My Stuff

https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





Total Pageviews

Monday, April 11, 2016

GRASPING AT STRAWS

Those of us on the left have spent a good deal of time lately worrying about Trump’s prospects in a general election, seizing on early polling match-ups with Sanders or Clinton to reassure ourselves that he would not win.  Here is one small inconclusive bit of good news.  Sam Wang, a Princeton neuroscientist who runs a nerdy blog in his spare time that crunches the election numbers, and who has had spectacular success in past cycles predicting outcomes, has lately been handicapping the Republican primary battle, and he has found that although Cruz regularly outperforms his polling numbers, Trump’s actual results track his polls very closely.  In the absence of contrary evidence, this offers some assurance that Trump’s poor performance in hypothetical races against Clinton predict how he would actually do in the general.  Since Wang, after some very complex modelling, puts Trump’s current chance of the nomination at 70%, I think we must prepare ourselves for a Trump/Clinton race.  I choose, at least for a while, to take comfort in his interim calculations.

3 comments:

Chris said...

It may be nice to take comfort in that interim report, but just the statement "Trump versus Clinton" makes me viscerally nauseous on both counts! Here we live in a supposed representative democracy, where both likely candidates are universally disliked and not trusted!

Couple that with the fact that I'm teaching my students the second chapter of In Defense of Anarchism this week, and it makes me sick.

Tom Cathcart said...

"Universally," except for a plurality (and in one case a majority) of primary voters in their party.

Chris said...

If Clinton wins, that's almost 2/3 of my life under Bush-Clinton rule. Take that King George III and your lineage Monarchy!


(Tom take into consideration all the people not voting because they are totally disenfranchised, uninterested, or see through the chicanery of representative democracy)