The wages of Strauss are death (as in this is literally about to kill people)

We've been arguing for about a decade now that the Straussian strategy and tactics has the dominant factor in American politics since the late 90s, both in the undermining of reliable and trusted information sources and the spread of disinformation.

This essential piece from our best press critic points out how costly this disinformation has become.

Rupert Murdoch could save lives by forcing Fox News to tell the truth about coronavirus — right now
By Margaret Sullivan


When Trump says “jump,” the network leaps into action. And what the president hears on Fox News often dictates his own pronouncements and policies — which, in turn, are glowingly represented in Fox News’s coverage and commentary.

That’s never been anything short of dangerous, since the effect has been to create a de facto state-run media monster more devoted to maintaining power than shedding light on the truth. But now the mind-meld of Fox News and Trump is potentially lethal as Trump plays down the seriousness of the coronavirus and, hearing nothing but applause from his favorite information source for doing so, sees little reason to change.

There’s one person who could transform all that in an instant: Fox founder Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born media mogul who, at 89, still exerts his influence on the leading cable network — and thus on the president himself.

...
The network’s influence on Trump is clear from the presidential tweets that follow fast on the heels of a Fox News broadcast. He was always a fan of Fox News, but after entering the White House, he made it even more of an obsessive daily habit, Bloomberg News reported in 2017, to the extent of blotting out dissenting voices from other sources.

Trump made specific reference to his reliance on Fox News during his misleading press event Friday, when he offered unwarranted reassurance rather than urging extreme caution and decisive action: “As of the time I left the plane . . . we had 240 cases — that’s at least what was on a very fine network known as Fox News.”

The message: Go about your business, America, and it will all disappear soon.

Days later, 30 deaths and more than 1,000 cases have been reported in the United States, with those numbers expected to grow exponentially. (By contrast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is telling hard truths: As much as 70 percent of that country could end up being infected.)

Matt Gertz, a Media Matters senior fellow and the foremost chronicler of the insidious Trump-Fox News feedback loop, connected the dots: “Roughly an hour before his comments, a Fox News medical correspondent argued on-air that coronavirus was no more dangerous than the flu; a few hours later, the same correspondent argued that coronavirus fears were being deliberately overblown in hopes of damaging Trump politically.”

He added: “The network's personalities have frequently claimed that the Trump administration has been doing a great job responding to coronavirus, that the fears of the disease are overblown, and that the real problem is Democrats and the media politicizing the epidemic to prevent Trump's reelection.”

On Fox Business Channel, host Trish Regan drew widespread condemnation for her over-the-top rant in Trump's defense: “The chorus of hate being leveled at the president is nearing a crescendo as Democrats blame him and only him for a virus that originated halfway around the world. This is yet another attempt to impeach the president.”

(By contrast, her Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson has taken the threat seriously, though using it as an excuse to stoke anti-China sentiment along the way.)

...

Even if all that changed today, great harm has already been done. As The Washington Post and others have documented, the administration has repeatedly squandered chances to prepare for and manage the global epidemic.

But every moment still counts. Lives can be saved by prudent practices and aggressive government action — and lost by their absence.

But it takes leadership from the top. And so, let’s acknowledge the obvious: There is no more important player in influencing Trump than Fox News. And no more powerful figure at Fox than its patriarch.

Murdoch might consider, too, that with the median age of Fox’s viewers around 65, they are among the most vulnerable to the virus’s threats.

From Andrew Gelman

"Cast Your Fate to the Wind"

After a week like this you can use some Guaraldi

Paul Krugman draws an interesting analogy

Writing for the New York Times.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

The 2008 financial crisis was brought on by the collapse of an immense housing bubble. But many on the right denied that there was anything amiss. Larry Kudlow, now Trump’s chief economist, ridiculed “bubbleheads” who suggested that housing prices were out of line.

And I can tell you from personal experience that when I began writing about the housing bubble I was relentlessly accused of playing politics: “You only say there’s a bubble because you hate President Bush.”

When the economy began to slide, mainstream Republicans remained deeply in denial. Phil Gramm, John McCain’s senior economic adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign, declared that America was only suffering a “mental recession” and had become a “nation of whiners.”

Even the failure of Lehman Brothers, which sent the economy into a full meltdown, initially didn’t put a dent in conservative denial. Kudlow hailed the failure as good news, because it signaled an end to bailouts, and predicted housing and financial recovery in “months, not years.”

Wait, there’s more. After the economic crisis helped Barack Obama win the 2008 election, right-wing pundits declared that it was all a left-wing conspiracy. Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly accused the news media of hyping bad news to enable Obama’s socialist agenda, while Rush Limbaugh asserted that Senator Chuck Schumer personally caused the crisis (don’t ask).

What if pretty much all of them were HermanCainHermanCainHermanCain? -- repost

Not Biden or Sanders. Arguably not Warren. But possibly everyone else in the Democratic field who got the commentators hot and bothered could be explained by the dynamics described below, It is the nature of the game to have small feedback driven surges that quickly fade.That's one of the reasons campaign data is so noisy. Another reason is the political journalists who insist on amplifying that noise.

What if Mayor Pete is HermanCainHermanCainHermanCain?

I've been meaning to write this up for quite a while, but it keeps getting put off and I'm afraid if I don't get something quick off, events may overtake us again. I'll try to come back to this if we get a chance. 

Those who followed our comments on the 2016 may remember how various pundits (especially Nate Cohn) truly, deeply, desperately wanted to convince us and, more to the point themselves, that Donald Trump was just another Herman Cain and his polls numbers would fall just as quickly.

The analogy never made any sense with Trump, but the idea of an HC3, someone who emerges from the middle of the pack for little apparent reason, seems to be on the verge of challenging the leading candidates only to have that surge evaporate, can be useful.

My take on HC3s is that it's basically a mix of symmetry breaking and a Keynesian beauty contest. Voters are dissatisfied or, at least, with the front runners. As the decision point approaches, second and third tier choices are reexamined.with the considerably lower standard of being an acceptable alternative. Eventually this process converges on a candidate, at which point the scrutiny increases and the bloom is off the rose.

I'm not saying that Pete Buttigieg is a Herman Cain (I'm not even saying Herman Cain was a Herman Cain), but so far, I don't know that I've heard any supporter describe Buttigieg in positive rather than non-negative terms, and that is generally not a good sign.

Tuesday Tweets -- If you're in a hurry skip to the end. It's essential reading

This is what epidemiologists I know are sharing. The good news I get from this is that the problem can be solved. The bad news is that the way to solve it is by doing the exact opposite of everything we've been doing.

With Italy quarantining millions and contemplating critical care rationing in hospitals, and Iran's health system in chaos, it's fair to ask if this is possible in the US.

Bottom line is: the longer we wait to act, the more likely it becomes.

I've made some charts.

— Jeremy COVID-19 IS NOT LIKE FLU Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) March 8, 2020

Snazzier than my sketches :) https://t.co/VrBQV0OExs

— Jeremy COVID-19 IS NOT LIKE FLU Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) March 9, 2020

That graph deserves revisiting.

There are so many of these great animations about “reducing the peak” on Twitter.

This is what we at @WHO mean by flattening the curve, slowing this down, allowing time to prepare. #COVID19 https://t.co/rQTymCFpKV

— Maria Van Kerkhove (@mvankerkhove) March 9, 2020

 

The Italian example is even more worrisome than the initial accounts suggest.

This is the "Italy's in trouble because they are have a national health system" nonsense

To be clear:

MDs per 1,000: Italy 4.0, USA 2.6

Hosp beds per 1,000: Italy 3.2, USA 2.8

The problem is surge of COVID19 has overwhelmed northern Italian hospitals

This can happen here https://t.co/kp3IqxIbJu

— Ashish K. Jha (@ashishkjha) March 9, 2020

35% of the people in ICU are less than 65 years old in Lombardy.

That's a number that gives an answer to those that said that the disease affected primarily (in severe cases) older populations.

That's not the case and Lombardy's healthcare system is on the brink of collapse. pic.twitter.com/pwrGO3gXL4

— Odysseus (@OdysseusIthake) March 8, 2020

 
Some particularly idiotic comments by Elon Musk prompted this reminder that not all billionaires are created equal.

In 2015, Bill Gates told me a deadly flu-like pandemic spreading under globalized conditions was the most predictable disaster in the history of the human race, and so there was no excuse to not be prepared for it.

I'm thinking about that a lot lately. https://t.co/2XlyCtTdwW

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) March 6, 2020

The always reliable Sarah Kliff.

Arkansas can only test five patients for Coronavirus per day.

Maine can't test any yet.

Washington State has a backlog of tests it hasn't gotten through.

New from me, @katie_thomas and @NickAtNews on the Coronavirus testing scramble.https://t.co/aQcmTe5He6

— Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) March 7, 2020

" the exact opposite of everything we've been doing."

On current trends it will take South Korea only 3 weeks to get initial spread of COVID19 under control. But that requires exceptionally broad testing and strong mitigation. https://t.co/UUCQvBAUgd

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) March 10, 2020

This is also a good time to observe that the economic costs of the South Korean approach will almost certainly be less than the cost of continuing to pursue our current course. As with climate change, paying now is cheaper than paying later.



And finally, this thread from an Italian ICU MD makes one of the most important points you'll read all week.

2/ This is the English translation of a post of another ICU physician in Bergamo, Dr. Daniele Macchini. Read until the end "After much thought about whether and what to write about what is happening to us, I felt that silence was not responsible.

— Silvia Stringhini (@silviast9) March 9, 2020

20/ I finish by saying that I really don't understand this war on panic. The only reason I see is mask shortages, but there's no mask on sale anymore. We don't have a lot of studies, but is it panic really worse than neglect and carelessness during an epidemic of this sort?

— Silvia Stringhini (@silviast9) March 9, 2020

Converging narratives on Covid-19

Much more on this soon, but I wanted to point out another of those weird narrative convergences between the mainstream press and conservative media. In this case both are heavily pushing the idea that most people's concerns about the pandemic are overblown and irrational.

Here are two of many examples.

Cass R. Sunstein writing for Bloomberg

At this stage, no one can specify the magnitude of the threat from the coronavirus. But one thing is clear: A lot of people are more scared than they have any reason to be. They have an exaggerated sense of their own personal risk.
...

Turn to the coronavirus in this light. The situation is very fluid, but as of now, most people in North America and Europe do not need to worry much about the risk of contracting the disease. That’s true even for people who are traveling to nations such as Italy that have seen outbreaks of the disease.

Max Fisher writing for the New York Times (see also here):

 For most people, the disease is probably not particularly deadly; health officials tend to put it somewhere within range of an unusually severe seasonal flu. Even in a global pandemic, it’s expected to kill fewer people than the flu virus. Data so far suggests that if you catch the coronavirus, you may be likelier to have no symptoms at all than to require hospitalization.

And from the right (in more dramatic fashion).

Reviewing the coronavirus supplemental appropriation and preparing to go vote. pic.twitter.com/wjJ4YY4VZz

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) March 4, 2020

(Worth noting that there are a lot of seniors in Gaetz's district.)

The reasons for the convergence vary based on side. The mainstream press loves to think of itself as the voice of reason which may be part of the reason it's so fond of the irrationality-of-the-common-man narrative. Fox et al. are trying to hold to administration line and avoid spooking the economy and the electorate.

It's worth noting that the narrative I've been from researchers is a bit more concerned.

Snazzier than my sketches :) https://t.co/VrBQV0OExs

— Jeremy WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) March 9, 2020

When language loses meaning: NYT has a rare bad moment

This is Joseph.

This tweet is just stunning:

I mean really, this "double dipping" language is quoted out of an actual NYT article. No, it really wasn't the Onion by mistake.

This is so silly. There is no such thing as "double dipping" -- if the players are eligible for Social Security Disability then it is because they have a separate insurance program and one that is hard to get on. This reduces costs for the most vulnerable players who are also the ones who got injured in the process of a dangerous occupation. Now I know there are probably bigger social injustices but what stops the NYT from framing this differently?

Given the brutal nature of the sport, hundreds of former players apply for disability benefits every year. Currently, some inactive players collect up to $135,000 year, or $11,250 a month, in disability benefits. If they also receive, say, $2,000 a month from Social Security, they collect $13,250 a month in disability payments. The N.F.L. wants to end that “double dipping” and reduce the players’ N.F.L. benefits by offsetting the amount they receive from Social Security.

Why not just say that owners want to reduce payments to disabled former employees to redeploy that revenue elsewhere?

Is that hard?

Barry Ritholtz on the Jack Welch legacy

In addition to luck, Welch built his success on two pillars:

1. Breaking the social contract that had long held between corporations and workers.

2. Cheating his ass off.

From the Big Picture:

I have long stated that Jack Welch was one of the luckier, more wildly over-compensated CEOs around. He became CEO of General Electric in 1981, just before an 18 year bull market in big cap stocks began. he left in 2001, just as the market implosion was getting rolling.

GE’s revenues grew 385% under his watch, but the company’s market cap grew 4000%. How did that happen? GE increased earnings over the years, and with stunning regularity, managed a quarterly profit beat.

Indeed, it was too regular: After the 2000 crash, we learned of earnings manipulation and accounting shenanigans. The criticism was GE Capital acted as an opaque leveraged hedge fund that always be counted on to help GE beat by a penny. (GE eventually had to settle accounting fraud charges with the SEC).

So if anyone knows a thing or two about cooking the books, its GE’s Jack Welch. Want even more proof? Have a look at this chart of Welch’s earnings versus his successor, Jeff Immelt:

This would probably be due a repost on its own, but the passing of Jack Welch is a good excuse

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Strauss and the war on data

The most important aspect of Randianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell themselves. "When you're successful, it's because other people are inferior to you." "When you fail, it's because inferior people persecute you (call it going Roark)." "One of these days you're going to run away and everyone who's been mean to you will be sorry."

The most important aspect of Straussianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell others. Having started from the assumption that traditional democracy can't work because most people aren't smart enough to handle the role of voter, the Straussians conclude that superior minds must, for the good of society, lie to and manipulate the masses.

Joseph and I have an ongoing argument about which school is worse, a question greatly complicated by the compatibility of the two systems and the overlap of believers and their tactics and objectives. Joseph generally argues that Rand is worse (without, of course, defending Strauss) while I generally take the opposite position.

This week brought news that I think bolsters my case (though I suspect Joseph could easily turn it around to support his): one of the logical consequences of assuming typical voters can't evaluate information on their own is that data sources that are recognized as reliable are a threat to society. They can't be spun and they encourage people to make their own decisions.

To coin a phrase, if the masses can't handle the truth and need instead to be fed a version crafted by the elite to keep the people happy and doing what's best for them, the public's access to accurate, objective information has to be tightly controlled. With that in mind, consider the following from Jared Bernstein:

[D]ue to pressure from Republicans, the Congressional Research Service is withdrawing a report that showed the lack of correlation between high end tax cuts and economic growth.

The study, by economist Tom Hungerford, is of high quality, and is one I’ve cited here at OTE. Its findings are fairly common in the economics literature and the concerns raised by that noted econometrician Mitch McConnell are trumped up and bogus. He and his colleagues don’t like the findings because they strike at the supply-side arguments that they hold so dear.

And with Sandy still on everyone's mind, here's something from Menzie Chinn:

NOAA's programs are in function 300, Natural Resources and Environment, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a range of conservation and natural resources programs. In the near term, function 300 would be 14.6 percent lower in 2014 in the Ryan budget according to the Washington Post. It quotes David Kendall of The Third Way as warning about the potential impact on weather forecasting: "'Our weather forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until another polar satellite is launched,' estimates Kendall. 'For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long for an accurate forecast.'"

There are also attempts from prominent conservatives to delegitimize objective data:

Apparently, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, is accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of manipulating the jobs report to help President Obama. Others seem to be adding their voices to this slanderous lie. It is simply outrageous to make such a claim and echoes the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments of our nation. The BLS employment report draws on two surveys, one (the establishment survey) of 141,000 businesses and government agencies and the other (the household survey) of 60,000 households. The household survey is done by the Census Bureau on behalf of BLS. It’s important to note that large single-month divergences between the employment numbers in these two surveys (like the divergence in September) are just not that rare. EPI’s Elise Gould has a great paper on the differences between these two surveys.

BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are manipulated is just completely implausible. Moreover, the data trends reported are clearly in line with previous monthly reports and other economic indicators (such as GDP). The key result was the 114,000 increase in payroll employment from the establishment survey, which was right in line with what forecasters were expecting. This was a positive growth in jobs but roughly the amount to absorb a growing labor force and maintain a stable, not falling, unemployment rate. If someone wanted to help the president, they should have doubled the job growth the report showed. The household survey was much more positive, showing unemployment falling from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. These numbers are more volatile month to month and it wouldn’t be surprising to see unemployment rise a bit next month. Nevertheless, there’s nothing implausible about the reported data. The household survey has shown greater job growth in the recovery than the establishment survey throughout the recovery. The labor force participation rate (the share of adults who are working or unemployed) increased to 63.6 percent, which is an improvement from the prior month but still below the 63.7 percent reported for July. All in all, there was nothing particularly strange about this month’s jobs reports—and certainly nothing to spur accusations of outright fraud.

We can also put many of the attacks against Nate Silver in this category.

Going back a few months, we had this from Businessweek:

The House Committee on Appropriations recently proposed cutting the Census budget to $878 million, $10 million below its current budget and $91 million less than the bureau’s request for the next fiscal year. Included in the committee number is a $20 million cut in funding for this year’s Economic Census, considered the foundation of U.S. economic statistics.

And Bruce Bartlett had a whole set of examples involving Newt Gingrich:

On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. "is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated."

Mr. Gingrich's charge is complete nonsense. The former C.B.O. director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, now a Republican policy adviser, labeled the description "ludicrous." Most policy analysts from both sides of the aisle would say the C.B.O. is one of the very few analytical institutions left in government that one can trust implicitly.

It's precisely its deep reservoir of respect that makes Mr. Gingrich hate the C.B.O., because it has long stood in the way of allowing Republicans to make up numbers to justify whatever they feel like doing.

...

Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998. In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, "If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies."
...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress's professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise.                                                                                                                                                                                                

To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Of course, when party control in Congress changes, many of those employed by the previous majority party expect to lose their jobs. But the Democratic committee staff members that Mr. Gingrich fired in 1995 weren't replaced by Republicans. In essence, the positions were simply abolished, permanently crippling the committee system and depriving members of Congress of competent and informed advice on issues that they are responsible for overseeing.

Mr. Gingrich sold his committee-neutering as a money-saving measure. How could Congress cut the budgets of federal agencies if it wasn't willing to cut its own budget, he asked. In the heady days of the first Republican House since 1954, Mr. Gingrich pretty much got whatever he asked for.

In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.

The amount of money involved was trivial even in terms of Congress's budget. Mr. Gingrich's real purpose was to centralize power in the speaker's office, which was staffed with young right-wing zealots who followed his orders without question. Lacking the staff resources to challenge Mr. Gingrich, the committees could offer no resistance and his agenda was simply rubber-stamped.

Unfortunately, Gingrichism lives on. Republican Congressional leaders continually criticize every Congressional agency that stands in their way. In addition to the C.B.O., one often hears attacks on the Congressional Research Service, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Government Accountability Office.

Lately, the G.A.O. has been the prime target. Appropriators are cutting its budget by $42 million, forcing furloughs and cutbacks in investigations that identify billions of dollars in savings yearly. So misguided is this effort that Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma and one of the most conservative members of Congress, came to the agency's defense.

In a report issued by his office on Nov. 16, Senator Coburn pointed out that the G.A.O.'s budget has been cut by 13 percent in real terms since 1992 and its work force reduced by 40 percent -- more than 2,000 people. By contrast, Congress's budget has risen at twice the rate of inflation and nearly doubled to $2.3 billion from $1.2 billion over the last decade.

Mr. Coburn's report is replete with examples of budget savings recommended by G.A.O. He estimated that cutting its budget would add $3.3 billion a year to government waste, fraud, abuse and inefficiency that will go unidentified.

For good measure, Mr. Coburn included a chapter in his report on how Congressional committees have fallen down in their responsibility to exercise oversight. The number of hearings has fallen sharply in both the House and Senate. Since the beginning of the Gingrich era, they have fallen almost in half, with the biggest decline coming in the 104th Congress (1995-96), his first as speaker.

In short, Mr. Gingrich's unprovoked attack on the C.B.O. is part of a pattern. He disdains the expertise of anyone other than himself and is willing to undercut any institution that stands in his way. Unfortunately, we are still living with the consequences of his foolish actions as speaker.

We could really use the Office of Technology Assessment at a time when Congress desperately needs scientific expertise on a variety of issues in involving health, energy, climate change, homeland security and many others. And given the enormous stress suffered by state and local governments as they are forced by Washington to do more with less, an organization like the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations would be invaluable.

The probabilistic forecasts debate -- That's nice fellows, but I'm kinda focused on that iceberg

Andrew has a good breakdown of the debate over probabilistic election forecasts if you're interested. Here's why I think you shouldn't be.

1. At this point, economists have so thoroughly screwed up the discussion of rationality that I now make a conscious effort to avoid the term “rational,” much as I try not to use “significance” except in the technical sense. Rational actor arguments routinely rely on simplifying assumptions that are never observed in real life and which exclude most of what we would think of logical thinking.

2. That said, any reasonable “rational choice” model has got to address the accuracy and completeness of the information available to the actors. For people who relied on 538, perceived and actual closeness matched up fairly well and it makes a fair amount of sense to talk about “rational” voting behavior. For people who relied on NYT’s Upshot and Slate’s real-time exit polls, not so much…

3. With this in mind, this whole debate over probabilistic forecasts strikes me as another one of those secondhand smoke on the Titanic questions that are eating away at our collective decision making ability. We have larger and more immediate concerns.

Even with good data and solid analysis, it seems obvious to me that the social good of horse race coverage is U-shaped. A reasonable amount provides useful information and helps voters converge on a generally satisfactory choice. Too much (either probabilistic or old school) overwhelms the process and creates a noisy feedback loop. Even if we were getting good information we’d still be on the wrong side of the U, and we aren’t getting good information.

4. It’s convenient to blame the voters for being “irrational” but given the crap they’ve been fed, it’s difficult to see how they can reasonably be expected to make intelligent decisions. We have supposedly serious organizations like the New York Times giving oxygen to joke candidates.

Billionaire vanity campaigns crowding out viable options. Millions of early votes wasted because someone thought it would be a good idea to have Super Tuesday three goddamn days after the first real primary of the election (no one takes NH seriously). And, of course, a level of noise that would strain even a well running system.

Some post-Saturday, pre-Tuesday thoughts

Back in September, my co-blogger and I were having a conversation about worst possible case scenarios for the Democrats. He suggested a third party candidate. I went with having the Democratic nominee collapse shortly before the election. I was thinking about Biden at the time, but having an even older candidate actually have a heart attack didn’t lessen these concerns. 

I’m not sure if any of the chattering class have seriously thought through the implications of the Democrat’s electability focus. In the general election, this is all to the good, but in the primary, it can create all sorts of problems as the selection process frequently degenerates into a pure Keynesian beauty contest which can drown out real content and produce alarming levels of feedback driven noise. This can delay convergence on the best choice, particularly if…

The people covering the primary are a bunch of noise chasing idiots.

The noise and feedback issues remind us that the decision to move up California’s primary was incredibly bad. The idea that California needed more influence was insane on its face. In general, we give too little time for the tough part of the process and lengthened the part that was too long already, pursuing the mythical swing voter.

We also need to stop wasting oxygen on joke campaigns. Any system where Steyer, Yang, and Williamson don't drop out long before Booker, Harris, and Castro  is broken .

"Just as hard as I could" -- Ben Cooper 1933-2020

Support Your Local Sheriff is the better movie -- less cartoonish and it holds together better -- but if you're looking for a complete dismantling of the Western hero, you'd be hard pressed to find a more thorough job than the follow-up, Support Your Local Gunfighter.






Though the comedy is much drier, Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily (Garner's personal favorite) had a similar take on military honor, and produced one of the few really good anti-war films.

Repost: We'll be coming back to this.

One of the many discouraging things about the fight to address climate change and ocean acidification is that while the facts are overwhelmingly on the movement's side, it's narrative are increasingly handed over to people who traffic in questionable arguments and misinformation.

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

David Wallace-Wells, autism and bad science

David Wallace-Wells has been catching a lot of flack (most of it richly deserved) for his recent New York Magazine article on climate change. It is a hugely troubling sign when the very scientists you were claiming to represent push back against your article.

This controversy illustrates a larger problem with science reporting at the magazine. We already have a post in the queue discussing the neutral-to-credulous coverage of topics ranging from homeopathy to magic crystals to Gwyneth Paltrow's goop empire. The Wallace-Wells piece takes things to another level and goes in a very different but arguably worse direction. Rather than giving bad science a pass, he takes good science and presents it so ineptly has to do it a disservice.

I am not going to delve into that science myself. The topic has been well covered by numerous expert and knowledgeable writers [see here and here]. The best I could offer would be a recap. There are some journalistic points I may hit later and I do want to highlight a minor detail in the article that has slipped past most critics, but which is perfectly representative of the dangerous way Wallace-Wells combines sensationalism with a weak grasp of science.

Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe” level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism (as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.

No, David, no it doesn't.

I want to be painstakingly careful at this point. These are complex and extraordinarily important issues and it is essential that we do not lose sight of certain basic facts: by any reasonable standard, man-made climate change is one of the two or three most important issues facing our country; the effect of various pollutants on children's mental and physical development should be a major concern for all of us; high ozone levels are a really bad thing.

But the suggestion that ozone levels are causing an autism epidemic in West Hollywood is both dangerous and scientifically illiterate. You'll notice that I did not say that suggesting ozone levels cause autism is irresponsible. Though the study in question is outside of my field, the hypothesis seems reasonable and I do not see any red flags associated with the research. If Wallace-Wells had stopped before adding that last sentence, he would've been on solid ground, but he didn't.

Autism is frightening, mysterious, tragic. This has caused people, particularly parents facing one of the worst moments imaginable, to clean desperately to any explanation that might make sense of their situation. As a result, autism has become a focal point for bad science, culminating with the rise of the anti-vaccination movement. There is no field where groundless speculation and fear-mongering are less welcome.

So, if ozone and other pollutants may contribute to autism, what's so bad about the West Hollywood claim? For that, you need to do some rudimentary causal reasoning, starting with a quick look at ozone pollution in Southern California.

Here are some pertinent facts from a 2015 LA Times article:

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy selected a limit of 70 parts per billion, which is more stringent than the 75 parts-per-billion standard adopted in 2008 but short of the 60-ppb endorsed by environmentalists and health advocacy groups including the American Lung Assn. The agency’s science advisors had recommended a limit lower than 70 -- and as low as 60.

...


About one-third of California residents live in communities with pollution that exceeds federal standards, according to estimates by the state Air Resources Board.


Air quality is worst in inland valleys, where pollution from vehicles and factories cook in sunlight to form ozone, which is blown and trapped against the mountains.


The South Coast air basin, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, violated the current 75-ppb ozone standard on 92 days in 2014. The highest ozone levels in the nation are in San Bernardino County, which reported a 2012-2014 average of 102 parts per billion.

Now let's look at some ozone levels around the region. West Hollywood, it should be noted, is not great.

But just over the Hollywood Hills, the situation is even worse.

Go further inland to San Dimas and the level is even higher…

Higher still in Riverside ...

Though still far short of what we find in San Bernardino.

If you look at autism rates by school district and compare them to ozone levels, it is difficult to see much of a relationship. Does this mean that ozone does not contribute to autism? Absolutely not. What it shows is that, as with many developmental and learning disabilities, the wealthy are overdiagnosed while poor are underdiagnosed. It is no coincidence that a place like Santa Monica/Maibu (a notorious anti-vaxxer hotspot) has more than double the diagnosis rate of San Bernardino.

The there's this from the very LA Times article by Alan Zarembo that Wallace-Wells cites [emphasis added]:

 Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an epidemiologist at UC Davis, suspects that environmental triggers such as exposure to chemicals during pregnancy play a role. In a 2009 study, she started with a tantalizing lead — several autism clusters, mostly in Southern California, that her team had identified from disability and birth records.

But the hot spots could not be linked to chemical plants, waste dumps or any other obvious environmental hazards. Instead, the cases were concentrated in places where parents were highly educated and had easy access to treatment.

Peter Bearman, a sociologist at Columbia University, has demonstrated how such social forces are driving autism rates.

Analyzing state data, he identified a 386-square-mile area centered in West Hollywood that consistently produced three times as many autism cases as would be expected from birth rates.

Affluence helped set the area apart. But delving deeper, Bearman detected a more surprising pattern that existed across the state: Rich or poor, children living near somebody with autism were more likely to have the diagnosis themselves.
Living within 250 meters boosted the chances by 42%, compared to living between 500 and 1,000 meters away.

The reason, his analysis suggested, was simple: People talk.
They talk about how to recognize autism, which doctors to see, how to navigate the bureaucracies to secure services. They talk more if they live next door or visit the same parks, or if their children go to the same preschool.

The influence of neighbors alone accounts for 16% of the growth of autism cases in the state developmental system between 2000 and 2005, Bearman estimated.

In other words, autism is not contagious, but the diagnosis is.

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?