Enlighten Radio Podcasts:The Moose Turd Cafe -- New Years 2018 -- the worst is still ahead

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Blog: Enlighten Radio Podcasts
Post: The Moose Turd Cafe -- New Years 2018 -- the worst is still ahead
Link: http://podcasts.enlightenradio.org/2018/01/the-moose-turd-cafe-new-years-2018.html

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Recovery Radio:James Boyd's Recovery Radio -- New Years, 2018

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Blog: Recovery Radio
Post: James Boyd's Recovery Radio -- New Years, 2018
Link: http://recovery.enlightenradio.org/2018/01/james-boyds-recovery-radio-new-years.html

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Socialism and capitalism work together?

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-22/socialism-and-capitalism-work-together

Is public opinion part of a complex system? [feedly]

Is public opinion part of a complex system?
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2017/12/is-public-opinion-part-of-complex-system.html

The worrisome likelihood that Russians and other malevolent actors are tinkering with public opinion in Western Europe and the United States through social media creates various kinds of anxiety. Are our democratic values so fragile that a few thousand Facebook or Twitter memes could put us on a different plane about important questions like anti-Muslim bigotry, racism, intolerance, or fanaticism about guns? Can a butterfly in Minsk create a thunderstorm of racism in Cincinnati? Have white supremacy and British ultra-nationalism gone viral?

There is an interesting analogy here with the weather. The weather next Wednesday is the net consequence of a number of processes and variables, none of which are enormously difficult to analyze. But in their complex interactions they create outcomes that are all but impossible to forecast over a period of more than three days. And this suggests the interesting idea that perhaps public opinion is itself the result of complex and chaotic processes that give rise to striking forms of non-linear change over time.

Can we do a better job of understanding the dynamics of public opinion by making use of the tools of complexity theory? Here is a summary description of complex systems provided by John Holland in Complexity: A Very Short Introduction:

Complexity, once an ordinary noun describing objects with many interconnected parts, now designates a scientific field with many branches. A tropical rainforest provides a prime example of a complex system. The rainforest contains an almost endless variety of species—one can walk a hundred paces without seeing the same species of tree twice, and a single tree may host over a thousand distinct species of insects. The interactions between these species range from extreme generalists (' army' ants will consume most anything living in their path) to extreme specialists (Darwin's 'comet orchid', with a foot-long nectar tube, can only be pollinated by a particular moth with a foot-long proboscis—neither would survive without the other). Adaptation in rainforests is an ongoing, relatively rapid process, continually yielding new interactions and new species (orchids, closely studied by Darwin, are the world's most rapidly evolving plant form). This lush, persistent variety is almost paradoxical because tropical rainforests develop on the poorest of soils—the rains quickly leach all nutrients into the nearest creek. What makes such variety possible? (1)

Let's consider briefly how public opinion might fit into the framework of complexity theory. On the positive side, public opinion has some of the dynamic characteristics of systems that are often treated as being complex: non-linearity, inflection points, critical mass. Like a disease, a feature of public opinion can suddenly "go viral" -- reproduce many times more rapidly than in previous periods. And the collective phenomenon of public opinion has a feature of "self-causation" that finds parallels in other kinds of systems -- a sudden increase in the currency of a certain attitude or belief can itself accelerate the proliferation of the belief more broadly.

On the negative side, the causal inputs to public opinion dynamics do not appear to be particularly "complex" -- word-of-mouth, traditional media, local influencers, and the new factor of social media networks like Twitter, Weibo, or Facebook. We might conceptualize a given individual's opinion formation as the net result of information and influence received through these different kinds of inputs, along with some kind of internal cognitive processing. And the population's "opinions" are no more than the sum of the opinions of the various individuals.

Most fundamentally -- what are the "system" characteristics that are relevant to the dynamics of public opinion in a modern society? How does public opinion derive from a system of individuals and communication pathways?

This isn't a particularly esoteric question. We can define public opinion at the statistical aggregate of the distribution of beliefs and attitudes throughout a population -- recognizing that there is a distribution of opinion around every topic. For example, at present public opinion in the United States on the topic of President Trump is fairly negative, with a record low 35% approval rating. And the Pew Research Center finds that US public opinion sees racism as an increasingly important problem (link):



Complexity theorists like Scott Page and John Holland focus much attention on a particular subset of complex systems, complex adaptive systems (CAS). These are systems in which the agents are themselves subject to change. And significantly, public opinion in a population of human agents is precisely such a system. The agents change their opinions and attitudes as a result of interaction with other agents through the kinds of mechanisms mentioned here. If we were to model public opinion as a "pandemonium" process, then the possibility of abrupt non-linearities in a population becomes apparent. Assume a belief-transmission process in which individuals transmit beliefs to others with a volume proportional to their own adherence to the belief and the volume and number of other agents from whom they have heard the belief, and individuals adopt a belief in proportion to the number and volume of voices they hear that are espousing the belief. Contagion is no longer a linear relationship (exposure to an infected individual results in X probability of infection), but rather a non-linear process in which the previous cycle's increase leads to amplified infection rate in the next round.

Here is a good review article of the idea of a complex system and complexity science by Ladyman, Lambert and Wiesner (link, link). Here is a careful study of the diffusion of "fake news" by bots on Twitter (link, link). (The graphic at the top is taken from this article.) And here is a Ph.D. dissertation on modeling public opinion by Emily Cody (link).

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

How Doug Jones Won and the Takeaway for Democrats [feedly]

How Doug Jones Won and the Takeaway for Democrats
http://prospect.org/article/how-doug-jones-won-and-takeaway-democrats

AP Photo/John Bazemore

Senator-elect Doug Jones is greeted by a supporter before speaking during an election-night watch party in Birmingham

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Doug Jones made sure to wish his Jewish supporters a "Happy Hanukkah." His stunning victory over Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate seat from Alabama coincided with the first night of what Jews call the Festival of Lights. The holiday celebrates the Jews' triumph over a tyrant king and the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem. As the story goes, they only had enough oil to light the temple's lamp for one day, but the oil lasted a full eight days. During the holiday, Jews play with a four-sided spinning top called a dreidel, whose Hebrew letters represent the saying, "A great miracle happened there."

Many voters and pundits think that a great miracle happened in Alabama on Tuesday. Who can blame them? Jones is the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race in Alabama in 25 years. Even a month ago, a Jones victory seemed like an incredible long shot. Clearly President Trump's political advisors believed that Jones couldn't win, or else they wouldn't have persuaded the president, who hates associating himself with "losers," not only to endorse but also to enthusiastically campaign and Tweet on Moore's behalf.

Once part of the Democratic "solid South," a bastion of Jim Crow segregation, Alabama began shifting toward the Republican Party in the wake of the civil rights movement and became a Republican stronghold. Alabama's current senior senator, Richard Shelby, was initially elected in 1986 as a Democrat, but in 1994, two years into his second term, he switched parties.

The last time Alabamans elected a Democratic governor was in 1998, when Donald Siegelman won the post and served for four years, losing his re-election bid to Republican Bob Riley in 2002. In 2010, Republicans gained control of both chambers of the state legislature for the first time since 1874. The Republicans currently have a 26-to-seven majority in the state Senate and a 70-to-33 majority in the state House of Representatives. 

Republicans hold six of the state's seven congressional seats, a triumph of gerrymandering as well as voter preferences. In 2014, Jeff Sessions won re-election to his U.S. Senate seat with 97 percent of the vote. The Democrats didn't even bother to field a candidate. (Jones won the seat that Sessions vacated after Trump appointed him attorney general.) Last November, Trump won 62 percent of the Alabama vote, while Shelby garnered 64 percent in his Senate re-election contest.

So it is understandable that the idea of a pro-choice Democrat like Jones winning a statewide election might be viewed as miraculous. The former U.S. Attorney is best known for prosecuting the remaining Ku Klux Klan members who bombed Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 that killed four African American girls. He also secured an indictment of Eric Rudolph for bombing a Birmingham abortion clinic in 1998 that killed an off-duty police officer.

Of course, it helped Jones to have a controversial opponent who was accused of child molesting and sexually exploiting teenage girls. But Jones ran an exemplary campaign. The key factors in his victory include the following:

• African American turnout: According to The Washington Post's exit polls, an unprecedented turnout among black voters helped catapult Jones to victory. Blacks comprise 26 percent of Alabama's eligible voters but made up 28 percent of voters in Tuesday's election. Turnout was particularly robust in the counties with the largest black populations. 

The high turnout helped Jones: 96 percent of black voters supported the Democratic candidate, slightly higher than the 95 percent who embraced President Obama in 2012. The cities of Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham, as well as rural Lowndes County—each key bastions of the civil rights movement—gave Jones large majorities. Alabama's racist voting laws have often suppressed the black vote, but one lesson of Jones's campaign is that Democrats can overcome those obstacles if they invest the time, staff, and money in registering and mobilizing African American voters. 

The NAACP, black churches, and historically black colleges were the core of the mobilization effort, but the Democratic Party put organizers on the ground to support the effort of local black organizations. They registered people with past felonies, people without proper identification cards to get the necessary documents so they could vote, and turned the election into a moral and civil rights crusade.

During the last week of the campaign, Democratic stalwarts Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and basketball legend Charles Barkley, who attended Alabama's Auburn University, hit the campaign trail for Jones, while Obama taped a robocall directed at black voters.

• The write-in vote: Jones's margin over Moore was 20,715 votes (671,151 to 650,436). There were 22,819 write-in votes. Most of them were Republicans and independents who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Moore. One percent of Republicans and 5 percent of independents wrote in a name other than Moore or Jones, according to TheWashington Post exit polls.

The write-in idea got a huge boost from Senator Shelby on Sunday when he urged voters follow his example and write in the name of another Republican other than Moore. "I wouldn't vote for Roy Moore," Shelby said. "I think the Republican Party can do better." The large number of Republicans and independents who abandoned Moore in favor of write-in candidates boosted Jones's chances of victory.

• Women: The national upsurge of outrage about sexual assault, which has only escalated since the exposure a month ago of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's behavior, clearly had ripple effects in Alabama. Like Weinstein, Moore became a symbol of predatory practices, including the most damning of accusations, pedophilia.

On Tuesday, women supported Jones by a whopping 57-to-42 percent margin, while men gave Moore a 57-to-40 percent edge. (Even among black voters, women were more enthusiastic than men about Jones; 98 percent of black women and 93 percent of black men embraced the Democrat).

College educated white women, who accounted for 14 percent of the total vote, gave Jones 45 percent of their votes and another 3 percent wrote-in other candidates, depriving Moore of their votes. (Only 25 percent of white women who did not graduate from college, who accounted for 17 percent of the vote, supported Moore.)

• Young voters and college graduates: Jones did particularly well among young voters and voters with college degrees. Overall, 54 percent of college graduates backed Jones, including 40 percent of white voters with college degrees. (Jones garnered 30 percent of the total white vote, twice the 15 percent who voted for Obama). 

White suburban areas, where college-educated voters are more likely to live, shifted dramatically toward Jones compared with their support for Trump last November, a trend that was foreshadowed by the significant number of white suburban women who voted in June for Democrat Jon Ossoff, turning a traditionally Republican House district in the Atlanta suburbs into in battleground.  

Alabama's college towns are hardly bastions of liberalism like Austin and Ann Arbor, but voters in the areas around the University of Alabama (in Tuscaloosa), the University of South Alabama (in Mobile), Auburn University (in Auburn), and the University of Alabama campus in Huntsville (also the home of NASA's Space Flight Center) went heavily for Jones.

In the 18 to 44 year old cohort, 61 percent (35 percent of the total turnout) cast their ballots for Jones, according to CNN polls. No one would describe Alabama as a liberal state. In 2016, only 17 percent of Alabama adults identified themselves as liberals, according to the Gallup poll. But in Tuesday's election, 23 percent of the voters did so. Either the number of liberals is increasing or they are simply more likely to vote. Either way, they helped Jones win in such a close contest.

• Independent Voters: Many political pundits expected turnout among Republicans, especially in rural areas, to decline because Moore was such a toxic candidate. But apparently the Republican enthusiasm gap didn't occur. On Tuesday, Republicans accounted for 43 percent of the voters, compared with 37 percent of Democrats.

This figure is comparable to the Republican share of turnout in recent presidential years. Despite, or perhaps because of, his controversial career, including his stands on abortion, gun control, gay rights, religion, the rights of Muslims, and other issues, Moore still had a solid base of support. He garnered 81 percent of white evangelical voters, the same margin that Trump got nationwide last November, despite his own controversial morals. White born-again Christians accounted for 44 percent of all Alabama voters on Tuesday.

Many evangelical leaders endorsed Moore, who laced all of his campaign speeches with Biblical quotes to defend his noxious views. The big difference is that Moore lost the confidence of Alabama's independent voters, who comprised 21 percent of Tuesday's turnout. They gave Moore only 43 percent of their votes, compared with 51 percent for Jones and 5 percent for write-in candidates.     

• Money: Jones raised more than twice as much money as his rival, garnering $11.5 million to Moore's $5.2 million as of November 22, according to the nonpartisan and nonprofit Center for Responsible Politics. That financial advantage allowed him to flood the state with television and radio ads as well as to hire organizers to register voters and turn them out on Election Day.

He even did much better at attracting money from Alabama residents—$3.9 million to $771,202. Moreover, many more Alabamans contributed to Jones (about 5,000) than to Moore (about 1,000), an indication that the Democratic candidate ran a more robust grassroots campaign. In an interview Tuesday night on MSNBC, former New York TimesExecutive Editor Howell Raines, an Alabama native, observed that even the state's business establishment shunned Moore, concerned that his election would tarnish the state's reputation, hurt tourism, and undermine growing investment by both U.S. and foreign companies.

Both candidates raised the majority of their funds from out-of-state donors, but while Jones raised $7.6 million from outside the state, Moore attracted only $4.4 million. Jones raised $1.6 million from Californians and $1.5 million from New Yorkers. Moore attracted just $289,842 from the blue Golden State, but got only $401,251 from donors in deep red Texas.

Major national GOP donors were ambivalent about Moore's candidacy as more and more Republican politicians distanced themselves from the controversial former judge. After Trump fully embraced Moore a week before the election, some Republican bigwigs, along with the national party, began to write checks, but it was too little, too late. Meanwhile, the national Democratic Party and liberal and progressive groups like MoveOn, Indivisible, and Planned Parenthood Votes (the group's political arm) made Jones's campaign a top priority. 

 

DEMOCRATS NOW HOPE that they can build on Jones's victory—and Trump's embarrassing defeat—to take back the House of Representatives next November. (His victory gives the Democrats 49 seats in the Senate, but the odds of winning a majority in that chamber next year are slimmer). To secure a majority in the House, the Democrats have to gain 24 seats. Six months ago, that seemed impossible. But the number of "swing" House districts now held by Republicans has grown dramatically in that period to more than 50 seats. 

The reasons aren't mysterious: Trump's declining approval ratings, the escalating resistance movement, and the rise of groups like Indivisible has emboldened Democrats and liberals. The Democrats' surprising victories in Virginia last month, winning the governor's race and making unprecedented gains in the state legislature, suggest that Jones's triumph isn't a fluke.

Few Republican candidates will be as toxic as Moore. But the Democrats now believe that the wind is at their backs. Whether they can avoid the infighting that has plagued the party remains to be seen. Democrats need to unite behind a positive message, target battleground races, raise money, nominate compelling candidates, deploy veteran campaign organizers, mobilize volunteers, and excite traditional Democrats as well as independents.

Jones's triumph, along with recent statewide Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey, also remind us that although Trump is president, he hasn't taken over the nation's soul. The vast majority of Americans support liberal policy ideas. We are a more decent country than the madman who occupies the White House.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Weekend Reading: Sidney Blumenthal on the Finances of Stephen "The Little Giant" Douglas [feedly]

Interesting episode for historical materialists....

Weekend Reading: Sidney Blumenthal on the Finances of Stephen "The Little Giant" Douglas
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/12/in-1836-the-legislature-granted-a-charter-for-a-railroad-running-from-galena-in-the-northwest-corner-to-the-southernmost-ti.html

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Economics Debate, again and again [feedly]

The Economics Debate, again and again
http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2017/12/the-economics-debate-again-and-again.html

The debate on the economics profession – its alleged ills and failings -- abates at times, but never ends. A recent piece in The Guardian taking the profession to task for its lack of reform has prompted a response from a group of economists. I thought it was time to re-up my own views on this debate, in the form of two sets of ten commandments. The first set is directed at economists, and the second to non-economists.   

Ten commandments for economists

1.      Economics is a collection of models; cherish their diversity.

2.      It's a model, not the model.

3.      Make your model simple enough to isolate specific causes and how they work, but not so simple that it leaves out key interactions among causes.

4.      Unrealistic assumptions are OK; unrealistic critical assumptions are not OK.

5.      The world is (almost) always second-best.

6.      To map a model to the real world you need explicit empirical diagnostics, which is more craft than science.

7.      Do not confuse agreement among economists for certainty about how the world works.

8.      It's OK to say "I don't know" when asked about the economy or policy.

9.      Efficiency is not everything.

10.  Substituting your values for the public's is an abuse of your expertise.

Ten commandments for non-economists

1.      Economics is a collection of models with no predetermined conclusions; reject any arguments otherwise.

2.      Do not criticize an economist's model because of its assumptions; ask how the results would change if certain problematic assumptions were more realistic.

3.      Analysis requires simplicity; beware of incoherence that passes itself off as complexity.

4.      Do not let math scare you; economists use math not because they are smart, but because they are not smart enough.

5.      When an economist makes a recommendation, ask what makes him/her sure the underlying model applies to the case at hand.

6.      When an economist uses the term "economic welfare," ask what s/he means by it.

7.      Beware that an economist may speak differently in public than in the seminar room.

8.      Economists don't (all) worship markets, but they know better how they work than you do.

9.      If you think all economists think alike, attend one of their seminars.

10.  If you think economists are especially rude to non-economists, attend one of their seminars.

I have spent enough time around non-economists to know that their criticism often misses the mark. In particular, many non-economists tend not to understand the value of parsimonious modeling (especially of the mathematical kind). Their typical riposte is: "but it is more complicated than that." It is of course. But without abstraction from detail, there cannot be any useful analysis.

Economists, on the other hand, are very good at modeling but not so good at navigating among their models. In particular, they often confuse a model, for the model. A big part of the problem is that the implicit scientific method to which they subscribe is one in which they are constantly striving to achieve the "best" model.

Macroeconomists are particularly bad at this, which accounts in part for their dismal performance. In macroeconomics, there is too much of "is the right model the classical or the Keynesian one" (and their variants), and too little of "how do we know whether it is the Keynesian or the classical model that is the most relevant and applicable at this point in time in this particular context."  

 -- via my feedly newsfeed