West Coast Stat Views (on Observational Epidemiology and more)
Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
When I said
Democrats wanted another 1964, that included a desire for the kind
campaign that LBJ ran, unapologetically aggressive and most of all,
willing to call a spade a spade. That's one reason why this...
Before I became
vice president and before I was elected as U.S. senator, I was the
attorney general of California. Before that, I was a prosecutor who took
on predators, fraudsters, and cheaters.
Sixty years ago these ads were playing over broadcast TV and radio at a time when almost everyone was tuned in to these two media. I doubt that any political advertising has had the same cultural impact before or since, particularly this:
"Daisy", sometimes referred to as "Daisy Girl" or "Peace, Little Girl", is an American political advertisement that aired on television as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign. Though aired only once, it is considered one of the most important factors in Johnson's landslide victory over the Republican Party's candidate, Barry Goldwater, and a turning point in political and advertising history. A partnership between the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency and Tony Schwartz, the "Daisy" advertisement was designed to broadcast Johnson's anti-war and anti-nuclear positions. Goldwater was against the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and suggested the use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War, if necessary. The Johnson campaign used Goldwater's speeches to imply he would wage a nuclear war.
...
The ad was pulled after its initial broadcast but it continued to be
replayed and analyzed by media, including the nightly news, talk shows,
and news broadcasting agencies. The Johnson campaign was widely
criticized for using the prospect of nuclear war, and implying that Goldwater would start one, to frighten voters.
Several other Johnson campaign commercials would attack Goldwater
without referring to him by name. Other campaigns have adopted and used
the "Daisy" commercial since 1964.
After Daisy, the most disturbing ad featured images of of a Klan rally and a quote from Robert Creel, grand dragon of the Alabama KKK, listing the targets of his bigotry and ending with his statement of support for Goldwater. Because of the language, it's been pulled from YouTube, but you can watch it here.
I've been meaning to talk about this exchange since it
happened, but it's just as well that I waited. Difficult to beat
the timing on this one.
Fair question. Here's the answer:
-@VP defeated an incumbent Democratic DA in SF. Started out third in three person race. Made runoff but trailed 33% to 37% against incumbent. Won with 56%.
-Ran for AG in Ca. against LA DA Steve Cooley, strongest Republican not named… https://t.co/2YqpP3JNig
Cooley was fairly popular & had a bigger base of support as LA Dist Atty. LA Times endorsed him. Harris got through a bloody primary. She was outspent pretty heavily. Cooley should have won with relative ease, blew the race late.https://t.co/GkUk55bm4R
Gene Maddaus writing for the LA Weekly, November 24, 2010 [Emphasis added.]
Whatever the outcome of the attorney general's race, it's clear that
Steve Cooley led most of the way and then blew it in the final days.
That's
because Cooley ran a tentative and complacent campaign. If he loses,
and trends suggest he will, it will be thanks to several tactical
mistakes, an indifference to stumping for votes, and a gaffe on
pensions.
Cooley can also blame Meg Whitman, whose 12-point loss
probably sealed his defeat. But the fact remains that he could have won
with a more aggressive campaign. Herewith, a post-mortem analysis.
Kamala
Harris declared her intention to run for attorney general in the
afterglow of the 2008 presidential race. She was a rising star, a member
in good standing of Generation Obama. Like the president, she was a
biracial candidate who had proven she could attract white votes.
But
the glow wore off as Obama's approval ratings dipped, and by the time
Steve Cooley entered the race early this year, Harris was all but
written off.
She was a San Franisco liberal. She opposed the death penalty. In an anti-Obama year, she was an Obama clone.
Polls
consistently showed her trailing Cooley by about five points, though a
large chunk of the electorate remained undecided. Conventional wisdom
held that he would do well in L.A. County, his home turf, because he was
seen as a competent prosecutor, not a partisan Republican.
In 2010,
Ca. Republican party realized by July their only hope for state wide
victory was in the AG race with the very popular LA DA.
Jerry
Brown was going to crush Meg Whitman. Newsom was never in doubt for Lt.
Gov. No R. was going to beat Boxer. No other races were in play.… https://t.co/9kccnAn2Ui
The tweet is yet another reminder of how lazy Nate Silver has gotten. He ignores two of the three races cited by Stevens, runs one metric, doesn't bother to look at other equally relevant numbers such as initial position in the polls, completely leaves out important context like campaign spending, the endorsement of the LA Times and the fact that Cooley went into the race as the popular district attorney of LA representing about one in four Californians, as compared with less than one tenth of that represented by Harris as the district attorney of San Francisco. Silver then goes on to draw a sweeping conclusion and adds an LOL just to push the dickishness level over the top.
There is a bit of an analogy here with Harvard's Avi Loeb. Both he and Silver are experts in their fields. Silver knows a great deal about certain aspects of political science while Loeb has done seminal work in astrophysics, but those are both big subjects and it is possible to be highly knowledgeable in parts of those disciplines and completely ignorant of others. Both men have been opining outside of their areas of expertise, and they have been doing so with an entirely inappropriate level of confidence.
This is also a prime example of one of the driving narratives of
recent political coverage, hapless Kamala. Along with Trump's
followers will abandon him after he loses an election, DeSantis has a
lock on the nomination, and Dobbs won't matter, this is one of the
stories that has guided journalists over the last four years. By now, two of these have been completely discredited and the other
two are looking highly questionable. If you are new to this game, you
probably think that being proven this wrong this often would humble
Silver and Barro and all the other pundits and big-name reporters who
have staked so much of their reputations on these claims, but what
we've seen instead is defensiveness, denial, and evermore tortured
logic trying to prop up failed arguments.
What follows is a grossly oversimplified mental model based on flawed and arguably past their sale date historical analogies. I'm giving you a lot to criticize, but consistent with the maxim that all models are wrong but some are useful, I found this very useful for organizing my thoughts. I'll go even further and say I think it is true in the advisory sentence: when it tells you to do something, you should probably do it.
1964 was a very good election for the Democrats. 1968 was a bad one and 1972 was a disaster (at least with respect to the presidency). In the broadest sense, how can we characterize 64 versus 68/72?
Skipping a lot of back story, 1964 had a unified Democratic party spend the campaign aggressively attacking an ideologically extreme Republican as dangerous and erratic.
1968 had a divided Democratic Party largely focused on internal squabbles. 1972 took this to the next level, passing over the candidate who actually got the most primary votes for the one who had headed the committee that rewrote the nominating rules.
Like I said, this leaves a lot out, but if we take the analogy at this very high level I think it gets to the gist of what Democrats want and why they feel so angry with and disconnected from much, perhaps most of the elite mainstream media. The response to Kamala Harris clearly suggests they want 2024 to be another 1964, one where a united party concentrates all of its attention, energy, and resources attacking and unfit candidate and his wildly unpopular positions.
By comparison, viewed using this framework, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic have been actively lobbying for what looks a great deal like a combination of 1968 and 1972 with a little bit of 1980 thrown in. Ezra Klein is still whining over the lack of a Eugene McCarthy or a Ted
Kennedy this time around.
Wisdom-of-crowd question:
As
far as I can tell, *everyone* warning about the "rush to support Kamala
Harris" is (a) on a newspaper editorial board, mainly NYT and WaPo, or
(b) a newspaper / magazine columnist, like the fiesta in the NYT
(attached).
It is almost
impossible to take the arguments of the 68/72 crowd at face value.
After months of complaining that Biden was too old and would leave
the party divided, now they have a young candidate implicitly chosen by primary voters and currently backed by the near universal support
of a reenergized party, and it's driving them crazy.
Why are they so
upset over getting what they claimed to want? I've heard cynics
suggest that the editorial boards of papers like the New York Times
secretly want Trump to win because he's good for the news business,
or because they tend to represent the social class that will benefit
from his tax policies, or because they secretly agree with parts of
his philosophy. While there is some merit to the first two and perhaps just a
little to the third, I don't think that's it.
I believe they don't
want Trump to win, but more importantly, they don't want him to lose
in a way that makes them look bad and feel foolish. It is nearly
impossible to overstate how invested institutions like the New York
Times become in their narratives and how far they will go to defend
them. Over the past four years, the standard narratives have been
that Trump's support would evaporate once he actually lost an
election, that Dobbs would not play a significant role in any
upcoming elections, that DeSantis had a virtual lock on the
Republican nomination, that JD Vance was the principled conservative and political talent
we needed to counter Trump, and that Kamala Harris was an extremely
weak politician who could not possibly unite the Democratic Party.
Compared to the pain of owning up to all their mistakes, four more
years of Trump doesn't seem that bad to these people.
Yesterday morning I posted some thoughts on the elite press's fixation on open primaries under the title, "Straussians* of the Center Left" which concluded with...
There is an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery quality to arguing that
following the will of the party's voters somehow suppresses it while
going with a plan conceived and all but solely supported by
the journalistic elites of the NYT et al., a plan that allows for no
direct participation of the party's actual voters is the democratic
option.
None of this is surprising. While it is possible to find people of
humble beginnings holding prominent positions in the New York Times,
New York magazine, and company, they are rare and they become more
rare the higher up you go. You don't have to look very deep to find
signs of class bigotry and a profound distrust of rule by the people.
This is always been true. Recently, it's just been closer to the
surface.
Yesterday afternoon, Josh Marshall ran a piece that made many of the same points (which if you're writing about politics, is always reassuring).
We’re now a day out from President Biden’s semi-expected but still
shocking decision to depart the presidential race and the rapid
ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive nominee. We
don’t know what the first polls will tell us. We should be prepared for
them, at least at first, not to be dramatically different from Biden’s
in the weeks leading up to the big and now genuinely historic debate.
That’s not pessimism about Harris’ campaign. It’s a recognition that the
best argument for the switch is not that she would instantly transform
the campaign but be better able to make the case against Donald Trump
over the next three months. But now the great majority of Democrats are
treating her ascension with something approaching euphoria.
That’s both a measure of her as a candidate and an end to the
protracted agony of the last three weeks. But already we’re hearing that
this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats
have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were
doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the
making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece
by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the
argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six
months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new
terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because
this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and
columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game
rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate
that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”
The Wood article really is jaw-droppingly bad. His ignorance of the history and workings of politics would be embarrassing in a high school newspaper editorial. We'll get back to it if I have the time and the stomach for it.
Back to Marshall.
The point is that beneath this seeming appetite to let politics run its
course in all its ferality is something quite different: It’s a kind of
disdain for actual voters and how actual politics works – not always
pretty, mixed with peoples overweening ambitions, their intense loves
and fears, and all the rest. If Democrats want to get behind Kamala
Harris, stop fighting with each other, stop watching the unmerited pain
of an aging leader most of them respect and even love, and get on to
running a campaign against a menacing adversary … well, that’s just
fine. They don’t have anything to prove to folks who write for a living.
While technically there may only be one name on the ballot, when primary voters pull the lever for the incumbent, they know they are voting for a ticket not an individual. They are choosing a candidate and that candidate's successor.
Much to the consternation of the pundits and in direct contradiction of their narrative, Biden and Harris sailed through the primaries with margins similar to that of Obama in 2012. The voter's preference was clear.
The Democratic Party told its voters that they could not be trusted to select a nominee when they effectively shut down their primary process. Now, they are installing a new nominee. American voters happen to like democracy. I predict some backlash.
This never happened. If it had, you would have never heard of Dean Phillips (instead of just hearing about him and forgetting). It's true that no one wanted to be McCarthy '68, McGovern '72, or Kennedy '80, but that was an individual choice (and probably a good one).
There is an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery quality to arguing that
following the will of the party's voters somehow suppresses it while going with a plan conceived and all but solely supported by
the journalistic elites of the NYT et al., a plan that allows for no
direct participation of the party's actual voters is the democratic
option.
Is the Trump campaign writing the Washington Post editorials now? beyond ridiculous. https://t.co/Aw3okZBns3
Opinion | As Joe Biden drops out, Democrats get a golden opportunity to reset - The Washington Post https://t.co/52daa2Nvd1
You might, and I
want to heavily emphasize the word "might," be able to make
some kind of a case for an open convention if we had evidence of a
huge groundswell of popular support for the idea, but we appear to be
seeing the exact opposite. Based on polling, responses from across
the party, and the stunning wave of small donor contributions, it
seems that members of the party are (at least by Democratic
standards) remarkably unified behind and excited about the successor
that they overwhelmingly voted for explicitly in 2020 and implicitly
in 2024.
None of this is surprising. While it is possible to find people of
humble beginnings holding prominent positions in the New York Times,
New York magazine, and company, they are rare and they become more
rare the higher up you go. You don't have to look very deep to find
signs of class bigotry and a profound distrust of rule by the people.
This is always been true. Recently, it's just been closer to the
surface.
* I'm using
Straussian in the sense of someone who believes in rule by the
elite.. That's an overly broad and somewhat sloppy definition, but
what you expect from a blog?
But Oumuamua's old news. These days everyone's overreacting to Dyson swarms.
(You have to get about halfway through the articles to find out that the researchers have said that these anomalies have more mundane explanations and probably aren't alien mega-structures, but that's not a catchy headline.)
Weigel Broadcasting is getting a lot of getting a lot deservedly positive press for its launch of MeTV Toons, the company's latest typically classy over-the-air superstation, Arguably the last of the independents in the television industry, Weigel has managed sixteen years of extraordinary growth, brought in consistent profits, and absolutely kicked the asses of most shows from the major studios in terms of viewers with budgets that were one to two orders of magnitude smaller.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Two anecdotes on how (and how not) to run a business
I'm going to be discussing both of these businesses in future posts but
since my queue is pretty full at the moment I thought I'd get these two
examples out while they were still current.
The first involves Weigel Broadcasting, probably the best run business you've never heard of.
As with sports and politics, there's an aesthetic pleasure to watching
business done well and under that criteria, Weigel is in Joe Montana
territory.
Take the response to the death of Andy Griffith on their MeTV network.
The network ran a slate of shows featuring Griffith including the Make
Room for Daddy back door pilot. Nothing particularly surprising there.
I'm sure they plan these in advance and have already laid out the shows
they'll air when other notables like Dick Van Dyke or Mary Tyler Moore
pass away.
What was notable was the timing. The tribute aired on the Fourth of
July. It was an inspired choice -- no living performer was more
associated with Americana than Griffith -- but what makes it notable was
the fact that Andy Griffith died on July the third.
Let's run through the timeline:
1. Decide on the Fourth
2. Reschedule the day's shows
3. Record the promos
4. Put the promos into heavy rotation
5. Issue press releases.
I've seen simpler corporate processes stretch on for months. At Weigel,
this took six hours on the outside. If we had better business
journalists, you'd be hearing more about Weigel.
Now for something completely different...
I was checking Hulu last night when I noticed an item about the Dark
Knight. I immediately assumed it was something about the shootings (keep
in mind, the time you see at the bottom of the screen is West Coast
time) but instead it was a jokey piece on fake spoilers. It was still
there when I went to bed.
When you get a big, tragic story like this, smart nimble businesses
immediately ask themselves if there's a negative PR aspect that they
need look out for and if possible, avoid. This is particularly true for
websites because
1. it's easy to make changes
2. screen captures are forever.
I suspect that someone at Hulu saw this and thought "we really ought to
pull that" but the company wasn't set up for that kind of rapid
response. This is also consistent with other things we've seen from
Hulu, but that's a topic for other posts.
[Apologies for going into reruns so heavy this week, but it's another topic people need to be paying attention to this week.]
Concern over the white right people not having enough babies has become one of the main issues bringing together the Silicon Valley Billionaire wing and the redneck wing of the Republican Party together.
Gov Kristi Noem of South Dakota talking about fertility rates. So much of the Republican Party is the cult of reproduction right now. The JD Vance pick, Elon Musk’s support, anti-lgbtq activism, anti-abortion rights, this speech… all talking about fertility and birth rates. pic.twitter.com/Z8gl6inS3U
Sometimes,
when I come across yet another bit of jaw-dropping flakiness from some
tech-bubble billionaire, my thoughts turn to Ithuvania. What if this
were an experiment? What if some well-funded research organization
decided to see what would happen if it randomly selected individuals of
average intelligence, handed them huge checks and told them they were
super-geniuses?
I'm not saying that's what happened; I'm just saying the results would have been awfully damned similar.
In
his review of the remake of Death Wish, Bob Chipman was talking about
the premise of the new version when he stopped and looked around the
said, "Y'know, I don't hear anything, but my dog is going nuts."
If you listen to this article by Julia Black, I'm pretty sure you'll get the same reaction. [emphasis and commentary added]
Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are "pronatalists," part of a
quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and
venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling
birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and
most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of
economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. [As has been pointed out numerous times (including this post
by Joseph), these nations maintain a growing population though
immigration which suggests that these particular pro-natalists have less
of an issue with birth rates and more of an issue with which people are
being born -- MP] It's a theory
that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat
has defended in The New York Times' opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan
and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen [the honorary dean of Ithuvania -- MP] bantered about on
"The Joe Rogan Experience." It's also, alarmingly, been used by some to
justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying
marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "You will not replace
us" to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his
2019 manifesto: "It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates. It's the
birthrates."
Google searches for "population collapse" spiked this summer, after Musk continued to raise the issue in response to Insider's report that he'd fathered twins with one of his employees. According to the United Nations,
more than a quarter of the world's countries now have pronatalist
policies, including infertility-treatment benefits and "baby bonus" cash
incentives. Meanwhile, a spate of new assisted reproductive technology
startups are attracting big-name investors such as Peter Thiel and Steve
Jurvetson [Another charmer -- MP], fueling a global fertility-services market that Research and
Markets projects will reach $78.2 billion by 2025.
...
Together [the Collinses] write books and work in the VC and private-equity worlds.
Simone has previously served as managing director for Dialog, the
secretive retreat cofounded by Thiel. While they relate to the
anti-institutional wing of the Republican Party, they're wary of
affiliating with what they called the "crazy conservatives." Above all,
they are focused on branding pronatalism as hip, socially acceptable,
and welcoming [It's the 'welcoming' that makes it truly special -- MP]— especially to certain people. Last year, they cofounded
the nonprofit initiative Pronatalist.org.
...
"We're
frustrated that one of the inherent points of this culture is that
people are super private within it," Simone said. They not only hope
that their transparency will encourage other members of the upper class
to have more children; they want to build a culture and economy around
the high-birth-rate lifestyle.
The payoff won't be immediate,
Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans
into place, their successors will "become the new dominant leading
classes in the world." [Boy, that has a familiar ring to it -- MP]
...
It makes sense considering that Musk, who has fathered 10 known children
with three women, is the tech world's highest-profile pronatalist,
albeit unofficially. He has been open about his obsession with Genghis
Khan, the 13th-century Mongol ruler whose DNA can still be traced to a
significant portion of the human population. One person who has worked
directly with Musk and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this
article recalled Musk expressing his interest as early as 2005 in
"populating the world with his offspring."
...
These worries tend to focus on one class of people in particular, which
pronatalists use various euphemisms to express. In August, Elon's
father, Errol Musk, told me that he was worried about low birth rates in
what he called "productive nations." The Collinses call it
"cosmopolitan society." Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie
"Idiocracy," in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing
the unintelligent to populate the earth.
...
The Collinses themselves have been called "hipster eugenicists"
online, something Simone called "amazing" when I brought it to her
attention.
Malcolm's "going to want to make business cards that
say 'Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists," she said with a
laugh.
Back in 2021, the national press was desperately trying to convince itself that Trump was losing his hold on the Republican Party. This was behind the wishful analytics that launched a thousand "DeSantis is Dominating a Sinking Trump" stories. It was also why journalists and pundits were so eager to believe the obvious con job that was J.D. Vance.
Before we get to Vance, here's a bit of relevant personal history. My
grandparents on my father's side had a family farm in the Rio Grande
Valley. On my mother's side, my grandparents started out as
sharecroppers until World War II gave my grandfather the opportunity to
find work as a carpenter.
I was born in Texas, but when I was
five, my family moved to a small town in the Ozarks and I stayed in the
region until I was in my thirties. I taught high school and college
there before making the jump to the corporate world and the East Coast
before ending up in California.
I mention this to give you some
idea why the transparent fraud of J.D. Vance pissed me off so much, and
why I'm so angry with the national press and particularly (as always)
the NYT for their role in the sham.
2022
has been a rough year for conventional wisdom which means a rough year
for the NYT and journalists like Weisman. Not only was his framing inappropriate; it was wildly off base. Vance has taken what was supposed to be a safe seat and made it into a tight (an for the GOP, expensive) race.
But
it's not just Vance's competence as a candidate that the press got
wrong; it was his sham persona, and no publication bought into the lie
more than the New York Times.
Take a look at Jennifer Senior's 2016 review of Hillbilly Elegy.
But
his profile is misleading. His people — hillbillies, rednecks, white
trash, choose your epithet (or term of affection, depending on your
point of view) [These terms are in no way interchangeable -- MP] —
didn’t step off the Mayflower and become part of America’s ascendant
class. “Poverty is the family tradition,” he writes. His ancestors and
kin were sharecroppers, coal miners, machinists, millworkers — all
low-paying, body-wearying occupations that over the years have vanished
or offered diminished security.
We start hitting likely
embellishments right off the bat. The part of Kentucky Vance's
grandparents came from does not and probably did not produce the kinds
of cash crops associated with sharecropping. It's possible that Vance's
family moved there from more productive land, or it might be he was just
adding a flourish to his tale of humble origins.
Mr.
Vance was raised in Middletown, Ohio, a now-decaying steel town filled
with Kentucky transplants, which at one point included his Mamaw and
Papaw — in newscaster English, that’s grandma and grandpa — who moved
there shortly after World War II. Though the couple eventually managed
to achieve the material comforts of a middle-class life (house, car),
they brought their Appalachian values and habits with them. Some were
wonderfully positive, like loyalty and love of country. But others, like
a tendency toward violence and verbal abuse, were inimical to family
life.
Just to emphasize this point, J.D.
Vance was born in the suburbs and never lived in
rural America (no, summer vacations don't count). His mother was born in
those same suburbs. Middletown is a lower middle-class suburb located
between Cincinnati and Dayton. While hardly prosperous, it is better off
than some of the surrounding area, For instance, the percent of the
population below the poverty line in 2020 (back when Vance was living
there) was around 9%, roughly half that of nearby Dayton.
As
for violence being inimical to family life, Vance is on the record as
saying women should stay with abusive husbands for the sake of the
children, so maybe that's more his thing.
Papaw
was forever coming home drunk. Mamaw, “a violent nondrunk,” was forever
tormenting him, whether by serving him artfully arranged plates of
garbage for dinner or dousing him with gasoline. All this guerrilla
warfare affected their children. Mr. Vance’s mother was an empress of
instability — violent, feckless, prone to hysteria. A long stint in
rehab couldn’t shake her addiction to prescription narcotics (she’d
later move on to heroin). She spun through more boyfriends than this
reader could count and at least five husbands.
The
only reason Mr. Vance made it out in one piece is because his
grandparents eventually reconciled, becoming his unofficial guardians.
(He also spent a terrifically affirming four years in the Marines.)
Mamaw was especially encouraging. She was tough as snakeskin,
foul-mouthed as a mobster and filled with love. In a town where many
children don’t finish high school, she raised a grandson who managed to
graduate from Ohio State University and Yale Law School, defying
skyscraping odds.
Have to stop for just a
minute and say something about those "skyscraping odds." Besides being
purple prose, it was also badly inaccurate.
Ohio
State is a good school but it is not (to its credit) particularly
exclusive with an acceptance rate of 68%. Furthermore, Vance went to OSU
by way of the military, meaning he had a tremendous support network to
help him get into college.Vance graduated summa cum laude, so he was
clearly hard-working and academically talented, but suburban kid raised
by his grandparents graduates high school, joins the Marines, gets into a
good university, goes on to get an ivy league law degree is not
particularly inspiring.
I've taught high school in the Delta and
in Watts and I can point you to lots of kids who genuinely defied the
odds to get where they are. Putting Vance in that group is offensive.
It's
also worth noting that Vance got his opportunities primarily through
the GI Bill and the land-grant college system, two landmark progressive
programs that Vance's mentor, employer, and political backer Peter Thiel
would beat to death with a tire iron given the chance.
“Hillbilly
Elegy,” in my mind, divides into two components: the family stories Mr.
Vance tells — most of which are no doubt better experienced on the page
than they were in real life — and the questions he raises. Chief among
them: How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their
own misfortunes?
...
Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and
personal responsibility. He has no patience with an old acquaintance who
told him he quit his job because he hated waking up early, only to take
to Facebook to blame the “Obama economy.” Or with a former co-worker at
a tile warehouse who missed work once a week though his girlfriend was
pregnant.
Just to recap. Vance is a Thiel
disciple with a history of romanticizing and possibly embellishing his
stories. Perhaps we should take that into account when reading his
unlikely sounding anecdotes.
Squint, and you’ll note the incendiary nature of Mr.
Vance’s argument. It’s always treacherous business to blame a group for
its own misfortunes. Certainly, an outsider cannot say what Mr. Vance is
saying to his kin and kind. But he can — just as President Obama can
say to fellow African-Americans, “brothers should pull up their pants,” as he did on MTV.
Except that Obama is an African-American while Vance is a venture capitalist from the suburbs doing hillbilly cosplay.
None
of it mattered, not the sham persona, not the embellished bio, not the
association with and dependency on a far-right billionaire so extreme he
publicly called women's suffrage a bad idea. Journalists across the
country immediately fell in love.
David Brooks got where he is
by telling often fabricated anecdotes with a veneer of pop sociology
that confirmed his target audience's preconceptions about the class
system. Vance took the act to the next level, adding "first-hand"
observations and substituting tough love for Brook's "more to be pitied
than censured" shtick when discussing the lower classes. Vance also
seemed to offer special insight into the rise of Trump, something that
had caught the pundit class completely off guard.
The mainstream press swallowed the obvious fraud because they wanted to believe it.
I feel bad about associating Hee Haw with Vance, so I picked out a few clips to balance things out.
[I did have three, but YouTube didn't like the third one. -- MP]
Every predictive model relies on at least one of two things. The first is the assumption that patterns and relationships will in the future look basically like they did in the past. The second is first principles, the idea that we have such a trustworthy and complete understanding of how things work that we can say with a high level of confidence that this system or set of conditions will produce this result.
Pretty much the first thing they tell you in any introductory class on regression is the all of the beautiful and deeply reassuring math around confidence about your work assumes that you only draw conclusions about the population your data comes from. When you wander out of the range of observed data, you leave behind that rigorously proven framework.
This is always a problem with predictive models because obviously the future is outside of the range of observed data. We can get around this to a degree by not straying too far, by relying on patterns and relationships that have proven stable over time, and by keeping an eye on things that might cause our models to go haywire. You're still breaking the rules, but you're not getting too far out on the ice.
Models of presidential elections have always been weakly supported both in terms of data and our understanding of the underlying mechanisms that drive them. In terms of predictive value, political data always has a sell by date. Just because a particular group reliably voted one way 50 years ago doesn't mean that you can count on them to do the same thing today likewise, polling and elections have changed so much that it makes no sense to aggregate numbers that aren't relatively recent. Take away special cases in outliers, and you can easily find yourself building models on n < 10.
In the 21st century, things have gotten even worse for political scientists. Old relationships are broken down, polling faces serious issues, and pretty much all the elections are outliers on one dimension or another.
Now add in black swans. These events are more or less by definition outside of the range of observed data. You can make math-based statements about their possible aftermath, but I wouldn't say they were based on the discipline of statistics. All you can do under the circumstances is make the most informed guess you can then run the numbers to see what you get.
I won't go so far as to say one guess is as good as another, just that you shouldn't rely too heavily on guesses period.
Finally got around to watching this video by physics post-doc Angela
Collier, recommended by frequent commenter David, and I'm giving it a
strong recommendation as well, albeit with a caveat or two. It is (as
mentioned in David's comment) too long, partly because it could do with
some editing, but mainly because it consists of two halves which,
though related, might work better as two freestanding videos, both of
which would be very good.
The first part is a
discussion of what makes a cranck, why otherwise smart and
accomplished people can be sucked down the rabbit hole by obsessing
over fringe ideas. Collier also talks about how others can do
something similar and yet maintain their equilibrium. Her example of
the first is Francis G. Perey and his belief that he had disproven
Bell's theorem. Her example of the second is Luis Walter Alvarez, who
investigated such kook-friendly topics as the JFK assassination,
pyramids, and dinosaurs, but rather than damaging his reputation,
greatly enhanced it (especially with that last category).
The second part
takes a deep dive into the self immolation of Harvard's Avi Loeb, who
as regular readers already know, has gone from being one of the world's
leading astrophysicists to a crank who sees proof of alien technology
pretty much everywhere. Loeb has been a major player in our UFO
thread. This video fills in the some missing and particularly damning
details.
Collier as posted a
number of videos on physics and science journalism. From what I've
sampled they're all worthwhile (though, as previously mentioned, a
good editor wouldn't hurt).
I've been thinking about the similarities between the education reform movement we spent so much time discussing a dozen years ago and the YIMBY movement we've been focusing on for the past few years. I had originally intended on doing a medium length post on the subject, but the more I think about it the more I realize it's going to take more than one trip.
It would be an oversimplification to say that the education reform movement was a bunch of management consultants and rich white and Asian people swooping in to show poor black and Hispanic people how things were done, but that would capture a great deal of what was going on back during the height of the movement. This was nowhere more obvious than with Teach for America, a tiny but wildly overhyped program that took kids from elite colleges, gave them a crash course in teacher prep, then dumped them in the classroom with highly mixed results.
The hagiographic coverage that TFA teachers got at a time when career educators in genuinely tough urban and rural schools were being routinely demonized was more than a little contradictory, but it made perfect sense when you remembered two things. First, around the turn of the millennium, the education reform movement's worldview was the standard narrative, so widely and unquestioningly accepted by the press that editors who would reflexively both-sides even the clearest of issues would give reform advocates a free pass to say anything they wanted unchallenged. Second, the upper echelons of journalism are disproportionately made up of the children of elite families. It's not that surprising that alumni of Ivy League universities will be more impressed by a rich kid who chooses to do a two year stint teaching in Inglewood than they are by poor kids who go to state schools then choose to devote their lives teaching their communities. It's sad, but it's not surprising.
Class and economic status play a different role in the YIMBY movement, but not that different. In both cases, the world is viewed predominantly through a six or seven figure lens. Much of the NIMBY/YIMBY debate comes down to old money versus nouveau riche, the "we were here first crowd" versus the "we've got the money why can't we live by the beach?" crowd.
In terms of coverage and rhetoric, the focus of the housing discourse is completely dominated by a handful of enclaves for the rich. The plurality of American housing stories are about a wealthy, medium-sized (17th largest by population) urban exurb that is unique to the point of being an outlier along so many dimensions that many researchers avoid using it as an example. Here in Southern California you are more likely to find a discussion of the tiny postage stamps of Santa Monica and Venice than about all of East LA. Even the housing crisis of the Central Valley was largely ignored until someone came up with the bright idea of pushing the narrative that the explosion in prices was caused by rich tech bros moving to Bakersfield. (Quick side note. This is and always has been bullshit. Bakersfield is not a town that is going to attract the wealthy and trendy, particularly not in a time of global warming. I'd argue that they don't know what they're missing. Like the late Jonathan Gold, I'm very fond of the town, but even I wouldn't want to spend August there.)
Not only are poor and lower middle class people underrepresented in the YIMBY movement, there is considerable tension between the movement and those housing advocates who primarily come from and speak for people below the median income line. There are sharp divides over issues such as rent control, public housing, vacancy rates, and the trustworthiness of developers. I'm not going to get into who's right and who's wrong on each of these issues (though, for the record, I tend to favor the YIMBY positions within reason). The point is that the movement's perspective is one of successful people, economists, and developers. There's nothing wrong with that perspective, but they don't speak for everyone.
Even more than usual, the best political commentary over the past few days has been coming from Josh Marshall. Though I want to wait until the dust settles before weighing in on the politics and political journalism of the moment (taking a pause in times of confusion is a good policy in general), I did want to break into our regularly scheduled programming to highlight a few recent observations from Marshall.
[Emphasis added.]
One of the reasons for that shift was simply that Biden was still
there. He’s still running and still the nominee. We’re in the midst of a
level of feeding frenzy I’ve only seen twice as a political observer —
the first week of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998 and the one that
ended Al Franken’s career in the Senate in 2018. The Washington press
corps and national political press overwhelmingly and vociferously want
to force Biden out of the race. I don’t say that in the sense of bias, per se
— it’s not even necessarily at the level of intentionality. It’s more
at the level of crowd behavior. It’s just how these feeding frenzies
work. What do foxes think they’re doing when they rip through a hen
house? For the DC press, this is all mixed in with ego and a sense of
vindication. But again, it’s just how feeding frenzies work. But at a
certain point, the feeding frenzy has been churning for days and Biden’s
still running and there’s some element of a wave cresting. Like, hey
we’ve been telling you all the reasons why Biden has to withdraw from
the race for days but he’s still running and okay, well, maybe not — or,
like, we can’t keep up this 100 yard dash forever. It’s just a cresting
pattern.
At the same time I think there were the first hints of a realization
that this has been overwhelmingly a conversation among media and
political elites without much focus or knowledge about anything average
voters are thinking or doing. My point here isn’t that average voters
are necessarily rising up in defense of Joe Biden. More that no one
really has any idea what most voters are thinking. And of course there
is no “average voter.” It’s a big country with lots of different kinds
of people. My point is simply that the elite conversation had already
arrived at a consensus and blown right past it without any real idea of
what the rest of the country was thinking.
This was captured for me by a couple interviews with Rep. Debbie
Dingell (D) of Michigan. At the beginning of the week she appeared on TV
demanding Biden solve the situation or move on, appear on camera with
various feats of cognitive strength, etc. We’re running out of time,
etc. Then, a couple days later, she described spending time back in her
district and getting approached by ordinary voters saying, Debbie, what
are you talking about? We had a primary and we voted for Biden. What’s
going on here? It wasn’t so much a dead-end defense of Biden as a
reality check that what was happening in DC was pretty different from
what was happening at home. And, again, not absolute resistance, as she
seemed to put it, more just, “hold on a second, what are we talking
about here?” After that she’s shifted to a more equivocal stance, mainly
saying we need to find a way to get back to bashing Donald Trump.
Before we get down into the weeds, we need to acknowledge maybe
the most obvious point: Clinton in '98; Franken in 2018; Biden in 2024. I
might need to check Wikipedia to make sure, but I'm reasonably certain
all three of those politicians were Democrats. To find a comparable case
with Republican, you probably need to go back 50 years to the
presidency of Richard Nixon. For a particularly informative point of
comparison, this is not the first time we have seen an incumbent
president who has battled rumors about age and decline stumble in an
initial debate, but this is the first time the New Yorker has responded
by suggesting we consider the 25th amendment. [Emphasis added.]
Despite
trailing far behind Reagan in the polls leading up to the debate,
Mondale exceeded expectations and emerged as the clear winner of the
first debate. According to a Newsweek/Gallup poll, 54 percent of
debate-watchers favored Mondale, while only 35 percent sided with
Reagan. President Reagan was perceived as confused and tired during the
debate, whereas Mondale demonstrated articulate communication. This
praised performance briefly revitalized the Mondale campaign, narrowing
Reagan's lead in the polls by seven points.
This is not to suggest that the establishment press is biased against Democrats, at least not in the conventional sense, but that's the way it plays out in practice. Decades of working the ref now totally internalized. A profoundly flawed of journalistic ethics. Republican skill at messaging and setting the agenda. Probably most of all a herd mentality so powerful that lockstep is almost unavoidable while independent thought is vanishingly rare.
The use of the terms 'ego' and 'vindication' are extraordinarily insightful on Marshall's part. If you go back through the interviews and memoirs of editors and publisher of the New York Times (which generally speaks for the establishment press), you will see a great deal of regret over coming off badly, over being wrong, but virtually no regret over decisions like teaming with Steve Bannon or giving heavy coverage to leaks which everyone in the newsroom knew were part of a Kremlin operation to influence the election.
We know this about the NYT newsroom because one reporter, Amy Chozick , has stepped up and acknowledged her role in the election of Trump. As far as I know, no editor with the paper has done the same.
It is difficult to overstate how humiliating the past decade has been for the establishment press going all the way back to 2015 when the standard narrative was that Donald Trump could never get the Republican nomination. Since then, the narrative has been that there was no way for Trump to beat DeSantis, Dobbs would not be a big deal in the upcoming elections, inflation and Biden's unpopularity would devastate the Democrats in the midterm, Gaza would continue to grow as a political issue, "sure, abortion was a big deal in the midterms, the people are starting to forget about it," Biden would never catch up with Trump in the polls.
(I was tempted to mention how the New York Times called the Russian military lean and lethal at the beginning of the Ukraine war, but you know me, I hate to pile up on.)
The establishment press and most of all the New York Times hates to be embarrassed. I'm not talking about normal levels of aversion. I mean they genuinely hate it. The idea that this is the best paper in the nation is fundamental to its culture and to the sense of identity of many who work there. Self-congratulation has become a verbal tic for these poeple. They don't even hear themselves doing it anymore.
Whenever the press does something that seems to undermine its presumed political leanings, ask yourself "does this make them look good?" Case in point, within days of the decision, the New York Times and Politico jumped on the narrative that Dobbs wouldn't matter and they have been trying to shore it up ever since. Recently, the NYT has been pushing the idea that Donald Trump has successfully pivoted to the center on reproductive rights and have downplayed or failed to mention entirely tons of conflicting evidence such as Trump continuing to brag about overturning Roe V Wade or telling increasingly fantastic stories about infanticide in blue states. The New York Times is clearly a pro-choice paper, but it's safe to say that they care more about not being caught in a mistake than they do about women's lives.
One more point. Politicians and the press corps have always had an insular and incestuous relationship. In the Internet age it has only got worse. This has led not only to a growing disconnect between those in the bubble and those outside of it; it has led to a dunning Kruger effect around that disconnect. They don't know how little they know, which is one of the reasons why their response to the 2016 election was to put pith helmets on their reporters and send them to the diners of middle America.
Back in 1998, just as the feeding frenzy was cresting, you would see journalists and pundits confused, even stunned, at how little the rest of America cared about an extramarital affair. They would shake their heads and ask what were people thinking, not even considering the possibility that it was they and not everyone else who were going crazy.
First off, it's a 1961 documentary about what researchers and technocrats thought the future would be like. Postwar beliefs and attitudes about progress and technology are a long-standing obsession here at the blog. As the title quote indicates, the program captures the era's schizophrenic optimism, the idea that if we could avoid nuclear Armageddon, we'd be unstoppable.
For an added touch of relevance, the show's first half is focused on the founding of BrasÃlia.
Given that establishing new cities (or at least, commissioning CGI renderings of new cities) has recently come back into fashion among plutocrats and dictators, it's useful to see how the real thing was done.
However,
the East Solano Plan, as proposed, can offer a model for how to build
new cities with the whole ecosystem in mind, intentionally: dense
housing, paired with walkable and transit-accessible necessities and
amenities like jobs, parks, daycares, shops, and services.
The advocates for this project have gone on at great length about all the great ideas and innovations in this proposal, how walkable and sustainable it will be, how the planners have thought through smart ways to use public spaces and encourage local dining and culture, but before we go down the rabbit hole and pursue the feasibility and impact of each of these ideas, this is a good time to step back and remind ourselves why density is considered a good thing and sprawl bad.
There are a lot of arguments for densification. It decreases the footprint required for housing. It reduces commuting time. It reduces the need for additional roads and other transportation infrastructure. It reduces carbon emissions and other pollution.
While these are all valid, all but the first (and in the West, probably least important) depend on how we define density. If were just talking about having a bunch of people living very close to each other, but still driving considerable distances work, shop, dine, etc., then our densification has accomplished little, and may have actually made things worse.
That last point is not just hypothetical. Though we can go back and forth on the magnitude, we note there are cases of new housing in San Francisco being taken by people who worked and previously lived in Silicon Valley. Assuming they were not fully remote, the result was to increase the time and distance being driven and all the negative externalities that go with that.
Now let's take a look at the Solano County project. We'll need more precise details and in-depth traffic impact studies to be more exact, but we are looking at a site roughly halfway between San Francisco/Oakland and Sacramento, slightly closer to the latter, with commute times ranging from 45 to an hour and 15 minutes. It will probably be forty-five minutes to an hour away from University of California at Davis. About the same to Stockton.
Though San Francisco is somewhat smaller and population than most people seem to think, when combined with Oakland we are still talking about well over a million people. Sacramento is about half that but, being the state capital, it tends to punch above its weight. Stockton has over three hundred thousand. If you were looking to establish an exurb to service all of these areas, this is where you'd put it.
And not to put too fine a point on it, exurbs are bad.
Keep in mind that there will be no passenger rail service to this new town for the foreseeable future and that traveling by bus will inevitably make these commute times longer even assuming excellent service. How likely are people to live here without a car? Remote work complicates the picture a bit but presumably most of the residents will work in either Sacramento, Stockton, or the Bay Area. We can easily be talking about over 150 to 250 miles a week of commuting. What about shopping, dining, entertainment, and other services? Even given the most optimistic estimates, for years to come this will still be a relatively small town that can't hope to compete with the major cities on either side.
No matter how densely packed or efficiently laid out this town is, no matter how well designed and innovative the local transportation system is, any conceivable savings will be dwarfed by the fact that this is an exurb.
Other investors include Nat Friedman, a co-founder of California YIMBY and a current board member. Brian Hanlon, who leads the organization, said Friedman had no influence on California YIMBY’s endorsing of the East Solano Plan.
