Edward Glaeser

Two quotes from the first chapter of his new book, triumph of the city:

All of the world's older cities have suffered the great scourges of urban life: disease, crime, congestion. And the fight against these ills has never been won by passively accepting things as they are or by mindlessly relying on the free market.

and

Infrastructure eventually becomes obselete, but education perpetuates itself as one smart generation teaches the next.

so far the book itself is beating my expectations based on his recent articles. Already there is a strong theme of needing to consider group interests relative to individual interests (and the collective action problems that result when you do not properrly regulate a city). We'll see if the rest of the book holds up or not.

Zonkers and millionaires

Partially making up for recent indiscretions, Paul Krugman gives us a wonderful analogy for proposals that leave out the hard part:

When I was in college, we sat around eating, among other things, Screaming Yellow Zonkers; they weren’t especially tasty, but the copy on the boxes was fun. Among the instruction was the Disappearing Zonkers Trick:

After putting on your magician’s outfit, look around the house for a handkerchief, two hard boiled eggs, and a small piece of radium. Then take seven Zonkers and place them neatly into the exact center of the handkerchief. Two eggs are arranged near each other and under your hands. Tie a half-hitch knot in the radium. Then make the seven Zonkers disappear. Your friends will be amazed.

It occurred to me that this is a pretty good description of the Ryan Roadmap plan for controlling health care costs — make a lot of proclamations about responsibility, dress up in a reformer’s costume, then make cost growth disappear.

How to lie with statistics -- rare cinema history edition

From David Leonhardt (via DeLong):

When I read that John Boehner, the speaker of the House, had said that the federal government added 200,000 federal workers under President Obama, I wondered, “Really? Where?” I’m not aware of any major federal hiring initiatives since January 2009.

... It turns out that the 200,000 number is simply incorrect.

...

Second, Mr. Boehner was starting his clock in December 2008, the month before Mr. Obama became president. The Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts its monthly survey during the week that contains the 12th day of each month, so there is no reason to start the clock in December 2008 as opposed to January 2009. On Jan. 12, 2009, George W. Bush was still president.

To be more accurate there wasn't an honest reason. As Leonhardt points out later, 11,000 jobs were added by President Bush in his last month in office. Speaker Boehner was interval shopping, one of the most effective and time-honored methods of lying with statistics. (Given that, by Leonhardt's estimate, Boehner went from 57,000 actual jobs to a claim of 200,000, he used lots of effective and time-honored methods of lying with statistics.)

Interval shopping is based on the idea that if you can adjust the period being studied, you can make something look much better or worse than it actually is. For example, if you take one day off of the service record of the Titanic, it looks like a remarkably safe form of transportation.

The method also allows you to have a great deal of fun with denominators. You will often see people in positions of responsibility pointing to a period of growth that started just after a disastrous collapse and ends just before the next one. The worse that initial collapse was, the better your growth rate looks.

Interval shopping can be particularly effective when the groups being compared are at different stages of life. You can, for example, use it to argue that a product is less reliable than one that was introduced a couple of years later, not taking into account the difference in average ages, or you could 'prove' the mental inferiority of one immigrant group over another by comparing test scores, not taking into account the higher proportion of non-English-speaking first generation immigrants.

For beautiful example of egregious interval shopping, check out this excerpt from a rebuttal to Gore Vidal written by Peter Bogdanovich in the New York Review of Books:

Now I’m getting in a foul mood because I’m reading this sentence again: “The badness of so many of Orson Welles’s post-Mankiewicz films ought to be instructive.” That’s another of those glib, sweeping statements that play right into the reader’s lack of information and is written so as to presume a general critical atmosphere, which in this case is not just superficial, it is decidedly untrue, which makes it all the more offensive and irresponsible on Gore’s part. Almost everyone with any sense knows that Orson Welles is a great director and that Herman Mankiewicz was a talented hack,* but for the record, here is a list of the movies Orson Welles has directed since Citizen Kane:

The Magnificent Ambersons

The Stranger

The Lady from Shanghai

Macbeth

Othello

Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report)

Touch of Evil

The Trial

Chimes at Midnight (Falstaff)

The Immortal Story

F for Fake

And these are all of Herman Mankiewicz’s post-Welles films:

Rise and Shine

Pride of the Yankees

Stand by for Action

Christmas Holiday

The Enchanted Cottage

The Spanish Main

A Woman’s Secret

The Pride of St. Louis

One of the surest signs of interval shopping is the arbitrary start point, but the key to making it work is finding an arbitrary point that doesn't look arbitrary. Here Bogdanovich is able to make use of a sloppy writing by Vidal. The phrase "post-Mankiewicz" implies that there is some special significance to these films coming after Citizen Kane. If Vidal were comparing Welles' post-Mankiewicz films to his pre-Mankiewicz films (which he obviously isn't), or if he were arguing that Welles was changed by working with Mankiewicz (which seems unlikely, though I'd need to get behind the paywall to be sure), then the wording would have been appropriate. Here, though, we simply have Vidal saying "post-Mankiewicz" when he means "non-Mankiewicz."

This small bit of imprecision on Vidal's part gives Bogdanovich the opportunity to use Kane as the start point for his interval (and Peter Bogdanovich has never been one to pass up on opportunity). When comparing careers you would normally look at entire careers. This interval includes all of Welles' films and less than half of Mankiewicz's.

To make matters worse, the intervals aren't even close to the same length for the two men. Mankiewicz drank himself to death in 1953. Welles died in 1985 (the last film on Bogdanovich's list was released in 1974).

More importantly, though, this list includes all of Orson Welles' career as a director barring some shorts and TV work, while it leaves out most of Mankiewicz's major accomplishments as a writer and producer. Even in his final, declining, alcohol-soaked years, Mankiewicz still managed a good picture or two, but a list of films that he wrote or produced before Kane would include Dinner at Eight, Million Dollar Legs (with W.C. Fields) and three out of four of the Marx Brothers' best movies Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup.

And when you leave out Duck Soup, that's just going too far.



*Bogdanovich's senseless group here include Mankiewicz collaborators and admirers such as Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly and Nunnally Johnson, but that's a topic for another post and perhaps another blog.

Update: The conversation continues here and here.

An excuse to pull out my favorite John Ford quote

It's not often you have to correct Roger Ebert on film history, but his recent retrospective on the Grapes of Wrath opens with a statement that definitely needs correcting:

John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath" is a left-wing parable, directed by a right-wing American director, about how a sharecropper's son, a barroom brawler, is converted into a union organizer.

It's true that Ford became more identified with the GOP in the late Forties (calling himself a 'Maine Republican') and turned sharply to the right in the mid-Sixties (around the time he turned seventy), but up until that sharp turn he had been a progressive (even afterwards his favorite presidents were FDR and JFK) and he was an ardent FDR man when he made Grapes of Wrath in 1940. He held to these basic principles even when they entailed significant professional risk in the Fifties.

From Wikipedia:

Ford's attitude to McCarthyism in Hollywood is expressed by a story told by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. A faction of the Directors Guild of America led by Cecil B. DeMille had tried to make it mandatory for every member to sign a loyalty oath. A whispering campaign was being conducted against Mankiewicz, then President of the Guild, alleging he had communist sympathies. At a crucial meeting of the Guild, DeMille's faction spoke for four hours until Ford spoke against DeMille and proposed a vote of confidence in Mankiewicz, which was passed. His words were recorded by a court stenographer:

"My name's John Ford. I make Westerns. I don't think there's anyone in this room who knows more about what the American public wants than Cecil B. DeMille — and he certainly knows how to give it to them.... [looking at DeMille] But I don't like you, C.B. I don't like what you stand for and I don't like what you've been saying here tonight."^[77]

Having made fun of Paul Krugman's puns, there's no way I can use the title "Darby's Rhee Lapse"

From the New Republic's Seyward Darby:

The mantra goes, “You either love or hate Michelle Rhee.” In the education world, there is no figure as polarizing as the former chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s public schools, who famously warred with the city’s teachers’ union and left abruptly when her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, lost reelection last year. Since then, she has started an organization called StudentsFirst to push for education reform nationwide. She announced the group in a Newsweek cover story, and it raised more than $700,000 in its first week. Andrew Rotherham, an education policy expert, told me, “Do people say, ‘I [am] kind of uncertain about Michelle Rhee’? No way.”

Count me, then, as one of the uncertain few. To be sure, I am generally a fan of Rhee. The world of liberal education policy consists, more or less, of two factions: reformers, who support performance pay, charter schools, and weakening seniority-based job protections for teachers; and opponents of these ideas, who are often allied with teachers’ unions. Like most reformers, I greatly admired Rhee’s tenure in D.C., in which she closed failing schools, fired underperforming teachers, and helped raise student achievement.

But, in reading about Rhee’s recent moves, I’ve felt a nagging sense of disappointment. She is now advising several conservative governors who line up with reformers on certain issues but whose commitment to public education is questionable. Meanwhile, she hasn’t offered robust answers to some of the thorniest matters facing education policymakers. Last week, I put these challenges to Rhee directly. And I came out of our conversation much as I went in: with decidedly mixed feelings about her vision for the education-reform movement.

I have long had decidedly mixed feeling about Seyward Darby (as you can see for yourself with a quick keyword search). Her reporting and analysis of the education reform movement has been, to put it simply, bad (better than Chait's but still bad). She was overly eager to accept the movement's preferred narrative, credulous about its claims, negligent about digging into the research that called these claims into question, and dismissive of those on the other side.

That last trait is still on display even now with the weasel-worded "more or less, of two factions... opponents of these ideas, who are often allied with teachers’ unions." The implication here is that the opponents are shilling for the unions. I don't know the alliances of everyone out there but I can tell you that I'm not allied with the unions (I never even bothered to join one when I was a teacher), nor is Joseph, nor is David Warsh, nor, to my knowledge are most of the people in my corner of the blogosphere. In my experience, it would have been more accurate to say "opponents who question the evidence presented by the reformers."

But there was no question in my mind that Darby is an intelligent, competent and basically honest journalist and that eventually the internal contradictions would start to get to her. One of the ways that people deal with cognitive dissonance is by convincing themselves that things have changed. Rather than question their original assessment and reaction, they convince themselves that they were right then but they are taking the opposite position now because things are different.

Michelle Rhee hasn't changed. She is constant as the northern star. Every point on her career trajectory is collinear. Those who didn't see her current incarnation coming either weren't paying attention or weren't being honest with themselves.

The rest of Darby's article is behind a paywall and I haven't had a chance to look at it. Perhaps something in the piece will invalidate something I've said here. If so let me know and I'll gladly make the appropriate retractions.

Paul Krugman still has no shame

An Asterix the Gaul pun? Has it really come to that?

(this is not a first offense)

Words of Wisdom

From the ever brilliant Felix Salmon:

The more important answer is “I’m not an investor” — and neither are you. Just because you have a 401k plan does not, ipso facto, make you an investor. This is a serious problem with defined-contribution pensions in general: they place an onerous set of responsibilities onto individuals who are wholly unqualified to discharge them in a sensible manner. Already, such plans tend to have far too many choices, many of which are expensive long-only mutual funds which seem like a pretty bad idea for just about anybody. Trying to add alternative investments in private equity or hedge funds to the mix would almost certainly be disastrous — the dumb money coming in at just the wrong time, just like it always does.

I always kind of worry paying a management fee for investing in TIPS (i.e. my retirement fund does not let me buy individual bonds). The yield on these bonds is already pretty low and paying a percentage of assets in order to invest in this instrument makes it a far less efficient vehicle for investment. But it's also true that I have neither the expertise nor the information network to invest intelligently (beyond some basic, general principles) in the general market.

I always find it odd that the employer (who does not directly benefit from the results of the investment) picks the funds that are available. Market forces only work well when the customer (in this case the individual employee) is able to make free choices. But, unfortunately, the lack of information makes it impossible for the average employee to know if they are getting a good return.

So, in the end, only the fund managers really seem to benefit from this arrangement.

Easily worth a thousand words... Maybe even fifteen hundred

From Mark Thoma.

Forget Jeopardy, show me a computer that can play Eleusis

The odd thing about the much publicized Jeopardy match between humans and IBM's Watson is how differently both sides are challenged by the game. Arguably the hardest part for the human players, acquiring and retaining information, is trivial for the computer while certainly the hardest part for Watson, understanding everyday human language, is something almost all of us master as young children.

Natural language processing continues to chug along at a respectable pace. Things like Watson and even Google Translate represent remarkable advances. Still, they hardly seem like amazing advances in artificial intelligence. I'm not going to worry about the rise of the machines until they start beating us at games like Robert Abbott's Eleusis.

Abbott's game (old Eleusis -- you can buy a booklet of rules for the updated game from Mr. Abbott himself) made its national début in the Second Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions by Martin Gardner. It's easy to play but a bit complicated to score (not unnecessarily complicated -- there's a real flash of insight behind the process).

The dealer (sometimes referred to as 'Nature' or 'God' for what will be obvious reasons) writes a rule like "If the card on top is red, play a black card. If the card on top is is black, then play a red card." on a piece of paper then folds it and puts it away. The dealer then shuffles the deck, randomly selects a card, puts it face up in the center of the table then deals out the rest evenly to the players (the dealer doesn't get a hand). If the number of cards isn't divisible by the number of players the extra cards are put aside.

The first player selects any card from his or her hand and puts it on top of the starter card. Based on the hidden rule, the dealer says 'right' and the card stays on the pile or says 'wrong' and the card (called a mistake card) goes face up in front of the player. The players continue in turn

The object for players is to have as few mistake cards as possible. The object for the dealer is to have the largest possible range in players' scores.

At the end of the first hand, the score is calculated for the dealer. The scoring method is clever but a bit complicated. For n players (excluding the dealer), have each player count his or her mistake cards then multiply the smallest number by n-1 and subtract the product from the total number of mistake cards in front of the other players. For example, if there were four players with 7, 2, 9 and 8 mistake cards, you would multiply 2 (the lowest) times 3 (n-1) and subtract that from 24 (the sum of the rest).

In the second stage, the players take turns selecting cards from their mistake pile (leaving them face up so that other players can see what has been rejected). Play continues until someone goes out or until the dealer sees that no more cards can be accepted. At that point the rule is revealed.

Players' score are then calculated with a formula similar to the one used for the dealer: each player multiplies his or her mistake cards by n-1 then subtracts the product from the total of the other players' mistake cards. If the difference is negative, the score is zero. The player who goes out first or who has the fewest cards if no one goes out gets an additional six points.


While most 'new' games are actually collections of old ideas with new packaging, Abbott managed to come up with two genuinely innovative ideas for Eleusis: the use of induction and the scoring of the dealer. As someone who has spent a lot of time studying games, I may be even more impressed with the second. One of the fundamental challenges of game design is coming up with rules that encourage strategies that make the game more enjoyable for all the players. In this case, that means giving the dealer an incentive to come up with rules that are both challenging enough to stump some of the players and simple enough that someone will spot the pattern.

Eleusis has often been used as a tool for teaching the scientific method. You recognize a pattern, form a hypothesis, and test it. Gardner discusses this analogy at length. At one point, he even brings William James and John Dewey into the conversation.

The New York Times said that Robert Abbott's games were "for lovers of the unfamiliar challenge." Any AI people out there up to that challenge?

Notice anything funny?

Felix Salmon makes the catch.

Hint: always check out the x-axis.

"Looking under the lamp post"

People are hard-wired for convergent behavior. We instinctively imitate, we constantly reset our social norms and we love to feel included. One of the best ways to achieve this feeling of inclusion is to talk about what everyone else is talking about.

When you combine this natural desire to join the conversation with the constant pressure on journalists to come up with an angle for every story, the result is a natural tendency to converge on a standard narrative, particularly if this narrative plays off another hot topic.

Case in point, the recent events in Egypt have been repeatedly described using social networks and references to Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter. The phrase 'egypt "revolution 2.0"' produces almost ninety thousand results (If you hear the term 'two point oh' to describe non-sarcastically anything other than a new product release, you can be pretty sure the speaker is trying to feel included).

But did revolutionaries friending each other and texting on their cell phones really contribute to the fall of the government? According to this excellent post over at Whimsley (via Thoma, of course), the answer is yes, but not as much as you might think.

The easiest people to talk to

Most obviously, it is much easier to talk to English speaking participants than non-English speakers. English speakers are far more likely to be part of the one-fifth or so of the country that has access to the Internet. (World Bank Development Indicators). And it is easy to contact people over the Internet, so we hear from people who are on the Internet. It is easy to follow Twitter feeds, so we hear Egyptian tweets.

The easiest story to tell

It isn't just the sources, though. The Facebook Revolution narrative is an interesting story to tell to a contemporary Western audience. For us, a story built around the familiar yet novel world of Facebook and social media is an easy way into the Egyptian rebellion. How many of us know much about the specifics of Egypt's history, its recent past, or the economic sources of discontent? It is a much quicker and lighter story to say "look at the Facebook page." We can even go and look at it ourselves (>>). Talking about strikes is more likely to lose an audience.

So every time prominent activist Wael Ghonim is mentioned, he is described as a "Google executive Wael Ghonim" even though he has explicitly said that "Google has nothing to do with this" (>>). Do we hear the employer of any of the other leaders? April 6 Movement founders Asmaa Mahfouz, Ahmed Maher and Ahmed Salah are commonly described as "activists". It is possible to track down Maher's occupation as a "civil engineer", but with no employer. The discrepancy is glaring, and so Google gets to be associated with the uprising, adding to the digital tone of the story.

Underreported players

As people look back for the roots of the rebellion, the April 6 Movement and the We Are Khaled Said Facebook page have received much of the attention. But there are other strands that fed into the protests. The April 6 Movement was created to commemorate an industrial strike, after all, at a textile factory. There have been more than 3,000 separate labour protests in Egypt since 2004 according to a report by the AFL-CIO. The Kefaya movement is considered by some experts to be a central organizer of the January 25 protests, along with Mohamed ElBaradei's organization (two-minute video with Samer Shehata).

An interesting perspective

Matt Yglesias makes a good point:

And on the politics, it’s a mess. Right now we have conservatives simultaneously calling for huge spending cuts and also getting the line’s share of old people’s votes even while the vast majority of non-security spending is on old people. In essence, by first separating the domestic budget into “discretionary” and “entitlement” portions and then dividing the entitlement programs up into “what today’s old people get” versus “what tomorrow’s old people will get” the political class has created a large and vociferously right-wing class of people who are completely immune from the impact of their own calls for fiscal austerity. In my view, that reality is the biggest driver of our current political dysfunction.

I had not thought about things like this but it is a really good point. I dislike the idea of revising benefit levels because people plan their lives around these benefits and it seems unfair to change things mid-stream.

However, I had completely overlooked the political point involved. Social Security, Medicare and CHIP are 41% of the budget. Veterns and retirees are another 7%. This makes about half of the budget being focused on people over 55/60 years of age.

So I think I agree that this is a better point than the moral one. The conversation about the budget becomes a lot more sane if there is not a "protected class" of citizens. It's not a conclusion I like but I think it might be correct.

"Human see; human do."

There was a fascinating interview on NPR's Fresh Air earlier today. I particularly enjoyed this section:

If you're just joining us, we're speaking with V.S. Ramachandran. He is a behavioral neurologist and author of the new book "The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neural Scientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human."

You write a lot about mirror neurons and the role that they played on our evolution. You want to just tell us a little bit about that?

Dr. RAMACHANDRAN: Well, mirror neurons were not discovered by us, obviously. They were discovered by Giacomo Rizzolatti in Parma, Italy, and his colleagues. And what they refer to is in the front of the brain, the motor and pre-motor cortex, there are neurons that issue commands to your hands and other parts of your body to perform specific actions, semi-skilled actions, skilled actions or even non-skilled actions. So these are motor-command neurons which orchestrate specific sequence of muscle twitches for you to reach out and grab a peanut, for example, or put it in your mouth.

What Rizzolatti and his colleagues found was some of these neurons, as many as 20 percent or 30 percent, will fire not only when - let's say I'm measuring mirror neuron activity in your brain. So when you reach for a peanut, these neurons fire. But the astonishing thing is these neurons will also fire when you watch me reaching for a peanut so these are promptly dubbed mirror neurons for obvious reasons. So it's as though your brain is performing a virtual reality simulation of what's going on in my brain, saying, hey, the same neuron is firing now when he's doing that as would fire when I reach out and grab a peanut, therefore, that's what that guy's up to.

He's about to reach out and grab a peanut. So it's a mind-reading neuron. It's essential for you seeing other people as intentional beings who are about to perform certain specific intended actions.

DAVIES: And that might have helped us learn from one another and thereby advanced culturally far beyond our...

Dr. RAMACHANDRAN: That's correct. That's the stuff - that's kind of an obvious behind-site, but that's the claim I made, oh, about 10 years ago in a website run by Brockman called "Edge." And what I pointed out was - and others have pointed this out, too, is that mirror neurons obviously are required for imitation and emulation. So if I want to do something complicated that you're doing and I want to imitate it, I have to put myself in your shoes and view the world from your standpoint. And this is extremely important.

It seems like something trivial, you know, mimicry, but it's not. It's extremely important because imitation is vital for certain types of learning, rudimentary types of learning. These days you learn from books and other things, but in the early, early days when hominids were evolving, we learned largely from imitation. And there's a tremendous acceleration of evolution illusionary process. What I'm saying is maybe there are some outliers in the population who are especially smart simply because of genetic variation, who have stumbled, say, accidentally on an invention, like fire or skinning a bear.

Without the mirror neuron system being sophisticated, it would have died out, fizzled out immediately. But with a sophisticated mirror neuron system, your offsprings can learn that technique by imitation so it spreads like wild fire horizontally across a population and vertically across generations. And that's the dawn of what we call culture and therefore, of civilization.

Google can make you disappear

The SEO's may have it coming but this is still creepy:

Interviewing a purveyor of black-hat services face-to-face was a considerable undertaking. They are a low-profile bunch. But a link-selling specialist named Mark Stevens — who says he had nothing to do with the Penney link effort — agreed to chat. He did so on the condition that his company not be named, a precaution he justified by recounting what happened when the company apparently angered Google a few months ago.

“It was my fault,” Mr. Stevens said. “I posted a job opening on a Stanford Engineering alumni mailing list, and mentioned the name of our company and a brief description of what we do. I think some Google employees saw it.”

In a matter of days, the company could not be found in a Google search.

“Literally, you typed the name of the company into the search box and we did not turn up. Anywhere. You’d find us if you knew our Web address. But in terms of search, we just disappeared.”

The company now operates under a new name and with a profile that is low even in the building where it claims to have an office. The landlord at the building, a gleaming, glassy midrise next to Route 101 in Redwood City, Calif., said she had never heard of the company.

USA Today has some bad graphs but at least it's not the New York Times

The following quote was included in one of Andrew Gelman's recent posts:

Is this the worst infographic ever to appear in NYT? USA Today is not something to aspire to.

This strikes me as deeply unfair to USA Today. The paper has certainly run its share of bad graphs but these take things to a new level. It is as if the NYT used illustrations from "How to Lie with Statistics" as a starting point and then tried to top them.

Here's the "View of the U.S." where the lower the icon is, the higher its approval.



And here's the "U.S. Pakistan Policy" where the scrolls are arranged so you can't really compare their sizes (I initially thought they were going for some depth effect).

And here's the "Greatest Threat" which takes Huff's height/volume examples to the next level by using images of different shapes and densities.

Finally there's this amazing piece of work:

Just glancing at this you would probably conclude that the amount of blue in the circles corresponds to percentage in agreement. For example, looking at the middle circle you'd assume that almost all of those surveyed were in disagreement. You'd be wrong. More agreed than disagreed. (This was also noted by one of the commenters on Gelman's site.)

While they don't quite match this, these graphs may be the worst we've seen from a major paper in recent memory.




[adapted in part from a comment I left on Andrew Gelman's site]