Adam Dynes on Noisy Retrospection: The Effect of Party Control on Policy Outcomes – #35

Steve and Corey talk to Adam Dynes of Brigham Young University about whether voting has an effect on policy outcomes. Adam’s work finds that control of state legislatures or governorships does not have an observable effect on macroscopic variables such as crime rates, the economy, etc. Possible explanations: parties push essentially the same policies, politicians don’t keep promises, monied interest control everything. Are voting decisions just noisy mood affiliation? Perhaps time is better spent obsessing about sports teams, which at least generates pleasure.Topics1:22 – What is retrospective voting?5:43 – Research findings on retrospective voting14:02 – Uniparty/Monied interests?17:23 – Martin Gilens’ research23:10 – Are people just voting based on noise or mood affiliation?27:13 – Bryan Caplan – Myth of the Rational Voter34:35 – Is time better spent obsessing about sports teams, which at least generates pleasure?39:42 – After the fall of Athens, was democracy commonly referred to as irrational mob rule?48:22 – Does this research translate to the national level?52:19 – Super Nerdy Stuff: Statistical Analysis, Reproducibility & Null Results56:40 – Reactions to the resultsResourcesTranscriptAdam Dynes (Personal Website)Adam Dynes (Faculty Profile)Noisy Retrospection: The Effect of Party Control on Policy Outcomes Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.