First debate: a tie
The presidential debate this evening was interesting, but dense. A lot of important points were raised, but I’m unsure about how much the average viewer could take away from it, especially if they haven’t been following the details of the campaign in depth for as long as I have.
Of course, the big question after all debates is who won. I don’t think there was a clear winner (especially if you emphasize clarity in addition to simply having better arguments). Both candidates gave many answers in which they seemed to be listing handfuls of different ideas they wanted to cram in somewhere, rather than directly and succinctly answering the questions posed. Obama definitely came out ahead in terms of appearance and mannerisms, using the format of the debate to directly challenge McCain, while McCain looked down or away from Obama more often and seemed less comfortable. (Also, that tie… stripes were maybe not the best for TV?) It was nice to see the whole event stay civil and focused on issues (even if maybe not on one specific issue at a time).
In the end, I doubt this debate will change many people’s minds. However, both candidates have shown themselves to be skillful at speaking extemporaneously and with expertise on their policies, so I’m definitely looking forward to the next one.
Like farm subsidies, but for babies
Louisiana state representative John LaBruzzo announced on Tuesday that he is considering a proposal to pay $1000 to poor people willing to undergo tubal ligation or vasectomy so they will not have any children in the future. (I heard about this on CNN, but found a link to the Times-Picayune article via Wonkette.) LaBruzzo says he is concerned that families on welfare have more children than families who aren’t, and thus sap the state’s resources in ever-increasing amounts.
This idea sounds revolting on face to most people. John LaBruzzo is surely not a politician I would trust to formulate reasonable policy, particularly after hearing him say on CNN that he didn’t expect Democrats to support this proposal because people on welfare are the Democratic base. Cute. More importantly, the statistics don’t support LaBruzzo’s fears. While I strongly suspect that LaBruzzo’s intentions are racist and/or classist in nature, and I acknowledge that there is no urgency of an out-of-control welfare budget, I don’t think that that visceral revulsion at the basic idea is really warranted.
The first thing I want to point out is that no one is being forced into this arrangement, unless your definition of “force” is incredibly broad. If a person would rather have $1000 than be able to have children in the future, I see no reason not to allow them to make that trade. Plenty of people seek vasectomies or tubal ligations on their own, so it’s clear they’re not inherently bad operations. No one else would be harmed by the fact of an individual receiving the surgery, so if that individual would prefer the money to their fertility, the trade makes everyone better off. Surely there are people out there who face both unwanted pregnancies and financial problems, and would find themselves killing two birds with one stone in a system of this sort. (I anticipate a claim that this is merely economic coercion, since some people really need the money — but this is a ridiculous argument. Is it coercive for a grocery store to charge you money for food? You need that to survive. Is it coercive for your employer to require you to work according to your contract before you get your paycheck? Clearly not.)
We can also think about the potential children that might have been conceived in the future by someone who signed up for this surgery. If $1000 is worth more to you than your own child, I’m going to hazard a guess that you either would not love and care for that child very much, or that you clearly do not have the financial resources necessary to raise a child in a healthy situation (I mean, with adequate food, clothing, shelter, etc.). In either case, the wisest choice would be to refrain from conceiving a child in the first place, which is what a program of this sort allows for.
I know any hint of eugenics makes everyone queasy, because of how easy it is to invoke a comparison to the Nazi regime. I am not contesting the badness of Hitler here. However — aside from the obvious differences in levels of violence and coercion — it is important to notice that while Nazi eugenics were based on ethnicity, religion, and other qualities having in reality nothing to do with one’s ability to raise a family, the eugenics in a program of this type are almost precisely equivalent to the sort we all employ if and when we look for someone to start our own families with. We ask, will this person be able to love and care for our children, putting their needs ahead of his or her own? Will this person take on the intense level of responsibility involved in raising a child? Will our combined salaries be enough to support a family of the size we want? It’s not exactly “eugenics” to choose to have children with someone you think would make a good parent, as opposed to someone you think would make a bad one — or, if it is, it’s not the hateful sort of eugenics that’s tantamount to genocide.
Claims of eugenics with respect to this program are based on the fact that the payments could only go to poor people. Either the goal is to end poverty by ending poor people, as the Wonkette headline read, or the goal is to diminish the numbers of ethnic minorities who are statistically more likely to be poor. These are legitimate complaints. I’d like to step back and look at the basic idea of paying someone not to have children, though, and ask: is it really necessary to restrict this program to poor people? Everyone’s children impose some burden on the state, since public schools must make room for them, they consume resources and contribute to scarcity, Social Security will (maybe…) make payments to them when they retire, and so on and so forth. Sure, wealthy people are probably less likely to take the government up an an offer like this (since $1000 has less marginal utility to someone with greater financial assets), but for the sake of fairness why not offer it to them as well? Would a plan structured in that way make you feel the same kind of revulsion? I doubt it.
My point is absolutely not that John LaBruzzo is a good guy, or that his particular proposal is a good idea. I simply believe that what I’ve been hearing and reading on this topic is missing a certain level of rational discourse. Of course, in the US we don’t suffer from such severe overpopulation as to make a policy like this worth enacting, and I definitely think we should steer away of programs with central and unavoidable discriminatory effects. If it became practically necessary, though, paying people not to have children would be a legitimate plan, not a reprehensible one.
Don’t trust the polls (too much)
It’s natural in an election with high stakes to follow closely any signs of who is going to win. The polls are by far the most noticeable of those signs, but everyone knows that the polls aren’t perfect predictors. There are two obvious reasons for this.
First, polls measure voters’ opinions at the moment, and those opinions can easily change before election day (and of course, some are undecided). Second, polls are a random sample of voters, and therefore suffer from random errors based on who happens to get polled. I think everyone is basically aware of these problems.
There are, however, other problems with them that I think people don’t really think about as much. The problem with these errors is that they don’t just make the polls less useful by introducing noise. They actually bias the results consistently in one direction or another. This is the kind of error that no amount of polling or averaging of multiple polls can eliminate. Here are a couple of the issues:
- Organization: The Obama campaign, which has a huge amount of money, has been spending a lot more on organizing (as opposed to ads) than is traditional. The campaign’s employees and volunteers are working incredibly hard to register new voters, and as soon as the registration deadlines pass, they’ll start preparing for getting out the vote (and in many cases, will start instantly getting out the early vote in states that allow it). Now McCain has his own forces, but overall Obama’s outnumber his substantially. Now, this varies a lot from state to state. In some states Obama has a huge advantage, while in others he has none. No one knows exactly what kind of advantage Obama might get in each state, but what we do know is that this isn’t picked up in the polls.
- Turnout: This overlaps with organization, but is different in some ways. Polls don’t just call X random people and ask them who they’re voting for. They call a bunch, then try to adjust their sample to match “likely voters”. This involves asking a bunch of questions to try to determine if each respondent is likely to come out and actually vote. It also involves weighting their samples so that various demographic/ideological groups make up the same portion of the sample as they will voters in November. This is always tricky, but it’s trickier this time. There are issues of race and gender to play with, as well as the old question of whether young voters will actually show up. The more likely this election is to violate patterns from previous elections, the more these models of who will vote are going to be guesswork and unreliable.
- Lying to pollsters: People sometimes tell people they’ll vote for X and then vote for Y, or that they’re undecided when they’re not. It’s not just about people changing their mind since the poll. Sometimes they just don’t tell the truth. Why? Well, there is a long history of people telling pollsters the things that they think the pollsters want to hear, or hiding things they find embarrassing. Polls routinely show much higher levels of exercise, for example, or church attendance, than actually happens. You could imagine several ways this would happen in this election. One is the so-called “Bradley effect,” where voters say they are voting for a black candidate only to then not vote for him. This seems to me like it would be likely in instances where the perception is that the main reason to vote against the candidate is racism. If it’s widely accepted that non-racists can vote against the candidate, I wouldn’t expect it so much. I could also imagine something of this sort based on the media message. If the current media narrative is that Bush has bungled his presidency and the Republicans are hopeless, the voter might feel as if the pollster will look down on them for voting Republican. This could lead to an artificially high number for any Democrat right now. (Incidentally, my guess is that this effect existed and was largely deflated by the Republican convention, which is where McCain’s bounce came from.) You could also imagine that this effect in general makes the polls more extreme in states with a clear favorite, because voters feel like they’re the odd ones out if they vote for candidate less favored in their area.
- Cell phones: Most pollsters don’t call cell phones. If cell phone use is correlated with particularly political preferences, this could matter a lot. Younger voters are more frequently cell-only, but this can be compensated for by overweighting other young voters who are contacted. The real question is, within a given demographic group, whether those with cell phones likely to have a different political preference than those without. Pollsters can’t control for everything with weighting, and I would assume cell phone ownership (to the exclusion of land lines) correlates with not just age and race, but also education level, income level, urban/rural location, etc. This could mean a big difference is hidden here.
So to what extent do these effects exist, and if so, whom do they favor? Really, no one has the slightest clue. The best we can do is look at previous elections (including the primary) to see if they existed there. Of course, there are multiple, possibly contradictory effects, and teasing out what’s going on is near impossible. My guess is that all effects above do exist, if only in small amounts. I also would be willing to bet that all except the lying favors Obama being better off than the polls imply. The best analysis I’ve seen of this stuff is at FiveThirtyEight, but the analysis there of the Bradley effect is based on the Democratic primary, with a very different universe of voters and a lot of other complicating factors. Same with the cell phone analysis, with similar problems (plus some others).
The bottom line is just that there isn’t enough information out there for us to really know anything that exactly, regardless of how much polling we do. Don’t think of a state as guaranteed unless the polling margins are pretty big. This is an unusual election, so don’t be surprised by unusual results.
A new schedule
Well, as sad as it is, we have to admit it: life got busier once the school year started. A and I are both too bogged down with other responsibilities to keep up both an ideal posting schedule and good post quality. So we’ve decided to concentrate our efforts into writing twice a week — you’ll hear from A on Mondays, and from me on Thursdays. That’s not to say those are the only times we’ll post. If something newsworthy happens, you can bet we’ll be here to voice our opinions on it. The bottom line, though, is that we want to continue to give you high-quality writing without the counterproductive pressure of trying to produce a vast quantity of it.
Of course, we’ll still be checking in on the site often, and we’d love to continue to have conversations with you all through the comments. After all, we need to take a break from school sometimes!
What’s up with the polls?
Electoral projection website FiveThirtyEight is showing McCain at 289.1 electoral votes to Obama’s 248.9. They have him at 56% odds to win the presidency. This is a big change from a couple weeks ago. Before both conventions, Obama had about 60% odds of winning, and at the height of his post-convention bounce was at 75% (though no one expected that to last). Now that a bit of time has passed since both conventions and the transient effects are starting to decay, McCain is ahead. It may still be effects from the Republican convention, or it may be that he’s gaining a solid toehold.
What changed? Two major things. Sarah Palin has been announced as the GOP VP candidate, and the McCain campaign has been airing many negative ads. I can see how both of those things would change a few marginal minds, but I’m surprised that they would have this large of an effect. Then again, all the people who voted to reelect Bush in 2004 are still around and registered, so I shouldn’t write off voter stupidity as a possible factor.
And it is about stupidity. Sarah Palin has repeated so many lies about herself so many times and so blatantly, even after it’s been reported everywhere that they are false, that it’s hard to imagine she’s successfully winning over “values voters.” (It just underscores exactly which values matter, and exactly which ones don’t matter the slightest bit.) The smear ads also contain blatant lies and misrepresentations which, as Paul Krugman points out, “anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute.” The message that’s really sent by all this, as David Ignatius and Steve Chapman both argue, is that McCain will stop at nothing to win even if it means sacrificing the ideals he once stood for. Thomas Friedman believes that this trend of misrepresenting and oversimplifying the facts in order to turn everything partisan is ultimately making America stupid, and I’m inclined to agree.
As someone who prefers rational decisions to purely emotional ones, it’s hard for me to figure out how to argue with people swayed by these clearly false appeals. It seems to me that seeing the facts should make anyone’s decision clear. However, FiveThirtyEight has some great suggestions for the Obama campaign regarding Palin enthusiasts: acknowledge that she’s likable, and then point out that not every likable person would make a good vice president. Maybe a similar approach can be followed for the smear ads — explicitly agreeing that it would be bad for someone to do or believe the things Obama is accused of doing or believing, then explaining the truth. The concern, of course, is that this gives too much air time to the rumors, and denying something often just helps people to remember the something instead of the denial. However, doing nothing doesn’t appear to be working.
Skeptical blogging brainstorm #2
Following up on my first list of ideas, here are some more thoughts I have on what skeptics, atheists, and skeptical and/or atheist bloggers can do in order to add something new and repeat ourselves less. If you’re here via the Skeptics’ Circle #95 link to the earlier list, welcome! (And if you haven’t read the current Skeptics’ Circle, you’re welcome here too, but you should go check it out!)
The issue of community seems like the elephant in the room, which is why I want to focus on it now. We talk about the skeptical movement or the atheist community — but what are those? I feel like a shared respect for critical thinking is not enough to fuel a social organization. For a group focused on faith, it makes a bit more sense to have, well, a congregation. There are holy words to be studied and dogmas to be memorized; there are inner doubts requiring the support (or pressure, depending on how you see it) of a peer group to assuage them. I have a hard time imagining an atheist group meeting — what do you talk about there?
However absurd, I think we ought to try to foster these communities, since one real benefit to being part of a religious group is the fellowship and friendship it offers. It’s good for that to be available without having to profess beliefs in the literal truth of fairy tales and magic. So, we need to have something for those groups to do. That’s one topic for blogging I’d like to see more about. If you’re part of one of these organizations, what do you do? Even if you’re not, what do you think would make a good meeting? Do you play Trivial Pursuit? Watch movies like The Core and pick them apart MST3K-style? Do you organize a lecture series? (Who do you invite?) Tell us what works and what doesn’t, or what would get you to show up versus what would get you to unsubscribe from the mailing list. On a related note, I also like how the Skepchick blog makes use of the opportunity to advertise meet-ups.
We also need to have some open dialogue about how to make these groups what we collectively want them to be. I’ve already seen a bit of writing about how to make skeptical groups more inclusive, and how (or, whether) to reach out to demographics that are underrepresented without reason in most skeptics’ organizations, but I think more people should get involved in the discussion. A few good examples, in my opinion, can be found in this pro and this contra opinion about recruiting women into skeptical organizations, as well as this post on bringing people in the arts, humanities, and social sciences into the fold. I’m sure that topics that are not specifically related to diversity, but are more generally about recruiting and publicity successes and failures, would be well-received too.
I’m planning on writing one more installment in this series, on how to be most effective at reaching out to non-skeptics and getting our message across. In the meantime, please let me know in the comments if you think I make sense or if you think I’m a lunatic.
College endowments
Senator Grassley recently held hearings into how colleges use their endowments. There’s some understandable interest here. Universities frequently control large amounts of money, with a handful of them controlling huge assets. (Harvard, the richest by far, has over $34 billion.) With college costs rising faster than inflation, some in government have thought about ways to force colleges to put this money to work faster to help out with their expenses and reduce tuition. I really think this debate, though, has missed a few points.
First of all, and I think this is the most important point, the money has to be used on education/research eventually. Most of the money in endowments is tied to specific uses. It’s for scholarships, or the salary for a named professorship or something. Even what isn’t specifically targeted is going to end up being used by an educational institution. The real complaint here is just that colleges are saving more than they should — overvaluing education in the future as compared to the present.
I’m inclined to think they are not. Recognize first of all that, to a great extent, any lack of them funding education out of their endowments right now will be replaced with funding from people paying tuition, as long as tuition doesn’t get so high as to dissuade people from going to college. Now, I believe it’s clearly the responsibility of government to provide enough financial aid that everyone can attend college (assuming they put in the effort in high school to make themselves qualified). This is what’s annoying congressmen, since they don’t want to make room in the budget for it, and of course that’s understandable.
The real problem here, though, is that the vast majority of endowment money is held by only a small handful of schools. Maybe Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and MIT can make college free for everyone for a little while by spending down their endowments (or at least, not growing them fast enough to keep up with inflation), but that only affects a tiny minority of college students in the US, and those schools already offer enough financial aid that students from poor families pay very little if anything. Most students go places that don’t have much in the way of endowments, and Congress is still going to have to offer enough financial aid to keep those places affordable.
However, these big endowments do constitute a form of national savings for the US. The American savings rate is low (or negative, really) and could use every bit of help it can get, and a half-trillion dollars in savings isn’t something we should be trying to get rid of. Also, more importantly, it helps to lock in the leading status of US universities. The world’s most elite universities are near-universally in the US (the main exceptions being Cambridge and Oxford). This is largely a consequence of economics. The schools with the ability to bring in the top people will always be the best. The US isn’t going to stay the world’s biggest economy forever, and the gap is definitely going to shrink fast. Building up huge endowments in our top universities essentially locks in their top position, guaranteeing that they’ll be able to fight and stay at the top even as the overall position of the United States deteriorates.
The government should try to avoid forcing private actors to spend their money. I’m not a libertarian, and regulation of nonprofits is something I could live with when clearly necessary. Here, though, I don’t think it is. Harvard is still raising lots of money, so clearly their donors don’t have a problem with the way the endowment is being used. At a time when the United States is failing in general to invest in the kind of long-term society-building things that keep a country at the top of its game, private charities that devote resources to planning for the very long term should be helped, not hurt.
Standing up for the Constitution
This is exactly the kind of attitude I was hoping to see from a former constitutional law professor.
Referring to Obama at the RNC, Sarah Palin said, “Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.” It gave me chills and made me have to step away from the TV, but Obama has responded like the educated and intelligent person he is.
Calling it “the foundation of Anglo-American law,” he said the principle “says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ And say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.’”
The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, “because we don’t always have the right person.”
“We don’t always catch the right person,” he said. “We may think it’s Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it’s Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.”
It might defy our instincts. It might be a bit nuanced. It might require us to read something — and for a few of us, require the assistance of a dictionary. (Who would have expected a presidential candidate to throw around Latin phrases like habeas corpus as though he knows what they mean?!) But it’s exactly those qualities that make me proud of this speech. Rather than play to our fears and herd mentality, Obama is inviting us to think about why our laws say what they say, and why laws shouldn’t be disregarded whenever we feel hysterical. I think he deserves a lot of praise and attention for taking the intellectual stance in a time when “intellectual” is almost as dirty a word as “liberal.”
I like the dash of self-deprecating humor as well. It nicely underscores the ridiculousness of those smears.
Journalistic discretion
Bob Woodward’s new book, A War Within, is out, and is generating headlines with the report that the Bush administration spied on many in the Iraqi government, including Prime Minister Maliki. (With Maliki, it was apparently successful enough to “know everything he says.”) I really think the inclusion of this piece of information was a substantial failure of discretion on Woodward’s part. Of course we were spying on the Iraqi government. It would have been negligent not to spy on them. There were death squads working for the Interior Ministry, and some people seem offended that we didn’t just trust them on principle. It’s offensive, they say, that we were spying on an ally.
This reaction is incredibly naive. Almost every country on earth has an intelligence program, and they all spy on each other, including their allies. The US, for example, gets spied on by Israel and spies on France. It’s not all bad — if your ally has a spy in your government, they know your promises to them aren’t lies, and there’s a lot more trust all around. Good or bad, though, it’s business as usual. No government is really particularly surprised or offended by it. Their populations are, though, so the government has to act as if it’s a horrible surprise.
And this is exactly why I don’t think Woodward should have published what he did. It angers Iraqis and damages the chance of success there. (It should be noted that “success” in this case isn’t just something that’s good for the US, but pretty uncontroversially good for everyone.) It’s harmful, but has no particular value to public discourse. The spying isn’t controversial amongst anyone with the power to do anything about it.
There is, of course, a more complicated issue here. The information in question was probably classified. Clearly Woodward has a legal right to print it, but the person who told him the info was probably breaking the law. In an investigation, Woodward could be called to testify and imprisoned if he didn’t reveal his sources. Would it be proper to undertake these investigations and punishments? Would it be better if they weren’t legally available?
The real problem with the shield law debate is that intuitions vary so much based on the information in question. If the government has a secret program to burn down the houses of everyone who voted against the incumbent party, and you know it, you should leak it. No one will disagree with this, and you’d probably have a parade thrown in your honor. If instead you leak technical diagrams of US military weaponry, and the Washington Post publishes them on the front page, no one would support the Post, and everyone would support an investigation to find the leak. The dilemma, of course, is that any law punishes someone for leaking (or printing) classified information applies equally well in both cases. You can’t write an “unless it was good” exception.
In the end, I’m inclined to accept the status quo here. It’s very unusual for reporters to be supboenaed and their ability to report stays intact. (I disagree with those who want Woodward fired/subpoenaed/whatever. I don’t think he should have printed this, but he has some very good stuff about why violence is decreasing in Iraq, and to have some subjective, unpredictable standard is going to silence a lot of good reporting.) There is, though, some risk. When you leak something idiotic, like the identity of a CIA agent, there is definitely some danger of jail time. I feel uncomfortable depending so heavily on prosecutorial discretion, which can easily be political, but I don’t see any better alternative here.
Skeptical blogging brainstorm #1
I said in an earlier post that I planned to do a bit of brainstorming on what we as skeptical and/or atheist bloggers ought to be doing with our time, if we’re not rehashing the old skeptical and/or atheist classics. (Forgive me if I conflate atheism and skepticism a bit in this post. In my experience around the blogosphere, the two respective groups of bloggers overlap quite a lot, and their overall objectives are very closely aligned, so for all intents and purposes of this entry they are the same.) Here is what I’ve thought of since then.
My primary inclination is to suggest that we include a larger range of issues within the skeptical canon. Instead of just writing about alternative medicine or alien sightings, we can find some other aspects of life to be skeptical about as well. We can question claims made in advertising, or critique the methods in academic papers. We can point out when politicians promote blatantly false ideas. Anything with facts is worthy of a skeptic’s attention. If you’re writing a skeptical blog, rather than just being a skeptic while blogging, I understand an inclination to stick with the standard sorts of debunking. As for the rest of us, though, there are topics we can shift towards so as not to be quite as redundant.
Straight-up activism is certainly a good idea as well. If we assume, as seems to be the case, that most people reading skeptical or atheist blogs are themselves skeptics or atheists, this could be a very effective way of organizing. Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist has recently tapped into this on behalf of Kay Hagan, a candidate for North Carolina state senate who got attacked for planning to meet with an atheist organization. There are lots of ways that a skeptical or atheist viewpoint is relevant to politics, and if you want to create real change in society in the direction of that viewpoint, you should work to elect people you believe represent it and vote out of office those who are counterproductive. In addition to just blogging about John McCain’s comments about a link between vaccines and autism, we should be protesting about it at his speaking events. (Maybe use your blog to assemble protesters.) In addition to just writing about false advertising claims made for alternative medicine, call on your local district attorney to prosecute chiropractors and crystal healers and homeopaths in your area when they make unsubstantiated claims of healing. (Maybe use your blog to distribute a template letter to send to the DA’s office.) There’s plenty of work to be done.
Finally, there’s the question of unity as a group. There’s a lot of talk about the “atheist community” or the “skeptical movement” and what its goals are. It’s difficult to have a movement or a coherent set of group goals without some infrastructure. As much as I’m wary of the election of an atheist pope or some such central authority of a group based on thinking for yourself, I think these organizations have a place at least insofar as lobbying and publicity are concerned. Rather than have people seeing one dude here or there interviewed on the local news, or have a legislator receiving an occasional letter from individual constituents, we want to present a stronger message. A spokesperson on TV saying he represents so many millions of people looks a lot more compelling. Many groups of this sort already exist, such as Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the National Center for Science Education, the Skeptics Society, and the Secular Coalition for America. (There are of course many others; this is just a sampling.) Joining and/or donating to these groups will make them more effective at publicizing skeptical and secular perspectives.
That’s all I’ve got for now, but not forever. I have a few other ideas still percolating, and I’ll post again about them soon. In the meantime, let me know what you think about these ideas — if they’re good, crazy, infeasible, irrelevant… whatever.