Which way the contempt flows

From Randall Collins:

US surveys indicate the favorite TV shows of liberal Democrats are comedians satirizing conservatives; conservatives' favorites are college football.

Smug and disdainful: How liberals think conservatives are. How liberals actually are.

(HT: Megan McArdle.)

Propaganda of entropy

I mean this article.

What happened in the media is that one side has completely hijacked the debate and is trying to morally shame the other into submission. And now everyone thinks the problem is that there is a flood of refugees trying to find shelter in the safety of Europe, and the virtuous, tolerant and diverse Austria, Germany and Sweden are welcoming them with open arms whereas backwards Eastern European countries are sicking blood hounds on drowning children. So now the virtuous Europe has no choice but to try and force the backwards Europe to do their fair share.

This picture is a complete lie. Among all those hundreds of thousands of refugees and/or migrants there are maybe three or four people who want to settle in Poland or Hungary. They all want to go to Germany. (Okay, for some of them, Austria or Sweden may do.) But Germans know they can't handle all of them, so they are trying to bully other countries into taking some. This is what "refugee quotas" are really all about. The quota proposals are essentially asking that Poland and Hungary somehow round up some of the migrants trying to get to Germany, and force them to settle in Poland or Hungary instead. You'd have to be crazy to comply with that, so I really can't see how you can blame Poles and Hungarians for not wanting to.

As a side note, here's a (clearly condescending, even though passive-aggressively so) quote from the NYT article:

Unlike countries in Western Europe, which have long histories of accepting immigrants from diverse cultures, the former Communist states tend to be highly homogeneous. Poland, for instance, is 98 percent white and 94 percent Catholic.

We can't have that, now can we, because diversity. Except if you keep mixing things so that they are in the same proportions everywhere, how is that diversity? Looks more like entropy to me.

A concept too subtle for most proponents of diversity to grasp is that there are at least two dimensions to it. There's within-country diversity, and there's between-country diversity. They're functionally connected. If you increase within-, you decrease between-. England today is more diverse than England in 1369. But today, England is much less different from China than was the case in 1369. For the sake of diversity, then, can't the Western world have one or two all-white, all-Catholic countries, if only so that non-white non-Catholics can visit them and observe white Catholics in their natural habitat?

Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, summarized in six seconds

You can't ever defend yourself with rhetoric or logic. Which means sometimes you just can't really defend yourself at all.

Edward Feser writes:

Prominent conservative politicians and churchmen have all essentially caved in on the substance of the dispute over "same-sex marriage."  None of them will publicly express the slightest moral disapproval of homosexual behavior, and few even bother anymore with social scientific arguments supporting the benefits of children being raised by both a mother and a father. (...) All they ask is that religious believers who on moral grounds disapprove of "same-sex marriage" not be forced to cooperate formally or materially with it.  The circumstances where this might occur are, of course, very rare.  No one is proposing that business owners might refuse to serve a customer simply because he or she happens to be homosexual.  What is in view are merely cases where a business owner who objects to "same-sex marriage" would be forced to participate in it, say by providing a wedding cake or wedding invitations.  Nor would his refusal to participate inconvenience anyone, since there are plenty of business owners who have no qualms about "same-sex marriage." 

In short, what conservatives are proposing is not only extremely modest, but is being defended in the name of their opponents’ own principles, the most liberal of principles, viz. the Jeffersonian principle that it is tyrannical to force someone to act against his conscience.

This is a hard lesson to learn: Sometimes appealing to your opponent's good faith will not only not work but actually bring about more abuse. The reason is simple. By showing someone that in their treatment of you they are violating their own stated principles, you basically prove to them that they are a hypocrite. No one likes to think that about themselves, and everyone is going to get angry when confronted with an argument to that effect. And the degree of anger is going to be directly proportional to how hard the argument is to refute.

Everyone is a hypocrite, however, and everyone is prone to get pissed when presented with evidence thereof; so why even write about something so generally true as to be completely boring?

Because some people have power and others don't. That's why the cultural left's reaction to the Indiana religious freedom law is so utterly, irredeemably, insanely unhinged. You see, if you prove to someone that they're a hypocrite, they'll get angry with you; but if they also happen to think they are more powerful than you are, they'll do everything they can to make you pay. This is what the current spectacle is really about. The left has enjoyed cultural power for quite some time now, which is why they feel that at this point they can fight not just those they disagree with, but also those who happen to correctly call them out on their bullshit, regardless of how well meaning and non-threatening they may be.

You didn't earn that

There are a lot of Nobel Prize winning Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve won the Nobel Prize, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.  (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American education system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in high schools and universities.  If you’ve got the Nobel Prize-- you didn’t earn that.  Somebody else made that happen.  All these physics labs didn’t build themselves.  Government research created those labs so that all the scientists could use them to do their research.

Is the US under-insured?

Numbers below are 2008-2011 averages in 28 OECD countries as per World Development Indicators.

Clever words about stupid words

The stupid stuff is this essay by Stephen King. Of which Mike Munger had this to say:

So my man wants the government to both "fix global warming" and "lower the price of gasoline". Nice work there, Steve. Your political economy is way scarier than your fiction.

How about some perspective

Is it me, or are today's politicians and media people more prone to exaggeration than they used to be some two decades ago or so? My favorite recent example: the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), called the misconduct of Secret Service agents in Cartagena, Colombia "the worst moment in the history of the Secret Service."

Seriously? If I remember correctly, there was once a crew of Secret Service agents who allowed the President to be shot dead on their watch. I really don't think that has been topped yet. 

Fourteen years and a funeral

The newly elected coalition governing Poland is planning to pass legislation increasing retirement age from 65 to 67. Some guy named Krzysztof Feusette, who writes for the second-largest Polish daily newspaper, is protesting against this in an op-ed Four Years and a Funeral, in which he attempts to show that Polish men will, on average, enjoy retirement for only four years. He compares this figure with its counterparts in other European countries, showing that it is generally much lower.

In order to fully appreciate how much of a goddamn idiot Mr. Feusette is, let's look at the method he uses to arrive at the average length of male retirement. Here's how he does it (make sure you're sitting down when you're reading this): he subtracts retirement age from life expectancy at birth for men. You read that right: at birth. AT BIRTH. Could we make a one-time exception in retirement law for Mr. Feusette, so that this idiot could retire right the fuck now? (Also, when I check the source he cites, I see life expectancy at birth for Polish men to equal 72.3 years and not 71 years.)

For those of you who want to know what the truth is, I'm not sure exactly, because I couldn't find life expectancy data for each age. But it sure isn't even close to four years. In 2007, life expectancy for Polish men at the age of 65 was 14.6 years.

The process of elimination

At the moment, the GOP electorate behaves a bit like a very indecisive student trying to guess the right answer among four in a multiple choice test question. By process of elimination, the student already figured out that choices B, C, and D are definitely not the right answers. However, he doesn't like choice A either, so he won't just cirlcle it and be done with the question; instead, he'll keep thinking about the answer some more. And then a little longer.

Too ridiculous for words

Browsing various items relevant to the heated dispute over whether or not contraceptives should be subsidized, I've encountered a whole lot of beliefs that are not just false but quite obviously so. They're so ridiculous it's hard to believe there are people who actually have those beliefs. Here are some of those (in no particular order):

• Mandating insurance companies to cover contraception isn't asking taxpayers to pay for someone's contraception.
• Not requiring that insurance companies cover contraception is the same as denying access to contraception.
• The fact that the market price of contraceptives is high means there is a market failure.

If you believe any of those things, you should really be ashamed of your ignorance.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day

And so, every once in a while, will be Rush Limbaugh.

Tell us what to think

I've stumbled onto the striking graph below via FlowingData (the original source is ProPublica):

It's a good thing that this shift happened, but the magnitude and timing of it doesn't speak very well of the members of Congress. It reveals that they either have no principles at all or can't even be bothered to read the legislation proposals that they endorse or criticize.

Things I wish would die: The phrase "statistical dead heat"

You hear this phrase a lot any time there's an important election approaching. It refers to a situation when the difference between percentages of respondents declaring they'll vote for candidate A and candidate B is smaller than the margin of sampling error. For example, suppose there will soon be a Republican presidential primary in Florida where voters will be choosing between two candidates, Mitt Romney and Ann Coulter. A public opinion poll comes out, showing that 51% of respondents say they'll vote for Romney, and 49% of them say they'll vote for Coulter. The polling company says that the margin of sampling error in this poll is three percentage points. The media declare that Romney and Coulter are locked in a "statistical dead heat" or "statistical tie" because, given the margin of error, Romney's true vote share could be as low as 48%, and Coulter's could be as high as 52%.

But to represent this situation as a tie is highly misleading, for several reasons. I'll concentrate here on two of those reasons, to show just how misleading it can be. In what follows, I'm making a simplifying assumption that sampling error is the only source of uncertainty in my example poll. This is of course unrealistic, but completely justified, since sampling error is the only type of uncertainty that is reported by the media.

First, the size of the margin of error depends on the significance level chosen for the particular poll. Most polls choose to report a 95% confidence interval. Suppose that's the case with our fictional Romney v. Coulter situation. What this means is that, if this poll were to be redone a large number of times, with the same sample size, then 95% of the time Romney's vote share would fall somewhere between 48% and 54%. Put another way, it means that the difference between Romney's and Coulter's vote shares is not statistically significant at a 5% level (but if we chose, say, a 68% confidence interval, then the margin of error would be approximately 1.53--smaller than the spread). So the fact that the difference between Coulter and Romney is smaller than the margin of error doesn't mean Romney and Coulter are tied; it means that Romney is most  likely ahead but, if we hold ourselves to a 5% significance level, we can't say exactly by how much. Even when your point estimate is not significant at the level you chose, it is still the best guess you have.

Second, when we look at polls, we don't really care about spread; we care about who's more likely to win. The reason we pay attention to spread at all is because we treat it as a proxy for the probability of winning. So let's think about this in those terms (again, assuming sampling error is the only source of uncertainty). At 5% significance level, the margin of sampling error of a statistic is 1.96 times the standard error of that statistic (if you want to know how the standard error of a proportion is calculated, look below the fold). Thus, the sampling distribution of Romney's vote share is normal with mean 51 and standard deviation 1.53 (= 3/1.96). Below is a plot of that distribution. The ratio of the area shaded in red to total area underneath the curve is the probability that it's actually Coulter who's ahead (i.e. it's the probability that the true percentage of voters who intend to support Romney is less than 50). That probability is about 25%. The odds of Romney being ahead of Coulter are 3 to 1; doesn't sound like dead heat to me.

A big, happy family. Maybe not that happy, but really huge

Speaking of arguments against Polish central bank lending 5 billion euros to the IMF, here's an additional piece of hilarity. In an essay titled Don't Touch Our Currency Reserves, one Tadeusz Swiechowicz goes through the reasons why it's a bad idea for Poland to do this. Here's one of the reasons he lists:

Italians are capable of paying down their government debts themselves. The average household income in Italy is equivalent to 2 million PLN annually. [PLN is code for zloty, the unit of Polish currency--przemek]

A mind-boggling figure indeed, as made up figures tend to be. CIA World Factbook tells me that GDP per capita in Italy is currently around $30,000. Right now, 1 USD buys 3.4 PLN, which means Italian GDP per capita expressed in PLN is 102,000. So apparently, Mr. Swiechowicz believes that the average household size in Italy is almost 20 people.

Consider knowing what you're talking about

This is yet another post in which I decry the depressing stupidity of public debate in Poland, especially when it comes to matters of economics and finance. The recent EU summit, aside from making a large (though rather back-door) policy breakthrough with respect to bailing out illiquid governments, has also proposed that the central banks of EU countries guarantee a loan to the IMF, with the aggregate value of some 200 billion euros. The funds are presumably going to be set aside in order to be used to help eurozone governments facing liquidity problems.

Poland's share in that guarantee is supposed to be somewhere in between 5 and 10 billion euros, and it's going to be funded through Polish central bank's currency reserves (which really means foreign government bonds held by the bank). At any rate, what prompted this note was an argument I've heard from a politician of the opposition party, debating against Poland's participation in this loan: namely, that even though on the face of it we're lending to the IMF, "everyone knows" we'll really be lending to Greece and Italy in order to save the euro, and it is a violation of the constitution to use the central bank of Poland to defend a non-Polish currency.

This was said with a straight face, by someone who used to be a Foreign Minister, about a loan to the IMF. Whose main (and at the time of its birth, only) function is pooling funds from central banks of many countries in order to provide their participants insurance against speculative attacks on their currencies.

Let me rephrase that again: the argument is that we can't be lending this money to the IMF because everyone knows they will use it to protect a foreign currency from speculative attack.

And no one there seems to have anything to say

A new deal is in the works in order to save the eurozone. Judging by rumors, it's not a very good one. No mention of a possibility of establishing the ECB as lender of last resort; no mention of the possibility of eurobonds; plans of establishing credible commitment mechanisms to keeping budget deficits below 3% of GDP; some sort of risk-sharing agreement in the form of an overall debt guarantee; and - last but not least - plans of some sort of credible commitment to not force private sector bondholders to take any losses on any future eurozone bailouts. Now how is a market supposed to work if lenders are sheltered from experiencing negative consequences of bad lending decisions? (The question is rhetorical.) Also, how is the debt guarantee supposed to work? The eurozone doesn't have enough funds to guarantee the debt of, say, Italy without that debt having gone some serious restructuring; and a restructuring of Italian debt under the assumption that private creditors must get 100 eurocents on the euro is economically and politically impossible--the necessary austerity measures would be so severe that it would make much more sense for Italy to simply suffer the consequences of defaulting and leaving the eurozone unilaterally.

So, the Polish government supports the deal unreservedly. On the domestic front, the arguments it offers in favor of it are nothing short of inane. The inanity of them, however, will have to wait until another post. What irks me even more at this moment is the fact that the opposition's response to those shallow arguments are arguments that are generally much, much stupider than what they're criticizing. Here's a small sample.

In a TV interview, the leader of the largest opposition party argued that concerns about the devastating effects a severe recession in the eurozone would have on Polish economy are much exaggerated because "Poland's exports aren't large in relation to its GDP". (The ratio is about 35%, in case you're wondering. And this was said by a guy who was at one point a prime minister, for Pete's sake. Also, below the fold you can find a chart that shows where that 35% locates Poland among OECD countries.)

In another interview, that same guy said that the government's plans of increasing the retirement age for women to 67 years is a terrible idea because Germany is doing the same thing and being Germany's copycats shows our government's "psychological dependence" on our neighbors. How's that for a policy rule: The Germans are doing it, so we can't.

Or how about this: the main economic writer in Poland's largest opposition media outlet begins his essay about the eurozone crisis with the following:

Germany's annual trade surplus of 130 billion euros has to come from somewhere. It comes at the expense of deficits, debt, and eventual bankruptcy of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy.

In other words, he reveals that he doesn't know what trade surplus is, and can't tell the difference between current account deficit and public debt (hey, genius: how come Germany is in debt to about 84% of its GDP even though it's running all these surpluses?).

These arguments aren't just misguided. They're laughably ignorant.

And then another annoying one: we can't have a fiscal union because that would mean member countries would lose some of their sovereignty. True enough, but then again, countries give up some of their sovereignty left and right, lots of times voluntarily and to their own benefit. Entering a free trade agreement means losing a bit of your sovereignty (namely, sovereignty to set tariffs to whatever you damn well please). And losing that bit of your sovereignty happens to make you better off. I also find it interesting that those same politicians who decry the loss of independence that comes with a voluntary contractual agreement, never seem to have a problem with any type of policy that increases public debt (at least in Poland they don't). Hey, genius: when you take out a loan, what do you think happens to your sovereignty?

Anyway, rant's over for now. The chart I was talking about is below the fold.

Speaking of euphemisms

I know it's nowhere near in the same league of euphemisms, but Herman Cain's announcement that he's "suspending" his presidential campaign "because of the continued distractions" made me think of that famous quote from Emperor Hirohito's Imperial Rescript on the Termination of War (August 15, 1945): "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage".

Because it lies

Some excerpts from an interesting essay:

On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. “is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”  

[...] 

Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998. In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, “If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies.” 

This is typical of Mr. Gingrich’s modus operandi. He has always considered himself to be the smartest guy in the room and long chaffed at being corrected by experts when he cooked up some new plan, over which he may have expended 30 seconds of thought, to completely upend and remake the health, tax or education systems.

Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress’s professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise. To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Note that all this love is coming from Bruce Bartlett, who served as a policy analyst in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.

Department of civil engineering

An annoying feature of policy debates: Arguing over issues which are, for all practical purposes, inherently quantitative, as though they were qualitative. For example, we can't have laws that set this or that limiting condition because laws can't "draw completely arbitrary lines in the sand". Sure they can. They have to. How does one deal with issues now dealt with legal concepts of, for example, age of consent or maximum speed limit, without being arbitrary? Here's another one I love: We can't do this because that's "civil engineering". Well, so are stop signs. The entire civil code is an exercise in civil engineering. So is criminal code.

The questions of whether or not we want laws that use arbitrary limits, or whether or not we accept social engineering, are just a waste of time. There's no real choice there. The meaningful questions are where we want to draw this or that arbitrary line, or how we want our civil engineering done in this or that case.