NP: Spoon, Gimme Fiction

I almost don't even care about the conclusions drawn, from it. I just like these kinds of analyses, from Larry Bartels as communicated by Kevin Drum.

This goes back to one of the messages I took from reading up on chaos theory, and that is that there can be latent patterns in data that only emerge when you look at them a certain way. Like taking the difference between quartiles, or breaking out growth by subsegment and tracking that.

I'm a geek about this kind of stuff. And most other kinds of stuff, but that's not what we're talking about right now.

The results themselves are a bit of a Rorschach test on your own personal politics, as the notion that the rich get richer under Republican administrations isn't the scathing indictment liberals would make it out to be, IF you believe in, say, trickle-down economics. Presuming that you think income inequality and disproportionate growth are bad things, then yeah, this serves as a pretty good rallying cry.