Brad DeLong

Proposed Panel 6: 2013 Kauffman Foundation Economic Webloggers' Conference: Friday April 12, 2013

4:15 PM: Economic and Financial Weblogging and Standard Ivy-Covered Academia (Chair: Robert Strom, Kauffman Foundation. Speaker: Mark Thoma: weblogger and Department Chair, U. Oregon. Discussant: Stephanie Kelton, weblogger and Department Chair, UMKC).

Hoisted from Comments: Tom Redburn on Elon Musk of Tesla Motors vs. the New York Times

What I think happened:

• Does the Tesla overstate its range? Yes, if you drive 50-55 with minimal heat/air conditioning. Reduce range by 10% if you drive 65. Reduce range by another 10% in winter with heat or summer with air conditioning.

• Does the Tesla battery retain its charge when it is cold? No. That's why you plug it in at night.

• Did Broder set the cruise control to 54? No.

• Did Broder turn off the heat, and did his feet freeze, and did his knuckles turn white as his body tried to reduce heat loss through the hands? No. Eventually he turned the heat down to 64 1/2.

• Did he think that running out of electrons would make for a more interesting story? Yes.

• Did he try to make the car run out of electrons before Milford? I can't say.

• Did he forget to plug in the car in Groton because he was trying to make the car run out of electrons? I can't say.

• Did he fail to stop on the road from Groton to Milford because he was then trying to make the car run out of electrons? Yes.

• Did he claim the car was dead even though it was not? Probably not--probably he did not understand that turning it off meant that with the battery so low it would not automatically restart.

Tom Redburn said...

Brad,

For a guy who is always criticizing the press, funny how you jump to conclusions before getting both sides.

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-flying-over-a-test-of-teslas-charging-network/

It does look like your guy is in substantial trouble with his:

I planted myself in the far right lane with the cruise control set at 54 miles per hour (the speed limit is 65). Buicks and 18-wheelers flew past, their drivers staring at the nail-polish-red wondercar with California dealer plates. Nearing New York, I made the first of several calls to Tesla officials about my creeping range anxiety.... All the while, my feet were freezing and my knuckles were turning white...

Tesla says its telemetry says he was going not 54 but 62; that he turned the climate up to 74, only later reduced it, and never reduced it below 64.5; and when he reached the Milford charging station drove around the parking lot for five minutes hoping the car would run out of electrons...

And consider Broder's:

Virtually everyone says that I should have plugged in the car overnight in Connecticut, particularly given the cold temperature. But the test that Tesla offered was of the Supercharger, not of the Model S, which we already know is a much-praised car. This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a “normal use,” no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it.

That seems to me to be as close to a confession of "I was going to do whatever it took to make this car run out of electrons" as we are likely to get out of Broder. When you stop for the night, you plug your electric cr in. Am I wrong?

Unless Tesla's lying about their telemetry, I simply don't see a second side here…

And Anonymous37 said:

As some Wired.com commenters have pointed out (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/02/tesla-logs-nytimes/), the one fact which very strongly indicates that Broder's lying is that he didn't contact Tesla when the car supposedly ran out of charge (a fact which Musk disputes with the logs). He instead went with a different towing company, despite the fact that Tesla would have arrived in minutes.

The simplest explanation for this is that the car hadn't run out of charge. Had Tesla come instead, there would have been a very embarrassing cellphone video of Broder claiming the car was out of charge and then the Tesla folks demonstrating that he's an idiot or hugely dishonest.

Broder is claiming that he'll have a rebuttal up later today, but I honestly can't see how he can manage to effectively counter Musk's claims.

When Did Martin Peretz Become This Crazy?

The consensus is split between "well before 1969" and "when Bill Clinton defeated Al Gore in the 1992 Democratic primary"…

Today Martin Peretz denounces Whittaker Chambers fan Sam Tanenhaus as a left-wing nut job:

Martin Peretz: The New New Republic: Like many readers of the New Republic, I didn't at first recognize the most recent issue of the magazine…. Having read the cover story, I still don't recognize the magazine. "Original Sin," by Sam Tanenhaus, purported to explain "Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people." The provocative theme would not have been unthinkable in the magazine's 99-year history, but the essay's reliance on insinuations of GOP racism ("the inimical 'they' were being targeted by a spurious campaign to pass voter-identification laws, a throwback to Jim Crow") and gross oversimplifications hardly reflected the intellectual traditions of a journal of ideas…

Sam Tanenhaus thus rises in my estimation--surprisingly, for somebody whose book on Whittaker Chambers struck me as significantly flawed in its willingness to give the right-wing icon infinite amounts of slack…

Tanenhaus thus joins the estimable company of, among others, George Soros:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: "It's good to own the magazine": New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz recently took to the pages of his magazine to accuse George Soros of being a "young cog in the Hitlerite wheel." As Soros points out (follow the link) this charge is false. Peretz, in his response to Soros' response, won't even admit what he accused Soros of doing much less concede that the allegation was false!

It seems to me that when a magazine falsely accuses someone of being a Nazi collaborator that a correction would be warranted.

And TNR never bothered to run a correction. Memo to Frank Foer: you need to. Badly.

And Sam Tanenhaus joins the company of Hilary Clinton:

Ezra Klein: I think it's fascinating that Marty Peretz doesn't understand why people don't like him after his magazine lies about them. [Hilary Rodham Clinton] didn't snub you, Marty. She treated you with precisely the lack of respect you deserved after that shameful debacle.

The context:

Ezra Klein: I'm genuinely curious if [ex-New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan's] recitation of Clinton's personal failings is some sort of barely submerged explanation for why Sullivan published and championed a dishonest, fearmongering article meant to sink the Clinton health care plan -- and it was recognized as such even at the time. Thanks to The Atlantic's open archives, you can read the fairest man in journalism, James Fallows, take it apart in a feature article called "A Triumph of Misinformation." McCaughey's article, which Sullivan commissioned, published, and praised, was, Fallows said, "simply false." Yet Sullivan still touts it in his biography...

And:

Marty Peretz: When Hillary Snubbed Me: Hillary is known to snub people all the time. In fact, she even snubbed me once at a reception at the White House.  I was talking to someone in the Rose Garden, and she came over to greet the someone with whom I was already chatting.  That someone, in turn, introduced me, saying, "Of course, you know Marty Peretz," which actually she did not.  I had never been in a room with Hillary that didn't also contain a thousand other people.  That didn't phase her at all.  And she responded, "Indeed, I do," and turned on her heel and left. I don't have an explanation.  Except that The New Republic was not especially enamored of her health plan which, in retrospect, has impeded health reform for a decade and a half.  As it happens, we had published a devastating analysis of the proposal by Elizabeth McCaughey; and somehow, in the mysteries of Washington, this became the vivid center of the debate.  The White House actually put out what I recall as a nine page rebuttal to the TNR critique, another tactical mistake in the genius presidency.  Anyway, it is to this article that her snub to me may be attributed. But it could be something even more petty.

And, of course, there is so much more…

Elon Musk of Tesla Motors vs. the New York Times

What I think happened:

• Does the Tesla overstate its range? Yes, if you drive 50-55 with minimal heat/air conditioning. Reduce range by 10% if you drive 65. Reduce range by another 10% in winter with heat or summer with air conditioning.

• Does the Tesla battery retain its charge when it is cold? No. That's why you plug it in at night.

• Did Broder set the cruise control to 54? No.

• Did Broder turn off the heat, and did his feet freeze, and did his knuckles turn white as his body tried to reduce heat loss through the hands? No. Eventually he turned the heat down to 64 1/2.

• Did he think that running out of electrons would make for a more interesting story? Yes.

• Did he try to make the car run out of electrons before Milford? I can't say.

• Did he forget to plug in the car in Groton because he was trying to make the car run out of electrons? I can't say.

• Did he fail to stop on the road from Groton to Milford because he was then trying to make the car run out of electrons? Yes.

• Did he claim the car was dead even though it was not? Probably not--probably he did not understand that turning it off meant that with the battery so low it would not automatically restart.

---

And time to call this one for Elon Musk on points:

John Broder:

The phrase “the car fell short of its projected range” appeared in a caption with an accompanying map; it was not in the article.

And:

I do recall setting the cruise control to about 54 m.p.h., as I wrote. The log shows the car traveling about 60 m.p.h. for a nearly 100-mile stretch on the New Jersey Turnpike. I cannot account for the discrepancy, nor for a later stretch in Connecticut where I recall driving about 45 m.p.h., but it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch wheels and summer tires. That just might have affected the recorded speed, range, rate of battery depletion or any number of other parameters.

---

This looks very, very, very bad indeed for the New York Times:

A Most Peculiar Test Drive: You may have heard recently about an article written by John Broder from The New York Times that makes numerous claims about the performance of the Model S…. After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear… where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives… In the case of Top Gear, they had literally written the script before they even received the car (we happened to find a copy of the script on a table while the car was being “tested”). Our car never even had a chance.

The logs show again that our Model S never had a chance with John Broder. In the case with Top Gear, their legal defense was that they never actually said it broke down, they just implied that it could and then filmed themselves pushing what viewers did not realize was a perfectly functional car. In Mr. Broder’s case, he simply… worked very hard to force our car to stop running….

Nate Silver and Ezra Klein...

There has to be a piece to be written about Nate Silver and Ezra Klein--about how they both have performed Christensenian disruptions on pieces of their newspapers, election political coverage in the case of Nate Silver and domestic policy coverage in the case of Ezra Klein, about how both are the objects of whispering (and in Nate's case not-so-whispering) campaigns of scorn and fear, and about how neither of the newspapers they work for has done anything to try to generalize the experience…

A Question About Julia Ioffe's Profile of Ezra Klein in The New New Republic...

At one point in her profile, Ezra Klein: The Wise Boy, Julia Ioffe writes:

David Weigel, Klein’s friend and fellow member of what came to be known as the Juicebox Mafia…

As I remember it, the term "Juicebox Mafia" was coined by either the Washington Times's Eli Lake or The New Republic's editor-in-chief Marty Peretz as part of an attempted ideological police action against Ezra and company for being insufficiently hawkish on the Middle East.

David, Ezra, Spencer, Matt, Dana, and company then dealt with this by picking up the label and running with it--saying: "we work hard, we're experts in what we cover, we're not afraid of being young."

None of this makes it into Julia Ioffe's profile. Why not?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?: Julia Ioffe of the New Republic Takes 5000 Words and Turns Ezra Klein into a Mere Personality Weblogging

The truly interesting questions about Ezra Klein and his Wonkblog are four:

• Just what is Ezra Klein doing that gets him 100,000 page views a day (it is a very good day on which I get more than 50,000) and makes out-of-town newspaper bureau chiefs and senior senatorial staffers say that they learn "more from Ezra Klein on any given day than from the entire national news staff of the New York Times"?

• Why doesn't Wonkblog face more competition, or at least see more attempted imitators?

• Why is Ezra Klein doing this at the Washington Post--an organization that brought opinions-of-shape-of-earth-differ journamalism to its peak, with the ethos of its reporters in the 1990s and 2000s being: "Of course you can't learn anything about what's going on now from our stories, our job is to tell you what a centrist Democrat or lobbyist says and what a right-wing Republican says, so if you want to learn anything wait for the book we are going to right write in three years or so"?

• Can Wonkblog survive at the Washington Post, or will its DNA destroy Wonkblog as we know it?

The New Republic gives Julia Ioffe 5000 words to write about Ezra Klein and call the now 28-year-old "The Wise Boy".

How well does she do at shedding light on these four questions?

When I am asked who is like Ezra Klein but older, my standard answer is Gene Sperling--they both have the same desire to change the world, the same desire to understand what policies work, and the same drive to explain what policies work to a broader audience than just those of us who know what is what. Thus I was not surprised to be told that "Klein and his wife… Annie Lowrey, at… last year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner… spent most of the night talking to Gene Sperling." Who else there would Ezra and Annie have stuff to talk with about, after all?

But Julia Ioffe thinks this shows how Ezra is a devious operator:

“Ezra is an incredible operator,” says one prominent Washington editor. “He is always looking upward at things. You only have to watch him work a party. He moves right to the most important people there.” One friend saw Klein and his wife, New York Times reporter Annie Lowrey, at an event for last year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and noted that they spent most of the night talking to Gene Sperling, Obama’s economic adviser. All of this has allowed Klein to slip easily into the Washington establishment, leaving the rest of his old blogging crew merely doing well, though they are still close…

Ezra warned her at the start of his interviews with her:

"we highly overstate the power of individuals and highly under-rate seeing Washington as a system…" Klein began as we wheeled through the city. He placed particular blame on the media for latching onto trivial matters and overlooking the sticky, more complicated [structural] issues

Did she listen to him, and devote any portion of her 5000 words to Washington as a system?

:-)

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Joe Scarborough Edition

Paul Krugman:

Hearsay Economics: Jonathan Chait is boggled by Joe Scarborough…. What’s really striking is Scarborough’s certainty that we’re experiencing “explosive” spending growth, which is very much not the case. How do JoScar and others like him come by such misconceptions? Well, I’ve gradually come to the realization that most of the commentariat doesn’t do what, say Martin Wolf or I do — grub around in published data, read reports, and all that. Instead, they rely on what they heard somebody say the facts are; hearsay economics…. And where do the reputable people get their information? Why, it’s what they heard somebody in their circle say. It’s hearsay economics all the way down…. It may seem hard to believe that this sort of petty small-group sociology exerts a vast influence on actual policy, and that it is actually responsible for millions of lost jobs. But the more I look at it, the more that seems to be right.

Advance Reading (Watching?) for the Fifth Annual Kauffman Foundation Economic Webloggers Forum #kauffman

Picked up from Andrew Sullivan:

New Media; New Models, Ctd « The Dish: Below is a brilliant, inspiring interview with the late, great Aaron Swartz about how the internet challenges entrenched media power structures. It’s an eloquent case for what we’ve been trying to do with the Dish, and for how that media transformation will also change politics and culture more profoundly than most now recognize. Worth watching in full:

Proposed Panel 4: 2013 Kauffman Foundation Economic Webloggers' Conference: Friday April 12, 2013

12:45-1:35 PM CT: The Future Ecology of Mainstream Journalism, Opportunities and Challenges for Webloggers in:

• Chair: Felix Salmon, 12:45-12:46
• Panelist: Bruce Bartlett, 12:46-12:54
• Panelist: Megan McArdle, 12:54-1:02
• Panelist: Josh Barro, 1:02-1:10
• General discussion, 1:10-1:35

DRAFT INTRO: By now we all know the story of the Mergenthaler Linotype machine. It allows the delivery of classified ads to a mass audience with previously unheard-of economy. But how to get people reading your set of classified ads? Wrap it in interesting news stories. At first the edge was that your news was in the language of your audience or took the political position of your audience. Then, after merger upon merger, regional or class monopoly metropolitan dailies with healthy profit margins created space for journalists to transform themselves from ink-stained wretches and hacks to professionals without bias reporting the view from no political position in particular. And we know the Christensenian disruption now underway. We hope that, somehow, there will emerge space for journalists to make money and have careers while raising debate to a much higher level than in the “opinions of shape of earth differ” days when Jonathan Weisman’s idea of a credible expert on the economy was Donald Luskin. But if this is going to work, those laboring in the trenches of the mainstream media will need—somehow—help from the rest of us. What can they do? What should the rest of us do?. Let me welcome our panel of Josh Barro, Bruce Bartlett, and Megan McArdle.

Is There Anything a New York Times Columnist Will Not Say? II

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Robert Greenstein:

Commentary: How Effective Is the Safety Net?: [Nicholas] Kristof… a significant misjudgment… says that despite the growth of various social programs… the poverty rate is no lower… than… in the late 1960s… conclude[s] that the current system… doesn’t reduce poverty…. [T]he comparison of today’s poverty rate to the rate in the 1960s isn’t valid…. Kristof overlooks recent research showing that safety-net programs lift millions of people out of poverty and… have positive long-term effects on children’s outcomes.

The ignorance. It burns...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Yet Another New York Times/Tom Friedman Edition

Is there anything so stupid that a New York Times op-ed columnist cannot write with a straight face?

Tom Friedman:

India vs. China vs. Egypt: India has a weak central government but a really strong civil society…. China has a muscular central government but a weak civil society…. Egypt… has a weak government and a very weak civil society…. But there is one thing all three have in common: gigantic youth bulges under the age of 30, increasingly connected by technology but very unevenly educated.

Proposed Panel 3: 2013 Kauffman Foundation Economic Webloggers' Conference: Friday April 12, 2013

DRAFT… DRAFT… DARFT…

10:55-11:45 AM CT: The Future Ecology of Financial Journalism, Opportunities and Challenges for Webloggers in

• Chair: ???, 10:55-10:56
• Panelist: Cardiff Garcia, 10:56-11:04
• Panelist: Joe Weisenthal, 11:04-11:12
• Panelist: Alison Schrager, 11:12-11:20
• General discussion, 11:20-11:45

DRAFT INTRO: As Michael Bloomberg will readily attest, people are willing to pay a lot for timely and accurate information about financial markets. But issues quickly become more technical and convoluted than even in the rest of weblogging about the economy. And the problem of monetization remains: if one is unable to bundle one’s weblogging with delivery of a proprietary asset price-reporting terminal persuading somebody to actually pay so that you can continue to provide them with high-quality financial information that they find of immense value turns out to be a hard problem. Here today we have three panelists: one provides pink pages and web content behind a nasty firewall, one provides information firewall-free, and one is both a consumer and producer of what modern financial weblogging creates. We welcome Cardiff Garcia, Joe Weisenthal, Allison Schrager.

Proposed Panel 2: 2013 Kauffman Foundation Economic Webloggers' Conference #kauffman

DRAFT… DRAFT… DARFT…

9:50 AM: Economic Weblogging, and the Promise and Peril of New Modes and Orders in Education:

• Chair: ???, 9:50-9:52
• Speaker: Clay Shirky, 9:52-10:08
• Discussant: Ben Wildavsky, 10:07-10:15
• General discussion, 10:15-10:40

DRAFT INTRO: Higher education in the west was born at the start of the second millennium, as popes recognized that they needed more theologians and ecclesiastical bureaucrats and emperors recognized that they needed more judges. It was born in an environment in which books were incredibly costly—better to get everybody together in one room so they could take notes while somebody, the lector, read the book aloud in a lecture.

Higher education underwent its first Christiansenian disruption in the fifteenth century with Gutenberg.

The universities changed, and they survived, and they did more than survive--the coming of the printed book did not disintermediate the university but instead gave it and its faculty leverage.

It may well face its second Christensenian disruption today.

As Tyler Cowen, who with Alex Tabarrok is too busy attempting to do the disruption with Marginal Revolution University to join us today, tweeted last January: “Blogs already teach more people economics than Principles of Economics courses do.”

Here with us today to tell us where they think the curve of New Modes and Orders in education will take us--so that we can figure out how to get ahead of it-we have Clay Shirky from New York University, with discussant Ben Wildavsky from here at the Kauffman Foundation.

National Review: Say What You Like About the Tenets of National Socialism. Dude, at Least It's an Ethos!

In "The Big Lebowski" it was a joke. On the pages of National Review it is serious.

Have they no editors? Have they no minds?

The Corner: President Obama issued a statement yesterday to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He noted that survivors who bore witness to “the horrors of the cattle cars, ghettos, and concentration camps have witnessed humanity at its very worst and know too well the pain of losing loved ones to senseless violence.”… Nazism… is hardly “senseless.” By the early 1930s, the Nazi party had hundreds of thousands of devoted members and repeatedly attracted a third of the votes in German elections; its political leaders campaigned on a platform comprising 25 non-senseless points…. [M]any sensible Germans were persuaded…. [Obama's] sanitized version of events, both past and present, is surely more comforting. It’s also truly senseless.

We Need More Government Spending Right Now, Not Less...

If you have a depressed economy where the central bank wishes to but cannot lower short-term interest rates, then it is a fact that with a Keynesian spending multiplier of μ, a marginal tax-and-transfer share of τ, a hysteresis shadow of present depression cast upon future economic growth of η, and a long-term real government borrowing rate of r, increasing government spending now reduces the long-run burden of financing the debt if:

τμη/r > 1 - μτ

For consensus τ and μ or 0.33 and 1.5, and for a (lowballed) η of 0.1, this means that it is fiscally prudent to boost spending now as long as you do not expect the weighted-average real interest rate on government debt to be above 5%/year in the long-run--the nominal rate to be above 7%/year--in the future. For a lowballed multiplier μ of 1.0, you have to expect the weighted-average real interest rate on government debt to be above 3.75%/year in the long-run.

Even a moment's look back at history reveals that real interest rates above 3.75%/year--let alone above 5%/year are above the range in which the U.S. can expect to see interest rates remain for the long run.

When Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations says, therefore, that Paul Krugman "is right until he is wrong"--i.e., until interest rates rise--he is forecasting that interest rates will not just normalize to historical norms but rise far beyond historical norms and stay outside the historical range on the upside indefinitely.

And, of course, Richard Haass does not know that that is what he is forecasting. He is a Very Serious Person.

Matthew Yglesias vs. The Hax of Sol III: Implications of Negative Interest Rates Weblogging

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Real interest rates are negative: Taxing is more costly than borrowing.: A remarkable Damon Linker article about the "worrying rise of reckless liberal pundits"… [is] the very worst kind of common sense political pundity…. I have previously suggested that with real interest rates negative it makes more sense to finance government activities with borrowing than with taxes. Linker finds this "fanciful" but can't quite say what's fanciful about it….

Jonathan Chait on the Republican Slime Machine

Nobody even half-sane and half-moral supports these people. Nobody.

Jonathan Chait:

The Washington Free Beacon has a report… that Chris Hughes is purging Jews from The New Republic…. The sensationalism of the article is structured in hilariously descending fashion, with each successive addition to the story draining its plausibility until nothing remains…. But the Free Beacon’s report offers a helpful window into… [how] millions of conservatives are held in a constant state of bug-eyed rage because they’re being manipulated for financial and ideological profit by right-wing pseudo-journalists.

Proposed Panel 1: 2013 Kauffman Foundation Economic Webloggers' Conference: Friday April 12, 2013

9:15 AM: Economic Weblogging and the Future: Speaker: Hal Varian. Discussant: Joshua Gans:

DRAFT PANEL INTRO: In the beginning things were simple. You became a weblogger. Whenever you read something interesting—on or off the internet—you noted it. If it was online, you dropped a link to it.

Then people responded to comments about things you had written about people’s critiques of others’ writings, and you went from a singular voice, crying in the wilderness, as you snacked on your locusts and wild honey, to part of a collective, communal conversation: “the generation’s finest minds meeting on comment threads, battling roving bands of trolls, and holding the great conversations of the age!”

And then there became simply too much to read. We found ourselves reduced from insightful commentators and analysts to frontline aggregators, and then we gave up on aggregating anything outside our own narrow circles.

We know that chunk of the world and of the now that we see, but that is becoming a smaller slice of the Cosmic All with each passing day. How do we perform our role now? And how will be perform our role in the future, and with what tools are available? How will we do our jobs in the future?

Google as a company lives ten to twenty years in our future anyway. And Google does so because it specializes in thinking about how to drink from the information firehose without getting self-waterboarded. So here to introduce our conference and give us a more informed view than we have on both the future and on what tools we should already be using in the present, we have Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian—with discussion by the University of Toronto’s Josh Gans, one of the proprietors of http://digitopoly.org.

Randall Munroe Explains Why There Are No Rich Frequentist Statisticians: New Yorker #fail Vulnerable to a Dutch Book Weblogging

Randall Munroe:

Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis:

Bayesian Statistics and what Nate Silver Gets Wrong: The Bayesian approach is much less helpful when there is no consensus about what the prior probabilities should be…. In actual practice, the method of evaluation most scientists use most of the time is a variant of a technique proposed by the statistician Ronald Fisher in the early 1900s. Roughly speaking, in this approach, a hypothesis is considered validated by data only if the data pass a test that would be failed ninety-five or ninety-nine per cent of the time if the data were generated randomly. The advantage of Fisher’s approach (which is by no means perfect) is that to some degree it sidesteps the problem of estimating priors where no sufficient advance information exists. In the vast majority of scientific papers, Fisher’s statistics (and more sophisticated statistics in that tradition) are used.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Those of us economists who grumble about Bayesian statistics don't want us to move backward to Frequentism but forward to (prior probabilities) x (value of being right) -- the decision-theory counterparts of the so-called risk-neutral valuation method in finance...

Those of us economists who do use frequentist statistics know something very important that Marcus and Davis show no sign at all of knowing: that if you fail to reject the null hypothesis at 0.05, you do not conclude (even provisionally) that the null hypothesis is true--instead, you go gather more data and test again until you can either reject the null against the alternative or reject (the interesting) alternative(s) against the null.

That's science!!

Dylan Byers of the Politico Attempts to Relaunch His War on the Wizard Nate Silver!

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Given this: Twitter / DylanByers: What Nate Silver Gets Wrong...

It's time to repost Byers's entire initial catastrophe--the one in which he could not find anybody who actually knew anything about forecasting elections to quote, but only Joe Scarborough and David Brooks:

Dylan Byers:

Nate Silver: One-term celebrity?: The New York Times's resident political predictor says President Barack Obama currently has a 74.6 percent chance of winning reelection. It's a prediction that liberals, whose heart rates continue to fluctuate with the release of every new poll, want to take solace in but somehow can't. Sure, this is the guy who correctly predicted the outcome of the 2008 election in 49 of 50 states, but this year's polls suggest a nailbiter.

"Romney, clearly, could still win," Silver told POLITICO today.

Prediction is the name of Silver's game, the basis for his celebrity. So should Mitt Romney win on Nov. 6, it's difficult to see how people can continue to put faith in the predictions of someone who has never given that candidate anything higher than a 41 percent chance of winning (way back on June 2) and — one week from the election — gives him a one-in-four chance, even as the polls have him almost neck-and-neck with the incumbent.

2013 Fifth Annual Kauffman Foundation Economic Webloggers' Conference: Friday April 12, 2013

April 12, 2013: 9:00 AM: DeLong Introduction :: PROPOSED DRAFT: Thirty-five years ago my father bought my family’s first personal computer. Eighteen years ago my former roommate Paul Mende told me: “Hey, this World-Wide-Web thing is revolutionizing scholarly communication in Physics via the http://arxiv.org/ web server. You should check it out.” Fourteen years ago I noticed that both of my mentions in the then-most recent Foreign Affairs had come not from things I had published but from things I had thrown up on my website.

Twelve years ago I decided that somebody should go all-in and attempt to win the intellectual influence game via the strategy of always-putting-something-new-and-interesting-up-on-the-web. And as a guy with tenure at an institution that seemed to me to be the global optimum, I was one of the few people in the world who could do so with no significant possible downside risk.

And today here we all are.

Everybody here has shifted a great deal of their voice out of standard print and standard media into a form that bears at least a close cousinship to "weblogging". Everybody here has at least tried hard to significantly raise the level of the debate on matters economic. Everybody here has, I would argue, succeeded in significantly raising at least their corner of the debate above what it would otherwise have been. Everybody here has managed to do a great deal to disrupt and evade the dumbness filters that surround us and so much impede communication and education.

We all seem to have come remarkably close to maximizing the win, for some value of “maximize” and “win”--at least for ourselves if not for our institutions and our causes.

But the struggle is ongoing. There is still an enormous amount of headroom.

How do we keep maximizing our collective personal win? What are the tools, networks, and communities that we are going to use and deal with in the future? How will we deal with the other communities and modalities of communication on our borders. We, of course, seek total universal domination. Is that realistically attainable? If so, how? If not, for what should we settle and how should we settle for it? And how do we maximize the societal win?

---

So: Is this going to generate the kind of conversation on April 12 that it would be useful to see? What else should I say to open the conference?

Invitation only, alas: our budget and our space is limited...

Lionel Barber Tries to Steer the Finest Journalistic Institution in the--the Financial Times--World Around the Iceberg

We wish him luck:

Dear Colleagues,

In my New Year message, I said 2013 would test our resolve to move further and faster to support top quality journalism in a rapidly changing media landscape.

I now want to set out in detail how we propose to reshape the FT for the digital age. We need to do less in certain areas and more in others, we need to be much more nimble, and we need to reshape our teams.

Today we have started consultations with the NUJ with the aim of opening up an initial voluntary redundancy scheme. The intention is is to reduce the cost of producing the newspaper and give us the flexibility to invest more online.

Our common cause is to secure the FT's future in an increasingly competitive market, where old titles are being routinely disrupted by new entrants such as Google and LinkedIn and Twitter. The FT's brand of accurate, authoritative journalism can thrive, but only if it adapts to the demands of our readers in digital and in print, still a vital source of advertising revenues.

My visit to Silicon Valley last September confirmed the speed of change. Our competitors are harnessing technology to revolutionise the news business through aggregation, personalisation and social media. Mobile alone, for example, now accounts for 25 per cent of all the FT's digital traffic. It would be reckless for us to stand still.

Atlantic Monthly President Scott Havens Asks His Reporters to Please Shut Up and Stop Criticizing His Scientology "Sponsored Content" Campaign

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Atlantic Monthly President Scott Havens Asks His Reporters to Please Shut Up and Stop Criticizing Scientology:

[W]e did not adequately work with the advertiser to create a content program that was in line with our brand… we made some mistakes trying to moderate the commenting thread. The general media climate also played a role…. I made the decision to suspend it pending further review. To be clear, our decision to pull the campaign should not be interpreted as passing judgment on the advertiser as an organization….

One important note for everyone: casting blame on any group or any individual is both unfair and simply not what we do at The Atlantic. And we most certainly should not speak to the press or use social media to attack our organization or our colleagues. We are a team that rises and falls together.

The full memo:

Ezra Klein Says David Brooks and Michael Gerson Are Producing "the Craziest Strain of Commentary I Can Remember"

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Ezra Klein:

Is the Republican Party Obama’s fault?: recent weeks have birthed the strangest strain of commentary I can remember: The Republican Party’s crazy opinions are President Obama’s fault…. The Republican Party’s dilemma is that House Republicans keeps taking all kinds of unreasonable and unpopular positions. If Obama weren’t president, the House Republicans wouldn’t be taking so many unreasonable and unpopular positions. But since Obama is president, and since he does need to work with House Republicans, he is highlighting their unreasonable and unpopular opinions in a bid to make them change their minds, which is making House Republicans look even worse. And so it’s ultimately Obama’s fault that House Republicans are, say, threatening to breach the debt ceiling if they don’t get their way on spending cuts…. White House officials’ devious plan to destroy the Republican Party, in Brooks’s view, is that they will propose more moderate, popular policies than they did in their first term, thus making Republicans look terrible when they vote against everything.

There’s an Occam’s Razor problem…. Perhaps the White House is hewing to the popular, reasonable positions… because… those are its positions. If the Republican Party can’t either agree to them or come up with popular, reasonable positions of its own, the problem here might be located inside the Republican Party rather than at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave….

In the end, the Republican Party is going to need to fix itself, and that’s going to require a painful process in which more sensible voices stand up to the more extreme elements of the coalition. It is getting very far into cult-of-the-presidency thinking to say the solution instead lies in the relatively fixed policy proposals of a Democratic executive.

Joint Speaker John Boehner-Jake Sherman of Politico #FAIL

Jake Sherman:

House Republicans plan debt ceiling vote: House Republicans will vote next week on a bill that would raise the nation’s debt ceiling for three months and stop pay for members of Congress if the Senate doesn’t pass a budget, GOP officials said Friday…. It’s also a shift from House Speaker John Boehner…. But Boehner isn’t retreating on the debt ceiling without conditions; He’s framing this as a way to force Senate Democrats to lay out a budget…

Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

Everybody in the House and Senate now knows that this Charles Krauthammer-John Boehner "no pay for the Senate unless it passes a Budget Resolution" condition is unconstitutional.

But Jake Sherman does not tell the readers of Politico. Why not?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps>

You Really Cannot Make This Up: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Weblogging

Reconciliation:

David Brooks teaches Yale class on humility, compares self to Bono.

Wanted: SF w/ 2 Kids < 10 Making ≥$260K/Year Weblogging

@delong [The] CPS March supplement finds 1-3 each year from 2008-2012 [in their random sample], suggesting a couple of thousand [single mothers with two kids under ten making $260K/year or more], out of 16-17 million single mothers

— Evan Roberts (@evanrobertsnz) January 16, 2013

But they all read the Wall Street Journal, and are miserable:

Just how many female-headed single-parent families with two children under 10 are there in the United States making $260K/year, anyway?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Xenos:

Reading is for Snobs: These Are The People The Wall Street Journal Thinks We Should Have Sympathy For?: The Wall Street Journal had an article providing a fairly thorough breakdown of the new tax policies that will now be in effect due to the "fiscal cliff" agreement…. The article itself wasn't too bad…. However, it did include one little thing…. Yes, in that comic, every single one of those families makes a six figure income, the lowest being $180 thousand, and yet because of the new tax hikes imposed by Obama, they all appear as though he ran over the family dog.

The median household income in the U.S. between 2007-2011 was $52,762, but the American people are all supposed to shed tears for those that make between three to twelve times as much? Seriously, how out of touch do you have to be to think that? Of course, this is the same outfit that supported a guy who thought making $250k qualified as "middle income".

Just how many female-headed single-parent families with two children under 10 are there in the United States making $260K/year, anyway?

"Oderint dum Metuant?" Weblogging: Responsibility of Journalists to Place Quotes in Context Edition

According to Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, a favorite saying of first-century Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus "Caligula"…

Justin Wolfers tweets:

Sympathetic to @davidmwessel's view that Krugman & @delong can be too quick to call him a fool for citing their ideological opponents.

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers) January 5, 2013

I protest. Go to Google, enter "site:delong.typepad.com 'david wessel'" into the search box, press "I'm feeling lucky", and what comes up is:

Brad DeLong : David Wessel's You Are There: Ben Bernanke Five Years Ago Today: David Wessel alone is worth the price of the Wall Street Journal…

Andrew Sullivan and His Daily Dish Go the Full Utopian...

Let me say that I will never, never, never forgive Andrew Sullivan for what he hired Charles Murray to do to the New Republic--or, for that matter, for any other of his manifold sins against the Holy Ghost.

Nevertheless, he and his myrmidons are always worth reading, and definitely worth funding now that they go Full Utopian on us:

New Year, New Dish, New Media: So it's over to you. We're in your hands. The meter won't start until February 1, but you can become a member now. It takes two minutes tops. All you need is a credit card and a zip code - and you're done. The more of you who decide to contribute more than $19.99 the deeper and richer and more ambitious a Dish we will be able to provide. We have no marketing, no ads, no corporation behind us now. We only have you.

The link is here. Join us and keep the Dish alive and ad-free here.

And change the media world just a little - for the better.

So everybody go to http://www.tinypass.com/andrewsullivan/ and pony up your $19.99. Pony up twice!

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Yet Another Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post Edition

For someone who wrote a whole column advocating chained CPI, Ruth Marcus sure doesn’t seem to understand it: washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-…

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 26, 2012

Can We Please Keep Ross Douthat from Writing Again?

Shame on you, New York Times:

Ross Douthat: Bloomberg, LaPierre and the Void: Bloomberg, LaPierre and the Void FOR a week after the Newtown shooting, the conversation was dominated by the self-righteous certainties of the American center-left…

No, Ross Douthat. For a week after the Newtown shooting the conversation was dominated by grief, terror, and sorrow.

What kind of a sociopathic nut writes such a lead?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?: Charles Blow and Natalie Kitroeff of the New York Times Are Sleazebags Weblogging

http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2012/12/20/the-new-york-times-and-the-oecd/

George Will: Do You Know Who Else Had High Voter Participation? Hitler!

No, I am not kidding. Were to God I were: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-federal-voting-drive-makes-a-mountain-out-of-a-molehill/2012/12/19/461e17c4-494c-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_story.html

What other than the Washington Post would be silly enough to print this?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

The Crayon Scribble Page That Is the Washington Post Strikes Again!: Federal Reserve Policy

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Mark Thoma does the intellectual garage pickup:

Economist's View: Is the Fed Risking "Dangerous Side Effects"?: What does [Robert Samuelson] think a dual mandate means if not the "twin targeting of unemployment and inflation"? That's not unique to the 1970s…. [Samuelson] is trying to tell the story about shifting Phillips curve due to rising inflationary expectations, but he misses a key part of the story…. [T]he Fed was shooting at the wrong unemployment target (you can find this story in most textbooks, e.g. see Mishkin's text on demand-pull inflation). The Fed was shooting at a 4 percent unemployment target… the natural rate had drifted as high as 7 percent…. Unfortunately, the Fed didn't not realize this…. The fundamental problem… a miscalculation of the natural rate of unemployment… has the Fed made this mistake again? Is the natural rate of unemployment a lot higher than 6.5 percent?… First, the Fed is fully aware of this past mistake…. Second, there has been considerable effort to measure the structural/cyclical/frictional unemployment mix…. We didn't have this type of information in the 1970s…. Finally, there is an inflation threshold of 2.5 percent, a relatively low level of tolerance for mistakes of this type. If the Fed is wrong about the structural rate, we'll see inflation, and if it the projected inflation rate drifts above 2.5 percent, the program will be reversed. I have no doubt that the Fed is serious abut pulling the plug….

Samuelson… is good at playing the Very Serious Person role (inflation is coming!, the debt will cause interest rates to spike!, there could even be "dangerous side effects, including a future financial crisis"!), but the Fed is not risking a repeat of the 1970s, not even close.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Nick Kristof of the New York Times Edition

Erik Loomis sounds the intellectual garbage alarm:

Evidently Kristof is only interested in poverty if he can personally fly in and rescue women from sex slavery. Otherwise, he’s happy to channel the arguments of Gilded Age social Darwinists…

Indeed:

Nick Kristof: Profiting From a Child’s Illiteracy:

THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability. Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.

“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.” This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency….

THERE’S no doubt that some families with seriously disabled children receive a lifeline from S.S.I. But the bottom line is that we shouldn’t try to fight poverty with a program that sometimes perpetuates it….

There is not a single--successful--antipoverty program that does not "sometimes" perpetuate it. Kristof is calling for the elimination of all antipoverty programs. But he does not know that because, as he says:

I’m no expert on domestic poverty…. I don’t want to suggest that America’s antipoverty programs are a total failure…

A simple change to the New York Times's op-ed columnist policy: have an editor ask each of them "do you know what you are talking about?" before publishing...

Why Do Dylan Byers and Politico Think That Drinking Coffee Is Elitist and UnAmerican?

Scott Lemieux:

I’ve Had Enough Of You Water-Drinking, Air-Breathing Urban Elitists: Ben Jacobs’s piece reminds me of my favorite part of the Politico’s war on Nate Silver.   As others have pointed out, this botched hack cliche is comedy gold:

For this reason and others — and this may shock the coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis. — more than a few political pundits and reporters, including some of his own colleagues, believe Silver is highly overrated.

Look, I knew those snooty elitists in Seattle and San Francisco looked down on me and my kind, but now you tell me that they drink coffee? No real American would ever be caught dead consuming this obscure product.

I tell you, every election cycle it becomes harder to be a regular American. White wine, Lipton Green Tea, orange juice, Gray Poupon, coffee — every day you discover some product that my relatives in rural Saskatchewan would always have in their pantry that marks you as an out-of-touch urban elitist in the eyes of D.C.-based Ivy Leaguers.

Nobody ever told Dylan Byers that it was lattes that were elitist--French, you know--and not coffee.

And Dylan appears to have not had enough of a clue to have picked up the talking point cliché on his own.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Strangely, Nate Silver Does Not Make Dylan Byers's List of Ten Breakout Political Reporters of 2012

Curiously, Robert Costa does.

What would you have learned if you had trusted Robert Costa the week before the election? This:

Three blue states could turn red: Ohio is the presidential campaign’s fall blockbuster.... But it is not the only must-watch battleground. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are looking decidedly purple.... WISCONSIN Status: Toss-up.... Mitt Romney was set to campaign Monday in Wisconsin. He has already rescheduled for later this week — with good reason. The Badger State has suddenly emerged as a potential pickup. In the final days, look for the Romney campaign to put significant time and resources into the state. Local congressman Paul Ryan’s inclusion on the Republican ticket has energized the Romney campaign’s Wisconsin team.... [I]n the latest Rasmussen poll, Romney ties Obama....

You get the picture.

Anybody who trusted Robert Costa wound up more ignorant. He did not have the critical perspective on his Romney campaign sources and their pet pollsters that a reporter needed--no bullshit filter.

And, in Dylan Byers's view, the absence of a bullshit filter makes you a "breakout political reporter"--never mind that what he reported just wasn't so, and that to people not entirely within the right-wing bubble there were no good-faith reasons for him to believe it was so.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

After a Month of Radio Silence, the Weekly Standard's "Numbers Guy" Reappears...

…to kick Mitt Romney up and down the field:

Jay Cost, December 3, 2012:

[D]ecline... a stark decline in public confidence that the nation’s leaders can fix its pressing problems.... Most of the decline came from white voters; in fact, between 6 and 9 million white voters went missing.... Romney... out-of-touch plutocrat... yawning empathy gap.... underperformance relative to Bush.... Voters did not trust.... Romney to represent them.... The country was not persuaded that the Republican nominee had their interests at heart. Part of the blame belongs to the Romney campaign... the failure of the Republican party during the Bush years.... In 2016 the Republican party must find a nominee who can relate to average Americans... deliver the kind of prosperity that has been sorely lacking for the past decade...

But only a month and a half ago, Jay Cost said that Mitt Romney was completely covered with awesome sauce:

[R]eal economic conservatism.... Ronald Reagan... William McKinley... Calvin Coolidge…. Mitt Romney... channeling McKinley, Silent Cal, and the Gipper all at once.... [W]hen it came to the kitchen table issues, Romney focused much more directly on them. And in fact, when it came to the number one issue of this campaign – jobs and unemployment – Romney mentioned them more than twice as often as Obama did. This kind of emphasis on growth, prosperity, income, and jobs... economic conservatism exemplified by McKinley-Coolidge-Reagan... Romney tied pro-business economic policies to mass prosperity... even Calvin Coolidge would be impressed.... Following the lead of the early modern Republicans, Romney even issued a stark warning to China.... China’s systematic cheating… requires a response from economic conservatives. And Romney delivers it... Romney connects this philosophy again and again to jobs. That is the core economic argument of conservative Republicanism, one that the left has never understood. It is not elitist; it is an inherently republican philosophy: the belief that smart pro-business policies generate growth, and therefore jobs, and therefore prosperity for Americans all across the country...

And:

Mitt Romney is likely to win… for two reasons: (1) Romney leads among voters on trust to get the economy going again. (2) Romney leads among independents….

Romney has an edge on the economy…. [T]his election looks to hinge on the economy, and little else…. I do not know of an election where the electorate was so singularly focused on one set of issues, and the person trusted less on them nevertheless won….

Romney’s lead among independents…. [T]he New Deal coalition… broke into pieces in 1980…. This has led to the rising power of the independent vote…. I see Mitt Romney with a lead among independents in almost every poll…. [W]hite Democrats from the Ohio River Valley to the Gulf of Mexico will defect from their own party’s ticket in droves. These children and grand children of FDR’s core backers will support Mitt Romney overwhelmingly….

I am not willing to take polls at face value…. I am more interested in connecting the polls to history and the long-run structure of American politics, and when I do that I see a Romney victory.

The remarkable thing is that Jay Cost sees himself under no obligation to his readers to explain why he was so wrong a month ago--and his readers feel no need to inquire.

Jonathan Chait observes the same phenomenon in John Podhoretz.

National Review's numbers guy has apparently moved to Patagonia, and lacks all internet connectivity.

Michael Barone still insists that he got the analysis of the "fundamentals" of the election right, but that "fundamentals were trumped by mechanics and, to a lesser extent, by demographics"; and still insists that his call of a substantial Romney victory was "reasonable, just as other predictions that either Obama or Romney would win... with more than 300 electoral votes, were reasonable; you could... come up with pretty different conclusions..."

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Michael Grunwald Is Shrill: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps Weblogging?

Michael Grunwald: Fiscal Cliff Fictions: Let’s All Agree to Pretend the GOP Isn’t Full of It:

It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS…. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.

I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s defiance of reality–its denial of climate science, its simultaneous denunciations of Medicare cuts and government health care, its insistence that debt-exploding tax cuts will somehow reduce the debt—so I often get accused of partisanship. But it’s simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama… the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default…. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened.

Nate Silver Tells Us What He Thinks of Politico: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Weblogging

Bill Hickey:

NATE SILVER: What's remarkable for me is that you had some journalist for Politico who tweeted out "All Nate's doing is averaging polls and counting electoral votes? That's the secret sauce?." Well, yeah, and the fact that you can't comprehend that very basic thing, that says more about you than it does about me, right?

BILL SIMMONS: It was like passive aggressive--coming after you but they couldn't find a good way to do it. 

NATE SILVER: Politico is a "who won the day" kind of thing, right? They're trying to cover it like it's sports but not in an intelligent way at all. They want to create noise, basically. Their whole thing is you have to have a lead story about some gaffe that somebody made on the campaign trail…. In politics, you can have a month where nothing of any import whatsoever happens. But you still have to have Politico produce a paper seven times a week, and that's when they're trying to start trouble. 

Nate Silver is, of course, correct: he is a wizard.

And bonus Charles Pierce:

Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Guzzle Antifreeze, Part the Infinity: I've become a connoisseur of Charlie Mahtesian's "On Politics" column in Tiger Beat On The Potomac…. Between belaboring the obvious… and assuring us that Willard Romney had vast reservoirs of support abroad in the land that the rest of us were sadly overlooking, Mahtesian was the go-to source for all things fact-averse…. Today… he returns to the fray…

"Neither of the candidates inspired rural voters to go vote," James Gimpel, a University of Maryland political scientist, told the Daily Yonder, "although there was even less enthusiasm for Obama than there was for Romney." Romney did, however, manage to win the rural vote by a higher percentage than John McCain. In 2008, McCain won 53.3 percent to Barack Obama's 45.6 percent, but Romney won 58.9 percent among rural voters. That figure tracked almost exactly with George W. Bush's rural performance in 2004.

Call me cynical, but I suspect there was another factor that might have held turnout down among "rural" voters as regards the current president of the United States, a factor that does not, ah, apply to any previous Democratic presidential nominee.

My goal in life now is to live long enough to see the last of the "Mitt Would Have Won If Nobody But White Folks Voted" stories.

jonathan Weisman of the New York Times Is Very Unhappy That the Democratic Plan Is Not a Republican Plan

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Jonathan Weisman: White House Offers New Fiscal Plan, Prodding G.O.P.: WASHINGTON — House Republicans said on Thursday that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, an immediate new round of stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits.

The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, was likely to meet strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other entitlements, to be worked out next year, with no guarantees.

He did propose some upfront cuts in programs like farm price supports, but did not specify an amount or any details. And senior Republican aides familiar with the offer said those initial spending cuts might well be outnumbered by upfront spending increases, including at least $50 billion in infrastructure spending, mortgage relief, an extension of unemployment insurance and a deferral of automatic cuts to physician reimbursements under Medicare…

"Might well be outnumbered"? Can't Republicans count.

A real reporter would have asked Boehner: "Where is your plan?"

But not Jonathan Weisman.

John Podhoretz: My Columns Were Perfect, Perfect! If Not for That Meddling Electorate!

John Podhoretz:

Jonathan Chait… had a good deal of sport at my expense…. [My] article[s]… after Election Day sounded an entirely different note about the technical brilliance of the Obama campaign than columns I’d written before Nov. 6…. But does Obama’s victory suggest… that I and others were simply… unprincipled right-wing hacks and cheerleaders?… I genuinely believed over the spring and summer that the economic news would make the president’s re-election nearly impossible…. Chait also quotes me changing my tune on Romney’s vague general-election strategy…. The problem here is that there could have been no other strategy…. [P]olls feature wildly varying results that serve to support wildly opposing points of view. So all we’re left with are subjective observations…. This year I argued Barack Obama wouldn’t win… based on experience… knowledge — years of study of electoral and presidential politics… common sense… [and] conviction…. I was wrong this year not only about the technical superiority of the Obama campaign but also about the nature of the American electorate…. That was not hackery. It was, alas, misplaced idealism.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

You, Richard Cohen of the *Washington Post*, Are No Gary Cooper: Cary Cooper Was a Friend of Mine Weblogging

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? The Washington Post's Richard Cohen:

James Bond and the new sex appeal: Daniel Craig takes off his shirt…. Bond is in pain from his wounds. I am in pain from all the hours he has spent in the gym. This Bond ripples with muscles. Craig is 44, but neither gravity nor age has done its evil work on him. Nothing about him looks natural, relaxed — a man in the prime of his life and enjoying it. Instead, I see a man chasing youth on a treadmill…. In “North by Northwest” and other movies, Grant — for all his good looks — represented the triumph of the sexual meritocracy — a sex appeal won by experience and savoir-faire, not delts and pecs and other such things that any kid can have. He was not alone in this. Gary Cooper in “High Noon” wins Grace Kelly by strength of character, not muscles. He was about 50, and Kelly was a mere 23…

"[She] was… a mere 23." Where have I seen that before?

Ah. Here: Warren St. John:

Mr. Cohen… accused of engaging in “inappropriate behavior” toward Devon Spurgeon, a 23-year-old editorial aide…. Post management went into… crisis mode: Staff members… forbidden to discuss the matter….

Hope for a New and Very Different Political Press Corps

The old political journalism was one based on the active pursuit of misinformation. The Gallup poll swings from +4% to +1% and back to +4%--and National Journal Hotline writes breathless stories about what happened. Rasmussen says +3% and Pew says -1%--and Politico writes earnestly about how savvy insiders disagree. All that is going on is that with the small size of polls, especially tracking polls, sampling error and the house effects it shields have their day.

Thus we have a world in which Peggy Noonan writes easily about how magic dolphins have told her that Romney will win, Joe Klein is held up as an authority on the effect of Sandy on Pennsylvania turnout and thus margin, Karen Tumulty seeks out Bill Galston and Mark Mackinnon as experts on the likelihood of a popular-electoral vote split, David Brooks denies the possibility of forecasting in a world in which anything can happen, Joe Scarborough dumps on the idea of an odds ratio, Ramesh Ponnuru asks "who are you going to trust: the voters as interviewed by the pollsters or the Romney campaign operatives who talk to me?", George Will knows that he knows much less than Michael Barone but doesn't think he can say so and so decides to break with Michael by calling Minnesota for Romney, Michael Barone calls Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for Romney and afterwards claims that his prediction was "reasonable, just as other predictions that either Obama or Romney would win, or would win with more than 300 electoral votes, were reasonable; you could look at the polling data… and come up with pretty different conclusions".

Jeff Bercovici says that that day of mindless incoherent blathering is over:

Aaauuuggghhh! My Eyes! Ruth Marcus!

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-is-paula-broadwells-wardrobe-fair-game/2012/11/21/a71dbaf0-3404-11e2-9cfa-e41bac906cc9_story.html>

 

Hoisted from the Archives: Tim Russert on How It Should Be Illegal for Congress to Investigate the Lies of Republican Presidents

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

John Conyers:

Rep. John Conyers (2006): It's Checks and Balances, Mr. Russert: While interviewing my Leader, Nancy Pelosi, Russert intoned ominously:

The chair of the Judiciary cmte would be someone named John Conyers, I went to his website and this is what was on his website.

He then showed the headline of my website where I call for the creation of a Sam Ervin-style bipartisan Committee, equally composed of Democrats and Republicans, to investigate pre-war manipulation of intelligence and other matters and, if warranted, to make recommendations to the Judiciary Committee on possible grounds for impeachment.

"That's the man who would be Chairman of the Judiciary Committee," Russert ominously declared. He then asked if "John Conyers should take down his website."

Perhaps Mr. Russert has forgotten, but I have been a Chairman before. For five years, from 1989 to 1994, I was the Chairman of the House Government Operations Committee…. That was back when Congress did something called "oversight." You know, in our tri-partite system of government, when Congress actually acted like a co-equal branch. The Republican Congress decided to be a rubber stamp for President Bush instead.

Perhaps, if we had a little oversight, we wouldn't be mired in a war based on false pretenses in which we have lost thousands of our brave men and women in uniform and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis…

Tom Ricks: Lucian K. Truscott IV on Petraeus: Perhaps the worst op-ed I’ve ever read

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/19/lucian_k_truscott_iv_on_petraeus_perhaps_the_worst_op_ed_i_ve_ever_read

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?: A Question to National Journal's Steven Shepard About His Gallup Poll Article

Dear Mr. Shepard:

I was puzzled by your article: http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/gallup-blew-its-presidential-polls-but-why--20121118.

Were I writing an article about Gallup's remarkable miss this year, I would have started by Googling "Gallup 2012 election criticisms", which would rapidly have led me to Nate Silver's "Gallup vs. the World" http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/gallup-vs-the-world/ --an October 18 real-time analysis of the Gallup anomaly in considerable depth. Reading that, I would have learned--back last October 18--that:

[Gallup's] results are deeply inconsistent with the results that other polling firms are showing in the presidential race, and the Gallup poll has a history of performing very poorly when that is the case. Other national polls show a race that is roughly tied on average, while state polls continue to indicate a narrow advantage of about two points for President Obama in tipping-point states like Ohio....

[T]he Gallup poll accounts for 5 or 10 percent of the information that an election analyst should evaluate on a given day. The Gallup poll’s influence on the subjective perception about where the presidential race stands seems to be proportionately much greater than that, however — especially when the poll seems to diverge from the consensus. This simply isn’t rational, in my view. As I discuss in my book, our first instincts are often quite poor.... We tend to put too much emphasis on the newest, most widely reported and most dramatic pieces of data....