Bialystock's Paradox: Obamacare edition

I'm sure others have noted this, but reading Jonathan's Chait's account of the GOP's struggles to craft a health care plan that is satisfactory to the party and not wildly unpopular with the general electorate, I was struck by a familiar dynamic.

Eleven days before Donald Trump took office, I wrote a column with the slightly hedged but still hyperbolic headline “Obamacare Repeal Might Have Just Died Tonight.” While the “might” was doing a lot of work, my argument was that the GOP’s clearest and easiest path for repealing Obamacare had fallen short, which would force Republicans to attempt to forge a vastly more difficult path. That is what has happened since, and that is why the cause of repeal has been dying a slow and painful death. John Boehner — who repeatedly led his party to election victories on the promise that they would repeal Obamacare! — has now admitted repeal is “not going to happen” and “most of the framework of the Affordable Care Act” would remain in place.

As long as they lost the presidency, the Republican leadership was able to squeeze a lot of votes and dollars out of opposition to Obamacare, but the election changed the dynamic.

Republicans were able to paper over this yawning chasm between what their base demands and what their elites are offering for the last eight years only because they have been able to avoid a specific alternative. Republicans attacked Obamacare for its high deductibles, and Trump promised a replacement that would give everybody better coverage for less money. But their proposals would do the opposite. Multiple sources report that the House Republican replacement plan was supposed to come out this week, but was delayed after an initial analysis by the Congressional Budget Office yielded a horrific score. Their plan would cut the average subsidy level for a person buying insurance on the exchanges from $6,314 to $3,643, according to a preliminary calculation by the liberal Center for American Progress.

When you win, people expect you to start fulfilling obligations, and when you've been making promises you can't keep...

There will be safe seats. There are no safe seats.

In 2017, we have a perfect example of when not to use static thinking and naïve extrapolation.

Not only are things changing rapidly, but, more importantly, there are a large number of entirely plausible scenarios that would radically reshape the political landscape and would undoubtedly interact in unpredictable ways. This is not "what if the ax falls?" speculation; if anything, have gotten to the point where the probability of at least one of these cataclysmic shifts happening is greater than the probability of none. And while we can't productively speculate on exactly how things will play out, we can say that the risks fall disproportionately on the Republicans.

Somewhat paradoxically, chaos and uncertainty can make certain strategic decisions easier. Under more normal (i.e. stable) circumstances it makes sense to expend little or no resources on unwinnable fights (or, conversely,  to spend considerable time and effort deciding what's winnable). The very concept of "unwinnable," however, is based on a whole string of assumptions, many of which we cannot make under the present conditions.

The optimal strategy under the circumstances for the Democrats is to field viable candidates for, if possible, every major 2018 race. This is based on the assumption not that every seat is winnable, but that no one can, at this point, say with a high level of confidence what the winnable seats are.

More on Straussian communication matrices -- in retrospect, it's surprising it took us this long to get to the NYT

A few weeks ago we ran a post (followed up here) on the implications of Strauss on bullshit propagation.The prime example in both was the coverage of Paul Ryan.

Unless they are to stupid to breathe, reporters covering Paul Ryan have to know that he lies routinely, that he's not a world-class marathoner, that his tastes run less to domestic beer and more to $350 bottles of wine, that he was neither surprised nor disappointed when the camera crews show up to find him washing dishes at a soup kitchen. Journalists could still consider Ryan an honest man because they felt he was only lying to those below them on the hierarchy.

Even among the lied-to journalists, there were strata. There were those who didn't believe the humble everyman bit but swallow the rest. Then there were those who (having a rudimentary understanding of the numbers) knew that Ryan's budgets were profoundly dishonest, but they put those deceptions down as the compromises necessary to make the sausage. They too believed that he was only lying to those below them on the hierarchy, colleagues who lacked the sophistication to follow detailed budgetary discussions. Ryan was, after all, a serious policy wonk who cared deeply about issues like fiscal responsibility.

Of course, every bit of evidence we have indicates this is also a lie, that Ryan is a committed Randian who is willing to inflate the deficit like a birthday balloon if that's what's required to redistribute wealth from the takers to the makers.

Cognitive dissonance is a cruel mistress and hubris is a bitch. The New York Times has recently stepped up its game on the investigative side and has started turning in some truly extraordinary work. The analysis and editorial side, however, remains a disaster.  One of the flaws that has haunted the paper pretty since its inception is arrogance. No other American journalistic institution has more deeply internalized a belief in its own superiority.

Check out how Jennifer Steinhauer continues to cling to the myth of Rep. Ryan. [emphasis added]

Mr. Trump’s budget blueprint — which is expected to be central to his address to Congress on Tuesday night — sets up a striking clash with the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, who has made a career out of pressing difficult truths on federal spending. For years, Mr. Ryan has maintained that to tame the budget deficit without tax increases and prevent draconian cuts to federal programs, Congress must be willing to change, and cut, the programs that spend the most money — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Arrogant and wrong is a dangerous combination even in the best of times, and these are not the best. The paper is trying to deal responsibly with Trump, but to do so without admitting that they had been wrong about so much of the political landscape or owning up to the part their pox-on-both-their-houses reporting played in the election.

Pre-reading for tomorrow's post

I've got one in the queue on a recent example of the New York Times' ongoing effort to face the reality of Trump while clinging to the myth of Ryan. Over at New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait takes an ax to the NYT's battle for the party's soul narrative.

GOP Game Theory -- things are still different

"It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."

    LBJ on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,

[UPDATE: The conversation continues with The nuclear moose option and The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat.]


Let's start with a prediction:

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) predicted on Tuesday that Republicans will split with President Trump within months unless the administration changes course.0

"My prediction is he keeps up on this path...within three, four months you're going to see a whole lot of Republicans breaking with him," Schumer said during an interview with ABC's "The View."

Schumer argued while most GOP lawmakers aren't yet willing to break publicly from the White House, they are privately having "real problems" with Trump's policies in his first month.

"A lot of the Republicans, they're mainstream people. ... They will feel they have no choice but to break with him," he said.

GOP leadership are largely dismissing any early signs of discord between Congress and the White House as they slowly try to make progress on an ambitious agenda.

Ed Kilgore, however, points out that Trump may not be as toxic as many people think:

So while it is hard to deny that Trump is amazingly unpopular for a new president, unless his approval ratings trend farther down the way even those of popular presidents typically do, his party may not suffer the kind of humiliation Democrats experienced in 2010. For all the shock Trump has consistently inspired with his behavior as president, there’s not much objective reason for Republican politicians to panic and begin abandoning him based on his current public standing. But in this as in so many other respects, we are talking about an unprecedented chief executive, so the collapse some in the media and the Democratic Party perceive as already underway could yet arrive.

The relationship between the Trump/Bannon White House and the GOP legislature is perhaps uniquely suited for a textbook game theory analysis. In pretty much all previous cases,  relationships between presidents and Congress have been complicated by numerous factors other than naked self-interest--ideological, partisan, personal, cultural--but this time it's different. With a few isolated exceptions, there is no deeply held common ground between the White House and Capitol Hill. The current arrangement is strictly based on people getting things they care about in exchange for things they don't.

However, while the relationship is simple in those terms, it is dauntingly complex in terms of the pros and cons of staying versus going. If the Republicans stand with Trump, he will probably sign any piece of legislation that comes across his desk (with this White House, "probably" is always a necessary qualifier). This comes at the cost of losing their ability to distance themselves from and increasingly unpopular and scandal-ridden administration.

Some of that distance might be clawed back by public criticism of the president and by high-profile hearings, but those steps bring even greater risks. Trump has no interest in the GOP's legislative agenda, no loyalty to the party, and no particular affection for its leaders. Worse still, as Josh Marshall has frequently noted, Trump has the bully's instinctive tendency to go after the vulnerable. There is a limit to the damage he can inflict on the Democrats, but he is in a position to literally destroy the Republican Party.

We often hear this framed in terms of Trump supporters making trouble in the primaries, but that's pre-2016 thinking. This goes far deeper. In addition to a seemingly total lack of interpersonal, temperamental, and rhetorical constraints, Trump is highly popular with a large segment of the base. In the event of an intra-party war, some of this support would undoubtedly peel away, but a substantial portion would stay.

Keep in mind, all of this takes place in the context of a troubling demographic tide for the Republicans. Their strategic response to this has been to maximize turnout within the party while suppressing the vote on the other side. It has been a shrewd strategy but it leaves little margin for error.  Trump has the ability to drive a wedge between a significant chunk of the base and the GOP for at least the next few cycles, possibly enough to threaten the viability of the party.

The closest analogy that comes to mind is the Democrats and Vietnam, but that was a rift in a big-tent loosely organized party. The 21st Century GOP is a small tent party that depends on discipline and entrenchment strategies. It's not clear that it would survive a civil war.

Given that, I suspect the next year or two will prove Schumer wrong. There is some evidence that the president's polling has stabilized, perhaps even rebounded a bit, but even if the numbers go back into free fall, Republicans in the House and the Senate will be extremely reluctant to break from Trump with anything more than isolated or cosmetic challenges.

This isn't just a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent pissing in; this is a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent tossing grenades. 

Sometimes problems are complicated

This is Joseph

Kevin Drum points us to data suggesting that, contrary to the experience in the United States, immigrants in Sweden are more likely to commit crimes than natives.  Now this data has the same issues that any crime data has -- reported crime and committed crime are slightly different constructs and there may be some important social norms. 

The source of immigration might matter a lot if you believe in the "lead-crime hypothesis", or in strong cultural factors underlying criminal acts. 

That said, this sort of evidence actually makes me more confident in the "immigrants commit less crime findings" in the United States, as it tends to rule out an underlying confounding factor that generates these results despite the true rates being equal.  It doesn't mean that the comparison is unbiased, but it suggests we don't have a uniform, large bias in effect everywhere. 

This suggests an approach to immigration filled with nuance, and likely a suggestion that US immigration policy has probably been a bit if an under-reported success story for the past couple of decades. 

Postscript: Mark points out that the absolute rates are different.  Wikipedia suggests ~2 murders per 100,000 persons in Sweden and ~5 murders per 100,000 persons in the United States of America.  So you could see this type of effect modification, even if the crime rate among immigrants was identical between the two countries. 

What the relative rate discussion is doing is pointing out the policy implications of immigration and public safety.  If immigrants have a lower crime rate then natives then criminality among immigrants is a very odd reason to be against immigration.  Note that this is the general policy case: one can be pro-immigrant, see immigrants as being a net positive for crime rates, and still see specific immigrants (say one who commits a violent crime) as being problematic. 

Nor are these points decisive on a policy front.  It's merely one data point among many when making complex policy decisions.  Immigration has implications for economic growth, wages, and human rights, all of which are also important considerations. 

Of course, watching video on tiny screens has made a comeback...

One of the topics I want to take a serious run at one of these days is how the way we think about scientific and technological progress was shaped by two huge spikes, the larger occurring in the late 19th and early 20th century and the other hitting during the postwar era. A big part of that story is the break represented by the Great Depression and the second World War. Though you could argue that the war was actually a period of heightened progress, from a man-in-the-street standpoint, the 30s and the first half of the 40s generally seemed somewhat stagnant.

Television is a useful example. Almost as soon as people were able to transmit voices via wires or over the airwaves, the developers started thinking about ways to add video. This goes all the way back to Alexander Graham Bell. In the early part of the last century, the progress toward television appeared rapid and inevitable.

It is true that the system shown below looks awfully crude, but it represented a stunning advance at the time. Within the space of something like three years the technology went from first public demonstration to actual broadcast received by commercially available sets. In another five years the resolution would top 300 lines, not much by our standards but enough for a reasonable viewing experience.

It is also true that the mechanical approach to prove something of a dead end, but electronic television systems were not far behind. As early as 1929, Philo Farnsworth was publicly demonstrating television systems with no moving parts.

I suspect that most of the people who saw the various demonstrations or who eagerly leafed through each month's edition of magazines like Popular Science back in the late 20s assumed that most modern, upper-class houses of the late 30s would come equipped with a television.

Recommended by the good people at Gizmodo:

Canceling then showing up anyway is probably my favorite

I'm no fan of Andrew Romano. He's one of those journalists who likes to use his instincts and understanding of politics to delve beyond the mere facts. Unfortunately, he's not very good at that part. He does seem, however, to be a reasonably reliable reporter. I wouldn't post his analysis and predictions (at least, non-ironically), but I do trust his to get his quotes right and this summary of Republican "evasive maneuvers" in the face of angry constituents is a nice complement to our previous discussion of how important lines of communication are breaking down between GOP officials and the voters.

    Publicly canceling a scheduled town-hall event because you “didn’t want to meet until all the president’s nominees were confirmed,” then showing up anyway, to talk solely to your conservative supporters, who somehow still seemed to know you would be there (Mo Brooks, R-Ala.)

    Posting a photo from your “great town hall this morning with concerned citizens about the need for tax reform” on Facebook, despite never actually putting said event on your calendar or otherwise telling your constituents that it was happening (Jim Renacci, R-Ohio)

    Removing all mention of your upcoming “town hall” from the host city’s municipal website and refusing to call it a town hall when questioned, insisting instead that it is a “low-key” “community meeting” with other elected officials (Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.) [Not to be confused with the previously mentioned town hall avoidance of Rep. Jimmy Duncan Jr. (R-TN) -- MP]

    Refusing to denounce your “friend” when he announces that he needs “all patriots in attendance” at your next town hall “to protect” you “from any potential disruption of [your] speech,” adding that “concealed carry permit holders [are] most welcome” and shouldn’t “forget [their] ammo” (Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.)

    Insisting that you are too “busy, busy, busy” to meet with your own constituents during the “first 100 days,” while at the same time scheduling a “special guest” appearance at another congressman’s town hall meeting 2,130 miles away (David Brat, R-Va.)

Speaking of older posts

This is Joseph.

LGM points to this older Paul Krugman piece on why market forces don't work in health.  It discussed the work of Kenneth Arrow, who recently passed away.  But it is worth considering that health care is not a traditional market, like the ones that Adam Smith so nicely described, but has features (high and variable cost, complexity) that make it different. 

Bowling Green is more than just a town in Sweden; it's an excuse for a repost

I don't want to overgeneralize, The producers at Fox News have multiple objectives -- they are interested in money, ratings, sometimes even informative journalism --  but at this point it would be denying the obvious to pretend that feeding slanted news and misinformation to the base isn't one of the primary objectives of the network.

If a Florida retiree hears a story on Fox that implies that Muslim immigrants are killing and raping their way through Sweden, then tells all his friends about how bad things have gotten, that is a clear win for the Conservative Movement. If that same story leads to those same comments, but this time spoken at a rally by the head of your party, that's not so much of a win.

From Tuesday, November 1, 2016

In retrospect, it's surprising we don't use more sewage metaphors

A few stray thoughts on the proper flow of information (and misinformation) and a functional organization.

I know we've been through all of this stuff about Leo Strauss and the conservative movement before so I'm not going to drag this out into great detail except to reiterate that if you want to have a functional  institution that makes extensive use of internal misinformation, you have to make sure things move in the right direction.

With misinformation systems as with plumbing, when the flow starts going the wrong way, the results are seldom pretty. This has been a problem for the GOP for at least a few years now. A number of people in positions of authority, (particularly in the tea party wing) have bought into notions that were probably intended simply to keep the cannon-fodder happy. This may also partly explain the internal polling fiasco at the Romney campaign.

As always, though, it is Trump who takes things to a new level. We now have a Republican nominee who uses the fringier parts of the Twitter verse as briefings.

From Josh Marshall:

Here's what he said ...

Wikileaks also shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling democrats, a voter suppression technique. That's happening to me all the time. When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I'm leading. But you see these polls where they're polling democrats. How is Trump doing? Oh, he's down. They're polling democrats. The system is corrupt, rigged and broken. And we're going to change it. [ Cheers and applause ]
Thank you, thank you. In an e-mail podesta says he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling. It's called voter suppression because people will say, oh, gee, Trump's down. Folks, we're winning. We're winning. We're winning. These thieves and crook, the immediate, yeah not all of it, not all of it, but much of it -- they're the most crooked -- they're almost as crooked as Hillary. They may even be more crooked than Hillary because without the media, she would be nothing.

Now this immediately this grabbed my attention because over the weekend I was flabbergasted to see this tweet being shared around the Trumposphere on Twitter.

Todays Wikileaks dump revealed the DNC works w/ pollsters to skew polls in their favor by over-polling Democrats & under-polling Republicans pic.twitter.com/tVA8K6n79T

— Taylor Egly (@TaylorEgly) October 24, 2016

I don't know who Taylor Egly is. But he has 250,000 followers - so he has a big megaphone on Twitter. This tweet and this new meme is a bracing example of just how many of the "scoops" from the Podesta emails are based on people simply not knowing what words mean.
Trump had already mentioned 'over-sampling' earlier. But here he's tying it specifically to the Podesta emails released by Wikileaks. This tweet above is unquestionably what he's referring to.
There are several levels of nonsense here. Let me try to run through them.
...

 More importantly, what Tom Matzzie is talking about is the campaign/DNC's own polls. Campaigns do extensive, very high quality polling to understand the state of the race and devise strategies for winning. These are not public polls. So they can't affect media polls and they can't have anything to do with voter suppression.

Now you may be asking, why would the Democrats skew their own internal polls? Well, they're not.
The biggest thing here is what the word 'oversampling' means. Both public and private pollsters will often over-sample a particular demographic group to get statistically significant data on that group.
...  You need to get an 'over-sample' to get solid numbers.

Whether it's public or private pollsters, the 'over-sample' is never included in the 'topline' number. So if you get 4 times the number of African-American voters as you got in a regular sample, those numbers don't all go into the mix for the total poll. They're segmented out. The whole thing basically amounts to zooming in on one group to find out more about them. To do so, to zoom in, you need to 'over-sample' their group as what amounts to a break-out portion of the poll.

What it all comes down to is that you're talking about a polling concept the Trumpers don't seem to understand (or are relying on supporters not understanding), about polls that are by definition secret (campaign polls aren't shared) and about an election eight years ago.

Brexit and the problem of referendums

This is Joseph.

There has been a lot of discussion about direct democracy in the wake of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom.  On one hand, you want to respect the will of the average citizen.  On the other hand, it is one thing to set a policy and quite another to carry out.

Consider the Sicilian Expedition carried out by classical Athens.  Clearly this course of action was voted for by the majority of the citizens of Athens and was an exercise of direct democracy.  But the result was a complete catastrophe, and likely the beginning of the end of Athens as a major power.  The loss of the sailors in the this debacle was a key element that led to the eventual defeat and conquest of Athens by Sparta.

This isn't a argument against democracy but rather an endorsement of representative democracy, as practiced by countries like the United Kingdom. These sorts of governments have the ability to develop complex policies to handle complex questions, and to make difficult trade-offs. There seems to be a naive notion that asking people to make tough decisions is a good idea, but this is only true if the sequela are also pretty simple.  It is one thing to vote to invade Sicily.  But the question presumes a competent expedition and the answer might be very different if the people would presume that the politicians might bungle the implementation.

Possible analogies with Brexit are left as an exercise to the reader.

Accusation-driven reporting

I recently came across an excellent piece by Eric Ravenscraft (old but new to me) on dealing with fake news. The whole thing is worth reading but I wanted to take a minute to share his summary of Prof. Jay Rosen's accusation-based reporting concept.

On top of people making stuff up online (whether intentionally or accidentally,) political and corporate figures often muddy the news waters with accusations. In an attempt to promote “neutrality,” many news outlets are hesitant to claim a statement made by a public figure is outright false, even if it’s demonstrably so. Professor of Journalism at New York University Jay Rosen calls this accusation-based reporting.

Accusation-based reporting follows a basic structure:

1. Person A makes an accusation against Person B.
2. Person B denies the accusation.
3. A news outlet reports that the accusation has been made and denied, but doesn’t offer any information to support or disprove the accusation.
4. The accusation itself, not the accuracy of the claim, is treated as the newsworthy story.

Rosen says this runs counter to evidence-based reporting. In evidence-based reporting, a story should lead with information about the veracity of the accusation. If there is no evidence to support the accusation, a story should say so. If there is evidence to disprove an accusation, the piece should say that as well. The evidence should be given top billing, instead of the accusation.

For example, President-Elect Donald Trump claimed that millions of votes were cast illegally, costing him the popular vote. As Rosen points out, accusation-based reporting would present this accusation as valid until disproven merely because it was stated by the president-elect. In an evidence-based report, there must be evidence before a story is treated as true. In this particular case, The Washington Post explained that there has been no hard evidence of mass voter fraud on the scale the president-elect mentioned. Recount efforts are underway in several states, but until the recounts are finished or data is released, there’s no evidence to rely on, only accusations.

While most news outlets at least reported this information, many legitimate organizations feature headlines that simply quote the president-elect’s assertion, giving the impression that the accusation is more credible than it is. This practice presents the claim in a bombastic way to draw in readers, but it sets a misleading tone from the outset.

Quote of the day

This is Joseph

Via Stumbling and Mumbling, here is a George Carlin quote:

Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.

Now it is true that the mechanisms of subsidy are different, but there is no reason that the investment activities of the poor could not have similar approaches to that of the wealthy.  I think that it is a very important flag that incentives are very complex to apply, and it is not always straightforward to figure out the net effect that they will have. 

Sometimes I post something just so I'll remember it later

Like that assembly line music from the old Warner Bros. cartoons.

"Selling you pain"

Kristin Wong, writing for the Gawker remnant Lifehacker, has an excellent piece up on the economics of air travel.

I like the way Skift puts it: airlines are selling you pain. They make your experience as uncomfortable as possible so you’ll pay more.

by increasing the density of the Economy cabin, airlines “can boost capacity without adding to the fleet. Of course, as they shrink the coach section they force many to pay more to be able to have an ounce of comfort.” This is a key element of the up-selling strategy employed by airlines today to boost revenues, shored up by unbundled pricing strategies which offer to sell the pain away.

And with some of the carriers, you can’t even buy relief. Spirit is the worst airline for on-time arrivals, for example; only 73.8% of its flights arrive on time. You can’t pay extra to ensure they’re prompt. And when my friend and I were yelled at by WOW gate agents, we were afraid to even approach the desk to ask what our options were. We laughed about it later, but there wasn’t a fee we could pay to not get reprimanded like children. In other words, you can’t buy your way to better overall service.