Mind Poison

So, here's a book that I just read. I found it while exploring the website of Ray Fair, a very distinguished economist at Yale. It's called Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things, and as you can see, the full text is conveniently available online (though on his site, it's slightly hidden behind a hard to see link). I started reading it while at work the other day, since I was interested in the specifics of his presidential election prediction model, and before I knew it, I'd read almost half the book (the whole thing only took a few hours). It's quite readable, and only requires enough math to understand the slope of a line or so, and that's only in chapter two. If you want to get a very good intuitive understanding of how econometrics works, his explanation is the best I've ever seen.

By the way, his model was predicting pretty strong results for Bush two years ago, even with anemic GDP growth assumptions. The latest versions are close to predicting a landslide.