Electability

This is Joseph

Ok, I am bracing for being taken down by Mark, but I wanted to comment on one of my current pet peeves.

There is a presidential primary going on right now. One of the big issues I keep hearing is whether a candidate is "electable". Now, historically speaking this might have been a valid concern. From Wikipedia:

The impetus for national adoption of the binding primary election was the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention. Vice President Hubert Humphrey secured the Presidential nomination despite not winning a single primary under his own name.

So in earlier eras it was a reasonable concern that the delegates at the convention might not be a representative sample of the voting population. Now primaries today are not necessarily representative of the electorate as a whole, but they are broadly based elections. It's pretty clear that anybody who wins a primary is "electable" in some important sense of the term.

Now, I think that this argument is a proxy for what people don't want to say out loud. All candidates who are able to win the primary do it from a combination of "crossover appeal" (get the other side to vote for you) and "enthusiasm" (get more of your base to run out and support you). In general, these things tend to be negatively correlated. Making your core supporters super-happy is often in conflict with reaching across the aisle.

In the small number of cases where this is not true, there doesn't tend to be much life in such a proposal. Both parties are united in not wanting to return big pieces of the country to Mexico, and you will note the absence of such proposals.

So I loathe the term "electable" in this context. Instead, I want the more precise discussion of the trade-off between exciting people and building bridges. Anybody who can survive the primary process looks like they are at least potentially "electable" to me. We'd probably all have had a clearer view in 2016 if we'd remembered that about Donald Trump.

Daycare and what does work pay for?

This is Joseph

So, I have a philosophical question. It is clear that work places benefit from having a robust set of benefits for workers, many of which make a lot more sense given as a employer benefit rather than as a part of cash compensation. In the United States, for example, the current regulatory system favors employer sponsored health care (although I hear they are in the process of revisiting this assumption).

Other benefits are a lot more standard. For example, heating and/or air conditioning makes a big difference in an office. Parking is another case where you could just give employees money but liquidity issues might make that inefficient (is there a private parking vendor near work that employees could rent spots from? Will land use allow this?).

An interesting case in this rubric is daycare. On site daycare would make at least as much of a positive difference for workers as on-site parking. Not everyone uses parking and not everyone uses daycare, either, but it would be a broadly useful benefit. It is also quite possible to offer paid daycare just like many universities offer paid parking.

My question is what is it that has kept daycare from being in the same category as parking for workplace infrastructure? Marissa Mayer was famous for thinking that raising a child as CEO wasn't as bad as people predicted, but she had a daycare in the office next door. Now, she paid for the expenses but the typical employee does not have the option to pay for a daycare in the same building, even if they want to.

Is there a reason that this relatively big boost in workforce benefit is so rarely fully staffed? Most daycares I am looking at, in multiple cities, have difficult wait lists and are hard to coordinate with work locations. Can't this be improved?

Still out sick

Here's some weekend Debussy until we resume regular programming.

Out Sick

Back soon. Enjoy the musical interlude in the meantime.

Didn't even get to Thiel's Cato Institute essay on women's suffrage

This 2014 piece by Mark Ames on the relationship between the Holocaust denial movement and the Koch Brothers should be read in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight this section.

The Reason issue discussed here was from 1976. The provocative, contrarian rhetorical approach is familiar to anyone who has been following Robin Hanson. It’s a process that pretends to be a free intellectual inquiry but which always ends up attacking a liberal position and pushing the Overton Window to the right.

Of course, Reason and Hanson have something else in common.

My dept just got $5M grant from Koch foundation. I'm pretty sure this won't influence what policies we recommend. https://t.co/zuO71GysTG

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) March 22, 2018

It’s easy to dismiss the more clownish examples, but in today’s journalistic ecosystem, no one from the right is more than one degree of separation from respectability in the mainstream media. Pretty much every major press outlet (the New York Times, NPR, CNN) welcomes Koch-subsidized academics and pundits. For the serious news consumer, they are unavoidable.

Obviously, there are smart people doing serious work at places like the Manhattan Institute or George Mason University, but while we shouldn’t reject their work out of hand, for the sake of the discourse, we need to find a way of reminding ourselves that their funding comes from an initiative that promotes Holocaust deniers, rape apologists and other extremists and propagandists when they serve the agenda, and that even the most independent researchers in that world know that reaching the wrong conclusions too often will cost them.

There is a politics to all of this, a politics that's barely budged since the days of the American Liberty League: The goal is to discredit the New Deal and FDR, which can't be done effectively without discrediting FDR's most popular cause, the victory over fascist Germany and Japan. To far-right extraction industry billionaires like the Koch family, FDR and his New Deal politics were a kind of anti-business "holocaust," because the New Deal forced the long-dominant plutocrats to part with a portion of their wealth and political power. To the nation's Big Business oligarchs in the 1930s, FDR's New Deal reforms — breaking up the power of finance, trusts, and industrialists, while empowering labor unions —was a crime and a wound as raw in 1976 as it was in 1936.

For them, FDR was a tyrant and a criminal, an American Hitler, only no one else could see things their way, because the real Hitler was widely believed to be one of the worst figures in history. Therefore, libertarian "historical revisionism" had to convince these Americans that Hitler wasn't nearly as awful as they believed, which meant that the Holocaust couldn't have happened — if the goal was to discredit FDR and the New Deal.

North’s article appeals to another sensibility popular with libertarians (and the Boomer left): the cult of the anti-Establishment iconoclast, every self-absorbed middle-class Baby Boomer's fantasy. That cult of the iconoclast allows North to paint libertarianism's far-right "historical revisionism" as anti-Establishment Cool, more an expression of one's individuality than a political act. So if the boring, bad Establishment says Hitler was bad and World War II was good, then naturally the anti-Establishment maverick will question that. Gary North writes:

One topic—the ultimate litmus test of hardnosed World War II revisionism—has generally been skirted: Hitler. Was he a madman, diplomatically speaking? Was he exclusively responsible for the Second World War?”

Much of the Reason Holocaust denier propaganda is about promoting a new set of anti-authority voices to replace the Establishment’s. So Martin cites Holocaust deniers Paul Rassinier and Harry Elmer Barnes; and Gary North introduces Reason’s readers to Bay Area Holocaust denier David Hoggan, the “anonymous” author of the 1969 neo-Nazi book “The Myth of the Six Million”:

    “In American revisionist circles the most famous (or infamous) case has been that of David Hoggan, the Establishment’s number-one academic pariah of the revisionist camp...Hoggan’s thesis regarding the origins of the Second World War are straightforward, and completely unorthodox. The primary villain was not Hitler; it was Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary.”


North is a clever huckster who’s studied his Baby Boomer audience, so he uses marketing words that he knows appeal to his target consumer: “unorthodox,” “Establishment’s number-one academic pariah,” and weirdest of all for a strict Old Testament theofascist like North, he even uses the then-popular hippie expression “far-out” (meaning “cool") to sell Holocaust denial:

    “Probably the most far-out materials on World War II revisionism have been the seemingly endless scholarly studies of the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler. The anonymous author [Hoggan] of ‘The Myth of the Six Million’ has presented a solid case against the Establishment’s favorite horror story—the supposed moral justification for our entry into the war.”

Tuesday Tweets

These next few tweets go to a longstanding problem with the New York Times and its place in the ecosystem. As many including Josh Marshall have observed, the NYT has a way of coming late to a story and downplaying the work that came before. Because of the paper's standing, from that point on, it's "as reported by the New York Times."

in case i wasn't clear: THIS VERY NYT STORY rips off a Vox story, which the Times merely alludes to airily in passing, a dozen or more paragraphs in, without saying THIS IS THE EXACT SAME STORY. O the irony. https://t.co/ZYGFvSiubC

— Marjorie Ingall (@MarjorieIngall) February 15, 2020

here's one of the more egregious examples I know of but there are tons.

Buzzfeed (Apr 7): https://t.co/R1wmd8YjWq
NYT (Apr 21) https://t.co/Itm31NcCsF

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) February 15, 2020

My impression is that the conservative think tank world initially built up Hanson as a deep thinker assuming he'd be useful for moving the Overton Window, Unfortunately, Hanson has been too big of a attention junkie/clown to be effective.

I'm going to retweet this every time @NoahHaber starts on about economists being smarter than epidemiologists. https://t.co/JmnyXmpmKO

— George Savva (@georgemsavva) February 15, 2020

In 1632, Rasputin would have been considered mildly unlucky.

Life came with challenges back in 1632.
“Kil’d by several accidents” seems a tough way to buy it. https://t.co/T6z5rsLjQs

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) February 15, 2020

I know I'm not supposed to call Robin Hanson creepy because that would be mean. How about this? Can I call this creepy?

Great lede and great story by @JamesVGrimaldi, Brody Mullins and @johndmckinnon https://t.co/kQzSQRcj5F pic.twitter.com/wnVl4XxS0Y

— Joe Palazzolo (@joe_palazzolo) February 13, 2020

Could Bernie's branding help him in the primaries but hurt him in the general?

Bernie Sanders Isn’t a Socialist https://t.co/VGxWuWGeAX

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) February 13, 2020

Worth a look.

"It works just like Google Trends, the popular tool that displays and compares terms that people are searching for with Google, except that MuckRack Trends looks only at news articles." https://t.co/8C60scF7CI Pretty useful for people in my business.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) February 14, 2020

As we've been pointing out for the past decade, the black and white, us vs them worldview of the education reform movement left it vulnerable to corruption.

In a damning audit, Indiana calls on two virtual schools to repay $85 million in misspent state funds https://t.co/JgBYFdc29d

— Jersey Jazzman (@jerseyjazzman) February 13, 2020

NEW: Arizona charter school principal pleads guilty in $2.5 million enrollment scheme https://t.co/d2mW8Z3Zwz via @azcentral

— Craig Harris (@charrisazrep) February 14, 2020

'“We remain neutral on geopolitical disputes and make every effort to objectively display disputed areas,” Russell said in the statement. “In countries where we have local versions of Google Maps, we follow local legislation when displaying names and borders.”'

Google redraws the borders on maps depending on who’s looking https://t.co/siDhFbGuWh

— Paul Staniland (@pstanpolitics) February 14, 2020

My favorites are the pundits who go from one set of absolute certainties to another completely contradictory set without the slightest pause for doubt, humility or reflection.

Lots of potential explanations for it, but maybe worth noting: On twitter I see tons of political scientists (and others) confidently stating which dem candidates are more or less electable. In offline conversations, the political scientists I talk to are far more uncertain.

— Andrew Little (@anthlittle) February 13, 2020





I'm not saying I'd never use the phrase "surge to third place in New Hampshire" unironically, but I promise to feel bad about myself if I do. https://t.co/BTImXfNsxb

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) February 13, 2020

 

I think that captures it. And there's an impatience that they're fighting each other - even though that's what a primary is - because people want to move on to running against Trump.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 11, 2020

  

High SF housing prices are forcing Silicon Valley workers to make slightly shorter commutes

Just to get the obvious out of the way, California needs to build more housing. Rents are too high and the situation with the homeless is becoming a genuine humanitarian crisis. Unfortunately, as with climate change, the very seriousness of the problem sometimes makes people reluctant to criticize bad arguments, lest they be accused of minimizing the issue (see the reaction to the collected works of David Wallace Wells). The result is some truly silly ideas have lodged themselves into the standard narrative.

Case in point.  [Emphasis added]

Welcome to life on Silicon Valley's new frontier. When tech companies first introduced private shuttles for their employees more than a decade ago, they served the affluent neighborhoods in San Francisco and the Peninsula. Now the buses reach as far as the almond orchards of Salida and the garlic fields of Gilroy.

…

"That just tells you the story of the Bay Area," said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of regional think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley. "We're going to be in these farther-flung places, and that's our reality because we're not going to be able to create affordable housing."

...


A few miles into Alameda County, a fairgrounds parking lot has been transformed into a massive park-and-ride operation. A laundry list of tech companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and others — send shuttles here or nearby train stations, according to a report prepared for the Alameda County Transportation Commission. Around 7 a.m., people in puffy jackets and backpacks jog to a silver bus with its destination displayed as Wolfe Road in Sunnyvale, where Apple has a large campus.

We need to talk about the word “farther” because in this context, it is more of a cultural than a physical concept. Go online and check out the distance and rush-hour driving times from Silicon Valley towns like Sunnyvale to either San Francisco or Gilroy and you’ll find that the differences aren’t great and that Gilroy is often closer.

A great deal of the discussion of Bay Area housing and infrastructure is based on the implicit assumption that Silicon Valley is next to San Francisco rather than 40 or so miles away. It’s not even the closest big city (San Jose is considerably larger).

Nonetheless, Bay Area residents still refer to it as “the City” and the other towns continue to have an inferiority complex that as an Angeleno I’ve always found a bit odd, as if it were 1900 and it was the only outpost of culture west of the Continental Divide.

Whatever its origins, the mystique of San Francisco has badly muddled people's thinking about the housing crisis, and this is a problem that requires clear thinking.

RIP Robert Conrad, good work Kai Ryssdal

At the risk of getting lots of angry comments, Star Trek makes the top ten my best of 60s TV list. This spy-fi/proto-steampunk series makes the top five.






This episode of Marketplace had three stories I was thinking about blogging...

The business and business metrics of music and streaming about 10 minutes in. If nothing else, check out the chutzpah of Justin Bieber.

Wal-Mart will now deliver to your home while you're not there about 20 minutes in. It's not quite as creepy as it sounds but, with the tight margins of the grocery business, it's not easy to see how they expect to turn a profit. Given that the two big players in this are Wal-Mart and Amazon, I wouldn't rule out a purely anti-competitve play to drive smaller competitors out of business.

And finally the show ends with an interesting new hiring policy at the Body Shop retail chain.

The Saudi sovereign wealth fund bet big on Uber.. That didn’t work out too well for them. Then they backed WeWork. This time though, I think they picked a winner.

As I've said before, serious money is starting to change hands here.

"Saudi Arabia, Virgin Hyperloop One to conduct world’s first national hyperloop study"

RIYADH: A groundbreaking study will be conducted to build the world’s longest hyperloop track,  the Ministry of Transport announced on Thursday.

It said an agreement with Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO), the world’s leading hyperloop company, would see a groundbreaking pre-feasibility study conducted on the use of hyperloop technology, laying the groundwork for a network of routes across Saudi Arabia.

The study is the first to be carried out anywhere in the world [I assume they mean the first on this scalee – MP] and will examine viable routes, expected demand, anticipated costs and explore the socioeconomic impact, such as the creation of jobs and environmental effects.

...

“We have a vision for the Kingdom, and that vision is of connecting it and the Gulf with the ability to travel from Riyadh to Jeddah in 46 minutes, to Neom from Jeddah in 40 minutes, from Riyadh to Dammam and Jubail in 28 minutes, and to go beyond the Kingdom, from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi, in 48 minutes.     

“It’s not just about providing a future transportation system, it’s the ecosystem behind it. What we want to do is to be able to bring technology to the Kingdom to be able to share and develop that knowledge. We signed an agreement with King Abdullah Economic City in October last year specifically to look at manufacturing, how we can actually bring technology, and that is expected to create about 124,000 jobs.”

Saudi Minister of Transport Saleh Al-Jasser said: “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has outlined the role of transport in shaping the future of the Kingdom’s economy within Vision 2030. As we enter a new decade, we intend to make rapid progress in building the infrastructure required to define mobility for the future, enabling the efficient movement of people and goods. With the transformative hyperloop technology, Saudi Arabia will not only unlock unparalleled benefits for its people and the economy but will continue to lead the region into an era of prosperity.”

I started to make a "Vulture" joke, but I realized carrion play an important role in the ecosystem

This screen grab does a great job capturing so much of what’s wrong with the New York Magazine family and with business and entertainment journalism in general.

First off, there’s the article itself. Billed as an explainer, it’s nothing more than an especially embarrassing press release for a business model that makes WeWork look well thought out. It will take more than one post to explore the full awfulness of Quibi as an investment. For here, I’ll just say that this is possibly the stupidest proposal you’ll read involving the streaming industry, and that’s a high bar to clear.

Then there’s the sidebar. I’m sure I could think of a celebrity of comparable stature more despicable than  Gwyneth Paltrow if I tried, but none come to mind (and, no, that’s not an invitation for suggestions. I already spend too much time thinking about horrible people). She uses the press’ sycophancy toward the rich and famous and fascination with lifestyle porn to push flaky and sometimes  dangerous pseudoscience. The New York Magazine group has been playing footsie with quacks and new age charlatans for years (see here and here)

Finally there’s Netflix’s minor but still notable accomplishment of making the normal monthly cycling of shows in and out of rotation into a respectable news genre. Even HBO, which has long been extraordinarily good at working the press, was never able to get this kind of steady, extensive PR out of routine programming changes. We can’t exactly single out Vulture for this one but they certainly seem willing to play along.

Tuesday Tweets

Because sometimes I just like to dominate the conversation

The casts of next season's CBC shows will just be Tatiana Maslany

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) February 2, 2020

 

just might be the best qualifier ive EVER heard! 😂🤣🤣🤣🤣

— T (@CheddarBo) February 8, 2020

  

When management consultants start bringing out the mindset, you know they mean business. https://t.co/NweBR0csJw

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) February 8, 2020

 

I wonder if they'll use more CGI on the dog or on Ford

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) February 8, 2020

buttigieg talks completely in platitudes! it is maddening!

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) February 8, 2020

One of the things we've learned from the primary so far is that many journalists had no idea what management Consultants actually do. This is it.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) February 9, 2020

  

The Saudis have been big backers of the hyperloop, Uber, WeWorks and I strongly suspect they secretly financed Cats.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) February 9, 2020

 

Since it's probably quicker to list the people who aren't losing their goddamn minds, let's start with Paul Campos

Even more than normal for primary season, we've seen a remarkable amount of panic and wild shifts in assumptions, the latter often driven by nothing but noise.

We could debate the odds endlessly, but at this point no one really has any great insight into who's going to win either the Democratic primary or the general election. Neither side is doomed and anyone who tells you _____ has ______ locked up is probably not someone you should be listening to.

Over at LGM, Campos takes on the current wave of WE'VE-PICKED-A-FLAWED-CANDIDATE-WE'RE-ALL-DOOMED hysteria.

You get the idea. Every one of these candidates has serious potential flaws in the general because EVERY CANDIDATE has serious potential flaws. Because they’re human beings, not LARP fantasy figures.

And the problem is losing to Trump is not an acceptable option. Can’t happen. So none of these candidates is the right candidate because they have serious flaws so they could lose, and that can’t happen. So everyone is freaked out right now, and instantly focuses on how what can’t happen could very much happen if X is the candidate.

But the problem aren’t these particular candidates — not really. The problem is that when American political system combines with the contemporary American media environment and then the two of them meet the American voter, you get Donald Trump as president. That’s the problem. And that problem isn’t going away, unless we stop freaking out and do everything we can to make it go away, temporarily, no matter who gets the nomination. All of them could lose but all of them could also win, and if you think any of these people can’t win you’re just panicking. Don’t panic.

RIP Kirk Douglas -- Don't watch the trailer...

... Unless you've seen the movie.







I was going to post just the trailer, but I checked it out and it was absolutely terrible, a complete misrepresentation of the film.




Of course, this was a picture that needed considerable misrepresentation in 1951. Even by 2020 standards, it's a stunningly hard-edged, cynical, mean piece of work. You can imagine the horror the PR department must have felt when they first saw what they were supposed to promote.

More appetizing than Milton Friedman's Underwear Index

The BBC has a list of oddball economic indicators centered around fast food. I was familiar with the Big Mac Index, and of course, I knew about the Waffle House Index. (I don't like to brag, but I grew up in a two WF town). The rest of these, however, are new to me.

Mars Bars

In 1932, a factory in Slough produced the world’s first Mars bar. Fifty years later, Financial Times writer Nico Colchester pointed out that the price of the confectionary in Britain was neatly correlated with the buying power of pound sterling. By measuring the cost of things in Mars Bars, Colechester noted how graduate salaries had improved slightly in 40 years. Meanwhile, train fares had become cheaper but roast beef dinners in pubs had gone up by more than 60 percent.

Baked Beans and Popcorn

When financial experts are trying to determine whether an economy is generally in good health, they often look to food products. In 2009, the Odeon cinema company announced an “Odeon Popcorn Index” that it claimed showed higher sales and therefore signs of economic recovery in Britain following the financial crisis of 2008. And analysts have also scrutinised sales of baked beans, popular when times are tough, as an indicator of how people are responding to periods of economic decline. When baked bean sales fell in 2013, some took it as a sign that the UK economy was in rude health.

French Fries

A fascinating article in the Oregonian in 1998 observed that sales of French fries could be a helpful indicator of trade between America and Asia. This food “leads US industries into foreign markets” wrote Richard Read, thanks to the fact that America exports so many of them (something that remains true today). And he added that consumption of French fries was also an indicator of how well-developed an Asian economy had become. This meant that when economic trouble in Asia was brewing in the late ’90s, farmers in the US were hit hard.

Josh Marshall on the reaction to the impeachment

We've been pushing this for a long time, but political journalists (at least the smarter ones like Marshall) are getting better about thinking through the implications of selection effects on polling data.

Why Are President Trump’s Poll Numbers Going Up?

But there is another plausible explanation. Pollsters call it differential response. When one side gets enthused or energized their numbers go up but in an ephemeral fashion. The pumped-up side is a bit more eager to answer the phone or fill out the survey. The demoralized side is a bit less eager. This is a real and demonstrated phenomenon, not just a concept or speculation. It’s not necessarily an error per se in the polling. It’s picking up something real. It’s just ephemeral.

One example many of us likely remember came after the first general election debate in 2012. President Obama turned in a stiff and disconcertingly flat performance. The consensus was that Mitt Romney won the debate and for the first and last time in the cycle Romney briefly pushed into the lead.

There are good reasons to think that at least some of that is happening today — the President’s impending acquittal and Republican unity have been the driving news of the last two or three weeks. Republicans are energized and enthused by the certainty of President Trump’s acquittal. Many Democrats are demoralized by seeing an overwhelming and exacting case made for the President’s guilt and seeing it simply not matter.