Meta thoughts on political pandering

As an unreformed free-trader, I cringe whenever the presidential campaigns focus on Ohio, because of the inevitable NAFTA-bashing that arises. I'm in 100-percent agreement with Matthew Yglesias when he writes

I should also say that as someone who thinks NAFTA was a smart policy and an important-though-oversold policy achievement of Bill Clinton's administration, I find it kind of painful to watch. Hillary Clinton's husband's administration had a perfectly defensible record on trade policy and that is why she defended it in the past -- she ought to keep defending it now. Instead, we get these weird contortions from her and Obama pressing a very dubious line of attack that Clinton won't challenge on the merits.

But, of course, this is politics, and just as Iowa's importance in the primary race guarantees we'll never see the end of ethanol subsidies, Ohio's position as a swing state guarantees that we'll be treated to a good show of protectionist rhetoric every four years. Andrew Leonard at Salon sums up the situation well.

How the World Works is sympathetic to economists who argue in favor of bulking up the social safety net and making investments in infrastructure and education, rather than attempting to micromanage corporate behavior, as a way of addressing the inequities catalyzed by trade. But if Willem Buiter ran for political office in Ohio with a stump speech that included a lecture on how the winners from trade outnumber the losers and how "Bill Clinton’s greatest achievement as President was his remarkable and unstinting support for a liberal international economic order" and therefore Ohioans need to stop moaning about NAFTA, he would lose. He would be pummeled. Economists pride themselves on understanding how the world is. But doesn't that imply that their calculus include political reality? The political reality is that voters in Ohio do not feel as if they have benefited from a liberal international economic order. And the political reality is that the voters of Ohio may well determine who the next president of the United States is.

And, of course, if Tennessee became an important state in a presidential election, we'd see no end of pandering to the cotton farmers.

This makes me wonder: If I were in charge of arranging the primaries, and could somehow designate a handful of states as swing states in the general, what would be the least harmful states to designate as the states that get pandered to?

Anti-Semitism in Tennessee

I'm not fond of the knee-jerk cries of anti-Semitism every time someone is critical of Israel's policy toward the Palestinians, but this is the real thing.

The Anti-Defamation League on Monday condemned a flier circulating in Memphis that says U.S. Rep. "Steve Cohen and the Jews Hate Jesus," saying it "attempts to incite tension" between African-Americans and Jews.

The flier, which provides the name and telephone number of Rev. George Brooks of Murfreesboro, Tenn., has been in circulation since at least last Thursday. On Monday, Brooks took responsibility for the broadside, saying, "I sent that out."

The flier, which Cohen said he received at his law office in Memphis last week, reads in part: "Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen and the JEWS HATE Jesus. So Memphis Christians must unite and support ONE Black Christian to represent Memphis in the United States Congress in 2008. Simply because this Congressional district is predominantly black…

"It is the responsibility of the black leaders of Memphis to see to it that one and ONLY one black Christian faces this opponent of Christ and Christianity in the 2008 election."

Brooks said he sent the flier because the 9th Congressional District is "about 90-something percent black. That's the reason." According to the latest U.S. Census, in 2000, the district was 59.7 percent black.

Wow. Just wow.

Say it ain't so. But how?

Human beings are stupid in interesting ways:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.[snip]

...once an idea has been implanted in people's minds, it can be difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce it.

Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.

Basically, until people start paying attention, we're doomed as a democracy. When information is absorbed passively in a peripheral manner, strong denials of untruths might have a counterproductive effect of strengthening the untruth instead of debunking it.

This reminds me of that Far Side cartoon where the exasperated owner is telling off his dog, saying "Ginger, you bad dog, if you keep misbehaving like this then you won't be getting any more yummy food..." and all the dog can hear is "Ginger...yummy food." Fill in analogous example with "Saddam" and "9/11" here.

An interview with the reporter who wrote the article above, Shankar Vedantam, from On The Media:



By the way, a collection of Vedantam's Department of Human Nature columns can be found here.

We really are different

Liberals kick ass at the most boring computer game in the world. WooT!:

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

How to interpret results like this?

First of all, it's fascinating because it's just so unexpected. We like to think that the way we arrive at our political orientations is a complex journey. "I read so-and-so, and suddenly the scales fell from my eyes"; "it was then I realized that x value was the most important to me" etc etc. It's rather startling to find that, in the aggregate at least, a factor as simple as "how likely are you to incorporate new information versus acting upon established patterns?" can predict where we are on the left-right spectrum. Since I'm very fond of clever-clever psych experiments that cut through complexity despite simple parameters, I say kudos, UCLA team.

Secondly, tempting as it may be, liberals shouldn't be smug about the results. The important thing this study showed is that liberals and conservatives have different thinking styles, not that one is superior to the other. I'm sure there can be other games where the conservative style trumps. Maybe it will be interesting to rig the same game to see under what conditions conservatives start to win (perhaps increase the frequency of the flashing letters to the point where thinking too much about it decreases performance?).

Thirdly, even though I just said liberals shouldn't be smug, I think there is one instance where it is totally legitimate to use this study to beat the conservatives with like a stick. Next time I hear any variant to that old "Conservatives are from Mars and Liberals are from Venus" trope, I'm going to say "You know there's another way to explain why conservatives and liberals think the way they do..."

(Via the Drumstir)

Cynicism or Delusion?

Paul Krugman asks the question of the day (via Mark Thoma):

The only real question about the planned “surge” in Iraq — which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation — is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional.

Opinions differ:

Senator Joseph Biden ... thinks they’re cynical. He recently told The Washington Post that administration officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be “the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.”

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize ... for his research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they’re delusional. Mr. Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administration’s unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one’s losses — the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.

I'm sure it's a mixture of the two. Warmongering pundits like William Kristol are surely delusional. And surely there are some in the administration who are merely cynical, perhaps including the President himself.

The danger is that the newly elected Democratic Congress falls prey to a different form of cynicism: they've already won one election because of an unpopular war, and it's got to be very tempting to put up only token resistance to the President's crazy scheme, let him have the "surge" he claims to want, and coast to another victory in 2008 when the plan inevitably fails. It's especially tempting since the most dangerous Republican presidential candidate in 2008, Senator McCain, is a surge proponent.

Is McCain delusional? Or is he a different sort of cynic, hoping that the Democrats refuse to go along with the President's scheme, so that he can run on the Dolchstosslegende?

Presidential mettle, or lack thereof

Senator Clinton is trying to prove something, but what?

Hot on the heels of the release of the Iraq Study Group Report -- and a day in which 10 U.S. servicemen were killed and at least 84 Iraqis were blown up or shot -- prospective presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will join with Joe Lieberman to hold a press conference today at 3 pm ET to announce the launch of a television PSA campaign about... video game ratings.

Oh. My. God.

The violence in Iraq is becoming more savage by the minute -- among the dead yesterday were 45 bullet-riddled corpses found in Baghdad, many of whom had been tortured before being executed -- and Hillary is worried about video game violence? Are you kidding me?

If you just look at their resumés, Senator Clinton is the second most qualified of the possible contenders for the 2008 Democratic nomination. (The most qualified, of course, is Al Gore, at least on paper.)

But then she goes and pulls silly stunts like this, which show that she has little sense for the proper business of the federal government, and little for the concerns of Americans, proper or not.

By all accounts, she's got an extraordinary talent for raising money, which will give her a strong advantage in the 2008 primary. But while fund-raising talent is what you need in a university president, it's not a qualification for President of the United States.

(Via The Editors.)

Democratic vs. Republican phrases

Jesse Shapiro and Matthew Gentzkow, in their paper "What Drives Media Slant?", offer up lists of phrases more commonly used by Democrats than Republicans, and vice-versa, based on the 2005 Congressional Record. Here's a sample from each list. I've trimmed each list to ten entries.

Two-word phrases more often used by Democrats:

private accounts
trade agreement
american people
tax breaks
trade deficit
oil companies
credit card
nuclear option
war in iraq
middle class

Three-word phrases more often used by Democrats:

veterans health care
congressional black caucus
va health care
billion in tax cuts
credit card companies
security trust fund
social security trust
privatize social security
american free trade
central american free

Two-word phrases more often used by Republicans:

stem cell
natural gas
death tax
illegal aliens
class action
war on terror
embryonic stem
tax relief
illegal immigration
boy scouts

Three word phrases more often used by Republicans:

embryonic stem cell
hate crimes legislation
adult stem cells
oil for food program
personal retirement accounts
energy and natural resources
global war on terror
hate crimes law
change hearts and minds
global war on terrorism