unhappy because I wrote, contra Sarah Palin's op-ed, "I don't think cap and trade has many supporters who think it's the best way to become 'less dependent on foreign energy sources.'"Spruiell says this is "ignorant" because prominent supporters of the…… More »

[UPDATE: part three is here.] Part one is here. There is one more part to come, which I'll post tomorrow. Part two, which is pasted below, is mostly about health economics. Arrow wrote the definite modern health economics paper -- "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care"; I believe the PDF is here -- which is required reading for every student of the subject. My questions are in bold. … More »

I spoke with Kenneth Arrow, Stanford Professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist, for about an hour last week. Dr. Arrow is perhaps most famous for the eponymous Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, one of the cooler ideas in public choice economics. But his work is wide ranging and we talked mostly about other topics, including the state of modern economics, the concept of general equilibrium analysis, and behavioral economics.… More »

This is mostly a housekeeping note: I've been in South America for the past week and had a lot of fun not paying attention to the Internet. But now that I've caught up on sleep and emails I do want to respond, in highly annoying omnibus fashion, to a bunch of things that came up while I was gone. (Some of these I'll try to get into in more detail over the course of the week, but I want to list them all for the sake of due diligence.)1. The Future of Sarah Palin:…… More »

[UPDATE: part two is here and part three is here.]I spoke with Kenneth Arrow, Stanford Professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist, for about an hour last week. Dr. Arrow is perhaps most famous for the eponymous Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, one of the cooler ideas in public choice economics. But his work is wide ranging and we talked mostly about other topics. (I also couldn't think of anything to ask about the Impossibility Theorem.)I have divided this interview…… More »