Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton, a man once described as frighteningly sane.

Earlier this year, I stumbled on to an interesting working paper.

An economist at Southern Methodist University named Ryan Murphy ranked every state in the union

and some of the other polities therein by the prevalence of psychopathy.

And at the top of the list, you want to make a guess?

You want to make a guess, top of the list, the most psychopathic state in the union, according to that paper?

I mentioned it was other polities too.

Washington, D.C., the nation's capital. I mentioned it was other polities too.

Washington, D.C., the nation's capital, when he added up D.C. and all the states and maybe some of the

territories, I don't know.

Washington D.C. was at the top, which, of course, made me laugh. It made my day a little bit brighter because

it had reinforced by worldview. It had confirmed my priors that Washington DC is somewhere on a spectrum between the nefarious

criminal masterminds and House of Cards and the equally nefarious but

mostly bumpkin-level intelligence people and VEP.

And so maybe we shouldn't concentrate any more power they're intel.

It's at least not the most psychopathic political jurisdiction in America.

Now it made me laugh.

Right in my day as I said, but I should note I have not read that paper, I just read

about it and admittedly based on what little I

know of how statistics work I am not going to put too much stock in it I think it

would be very difficult to accurately assess the

...