Dean Reloaded

This is a great video.

Ignorance is Bliss

A story from The Onion.

They should poll people when they finish the story and ask if they felt more like "that's funny because some people are like that" or "it's funny but sometimes I'm like that!"

I wrote about the Muslim community center earlier.

Great Speech

This is great.

More on why journalists need to study math

Usually when I write about why journalists need to make more math it's to correct a misleading statement about a statistic. This time, in a new twist, it's to correct Jeff Jacoby's subtle error in reasoning.

If you didn't read the Op-Ed, he's criticizing the National Popular Vote Compact, which will ensure the winner of the popular vote wins the presidential election when enough states ratify it. It's hard to understand Jacoby's argument because his point is (to translate) "you Democrats are so dumb, like I once was, then I became a conservative" with an imitation of Buckly-Hitchens flair.

But what I think he's saying is this: "Suppose the Democrat wins the popular vote, then MA will give it's electoral votes to them. But they almost certainly would have won the state. Now suppose the Republican wins the popular vote. There's a good chance that the Democrat won MA, so the outcome is to flip MA's 12 electoral votes in the Republican column." This is how the compact "nullifi[es] of [voter's] vote[s]."

That almost sounds like it makes sense. The compact, most likely, will make MA voters have less say in the election because it increases the chances that Republicans will win. Except that it doesn't.

What Jacoby forgot is that, while it's true that under the compact MA's electoral votes will never swing to a Democrat, it's possible votes in MA could swing Texas into the "D" column. In 2000, for instance, Gore's 787k margin of victory in MA also gave him a 545k margin of victory in the popular vote. If the compact were operative in Texas that would have flipped Texas' 34 electoral votes from Bush to Gore and Gore would have been president--thanks, of course, to MA Democrats. But under the compact, Jacoby assures us, MA Democrats would have nothing to gain.

(That only applies to a state's vote as a whole. The issue for a single voter is the probability that without their vote, under the compact, the popular vote is a tie or, under current law, neither candidate has 270 electoral votes without their state and the election in their state is a tie. For MA it's obvious the  tiny, tiny probability of the former is many, many orders of magnitude larger.)

More illegal immigration

I read this in The New Yorker. It's well written and, as the headline suggested, it does provide "the real numbers on illegal immigration."

But I dislike this kind of writing. The author takes a very serious tone and, early on, demonstrates command of the facts. You start to trust him. If you don't know any better, you continue to.

Then he claims that deporting illegal aliens would be "economic suicide . . . since they are, for a start, essential to large sectors of the economy, beginning with the food supply." But that is nonsense. If illegal aliens didn't pick fruit then farmers would have to pay for citizens to do it, or buy machines. Someone would have to produce the machines. Suggest that cheap labor is irreplaceable is irresponsible.

He also writes that "the Fourteenth amendment . . . guarantees citizenship to any child born on these shores." That is one standard interpretation of the Fourteenth amendment, similar to the interpretation that the 2nd amendment allows for possession of any type of firearm without restriction. Both of those are questionable, certainly not the intent of the authors, and probably not the interpretation you'd get from some random person in Wal-Mart.

The article ends with a series of attacks against "demagogues" after briefly dealing with one of the three hard questions in immigration reform, "don't illegal immigrants drive down wages for Americans?" That is what supply and demand predict, but (1) that doesn't tell you the magnitude of the effect and (2) things are more complicated. There is a large and growing literature of good research on the topic (see here). It would have been nice if he cut the attack on the nebulous "right wingers" and dedicated a few paragraphs to this issue. He could have also addressed these hard questions:

1. what penalty should they pay to gain citizenship? what is fair?
2. why should Mexicans get preferential treatment in immigration?

That said the first few paragraphs are worth reading.

Commit in September

The Quote of the Day goes to Invisible Children for this Facebook status:

Our friends at the Millennium Campus Network need your help to get 72 million children in a school.

They're going to achieve Millennium Development Goal #2 and set a World Record by having 72 million children in one school.

Joking aside, I do highly recommend singing the petition at Commit in September.

A lot of people don't like these things because they seem useless. Does it really matter that one more person signs the petition? Probably not. But even if there is a tiny probability that one extra e-mail, call, meeting or signature makes a difference, the payoff is massive. When you multiply a tiny number by a massive number you get . . . well, it depends on how tiny and how massive. So you might as well sign because it might be massive. (These models are hard to calibrate so I won't try. But here is an irrelevant fact I will mention to bias your views: based on a model estimated by Gelman et al. though, the expected payoff to voting in a swing state is at least on the order of $10,000.)

Another reason people don't like to sign these things is that they don't think these policy issues matter. Foreign aid doesn't work right? The only way to make a difference is to get your hands dirty, they say. But most small projects are utter failures. If I had to put money on it, your money and time would be better spent dealing with (and preventing) mental illness in the U.S., unless you're working on vaccinations or clean water. In contrast, PEPFAR has put 2 million people on ARVs for several years. That's means that an investment of a few hundred thousand signatures, letters, and calls yielded about 10 million life-years or about 100 life-years per signature. If the average impact of signing at Commit in September is something like 100 life-years isn't it worth 2 minutes?

Is affirmative action a distraction?

Note: When discussing affirmative action, everyone I've ever met that argued for it for the sake of diversity later admitted or showed they were being disingenuous. I'm just going to ignore the diversity argument.

A friend of mine had to write an essay about affirmative action for class, but she had a hard time figuring out what to write. She had mixed feelings, like most Americans do, caught between the value of "fairness," which affirmative action promotes, and an intolerance for racial discrimination, which is an unfortunately by-product.

She asked some friends for their opinions. I said I think in practice it's such a mess that it's not worth waxing philosophical on the theory. I pointed out that at our school two races were vastly underrepresented (vs. the U.S. population) while the two other large racial groups were overrepresented, one marginally so. The underrepresented groups were, of course, Blacks and Hispanics, except for the fact that they weren't. Hispanics were marginally overrepresented, while Blacks and Whites were underrepresented. Is the goal of affirmative action to give extra weight to one group (Hispanics) until it's relatively easy to get in at the expense of making is substantially more difficult for another (Whites). And wasn't affirmative action started to help Blacks? You wouldn't know if from the numbers, which look even worse under a microscope. It turns out that 35-40% of blacks were the children of highly educated Caribbean and African immigration, not disadvantaged decedents of slaves.

I've since changed my mind. The fact that affirmative action is so bad at getting the intended effect is probably only a marginal concern. The real questions are:

1. Does going to a more selective college even promote happiness (help people)?

2. What is the opportunity cost of affirmative action activism? Are there other reforms that could help more people?

The answer to is probably a conditional "Yes." Kruger and Dale found that going to more selective colleges increases earning for students for low-income backgrounds. Financial aid is more generous (as a rule of thumb) at more selective colleges too, and students are less likely to drop out, probably due to peer effects. Income, however, is only loosely correlated with happiness, and every student admitted on affirmative action likely crowds out almost one student, so the costs may wipe out the vast majority of the benefit. Furthermore, as discussed above, many (perhaps most) people who benefit from affirmative are not from low-income backgrounds. The benefits, then, seem modest but real.

The opportunity cost for activists, on the other hand, is probably substantial. Lobbying for universal pre-K, simpler financial aid forms, against credential inflation (which affirmative action may contribute to), for more Pell Grants, or implementing value-added models for teachers would all probably provide a bigger return (on time invested) of helping disadvantaged people improve their lot in life.

So, yes, affirmative action is a mess. It might even be harmful, but those costs are hard to quantify. But it does seem to improve the lives of a few thousand beneficiaries each year. The question is whether the real cost of helping those thousands is ignoring millions of others.

Update: One obvious question is why affirmative action (AA) became such a big rallying point for activists in a way that, say, universal pre-K didn't. Isn't the fact that people are willing to fight "by any means necessary" for AA, but not for pre-K, evidence that AA is more worth fighting for? No. AA is in the spotlight because it is controversial. Controversial issues always attract more attention even if they effect few people and only in marginal ways (e.g. gay marriage). Furthermore, the beneficiaries of AA have political clout. Educated blacks and self-righteous elites in Ivy League schools have a lot more political clout than single moms in Harlem and Roxbury, and the former are naturally more interested in AA because it benefits them directly and because it's under their nose. The fact that many people, like Lee Bollinger, are in favor of AA because of self interest is probably an uncomfortable thought. But that doesn't make the claim false.

Should our politics be predictable?

Mike Huckabee doesn't think so:

[Huckabee] finds it “repulsive” when people assume that they know his mind simply because they know his affiliations. “I was never that predictable,” he said with satisfaction. “. . . I was never one to just pick up the company line and recite it. I hate that . . . And politics is becoming more and more where you’re handed this script and told, ‘Don’t improv.’ ”

I think it's fair to say that toting the party line is not a good thing. If that's why you're predictable you shouldn't be proud of your ignorance.

But, in general, we should have predictable political positions.

Someone who knows you well should have a good sense of your fundamental ethical beliefs. You think such and such criteria are what makes the world a good place, so given policies A, B, and C you would pick the one with the best consequences. (This assume you are some kind of consequentialist. And you should be.)

This doesn't mean people won't be surprised by your position on things. You probably have read articles and know statistics other people are unfamiliar with, and that evidence might be why you prefer B to A.

But if someone looking at the same evidence as you can't pretend to be you and derive your opinion, you're probably letting emotion color your opinions. And that's usually a bad thing in politics.

Sen. Byrd died

Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) died early this morning. He was probably best known for being a former member of the KKK and defending big steel and other special interests.

The man had a way with words. In a letter (quoted on Wikipedia) to Sen. Bilbo in 1944 he wrote:

I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

But the thing is, Robert Byrd used his elegance to describe all races. In 2005 he pointed out to Fox News that " . . . there are white niggers" too. (See video.)

Joking aside, Byrd does have a point. Isn't it true that the lastseveralflaps over race were the product of someone getting indignant?

Before Barack Obama was president he wrote a book called The Audacity of Hope. One of the chapters concludes with the new Sen. Obama asking with the elder statesmen for advice:

I told him how remarkable it was that he had found the time to write [four long volumes on the history of the senate].

"Oh, I have been very fortunate," he said, nodding to himself. "Much to be thankful for. There's not much I wouldn't do over." Suddenly he paused and looked squarely into my eyes. "I only have one regret, you know. The foolishness of youth . . ."

We sat there for a moment, considering the gap of years and experience between us.

"We all have regrets, Senator," I said finally. "We just ask that in the end, God's grace shines upon us."

He studied my face for a moment, then nodded with the slightest of smiles . . . "God's grace. Yes, indeed."

I guess he had a good life.

Reading

Some reads are just fun, human interest pieces that leave you feeling pensive and satisfied even though you can't identify what you learned. I think there is value in this kind of reading--from time to time--and a favorite example from recent years is There and Back Again: Soul of a Commuter.

Other reads are complete tripe. One type is bad because the author don't make an argument. They are often dealing with a trade-off that necessities thinking about the costs on one hand and the benefits on the other, but they fail to see the big picture and obsess over benefits (if they are pro) or costs (if they are con). This "assessment" of Teach for America is a good example.

Another type of tripe masquerade as being about some important issue--global governance, ethics, religion--but makes trite, unverifiable, and often poorly formed claims. This deeply unsatisfying, but popular, piece from Ross Douthat fits that bill. Conservatives love it for pouring oil on the fire of their unexamined prejudices, but if you're a deep thinker that should be anathema.

The best reads are concise and make an explicit argument. They benefit from giving a sense of the big picture, but their value comes from teaching you something you didn't know before or only had a vague sense of. They can be particularly helpful if you've asked the question they ask but never found an answer. They are hard to find because good ideas don't grow on tree, but if you look in the right places you'll probably find a few each week. This paper, by Angrist and Pischke, is the best I've read the past few days, but I'd only recommend it for people who write empirical economics papers.

Assorted Links

1. Good analysis of Rand Paul.

2. Are the Republicans governed by extermists or corporations? There is some tension in these theses.

3. Big story only black people are allowed to speak the truth about. Perhaps that, not racism, is why it get too little press.

4. "the fastest-growing group . . . are men who self-identify as 'mostly straight' as opposed to labels like 'straight', 'gay', or 'bisexual." I don't know what to make of that.

5. Landsburg on psychiatry. I don't think this is fair. It would be like economists asking the public what should count as a recession or unemployment, or biologists asking what should count as life.

6. Cell phone banking in Haiti. I wish I knew more about M-PESA.

7. Is Chinese education as great as everyone thinks? No.

8. I haven't kept up with financial regulation but I liked this summary

9. "Horizontal" health care programs were all the rage a few year ago. Now a Gates Foundation study says they don't work. I'm a little skeptical of the methods based on this AP report. Easterly weighs in.

10. A high school in MA is forcing every student to buy a MacBook.

11. Maureen Dowd wrote a good column for the first time in her life.

12. Ezra Klein on the word "bailout"

13. "Good" professors are easy professors.

14. More debate on whether the Internet is good for you

What is wrong with Republicans?

Jonathan Haidt explains why you shouldn't believe all those bad things you are say the political opposition is true.

Some liberals use the fact that Democrats/liberals tend to be more educated than Republicans/Tea Party people as if it were proof liberals (at least in Cambridge) don't manipulate facts, ignore evidence, and, from time to time, make some pretty stupid statements. Some of my favorite examples of liberals being stupid are below:

In 2003, Barack Obama wasn't a member of congress, so he didn't vote against the war. In 2006, he was a senator, and voted against withdrawing the troops from Iraq. These are facts. In April 2008, I pointed these facts out to someone and said it made me wonder if he would actually have the troops out of Iraq in 16 months like he promised. She insisted I had no idea what I was talking about. Indeed, I must have been lying on purpose and a Republican stooge.

MIT, like most universities, has lower admissions standards for minorities. That is also a fact. (I think it's a rather blunt instrument, but it's better than nothing.) I've met a lot of people who think it's a good thing, but never once met a person who benefited from those lower standards. You can back out an estimate (by comparing MIT to a peer without affirmative action) that about 73% of URM students at MIT benefited from affirmative action so the odds are in 485,693 that I just happened to meet people who would have been qualified if they were White. When I made that comment to someone they said I must have done the math wrong.

My favorite example, though, of people being completely delusion is the Palin Test. Watch these two interviews, two of Palin and one of Biden, by Katie Couric. Somehow, probably because no one watched the interviews, people got the impression Couric asked them both hard hitting questions and Joe "Slave State-7-Eleven-Scholarship" Biden hit them out of the park while Palin stumbled.