Free TV blogging -- suspicion confirmed

This was an AV club day. A musician friend needed some help digitizing various videos in various formats so we picked up an adapter at Fry's (after being told by four different salespeople that they didn't have it) and spent the rest of the afternoon cannibalizing cables and rearranging equipment. (Worked great, by the way.)

The adapter came with a very small antenna that allowed you to watch broadcast television on your PC (I tried it my laptop and got almost 100 channels). After we'd captured the video clips he needed, we decided to hook up the antenna to his new big screen TV and check out the results. There was a dedicated connection for over the air so you could switch back and forth two versions of the same network feed, one coming over the antenna, the other coming through the Time Warner digital cable box.

I had expected the picture quality to be indistinguishable but we both immediately noticed the difference. The broadcast signal, picked up through a small, cheap antenna that basically came as a extra with a hybrid TV stick, was clearly better than the picture Time Warner charged hundreds of dollars a year for.

This anecdote would be a good stepping-off point if you wanted to address some big questions like media consolidation, bundling (both of services and content), the hard lot of orphan technologies or the wretched state consumer reporting. For now though, I'm just going to leave it as an experiment for our viewers at home: if you have a television set made in the last five years and a set of rabbit ears made in the last fifty, plug the antenna coaxial into the jack marked AIR and see what you get. It takes very little time and it might end up saving you a few hundred dollars a year.

I'll be coming back to this...

From John Hechinger:

From 1993 to 2009, U.S. universities added bureaucrats 10 times faster than they added tenured faculty.

Stupid, horrible people are not interesting; intelligent, decent people doing stupid, horrible things are.

Some recent activity here at Stat Views has got me thinking about a fairly obvious distinction that still somehow has a way of getting lost

Most bloggers (myself included) spend a lot of time singling out someone for the idiotic or offensive. These posts are fun and the targets often have it coming but there are two things to remember (and God knows this applies to me as much as anyone):

1. It's not that difficult to find an idiot or jerk if you're really looking;

2. There is nothing particularly notable about an idiot acting stupid or a jerk acting obnoxious.

What's interesting and potentially important is when someone who's not at idiot acts like one (analogous arguments hold for jerks and scoundrels for the rest of this post). This isn't just a case of hating the sin and not the sinner; it's more a question of causal reasoning. When a stupid person does something stupid it requires no explanation but when an intelligent person does something stupid (or better yet, engages in a pattern of stupidity), it suggests that something happened to cause a deviation from the expected. That deviation begs a cause.

For example in the 2000 election coverage, the journalistic lapses mentioned previously are interesting because the journalists involved were both professional and highly respected and had risen to the top of a very competitive profession. If a group of high school reporters had propagated errors in a school election and had biased their coverage because of social cliques and because one candidate had given them small gifts and compliments that would not be of any real interest.

What made this interesting and, to use an often misused phrase, significant was the fact that given the initial assumptions we would normally make about these respected and experienced journalists, what we saw was extremely unlikely. So unlikely it demanded an explanation

In this case various social psych phenomena did fit what we observed. Authority figures within the journalistic click were strongly opposed to Gore. Reciprocation meant that Bush's special treatment of the press corps would be returned. Bush's likability relative to Gore meant that he was likely to receive preferential treatment. Social norming meant that these behaviors would be internalized and repeated

Just to spell things out, what's interesting here is the way that one hypothesis (the Washington press corps was professional and impartial) fit the data badly while another (social dynamics were influencing journalists) fit the data well.

Sometimes what's interesting is neither the person or the act but the reaction to it. For example there was nothing that out of the ordinary about Timothy Noah complaining about the boss who fired him, there was however something strange about the way Politico reacted to Noah's complaint

By the same token there's nothing particularly interesting about a high school student writing a sarcastic essay about the schools that rejected her application. What is interesting is the way that essay illustrates an anticipated reaction among people of a certain social class to changes in the way students are admitted to prestigious schools.

It's easy for the reader (and too often the writer) to lose sight of what's going on. If they rise above the look-at-the-moron humor, posts about stupidity generally need to be a kind of significance test. Start with the assumption that "complete idiots are rare" and seldom make it through demanding selection processes, then, if you are faced with extreme stupidity, ask yourself how likely it is that someone that dim would have reached his or her position. At a p value of around 0.01, it's time to start looking for alternative explanations.

[note: I tried something new with this post, dictating the first draft to my I-phone. I found if I spoke very slowly and enunciated every syllable, the results were acceptable though I did get a couple of odd errors like cherlist for journalist (and, yes, 'cherlist' is a new one on me). I believe I caught all of the Siri-isms but if you see a complete non sequitur, it was probably supposed to be something else.]

Why I remain skeptical about fully private health care

Austin Frakt:

But the problem here is far worse than that. A shockingly large proportion of hospitals could not even report a price when asked. That’s not true of very many other industries. Typically, when someone is ready to buy, someone else is prepared to offer a quote. Not being able to produce one is a very unusual market feature.
 

So not only do you have the problems of trying to comparison shop when the seller has an incentive to make the price hard to find.  You actually have to take a leap of faith and hope that the final price is reasonable -- a gamble that it is hard to imagine doing with other goods and services of the same price point as a hip replacement (the example Frakt was talking about above).

Would you drive a car off the lot in hopes that it was cheaper than expected? 

And how do you apply market pressure when you can't actually use competition to select prices? 

The ever growing to-blog list

Something on the optimal partitioning of time based on this from Neal Stephenson and John D. Cook.

Mental Floss lists sometimes look a bit too good to be true but this list of scientific accidents would be a nice starting place for a post on the importance of open-ended research.

It's just possible that video gamers are over-represented in online polls.

The final chapter the JCP saga? We've already covered this as a fitness landscape problem, now we can talk about the dubious record of the great man theory of business management.

A whole thread on this excellent piece by E.O. Wilson on how much math a scientist really needs and this follow-up by Paul Krugman on the role of intuition.

Swords and Wizardry

Long term readers may know that I am interested in Table top RPGs and Mark is actually a published game designer (Kruzno).  It has been a while since I did a gaming post but there is a fun movement afoot to honor a small publisher that has been putting out some high quality books.

Erik Tenkar, of Tenkar's Tavern blog seems to be the nexus of an appreciation day that has been gathering steam.  So if you want to see something different, drop by and say hi. 

Cohort effects

Kevin Drum has a nice piece about recent increases in social security disability. 
His main hypothesis should be quite familiar to epidemiologists: that the increase is benefits is largely driven by cohort effects (due to the aging of a large demographic bulge in the United States population). Given how closely current payouts match 1996 projections, that isn't an unreasonable stance.

There are some small upticks recently, but these could be due to marginal workers in the face of a lengthy recession. Workers who would normally be border-line might prefer to work (given that working has a very positive halo on self-image in American culture) but lose their jobs due to the general economic downturn.

Is this a problem?

Well, only if you have a plan to employ 57-year olds with degenerative disk disease, or similar mobility restricting conditions. Otherwise, what really is the point of targeting this group at this time?

Obesity, genes and environment

Via Thomas Lumley:

In fact, just about the only completely uncontroversial fact about the increase in obesity is that it is entirely due to environmental changes of some sort. There’s disagreement on precisely which environmental changes, and on the likely public health impact, but not on the general principle. The reason is very simple: the genes of this generation’s children came from their parents, with almost no changes. There simply hasn’t been enough time for genetic differences to contribute.
 

This is absolutely correct.  Now it is possible that some genes make particular individuals more susceptible to particular environment insults.  But then it is unclear what the "cause" of the epidemic is: the susceptibility or the actual exposure.  In infectious diseases we are quite clear that some people are immune to some infectious diseases.  But if a particular individual becomes sick with a disease, it makes a lot more sense to blame the pathogen and not the genetic vulnerability of the person.

So when we see such a huge change in the prevalence of a chronic disease (like obesity) it makes a lot more sense to ask what is the underlying exposure.  In the same sense, I am unimpressed with arguments from things like self-discipline.  It is more probable that the current generation is more dissolute than the preceding one, but it seems unlikely that you are uniquely dissolute from a historical perspective. 

Quote(s) of the day

[See update]

High school senior Suzy Lee Weiss has a piece in the Wall Street Journal (Gawker does a good job summarizing. If you're a true glutton for punishment, you can follow their link to the original). The tone is jokey in an unconvincing way (mock bitterness coming off as all too real). The primary targets are people who have it easy because they're, you know, different (girls who wear headscarves, for instance). Those who do charitable work also get a good going over.

It was, however, this bit that really caught my eye.

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.

Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself!

Putting aside the apparent confusion over necessary and sufficient conditions, what's striking is item four on the list, buried between athletics and lesbian mothers. The humor in this piece is not subtle. I'm pretty that Weiss really does feel that a lack of academic achievement shouldn't count against her (yes, I realize that there are serious people who argue that we should use things other than test scores to assess a student, but Weiss spends the rest of the essay mocking most of these alternate measures).

...

I was going to stop there -- that's why there's a '(s)' in the title -- but as I was giving Weiss' op-ed one more read-through to make sure I wasn't being too harsh, I came across this:

Or at least hop to an internship. Get a precocious-sounding title to put on your resume. "Assistant Director of Mail Services." "Chairwoman of Coffee Logistics." I could have been a gopher in the office of someone I was related to. Work experience!

While on the subject of family connections, here's an interesting coincidence: this ordinary high school student who gets an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal happens to be the sister of a former Wall Street Journal features editor.

What are the odds?

UPDATE: Via a comment at Monkey Cage, this San Francisco Chronicle story puts Weiss' SATs at a respectable 2120. Not "killer" but high enough to make a Harvard application worth a shot. She was also a Senate page from a politically well connected family which makes the gopher comment a bit odd as well.

Still, for the record, Weiss was a strong candidate. I can understand her disappointment.

Arthur Godfrey, Marshall McLuhan and the educational topic of the day

There's a great quote from Arthur Godfrey which, unfortunately I'll have to paraphrase from memory. Godfrey, who was, by some standards, the most successful broadcaster ever, said his informal, intimate style came from the realization that radio personalities in the early Thirties talked as though they were addressing a roomful of people but most of the people who were actually listening to the radio (rather than talking to each other) were by themselves.

Godfrey was perhaps the first major broadcaster to think about broadcast media in the modern medium-is-the-message sense. This understanding extended to television as well. In the late Forties and early Fifties, Godfrey was the dominant personality of that medium as well.

Of course, in 1931, all recorded and broadcast media were fairly new. Now we've had about a century to think most of this through. Even Understanding Media is almost fifty years old. We have fully internalized the idea that different media are... different. No one but the hopelessly naive would suggest that what works in a play would work in a movie or that what works in a movie would work on TV or that what works on TV would work on the internet.

Except in education. Pick up the New York Times and you'll find not one but two Op-ed columnists whose writings about MOOCs aren't just pre-McLuhan, they're pre-Godfrey, and Friedman and Brooks are no worse than most people covering the topic.

We have decades of experience in educational media and distance learning. If we build on that we have the opportunity to revolutionize education. If we ignore it, all we're likely to do is enrich hucksters and waste students' time.

Just two more on journalistic tribalism and I'll change the subject

I was planning to give the topic a break for a while after these harsh (though I hope justified) posts on Timothy Noah and Jack Shafer, but these two recent stories (both via TPM) are simply too apt to leave out of a discussion of the increasingly unhealthy culture and social dynamics of journalism.

The first involves a topic hit briefly in the second post, Michael Kelly's handling of the Stephen Glass scandal, discussed here by Tom Scocca as part of a larger piece on Kelly and Iraq.

Remembering Kelly in 2004, the editor of his posthumous collected works, Things Worth Fighting For, wrote about the mystery of “the two Michaels”—the subtle reporter and the hectoring columnist. There were more like three Kellys: the loving and loyal personal Kelly; the impish, incisive, and sometimes courageous observer; and the nasty, often petty polemicist, who wrote things for effect that he knew were untrue. But they blended into each other, and not to his benefit.

It was Kelly’s notion of collegial devotion that led him to brutally defend his New Republic protege Stephen Glass, past the bitter end, refusing to concede to Buzz Bissinger that a smear Glass had written about the healthy-eating activist Michael Jacobson, in a story admitted to have been fabricated, was inaccurate.

When interviewed, Kelly said that he would gladly apologize to Jacobson for the opening anecdote—as long as he was given definitive proof of its embellishment.

So he shared with Sullivan, who had originally hired Glass, the distinction of an active role in two of the worst failures of journalism in a generation. Perhaps, like Sullivan, he would have changed his position on Iraq, had he lived to see our military might losing control, the easy liberation collapsing into hell, Saddam’s torture prisons reopening with American torturers. What might he have written, if he’d had the chance to engage with the terrible truths of this past decade? What might a hundred thousand other people have done, if they’d lived too?

The notion of loyalty comes up a lot when people remember Kelly. It's a word with highly positive connotations but a somewhat spotty record. You'll hear it used to describe people sticking with down and out friends but also to explain why clean cops cover up for dirty ones. As a general rule, when loyalty means always siding with the insider in an inter-group conflict, it's a bad and potentially dangerous thing.

If you look at this in terms of the interests of subjects, journalists and readers, Kelly's loyalty expressed itself almost solely as putting journalists' interest above those of  their subjects and readers. Both in the Glass affair and in his own writings, Kelly placed a low value on seeing a subject treated fairly or a reader informed truthfully. Despite this, even after the Glass scandal, Kelly remained a tremendously well respected member of the journalistic establishment.

The second involves a favorite Kelly target, Al Gore and the ultimate DC insider, Bob Woodward:

He also told an unflattering, but amusing story about sitting next to former Vice President Al Gore at a dinner, saying being with him was “taxing,” and added, “To be really honest, it’s unpleasant.”

Woodward said Gore pressed him on why the journalist didn’t go after Bush, who beat Gore in the 2000 presidential election, over the war in Iraq.

Gore was a former reporter before becoming a politician, and “he thinks he invented [reporting] also,” Woodward joked in reference to an often misquoted statement that the ex-vice president claimed he invented the Internet.

I don't want to dig through the whole sordid history again but here's a quick recap. Al Gore was strongly disliked by much of the DC press (most notably by the highly influential Kelly). Probably not coincidentally, the coverage of Gore's campaign was marked by the creation and propagation of various misquotes and factual errors.

What's interesting here is Woodward's ability to tune out more than a decade of revelations about the 2000 election. When faced with professional criticism, he responds by dismissing the critic with a widely debunked claim that originated from a string of professional lapses by his immediate colleagues.

These are all signs of a profession in trouble.

An anecdote on standardized testing

From Yahoo:

High school junior, Kyron Birdine of Arlington, Texas was suspended for tweeting a photo of his one sentence essay answer on the STAAR exam. As reported by WFAA News 8, Birdine used his iPad to snap a shot of his answer, "I have the TAKS test to study for, not this unneeded craziness." He filled out the rest of the page with the word “YOLO” ("You only live once") and a happy face emoticon. The tweet was sent to the Arlington Independent School District (ISD) and the Texas Education Agency as a protest against the new STAAR test. About the test Birdine said, "It wasn't for a grade. Colleges don't see it. It didn’t help, it didn't benefit my personal life at all."

The STAAR, State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, standardized test is a new testing program which is used by the state to evaluate educational outcomes for those entering the ninth grade in the 2011-2012 school year. Those students entering the ninth grade before that school year, like Birdine, are being issued the test to help perfect future versions of the exam. In Birdine’s case, the STAAR test does not impact graduation, instead he will be graduating under the TAKS, Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, testing standards.

A few quick points

1. Standardized tests take a great deal of valuable time away from everyone involved in the educational process -- students, teachers and administrators. That doesn't mean that these tests aren't worth the trouble but it does mean there are costs to consider;

2. Standardized test data measure a combination of factors including focus and motivation. The difference between a high scoring class and a low scoring class often has less to do with what the students learned and more to do with the teacher's ability to convince students who have no real incentive to do well not to ABCD their way through the test. When students approach these tests the way Birdine did, it can be extraordinarily difficult to glean useful information from them;

3. Birdine was not punished for a "breach of security" as administrators claimed; he was punished for making a legitimate protest. He knows it; they know it; everybody knows it. I have had mostly good experiences with principals and superintendents but there are certainly administrators out there who are inclined to use their power to silence critics and to advance their own interests over those of their students (and remember, some of these top positions pay damned good money). Though seldom put in so many words, one of the central tenets of movement reformers is the belief that administrators should be given more power. I'd argue some administrators are already abusing the power they have.

More on journalistic tribalism

Having brought up the charge in a previous post, I should probably take a minute to spell out exactly what I'm talking about. I'm using a very broad reading of the term 'tribalism' (perhaps so broad I should say something like 'tribalism and other social psych phenomena'). The traits I'm thinking of include:

1. Us/them mentality;

2. Excessive reliance on in-group social norms;

3. Deferring to and preserving hierarchies;

and as a consequence

4,   A tendency to use different standards to judge interactions based on the relative positions of the parties.

There is inevitably going to be a degree of subjectivity when deciding who goes where in the hierarchy, but I think it's fairly safe to say that Maureen Dowd and (till his death) Michael Kelly were in the innermost circle with writers like David Brooks and most prominent, established Washington and, to a lesser degree, New York journalists fairly close.

In this tribal model, it makes perfect sense that Politico would view Chris Hughes' (outsider) request for a small change in the copy of Timothy Noah (insider) as a major affront. It also explains Politico's attacks on Nate Silver (outsider) when his work started making established pundits (insiders) look bad.

The press corps's treatment of Al Gore in 2000 is another case in point. Following the lead of Dowd and Kelly and reinforced by a general dislike of the candidate, the group quickly established social norms that justified violating the most basic standards of accuracy and fairness.

The poster child for this kind of journalistic tribalism is Jack Shafer, or at least he was a few years ago when I was first experimenting with blogging. One of my main topics was the press's inability to face up to its problems and Shafer was the gift that kept on giving (I haven't read him much since). That blog is gone now but I still have my notes so here are some highlights.

Shafer was openly disdainful of readers and generally dismissive of their interests which is an extraordinary starting point for a journalism critic. Consider this passage from the aptly named "Why I Don't Trust Readers"

I'm all for higher standards, but I draw the line when journalists start getting more complaints about less serious professional lapses. Serious: Plagiarism, willful distortion, pattern of significant errors, bribe-taking. Not serious: campaign donations in the low three-figures for reporters distant from that beat; appearance of conflict of interest; a point of view; friendships with the rich and powerful.

First, notice the first item on the list. Plagiarism is certainly a serious offense, but the other serious offenses are the sort of things that can destroy people's lives, conceal crimes and enable corruption. Even more interesting is what didn't make the list: unintentional distortion due to laziness or bias; patterns of minor errors; isolated cases of serious errors due to negligence; selective reporting (as long as it doesn't rise to the level of distortion); failure to dig into important aspects of a story; cozy relationships with subjects as long as it doesn't involve the quid pro quo of a bribe.

What's important here was the victimology. In plagiarism, the primary victim is a fellow journalist. In all of these other cases, the primary victim is either the subject or the reader. Shafer was a tribalist and his main objective was almost always the defense of his tribe and its hierarchy.

There's a remarkable inverse correlation between the rank of Shafer's subjects and the harshness with which he treats them.  This is particularly apparent when different subjects of the same article have different positions. Shafer provided an excellent example when he wrote a post complaining about liberals writing books that actually called conservatives liars in the titles.

The books were Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,  Joe Conason's Big Lies and David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush. Of these three, Conason was something of a pariah (Shafer dismissed him as a Clinton apologist) and Franken was clearly a journalistic outsider. Corn, on the other hand, was very much an insider in the Washington press corp (Shafer even described him as a friend in the post).

Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that Shafer finds a way to shield Corn from much of the blast.

This criticism applies more to Franken and Conason than it does Corn—you can't expect a book about Bush's lies to also be about Clinton's lies. And Corn acknowledges in his intro that Bush isn't the first White House liar and that Clinton lied, too. 

Of course, you could easily make a similar but more persuasive argument in Franken's behalf. Lies was largely focused on the relationship between the GOP and conservative media and since the book was published in 2003 when there was no Air America and MSNBC was just starting to experiment with liberal programming, there was no way to provide similar examples on the left.  Just to be clear, I'm not making that argument; I'm only saying that it's just as viable as the one makes for Corn.

For an even more dramatic bit of paired data, consider two obituaries Shafer wrote, separated by only a few months. The first was for Walter Annenberg, best known as a philanthropist and founder of TV Guide. The second was for Michael Kelly, journalist and former editor of the New Republic. Once again there's a clear hierarchical distance between the subjects: Annenberg, though decades earlier a power in publishing and to his death a major force in philanthropy, was not a journalistic insider; Kelly, on the other hand was about as inside as you can get.

As you've probably guessed by now, Shafer's approach to these two obituaries differs sharply. Though they don't fully capture the difference, the epitaphs give a good indication of the respective tones:

Michael Kelly: "Husband. Father. Journalist"

Walter Annenberg: "Billionaire Son of Mobster, Enemy of Journalism, and Nixon Toady Exits for Hell—Forced To Leave Picassos and van Goghs at Metropolitan Museum."

The contrast is sharpest when Shafer addresses journalistic scandals and cozy relationships with controversial right wing politicians, areas where there are definite parallels between the two men. Shafer actually explains away the New Republic/Glass scandal as an instance of Kelly being too loyal for his own good.

Shafer often judges figures on the periphery of the journalistic establishment based on a much higher standard than "Plagiarism, willful distortion, pattern of significant errors, bribe-taking." For someone like Larry King, a few disputable errors and minor discrepancies (such as changing the date of an incident from 1972 to 1971 when retelling an anecdote) merit an entire column. (It's worth noting that this column ran in the middle of 2009, a period when the coverage of politics, the economy and the European crisis were raising all sorts of journalistic questions, questions that didn't get a lot of space in Shafer's column. This raises the issue of trivialism in media criticism -- see On the Media for a myriad of examples -- but that's a topic for another thread.)

If marginal figures committing minor offenses are treated harshly by Shafer, what happens when someone at the top of the hierarchy does something that Shafer normally considers a serious offense like plagiarism? We got an answer to that one when Maureen Dowd was caught lifting a passage from Josh Marshall.

Here's her explanation in Bloggasm:

“i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.”

And here Shafer explains why it's not so bad:

1. She responded promptly to the charge of plagiarism when confronted by the Huffington Post and Politico. (Many plagiarists go into hiding or deny getting material from other sources.)

2. She and her paper quickly amended her column and published a correction (although the correction is a little soft for my taste).

3. Her explanation of how the plagiarism happened seems plausible—if a tad incomplete.

4. She's not yet used the explanation as an excuse, nor has she said it's "time to move on."

5. She's not yet protested that her lifting wasn't plagiarism.

6. She's taking her lumps and not whining about it.

And here was my response at the time:

1. 'Responded.' Not to be confused with 'confessed,' 'owned up,' 'took responsibility,' or any phrase that uses a form of the word 'plagiarism.'
2. "[A] little soft"?
3. Yeah, near verbatim quotes make it through convoluted processes all the time.
4. "[M]y friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me." -- What exactly would an excuse look like?
5. No, she just implied it wasn't plagiarism. That definitely gives her the moral high ground.
6. What a trooper.

(I apologize for the tone. I was in a snarky phase, but I'm trying to play nicer these days.)

I've spent a lot of time on Shafer because he's a good example,  I was familiar with his work and, as a media critic, he has an important role in journalism's self-correction process, but he's is not an isolated case, nor is he the worst of bunch (particularly not since the rise of Politico).

The point of all this is that journalism has a problem with tribalism and other social dynamics. These things are affecting objectivity, credibility and quality. What's worse, journalists seem to have so internalized the underlying mindset to such a degree that most of them don't even realize what's going on.

Always read the fine print.

As a follow-up to the More on Libertarian priorities post, here are the actual factors that played into the freedom index:

Fiscal Policy (35.3%)

 The fiscal policy dimension consists of the following categories: Tax Burden (28.6%), Government Employment (2.8%), Government Spending (1.9%), Government Debt (1.2%), and Fiscal Decentralization (0.9%).

Regulatory Policy (32.0%)

 The regulatory policy dimension consists of the following categories: Freedom from Tort Abuse (11.5%), Property Right Protection (7.6%), Health Insurance Freedom (5.4%), Labor Market Freedom (3.8%), Occupational Licensing Freedom (1.7%), Miscellaneous Regulatory Freedom (1.3%), and Cable and Telecom Freedom (0.8%).

Personal Freedom (32.7%)

 Personal freedom dimension consists of the following categories: Victimless Crime Freedom (9.8%), Gun Control Freedom (6.6%), Tobacco Freedom (4.1%), Alcohol Freedom (2.8%), Marriage Freedom (2.1%), Marijuana and Salvia Freedom (2.1%), Gambling Freedom (2.0%), Education Policy (1.9%), Civil Liberties (0.6%), Travel Freedom (0.5%), Asset Forfeiture Freedom (0.1%), and Campaign Finance Freedom (0.02%).

So the single largest component of the Freedom index is "Tax Burden" (28.6%) followed by "Freedom from Tort Abuse" (11.5%).  Yet I had always assumed that the Libertarian alternative to government regulation was to allow lawsuits to proceed?  What other mechanism do they have for solving disputes that are resistant to amicable resolution? 

Meanwhile, "Assest Forfeiture Freedom" (at 0.1%) suddenly looks like the way to finance the freest possible government as you cna be awful on this scale and still do pretty well as Tax Burden is 286 times as important.  One can go on and ask about things like "Freedom from discrimination" but the real acid test is what are the most important parts of the index.  The largest category is Fiscal Policy and it is dominated by less government spending.  That may actually be a libertarian goal (under theories like the Night Watchman State) but that seems to conflate political preferences with actual empirical measures of freedom. 

More on libertarian priorities

I recently had a post where I wondered about what Libertarians in the United States focused their attention on.  It seems I am not alone. Consider these examples:

Personally, I do think freedom is important so fortunately we can salvage the concept from the wreckage of Mercatus. Some of the problem here arise from arbitrary weighting of different categories in order to simultaneously preserve libertarianism as a distinct brand and also preserve libertarianism's strong alliance with social conservatism. Consequently, a gay man's freedom to marry the love of his life is given some weight in the rankings but less than his right to purchase a gun with minimal hassle. A woman's right to terminate a pregnancy or a doctor's right to offer a pregnant woman treatment she considers appropriate are given zero weight. You might think at first that abortion rights are given zero weight for metaphysical reasons rather than reasons of cultural politics, but it turns out that permissive homeschooling laws are given weight as a factor in freedom. Children, in other words, are considered fully autonomous agents whose rights the state must safeguard vis-a-vis their own parents from birth until conception at which point they lose autonomy until graduation from high school.

.  I think he meant from conception until birth, above.  And also consider his later examples:

Nor is there any coherent treatment of the question your "freedom" to trample all over my legitimate interests. New Hampshire, for example, ranks number one in "travel freedom" in part because New Hampshire has lax laws about your right to engage in the dangerous practice of driving while talking on a cell phone. Obviously states attempt to curb unsafe driving in part out of paternalistic interests, but also because safe drivers have a strong interest in not seeing our property or our persons destroyed by unsafe driving. One possible reply is that instead of prophylactic rules about safe driving practices we could let people drive how they want and address claims of harm ex post. But "freedom from tort abuse"—i.e, making it difficult for the victims of the reckless behavior of others to secure financial compensation—is considered a dimension of freedom. What's more, while Mercatus does consider the right to buy cheap beer to be an important dimension of freedom and also considers the right to dangerously talk on your phone while driving a car, they don't consider the right to drive while drunk to be an important dimension of freedom. Presumably because that would be considered beyond the pale politically.

Part of the problem here is that freedom is a very broad concept and different people can have very different weighting functions on what they see as being the key freedoms.  It is also a factor in economic opportunity -- without the ability to feed and clothe oneself, it is rather academic how much the locals enforce no cell phone use while driving. 

But this is precisely what I was talking about. The idea that Texas is less free because of municipal debt is odd.  People can be less free because they have mortgages but we normally consider the freedom to enter long term contracts to be a good thing. 

Now it may be that I do not have the whole picture.  But I look at the free states and I wonder exactly how these rankings reflect the actual experiences of the residents.