(Credit: Microgen/Shutterstock) If someone proposed a "death tax", how likely would you be to vote for it? What if we called it an "estate tax"? The words used to frame arguments can play an important role in shaping opinions of important issues — "death" and "estate" can yield two different interpretations of the same concept. That the kinds of words we use to build an argument is important has long been known, but a new study led by a researcher at Stanford University suggests that politicians are playing word games at an unprecedented level — and a specific moment in history is marked as the watershed moment of this shift.
Along with a team of researchers from Brown University and the University of Chicago, economist Matthew Gentzkow developed a machine-learning algorithm to analyze over 130 years worth of Congressional speeches from the United States Congressional Record. He picked out 530,000 ...
