The Politics/Economics Resource Thread

[Reed Tiburon]

Updated. At the moment the updates are basically copy/paste of what you're all putting up there, trying to get them in the "right" place. Let me know about any mistakes.

Also, let me know if the spoilers are a bad way to organise the lists and I'll try and think up a better way. I just didn't want the OP to take up 10feet of scrolling, and for it to be easy to find "UK Politics" or "Chinese Economics" etc depending on what you want to read up on.

I think one level of spoilers max. nested spoilers suck

here's a good site for election circlejerkery / poll data: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/

[F*** My Aunt Rita]

For general what's going on in Washington upkeep plus other stuff I look at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/

Economics:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
http://crookedtimber.org/
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/

Lefty groupthink echochamber:

http://www.truthdig.com/
http://www.alternet.org/
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/
http://www.wsws.org/

Pro investigative journalism and other stuff:

http://www.motherjones.com/
http://www.propublica.org/

[Hel OWeen]

First off, some (German) links. I'll save the (german-speaking) readers from mentioning the obvious ones like Sueddeutsche, ZEIT, Die Welt etc. Instead where available, I've linked and noted English versions of sites.

Germany/Europe/World (all topics)
Telepolis (German, with a few English articles in between). Telepolis clearly has a (liberal) bias. What I like about it, is its linking to external sources (the real ones, not a blog that links an article which links a study). I find that important to mention, because over the years I've recognized the (for me) disturbing trend on traditional news sites to link to itself rather than to a real source. Which makes fact checking more different than necessary.

World (all topics)
DER SPIEGEL (English site, content differs from German main site). (Still) Most prominent/famous German news magazine. Was for years the most cited news source in other German media, because they did some real (investigative) journalism. SPIEGEL is famous for his own archive. In the day and age of the Internet, the importance of this may haved changed. But they still got tons of non-digitalized stuff there. SPIEGEL once had a clear left/liberal bias, it's not clear any more these days, but I still would rate it rather left- than right-leaning.

Legal
Harvard Law review (English, run by students)

Plain Facts, lots of them
Statistisches Bundesamt (Federal Office of Statistics, English version)

Some comments:

Any source is fine, as long as it is truthful, any website that are caught to be quoting false figures, inventing stories etc will be deleted off the list.

I guess the implied adjective missing here is "willingly", because I don't know any news source that hasn't been in error at some point. The good ones acknowledge and correct it, the bad ones don't.

1. Make sure you're reading reports and not editorials. Often news websites do not do an especially good job of distinguishing between the two.

I agree and disagree at the same time. Yes, make sure you don't mistake editorials for reports (and vice versa). But I disagree to ignore editorials. Yes, there's always bias. But there's fact-based bias and "i-simply-hate-you"-based bias (an example of the later category, who I'm sure everyone knows: Rush Limbaugh). Avoid the later like the plague. Even more so when they seem to support your opinion. But an educated and fact-based editorial of the first category is often more insightful than a pure report. Because those editorials might cite little known "side-facts", you would never read elsewhere. Ofc. double check them.

[Sacul]

Looking at the links i do not have much to add except:
Znet:
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet
(far left but good at background articles imo)

And if you are looking to brush up on gaps in your knowledge but dont want to read Barth type words:

RSA:
http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/

[Lallante]

Read the Economist, Private Eye (if in the UK), New Scientist and The Week.

Do so consistently for 6 months.

Welcome to understanding politics and economics to a strong conversational level. Also you'll be addicted.

[inora aknaria]

The economist online gives an rss feed that you can sign up for with your cell. Unfortunently it only gives the first 2 or 3 paragraphs of the article in the feed (i.e. downloadable / accessible without internet), but I've found it an excellent way to read a few articles while waiting for the bus etc.

[elmicker]

I've never liked the economist for actual economics. It's staffed by historians and classicists and it shows. Great for international relations and politics, but they spent 10 of the last 15 years shouting from the rooftops for deregulation of everything under the sun, from banking to third world economies and are now doing their damnedest to pretend they didn't. I also intensely dislike the editorial style of the magazine, whereby all the staff pretend to be this one faceless mass to avoid the author rather than the content being judged. You know what? Sometimes I'd quite like to judge the author because they probably deserve it.

If you want to learn yourself economics, rather that just current economic affairs, you simply cannot go wrong with Mankiw's Principles.... Nice mix of pure theory, discussion and case study, the standard text for undergraduate economics right around the world. More than accessible to anyone with a basic grasp of common sense and mathematics.

[NoirAvlaa]

Updated again. Large update. Can people help me out with the descriptions? For a lot of the websites etc I could only give the site a quick look and thus the descriptions aren't all that great or maybe wrong, I'm not entirely sure.

I'll start looking through the list when I have more time and remove/move anything that needs to be removed/moved. Until then let me know if I have anything wrong or if something shouldn't be on the list.

Trying a new format as well, going to tweak it each update and see if I can make it more readable. Suggestions welcome.

[Fourfingers frankie]

Read the Economist, Private Eye (if in the UK), New Scientist and The Week.

Do so consistently for 6 months.

Welcome to understanding politics and economics to a strong conversational level. Also you'll be addicted.

Confirming private eye is awesome.

[Qwert]

For Al Jazeera:
Middle Eastern world news organization based out of and owned by Qatar. Generally unbiased when Qatar is not directly involved. Tends to have pundits from both relevant parties; one example was a debate about Boko Haram (Islamist militants in Nigeria who are persecuting Christinas) where they had both a Christian and a Muslim Nigerian to weigh in on the issue. Widely praised and received awards for its coverage of Arab Spring. Has both a 24 hour news network stream and web articles.

[inora aknaria]

I've never liked the economist for actual economics. It's staffed by historians and classicists and it shows. Great for international relations and politics, but they spent 10 of the last 15 years shouting from the rooftops for deregulation of everything under the sun, from banking to third world economies and are now doing their damnedest to pretend they didn't. I also intensely dislike the editorial style of the magazine, whereby all the staff pretend to be this one faceless mass to avoid the author rather than the content being judged. You know what? Sometimes I'd quite like to judge the author because they probably deserve it.

If you want to learn yourself economics, rather that just current economic affairs, you simply cannot go wrong with Mankiw's Principles.... Nice mix of pure theory, discussion and case study, the standard text for undergraduate economics right around the world. More than accessible to anyone with a basic grasp of common sense and mathematics.

Just picked this up on amazon for $6 including shipping used. I've been looking for a good scimi book to review the college classes I took a few years ago

tapatalk

[Sponk]

Australian Politics:

News
* http://www.crikey.com.au/politics/australia/federal/

Analysis & Opinion:
* http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/
* http://blogs.crikey.com.au/thestump/
* http://www.abc.net.au/news/thedrum/


Australian Economics (as written by non-terrible economists)

* http://economics.com.au/
* http://johnquiggin.com/

[Hel OWeen]

Updated again. Large update. Can people help me out with the descriptions?

For ...

General/World
[...]
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Homepage.html - Lots of raw facts and stats.

... i would add "(German stats only)"

A somewhat similar site, not restricted to data from one country, claiming ...

With Statista, you can access the most relevant and important statistics and studies gathered by market researchers, trade organizations, scientific publications, and government sources on over 600 industries.

... is http://www.statista.com/. Basic (free) access gives you results and graphs. There's a paid access option, too. It seems you would get access to the underlying studies, which the free version does not.

Added benefit of that site: provides HTML code to embed the graphs elsewhere. Sample:

[Lallante]

How a single film DVD makes $1 for every 3 men women and children in the united states I have literally no idea.

[Varcaus]

How a single film DVD makes $1 for every 3 men women and children in the united states I have literally no idea.

Movie cost more than 1$?

[NoirAvlaa]

Updated with the aussie sites, added stats site, moved German stats site, renamed topic.

Worth applying for sticky?

[Nordstern]

http://www.opensecrets.org/ - Center for Responsive Politics. Lets you track (some) campaign finance income/expenditures for US candidates. Pulled from public sources that are intentionally obfuscated to (try to) prevent sites like this from popping up. Most useful for determining whether a candidate is backed by individual contributors, organizations or industry, and type of industry.

Examples:
Americans for Prosperity
AFL-CIO
Overview of Obama and Romney
Keith Ellison
Michele Bachmann

All PACs
All Super PACs

[NoirAvlaa]

Updated again.

Does anyone have links to resources in other parts of the world (Russia, Asia, Latin America)?

[Hel OWeen]

Can someone comment on the credibility of http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/SourceWatch? If the information presented there is valid, it looks like a useful tool for checking out people's hidden agenda.

[Ralara]

How a single film DVD makes $1 for every 3 men women and children in the united states I have literally no idea.

how a film called "Beverly hills chihuahua" got made is beyond me.

That there was a SEQUEL ... :S