Monday, September 19, 2022

Abdication?

This is Joseph.

Do royal ascensions bring out bad takes? Here is one that I think is worth talking about: Should Charles abdicate at 75 years of age?  

There are two ways to answer this question. One is to ask if it ever makes sense to have a hereditary monarchy, even a constitutional one? Because if your concern is a gerontocracy, then this is an institution that is likely to make this a common concern. Nor can one king abdicating bind any future king -- it'd need to be a constitutional change. 

Two, is to note that this confuses group and individual incentives. King Charles waited 73 years (almost 74) to ascend to the throne. Given that his birthday is in November, he would resigning after something like 15 months on the throne should be abdicate at 75 years of age. Now, his mother could have resigned at 75, with a half century on the throne, and that might have made sense in terms of setting a precent. But, in this case, we are correcting the excesses of the previous group by asking the succeeding group to make a sacrifice and that has some issues in terms of natural justice. 

About 30 years ago, the mandatory faculty age for retirement in Canada was overturned. Current faculty are benefiting from the lack of a retirement age which often delayed the careers of the succeeding generation. If we then dropped it back to the original 65, the group that would be penalized are not the current faculty who benefited from the change in rules, but their successors who had a delay to the start of their careers.

But there is no way that I would expect the person who waited 73 years for the throne (his entire working life) to quickly give it up because of a concern about gerontocracy in the context of a monarchy!  

Friday, September 16, 2022

There is no such thing as a poll of likely voters

[Starting a sometimes meta thread on the current state of polling.]

There are polls of the general population and polls of registered voters, but there has never been a poll of likely voters. What we do have do have is polls of registered voters that have been weighted to favor the respondents whom the pollsters think are likely to turn out on election day.

The polls and the models used to determine how likely different people are to vote are entirely different creatures, supported by different assumption, prone to fail in entirely different ways for entirely different reasons. If we are going to pay attention to electoral polling (and I have very mixed feeling about whether we should), we need to be aware of these things.

If you have a candidate like Trump or an issue like Dobbs bringing in large numbers of people who otherwise probably wouldn't have voted, inevitably you will screw over likely voter models. This is doubly true if the model puts heavy weight on past voting history. Dobbs is particularly interesting in this respect since it seems to be causing a surge not just in registrations, but in registrations of young people. If a likely voter model looked at voting history and age these are the last people it would flag as likely.

Of course, outside of a handful of special elections which don't really tell us much, we don't know how many of those young people who registered will actually vote. We won't know until November and from the standpoint of prediction, that will be too late.

Here's my take. At this point, I would not put any weight whatsoever on likely voter models. Not this year and not in 2024. Every warning light relevant to predictive models is flashing proceed with caution and we are so far out of the range of observed data that it is no longer visible on the horizon.

Thursday, September 15, 2022

This is definitely an interesting take

This is Joseph.

Parody, has gone here to die:


Paywalled but you can read it here:
When the yacht was commissioned in the 1950s, Her Majesty turned down the initial design as too lavish. She wanted simplicity and would disembark for picnics with the Tupperware on remote beaches in the Western Isles.

And:

 Her dresser, Angela Kelly, explained that once an outfit had become familiar to the public, the Queen would recycle it to wear at Sandringham fΓͺtes.

Her shoes and handbags dated back to the 1950s. She didn’t mind anyone seeing the £30 electric heaters in the Audience Room at Windsor or knowing of her preference for shallow baths — seven inches at 22C, adopted by her father George VI at Buckingham Palace during the war.

So you have a person who has a yacht, even a modest one, an audience room, and a dresser. It might be that she is projecting a helpful attitude but actual poor people lack the luxury of these things. Actual poor people don't have pets to spoil or Land Rovers as vehicles:

The Queen didn’t have to fake her naturally parsimonious nature. She championed the Land Rover for its durability and the fact that she could mend the engine herself. Not for her, her grandchildren’s new Range Rover SUVs. Only the corgis were spoilt: the story of Prince Andrew being made to retrace his steps after returning from a long walk as a child without their leads, while the dogs remained to eat slivers of freshly cooked rabbit, became a family legend. 

It is very different to be frugal by choice, when you have money. Just like it is easy to decide to diet as opposed to lacking enough food. This family is in a very different economic position than the Queen in terms of cost of living. It is one thing to have a style driven by frugality, it is quite another to be forced into it by circumstance, especially when actual deprivation is a policy.

It is like people who worry about climate change so they open windows instead of using AC but drive SUVs, fly to climate conferences, and think nothing of a large house. In the end, the Queen simply did not live in the same environment as any but the most affluent of her subjects. 

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Ten years ago at the blog -- We were into self-selection before self-selection was cool

Non-response has become a hot topic among political writers and data. I'm not entirely happy with some of the analyses we've been seeing, so I need to get serious about the thread on electoral forecast I've been putting for years. 

In the meantime, here was our first foray into the topic.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Life on 49-49

[Following up on this post, here are some more (barely) pre-election thoughts on how polls gang aft agley. I believe Jonathan Chait made some similar points. Some of Nate Silver's critics also wandered into some neighboring territory (with the important distinction that Chait understood the underlying concepts)]

Assume that there's an alternate world called Earth 49-49. This world is identical to ours in all but one respect: for almost all of the presidential campaign, 49% of the voters support Obama and 49% support Romney. There has been virtually no shift in who plans to vote for whom.

Despite this, all of the people on 49-49 believe that they're on our world, where large segments of the voters are shifting their support from Romney to Obama then from Obama to Romney. They weren't misled to this belief through fraud -- all of the polls were administered fairly and answered honestly -- nor was it a case of stupidity or bad analysis -- the political scientists on 49-49 are highly intelligent and conscientious -- rather it had to do with the nature of polling.

Pollsters had long tracked campaigns by calling random samples of potential voters. As campaign became more drawn out and journalistic focus shifted to the horse race aspects of election, these phone polls proliferated. At the same time, though, the response rates dropped sharply, going from more than one in three to less than one in ten.

A big drop in response rates always raises questions about selection bias since the change may not affect all segments of the population proportionally (more on that -- and this report -- later). It also increases the potential magnitude of these effects.

Consider these three scenarios. What would happen if you could do the following (in the first two cases, assume no polling bias):

A. Convince one percent of undecideds to support you. Your support goes to 50 while your opponent stays at 49 -- one percent poll advantage

B. Convince one percent of opponent's supporters to support you. Your support goes to 50 while your opponent drops to 48 -- two percent poll advantage

C. Convince an additional one percent of your supporters to answer the phone when a pollster calls. You go to over 51% while your opponent drops to under 47%-- around a five percent poll advantage.

Of course, no one was secretly plotting to game the polls, but poll responses are basically just people agreeing to talk to you about politics, and lots of things can affect people's willingness to talk about their candidate, including things that would almost never affect their actual votes (at least not directly but more on that later).

In 49-49, the Romney campaign hit a stretch of embarrassing news coverage while Obama was having, in general, a very good run. With a couple of exceptions, the stories were trivial, certainly not the sort of thing that would cause someone to jump the substantial ideological divide between the two candidates so, none of Romney's supporters shifted to Obama or to undecided. Many did, however, feel less and less like talking to pollsters. So Romney's numbers started to go down which only made his supporters more depressed and reluctant to talk about their choice.

This reluctance was already just starting to fade when the first debate came along. As Josh Marshall has explained eloquently and at great length since early in the primaries, the idea of Obama, faced with a strong attack and deprived of his teleprompter, collapsing in a debate was tremendously important and resonant to the GOP base. That belief was a major driver of the support for Gingrich, despite all his baggage; no one ever accused Newt of being reluctant to go for the throat.

It's not surprising that, after weeks of bad news and declining polls, the effect on the Republican base of getting what looked very much like the debate they'd hoped for was cathartic. Romney supporters who had been avoiding pollsters suddenly couldn't wait to take the calls. By the same token. Obama supporters who got their news from Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews really didn't want to talk right now.

The polls shifted in Romney's favor even though, had the election been held the week after the debate, the result would have been the same as it would have been had the election been held two weeks before -- 49% to 49%. All of the changes in the polls had come from core voters on both sides. The voters who might have been persuaded weren't that interested in the emotional aspect of the conventions and the debates and were already familiar with the substantive issues both events raised.

So response bias was amplified by these factors:

1. the effect was positively correlated with the intensity of support

2. it was accompanied by matching but opposite effects on the other side

3. there were feedback loops -- supporters of candidates moving up in the polls were happier and more likely to respond while supporters of candidates moving down had the opposite reaction.

You might wonder how the pollsters and political scientists of this world missed this. The answer that they didn't. They were concerned about selection effects and falling response rates, but the problems with the data were difficult to catch definitively thanks to some serious obscuring factors:

1. Researchers have to base their conclusions off of the historical record when the effect was not nearly so big.

2. Things are correlated in a way that's difficult to untangle. The things you would expect to make supporters less enthusiastic about talking about their candidate are often the same things you'd expect to lower support for that candidate

3. As mentioned before, there are compensatory effects. Since response rates for the two parties are inversely related, the aggregate is fairly stable.

4. The effect of embarrassment and elation tend to fade over time so that most are gone by the actual election.

5. There's a tendency to converge as the election approaches. Mainly because likely voter screens become more accurate.

6. Poll predictions can be partially self-fulfilling. If the polls indicate a sufficiently low chance of winning, supporters can become discouraged, allies can desert you and money can dry up. The result is, again, convergence.

For the record, I don't think we live on 49-49. I do, however, think that at least some of the variability we've seen in the polls can be traced back to selection effects similar to those described here and I have to believe it's likely to get worse.

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Tuesday Twitter -- Dispatches

If you've been trying to stay up to date on the war in Ukraine while not having to scroll past endless articles on Queen Elizabeth, Josh Marshall is here to help.

In any case, I would recommend to you again two Twitter lists I’ve curated with experts from whom we can learn more. This one is about the Ukraine war generally and this focuses more narrowly on the military dimensions of the conflict


Lots of smart, informed conversations and useful links like this excellent overview of the recent counter-offensive.



Remember Ted Cruz insisting our military was too "woke" to be effective fighters?


One of the recurring themes is just how bad a rout this was.








Part of the speed of the collapse might be explained by this.


With notable exceptions, the reaction of Russia and its allies has been anger, bluster, blame,,,


And denial.


 

 And to make the cold war vibe complete, we even have SMERSH (3:34).

Monday, September 12, 2022

"Russia’s Military, Once Creaky, Is Modern and Lethal"

2022 has been, so far, a remarkably bad year for expert opinion. We've been dabbling in press criticism now for more than a dozen years and I can't think of a time when the anointed experts of the mainstream media been more wrong on more important questions than they have been over the past 9 months. The  conventional wisdom has been comically off on the reaction to Dobbs and the January 6 hearings, the viability of prominent candidates, the GOP "moving on" from Trump, the importance of Social Security and Medicare as an electoral issue, and, of course, the war in Ukraine.

If recent trends continue (always a big if), we can expect to see a lot of revisionism from major pundits and publications. They will shove as much as they can down the memory hole. Where that fails, they will either dredge up some ass-covering quote from paragraph twenty-three and pretend that was the main thrust of their position or they will claim that "It wasn't just us. Everybody got it wrong."

 That last bit of retconning distorts what really happened in two ways. It ignores both the people who actually did get it right and the distinction between slightly wrong and totally wrong. If you two forecasts, one predicting warm and sunny with 0% chance of precipitation and the other warning of moderate to heavy rain, and you get a torrential downpour, both were wrong, but the warm-and-sunny guy doesn't get to use that as a defense.

 The post-2016 revisionist push, "everybody got it wrong" became the go-to line, probably because the screw-up was too big to downplay or deny. Michael Moore doesn't figure into the conversation and Nate Silver's 30% chance of a Trump is grouped with all the single digit predictions.

Here are two takes on the Russian military written during the build-up to the war. The first is from the NYT, as always, the official spokesman for conventional wisdom.


From Russia’s Military, Once Creaky, Is Modern and Lethal

 By Anton Troianovski, Michael Schwirtz and Andrew E. Kramer

Jan. 27, 2022

Two decades later, it is a far different fighting force that has massed near the border with Ukraine. Under Mr. Putin’s leadership, it has been overhauled into a modern sophisticated army, able to deploy quickly and with lethal effect in conventional conflicts, military analysts said. It features precision-guided weaponry, a newly streamlined command structure and well-fed and professional soldiers. And they still have the nuclear weapons.

The modernized military has emerged as a key tool of Mr. Putin’s foreign policy: capturing Crimea, intervening in Syria, keeping the peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan and, just this month, propping up a Russia-friendly leader in Kazakhstan. Now it is in the middle of its most ambitious — and most ominous — operation yet: using threats and potentially, many fear, force, to bring Ukraine back into Moscow’s sphere of influence.

“The mobility of the military, its preparedness and its equipment are what allow Russia to pressure Ukraine and to pressure the West,” said Pavel Luzin, a Russian security analyst. “Nuclear weapons are not enough.”

Without firing a shot, Mr. Putin has forced the Biden administration to shelve other foreign policy priorities and contend with Kremlin grievances the White House has long dismissed — in particular reversing Ukraine’s Westward lean in the post-Soviet period.

...

What is new is not just Russia’s upgraded equipment, but the evolving theory of how the Kremlin uses it. The military has honed an approach that Dmitry Adamsky, a scholar of international security at Reichman University in Israel, calls “cross-domain coercion” — blending the real or threatened use of force with diplomacy, cyberattacks and propaganda to achieve political aims.

That blended strategy is playing out in the current crisis around Ukraine. Russia is pushing for immediate wide-ranging concessions from the West. Russian troop movements into allied Belarus put a potential invasion force within 100 miles of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Russian state media is warning that Ukrainian forces are the ones preparing acts of aggression.


Compared to this from 

Assessing the Military Strength of Russia and Ukraine
Russia may not the hold the military advantage media reports indicate.
Giselle Donnelly
Feb 7


There has also been a profusion of articles summarizing Russian military modernization and reforms since the end of the Cold War and highlighting Russian successes in Syria and elsewhere, including Ukraine in 2014. “Russia’s Military, Once Creaky, Is Modern and Lethal,” headlines the New York Times. Under “Putin’s leadership,” the paper reports, the Russian military “has been overhauled into a modern sophisticated army, able to deploy quickly and with lethal effect in conventional conflicts. … It features precision-guided weaponry, a newly streamlined command structure and well-fed and professional soldiers.”

This is true, but isn’t the whole story. 

...

But just as in the United States, the logic of defense reductions is inescapable; the priority on “strategic” systems has crowded out investments in other elements of military modernization. Thus, while some elements of Russia’s conventional forces are indeed, as the New York Times puts it, “modern and lethal,” it is far from clear how far and wide the Russian general-purpose force modernization and organizational reforms has progressed. A review of post-Cold War performance reveals a mixed record.

...

In sum, the famed Russian willingness to suffer, perhaps Moscow’s greatest asset in World War II, has become a grave strategic liability. This, in conjunction with a need to preserve the limited quantity of his well-trained and well-armed conventional forces, has profoundly shaped Putin’s military moves for the past two decades. It also explains why “gray-zone” warfare—the use of unconventional tactics from cyber attacks to local proxies and influence operations—figures prominently in Russian strategy. Putin may be a wily card player, but he has some weak cards.

He has played these pretty close to the vest in Georgia in 2008, in Crimea and the Donbass in 2014 and since, in Syria the following year, in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 and lately in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Further, this is a substantial and growing list of conflicts—all of them limited but none of them decisively resolved or allowing for the easy shifting of forces and resources. And none of them is remotely of the same scale as the full-blown invasion of Ukraine he now threatens. For all of Putin’s provocations, he has acted like a man unsure of his own strength, more concerned with maintaining a potential “threat-in-being” than in showing off an undoubted ability to “shock and awe,” Desert Storm-style.

 

You can argue that no one realized how "creaky" the Russian military actually had become, it's important to distinguish between analysts who at least asked some of the right questions and those who simply followed the standard narrative.



Friday, September 9, 2022

We're going to skip the crown entirely...



If you're feeling warm and sentimental about the end of the reign Queen Elizabeth II, you'll probably enjoy this clip...




If, on the other hand, you were already tired of the German British royal family and the thought of wall-to-wall coronation coverage make you feel slightly sick to your stomach, you'll probably want to go with this incredibly mean spirited roman Γ  clef. This is the second chapter of the original (and far superior) House of Cards trilogy, but it works OK as a stand alone. Fans of Diana will want to give it a pass. 





Thursday, September 8, 2022

Thursday Tweets

Conventional wisdom assumed the midterms would be about Biden and Inflation. Trump and Abortion make for a very different battlefield.


In theory, the keep-him-out-of-the-election approach has a lot to be said for it; in practice, it's a bit difficult to execute when your party is now basically a conspiracy theory/cult of personality built around an attention hungry narcissist.



Remember when David Brooks was holding up Rubio as the sensible answer to Trump? No wonder Brooks has started talking about third parties.



If you listened carefully a few months ago, you would have noticed that smart Republicans were nervous about Dobbs. Now everyone has noticing something big is going on.





Ohio is a solidly pro-choice state with one of the most extreme anti-abortion policies. We talked about this back is May





Remember, Masters also wanted to overturn the ruling guaranteeing the right to contraception.

When things get chaotic, it's smart to field solid candidates in what would normally be extreme long-shot races. I'm not saying the Democrats should spend big bucks in Arkansas, but if Trump implodes (or turns on the GOP), they might be glad they had this minister with a PhD. on the ticket.



When useful idiots start winning the primaries, they no longer fall into the "useful" category.




Rich people

At least some of those billionaire survivalists are justifying themselves with this...
While on the subject of Thiel...



When I lived in Atlanta, I heard this a lot. Things were great under the benevolent mad, worse after Time-Warner, terrible after AOL.

Excellent thread retweeted by Margaret Sullivan,


Remember massive, systemic plagiarism from those too small to fight back is OK is long as you don't steal actual wording. 

Bad journalism.

Good journalism.


It took over a decade for the WSJ to notice MeTV but better late than never.



Wednesday, September 7, 2022

Ground source heat pumps are "the most energy-efficient, environmentally clean, and cost-effective space conditioning systems available," but maybe we can get journalists to talk about them anyway. [Repost]

I'm joking but I'm not kidding. 

If Elon Musk or some other Silicon Valley visionary proposed some laughable plan based on non-existent technology, reporters would be scheduling interviews within the hour, but a solution supported by experts based on mature, tested systems will get little to no coverage.

One of the biggest crises facing California is a failing electrical grid, particularly during summer heat waves which are going to continue becoming more frequent and severe as the planet warms. Ground source heat pumps and similar technology could greatly alleviate pressure on the grid, especially when coupled with roof top solar. On top of that, its efficiency reduces demand for fossil fuels.

If we're going solve our problems, we can't go on being disinterested in solutions. 



From Wikipedia:

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has called ground source heat pumps the most energy-efficient, environmentally clean, and cost-effective space conditioning systems available. Heat pumps offer significant emission reductions potential, particularly where they are used for both heating and cooling and where the electricity is produced from renewable resources.
...
Ground source heat pumps are characterized by high capital costs and low operational costs compared to other HVAC systems. Their overall economic benefit depends primarily on the relative costs of electricity and fuels, which are highly variable over time and across the world. Based on recent prices, ground-source heat pumps currently have lower operational costs than any other conventional heating source almost everywhere in the world. Natural gas is the only fuel with competitive operational costs, and only in a handful of countries where it is exceptionally cheap, or where electricity is exceptionally expensive. In general, a homeowner may save anywhere from 20% to 60% annually on utilities by switching from an ordinary system to a ground-source system. However, many family size installations are reported to use much more electricity than their owners had expected from advertisements. This is often partly due to bad design or installation: Heat exchange capacity with groundwater is often too small, heating pipes in house floors are often too thin and too few, or heated floors are covered with wooden panels or carpets.
...
Capital costs may be offset by government subsidies, for example, Ontario offered $7000 for residential systems installed in the 2009 fiscal year. Some electric companies offer special rates to customers who install a ground-source heat pump for heating or cooling their building. Where electrical plants have larger loads during summer months and idle capacity in the winter, this increases electrical sales during the winter months. Heat pumps also lower the load peak during the summer due to the increased efficiency of heat pumps, thereby avoiding costly construction of new power plants. For the same reasons, other utility companies have started to pay for the installation of ground-source heat pumps at customer residences. They lease the systems to their customers for a monthly fee, at a net overall savings to the customer.

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

A concern about the Canadian Health Care system

This is Joseph.

A 2017 CMAJ article has been making the rounds on Twitter that has the headline result of:
Medical assistance in dying could reduce annual health care spending across Canada by between $34.7 million and $138.8 million, exceeding the $1.5–$14.8 million in direct costs associated with its implementation. In sensitivity analyses, we noted that even if the potential savings are overestimated and costs underestimated, the implementation of medical assistance in dying will likely remain at least cost neutral.

While costs are never irrelevant and this was a pre-implementation estimate, there is a concern about focusing on costs in a context of medical resource shortages.  We also have concerning cases like the case where the only condition listed was "deafness" on an application for medical assistance in dying in 2019. Or the high profile concerns that Jennifer Gunter, a US physician, had for the end of life care for her father in Manitoba. 

Now, I know that people will blame COVID for the problems, and that is certainly not unrelated, but there consensus that this is also a problem with health care policy:

But experts say decades of bad policy, including the closure of hospitals and past austerity budgets, coupled with Canada's vast and complex geography, have exacerbated the pandemic pressure

And this is a real challenge to the goal of the system, to create equitable outcomes:

Canada's system, however, ranks lower overall than the UK and others in international comparisons . . . Canada specifically lags when it comes to equitable access and care outcomes.

Data over the last five years shows people are waiting longer in the ER before they are either seen by a doctor or admitted to hospital. Nearly five million Canadians don't have a family doctor, often making an emergency room their primary place to get help if they need it. 

 So I want to flag two important things. One, is there is a heightened need to be vigilant about processes like medically assisted dying in a context where care is hard to obtain. The risk of concerning events slipping thought is heightened when the entire hospital system is in crisis and people are overworked/burnt out. Two, that it is important to remember that the reason for a public-only health care system is to ensure equitable access and care outcomes -- making sure that more resources don't give better access to care but instead basing care on need. But that requires that these outcomes be equitable and that the level of care is acceptable (although perhaps minimally so) for all patients. 

If we can't do that then we need to think more carefully about what are the health care outcomes that we want. 

That said, everything I read suggests that there is a staffing crisis which is leading to issues like 20 hour waits in the emergency room. I hate to quote basic economics, but when there is a shortage of workers then maybe it is time to consider raising wages? Even temporarily? As a larger matter, it might not have been the wisest idea to let government funding drive the number of training spots, as it is possible for forecasts to be incorrect. 

Monday, September 5, 2022

It's Labor Day, so we're taking time off and running an excerpt from a recent Monkey Cage post

Sociologists Jasmine Kerrissey and Judith Stepan-Norris, co-authors of “Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Struggle over the U.S. Labor Movement,” look at the state of unions America and, for the first time in a long time, find reason for optimism.

It was 1894, the Gilded Age — a time of extreme inequality, foul working conditions, worker unrest and violent strikes. Congress created Labor Day, a national holiday celebrating workers and labor union

Labor Day alone didn’t change much. But from the 1930s through 1950s, labor unions were on the rise. One in every three workers were unionized, ushering in a new middle class, safety procedures and a voice at work, before membership declined again for decades. Today, only 1 in 10 workers are organized, and one-third of the country’s workers earn less than $15 an hour. Research suggests that union decline has contributed significantly to the rise in inequality.

But this Labor Day, for the first time in almost 25 years, union elections — events in which workers vote on whether to form unions — have increased significantly. Workers file for elections with the National Labor Relations Board, which governs most private-sector employees. Union election filings with the NLRB increased by 58 percent in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2022 (October-June), compared with the same period in 2021. Already, recent tallies estimate that more than 1,250 elections were held from October to August, more than were held during all of 2021. And unions have won the majority of these elections.

...

This past year has been different: Support for unions is surging. Both general approval of unions and union elections has been rising. In 2022, Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest percentage since 1965. Gallup also found that over 40 percent of nonunion workers have some interest in joining one.

And workers are taking action. Interestingly, many are organizing in industries and companies that previously avoided union representation. Megacorporations, especially in retail, tech and service, have long kept out unions — until now.

 

 

Friday, September 2, 2022

Why read about Pauline Kael when you can read Pauline Kael?

 Andrew Gelman has a post up on his blog discussing a new book by Louis Menand that includes the following quote:

"Kael’s contention that serious movies should meet the same standard as pulp—that they should be entertaining—turned out to be an extremely useful and widely adopted critical principle. . . ."

 I'm not familiar with Menand, but I am up on my Kael and I assume he's referring to this passage from the essay "Trash, Art and the Movies."

Keeping in mind that simple, good distinction that all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art, it might be a good idea to keep in mind also that if a movie is said to be a work of art and you don’t enjoy it, the fault may be in you, but it’s probably in the movie. Because of the money and advertising pressures involved, many reviewers discover a fresh masterpiece every week, and there’s that cultural snobbery, that hunger for respectability that determines the selection of the even bigger annual masterpieces. In foreign movies what is most often mistaken for “quality” is an imitation of earlier movie art or a derivation from respectable, approved work in the other arts — like the demented, suffering painter-hero of Hour of the Wolf smearing his lipstick in a facsimile of expressionist anguish. Kicked in the ribs, the press says “art” when “ouch” would be more appropriate. When a director is said to be an artist (generally on the basis of earlier work which the press failed to recognize) and especially when he picks artistic subjects like the pain of creation, there is a tendency to acclaim his new bad work. This way the press, in trying to make up for its past mistakes, manages to be wrong all the time. And so a revenge-of-a-sour- virgin movie like Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black is treated respectfully as if it somehow revealed an artist’s sensibility in every frame. Reviewers who would laugh at Lana Turner going through her femme fatale act in another Ross Hunter movie swoon when Jeanne Moreau casts significant blank looks for Truffaut.

In American movies what is most often mistaken for artistic quality is box-office success, especially if it’s combined with a genuflection to importance; then you have “a movie the industry can be proud of” like To Kill a Mockingbird or such Academy Award winners as West Side Story, My Fair Lady, or A Man for All Seasons. Fred Zinnemann made a fine modern variant of a Western, The Sundowners, and hardly anybody saw it until it got on television; but A Man for All Seasons had the look of prestige and the press felt honored to praise it. I’m not sure most movie reviewers consider what they honestly enjoy as being central to criticism. Some at least appear to think that that would be relying too much on their own tastes, being too personal instead of being “objective” — relying on the readymade terms of cultural respectability and on consensus judgment (which, to a rather shocking degree, can be arranged by publicists creating a climate of importance around a movie). Just as movie directors, as they age, hunger for what was meant by respectability in their youth, and aspire to prestigious cultural properties, so, too, the movie press longs to be elevated in terms of the cultural values of their old high schools. And so they, along with the industry, applaud ghastly “tour-de-force” performances, movies based on “distinguished” stage successes or prize-winning novels, or movies that are “worthwhile,” that make a “contribution” — “serious” messagy movies. This often involves praise of bad movies, of dull movies, or even the praise in good movies of what was worst in them. 

In particular, the phrase "readymade terms of cultural respectability and on consensus judgment (which, to a rather shocking degree, can be arranged by publicists creating a climate of importance around a movie)" is more relevant in an age where streaming services spend hundreds of millions on PR firms and billions on marketing. 

I'm not a big fan of most of the cultural commentary I occasionally see in the mainstream press (which isn't much since I don't seek out things that annoy me). This is partially because so much of it still feels like a bad Kael imitation. (Though, to be fair, Denby managed to be a pretty good Kael imitator.) As with so many things, if I want criticism that's insightful, honest and free of herd mentality, I'm more likely to go to a favorite blog or YouTube channel. On a good day, I'd put Bob Chipman up against anyone working the same beat at the New Yorker or the Atlantic. 

One warning about these essays. You will find yourself violently disagreeing with some of her takes on various movies, particularly those she dislikes. I'm OK with that. If you're not then you should probably stop here.

Otherwise, start with either Trash or Kane, and see what the original was like.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Essential Kael

I have a couple of posts in the draft stage and a few more in the back of my head that center on either quotes from Pauline Kael or discussion of the New Journalism movement that involve her. I thought it might not be a bad idea to do a quick introductory post because Kael is one of those writers who does need an introduction.

Part of the problem is that, when you say "critic," most people think "reviewer."  Probably the easiest way to explain the distinction is in terms of audience. Criticism is written for people who know a work; reviews are written for people who are thinking about trying it. Kael was, at best, a deeply problematic reviewer. She could wildly oversell films she felt were particularly deserving. Other times, she would simply use the film as a jumping off point for an essay on films or culture or politics. She almost always had something interesting to say, but little that was useful when you were trying to decide which movie to see.

My advice for those new to Kael is to start with the essays, then check out the full (not the capsule) reviews of films you've seen, then stop.

Here are four to get the ball rolling.

Raising Kane
 The New Yorker, February 20, 1971 and February 27, 1971

Kael's best known essay and my favorite. Also her most controversial, though not always for the reasons normally given (see below). The piece is difficult to describe, part critical essay, part historical narrative, part reflection on American culture, but the unifying thread is the story of the East Coast writers and artists who came to Hollywood. By turns affectionate, insightful and sad. At least part of the vitriol it inspired can be attributed to the people she had pissed off a few years earlier with...



Circles and Squares
Film Quarterly (01/Apr/1963)

A relentless dismantling of the American take on auteur theory, particularly that of Andrew Sarris. In addition to pointing out the various contradictions and logical flaws in the standard arguments of the time, it digs into the dangers of praising works and congratulating ourselves just because we catch various allusions and influences (decades before anyone had heard of Tarantino). It may not be a coincidence that many those who came off worst in this piece (particularly Peter Bogdanovich) were among the most vocal of Welles "defenders" after the release of "Raising Kane."



Trash, Art, and the Movies
Harper's, February 1969

Addresses the fundamental paradoxes of taking pop culture seriously. It argues that we should acknowledge the pleasures and the vitality of a good trashy movie without trying to project upon it artistic qualities and deeper meanings to justify our approval. At the same time, we shouldn't equate the lack of trashiness with great art, particularly when it means praising the boring and the high-minded.




Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers
The New Yorker, June 23, 1980

A prescient take on the end of the Young Turk era of American film. Kael didn't care for auteurism as a critical theory but she tended to like auteurs, particularly the big visionary directors like Welles and Kurosawa and Huston. She looked upon the late 60s and early 70s as a golden age with films like Bonnie and Clyde and directors like Altman.

Kael openly viewed herself as an advocate for what she considered important films and visionary filmmakers, and she was willing to cross ethical lines to promote her favorites (such as when she wrote an ecstatic review of Nashville based on a private screening of a rough cut).

The end of the Young Turks era (combined with a brief stint working in Hollywood) left her bitter and pessimistic about the future of American cinema, which led to this 1980 essay. By far, my least favorite  of the four. The topic is too depressing for her to have any fun with and too narrow for her to make the interesting connections that mark the other three pieces. Worse still, the few films of the period she did like are overpraised to the point of exhaustion. That said, the observations on corporate culture are sharp and the predictions about pre-novelization perfectly describe franchises like I am Number Four.

Thursday, September 1, 2022

Very smart post on causal inference

This is Joseph.

Andrew Gelman has a very nice piece on the challenges of causal inference over on his blog, looking at the discussion between Noah Smith and Bret Devereaux. As a conflict avoider of heroic stature, I don't like people I follow fighting but, in this case, it is bringing up some good points. 

But going back to just understanding patterns is also a very important step in epidemiology as well and there is a new movement towards trying to do more rigorous descriptive work. For example, this paper by Catherine R Lesko, Matthew P Fox, and Jessie K Edwards. I have some disagreements with the authors but it is a fantastic piece to get epidemiology thinking clearly about these issues. 

Not doing things is a nonrival good (and while we're on the subject, can you have a nonrival good with a monopsony?)

As mentioned before, Matt Levine has become on of the essential writers on the business and finance beat and I strongly recommend that everybody sign up for Levine's free Money Stuff newsletter mentioned at the bottom of the post.

Here's a choice bit from the August 30th newsletter. 

The most interesting field of economics might be the economics of not doing things. The main way that people make money, in the world, is by doing things that other people want: drilling oil, brewing coffee, maintaining social media sites, writing newsletters. But there are a few lines of business where you can get paid for not doing things that you’d otherwise do. Blackmail, for instance, is a classic: “I will go around distributing these compromising photos of you, unless you pay me money, in which case I will do nothing.” Coasean bargaining: “I will build a smelly polluting factory on my land next to yours, unless you pay me money not to, in which case I will leave it undeveloped.” Demand response in electric grids: “I will turn my lights on and use electricity, unless you pay me not to, in which case I will use less electricity.” And, in the modern world, all sorts of environmental credit schemes: “I will chop down these trees, drill this oil, etc., unless you pay me not to, in which case I won’t do anything at all.”

There are so many ways in which the economics here are unintuitive. Consider the oil market. There is some demand schedule for oil; people will use more of it at lower prices and less at higher prices. There is also a supply schedule: Some oil is cheaper to drill than other oil, so when oil prices are low only the cheapest-to-extract oil will get drilled, but when prices get high people will drill in more difficult environments because it becomes worth it. But then consider the market for not drilling oil. If you own a bunch of oil fields, and someone will pay you $5 per barrel not to drill oil, you should start your not-drilling in the most-expensive-to-drill places. “Good news,” you say, “I have decided not to drill in this field that costs $150 per barrel to drill, now pay me my $5.” You could expand on this theory. If you don’t own any oil fields, you could walk into the offices of some environmental-credits company and say “if you pay me $5 per barrel not to drill oil, I won’t go around buying oil fields and drilling them.”

Also consider the demand schedule there. If you promise me not to drill for oil, I might pay you $5 per barrel for the oil you don’t drill. But you could go to someone else and promise not to drill the oil, and they might pay you $3 per barrel. For the same barrels. “Not drilling oil” is a non-rival good; you can not drill the same barrel of oil as many times as you like, and sell it to a different person each time.

Or consider blackmail. If you get some compromising photos of me, and I pay you not to publish them, then you won’t publish them (let’s assume). But what are your long-term incentives? The way to succeed in the business of not publishing compromising photos is by taking lots of compromising photos and repeatedly threatening to publish them. If I paid you $100 not to publish the photos, and you were like “right, good, I get paid not to publish photos, I will stop taking the photos,” you would be deeply misunderstanding your business. You are not being paid to not publish photos — anyone can not publish photos! You are being paid to credibly threaten to publish photos, and then not publish them.

This has important implications for the environmental credit schemes. You don’t get paid for not drilling oil or not cutting down trees; you get paid when there is a credible threat (from you or someone else) to drill the oil or cut the trees, and you prevent it. You are in the credible-threats business.

You can probably guess where this is going.

One of the counterintuitive aspects of this having a well functioning market with multiple buyers and sellers actually leads to worse outcomes in this case. You're better off having few sellers and only one buyer. Take one of the more successful examples, programs where the federal government pay framers to leave land fallow.



 

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Student loan forgiveness

This is Joseph.

Mark mentioned this briefly yesterday but I thought it was worth a full post. 

In the United States there has been some controversy about student loan forgiveness and the modest amount of debt relief that was recently given. I understand the reasons why it was good to do something and also why the time isn't optimal as it could have an inflationary impact. Still, the amount of inflation, according to Paul Krugman, is about 0.2% and much larger sums were forgiven for business support in covid-19. It is quite reasonable that the lockdown could have made student loans worse than expected for some people and so forgiveness is a reasonable policy.

It was then attacked for funding very left wing educational opportunities -- the exact phrase being "lesbian dance theory". Now, one thing to consider is that very few students take classes in identity. Here is a statistics from the far more left wing province of Ontario in Canada:


That's less than 1%. As expected, in the United States it is even lower:

There are more philosophy majors than in these fields!

Looking at the linked tables from the Department of Education (USA), we see that the top two majors are business and health sciences, together making up 32% of bachelor degrees (that is 1/3). There are five times as many students studying agriculture than "Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies" which is lumping a lot of different things together (are Russian studies and women's studies really appealing to the same students?). Now it is true that 4.5% of degrees go to visual and performing arts (which would include dance) but also things like acting, painting, and film school. Maybe it is or is not the optimal vehicle for teaching these skills  but there are also a lot of students taking degrees in "Homeland security, law enforcement, and firefighting" (about 2./3 this total) which is also a case where the applied and theoretical pieces might be quite different. 

And this ignores the engineers, computer scientists, and mathematics degrees. Now, it is true, that a system where students pick what they want to study does occasionally result in bad decisions that compound. But this is also true of health decisions, employment decisions, and financial decisions -- we are not considering regulating those, either. 

If the student loan program is seen as a type of covid-19 relief than it isn't a bad program. It will help most those students who started a degree and did not finish due to the world changing -- most defaults are for small amounts and students who did not finish their degrees. This also addresses the question of whether it is only backwards looking -- it is, but the justification is reasonable and it matches other parties who borrowed money and had it forgiven due to covid-19 impacts

Now I agree with Dean Dad that a forward looking policy is overdue. But that doesn't mean that this plan is without merit and the general idea seems to be justifiable.