“eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects” — Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?
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Category Archives: politics
Scoring the Class War
Wow.
The chart shows the income growth for differing income classes: one line for Republican presidents, one for Democrats. Income growth is lower when Republicans rule vs Democrats. The growth is sharply less equitable when Republicans rule than Democrats. There is a slight shift toward lower income groups when Democrats rule.
This chart re-enforces the point highlighted by the Vote View work, i.e. that the primary divide between the two parties is economic issues; with the Republicans laboring on behalf of large economic entities.
Don’t ever forget this chart. Don’t ever pretend it’s not the single most fundamental issue in American politics. Don’t tolerate diversions, this is it. It’s not about war. It’s not about race. It’s not about religion. It’s about who gets the spoils of economic growth. One side is fighting a class war and the other side is not.
More here, and here.
Undermining Rational Choice Models of Voting
I enjoyed skimming a paper by Edlin, Kaplan, and Gelman on what motivates people to vote.
Snarky wags like to argue: “It is a waste of your time to vote! It is irrational. So, it is stupid to bother.” The argument goes as so: the cost/benefit doesn’t work. So many things need to happen to capture any benefit. Your vote would need to be critical. He needs to win. The benefit you hope for needs to get back to you. If you get the benefit, how big can it be? In some circles this is treated as conventional wisdom.
This argument is a tool of voter suppression, which is reason the meme is so virulent. It an effective tool for convincing your opponents to say home on voting day.
The arguement gleans it’s gloss of credibly from the math like analysis and the appeal to that high principle: rationality. You can dispute the arguement in assorted ways, for example substituting some other high principle such as responsibility or community.
The paper undermines the arguement on it’s own terms. And it is very simple.
It is stupid to argue that the only rational benefit we get from voting is selfish. Once you break the connection between rational and selfish the arithmetic changes. Benefits have two components: one selfish and one unselfish. Call that second one social benefit. This changes everything because the social benefit is multiplied by the size of the population! Put a million people into the population and even a 20 dollar benefit per citizen gets big.
Most of us think the per citizen benefit of our candidate winning is much larger than a few bucks. Of course both the selfish-benefit term and the social-benefit term are discounted. But notice that means the more social minded you are the more likely you are to vote. One reason the “it is irrational to vote” line of arguement works to suppress is how it makes the selfish term more salient in the mind of the voter, making him forget his more socially aware side.
In fact most political activist usage of the rational choice ideas in political debate is playing that card. I’ll note that this has changed clarified my thinking about mandatory voting laws. I’ve always found them a bit distasteful. I’ve had a few arguements for while I don’t like these laws. Coercing people into good behavior is a bit troubling – it seems to put the cart before the horse. I’m also bothered by the tone of those who advocate such rules. That tone has always seems scolding and righteous. The model above provides another arguement; selfish is toxic to good governance. Forcing selfish people to vote? I’m not sure that’s wise.
You can grab the paper here: Voting as a Rational Choice: Why and How People Vote to Improve the Well-Being of Others. The paper is a bit more subtle, and hence interesting.
Attack poodles
Nasty polarizing rhetoric dressed up as entertainment is par for the course these days. Mixing in the entertainment makes them particularly virulent. James Wolcott is particularly skilled as parsing out the various patterns used in this toxic political theater. Here for example he sketches the outlines of a nasty attack on Hillary Clinton. In this example the libertarian attack poodle uses a bad word and then runs around in circles snapping angrily at it’s own tail (nominally punishing it’s self for such naughty behavior). Meanwhile the other poodles stand around an yap.
Holding the Bag
The Irish decided to impose a 33 cents tax on those plastic bags that retailers use. I presume this was in part a sin tax, in part an attempt to tax the externalities created by the bags, and in part a bit of stunt. The end of the story is that it’s wiped out the use of plastic bags, shifted social norms about bag usage. It’s a fascinating story about deciding to change the way a society behaves; making it acceptable to shun those who exercise their freedom to use plastic bags.
For some reason that story is currently slotted in my mind with the health care debate’s latest point of discussion.
The question at hand is should we put everybody into the system, or should we allow people to opt out. Allowing people to opt out would presumably create incentives for people to game the system. Or putting it another way it would allow people to gamble that they aren’t going to need health care during the next time interval.
Boffins think that this single choice would have a sharp effect on costs. Plans were we all join look likely to cost us each about $2,700 a year, while those were we allow gaming would cost $4,400 per year. Intuitively that sounds about right – you just take a guess on how many people would decide to take a swag at getting away with no healthcare, say 25%, and then you figure that group is likely to be somewhat less likely to need care, say 60% less; an you get similar numbers.
So that’s 63% more expensive or additional $147/month. Our faux progressive funding system pushes most of the cost of these social programs onto the middle and upper middle class so you can multiply that as you think is appropriate. But that class struggle is less interesting to me today.
What this highlights is how it creates two classes: those who decide they want to take the gamble, in one class, are costing everybody who decides to join, the second class. It is an interesting case of creating a clear cost to the majority group by allowing a minority a freedom. The boffins think that minority is pretty large. Will those who join will shun those who take the gamble? Will the system create shifting social norms, like the Irish experience with the bags, where it becomes unacceptable behavior to take that gamble?
There is another interesting take though. An intertemporal one. I presume that many of those who might decide to take that bet they won’t get sick will be young people. There are plenty of reasons to think that. Young people tend to be less able to afford the insurance. They tend to be less risk adverse. They tend to be healthier. They tend to have less common cause with large institutions. Over time a person is two people; a young person, and then latter a older person. The first of these is raising the costs of the second one.
Actually there are really three people or more people in each individual, since for example, what makes for a healthy young person is a healthy childhood. So the healthy young person that opts out has his head in a bag, selectively blind to both to the past and the future.
Two Groups: rich and poor
This is an interesting post on income inequality across the nation’s states. What it adds to his prior posting is a brief synopsis of Jamie Galbraith’s model of what’s going on for the folks at both ends of the spectrum. I find it notable that both groups live on a raft.
The rich raft is the stock market – as the market rises and falls so do they. This says two things to me. One is that the rich are not easily distinguishable from firms for the purpose of modeling, i.e. that distribution of firm size and the distribution of individual wealth are probably the same. But more importantly, as a group, the rich have common cause in creating economic conditions that are, in short form, whatever is good for the stock market.
The poor live on a raft of social programs: the social security, food stamps, the earned income credit, and in the poor states the federal minimum wage. That should create common cause across that vast group to support state policies to improve and maintain those programs.
What I find notable is that in both cases the common cause of the two groups is about the nature of how the state engages with the market as a complementary actor. That again is the model exposed by the voteview work on legislative voting patterns. E.g. that the economic left/right axis practically one to one with the small/large economic actors. Those on the left looking to provide complements for the small actors and those on the right striving to aid the large ones.
Romney the Deal Maker
I have a great affection for agents, middlemen, deal makers. They sit at the hubs, build the bridges, keep the traffic flowing. I get a cranky when people who have never made a deal, built a bridge, or created a new solid connection betwen two diverse things start whinning about agency problems.
So my ears perked up at this bit over at Talking Point’s Memo. This appears in a quote from, we are told a very shrewd Republican. He’s reacting to the other evening’s Republican presidential debate.
Mitt Romney, just to try to figure out what he is thinking as he goes through this process. I don’t really know, but here’s a guess: to Romney, getting elected President is a lot like putting together a business deal. The details of getting the deal done matter, because the deal doesn’t happen without them, but the main thing is getting the deal done. I think Romney has personal beliefs, but not political principles; he wouldn’t do anything in this campaign that would hurt his family or someone he cared about, but he’ll change positions the way most people change socks. Whatever it takes to get the deal done.
Getting deals done is real work. It has it’s own ethical framework. I like to say that middleman’s problem is that he has to love both sides. Which can be hard because the sides don’t love each other; if they did you wouldn’t need to build the bridge. That makes the middleman appear two faced, since each side finds it deeply suspicious if they find out he likes the other side.
As an aside. My saying “love both sides” isn’t actually right. The middleman has to adopt some attitude about both sides, maybe not even the same one. He can hate them both for example. He can be delighted by one, and have high respect for the other. There are lots of choices.
I think that insight about Romney is reasonably correct. The presumption that he will do anything to get the deal done. I don’t know about that. I suspect it maybe right, some deal makers anchor their ethical house on the foundation of maximizing deal flow.
That said I think Romney also has a streak of boarding school brat. Poor adult role models combined with a arrogant attitude about the kids off campus. A tendency to think the uniform makes the man. I firmly believe his attitude about the voters is he doesn’t particularly like them. They just keep getting in the way of closing the deal.
Good politicians, i.e. the ones you should support, like the voters. One at a time, in groups, and all together.
Tax collecting
Bridges make great venues for collecting a tax. They are a bottleneck. As soon as people find a route around that bottleneck then your power to collect the tax weakens. Income taxes, for example, work only because firms have rich accounting systems that it would be hard for them to route around just to avoid the taxation. Of course the rich can route around them.
As technology changes the bottlenecks move around; and tax collectors slowly follow along behind. Slowly because people don’t like taxes, but inevitably because people dislike the absense of government a lot more.
So the question arises where in a highly globalized information economy are the bottlenecks where taxes might be effectively collected? At the emerging hubs. For example a tax on search would work. A tax on eBay, Amazon, and Windows would work as well. I’m surprised I didn’t see this before. What triggered it was it appears that China sold their search franchise. I don’t think what your seeing there is censorship; it’s about revenue, regulation, and as usual who’s cronies are in favor. That firewall of theirs looks like a real money maker!
Banking Concentration
This is called burying the lead, in the ninth paragraph of an eleven paragraph article.
Nationwide, perhaps the most significant point in the FDIC reports was figures showing Bank of America’s total deposits account for 9.9 percent of all US deposits, including assets it is acquiring with its purchase of LaSalle Bank in Chicago, according to analysis by research group SNL Financial in Virginia. This moves the bank up against the federal limit of 10 percent, beyond which it cannot grow by acquisition.
The nominal headline of the article was that smaller banks in Massachusetts appear to be taking market share away from the larger banks. On that topic the article appears to be mostly hearsay: “… she’s heard anecdotal evidence that frustration is driving the growth of midsize institutions. “They’re gaining on having lower fees, some higher interest accounts, and perhaps better service”. My impression is that there is some very aggressive efforts by some area banks to drag customers in; and it appears to me this is in service of making them more attractive acquisition candidates. For example DanversBank is both 6% interest on your checking account (with very complex rules) while at the same time it is going public. Going public is, I think, a precursor to selling the bank off.
Presumably Bank of America will now be lobbying for loopholes so it can get yet larger.
Arbitration Trap
Oh my this is quite a report! It’s about those mandatory arbitration clauses which have become so popular in various terms and conditions. This is a perfect example of how difference between left and right is how benefits from societies institutions; small economic entities v.s. large. Unsurprisingly the arbitration system favors the large.
The report is one outrage after another, so it is difficult to pick one thing to highlight. For example one of the arbitration companies had a press release saying 55% of the cases are settled for the consumer, neglecting to mention that they selected only those cases filed by consumers (a few hundred); a vanishingly small slice of the cases (tens of thousands) that move through the system. Contrast that statistic to one arbitrator they look at closely, 96% of the cases he handled were settled for the credit card company. On a few days they mention he handled half a million dollars worth of cases a day. Later Schwarzenegger made this guy a judge.