Or you could flip this around and say that big-budget superhero movies are a terrible investment

[Part of our ongoing economics-of-movies thread]

The following analysis is a bit simplistic but it does raise interesting questions about perceived vs. actual success in Hollywood.

From Planet Money

Using data from Studio System, a company that collects entertainment industry data, we looked at what kind of films have had the best return on investment over the last five years.
Horror films are at the top of the list, with 13 of the top 30 films by ROI since 2010.

And within the horror category, profits can be huge on small investments. The top five films in horror all had an ROI around 2,000 percent (translation: for every $10 put into a movie, an investor would get $200 in profit). By comparison the top films in comedy had an ROI around 1,200 percent.

...

Obviously if you're looking for the biggest payoff in total dollar amounts, the most profitable films in Hollywood will still be the traditional action and drama blockbusters. Look at this year's big summer flick, Jurassic World. It has made $1.6 billion in profit worldwide, but it cost an estimated $300 million to produce and market. That's an ROI of roughly 533 percent. By contrast, the horror hit Paranormal Activity 2 made $236 million but only cost $9.4 million to produce and market. That's an ROI of 2,510 percent.

The Tragedy of Mercury

If you think we have a lot of threads here at West Coast Stat Views, you ought to see the queue.

One of the threads I'd like too spend more time on is the mystery of sustained success. Why are certain individuals and institutions able to hold onto, perhaps even build on early successes, which, of course, leads to the related question of why the enormously promising so often fail to sustain that promise.

Pauline Kael's controversial essay "Raising Kane" is explicitly built around this question using W.R. Hearst, Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles as case studies. She also says some very smart things about what we might now call fanboy critics. I quoted some of her observations in a recent discussion at Brad DeLong blog. After finding the relevant passage I kept reading till I got to the end of the essay and it hit me just how much this was how well the theme of unfulfilled promise applied to all of the Mercury Players.  They all had good careers as character actors (Cotten even had a good run as a leading man), but, as Kael points out, entirely along conventional Hollywood standards. It seems strange now to think of the mother on Bewitched and the detective on Perry Mason as being integral parts of a group that was expected to revolutionize stage, screen and radio.

        Mankiewicz went on writing scripts, but his work in the middle and late forties is not in the same spirit as Kane. It’s rather embarrassing to look at his later credits, because they are yea-saying movies—decrepit “family pictures” like The Enchanted Cottage. The booze and the accidents finally added up, and he declined into the forties sentimental slop. He tried to rise above it. He wrote the script he had proposed earlier on Aimee Semple McPherson, and he started the one on Dillinger, but he had squandered his health as well as his talents. I have read the McPherson script; it is called Woman of the Rock, and it’s a tired, persevering-to-the-end, burned-out script. He uses a bit of newspaper atmosphere, and Jed again, this time as a reporter, and relies on a flashback structure from Aimee’s death to her childhood; there are “modern” touches—a semi-lesbian lady who manages the evangelist, for instance—and the script comes to life whenever he introduces sophisticated characters, but he can’t write simple people, and even the central character is out of his best range. The one device that is interesting is the heroine’s love of bright scarves, starting in childhood with one her father gives her and ending with one that strangles her when it catches on a car wheel, but this is stolen from Isadora Duncan’s death, and to give the death of one world-famous lady to another is depressingly poverty-stricken. Mankiewicz’s character hadn’t changed. He had written friends that he bore the scars of his mistake with Charlie Lederer, but just as he had lent the script of Kane to Lederer, Marion Davies’s nephew, he proudly showed Woman of the Rock to Aimee Semple McPherson’s daughter, Roberta Semple, and that ended the project. His behavior probably wasn’t deliberately self-destructive as much as it was a form of innocence inside the worldly, cynical man—I visualize him as so pleased with what he was doing that he wanted to share his delight with others. I haven’t read the unfinished Dillinger; the title, As the Twig Is Bent, tells too hoary much.

        In his drama column in The New Yorker in 1925, Mankiewicz parodied those who thought the Marx Brothers had invented all their own material in The Cocoanuts and who failed to recognize George S. Kaufman’s contribution. It has been Mankiewicz’s fate to be totally ignored in the books on the Marx Brothers movies; though his name is large in the original ads, and though Groucho Marx and Harry Ruby and S. J. Perelman all confirm the fact that he functioned as the producer of Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, the last reference I can find to this in print is in Who’s Who in America for 1953, the year of his death. Many of the thirties movies he wrote are popular on television and at college showings, but when they have been discussed in film books his name has never, to my knowledge, appeared. He is never mentioned in connection with Duck Soup, though Groucho confirms the fact that he worked on it. He is now all but ignored even in many accounts of Citizen Kane. By the fifties, his brother Joe—with A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve—had become the famous wit in Hollywood, and there wasn’t room for two Mankiewiczes in movie history; Herman became a parentheses in the listings for Joe.
...
        Every time someone in the theatre or in movies breaks through and does something good, people expect the moon of him and hold it against him personally when he doesn’t deliver it. That windy speech Kaufman and Hart gave their hero in The Fabulous Invalid indicates the enormous burden of people’s hopes that Welles carried. He has a long history of disappointing people. In the Saturday Evening Post of January 20, 1940, Alva Johnston and Fred Smith wrote:

            Orson was an old war horse in the infant prodigy line by the time he was ten. He had already seen eight years’ service as a child genius…. Some of the oldest acquaintances of Welles have been disappointed in his career. They see the twenty-four-year-old boy of today as a mere shadow of the two-year-old man they used to know.

A decade after Citizen Kane, the gibes were no longer so good-natured; the terms “wonder boy” and “boy genius” were thrown in Welles’s face. When Welles was only thirty-six, the normally gracious Walter Kerr referred to him as “an international joke, and possibly the youngest living has-been.” Welles had the special problems of fame without commercial success. Because of the moderate financial returns on Kane, he lost the freedom to control his own productions; after Kane, he never had complete control of a movie in America. And he lost the collaborative partnerships that he needed. For whatever reasons, neither Mankiewicz nor Houseman nor Toland ever worked on another Welles movie. He had been advertised as a one-man show; it was not altogether his own fault when he became one. He was alone, trying to be “Orson Welles,” though “Orson Welles” had stood for the activities of a group. But he needed the family to hold him together on a project and to take over for him when his energies became scattered. With them, he was a prodigy of accomplishments; without them, he flew apart, became disorderly. Welles lost his magic touch, and as his films began to be diffuse he acquired the reputation of being an intellectual, difficult-to-understand artist. When he appears on television to recite from Shakespeare or the Bible, he is introduced as if he were the epitome of the highbrow; it’s television’s more polite way of cutting off his necktie.

        The Mercury players had scored their separate successes in Kane, and they went on to conventional careers; they had hoped to revolutionize theatre and films, and they became part of the industry. Turn on the TV and there they are, dispersed, each in old movies or his new series or his reruns. Away from Welles and each other, they were neither revolutionaries nor great originals, and so Welles became a scapegoat—the man who “let everyone down.” He has lived all his life in a cloud of failure because he hasn’t lived up to what was unrealistically expected of him. No one has ever been able to do what was expected of Welles—to create a new radical theatre and to make one movie masterpiece after another—but Welles’s “figurehead” publicity had snowballed to the point where all his actual and considerable achievements looked puny compared to what his destiny was supposed to be. In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.

Kael doesn't mention that part of Welles trouble lay in his choice of company. He had started out with perhaps the most impressive set of collaborators any filmmaker had ever assembled. He ended up with fans and sycophants. He was only in his fifties when "Raising Kane" came out but his last hurrah, Chimes at Midnight (considered by some to be his best film), was already five years in the past and even his supporters (perhaps particularly his supporters) were inclined to talk about him as a revered figure rather than an active force.

As I write this I find myself thinking of another tremendously talented fellow I know very peripherally here in LA.  In his day, extraordinarily productive and influential but his work fell off to a trickle years ago. I've long been amazed by his entourage of admirers, but I never until now considered the possibility that always having someone around who wanted to hear him talk may have made him less inclined to sit down and work.

Arguments for a content bubble

First off a quick lesson in the importance of good blogger housekeeping. It is important to keep track of what you have and have not posted . A number of times, I've caught myself starting to write something virtually identical to one of my previous posts, often with almost the same title. At the other into the spectrum, there are posts that I could've sworn I had written but of which there seems to be no trace.

For example, living in LA, I frequently run into people in the entertainment industry. One of the topics that has come up a lot over the past few years is the possibility of a bubble in scripted television. Given all that we've written on related topics here at the blog, I was sure I had addressed the content bubble at some point, but I can't find any mention of the term in the archives.

One of the great pleasures of having a long running blog is the ability, from time to time, to point at a news story and say "you heard it here first." Unfortunately, in order to do that, you actually have to post the stuff you meant to. John Landgraf, the head of FX network and one of the sharpest executives in television has a very good interview on the subject of content bubbles and rather than "I told you so," all I get to say is "I wish I'd written that."

But, better late than never, here are the reasons I suspect we have a content bubble:


1. The audience for scripted entertainment is, at best, stable. It grows with the population and with overseas viewers but it shrinks as other forms of entertainment grab market share. Add to this fierce competition for ad revenue and inescapable constraints on time, and you have an extremely hard bound on potential growth.

2. Content accumulates. While movies and series tend to lose value over time, they never entirely go away. Some shows sustain considerable repeat viewers. Some manage to attract new audiences. This is true across platforms. Netflix built an entire ad campaign around the fact that they have acquired rights to stream Friends. Given this constant accumulation, at some point, old content has got to start at least marginally cannibalizing the market for new content.

3. Everybody's got to have a show of their very own. (And I do mean everybody.) I suspect that this has more to do executive dick-measuring than with cost/benefit analysis but the official rationale is that viewers who want to see your show will have to watch your channel, subscribe to your service or buy your gaming system. While than can work under certain conditions, proponents usually fail to consider the lottery-ticket like odds of having a show popular enough to make it work. And yet...

4.  Everybody's buying more lottery tickets. The sheer volume of scripted television being pumped out across every platform is stunning.

5. Money is no object. We are seeing unprecedented amounts of money paid for original and even second run content.

For me, spending unprecedented amounts of money to make unprecedented volume of product for a market that is largely flat is almost by definition unsustainable. Ken Levine takes a different view and I tend to give a great deal of weight to his opinions, but, as I said before, Langraf is one of the best executives out there and I think he's on to something.

The third reason Trump is so interesting

I think we've covered 1. and 2.:

1. Trump has brought a gun to a knife fight and has no intention of politely turning it in at the door. The threat of a third party run on an anti-immigrant ticket gives him exceptional leverage.

2. Trump is willing to take extreme positions that appeal to the base and present them in unvarnished terms even when they are repugnant to the general population;

But we haven't said much about  this:

3. Trump is also just as willing to abandon conservative sacred cows if they aren't popular with the base. We've mentioned preserving Social Security benefits but this hasn't gotten a lot of attention:

From Bloomberg:

"I would change it. I would simplify it," Trump told hosts Mark Halperin and John Heilemann from the lobby of Trump Tower on New York's 5th Ave. Specifically, Trump targeted hedge fund profits, which are currently taxed at a lower rate than regular income.

"I would take carried interest out, and I would let people making hundreds of millions of dollars-a-year pay some tax, because right now they are paying very little tax and I think it's outrageous," Trump said. "I want to lower taxes for the middle class."

Asked whether his proposed changes meant he was prepared to raise taxes on himself, the billionaire framed his answer in terms of fairness.

"That's right. That's right. I'm OK with it. You've seen my statements, I do very well, I don't mind paying some taxes. The middle class is getting clobbered in this country. You know the middle class built this country, not the hedge fund guys, but I know people in hedge funds that pay almost nothing and it's ridiculous, OK?" 

The underlying point I've been hammering away at in the naked emperor posts is that the political reporting of the mainstream press has become a mass of strange conventions and agreed-upon half-truths. It is not a robust system and Trump's campaign is applying stress from at least two different directions: when he rejects the Republican orthodoxy on taxes and Social Security, he points out how extreme those positions are; when he embraces popular positions within the base involving racism and xenophobia, he does it so openly  ("Obama is a Kenyan," "Mexicans are criminals.") that journalists can't spin it as anything but what it is.

p.s. I couldn't find a way to work in this very sharp analysis by Josh Marshall but you should read it anyway.

An unintentionally informative sentence about the culture of the education reform debate

From a recent Upshot post by movement reformer Kevin Carey:

If Congress removes that authority, it will mark the end of an optimistic, expansive era of federal efforts to improve K-12 education for disadvantaged students, one that began with the desegregation battles of the mid-20th century and extended to the creation of challenging standards nationwide.

Quick history lesson. There is no real continuity between Brown v. Board of Education and the national standards mentioned above. With the normal caveats about assigning lineages to this sort of thing, the initiative Carey is talking about is part of a top-down, technocratic movement that basically started with a Reagan administration report that called for [emphasis added]:

    Content: "4 years of English; (b) 3 years of mathematics; (c) 3 years of science; (d) 3 years of social studies; and (e) one-half year of computer science" for high school students." The commission also recommends that students work toward proficiency in a foreign language starting in the elementary grades.

    Standards and Expectations: the commission cautioned against grade inflation and recommends that four-year colleges raise admissions standards and standardized tests of achievement at "major transition points from one level of schooling to another and particularly from high school to college or work."

    Time: the commission recommended that "school districts and State legislatures should strongly consider 7-hour school days, as well as a 200- to 220-day school year."

    Teaching: the commission recommended that salaries for teachers be "professionally competitive, market-sensitive, and performance-based," and that teachers demonstrate "competence in an academic discipline."

    Leadership and Fiscal Support: the commission noted that the Federal government plays an essential role in helping "meet the needs of key groups of students such as the gifted and talented, the socioeconomically disadvantaged, minority and language minority students, and the handicapped." The commission also noted that the Federal government also must help ensure compliance with "constitutional and civil rights," and "provide student financial assistance and research and graduate training."

[The report also created some tension between the Department of Education and social conservatives, thus providing a bit of foreshadowing of things to come.]

In its current form, the most important figure in the movement came to education through the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, yet another group quite a few degrees of separation from Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. If anything, you could find more continuity in certain parts of the opposition, particularly in places like New Orleans.

Despite this historical disconnect, Carey and other movement reformers routinely depict themselves successors to Dr. King, and while a few are probably just cynically exploiting the association, I'm sure Carey and most others sincerely believe their own rhetoric,

That is where so much of the trouble starts. If you honestly see yourself as leading the civil rights movement of the Twenty-first Century, your perceptions of allies and opponents will inevitably be colored in simplistic terms. You will tend to assume the worst about those who disagree with you while being vulnerable to sharp operators who claim to be on your side.

Did you know Happy Birthday was copyrighted?

This is Joseph

I did not.  Nor was I aware of a lawsuit trying to change this until quite recently.  But the actual arguments have become rather odd:

Last week, they submitted evidence that they called “a proverbial smoking gun”: a 1922 songbook containing “Good Morning and Birthday Song,” with the birthday lyrics in the third verse. While other songs in the book are given with copyright notices, “Good Morning and Birthday Song” says only that it appears through “special permission” of the Summy Company. Under the laws of the time, an authorized publication without proper copyright notice would result in forfeiture of the copyright, according to lawyers involved in the case. Furthermore, under the 1998 law, anything published before 1923 is considered part of the public domain.

Warner argued that while earlier versions of the birthday song may have been published, they were not authorized by the sisters themselves. Also, no copyright covered “Happy Birthday,” the label argues, until it was registered in 1935, so there was no copyright to be invalidated in 1922.

So a song that was extant in 1922 can be copyrighted in 1935 -- making the term of copyright last until 2030 (presuming no additional extensions).  This is 108 years past the original songbook and 95 years after the formal copyright. 

I think intellectual property protections are extremely important.  Many artists depend on these rights in order to make a living by producing works of lasting value.  My question is becoming more one of "what is the socially optimal length of a copyright".  I am suspicious that we are on the wrong side of the curve (copyright increases innovation by increasing reward but stifles it by setting up things that others cannot use without cost/permission).  In this case, the copyright term extension act didn't even incent this innovation -- all of the prior copyright holders had innovated under the previous reward levels (including this song). 

Now I don't want to go too far here in proposing solutions.  But I think a robust discussion of 50 year terms for artistic works might be of great help in this debate.  That would make things in the mid-1960's leaving copyright now, which seems like a decent run to allow compensation for innovation. 

Hopefully not followed the next day by a BBC segment on what it feels like to be going to Mars

Two MIT students just schooled a company trying to send people to Mars

Two MIT engineering students just faced off with a private company that wants to send people on a one-way trip to Mars — and one group won by a landslide.

The debate stemmed from the students' scathing critique of Mars One's plan to set up a permanent human colony on Mars. That report, published in 2014, triggered widespread criticism of the company's too-low $6-billion budget, unrealistic timeline, and general lack of preparedness for the challenges of Mars.

In case you're coming in late, here are some links to the Mars One mega-thread.

"... while Governor Bush's attire was tastefully sheer and minimal"

As mentioned before, the mainstream press faces a difficult choice. For reasons of substance and style, most members of the press would very much like to see Trump drop out, but over the past few years they have gotten so reluctant to call out Republican politicians (who tend to push back), that they have essentially signed off on most of the same policies that makes Trump objectionable.

Here's how I summed up the situation before:

Over the past couple of decades, the press has gotten stunningly good at not noticing things they don't want to notice. You can get journalists to ignore all sorts of lies and bigotry if you just give them an out, but that's just the thing Trump refuses to do. His whole campaign up to this point has depended on being as memorable and entertaining as possible, the ultimate reality show villain in what is arguably the ultimate reality show.

There have been other naked emperors on the stage recently but they've all played it at least a little coy. Trump is basically running around, grabbing his crotch, shouting "Hey, baby, do you want a piece of this?" then skipping away singing "I'm naked, naked, naked."

Barring a sudden outbreak of journalistic self-aware, the two most likely responses to Trump are ignoring the other naked emperors on the stage or pretending that the other emperors aren't naked, which brings us to...


Dueling Town Hall Meetings Add Distance to Jeb Bush-Donald Trump Gulf
from the NYT by ASHLEY PARKER and JEREMY W. PETERS

[emphasis most definitely added.]

MERRIMACK, N.H. — At a serious and sober town hall meeting here Wednesday night, Jeb Bush dropped statistics like New Year’s Eve confetti.
...
Indeed, a mere 20 or so miles separated them on Wednesday: the bombastic developer from Queens, and the wonky son of a president.

But the dueling town hall events here by Mr. Trump and Mr. Bush, who are polling at No. 1 and No. 2 in the state’s crucial Republican primary, highlighted just how wide a gulf exists between the two men — in substance, style, experience and temperament.
...
Mr. Bush, taking a different tack, was measured and thoughtful, even in his attacks on Mr. Trump, choosing to focus on a record that he warned was insufficiently conservative.

First off, to acknowledge the elephant in the room. This is an inexcusably biased piece of reporting. Bush is sane, sober, thoughtful, measured, and wonky. (It was that last one that set Dean Baker off.) The article leaves no question as to whom the authors want you to vote for, but it still tries to maintain the pretense of objectivity. An editorial trying to pass for a news story.

I can understand writers' concerns over Trump (I share some of them), but that is no excuse for them lowering their standards and ethics. The single best defense against bad candidates is good journalism. Unfortunately, mainstream political journalism, particularly at the New York Times, has gotten so bad that fixing the flaws would be tremendously difficult and painful and would require a great deal of soul-searching.

Instead, the NYT and company are largely operating on the assumption that they can wiggle their way out of this situation but dropping their standards even further, basically hoping that the new lapses will cancel out the old. We get a Steven Rattner op-ed piece that consists entirely of headless clown arguments where Trump is singled out for holding positions that all of the other Republican candidates share and we get puff pieces like this.

Worse still, it's not even an honest puff piece. The authors could have done a slanted but otherwise respectable pro-Bush article focusing on immigration and diversity. The serious/thoughtful/wonky angle, on the other hand, has got to address the point raised by Jonathan Chait:

Jeb Bush has made the ludicrous promise that, if elected, his still to-be-determined economic program will launch the United States into 4 percent economic growth. Reuters reported out the genesis of this promise a few months ago. “There were no fancy economic models or forecasts when former Florida Governor Jeb Bush first tossed out the idea that 4 percent annual growth should be the overarching goal for the U.S. economy,” it revealed. Just a bunch of guys on the phone pullin’ numbers out of thin air:

    That ambitious goal was first raised as Bush and other advisers to the George W. Bush Institute discussed a distinctive economic program the organization could promote, recalled James Glassman, then the institute's executive director.

    "Even if we don’t make 4 percent it would be nice to grow at 3 or 3.5,” said Glassman, now a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In that conference call, “we were looking for a niche and Jeb in that very laconic way said, 'four percent growth.' It was obvious to everybody that this was a very good idea."

(George W. Bush’s policies didn’t produce anything close to 4 percent annual growth, but the Bush Institute has made 4 percent growth its major theme, in keeping with the general Republican practice of acting like the Bush administration never happened.)

At the risk of over-sharpening the point, serious, thoughtful, wonky politicians don't base their campaigns on wildly unrealistic numbers they simply mode up.

Trump's first gaffe? (tone of voice:tentative)

I don't have time to write this up today in detail, but events are moving quickly and I did want to get my stake into the ground. I'll lay out my arguments in more fully next week but the bare outline is that the illusion of Trump "defying political gravity" (particularly in the case of McCain) is mostly the result of flawed meta-perceptions on the part of the political establishment and mainstream press. They assumed wrongly that what offends them offends us.

The challenge for Trump has always been to keep being more and more outrageous while keeping the ugliness of his racist, xenophobic message in the background. He has gotten a lot of help on that front from journalists who are more interested in his PMS jokes than in his appeals to birthers and white supremacists, but eventually though, I believe we should see a break in the triviality and stories like the following will take a toll.

From TPM (which has been providing arguably the best analysis of the Trump campaign):

Two days after a Boston man allegedly cited Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric as a reason for beating and urinating on a homeless Mexican immigrant, the presidential candidate finally condemned the crime on Friday.

...

Scott and Steve Leader were charged on numerous counts, including assault with a deadly weapon on Wednesday. Police said that Scott Leader mentioned Trump and said he took part in the assault because the man was Hispanic and homeless. 

The fact that Trump backed off of his original statement is also worth noting.

Wishful Analytics

As mentioned previously, Donald Trump's campaign has definitely strained the standard assumptions of political reporting, Though this is an industry wide problem (even Five Thirty Eight hasn't been immune), it is nowhere more severe than at the New York Times.

The trouble is that the New York Times is very much committed to a style of political analysis that takes the standard narrative almost to the formal level of a well-made play. The objective is to get to the preassigned destination with as much craft and wit as possible. Nate Silver's problems at the NYT generally came from his habit of following the data to conclusions that made his editors and colleagues uncomfortable (by raising disturbing questions about the value of their work).

Cohn's articles on Trump have been an extended study in wishful analytics, starting with a desired conclusion then trying to dredge up some numbers to support it. He really, really, really, really, really wants to see Trump as another Herman Cain. Other than both being successful businessmen, the analogy is strained -- Cain was a little-known figure who surged well into the campaign because the base was looking for an alternative to an unacceptable presumptive nominee – but Cohn brings up the pizza magnate at every opportunity.

In addition to reassuring analogies, Cohn is also inclined to see comforting inflection points. Here's his response to the McCain dust-up.

The Trump Campaign’s Turning Point

Donald Trump’s surge in the polls has followed the classic pattern of a media-driven surge. Now it will most likely follow the classic pattern of a party-backed decline.


Mr. Trump’s candidacy probably reached an inflection point on Saturday after he essentially criticized John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War. Republican campaigns and elites quickly moved to condemn his comments — a shift that will probably mark the moment when Trump’s candidacy went from boom to bust.

Paul Krugman (like Silver, another NYT writer frequently at odds with the paper's culture) dismantled this argument by immediately spotting the key flaw.

What I would argue is key to this situation — and, in particular, key to understanding how the conventional wisdom on Trump/McCain went so wrong — is the reality that a lot of people are, in effect, members of a delusional cult that is impervious to logic and evidence, and has lost touch with reality.

I am, of course, talking about pundits who prize themselves for their centrism.

...

On one side, they can’t admit the moderation of the Democrats, which is why you had the spectacle of demands that Obama change course and support his own policies.

On the other side, they have had to invent an imaginary GOP that bears little resemblance to the real thing. This means being continually surprised by the radicalism of the base. It also means a determination to see various Republicans as Serious, Honest Conservatives — SHCs? — whom the centrists know, just know, have to exist.

...

But the ur-SHC is John McCain, the Straight-Talking Maverick. Never mind that he is clearly eager to wage as many wars as possible, that he has long since abandoned his once-realistic positions on climate change and immigration, that he tried to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat from the presidency. McCain the myth is who they see, and keep putting on TV. And they imagined that everyone else must see him the same way, that Trump’s sneering at his war record would cause everyone to turn away in disgust.

But the Republican base isn’t eager to hear from SHCs; it has never put McCain on a pedestal; and people who like Donald Trump are not exactly likely to be scared off by his lack of decorum.

Cohn's initial reaction to his failed prediction was to argue that the polls weren't current enough to show that he was right. When that position became untenable, he shifted his focus to the next inflection point:

Mr. Rubio, the senator from Florida, has a good case to be considered the debate’s top performer. A weaker Mr. Bush probably benefits Mr. Rubio as much as anyone, and if Mr. Bush raised questions about whether he would be a great general election candidate, then Mr. Rubio added yet more reason to believe he could be a good one. Mr. Rubio still has the challenge of figuring out how to break through a strong field in a factional party.



...
Mr. Walker won by not losing. In a lot of ways, the moderators’ tough, specific questions played to Mr. Walker’s weakness. He didn’t have much time to emphasize his fight against unions in Wisconsin. But he handled several tough questions — on abortion; on relations with Arab nations; what he would do after terminating the Iran deal; race; and his employment record — without appearing flustered or making a mistake. His answers were concise and sharp.
...

Mr. Kasich also advanced his cause. He entered as a largely unknown candidate outside of Ohio, where he is governor. But he was backed by a supportive audience, he deftly handled tough questions, and he had a solid answer on a question about attending same-sex weddings. His answer might not resonate among many Republicans, but it will resonate in New Hampshire — the state where he needs to deny Mr. Bush a path to victory and vault to the top of the pack.



It was Donald Trump, though, who might have had the weakest performance. No, it may not be the end of his surge. But he consistently faced pointed questions, didn’t always have satisfactory answers, endured a fairly hostile crowd and probably won’t receive as much media attention coming out of the debate as he did in the weeks before it. If you take the view that he’s heavily dependent on media coverage, that’s an issue. Whatever coverage he does get may be fairly negative — probably focusing on his unwillingness to guarantee support for the Republican nominee.

You might want to reread that last paragraph a couple of times to get your head around just how wrong it turned out to be. Pay particular attention to the statements qualified with 'probably' both here and in the McCain piece. The confidence displayed had nothing to do with likelihood – all were comically off-base – and had everything to do with how badly those committed to the standard narrative wanted the statements to be true.


This attempt to prop up that narrative have become increasing strained and convoluted, as you can see from the most recent entry

Yet oddly, the breadth of [Trump's] appeal and his strength reduce his importance in shaping the outcome of the race.


If Mr. Trump were weaker, or if his support were more narrowly concentrated in either New Hampshire or Iowa, he would play a bigger role in shaping the outcome. In that scenario, a non-Trump candidate might win either Iowa or New Hampshire — and he or she would be in much better position than the second-place finisher in the state where Mr. Trump was victorious.



If Mr. Trump were to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, the second-place finishers would advance as if they were winners. Assuming that one or both of the second-place finishers were broadly acceptable, the party would try to coalesce behind one of the two ahead of the winner-take-all contests on March 15.



In the end, Mr. Trump almost certainly won’t win the Republican nomination; the rest of the party will consolidate around anyone else. He can influence the outcome only if his support costs another candidate more than others. But for now, he seems to be harming all candidates fairly equally.

First off, notice the odd way that Cohn discusses influence. If I asked if you would like to “play a bigger role in shaping the outcome” of something, you would naturally assume I meant would you like to have more of a say, but that's not at all how the concept of influence is used in the passage above. Cohn is simply saying that a world where Trump was behind in one of the first two primaries might have a different nominee but since Trump wouldn't get to pick who would beat him, it's not clear why he would care and since there's no telling who would win in Cohn's alternate reality, it's not clear why anyone else would care either.


But even if we accept Cohn's framing, we then run into another fatal flaw. Put in more precise terms, “harming all candidates fairly equally” means that each candidate's probability of becoming president would have been the same had Trump not entered the race. This is almost impossible on at least three levels:

Trump has already produced a serious shift in the discussion, bringing issues like immigration and Social Security/Medicare to the foreground while sucking away the oxygen from others. This is certain to help some candidates more than others;

For this and other reasons, the impact on the polls so far has been anything but symmetric;

And even if Trump's support were coming proportionally from each of the other contenders, that still wouldn't constitute equal harm. Primaries are complex beasts. We have to take into account convergence, feedback loops, liquidity, serial correlation, et cetera. The suggestion that you could remove the first two primaries from contention without major ramifications is laughably naive.


Finally there's that “only.” Even if Trump isn't the nominee (and I would certainly call him a long shot), he can still influence the process as either kingmaker or spoiler.


While Cohn's work on this topic has been terrible, what's important here is not the failings of one writer but the current culture of journalism. This is what happens when even the best publications in the country embrace conventional narratives and groupthink, adopt self-serving but silly conventions and let their standards slip.

Who's Afraid of Lonesome Rhodes?

A Face in the Crowd is a memorable and entertaining film powered by a force-of-nature performance by Andy Griffith. It is also, in retrospect, rather silly.

What used to be called the intelligentsia (a word peaked about the time this film came out, by the way) was deeply disturbed by the rise of Arthur Godfrey. These days, Godfrey is what Andrew Gelman would call a member of the class Foghorn Leghorn, largely remembered only through the parodies and satires he inspired. Among broadcasters like Ken Levine, however, he is generally described in terms like this:

Before [Bob] Crane established himself as a fine comic actor, he was a truly great radio personality and here’s why: He really knew how to communicate one-to-one with his listeners. He was warm and funny and talked directly to YOU. Very few announcers understand that concept. But the great ones, like Arthur Godfrey, Paul Harvey, Dan Ingram, and Vin Scully do.

Godfrey was arguably the first to fully grasp this concept and almost certainly the one to master it most successfully. In the late forties and early fifties, he was the most influential and bankable broadcaster in television and radio.

When I've brought up Godfrey in previous posts, it has usually (always?) been for some McLuhanesque discussion of different media, but what got me thinking about him recently was the reaction to the Donald Trump campaign.



One of the recurring points on the ongoing Trump thread is how crazy the Donald makes his critics. On the right this mostly comes down to concerns about electability and the threat of a third party run. For the rest of the press, though, the reaction is harder to explain. In terms of policy, he's representative of the Republican Party except for issues like monetary policy and health care where he, if anything, is a bit more moderate.

I've suggested that part of the mainstream press's antipathy comes from the way Trump flouts the conventions those journalists rely on so heavily, but I wonder if another element might be a longstanding distrust of the general public. Since the advent of mass media, intellectuals have been convinced that we were just one fast talking demagogue away from dystopia,  and yet somehow we continue to dodge that bullet.

The subtext of Face in the Crowd and similar cautionary tales is not just that the masses are gullible and easily lead in absolute terms but in relative terms as well. The elites either underestimate or cynically exploit someone like Lonesome Rhodes. Intellectuals play Cassandra. They may fall victim to the demagogue, but they don't fall for his spiel.

But one of the things that our thought leaders are, if anything, easier to fool than the masses, not because they have, on average, significantly less than average intelligence, but because a combination of overconfidence, laziness and convergent thinking have left them open to the most transparent of cons. The same people who believed in Iraqi nukes and the Ryan budget are afraid that the rest of us will fall for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump as stressor – – Five Thirty-eight edition

As previously argued,  the Donald Trump candidacy is providing the kind of stress that highlights flaws in our journalistic system.

On the right, we have seen a blatant alliance of the Republican Party and right-wing media in an attempt to force out a popular but embarrassing candidate. On the center/left, we have seen newspapers like the New York Times loudly point out that the emperor has no clothes while carefully avoiding the fact that he is standing in the middle of a nudist colony. (The bizarre alliance between Fox News and the New York Times on derailing the Donald Trump candidacy is a fascinating topic that will have to wait for another post.)

On the analytic side, where we are supposed to be above this sort of thing, more and more of the coverage is sliding into drunkard's light post territory: using data for support but not illumination.

I'm going to pick on Five Thirty-eight now, not because they are particularly bad, but because they are particularly good. In many ways, Nate Silver and company have set the standard for analytic political journalism, so if they have started making groupthink mistakes, you can be pretty sure that the pods have now absorbed everybody.

One of Nate Silver's big innovations in political reporting was that he understood the innate complexity of the problem and had the appropriate analytic tools to deal with it. That tradition makes the simplistic approach of this piece by Harry Enten all the more troubling.

Candidates In Donald Trump’s Position Have A Terrible Track Record

Polls show Donald Trump leading in the Republican presidential primary. He’s leading nationally. He’s leading in Iowa. He’s leading in New Hampshire. That’s right — Donald Trump may end up winning … “Polling Leader for the Summer of 2015.”

I have a lots of issues with this, but to keep things moving, I'll limit this post to just one. If you read this argument carefully (or at least, not carelessly) you will notice a substantial disconnect between thesis and argument. The shift is a fairly standard bit of statistical Three-card Monte. We start out with Trump ahead in Iowa, New Hampshire and nationally. Enten then shows us a long list of candidates going back to the eighties who were ahead in the summer by comparable margins before the primary but lost the nomination anyway, but if you keep your eyes on the queen, you'll notice something funny – none of his “examples” were actually ahead in Iowa, New Hampshire AND nationally.

Using Enten's own data, since 1980 it appears that no candidate has ever gone three for three and not gotten the nomination and only one candidate has gone two for three. That would be Hilary Clinton in 2008, and if you'll remember, she had a pretty good run, hardly the stuff of terrible track records.

Enten opens his piece with “Polls show Donald Trump leading in the Republican presidential primary. He’s leading nationally. He’s leading in Iowa. He’s leading in New Hampshire.” According to Enten's own data, for the past thirty-six years, every candidate in that group has gone on to win their party's nomination.  In other words, his data point in the opposite direction of his conclusion.

So, am I saying that Trump is likely to be the Republican choice in 2016? Of course not. With the threat of a third party run, he did make things interesting by bringing a gun to a knife fight, but the primaries are a long way off and the election farther still. Between now and then, I strongly suspect that the feedback loop will peter out, the joke will grow old and the negatives will catch up with him.

We don't need polling data to tell us this and, more to the point, we don't have it.

[minor update: just corrected a small typo -- from 'inmate' to 'innate' -- but otherwise everything's the same.] 

More on Joseph the unclear

This is Joseph.

As a follow-up to this post, there is a guest post on Mathbabe pointing out how painful the new technology of monitoring is.  Consider:

A huge issue right now is surveillance. Inward-facing cameras that keep a constant watch on the driver may soon become the norm. Swift Transportation (the largest carrier in the U.S.) began installing them in all its company-owned trucks a few months ago.

Most OTR drivers are allowed to drive up to eleven hours per work shift and seventy hours every eight days. Their actual driving hours frequently reach these limits. That’s a lot of time to be in front of a running camera, never knowing for sure who might be watching you.

And also this piece:

Most OTR drivers are paid by the mile—the more miles they drive, the more money they make. This provides a strong incentive to use all eleven driving hours per work shift. With paper logs, if a driver needs to exceed the limit by a few minutes to get to a safe place to sleep (versus stopping after say ten hours, possibly sacrificing some pay), they can. With ELDs this same scenario might force the driver into choosing between (1) sacrificing pay, (2) sacrificing overnight safety by stopping wherever, or (3) recording a logging violation to get to the safe place.

Now you might think that these rules protect drivers but:

The hours-of-service rules never said anything about time of day until a new rule was introduced in 2013 requiring two 1 AM to 5 AM periods in every thirty-four-hour rest break (such breaks reset hours driven to zero). Strong industry resistance caused this rule to be suspended in December 2014.

The reason I am quoting this so extensively is that it makes it perfectly clear where the issue are with the industry.  For example, how much can the in-cab camera improve productivity?  Being constantly watched by camera isn't a fun experience and it's hard to see how it actually increases productivity by enough to make it work the psychological effects.

The driving time rules seem naive in a work with unexpected traffic issues.  One would need to work less than eleven hours to be certain of never being caught in a traffic jam and being unable to reach the next rest stop.  The lack of time of day rules seem to also suggest that the rules are not being designed in the interest of the drivers.

So the question I have is why these things are introduced without any compensating increase in compensation (presuming that these are productivity enhancements).  And if they don't improve productivity then why are they being done?

This is a question I would like to understand better.

Quote of the day

Ezra Klein:

Take spending cuts. It's table stakes in a Republican primary to talk about how you'll cut spending on Social Security and Medicare. The GOP's policy apparatus loathes both programs and considers their long-term cost to be among the most pressing economic threats facing the nation. Any Republican candidate who wants to be taken seriously by Republican Party elites needs to show they understand the urgency of cutting Social Security and Medicare spending.

One problem? Republican voters don't understand the urgency of cutting entitlement spending. In fact, they oppose cutting entitlement spending. More Republicans want to increase spending on Social Security and Medicare than decrease it. They think keeping entitlement benefits at current levels is more important than reducing the deficit.

Trump is the only Republican running who actually agrees with the GOP base on this one. "They're gonna cut Social Security. They're gonna cut Medicare. They're gonna cut Medicaid," he said on Fox & Friends. "I'm the one saying that's saying I'm not gonna do that!"

 It is very conventional to assume that the high polls garnered by Donald Trump are due to his more extreme statements.  But in a world where "everyone" in politics agrees that social security needs to be cut, maybe that is the source of his popularity.  After all, the median voter may or may not be impacted by a lot of the policy changes.  But lots and lots of people will be impacted by a later retirement on less money.

So one interpretation of the polls might be that the Overton window has been shifted on this policy so far that it makes it possible for an outsider to show up.  Even Democrats, like the current president, have been considering cuts to these programs. 

This fits well with other recent discussions on this blog.  After all, just protecting some popular programs might actually be what voters wants, and this would drive the elites crazy (as they are all convinced retirement is silly -- which it may well be when you have a high pay, fulfilling job). 

More naked emperor reporting -- at this point, the NYT is just trolling us

If they knew I was alive, I'd think they were just screwing with me. I post something on how Trump highlights the mainstream press' naked emperor problem and the very next day the New York Times (the ever reliable epicenter of this sort of thing) publishes a minor classic of the genre.

Trump’s Economic Muddle
by Steven Rattner, AUG. 14, 2015

DONALD TRUMP’S economic views may not have garnered as much attention as his misogynistic statements, but they are equally unpalatable, evincing a lack of understanding of basic economics that is startling for a billionaire businessman.

While Mr. Trump has not provided specifics much beyond the “Make America Great Again” slogan featured on his often-present baseball cap, strands of Trumponomics have trickled out amid the stream of braggadocio and ad hominem attacks on his critics.

And what bizarre views they are — a curious mélange of populism and hard-right conservatism, inherently contradictory perspectives that often lie far outside the boundaries of accepted economic thought.

Rattner casts his net wide and deep, going all the way back to the late nineties to find these unpalatable comments (rather surprising given that Trump's normal speaking style resembles a sitcom version of Tourette syndrome) and he defines the term rather broadly to include not just the wrong but also the inconsistent. This inclusive approach give Rattner lots of ammo for his attacks on Trump, most of which are completely valid, and yet, in the entire piece, doesn't supply a single example of an unreasonable or extreme position DT holds that is in any way out of line with the rest of the Republican field.

With the possible exception of protectionism (which in this case probably has more to do with xenophobia than economics), every major criticism that Rattner makes about Trump would be more valid about some other viable GOP candidate. Groundless complaints about debasing the currency (everyone does know there's another Paul running, right?). Climate change denial/skepticism (Hell, even Kasich has jumped on that bandwagon).

As for numbers that don't add up, let me refer you to Jonathan Chait:

But there’s a weakness in basing your economic message on pulling a crazy number out of thin air: Another candidate can always pull an even crazier number out of thin air. And now Mike Huckabee has done it. The obvious choice would be to one-up Bush by promising 5 percent growth. But Huckabee, thinking two steps in advance, probably realized that if he went with 5 percent, another candidate could still leapfrog him. So he went with 6 percent growth:

Huckabee, the winner of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, who is running as an economic populist, said 6 percent growth or more — notably upping the ante over Jeb Bush’s promise of 4 percent growth — would be possible through what he calls the Fair Tax, a type of national sales tax. Economists have expressed skepticism at Mr. Bush’s promise of 4 percent growth, so Mr. Huckabee’s 6 percent plan may cause even more raised eyebrows.

The beauty of this is that Bush can hardly call Huckabee’s promise unrealistic or made-up, without having to concede his own promise is also unrealistic and made-up, just less so. Bush has no grounds to argue against Huckabee here. Think about it. You walk into a caucus, you see 4 percent growth sittin' there, there's 6 percent growth right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?

There are a couple of examples in the New York Times piece where Trump takes positions that set him apart from the rest of the contenders, when he acknowledges the potential advantages of single payer health care or suggest devaluing the dollar, but those are issues when Trump is actually more moderate than his peers. Based on Rattner's own standards, Trump is, at worst, average on economic issues and might well be the leper with the most fingers.