Free Republic

....[F]rom the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official “chief scientist” for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions. Exactly what that team of dozens...

More bad news for President Obama. A survey released by Public Policy Polling shows that 8 percent of New Jersey voters think the president is the anti-Christ. Another 13 percent indicated that they were unsure of whether he was the anti-Christ or not. What has to be worrisome for Obama and his supporters is that it's not just conservative Republicans who believe Obama is in league with the darkest of dark forces: 19 percent of those who self-identify as political moderates, 13 percent of those who call themselves Democrats, and 10 percent of those who claim to have voted for...

Ian Ayres of Yale University Law School talks about the ideas in his new book, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. Ayres argues for the power of data and analysis over more traditional decision-making methods using judgment and intuition. He talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about predicting the quality of wine based on climate and rainfall, the increasing use of randomized data in the world of business, the use of evidence and information in medicine rather than the judgment of your doctor, and whether concealed handguns or car protection devices such as LoJack reduce...