Welcome to Empirical Questions
Hello, all, and welcome to my Substack. I thought I’d say a few words about who I am and what I’m aiming to do with this space.
My name is Robert VerBruggen. My background and formal credentials are in journalism, and I spent much of my career on the editing side of things—but I’ve always gravitated toward writing about numbers and data. In my current role as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, I’m able to cover a wide variety of domestic-policy topics, both simply by learning and writing about them, and by analyzing data for formal publications that are reviewed by colleagues much better trained than I am.
Something I’ve been missing lately, though, are the “just throwing this out there” data analyses I used to post in long Twitter threads—where I’d get interested in something, dig through the numbers a bit, run a few crosstabs or regressions, post the screenshots, discuss them with data-minded followers, learn from it, and move on (usually to my actual editing job!).
It’s the kind of thing that’s too nerdy and in-the-weeds for a general-audience article, but probably not worth the effort to turn into a big report. The kind of thing where I’m happy if even a few people read it, if those are people who can engage with it and tell me what I should have done differently. The kind of thing that could teach me more of the stats methods and concepts I never learned in journalism school, but have tried to catch up on ever since. And the kind of thing that, once in a while, can meaningfully contribute to the discussion.
Now that blogging is making a comeback—fantastic news, as far as I’m concerned, having started my career in the mid-to-late 2000s—I thought I’d start a Substack and use it for this purpose. I miss those days of open discussion and back-and-forth.
Once in a while when the mood strikes me, I’ll analyze some data and post the results here for your perusal and comment, with the code on GitHub (site forthcoming). I’ll also try to link the writing I publish elsewhere, and maybe post on policy topics once in a while if I don’t have a better outlet for that commentary. I make no promises about posting frequency and do not plan to charge for anything, though I might add some kind of tip jar if that’s an option on Substack.
Enjoy.