Does Talking Points Memo know what it's talking about?

When it comes to California, apparently not. TPM (along with TNR) is one of my two favorite political sites but like many news organizations they tend to be NY/DC-centric and their quality tends to drop as they get further from home.

Here's the opening sentence from today's story:

Last week, California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman released an ad that called Republican opponent Steve Poizner that dreaded "L" word -- liberal.

My first thought was that TPM was under the impression that Whitman just started calling Poizner a liberal; my second thought was that my first thought couldn't be right so I checked previous TPM stories on the race. Here's how they described the ad on May 11th:

Whitman Ad: My Conservative Opponent Is A Liberal!

California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has a word she'd like you to associate with her GOP primary opponent: liberal.

In a new Whitman ad aimed at state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a narrator ominously asks, "How liberal is Steve Poizner?" before rattling off a long list -- He supported Al Gore! He supported higher sales taxes! -- before the narrator declares:

"Liberal on taxes. Liberal on spending. Just another liberal Sacramento politician."

As we reported earlier, a new poll shows Whitman's lead over Poizner in California's June 8 Republican gubernatorial primary at a very thin 39% to 37%.

How badly out of the loop was TPM here? For over a month, Meg Whitman has been running, in mind-numbingly heavy rotation, an attack ad with the tag line "Way more liberal than he says he is." As for that "long list," it wasn't very long, particularly considering that it is the exact same list that Whitman has been running (and running and running) in every single attack since February.

The TPM story suggests that these charges were a reaction to the race getting close despite the fact that they started when (according to TPM's own poll tracker) Whitman had a lead of over forty points and she pulling out further ahead.

It would have taken less than fifteen minutes of research to catch these problems. This is not the kind of reporting we expect from Talking Points Memo.

Candidate Rorschach will not be running

Nate Silver has an excellent post that implicitly makes a point that slips past most analysts: in a campaign where an incumbent faces an undetermined or little-known opponent, polls can be difficult to interpret. This doesn't mean that the polls at don't have useful information; it means you need to have someone competent (like Silver) to put them in the right context and properly analyze them.

CA election update -- the ad Meg Whitman didn't want to run

It's been almost a week since my last post on the subject and things have been moving along at a nice clip.

Goldman Sachs continues to show up in the discussion though mainly among Democrats. It has the makings of a potent issue in the general election but it's still a minor one in the primary.

The big issue for Republicans at the moment is the very one Whitman wanted to avoid: immigration. This is not a great issue for Poizner (he'd also like to hold onto the Latino vote), but it represents his best chance for a primary victory and he's hammering away at it and forcing Whitman into the never desirable "am not" mode of campaigning.

This weekend I was in a shop in Southern California where I heard the following ad over the radio:

Announcer: Meg Whitman on illegal immigration.

Meg Whitman: Don't be fooled by misleading ads, my position on immigration is crystal clear. Illegal immigrants are just that, illegal. I am 100 percent against amnesty for illegal immigrants. Period. As Governor, I will crack down on so-called sanctuary cities like San Francisco who thumb their nose at our laws. Illegal immigrants should not expect benefits from the state of California. No driver's license and no admission to state-funded institutions of higher education. And I'll create an economic fence to crack down on employers who break the law by using illegal labor.

Pete Wilson: This is former Governor Pete Wilson. I know how important it is to stop illegal immigration and I know Meg Whitman. Meg will be tough as nails on illegal immigration. She'll fight to secure our border and go after sanctuary cities. Please join me in supporting Meg Whitman for Governor.

Announcer: Paid for by Meg Whitman for Governor 2010. Meg2010.com.

The clientèle was largely Hispanic.

How to ace the essay section of the SAT

Write badly.





When I was teaching at a small urban prep school, we had a faculty meeting to discuss the writing section of the SAT. The people at College Board had provided a set of sample essays with grading guidelines. We individually scored each of the papers then got together to compare our results. There were some minor disagreements -- two of the essays were close in quality and we had trouble deciding which was best -- but there was one thing which we all agreed on: the one that the College Board listed as best came in a distant third.

The College Board's choice was terrible, but it was terrible in a distinct way that any English comp teacher would immediately recognize. The writer had tried to show his or her erudition by stuffing the essay with vocabulary words that weren't apt and literary allusions that didn't advance the argument. The prose was choppy, the sentences were clumsy, and the logic was flawed.

I remember discussing how we should handle this. Should we teach students how to write sharp, readable essays or should we tell them just to use the biggest words they could think of and shoehorn in a list of inappropriate literary references?

Now I know we should have added make it as long as possible.

(with thanks to Mr. Colbert for the tip.)

Financial Literacy

There is a really nice post over at Dean Dad about financial literacy. The part that I really liked was the issue of stock market returns. In the post he discusses how planning tools often assumed an 8% return while his own IRA has performed nominally negative. While it is possible that there could be a growth surge that makes an 8% return happen over a 30 year period, it has got to be one heck of a surge to cover up 12 years of negative nominal returns.

This is actually a more general principle and one that we should keep in mind as researchers -- for many phenomena that we study, there is limited data as to what could happen in the future. Extrapolating disease rates, for example, is hard based on current rates (especially for infectious diseases where exponential growth can matter). You also have subtle issues like vaccines and herd immunity (or, in a similar sense, behavioral firebreaks such as careful hand washing). Very small changes in circumstances can make it impossible to predict the future.

So my own lesson from this anecdote is that we need to be very skeptical about the assumptions that go into forecasting. We want to do it (because some information is better than no information) but we need to be ready to revise assumptions as data comes in.

How to ace the math section of the SAT

The SAT is the toughest ninth grade math test you'll ever take. The questions can be complex, subtle, even tricky in the sense that you have to pay attention to what the problem actually says, not what you expect it to say, but even the most challenging of the problems require no mathematical background beyond Algebra I and a few basic geometry concepts.

Because of this basic-math/difficult-questions dichotomy, many of those question have a short solution and a long one (check out this Colbert clip for an example). Quite a few others just have long solutions. Since the SAT gives students about ninety seconds for each problem, a high score normally indicates a student who was insightful enough to spot AHA! solutions* and fast enough to get through the rest.

Of course, if the SAT were not a timed test, a high score wouldn't indicate much of anything. Which is why the following is so troubling.

From ABC News:

At the elite Wayland High school outside Boston, the number of students receiving special accommodations is more than 12 percent, more than six times the estimated national average of high school students with learning disabilities.

Wayland guidance counselor Norma Greenberg said that it's not that difficult for wealthy, well-connected students to get the diagnoses they want.

"There are a lot of hired guns out there, there are a lot of psychologists who you can pay a lot of money to and get a murky diagnosis of subtle learning issues," Greenberg said. ...

The natural proportion of learning disabilities should be somewhere around 2 percent, the College Board said, but at some elite schools, up to 46 percent of students receive special accommodations to take the tests, including extra time.

This is not a new problem. I know from personal experience as a teacher that public schools have a history of trying to keep kids from being diagnosed as LD, both to save money and avoid paperwork. Everyone in education knew that, just as everyone knew that expensive private schools were working the system in the other direction.

* I assume everyone has read this. If you haven't, you should.

"Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in."

I was going to to take a week off from blogging and work on another project, but this clip from the Colbert Report was too good to go unmentioned. Pay particular attention to the parts about learning disabilities and the grading of the writing section:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Stephen's Sound Advice - How to Ace the SATs
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

"Red and yellow can kill a fellow"

The pharmaceutical industry does a great job developing most kinds of drugs, but there are certain areas where we might consider a less market based approach.* Antibiotics are one example. Here's another:

Unfortunately, after Oct. 31 of this year, there may be no commercially available [coral snake] antivenom (antivenin) left. That's the expiration date on existing vials of Micrurus fulvius, the only antivenom approved by the Food and Drug Administration for coral snake bites. Produced by Wyeth, now owned by Pfizer, the antivenom was approved for sale in 1967, in a time of less stringent regulation.

Wyeth kept up production of coral snake antivenom for almost 40 years. But given the rarity of coral snake bites, it was hardly a profit center, and the company shut down the factory that made the antivenom in 2003. Wyeth worked with the FDA to produce a five-year supply of the medicine to provide a stopgap while other options were pursued. After that period, the FDA extended the expiration date on existing stock from 2008 to 2009, and then again from 2009 to 2010. But as of press time, no new manufacturer has stepped forward.

Antivenom shortages are a surprisingly common occurrence. The entire state of Arizona ran out of antivenom for scorpion stings after Marilyn Bloom, an envenomation specialist at Arizona State University, retired in 1999. Bloom had been single-handedly making all the scorpion antivenom for state hospitals. Recently, Merck & Co, the only FDA-licensed producer of black widow antivenom, has cut back distribution because of a production shortage of the drug. In a 2007 report, the World Health Organization listed worldwide envenomations as a "neglected public health issue."

New scorpion and black widow antivenoms are currently in the pipeline, thanks to efforts by several poison-control associations to speed foreign drugs into the market through FDA research programs. There is also a coral snake antivenom produced by Mexican drug manufacturer Instituto Bioclon that researchers believe could be even more effective and safe than the outgoing Wyeth product. But that drug, Coralmyn, is not currently licensed for sale by the FDA. The tests required for licensing would cost millions of dollars, and for such a rare treatment (there are 15 times as many scorpion stings per year as coral snake bites), it could take decades for Bioclon to make its money back.

*Or perhaps, to go the other way, a less regulated one. I'm open to suggestions.

Another failure for the blitzkrieg strategy? -- updated

This is getting interesting. There's a new poll out in California that shows Meg Whitman leading Steve Poizner 39 to 37. Now it's always nice to be ahead (even if it is within the margin of error) but there are two small details that might undercut Whitman's sense of triumph:

1. She spent $70,000,000 establishing that two point difference;

2. It was a forty-nine point lead when she started.

This has been a fun campaign to follow (who among us is above a little schadenfreude at the sight of an arrogant billionaire getting blindsided?), but it has also been interesting from a strategic point of view, raising all sorts of neat questions about the best way of runninga campaign for a compound election, particularly if you happen to be a Republican in a blue state in 2010.

Strategies in simple elections are, well, pretty simple: you pick the course of action that gets you the most votes. There are actually two goals here -- you want to maximize both the size of your mandate and your chances of winning -- but they generally line up so well that we can treat them as one.

Strategies for compound elections are anything but simple. For starters you can no longer count on chances of winning and size of mandate lining up. Mandate becomes a secondary goal that has to be somehow weighed in. Worse yet, the probability of winning is now the product of the probabilities of winning two different elections, each of which has a different (in some cases radically different) optimal strategy.

Richard Nixon solved this problem with a hard pivot strategy -- run as far to the right as you can during the primary, then run as fast as you can to the center in the general election. He based this on the observation that Republicans tended to be much more loyal to their candidates. Once you had the primary under your belt, you could generally count on their votes. (Nixon had also seen what happened when Goldwater had gone hard right and stayed there in '64.)

Nixon's insight was brilliant. It was not, however, all that robust. Republican core voters will no longer tolerate movement to the center, even when their candidate is trailing badly. This leaves GOP candidates in blue and purple states with a serious problem. The Nixon strategy is forbidden; the Goldwater strategy is hopeless.

For a while, it looked like a blitzkrieg strategy might work. This approach involves coming in with a big war chest and a stack of endorsements, establishing a huge lead as early as possible, marginalizing primary competitors, and running a campaign for a de facto simple election. Charlie Crist and Meg Whitman both tried this approach and though it is possible that either or both might end up winning in the general election, it is safe to say that the blitzkrieg failed.

Crist has adopted what you might call a Gordian-knot strategy and skipped directly to the simple election. I don't see that option for Whitman. She can continue carpet-bombing the state with ads while not taking a position on anything that doesn't involve tax-cuts. No polls to date show Poizner ahead. It's possible she could scrape by without a course change.

Or she could try a hard right turn and match Poizner's positions on gay marriage and the Arizona immigration law, but it's awfully late in the game to try to win over social conservatives and these stances will be hard to live down in a general election. Still, if the trend lines continue to hold, she may not have a choice.

Update: Talking Points Memo has a completely different take on Poizner's surge, crediting it mostly to Whitman's association with Goldman Sachs. I suspect that the difference has a lot to do with geography. TPM is based in New York where it's easy to imagine the world revolving around the financial services industry. I'm sitting in Whittier, where I've noticed the following:

1. Various groups have been trying to push the Goldman Sachs story for months;

2. By contrast, the Poizner campaign has only gone into high gear recently (just before Whitman started to slide);

3. Goldman Sachs continues to play a small role in the campaign. The "Vultures" ad (which debuted April 30) is not in particularly heavy rotation. It's hard to see how it could have slashed Whitman's lead in about a week;

4. People seem to be paying more attention to more prominent ads featuring immigration, McClintock's endorsement, and Arnold Schwarzenegger morphing into Meg Whitman.

TPM is still my favourite place for politics, but I think they got this one wrong.

"U-Va. should fight Cuccinelli's faulty investigation of Michael Mann"

The Washington Post weighs in on Ken Cuccinelli's investigation (via Mark Thoma):

By equating controversial results with legal fraud, Mr. Cuccinelli demonstrates a dangerous disregard for scientific method and academic freedom. The remedy for unsatisfactory data or analysis is public criticism from peers and more data, not a politically tinged witch hunt or, worse, a civil penalty. Scientists and other academics inevitably will get things wrong, and they will use public funds in the process, because failure is as important to producing good scholarship as success. For the commonwealth to persecute scientists because one official or another dislikes their findings is the fastest way to cripple not only its stellar flagship university, but also its entire public higher education system.

I'm not saying we should stop trying...

but it is worth remembering that most innovations don't work out all that well.


From Wired:

What Felix Salmon missed -- the Hulk paradox

Felix Salmon has an interesting piece in the New York Times arguing that:

[A] futures contract on box office receipts would be great news for the industry. For one thing, if the market got big enough, it would allow studios to easily hedge their investments in movies just by entering into a simple derivatives transaction. Studios could essentially sell contracts on their movies’ grosses into the open market, and pocket the proceeds. They would lose money on the contract if the movie does well, but in that case they’d make enough money on the movie itself to cover their derivatives losses.

The problem Salmon's thesis is that Hollywood runs on expectations and perceptions. A futures market would add another set of hard-to-dismiss numbers to the process. It's difficult to spin a forty million dollar opening as success if the market had predicted seventy.

Consider the case of the Hulk movies. Most people (myself included) were under the opinion that the first was a flop and the second was a success, but the first film made almost exactly the same amount of money when you take into account its smaller budget. In terms of return on investment it did much better than the second film, but in terms of advancing careers, it did much worse.

This was largely due to the fact that the press had reported an expected opening of $45 million (weak for a $150 million action film). By comparison, the $55 million opening looked great even though the first had opened with $62 million five years earlier with a smaller budget. The ability to get that '45' into the press made the film a perceived success. If there had been a futures market and it had said '55,' the film would have been seen as lackluster at best.

I'll let the Onion take it from here:

Why No One Want Make Hulk 2?
By The Hulk

July 14, 2004 | ISSUE 40•28

X2 come out last year. Spider-Man 2 come out last month. Both great sequels to great movies about Hulk friends. Hulk love great action movies about friends! People buy tickets. Make money for theaters, make money for movie company. Movie company make more movies with money. Already, they working on X-Men 3. Hulk movie come out last year. It success. It big popcorn movie with heart. So why no one want make Hulk 2? It make Hulk mad!

Hulk know what people say. Original movie no good, people say. Hulk movie Hulk-sized bomb, people say. That not true! Hulk more successful than people think. Make $132 million in U.S. alone, only cost $120 million. That not small potatoes. Add international box-office receipts and DVD sales and it add up to big money. Big! Oh, and did Hulk forget merchandising tie-ins? First Hulk movie really forge Hulk brand identity. Make people aware of Hulk. Hulk now poised to build on success of first Hulk movie. Hulk 2 smash box-office records!

(you really have to read the rest of this)

White flight

The most dramatic improvement I've ever seen in a marketing model came from adding an urban/suburban/rural variable. I wonder how that model is holding up given this:

In a reversal, America's suburbs are now more likely to be home to minorities, the poor and a rapidly growing older population as many younger, educated whites move to cities for jobs and shorter commutes.

An analysis of 2000-2008 census data by the Brookings Institution highlights the demographic "tipping points" seen in the past decade and the looming problems in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, which represent two-thirds of the U.S. population.

The findings could offer an important road map as political parties, including the tea party movement, seek to win support in suburban battlegrounds in the fall elections and beyond. In 2008, Barack Obama carried a substantial share of the suburbs, partly with the help of minorities and immigrants.

"You can't shrink your way into prosperity"

This is interesting:

New research from the Univ. of Colorado, Denver shows major job cuts don't guarantee prosperity down the line but, in fact, lead to lower profits and stock returns.

"Those who cut deepest, relative to industry peers, delivered smaller profits and weaker stock returns for as long as nine years after a recession," the WSJ reports, citing a study by Univ. of Colorado business professor Wayne Cascio. He studied how companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index have performed during and after recessions over an 18 year period.

Why?

Turns out firms that cut aggressively aren't prepared to ramp up quickly once the recovery begins. In contrast, peer firms that cautiously trimmed are well-staffed to take advantage of a swift shift in momentum. "You can't shrink your way into prosperity," says Cascio in the article.

Assuming the research holds up, isn't this the exact sort of thing an efficient market should catch?

A brief history of beast-starving by Bruce Bartlett

Via Thoma, Bruce Bartlett traces the rise and consequences of an economic theory. The whole thing is worth a read but these paragraphs in particular caught my eye:

Once upon a time Republicans thought that budget deficits were bad, that it was immoral to live for the present and pass the debt onto our children. Until the 1970s they were consistent in opposing both expansions of spending and tax cuts that were not financed with tax increases or spending cuts. Republicans also thought that deficits had a cost over and above the spending that they financed and that it was possible for this cost to be so high that tax increases were justified if spending could not be cut.

Dwight Eisenhower kept in place the high Korean War tax rates throughout his presidency, which is partly why the national debt fell from 74.3% of gross domestic product to 56% on his watch. Most Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against the Kennedy tax cut in 1963. Richard Nixon supported extension of the Vietnam War surtax instituted by Lyndon Johnson, even though he campaigned against it. And Gerald Ford opposed a permanent tax cut in 1974 because he feared its long-term impact on the deficit.