“The Devil Is In The Data”: Simply Adding More Observational Data Won’t Expand The Ranks Of The GOP
GOP’s “Growth and Opportunity Project,” which details a plan for revitalizing the Republican Party in the aftermath of the 2012 defeat, is necessarily broader than it is deep. There is, however, a topic that will need to be thoroughly explored if the Republican Party is to successfully execute this ambitious plan.
Two words were used nearly 300 times throughout the report: “data” and “testing.” One word—”experiment”—was not mentioned at all. But experiments are the only type of test that can produce the kind of data the GOP needs.
Put simply, “data” is information about the world we live in, and it comes in two types: “observational” and “experimental.” “Observational” data is static; it’s information about the things as they are, or were. For example, voters who are pro-life are also less supportive of gun control. That’s the world as it is. But it doesn’t tell us whether being pro-life causes people to be more pro-gun or whether a pro-life message will decrease support for gun control.
“Experimental” data is dynamic; it’s information about what causes things to change and how things could be. Experiments show us how specific messages or modes of contact—like telephone calls, mailers or TV ads—push or pull on voter opinion and behavior. Experiments open our eyes to a counterfactual universe: what if every citizen watched this ad, knew that fact, or was visited at their door by a volunteer? Will it shift the vote or turn more people out to the polls? Will it work with some voters, but not others, or even cause a backlash?
The experimental method is simple in concept, but difficult in practice. The core of a true experiment is random assignment of a large number of test subjects to “treatment” and “control” groups, like a clinical drug trial. With large numbers, random assignment ensures there is no systematic bias in who ends up in each group. We can then attribute any difference in the outcome between the “treatment” and “control” group, whether that’s blood pressure or support for a candidate, to the effect of the “treatment.” It’s the only way to confidently identify a causal relationship.
This all might sound far too fussy and academic, even philosophical, to be a core part of a political effort. But this is the new world of politics in which we’re already living.
What made the Obama campaign so accurate in their prediction of the vote across contested states was the use of experimental results from the “lab” and the “field” in their voter modeling. Because they had a large amount of experimental data, showing them how different kinds of people shifted in response to various messages (toward or away from Obama, greater or lesser likelihood of voting), they could predict with astonishing accuracy the aggregate results of their efforts.
Simply adding more observational data won’t expand the ranks of the GOP. In Iowa’s 2008 caucus, the Romney campaign turned out just under 30,000 votes and lost badly to a late-surging Mike Huckabee. Romney maintained his database on the state’s voters. In 2011, his campaign commenced a quiet but ambitious “data-driven” effort to win Iowa. All the experience, information and algorithms hard-won over the last four years were plowed into a massive persuasion and turnout effort. But when their work was completed and the counting was done, Romney received just under 30,000 votes once again. Four years and millions of dollars later Romney had earned about 140 fewer votes and a loss to yet another late-surging social conservative.
Observational data and the modeling it generates are cold and static. And no statistical technique, regardless of its sophistication, can overcome the inherent limitations of observational data. In contrast, experimental data and the modeling it generates are alive and dynamic.
We will never know what messages, digital tactics or other campaign tools work or are a waste without experiments. As Alan Gerber, Donald Green and Edward Kaplan—two of whom are political scientists from Yale who brought experiments out of academia and into Democratic politics—conclude, “unless researchers have prior information about the biases associated with observational research, observational findings are accorded zero weight [in a test of a causal proposition] regardless of sample size, and researchers learn about causality exclusively through experimental results.”
Big, integrated, and clean observational data are a necessity. But it isn’t sufficient. Mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré claimed, “experiment alone can teach us something new; it alone can give us certainty.” I’d only caution that certainty is not something we can expect of this world. But experiments bring us as close to glimpsing it as we can hope.
By: Adam Schaeffer, U. S. News and World Report, March 22, 2013
“A Devastating Blow To The Scientific Process”: The Idea That Politicians Decide What Is Worthy Of Research Is Perilous
This week, ten years after swearing to destroy Saddam Hussein and build democracy in Iraq, the United States took a step toward dismantling its investment in studying how democracy works.
For more than 15 years, congressional Republicans have been trying to do away with federal funding for political-science research. Every time until now, political scientists successfully fought back. One reason they could: The pot designated for political science in the National Science Foundation (NSF) was a tiny percentage of overall research money—about $10 million out of a $7 billion budget. That’s less than two-tenths of a percent. But it’s also the majority of total grant funding for political-science research. The field provides us with much of what we know about how democracies, including our own, function (and don’t function). Political scientists study how and why opinions change on key issues, what motivates people to vote, and how public opinion influences elected officials. For a relatively small sum, the nation that loves to tout its democratic ideals has been funding projects to investigate how that democracy works (and doesn’t).
Last May, when House Republicans passed an amendment by Congressman Jeff Flake to stop funding the NSF’s Political Science Program, Senate Democrats stopped it from going anywhere. Even New York Times columnist David Brooks got agitated by Flake’s selective targeting of the program, arguing, “This is exactly how budgets should not be balanced—by cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits.” (If he’s like most political journalists, Brooks uses plenty of NSF-funded data.)
But tucked inside the 600-page continuing resolution the Senate passed on Wednesday afternoon—the measure that must pass to avoid a government shutdown—is an amendment from Republican Senator Tom Coburn, designed to cut off the vast majority of federal support for political-science research. The amendment prevents the National Science Foundation from funding its Political Science Program, “except for research projects that the Director of the National Science Foundation certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.”
Perhaps most surprising, the resolution passed by a voice vote, meaning there was no real opposition from Democrats. It’s quite a turnabout. Democrats have long supported research grants for the social sciences. When Coburn introduced a similar amendment in 2009, Democrat Barbara Mikulski went on the offensive: “This amendment is an attack on science. It is an attack on academia,” she said. “We need full funding to keep America innovative.”
But this time around, Senator Mikulski, as appropriations chair, was shepherding a difficult piece of legislation through the body as Republicans threatened a government shutdown. Democratic leaders were afraid that if Coburn didn’t get his way on the amendment, he would slow down the continuing resolution. That might have doomed the thing, with Congress headed to recess. Instead, it seems Coburn modified his original amendment to assuage the Democrats. His new language permitted the NSF to allow exceptions for political projects that “promote national security or the economic interests” of the country. Instead of cutting the $10 million allotted for the Political Science Program, the measure simply prohibits grants in political science. The NSF gets to keep the money for other purposes.
“It reflects the nature of the Senate more than it reflects any shifting views or shifting support,” says Thomas Mann, political scientist and congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution. “If there were a [roll call] vote on this, it never would have passed.” The House has already shown its support for a similar measure. The die has been cast, at least in the short term. Democrats will have a chance to undo the measure in October, when Congress will need to pass another budget for the next fiscal year.
The American Political Science Association called the decision “a devastating blow to the integrity of the scientific process.” That’s not overstating things, even if $10 million looks like a drop (if that) in the national budgetary bucket. If you care about scientific process generally, it’s not hard to see why the amendment is an ominous portent for other NSF programs. Growing up as the daughter of a political scientist who received several NSF grants, I was well aware of their importance, not only to political-science research but to the social sciences in general. Fields like sociology, psychology, and economics also rely heavily on NSF funding—and could also fall victim to the whims of an influential member of Congress. What if Senator Coburn next decides that sociological studies of gender and homophobia are frivolous? House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has already expressed his support for getting rid of funding for all social-science research, even though the combined budget for those programs is less than 3 percent of total NSF funding.
The situation could easily spread further, into the many parts of the hard sciences that are just as easily politicized—say, evolutionary biology or climate change. When the Flake amendment entered the House, the science magazine Nature wrote an editorial detailing the threat to all fields: “Scientists should ask themselves which vulnerable research programme could be next on the hit list,” the piece read. “The idea that politicians should decide what is worthy of research is perilous.”
Second, political-science research is important. NSF funds a number of major projects that inform much of how we understand our system. For instance, for decades, the Political Science Program has funded the National Election Study, a multimillion-dollar project run out of the University of Michigan. The data, freely available to anyone, provides the most comprehensive look at how American political opinion has changed over time on key issues. Through the study, we can track the evolution of partisan identification, public opinion, and a variety of other key issues over decades. The findings are used by journalists and campaigns, and they’re used to train undergraduates and graduate students in research. If the study ceases, there will suddenly be no way to see long-term trends in the American electorate.
Other Political Science Program studies have investigated questions that are important to our functioning democracy but not particularly easy to raise money for—like gender gaps in political ambition or how responsive elected officials really are to public opinion. Furthermore, the research has helped develop a number of statistical and methodological tools, like computer-assisted interviewing, which has since become standard in private-sector research.
Without NSF, many of these projects may go unfunded. Political-science research, like most academic research, relies on outside funding. Universities pay professors’ salaries and offer basic infrastructure—the buildings in which the research can take place, for instance—but most of the actual dollars for research come from grants. NSF funds 61 percent of political-science research. “There are other opportunities out there” for funding, says John McIver, who ran NSF’s Political Science Program in the mid-1990s. “But there are no pots as big as the NSF program. It’s going to be hard for big political science to continue.”
Why would political science be singled out for cuts in the first place? Coburn says he opposes the funding because the $10 million spent on political science takes away $10 million from studies of diseases or other causes deemed more worthy. In a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation earlier this month, he argued, “Discontinuing funding for these types of studies will increase our ability to fund research into basic fields of mathematics and science such as engineering, biology, physics, and technology.”
Of course, the National Science Foundation has a number of programs that have no direct economic or medical benefits. Physicists spend millions studying dark matter; not only have some of those studies failed to reach a conclusion but the research has no impact on most of our lives. Political-science research also makes its way into Congress—as the political scientist John Sides noted in 2011, even Coburn hasn’t let his opposition to NSF’s political-science grants stop him from relying on NSF-funded political-science research when the research bolsters his own positions. In one debate, he cited NSF-funded research to demonstrate the lack of congressional oversight of the Government Accountability Office.
Singling out political science for a cut seems absurd, until you consider that political scientists conduct research about elected officials and also that this research (usually) doesn’t rely on access or parlor games. Unlike reporters, who must establish relationships to gain access and information—and risk getting shut out when they write something controversial—political scientists have been free to critique and explain our political process, warts and all, and have never had to fear political repercussions. Until now, it seems. “Members of Congress don’t like research being done about members of Congress,” McIver says. “In a world in which Congress has an 11-percent approval rate, Congress is not happy to know there’s research being done specially on that topic.” As if to prove his point, Senator Coburn has repeatedly insisted that there’s no need to fund studies of the GOP’s use of the filibuster. It just so happens that many political scientists are eager to examine how the tool has been used (if not abused) under the current Republican leadership in the Senate.
Coburn’s attempt to stifle political science probably won’t succeed for long. Democrats are expected to restore the status quo by next October. But the fact that this decision was made at all is worrying. Flake, Coburn, and Cantor aren’t likely to let this go, especially now that they’ve had a taste of success.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, March 23, 2013
“Reactionary, Ill-informed And Ill-intentioned”: The G.O.P.’s Bachmann Problem
The current intramural squabbling on the right is just too delicious for words. At least for nice words.
Senator John McCain called the far-right darlings Senator Rand Paul, Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Justin Amash “wacko birds” earlier this month. (McCain later apologized for that burst of honesty and candor.)
Ann Coulter used her Conservative Political Action Conference speech to take a shot at New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, who was not invited to speak this year. Coulter quipped: “Even CPAC had to cut back on its speakers this year, by about 300 pounds.” What a lovely woman.
Also at CPAC, the half-term ex-governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, took a whack at Karl Rove, challenging him to run for office himself. “Buck up or stay in the truck,” she said with her usual Shakespearean eloquence. Rove shot back that if he were to run and win, he’d at least finish his term. Ouch.
Donald Trump took to Twitter recently to call the conservative blogger Michelle Malkin a “dummy” who was “born stupid.” It’s hard to know whom to side with when two bullies battle.
But all this name-calling, as fun as it is to watch, is just a sideshow. The main show is the underlying agitation.
The Republican Party is experiencing an existential crisis, born of its own misguided incongruity with modern American culture and its insistence on choosing intransigence in a dynamic age of fundamental change. Instead of turning away from obsolescence, it is charging headlong into it, becoming more strident and pushing away more voters whom it could otherwise win.
Andrew Kohut, the founding director of the Pew Research Center, pointed out in The Washington Post on Friday that the party’s ratings “now stand at a 20-year low,” and that is in part because “the outside influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the G.O.P. what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s — radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization.”
And too many of those hard-liners have a near-allergic reaction to the truth.
A prime example is Michele Bachmann, the person who convened the Tea Party Caucus in Congress and a Republican candidate for president last year.
She burst back on the scene with a string of lies and half-truths that could have drawn a tsk tsk from Tom Sawyer.
PolitiFact rated two of her claims during her CPAC speech last Saturday as “pants on fire” false. The first was that 70 cents of every dollar that’s supposed to go to the poor actually goes to salaries and pensions of bureaucrats. The second was that scientists could have a cure for Alzheimer’s in 10 years if it were not for “a cadre of overzealous regulators, excessive taxation and greedy litigators.”
She also said during that speech that President Obama was living “a lifestyle that is one of excess” in the White House, detailing how many chefs he had, and so on.
The Washington Post gave that claim four Pinocchios, and pointed out that “during last year’s G.O.P. presidential race, Bachmann racked up the highest ratio of Four-Pinocchio comments, so just about everything she says needs to be checked and double-checked before it is reported.”
And in a speech Thursday on the House floor, she said of the federal health care law:
“The American people, especially vulnerable women, vulnerable children, vulnerable senior citizens, now get to pay more and they get less. That’s why we’re here, because we’re saying let’s repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens.”
Factcheck.org pointed out that her “facts” didn’t match her hyperbole.
Last year The Washington Post quoted Jim Drinkard, who oversees fact-checking at The Associated Press, as saying, “We had to have a self-imposed Michele Bachmann quota in some of those debates.”
It’s sad when you are so fact-challenged that you burn out the fact-checkers.
People like Bachmann represent everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. She and her colleagues are hyperbolic, reactionary, ill-informed and ill-intentioned, and they have become synonymous with the Republican brand. We don’t need all politicians to be Mensa-worthy, but we do expect them to be cogent and competent.
When all the dust settles from the current dustup within the party over who holds the mantle and which direction to take, Republicans will still be left with the problem of what to do with people like Bachmann.
And as long as the party has Bachmanns, it has a problem.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 22, 2013
“The Siren Song Of War”: Why Pundits Beat The Drums For Iraq
Pundits like to imagine that they take political positions only after a careful consideration of the merits — listening to arguments, studying position papers, weighing the pros and cons, and coming to a decision.
But politics is not necessarily so rational, and never was irrationality more plainly on display than in the months leading up to the Iraq War. Ten years later, it is worth exploring why so many opinion-makers – including those who were otherwise critical of the Bush administration — passionately advocated war.
For at least some leading pundits, their position seems to have been shaped less by “reason” or “ideas” than something more primal and even tribal, reflecting their fantasies about who they imagined themselves to be. What follows is a taxonomy of certain pundits on the center and the left who, to their eternal shame, beat the drums of war — hard.
First let’s consider the contrarians. Young Matthew Yglesias, who was in college at the time and thus deserves to be excused, wrote a refreshingly honest piece that noted the seductions of contrarianism: “Being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite.” It was easy to feel the glow of being an utterly unique snowflake, and yet at the same time to join the establishment. How special!
What Yglesias calls the“fake-dissident posture” held a powerful allure for war supporter Dan Savage as well. Reading between the lines of his stridently pro-war 2003 column, it’s clear that the anti-war types worked his last nerve. Everything about them is uncool — their posters are “sad-looking” and their slogans are cheesy. True, the left can be deeply irritating. Protests are great, but why can’t the organizers come up with better music? Yet that’s a stunningly shallow reason to support a brutal war that left over 100,000 people dead.
Next up are those heroic journalists – sometimes dubbed the “Keyboard Commandos” — who wanted to re-fight World War II in Iraq. This crew saw Islam as a noxious, world-conquering ideology akin to Nazism: Islamofascism, as the late Christopher Hitchens once coined it. He and Andrew Sullivan flattered themselves as intellectual heirs of George Orwell, saving the world from both fascism and left-wing appeasers. Sullivan’s smearing of war opponents as a “fifth column” made that abundantly clear.
Paul Berman was another journalist who tirelessly refought the good war from his armchair. As he explained in a roundtable, Iraq was important because it provided an opportunity for intellectuals to “speak up.” How lovely for them! Admittedly, says Berman, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were “counterproductive in some respects,” because “for a while, they appeared to discredit the notion of liberal democracy, which was dreadful. This, apart from the deaths and suffering.” [emphasis added].
On the tape, writer David Rieff is aghast: “All this to raise the issue of liberal democracy? My God, man!” My God, indeed.
Let’s not neglect the pundits of the so-called “decent left.” Obsessed with preserving the martial virtue of the Democratic Party, these types zealously advocated a militaristic version of liberalism. Peter Beinart, then editor of The New Republic, figured prominently in this group. To Beinart, opponents of the Iraq War were guilty of “abject pacifism”, and he all but advocated purging them from the Democratic Party, Cold War-style. They might be liberals, but wanted the world to know they were respectable thinkers– not filthy hippies.
Finally, there’s the most powerful, if most deeply buried justification of all: Iraq provided an opportunity for dweebish, pasty, desk-bound dudes to indulge in macho daydreams. Throughout history, men have asserted masculine dominance through imperial adventures. While few liberal female pundits were pro-war, many centrist and liberal men were unable to resist the war’s siren call.
The most infamous example of such macho knucklehead punditry is Thomas Friedman’s 2003 appearance on The Charlie Rose Show. The war, he said then, was “unquestionably worth doing” so we could tell the Iraqis to “suck on this.” Commentary so inane and puerile would sound outrageous coming out of the mouth of Friedman’s fictional look-alike Ron Burgundy; that an actual, Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times columnist said it simply boggles the mind.
By 2011, writing as the last American troops pulled out of Iraq, Friedman’s macho swagger had completely vanished. Was the war a wise choice? “My answer is twofold: ‘No’ and ‘Maybe, sort of, we’ll see.’ ” Weasel words don’t get any more weaselly. This week he said merely that America “paid too much” for the war.
Writing this week in The New Yorker, Packer admits “the war was a disaster for Iraq and the U.S. alike. It was conceived in deceit and born in hubris.” Note the passive voice — he takes no personal responsibility for helping to foment the media stampede into war.
For what it’s worth, Beinart eventually saw the war as a tragic mistake. But his repentance came far too late. But Berman clearly has learned nothing and has no regrets. He wrote in The New Republic this week that “the isolationist alternative” to the war was “fantastical nonsense.”
Sullivan eventually denounced the war as tragically wrong – but in the early days, when it actually mattered, he was among its most obnoxious cheerleaders. His buddy Hitchens died in 2011, without ever having second thoughts about Iraq.
As for Dan Savage, his position grew more ambivalent within six months after that highly belligerent column — but he doesn’t seem to have written a word about Iraq since then.
The inability of these pundits to think straight may simply be a symptom of narcissism poisoning. For them, invasion and war were all about presenting their preferred face to the world — and to themselves. Henry James once wrote that a writer should be “one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” For these pundits, everything was lost — everything, that is, but their own overgrown egos.
By: Kathleen Geier, The National Memo, March 22, 2013
“Greed Has Not Been So Good”: The Private Sector Does Not Produce Public Virtue
Ever since he first proposed it in the same year Thomas Jefferson declared all men to be created equal, people have been delighted and beguiled by the hidden workings of Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand.”
For a millennia or more, humans who marveled at the orderly movements of the heavens sought to invent some system to explain and predict the comings and goings of the planets. And so, it was entirely inevitable that in the fullness of time people would seek to impose the cosmic reliability of celestial mechanics onto more terrestrial phenomenon as well, like economics.
“Let the market decide!” That has been the battle cry of free market aficionados from the day Adam Smith first suggested that private avarice might transubstantiate into public virtue right through to the unspoken suppositions buried deep within Congressman Paul Ryan’s god-awful budget that tax cuts pay for themselves and the whole point of national fiscal policy is to lift from the minds of America’s job-producing investor class the dark clouds of “uncertainty.”
But what if the laissez faire conception of the free market doesn’t hold up any better than did the Ptolemaic vision of an earth-centered solar system that very nearly got Galileo burned at the stake for contradicting?
What if private vice doesn’t produce public virtue at all, as Adam Smith surmised, but rather invites a heedless and reckless pursuit of private profit that leads inexorably to public catastrophe? That was the conclusion which the Chicago-school conservative Richard Posner reluctantly reached after sifting through the rubble following the collapse of capitalism in 2008.
In his 2009 diagnosis of the most recent financial crisis, The Failure of Capitalism, Posner concluded that the fundamental problem with free market capitalism is that behavior which is perfectly rational when pursued by individuals, and individual firms, is disastrous when that behavior is aggregated across the entire society.
The micro-economic laws of supply and demand that tell an economic participant how to use the price mechanism to maximize profits, in other words, are worse than worthless as a macro-economic guide for the national policymaker whose aim is, not profits, but the productivity and prosperity of the economy as a whole.
It makes perfect sense for the consumer to buy when the market is strong and save when it is weak, “but by doing this they make the downturn worse,” says Posner, since from the standpoint of the overall society “we want people to save when times are good and spend when times are bad.”
Likewise, it can be rational to ride one of the serial economic bubbles that have become all too commonplace since high finance replaced making things as America’s signature industry — even if you know it is a bubble — since the individual investor can never know when that bubble will burst. And until it does, says Posner, there are lots of profits to lose if one climbs off the bubble too soon.
As a former Citigroup CEO put it: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing you got to get up and dance. And we’re still dancing.”
Because risk and return are positively correlated, Posner says a firm that plays it safe is, paradoxically, “courting failure because investors will turn elsewhere.”
Likewise, while a “cascade” of bank failures could bring the economy to a halt, Posner says “no individual bank has an incentive to take measures to avoid such a consequence.”
That is why, he says, it may be risky to follow the herd, but it is not irrational.
Since the 2008 collapse, the media has been on high alert (unlike the government) for the scoundrels and knaves who brought our economy to grief. But in apportioning blame, Posner says “there is no need to bring cognitive quirks, emotional forces, or character flaws into the causal analysis.”
The “rational maximization” of businessmen and consumers all legally pursuing their self-interest, together and intelligently, within a framework of property and contract rights, was all it took to “set the stage for economic catastrophe.”
It’s this “rational indifference” to the consequences of one’s own business and consumption behavior — an indifference baked into the very nature of the “free” market itself — that explains why government has a duty to do more than merely prevent fraud, theft and other infringements of property and contract rights, even though this “is the only duty that libertarians believe government has,” as Posner says.
Government also has an obligation to regulate financial behavior, says Posner, for without such regulation “the rational behavior of law abiding financiers and consumers can precipitate economic disaster.”
Given the structural deficiencies of the free market and the perverse, self-destructive incentives it creates, it was probably smart for conservatives to shift the focus of their cheerleading away from capitalism’s economic performance and towards laissez faire’s imagined moral underpinnings instead — freedom, liberty, individualism and all of that. That’s because, as an economic incentive that promises broad-based prosperity, greed, it turns out, has not been so good.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, Salon, March 21, 2013
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