The issue of race has followed Barack Obama since he emerged on the national political scene, continuing unabated throughout his successful 2008 presidential campaign. Although the issue of race is not always explicitly acknowledged or discussed by Obama himself, the implications of his successful candidacy for U.S. politics and the ways people in the United States think about race more general...

Random sampling relies on the law of large numbers. To see this, suppose 57% of the population supports Obama. Asking a random person whether they support Obama is the same as flipping a biased coin, which comes up “yes” 57% of the time and “no” 43% of the time. By the law of large numbers, the more people we ask, the smaller the error. Note that this argument doesn’t depend on the size of the ...

1. Keynesian stimuli don’t work? That assertion amounts to pure propaganda. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Obama stimulus created or saved from one to three million jobs. And many voices joined in. For example, the top economic model building company, Macroeconomic Advisers, estimated a gain of 2.6 million jobs. Even a top conservative economist, Robert Barro, regards the st...

The most common and conventional way to collect people’s opinions has always been random sampling and asking several survey questions by phone. For instance, if a news media is interested in how popular Obama is among Americans, it would probably call up a thousand people and ask how they would rate Obama. The data collected in this manner is considered a gold standard; there has been only few ...