Politics and Jobs

This is Joseph.

So I think that this line of thinking is misguided:

Why? Well, the first problem is that purity tests, in general, have a tendency to be abused. The question of whether one's political beliefs make one capable of doing a job, seem like something that goes wrong. Even in this exact context. 

Now, if there is an actual act that shows a physician is acting inappropriately with respect to patient care that is different. It can also be helpful to include a broad range of marginalized voices in the discussion of priorities -- this is why we have a universal voting franchise. But "Zionism" is a very nebulous term in this context and it is going to map to a specific heritage rather more than chance alone would. I will also point out that many people see the political beliefs of their opponents odious. You may say real lives are associated with the consequences of Zionism. But the same is true of abortion rights. 

A pluralistic society needs to have room for disagreement on politics, especially with international politics. I disagree with Russia's decisions in Ukraine, but would not think of it as a good idea to interrogate the beliefs of Russian-Americans. Even if some of them might have perspectives that are more positive towards this conflict than mine are. People do not automatically become liable for actions of groups that they just happen to be distantly related to, especially if they are not members of these polities. 

I think that this crosses an important line in trying to keep a diverse and dynamic society together. 

Meet Dan O'Neill, the one person who still isn't allowed to draw Mickey Mouse

Another post for copyright month.

Gene Maddaus writing for Variety.

Dan O’Neill was 53 years ahead of his time.

In 1971, he launched a countercultural attack on Mickey Mouse. In his underground comic book, “Air Pirates Funnies,” the lovable mouse was seen smuggling drugs and performing oral sex on Minnie.

As O’Neill had hoped, Disney sued him for copyright infringement. He believed it was a legal parody. But after eight years in court, he was saddled with a judgment he could not pay. To stay out of prison, he agreed never to draw Mickey Mouse again.

“It’s still a crime for me,” said O’Neill, 81, in a phone interview from his home in Nevada City, Calif. “If I draw a picture of Mickey Mouse, I owe Walt Disney a $190,000 fine, $10,000 more for legal fees, and a year in prison.”

 

 

It's possible this agreement is no longer in effect -- I doubt very much that even Disney would try to enforce it at this point -- but the story is fascinating, and one we've talked about before.

Parody is a protected form of free speech as long as it isn't too good 

With IP law, you know in advance that the big boys are heavily favored to win. The suspense is in the legal twists and turns getting there.

From Terence Chua's thesis, "Messing with the Mouse."

In 1971, Disney sued a group of underground comic artists calling themselves the Air Pirates, who published two comics portraying Walt Disney characters in sex and drug-related situations. The resulting case lasted 8 years and ended in a settlement where both sides claimed victory. This thesis uses the case to examine the development of the law of copyright and parody as a defense and demonstrate that the court tends to rule against the parodist if the work is offensive or obscene, although these are irrelevant concerns. It also examines the case itself and the cultural and personal forces motivating the parody.

[Dan]O'Neill's affidavit was positively lyrical in justifying the artistic reasons behind Air Pirates Funnies, but it contained language that ultimately proved damaging to the Air Pirates' arguments. O'Neill stated that he drew cartoons to "relieve a basic human anxiety pattern, hysteria," by means of laughter. Mickey Mouse, he deposed, had started as a positive image, but as people grew older, it became a "non-positive adjective." To investigate why it had degenerated, O'Neill said he "chose to parody exactly the style of drawing and characters to evoke the response created by Disney (emphasis in original)."
...

[From here on, all emphasis added]

The Ninth Circuit delivered its 15-page decision on September 5, 1978, ruling three to zero against the Air Pirates on the charges of copyright infringement. Judge Walter J. Cummings, a sixty-year-old former Assistant United States Solicitor General and former partner in a Chicago-based law firm appointed to the bench by Johnson, penned the judgment. ... Cummings then considered fair use as a defense. He noted that the Pirates were not saying that the copying was not substantial enough to be infringing, merely that the infringement was defensible as an example of parody and thus fair use. Noting that Loew's case was the legal standard, the court found that Wollenberg's test of "substantial copying, combined with the fact that the portion copied constituted a substantial part of the defendant's work" that "automatically precluded the fair use doctrine" was unjustified. Such a reading would make any defense of fair use untenable, and would lead to a gap where a substantial amount was taken but not a substantial part of the defendant's work. Loew's was more properly read as "setting a threshold that eliminates from the fair use doctrine copying that is virtually verbatim," as in Jack Benny's burlesque of Gaslight. Loew's, in other words, was the upper limit to tell what was definitely not fair use. In the absence of "near-verbatim copying", the test would be Berlin's, as in whether the parodist had taken up more than was needed to "recall or conjure" the original.

The Ninth Circuit decided that the Pirates had done more than was needed. Ironically, the ubiquitous presence of Disney's characters in popular culture that made them such attractive targets was precisely why the Pirates had gone too far. Cummings wrote, "Given the widespread public recognition of the major characters involved here... very little would have been necessary to place Mickey Mouse and his image in the minds of the readers." He noted that Pirates did not parody how the characters looked, but their "personalities, their wholesomeness and their innocence." The Pirates would therefore have had a better argument if they had "paralleled... Disney characters and their actions in a manner that conjured up the particular elements of the innocence of the characters to be satirized... Here, the copying of the graphic image appears to have no other purpose than to track Disney's work... as closely as possible." Cummings dismissed the Pirates' arguments that they had to copy Disney exactly to make their point effectively. They were entitled to parody, but they were not entitled to the "best parody" they could make – that consideration had to be balanced with the rights of the copyright owner, and the Pirates had exceeded what was "necessary to place firmly in the reader's mind the parodied work and those specific attributes that are to be satirized." Because of this, Wollenberg's granting of summary judgment on copyright infringement was proper.

...

"Communiqué #1" goes on to criticize the Ninth Circuit's decision in the Air Pirates case as being too vague. Misidentifying the Ninth Circuit as the "Supreme145 Court", O'Neill quotes the court as saying that the Pirates had taken too much of the original when effecting their parody. Although "'some' says the Court, is OK... no one, including the Court, is sure how much is 'some'..." O'Neill juxtaposed this with a drawing of Mickey's head on a realistic rat's body, its tail curled around a sign that says, "Is this some?" Minnie also points to her gloved hand – which has five fingers instead of the usual cartoon four – with a caption, "Is this some?"

Something about the "best parody" section seems particularly off. It was not the juvenile and deliberately offensive attempts to shock that did the Air Pirates in but the loving homage. Though there was little that could be called copying -- only a few of the images call back directly to the source material --  O'Neill and friends beautifully captured the style and the sensibility of the original Gottfredson strips. 

One of the many ironies of this case is that had the artistic quality of the parody been worse, the defendants' legal case would have been stronger,

And that doesn't seem right. 

 

The semi-emancipation of proto-Mickey

So it finally happened. After countless successful battles involving armies lobbyists, Mickey Mouse is in the public domain... sort of. He still has trademark protection which isn't going away anytime in the foreseeable future so you can't name your amusement park Mickey Mouse-land, nor can you draw him with white gloves and red pants (It is only the 1928 Steamboat Willie version where the copyright has expired), but if you are creating a movie or TV show or comic book, you can introduce the familiar rodent as a character without being sued into oblivion by the Walt Disney company.

This is a complicated story, so some background is helpful.

From Wikipedia:

The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years. Since the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years for a work of corporate authorship. The Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier. Copyright protection for works published prior to January 1, 1978, was increased by 20 years to a total of 95 years from their publication date.

For twenty years, nothing entered the public domain.

What made the Sonny Bono Act especially egregious was the fact that it came less than a quarter century after the 1976 act which was itself a major copyright extension. For context, the previous statutory extension had been in 1909.

There was some justification for the 1976 law. Media had undergone huge innovations and those sixty-seven years and the law very much needed to be updated with respect to movies, television, etc., but the case for those extensions was far weaker, particularly with work-for-hire. What had changed was that this IP was now worth a tremendous amount of money. The middle fifty years or so of the 20th century had been stunningly fertile in terms of popular culture creating tens, probably hundreds of billions of dollars worth of intellectual property which was about to start sliding into the public domain unless action was taken.

In 1998, the impetus was obviously and almost entirely the desire of a handful of huge corporations to keep from handing back works that, for the most part, they had accumulated, almost always having paid the actual creators a fraction of the value of the original works. 

As for the wider economic impact, here's the invaluable Michael Hiltzik:

The fundamental error in this timeline is the notion that ever-longer protection is a good thing. It’s wrong on several counts. To some extent it’s based on the theory that creators (or their heirs) should be entitled to income from a work well into the distant future in order to incentivize creative artists to create.

But the truth is that the income stream from all but a tiny minority of published works largely evaporates after the first few years, and what does arrive decades in the future has a minuscule present value at the time of creation. The 20-year extension in the 1998 law, as 17 economists (including five Nobel laureates) wrote in a 2002 Supreme Court brief, provided “no significant incentive to create new works” and arguably less for existing works.

In fact, constraining entry into the public domain is a drag on creativity. 

Once a work enters the public domain, Jenkins says, “community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. ... Anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.”

In some cases, extended copyright seems to work against the public interest. Consider the stringent control exercised by the estate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — mostly his children — over his speeches and writings such as the “I Have a Dream” speech he delivered in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963.

On the day it was delivered, the speech was eligible for copyright protection through 2019. Congressional revisions extended the speech’s copyright until 2058, nearly a century after King delivered it to a massive crowd at the Lincoln Memorial and untold more viewers on television. Filmmaker Ava DuVernay had to put rewritten and paraphrased lines into the mouth of the actor portraying King in her film “Selma,” about the 1965 protests in support of the Voting Rights Act.

DuVernay’s options were limited because the King estate had sold the film rights to Steven Spielberg for a still-unproduced project. Even had she acquired the rights, she said, that might have required giving the family a voice in how King was portrayed, constraining her own artistic choices.

The next few years will be interesting. Things should be quiet for a while, but around 2034, assuming they don't try for another extension (and I doubt they'll push it that far), things will start to pop, particularly at Disney and Warner Bros. where such valuable characters as Donald Duck, Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Namor will either be in the public domain. 

 We are about to enter the golden age of trademark enforcement.

 

The very idea of claiming a candidate a year before an election has X% chance of winning is gross statistical malpractice.

[This has been sitting in the queue for a while but I think it still has another month or two on the sale-by date.]

A couple of issues make talking about predictive modeling difficult: 

Predictive range -- When we say someone accurately predicted an outcome, are we talking about an event that happened the the next day or the next year? Most are easier in the short range. Some are easier in the long (we'll all be dead) range. This has been particularly relevant with poll-based electoral predictions, where the track record for short term models has been great and long term models has been disastrous. We have an extensive history of pundits bragging about successes in the first category while hoping you'll forget about their failures in the second.

So, Is Obama Toast? by Nate Silver

Then there's modelers' luck. The problem with checking any probabilistic claim is that being right (got the outcome predicted) doesn't mean you were right (used a sound approach to estimate reasonable odds). The person who told you not to try to fill an inside straight was right and the person who told you to go for it was wrong, even if you did end up getting the card you were looking for.  

Back in 2011, Nate Silver said that, unless there was a major uptick in the economy, Obama had very little chance (think Russian Roulette odds) of winning the election. Instead, the economy was basically flat and yet the incumbent not only won but won by a comfortable margin. It is safe to say the model is wrong but was it bad or merely unlucky? Based on this article's long and admirably transparent explanation, I have to go with bad and here are some of the reasons why.

The fundamental assumption of predictive modeling is that things still work like they used to. Correlations and causal relationships from the past still hold. Data are collected in roughly the same way and the statistics derived from them have the same definitions.

The first practical implication of the fundamental assumption is that you can't push the boundaries of your data back too far. If things were two different beyond a certain point, you can't reasonably assume that they will generalize to today.

How far back you can reasonably go depends on what kinds of questions you are trying to answer and what types of data you're relying on. In terms of re-elections, 1931 is certainly too far back for any kind of meaningful comparison. This would have been 80 years before Nate Silver did his analysis which is a long time with respect to making political or social comparisons. More importantly, the way public opinion was formed and measured is enormously different. Add to that the huge outlier which was the beginning of the Great Depression.

We are even further into outlier territory with the entire presidency of FDR, especially if we're talking about the concept of re-election. (Silver goes back to 1944 in his analysis.) Truman is also problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the fact he was not technically re-elected. The same concerns apply to LBJ and Gerald Ford.

This leaves us with Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, HW Bush, Clinton, and George W Bush. 

N equals 7.

Even if we ignore the distinction between election and reelection (which is a pretty big jump) and look at all elections going back to 1952, which is about the maximum I would be comfortable with, we're still looking at 15 elections to take us to Obama versus Romney. 

N equals 15.

(If we were just looking at win/loss, one of those 15 data points is missing since we will never know who actually won the 2000 election.)

That would be a small sample under the best of circumstances, but in this case we also have messy data, major one time events like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the Watts riots and the Iranian hostage crisis, not to mention waaaaaaay more than 15 researcher degrees of freedom.

Case in point. Look at how Silver handles the 800 lb gorilla of the model.

A president’s approval rating at the beginning of his third year in office has historically had very little correlation to his eventual fate. In January 1983, Reagan had an approval rating of just 37 percent, but he won in a landslide. George H. W. Bush had a 79 percent approval rating in January 1991 and was soundly defeated. But voters start to think differently about a president over the course of his third year; they view him more on the basis of his performance and less on the hopes they had for him. These perceptions are sharpened by the beginning of the opposition party’s primary campaign, which, of course, accentuates the negatives.

A president’s approval rating toward the end of his third year, therefore, has been a decent (although imperfect [I love how Silver throws in these little qualifiers while getting further and further ahead of the data -- MP]) predictor of his chances of victory. Reagan saw his approval rating shoot up to 51 percent in November 1983 amid the V-shaped recovery from the recession of the previous year — the first sign that he was headed for a big win. Obama’s approval rating may have rebounded by a point or two from its lows after the debt-ceiling debacle — but not by much more than that. In late October, it ranged between 40 and 46 percent in different polls and averaged about 43 percent.

Look at the forks. Of the various factors we can put in the model,  we pick approval rating but the fit to our fourteen data points is still crappy, so we limit ourselves to an arbitrary interval. Silver tells a good story to justify setting the the cut-off at the end of the third year, but that's all it is, a story, and even if it's true, we have no way of knowing if that particular cut-off will be appropriate going forward.

Silver also considered

The good news is that voters have short memories. If there are hopeful signs during an election year, they may be willing to forget earlier problems. Reagan, Nixon, Eisenhower and Truman all won despite recessions earlier in their terms. Moreover, voters’ evaluations of the economy are relatively forward-looking. Even if the economy is below its full productive capacity — as it was in November 1984 when the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent, and as it certainly was in 1936, when it was still around 17 percent — voters may be willing to overlook this, provided it seems headed in the right direction.

[Though it's a bit off topic for this post. It is worth noting that Nate Silver who has become one of the leading voices in the why aren't the Democrats panicking contingent has completely reversed the position stated here. If voters really do have short economic memories and are inclined to heavily weight positive trends, Joe Biden should be sitting awfully pretty now according to the Nate Silver of 2011.]

The bad news for Obama is that he has already missed his opportunity for a V-shaped recovery, and the prospects for a U-shaped recovery seem uncertain. In October, a panel of economists polled by The Wall Street Journal forecast 2.3 percent G.D.P. growth (adjusted for inflation) in 2012, somewhat below the election-year average of 3 or 4 percent and only enough to provide for modest job creation.

To his credit, Silver did explicitly state most of his assumptions and even assigned different probabilities to different scenarios.

CASE STUDY NO. 1: ROMNEY AND STAGNANT ECONOMY
Obama approval rating in November 2011: 43% 
G.D.P. growth in 2012: 0%
Probability of winning the popular vote: Romney: 83%, Obama: 17%

We begin with the worst of these situations for Obama: Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee, and economic growth, rather than continuing along sluggishly, comes to a halt (perhaps the debt dominoes have fallen in Europe). Under these assumptions, Obama would only have a 17 percent chance — about one in six — of winning a majority of the popular vote.

His chances are slim enough in this case that if I woke up next November to discover that we would have four more years of Obama, I might ask whether there was some sort of October surprise: “Mitt in Torrid Affair With Filipina Housekeeper.” Subhead: “Illegal Immigrant Got Free Romneycare.” Then I might ask if Sarah Palin had run on the Tea Party ballot line and taken 6 percent of the vote.

...

 

In practice, voters may think about the economy as falling into one of three basic categories — Good, Bad and Getting Better — rather than along a continuum. Obama would benefit if he could make a credible case for Getting Better, something he would not be able to do in this situation. But since he’s already unable to make that case now — remember “Recovery Summer”? — it’s plausible that a deterioration in the numbers would not hurt him as much as an acceleration of growth might help him. Beating Romney with 0 percent growth would not be easy, but it might not be that much more difficult than beating him with 2 percent growth (also no piece of cake, of course).

CASE STUDY NO. 2: ROMNEY AND IMPROVING ECONOMY
Obama approval rating in November 2011: 43%
G.D.P. growth in 2012: 4%
Probability of winning the popular vote: Romney: 40%, Obama: 60%

Obama would be far better off if he could make the Getting Better case. Imagine, as before, that Romney is the nominee. But rather than going into recession, the economy grows by 4 percent next year, enough to make a real dent in the unemployment rate. This would be enough to make Obama the favorite.

But not by all that much: he’d have only about a 60/40 edge.

Why not larger? The key to understanding this one is that Obama has a lot of gravity to overcome. Voters usually put their earlier concerns aside if there is an improvement in the economic fundamentals in the election year. But there have been exceptions: growth was quite strong in 1992, but voters were still punishing George H. W. Bush for the 1990-91 recession and the jobless recovery it produced.

...

Still, the most likely eventuality in this case — enough economic growth that the White House gets to make the Getting Better case while maintaining a straight face — is a narrow win for Obama. Perhaps it would be somewhat like the one that George W. Bush secured in 2004: it would keep the network anchors up late, but it wouldn’t be close enough to put us in Recount Land.

This breakdown highlights on of the most curious aspects of Silver's model. He does not appear to have run numbers based on current economic numbers or trends (despite citing that "bad news" WSJ forecast turned out to be pretty much dead on the money). That 17% was based on the assumption of the economy getting much worse in 2012. The narrow win scenario was based on it getting much better. Neither happened...

... but Obama not only won without anywhere near the 4% GDP growth of the second scenario, he did it with a 3.9% margin and managed to get the network anchors to bed at a reasonable hour.

Silver's model could have been better but they weren't terrible -- we've seen worse -- but it never should have been built in the first place. Predictions about a presidential election serve no public good. Long term predictions about a presidential election have the added charm of being about as reliable as a magic 8-ball.

Our Annual New Year's Greeting from Windsor McCay and Little Nemo

 

Make it a good one.

Twelve years ago at the blog -- We can debate whether LLMs are really learning languages but as long as we factor in cuteness, we will always have the edge.

Friday, December 30, 2011

Yes, another talking baby video, now with informed commentary

This is actually the first half of the conversation. Both come from a blog called Twin Mama Rama and they've generated quite a bit of discussion. I found these two particularly interesting:

Hope Dickinson, MS, CCC-SLP, coordinator of the Speech-Language Pathology Services at Children’s Hospital Boston at Waltham.

These two are babbling, specifically they’re demonstrating a behavior known as “reduplicated babbling,” because the sounds used are repeated, which you can hear in their use of “da-da-da.” In a more informal way, I guess I would describe it as turn-taking with babbling, or conversational babbling.

Play talk is a healthy way for kids to develop language skills

...

It really demonstrates how very young children communicate and know how a conversation works, even before they have the words to use. They will eventually begin to replace the babbling strings with words. If you listen closely, you’ll even hear a couple of words: One says “mama” when looking at the camera, and one or both say “up” more than once when picking up a foot.

One thing they are using wonderfully is turn taking, as in first one “talks” and then pauses and the other responds. They are also imitating the various intonations we use in conversation and speaking. There is fantastic rise and fall to their pitch and tones. Sentences or exclamations end loudly and emphatically, and there is also some questioning (rising) intonation. They are using gestures to supplement their talking, much like adults do. Their body distance is even very appropriate for most Americans; not too close, but not too far either.

And from the New York Times:

“Some people believe twins have the ability to generate their own detailed language, a twin language, but it doesn’t seem to be true in terms of a fully developed language system,’’ said Stephen Camarata, professor of hearing and speech sciences at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “They are going back and forth and enjoying each other’s company, but they aren’t saying anything specific like ‘Hey, Mom’s videotaping us. Look at her hair.’ “

...

Dr. Camarata says the video is rich with examples of how children develop language. It’s filled with canonical babbling that sounds like speech because it uses vowels, consonants and syllables to mimic words. Although most healthy babies go through the same phase of language development, most of the time the conversation is one-sided because they are interacting primarily with parents or older siblings. What’s special about the twins’ exchange, he notes, is that each baby has a peer with whom to practice language.

“The thing that is remarkable is that they both have this intonation pattern,’’ he said. “It sounds like they are speaking, making a statement, asking a question. They are using those broader markers we use in language.”

He says it’s possible that the twins are re-enacting conversations they’ve witnessed in the family kitchen.

“Children are very clever at watching and learning from adults,’’ said Dr. Camarata. “You wonder if there hasn’t been a conversation between the husband and wife or other people in the kitchen that they are mimicking. The intonation patterns were almost certainly learned from the parents.”

Dr. Camarata said he finds the video particularly delightful given that he often works with children who have delayed speech as a result of autism or another disability. He said he hopes parents who see the video will be reminded to celebrate the amazing developmental milestones of their own children.

“Here are these children interacting with each other in a very spontaneous and unguided way, and there are a lot of rich things going on that are really cool,’’ he said. “You wonder in this day and age of people programming their child’s activities if we’re losing a little bit of that. I worry that we’re not looking for and celebrating these kinds of spontaneous things that our toddlers do that are really exciting and fun.”

Straussian collapse, feral disinformation, and the increasingly ineffectual GOP Establishment

See here and here (both from 2017) for our previous Straussian thread, in particular, this.

At some point though (I suspect inevitably), a couple of things happen. First, the believers become leaders. This is become blindingly obvious with Trump, but the children of Fox News have been in control of the party since at least 2010 and the roots go back further. Remember how Dick Cheney insisted while traveling that all hotel televisions be tuned to Fox News?

The second, and possibly more dangerous problem is that a propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum, often exacerbated by ratcheting mechanisms. Soon you reach a point where, even if the leaders accurately perceive the situation and realized the best solution, they can no longer reconcile that reasonable course of action with what the vast majority of their supporters have been told to believe for decades.

For anyone trying to make sense of American politics in these strange days, the good people at This American Life have put together an absolutely essential show about the intra-party turmoil in the Michigan State GOP. Even if you have no interest in the subject, TAL Remains the gold standard for this kind of long form radio journalism and this episode is no exception, but if the current state of the Republican Party and its implications for the nation is something that you've been struggling to understand, this hour will fill in a lot of gaps. 

Glass spells out the basic set-up with remarkably direct, spade = spade language.

Ira Glass

And-- maybe you saw this coming-- Karamo wins. She becomes the head of the Michigan Republican Party, the outsiderist, the grassroots-ist-- not for nothing, the Christianist. And in picking Karamo, Michigan Republicans were saying, basically, what we want as a party is somebody to lead, who, A, believes the election was stolen, and B, has no connection to any establishment political machinery of the past, which is all corrupt.

That kind of purity test is something that you see a lot among Republicans right now. In the House of Representatives in Washington, so many political fights are basically between Republicans who don't want to compromise at all, and everybody else. You see this in other Republican state parties in swing states-- Arizona, Colorado, Georgia. But no state party has taken the flying leap off the cliff that the Michigan Republicans have.

Spoiler alert: It turns out that alliances of election deniers motivated by anger, paranoia, and conspiracy theories aren't all that stable. Throw racism, islamophobia, and purity filters into the mix and things only get worse.

Michigan is one of the largest purple states in the Electoral College. It is very much not a place that the Republicans want to go into 2024 with a dysfunctional and broke organization. 

Listening to what followed, I kept getting flashes of older revolutions that turned ugly. I'm not the history guy here at the blog, but there were moments that felt so familiar, the smallness of the players contrasted with the grand historical moments they saw themselves as key parts of, the rapid formation of factions, each convinced that they were the ones who carried the true message of the revolution, the viciousness and distrust when things fell apart.

Zoe Chace

This is the problem with the coup Warren's trying to pull off. It's the problem that was baked into Karamo's version of the party from the start. This group of people all agree on some basic issues-- election fraud, less immigration, no gun control, abortion is murder, don't tell me when to wear a mask, don't tell my children what to read, and the rent is too damn high.

But what's brought them all together running this party is their lack of trust in any kind of political leadership. They are a very suspicious, conspiracy-minded group. And that's how they look at everything, including each other. Of course they can't agree on who the real enemy is of the cause they all actually believe in.

Warren Carpenter

You lied! You're a liar! You're a liar!

 [You really have to hear this to get the full effect.]

 The segment also illustrates how the once near total control that donors and the Republican establishment held over the party has waned since the rise of Trump.

Zoe Chace

Mark Forton is one of those who wanted a complete break with how it used to be. And how it used to be was that the head of the party was a super-rich Michigan guy, real estate mogul Ron Weiser. In the last few years, the party yearly budget has been something like $20 million, a chunk of which came directly from Weiser, and mostly one other rich family in Michigan-- the Devoses.

Mark Forton

We knew that if the grassroots took over the state party, that the big shooters would go. Not all of them, but we knew the DeVos family would go and Mr. Weiser would go. They're all globalist. They're all part of the same great, big mess that Michigan's in-- you know, bringing in the Chinese, battery factories. So I mean, we know they're globalists.

 

Trump, particularly Trump's story of a stolen election, plays a huge in the identities of of these people, most of whom seem to have become active since 2016, many as recently as 2020.

Zoe Chace

Warren comes off antagonistic right from the beginning, and a little manic. What he's just done-- leaking documents to the press about Kristina-- it's a big deal, though.

Zoe Chace

How are you? You got a lot going on?

Warren Carpenter

Well-- [LAUGHS] It's like you didn't read the news or something.

Zoe Chace

"It's like you didn't read the news or something," he says. That morning, the morning we spoke, September 29, Detroit News reporter Craig Mauger, an eminently fair and lightning-fast journalist, published a write-up of all the documents Warren had sent him.

The article begins, "The Michigan Republican Party had about $35,000 in its bank account in August, according to internal records that flashed new warning signs about the dire state of the GOP's finances." This is followed shortly by a quote from a former state GOP official-- "These numbers demonstrate that the party isn't just broke, but broken."

Warren is also extensively quoted in the article, which is a big betrayal of Kristina, talking to a journalist who, in her view, is just in league with the establishment trying to take her out. Warren says he dabbled in Republican politics before this movement took off, worked on a statewide campaign over 10 years ago, but not much since then, until Trump.

He loves Trump, calls him Big Daddy, and had that school board come-to-Jesus so many Republicans did around the COVID protocols-- masking in schools kind of thing. He went to January 6 after he thought he saw the election get stolen. Says he didn't go inside the Capitol, but he had such an intense experience there, that not long after, he had a mental breakdown, as he puts it.

 

Functional institutions will have mechanisms in place, some explicitly spelled out others implicit but still effectively in place, that will keep most of the incompetent, disloyal, and crazy out of leadership positions. When these mechanisms break down, the institution becomes a danger to itself and often to others.

Ten years ago at the blog -- the one time I told a major thought leader to go screw himself, Andrew Gelman decided to write a post on it.

The annual party described below did not survive the pandemic, which was perhaps just as well. It had been going on forever and was already showing its age before the plague hit.

You can find Gelman's comments here. Our follow-up post from 2014 is scheduled for tomorrow.

 

Friday, December 27, 2013

A holiday message from the creative class to Richard Florida -- screw you

Last Saturday was the big party of the year for the LA hot jazz/country blues scene. Droves of musicians, actors, writers and directors converge on a small house in Venice Beach, along with a smattering of historians and engineers (sound and software). Every year, numerous people make an allusion to the stateroom scene in Night at the Opera (and with this crowd, everyone gets the reference). There weren't any famous faces (unless you're really into jazz or roots music), but it was an accomplished crowd with Grammys, Broadway credits, glowing NYT, WSJ and NPR reviews and numerous impressive collaborations.

A few hours in, it struck me that almost all of the people at this party fell squarely into Richard Florida's creative class. In fact, most of the people I associate with on a regular basis fall into Florida's rather broad definition. What I heard last night further reinforced some things I've been observing for years now about the disconnect between the picture painted by pundits and social commentators and what it actually means to make a living through creativity in today's economy. It's a complicated situation but I think I can boil the gist down into the following fairly brief statement:

Screw you, Florida.

The super- creative core of this new class includes scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the "thought leadership" of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion-makers.

From "The Rise of the Creative Class" by Richard Florida

Florida paints a bright picture of these people and their future, with rapidly increasing numbers, influence and wealth. He goes so far as to say "Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don't." It wass hard to read something by Florida and not envy that rising class, at least it was until it hit me that he was talking about me and people I knew and our lives weren't going nearly as well as he suggested. As Thomas Frank put it "The creative class has never been more screwed."

Except for a few special cases, this may be the worst time to make a living in the arts since the emergence of modern newspapers and general interest magazines and other mass media a hundred and twenty years ago (even in the depression you had the WPA -- “Artists have to eat too”). Though we now have tools that make creating and disseminating art easier than ever, no one has come up with a viable business model that supports creation in today's economy.

With the exception of a few select areas where you can find lots of wealthy patrons, it's just not a reasonable career path. At the party this weekend, out of dozens of nationally and internationally recognized musicians, perhaps three or four were making a middle-class or better living at their craft; most were either getting by on very modest means and/or had day jobs.   Artistic professions used to have teaching to fall back on but those jobs have been getting crappier and yet harder to find over the past thirty or so years.

The picture is somewhat brighter on the STEM side, but not that much brighter. The collapse of teaching has hit us too. In the private sector, it's hit-or-miss if you're not flavor of the month and even if you are among the lucky few:

Companies (including the hungry ones) have gotten surprisingly picky;

You'll probably need a graduate degree (and the debt that goes with it);

There's little security even while you're hot;

The specialists who get the most money are also the most vulnerable to changes in tech and taste.

In other words, it's a lottery ticket and, considering the odds, the pay-off isn't all that great.

Florida's framework has rather publicly come crashing down lately, but, even at its peak, it never stood up to serious scrutiny. Like most of the utopian urbanists, his collection of anecdotes, cherry-picked statistics and wildly unjustified causal inference was only convincing because people wanted to be convinced.

 

Boxing Day blogging - - Jay Powell's wonderful Christmas present and a test for American journalists

 From Mike Konczal:

 

You are going to hear a lot of buts and qualifiers downplaying this news, but barring a major downward revision in the numbers, we have achieved the mythical soft landing with strong GDP growth, low unemployment, and an inflation rate below what we had when Joe Biden took office. No one knows if the good times will continue but happily ever after was never part of the definition. Jay Powell's Fed policy and Joe Biden's economic policy have managed to pull something off that almost all economists were telling us was impossible as recently as one year ago.

Based on any reasonable and consistent standard for newsworthiness, this should be getting huge headlines. Will it get them? 

Maybe...

And maybe not...

(and, yes, I am saying that the  New York Times is more reluctant to publish good news for Biden than the Wall Street Journal is, at least if we leave out the WSJ opinion page.)

When it comes to misperceptions about the economy, the United States is not just terribly misinformed, it is uniquely misinformed. (From the Financial Times)

 

 This is an issue of potentially catastrophic political implications and while there are probably three or four major causes, journalists have to bear a substantial part of the blame here. There are a handful of exceptions, the Los Angeles Times, American Public Media's Marketplace, TPM, individuals like John Harwood, but overall coverage of the economy has gone from alarmist and sensationalistic about the rise in inflation to far, far quieter about its impressive drop, while stories about shockingly good employment numbers and a decline in things like the racial wealth Gap  were pushed below the fold.

One of the great unquestioned truisms of journalism is that the unexpected and unusual is newsworthy. Man bites dog is the standard shorthand. But in 2023, we saw one of the most expectation-defying economic stories of the past hundred plus years, in terms of good news, most unexpected. The soft landing was perhaps the ultimate cryptid of economics , what we've described before as a Yeti and a Sasquatch riding a Loch Ness Monster , and while it was happening, many major developments were given less coverage than a literal dog bites man story.

Merry Christmas from Little Nemo

 

And make sure to drive safely.

Maybe we should state all holidays as Eve powers

 

Twelve years ago at the blog -- depressingly little has changed

There has been some improvement. That excellent LA Times series has finally gotten ocean acidification into the conversation, but it is usually mentioned in passing and, as far as I can tell, it still doesn't get the coverage in the NYT that the threat of rising sea level to West Coast cities, despite almost all of our cities having a higher elevation than New York.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

A few more thoughts on journalistic conformity

I complained in an earlier post that journalists have recently shown an alarming tendency to converge on a small set of standard stories when covering a major topic -- small sets that more often than not leave out things that we readers really ought to know about. Here's another example.

There are at least two potentially serious consequences to the amount of carbon we've been pumping into the atmosphere. The first is global warming. The second is the chemical and biological changes in the oceans.

Though it's difficult to compare the likely impact of phenomena this big and complex, the second problem is arguably on a level with the first, a point driven home in the LA Times' Pulitzer-winning series on the subject:

As industrial activity pumps massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the environment, more of the gas is being absorbed by the oceans. As a result, seawater is becoming more acidic, and a variety of sea creatures await the same dismal fate as Fabry's pteropods.

The greenhouse gas, best known for accumulating in the atmosphere and heating the planet, is entering the ocean at a rate of nearly 1 million tons per hour — 10 times the natural rate.

Scientists report that the seas are more acidic today than they have been in at least 650,000 years. At the current rate of increase, ocean acidity is expected, by the end of this century, to be 2 1/2 times what it was before the Industrial Revolution began 200 years ago. Such a change would devastate many species of fish and other animals that have thrived in chemically stable seawater for millions of years.

Less likely to be harmed are algae, bacteria and other primitive forms of life that are already proliferating at the expense of fish, marine mammals and corals.

In a matter of decades, the world's remaining coral reefs could be too brittle to withstand pounding waves. Shells could become too fragile to protect their occupants. By the end of the century, much of the polar ocean is expected to be as acidified as the water that did such damage to the pteropods aboard the Discoverer.

Some marine biologists predict that altered acid levels will disrupt fisheries by melting away the bottom rungs of the food chain — tiny planktonic plants and animals that provide the basic nutrition for all living things in the sea.

And we haven't even gotten to the primeval toxic slime (you really do need to read the whole series).

Given their common origin, comparable severity and potential for synergistic effects, topics like acidification should show up frequently in stories about global warming. Not all the time, but I would expect to see it in at least fifteen or twenty percent of the stories. It is simply a pairing that journalists to make on a fairly regular basis, but while a search of the last twelve months of the New York Times for "climate change" produces 10,509 hits, a search on '"climate change" acidification' over the same period produces 15.

(If we do a quick, back-of-the-envelope hypothesis test on the null that most journalists are well-informed, hard-working, independent thinkers...)

The specific tragedy here is that, for all the ink that's been spilled on the impacts of carbon emissions, all we really get in the vast majority of cases are simply the same handful of stories endlessly recycled. We read dozens of articles but since the writers have converged on a tiny number of narratives we remain ill-informed.

The general tragedy is that this is the way almost all journalism works these days. Through a lack of independent thinking (often augmented by laziness and a lack of rigor), journalists quickly settle on a small number of templates which they seldom stray from, even though these templates leave out important aspect of the larger story. Stories on the environmental impacts of carbon leave out the oceans; stories on the economics of cable don't mention broadcast television; stories about the free spending ways of countries like Greece and Spain omit the fact that Spain was running a surplus before the crisis.

It would be easy to find more examples. Finding counter-examples is the tough one.

 

Bidenomics and the NYT: Revenge of the Petruchio liberals

 

With apologies to regular readers who have heard this too many times already. The New York Times has, more than any other news organization with the possible exception of NPR, fully internalized the "if I keep his beer cold and the house clean, maybe he won't hit me anymore" mentality in response to conservative critics. The paper has fully equated the concept of bias with the possibility of making Republicans mad at them. Good news for the Democrats is underplayed; bad news is bumped to the front page, and the editors choose the most damaging framing for Biden as a default setting.

Though the NYT likes to boast about the diversity of opinions it publishes, with a handful exceptions, there are only a few acceptable narratives. The pretense of diversity only holds if you look only at the left-right spectrum, and even then not too closely. Far right figures like Tom Cotton, Brett Stephens, and Ann Coulter are given pretty much free reign, nominally liberal writers are expected to both-sides every question, and voices from the left tend to be Petruchio liberals, spending more time sniping at the mainstream Democrats than at the increasingly extreme republicans.

Petruchio liberals attack Democrats and, in effect, support Republicans because any real world proposal from a Biden or an Obama or a Pelosi meant to advance any progressive objective will inevitably fall short of their standards. To endorse a plan that is in any way short of perfect represents an unacceptable compromise of principle. Needless to say, these people are impossible to satisfy.

This NYT opinion piece by Karen Petrou is a minor classic of the genre. Damning criticism of the Democrats garnished with great performative concern for the disadvantaged and the left behind, supported by non-arguments and distorted statistics, dismissive of liberal accomplishments, strangely oblivious to the fact that, by the standards laid out by the author, in every case the republican policies would be worse.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the column is what it leaves out. Evidence of a good economy isn't explained away; it is omitted entirely. In a piece about income inequality, the word "employment" appears one time. "Jobs" doesn't appear at all. Likewise, the terms "union," "taxes," or "student loan." are also missing.

Instead, we get a lot of generalities.

The West Wing may believe Bidenomics is working because the macroeconomic gurus at the Federal Reserve are telling the White House it’s working. But Bidenomics has failed to create sufficient tangible improvement in the lives of most voters in a world in which groceries still cost more than they did a year ago, average rent and mortgage rates have spiked and health and child care grow ever more unaffordable. Mr. Biden cannot win in 2024 unless he speaks to the economy as it is, not as he wishes it was.

Make a note of the charge of scoring points by ignoring the way the economy really is. We'll be getting back to that one.

Although the Fed’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances showed that wealth inequality has dipped a bit because of recent generous federal spending, income inequality is worse than ever. For most Americans, a sense of financial well-being doesn’t come from capital returns in the stock market or even from house price appreciation. It comes in each paycheck and benefit payment and is challenged by each bill and receipt from the supermarket. Paychecks are falling shorter and shorter for more and more households [Wages are slightly outpacing inflation, but let's not get bogged down with details -- MP], no matter the seemingly record high employment data the White House also likes to trumpet. [Thus concluding Petrou's entire discussion of the job market -- MP]

 Let's check in with the LA Times indispensable Michael Hiltzik.

“Bidenomics didn’t just promise economic growth,” wrote economists at the progressive Roosevelt Institute in a recent newsletter; “it promised a transition from the era of trickle-down, neoliberal economics to a new paradigm that focused on improving the wages and livelihoods of working- and middle-class people.” They titled their post: “It’s working.”

Indeed, as I reported in July, lower-income workers have been the chief beneficiaries of Bidenomics. Economists David Autor of MIT and Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew of the University of Massachusetts determined in a paper published in March that lower-income workers had recovered about 25% of the increase in wage inequality that had built up over the previous four decades.

Organized labor seems to have experienced a renaissance, or at least the glimmer of one. Unions won more representation elections, 641, in the first half of 2022 than they had in the same period for 20 years. The victory by the United Auto Workers over the Big Three automakers after the recent strike may be a harbinger of more victories to come, but even if not, it’s certainly a high water mark for union activism over recent decades.

If you'd rather get your economic takes from the NYT, back in June, David Leonhardt did a similar story about the racial wage gap shrinking though, being one of the paper's good soldiers, he managed to write an entire column largely about the success of Biden's economy without ever mentioning the name "Biden."

 There's also a time travel element to Petrou's criticisms. Joe still hasn't gone back to the 80s and prevented the Reagan administration.

Mr. Biden ignores the inequality at the heart of Bidenomics at his political peril. America’s top 1 percent always got far more than 1 percent of national income and wealth, but they have rarely gotten as much as they do now. The most recent data shows that the top 1 percent now owns 31.4 percent of American wealth, more than that of the entire bottom 90 percent. Between 1975 and 2018, American adults at the median income saw their paychecks go up at less than one-third the rate of G.D.P. growth while those with incomes at the 99th percentile saw their earnings rise nearly twice as fast as G.D.P.

About that "inequality at the heart of Bidenomics" line. Despite spending an entire column attacking Biden's economic policy in general, we have to wait till the last paragraph to find one specific policy mentioned, and it is a very curious choice.

On Nov. 9, the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget issued a rule instructing federal agencies in no uncertain terms to consider the impact of the standards they promulgate on economic inequality. Mr. Biden’s political advisers should do the same over the coming year, recasting Bidenomics to truly support the middle class instead of continuing to stand proudly atop an economy in which growth goes to those who already have a lot, not those who work hard yet still are in need.

  I've read over this paragraph multiple times trying to get a grip on what Petrou is trying to say here. Literally the only specific policy she mentions is one she strongly endorses, nor does she give any specific policy that Biden should be doing but isn't. The closest she comes is repeatedly attacking Biden for taking credit for parts of the economy that are going remarkably well.

 This and every other conversation about the economy needs to start with the fact that we appear to be in the middle of the fabled soft landing, which is roughly the economic equivalent of seeing a bigfoot and a yeti riding Nessie. The conventional wisdom going into this was that taming inflation would require a period of severe economic pain. You'd think that avoiding that would make Ms. Petrou happy. You'd be wrong.

The NYT's Election Trilemma

The dilemma the New York Times and other news organizations that follow its lead face with a Trump Biden matchup is genuinely painful for them:

On one hand, second Trump Administration would mean an authoritarian, anti-democratic, arguably fascist state. This is not just speculation; this is what the candidate himself has explicitly promised. It is difficult to imagine a responsible journalist not doing everything in their power to stop this. On the other hand, going all out in support of Biden would go against longstanding and deeply held ideas about the role of the press, ideas that go to the very heart of the New York Times' sense of identity.
 
The NYT and many other journalists and news organizations have fully internalized fifty years of intense and focused conservative manipulation and working the ref. They have come to genuinely believe that bias largely boils down to saying things that make Republicans angry. We saw this play out with what we thought at the time were lower stakes back in 2016. The Washington Post explicitly took the position that the old standards and ethics were flawed and it would be far too costly to hold on to them given the risk that Trump presented. The New York Times took the position, also explicitly, that there was nothing wrong with the old standards and it had no intention of abandoning them. (Some current and former NYT journalists have even convinced themselves that the country went off the rails because the paper didn't hold to these old standards tightly enough.)

As we discussed before, barring a major black swan event, this will be a Biden Trump race, leaving journalists with only two realistic choices. If, however, we aren't constrained by realism, then there is a third: go all in on supporting Trump's rivals in the primary.

Since the paper's de facto definition of bias is largely limited to doing anything that helps Democrats and hurts Republicans, writing slanted news stories and wishful analytics does not violate this ethical code. No major conservative can accuse them of being anti-GOP because they are writing puff pieces for Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. Quite the opposite, the Republican establishment would overwhelmingly prefer either of those candidates to Donald Trump.

It is the nature of cognitive dissonance that people faced with ugly choices on one hand and an unrealistic but appealing choice on the other, will not only make themselves believe in the unbelievable, they will fanatically embrace it.

In this case, the New York Times has abandoned their nominal ethical standards of balance and objectivity across the reporting, analysis, and commentary. The results have been predictably embarrassing. the paper has run data analyses arguing that being crushed by Trump in the polls was actually great news for DeSantis. They have managed to collect the world's most unrepresentative focus group. They have run multiple pieces insisting that Haley breaking 10% and coming off as better than Ramaswamy put her on the fast track to the White House.

But as entertaining as this has been, it looks like reality is finally coming for the narrative.

Betting markets think the GOP primary is basically over pic.twitter.com/iHDIXgCmmi

— Adam Ozimek (@ModeledBehavior) December 17, 2023

 Donald Trump is now the GOP establishment
Analysis by Harry Enten

As we've said before, if you've gone through the holidays without hearing "Sugar Rum Cherry"...

  ... you have not had a cool Christmas.