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Piss-poor monocausal social science strikes again

- July 25, 2010

I come to the London Review of Books for the interesting essays on history and literature; I stay for the prospect of overeducated people saying silly things . . .

Here’s a letter from Janet Malcolm:

Jackson Lears wants to ‘complicate the explanation for Gore’s loss, beyond a simple demonisation of Nader’, but the complications he cites – fraud by Republicans preventing 8000 people from voting and the Supreme Court decision halting the recount – would, in the first case, not have mattered, and in the second not have taken place, if Nader hadn’t run Nader received 97,488 votes in Florida.

Just to spell things out . . . if Nader hadn’t run, the campaign would’ve gone differently. 97,488 votes is chicken feed (albeit, approximately 97,488 votes more than I would’ve received had I been running). It was a close election, and it’s meaningless to try to pick out one factor as being the cause of Gore receiving more votes than Bush (or of Bush being ruled the winner).

I know it’s not the responsibility of the authors of articles or letters in the London Review of Books to think quantitatively about U.S. politics; still, given my own interests, I can’t help noticing these things.