JIM GERAGHTY: Scary Campfire Stories of the ‘Preference Cascade’ That Haunts Campaigns.

By the way, I’ve seen some bloggers crediting me for the “Preference Cascade” notion, but I just wrote a couple of columns about it. It comes from Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, a book I highly recommend.

UPDATE: While I’m plugging, let me also put in a word for James Scott’s Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Obama would be doing a lot better if he’d read this book. Well, I recommended it to him. But although he reportedly reads blogs, I’m afraid he doesn’t read the ones that could help him. . .