Ulysses S. Grant, Politician

Hero or Cunning Politician ?

Ú ̆ ‰ ‡ Ï , È Â ‡ · was an active, if not the most active, character throughout „ Â „ ’s reign. However, the character of È Â ‡ · and his brothers is foggy and puzzling. Although many of us have been taught to classify figures in Tanach into the roles of either ¢ ˆ „ È ̃ ¢ or ¢ ̄ ̆ Ú ¢ to further our understanding of the manifest context © Ù ̆ Ë ® and latent meaning © „ ̄ ̆ ® of the text, È Â ‡ · and ...

Politician - Proof Policy ? ∗

In this paper I discuss the nature of the political constraints that the World Bank faces in delivering basic services to the poor. The main problem arises because the Bank has to work through domestic governments which have political aims different from helping the poor. The conceptual approach attractive to economists and central to the WDR2004 is the notion of politician prooÞng. Given that ...

The Ulysses perspective

Politician Effort and Voter Inference∗

This paper explores a psychologically motivated model of belief formation in a political context. Using a retrospective voting framework, we specifically examine the implications of a common inference bias in which voters overweight the effect of an incumbent’s unobserved effort on realized outcomes. This bias is motivated by and consistent with the fundamental attribution error in social psych...

Black-box Optimization with a Politician

We propose a new framework for black-box convex optimization which is well-suited for situations where gradient computations are expensive. We derive a new method for this framework which leverages several concepts from convex optimization, from standard first-order methods (e.g. gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods) to analytical centers (i.e. minimizers of self-concordant barriers). We de...