Picking on Gregg Easterbrook

I don’t want to make a habit of this, but . . . I was curious what Easterbrook would write as a follow-up to his recent Huntsman puff, and here’s what he came up with:

Tired of cookie-cutter political contests between hauntingly similar candidates? Then you’re going to like the upcoming race for one of the Senate seats in the late Ted Kennedy’s haunting grounds. Elizabeth Warren, best known for creating and fighting for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is hoping to challenge Republican incumbent Scott Brown. They’re both qualified, but they couldn’t be more different — personally or politically.

Um, no.

1. It seems a bit of a stretch to say the two candidates “couldn’t be more different personally.” Brown is a 52-year-old married white lawyer with two children. Warren is a 62-year-old married white lawyer with three children. According to Wikipedia, they both had middle-class backgrounds, Brown in Massachusetts and Warren in Oklahoma, and they suffered some personal and financial challenges during their childhood. Brown and Warren may very well have strikingly different personalities but Easterbrook presents no evidence for that claim.

2. It’s even more difficult to plausibly claim that Warren and Brown “couldn’t be more different politically.” Yes, Warren is a liberal Democrat, but Brown is not a conservative Republican. He’s a moderate, and is as liberal as a Republican as you’ll see in the contemporary U.S. Senate.

What’s the evidence that Scott Brown is moderate, not conservative? See here (from Jan 2010) and here (May 2010). There aren’t a lot of moderate Republicans in Congress, but Brown is one of them. See here for details from Boris Shor.

A recommendation

In all seriousness, I think Reuters should fire Easterbook and replace him with Boris Shor. Boris is a professor at the University of Chicago who did the research predicting that Scott Brown would be a political moderate in the Senate. This was a prediction that Boris made publicly, in advance of Brown’s special election. Boris is a political scientist, he knows a lot about politics, he’s a serious guy with interesting ideas. Unless Reuters is afraid of losing their football-fan readership, I think they should invite Boris to write a column for them.

If Reuters really doesn’t want to lose Easterbrook, they could give him a lateral move to their “Life & Culture” section.

P.S. Amazingly enough, Easterbrook’s column was reposted at the Washington Monthly website. I thought the Washington Monthly had better taste than that!

22 thoughts on “Picking on Gregg Easterbrook

  1. Wow. Thanks. Problem is I’d only publish an oped every month or two; ask me to write a column every week and I’d start sounding like Easterbrook… It’s YOU who should have a column, because you have the chops to write high quality output consistently.

  2. :-) you really are the pitbull of statistical blogging (and I mean this as a compliment) – once you get hold of someone you don’t let lose. The bruised Drs. Myhrvold, Levitt, Wegeman, Yoo etc. would be able to tell Easterbrook that chances are that you’ll make it a habit.
    I think it’s both a great public service and highly entertaining, so please don’t stop.

  3. Easterbrook on Life & Culture: “Tired of the same-old desserts and hauntingly similar side dishes at Thanksgiving? Candied yams, best known for mounds of toasted marshmallow topping, are hoping to challenge incumbent oatmeal-cookie-topped sweet potatoes. They both straddle the fine line between dessert and side dish, but they couldn’t be more different – calorically or in terms of mouth-feel. And at this point in the menu cycle, apple cobbler is just as vulnerable as black licorice was in 1977, perhaps even more so.”

  4. Scientific American takes Easterbrook to task on physics:

    http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/degrees-of-freedom/2011/10/16/on-the-physics-nobels-the-atlantic-gets-dark-energy-all-wrong/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_SPC_20111020

    So, Andrew, it’s not just you.

    “Several years ago, Carl Zimmer took him to task for some nonsensical statements about string theory and other dimensions. Last week, Easterbrook ventured again into cosmology, on the web site od The Atlantic. Unfortunately his piece contains a number of bizarre or outright wrong statements. I don’t mean this blog to engage in character assassination, and certainly not of Easterbrook, as I like the guy, but I would just like to correct his article for the record.”

    • Perhaps the key line in that quote is “I like the guy.” I don’t know Easterbrook personally and so can feel free to mock, but if he is indeed a likable guy, perhaps that could be part f the explanation for his continued journalistic employment.

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  6. Now, now, I don’t think Reuters wins over any football fans with Easterbrook. His football writing has approximately the same reputation as his political writing.

    • Thanks for the vote of confidence but I think I can make a larger contribution to global well-being by working on Stan. This blog is good for letting off steam, though. I just wish the right people would read this and stop paying Easterbrook to write political columns!

  7. Clearly, Warren and Brown COULD be MORE different. But is Brown really a moderate? ProgressivePunch gives him a “lifetime progressive score” of 27.91 and a rank of 56 in the Senate. This is a fair bit less progressive than Snow or Collins, the only two Republican senators who are more progressive (they get scores of 36.56 and 35.55, respectively, while the least progressive Democrat gets 54.28 (that’s Ben Nelson) and the 2nd least progressive Democrat (Baucus) gets 75.59

    VoteView also ranks Brown as less moderate than Snowe or Collins. On their “first dimension” (which accounts for a huge proportion of the variance) Snowe gets 0.085, Collins 0.098 and Brown 0.180 and Specter (while a Republican) got 0.070, while Ben Nelson got 0.027. (VoteView is based on the 111th Senate).

    Of course, what’s the definition of “moderate”?

  8. What is the standard you’re using for “moderate”? Is it relative to his contemporary republican colleagues, or is this on a broader scale? Because as far as I can tell, as one of his constituents, he’s only moderate in comparison to the current crop of “let’s burn down american and play the fiddle so we can actually get elected” modern colleagues. In comparison to even, say, Reagan era conservatives, he seems pretty hard core.

    But I’m young. This is a case where I probably don’t know what I’m talking about.

  9. Pingback: This guy has a regular column at Reuters « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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