Brendan Nyhan

A question: When you’re being criticized for running a campaign about process, should you be sending out emails less than two months before Iowa with the subject “Change the process”? (PDF)

Why are journalists so bad with numbers?

Reader Joel Wiles passed on this example from a New York Times article on the aging of Japan’s prison population:

Between 2000 and 2006, while the total population of Japanese 60 and over rose by 17 percent, inmates of the same age group swelled by 87 percent. In the country’s 74 prisons, the proportion of older inmates rose to 12.3 percent in 2006 from 9.3 percent in 2000, while the share of those in their 20s declined and in other age groups remained flat.

While the main reason behind the explosion in graying lawbreakers is the rapid aging of Japan’s population, the rates have far outpaced the increase of older people in the general population.

Between 2000 and 2006, while the total population of Japanese 60 and over rose by 17 percent, inmates of the same age group swelled by 87 percent. In the country’s 74 prisons, the proportion of older inmates rose to 12.3 percent in 2006 from 9.3 percent in 2000, while the share of those in their 20s declined and in other age groups remained flat.

Japan’s rates are much higher than those in the West. America’s prisons — where those 55 years and over are categorized as elderly — are also graying. But such prisoners accounted for only 4.6 percent of the total prison population in the United States in 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The phrase “Japan’s rates are much higher than those in the West” falsely suggests that more elderly people are in prison in Japan than the US. However, while a higher percentage of prisoners in Japan are elderly, the proportion of the population that is both elderly and incarcerated is much greater in the US due to our dramatically higher incarceration rate (PDF). This is a classic example of what is known as the “base-rate fallacy.” Can we get a statistical ombudsman or something?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, GMU law professor Peter Berkowitz offers this paragraph as part of his argument for why it is wrong to hate President Bush:

And lord knows the Bush administration has blundered in its handling of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror. But from the common progressive denunciations you would never know that the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal. And you could easily overlook that in our system of government the executive branch, which has principal responsibility for defending the nation, is in wartime bound to overreach–especially when it confronts on a daily basis intelligence reports that describe terrifying threats–but that when checked by the Supreme Court the Bush administration has, in accordance with the system, promptly complied with the law.

Note how shallow these substantive points are. First, Berkowitz writes that “the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal,” but fails to explain that it has endorsed the use of several techniques that are commonly viewed as torture. Then he congratulates the White House for complying with Supreme Court decisions, which I didn’t realize was an action worthy of praise. Things must be worse than I thought if this is the best defense a conservative law professor can muster.

I was just thinking how nice it was that the persistent and unrealistic third party hype had finally died down, but then I read Richard Cohen and got annoyed all over again. Yes, he eventually allows that it is unlikely Bloomberg could win the presidency, but the whole column is still absurd:

The equilibrium of ineptitude — fools at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue — is not lost on the American people. They award Congress even lower approval ratings than they do the president, about 20 percent in the case of the Hill, about 30 percent in the case of George W. Bush. What they think of the crop of presidential candidates is not yet clear, but I, for one, pick up the paper in the morning and read that the economy is sinking, that oil could top $100 a barrel and that a pandemic of house foreclosures is sweeping our nation of sweet cul-de-sacs — and the people who want to be president have precious little to say about any of these issues.

Enter Mike Bloomberg. He is the mayor of New York, endowed with near-universal support in his city and about $13 billion in the bank. Intimations of his presidential ambitions are getting stronger. He cooperated with a Newsweek cover story that, whether he intended it or not, left the clear impression that he can hardly be restrained from running. More to the point, his associates and friends do not, as you might expect, caution me against believing that a presidential run is under consideration. On the contrary, they fairly drool like Pavlov’s famous mutts when the words “White House” are mentioned.

How such a feat can be accomplished — how the electoral college can be won and how an independent can govern with a Congress composed of Democrats and Republicans — is not the issue for the moment. Instead, what animates and energizes the hope of a Bloomberg candidacy is the utter failure of the current political establishment to deal with, not to mention solve, the immense problems facing us.

Michael Dukakis ran for the presidency partially on a platform of competence. The American people took one look at him in a battle tank and concluded that someone else should be commander in chief. Yet things may be different for a different Mike from, of all places, Massachusetts (Bloomberg grew up in Medford).

A glance at the sky shows more than winter’s coming — maybe a recession, too. All sorts of things are going wrong and some of them, like the crisis on Wall Street, cannot even be gauged. Just who will be stuck owning worthless paper based on worthless mortgages secured by nearly worthless houses is still unknown. Not even the financial institutions — Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, etc. — knew what was happening or know, will you believe, what is now happening. Bad times — probably very bad times — are coming.

So competence will have a certain charm. (And Bloomberg is not short on actual charm, either.) These circumstances, not to mention an ability — if not a determination — to spend maybe $1 billion on a campaign, could radically change American politics. The chances of this happening are not great, I know, but Ross Perot did get 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992 (nary a vote in the electoral college, though) and he was perceived as a bit weird and totally unsuited for the presidency. Bloomberg is a different story altogether.

Will Mayor Mike run? He might. Can he win? I still doubt it. But my doubts are nothing compared with my chagrin when I read an op-ed by Karl Rove with which I keep nodding in agreement. It takes a pretty broken system for Rove to be right. Maybe it will take a Bloomberg billion to fix it.

Unfortunately for the Cohens and Broders of the world, “competence” — which is code for their brand of establishment centrism — is not an issue that will overthrow the two-party system.

Supply-sider Stephen Moore, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, again suggests that tax cuts increase revenue:

The quality of this discourse rarely rises above the level of trash talk. Nevertheless, some arguments are repeated with such regularity that they need to be addressed. One is that supply-siders dishonestly claim that tax rate cuts increase tax revenues. Now, we can argue forever whether tax revenues would have been higher or lower without the Bush 2003 tax cuts. But one stubborn fact remains: Tax receipts are up, not down, by $745 billion in four years since the 2003 tax cuts.

It’s one thing for the supply-side critics to have predicted four years ago that the Bush tax cuts would increase the budget deficit. But Mr. Surowiecki tells us, today, that “myriad studies” find that the Bush tax cuts “led to bigger budget deficits.”

Bigger deficits? After the second Bush tax cut of 2003, the budget deficit tumbled to $163 billion in FY 2007 from $401 billion in FY 2003.

The point is obviously disingenuous. The consensus among economists, including those who work for the Bush administration, is that tax cuts decrease revenue all else equal. The fact that revenue has increased and deficits have declined over time proves nothing. Revenue would have increased more and the deficit would have declined more had the tax cuts not been in effect.

(For more on Stephen Moore, see my posts on him and our writing about him at Spinsanity.)

Update 11/14 10:09 AM: Donald Luskin makes a similar claim in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

When [rich people stop working in response to tax increases], Mr. Rangel will get a lesson in supply-side economics he’ll never forget. Some say that the Laffer Curve is wrong, and that tax cuts don’t result in higher tax revenues. But when America’s most productive workers stop working — even a little bit — in reaction to the incentive effects of the “mother of all tax reform plans,” they’ll see that the Laffer Curve was right after all, and that it can cut both ways. Involuntary tax hikes result in voluntarily lower tax revenues.

Via Christina Bellantoni, John Edwards has released an ad in Iowa that makes the misleading claim that he can take away health care from members of Congress:

The Clinton campaign’s Fact Hub blog has posted a response citing my post on Edwards’s proposal as well as one by Matthew Yglesias:

Sen. Edwards has a new TV advertisement about health care where he proposes the following law:

When I’m president, I’m going to say to members of Congress and members of my administration including my cabinet, I’m glad that you have health care coverage and your family has health care coverage. But if you don’t pass universal health care by July 2009, in six months, I’m going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you.

The problem is, Sen. Edwards doesn’t have the power to take health care away from Congress unilaterally—he’d have to propose a law. (Sen. Edwards himself has acknowledged this point.) And a law that takes away health coverage from Congress in July 2009 is unconstitutional according to the 27th Amendment:

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

Thus, since the law would change compensation for Congress before the next Congressional election (2010), it would violate the 27th amendment. The Atlantic’s Matt Yglesias and All The President’s Spin author Brendan Nyhan agree.

I love how I’m cited as if I’m some sort of constitutional law expert. But I’m pretty confident I’m right that the law would be invalidated. And even if I’m wrong, do you think Congress will vote to drop its own health care?

Various liberal bloggers (here, here, and here) are concluding that Paul Krugman was right in his debate with David Brooks over the meaning of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 speech in Philadelphia, MS. The key point, according to Kevin Drum, is this:

Reagan’s states rights line was prepared beforehand and reporters covering the event could not recall him using the term before the Neshoba County appearance.

If this is true it wraps up this argument on pretty much every level, both substantive and semantic. Anybody care to weigh in on this? Is it true that Reagan had never (or virtually never) used the phrase “states’s rights” before this speech?

I’d agree that this, if confirmed, would be relevant evidence. I found articles predating the speech in which Reagan indicated support for a federalist approach to economic and land use policy (see below the fold) — two issues with no clear racial implications. However, he is not quoted using the loaded phrase “states’ rights” in either article.

Taking a step back, I want to be clear what my original post on this subject was arguing. I am not saying that Reagan’s use of the phrase “state’s rights” in Philadelphia, MS wasn’t an appeal to racist sentiment. As I wrote, Reagan frequently appealed to race in ugly ways. My point was that the circumstances of the speech have frequently been oversimplified. For instance, take the way Paul Krugman described it in one column:

Thus Ronald Reagan, who began his political career by campaigning against California’s Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered.

From this description, you would think that Reagan’s speech focused on state’s rights. But as David Brooks writes, the phrase was invoked once in a short passage on education:

He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”

The use of the phrase is inappropriate and inflammatory in that context, but the overall content of the speech still doesn’t correspond well to Krugman’s description. From his account, you would also not know the Reagan spent the following week appealing to black voters, as Brooks notes. There’s no excusing appeals to racism, but there’s no reason to exaggerate them either. Many other things Reagan said and did were much worse.

Update 11/13 1:23 PM — Tom Maguire continues the search in a comment:

How precisely must we match the loaded “state’s rights” phrase?

From his days as Governor, here is Reagan in 1967 – the topic was federal legislation on water use:

We believe the essential ingredients of an acceptable augmentation study to be: …(4) that the rights of the states and regions be fully respected;

And in general remarks to some Republicans in 1967:

It is not enough for our senators and our representatives to seek to pass legislation involving the several states, they must also work to insure that legislation does not infringe on the rights of the individual states…

And that is not the product of a comprehensive search – I just went to a collection of Reagan speeches and clicked on two likely ones.

That said, the book “In His Own Hand” – the collection of Reagan radio addresses – does not contain the loaded phrase, if we can trust an Amazon search.

(more…)

I wasn’t the only person to object to yesterday’s New York Times column on brain imaging study of the 2008 presidential race.

Martha Farah, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Penn, has written a very useful guest post for the Neuroethics & Law blog on why the research should be treated with skepticism:

[W]hy do I doubt the conclusions reported in today’s Op Ed piece? The problems I see have less to do with brain imaging per se than with the human tendency to make up “just so” stories and then believe them. The scattered spots of activation in a brain image can be like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup – ambiguous and accommodating of a large number of possible interpretations. The Edwards insula activation might indicate disgust, but it might also indicate thoughts of pain or other bodily sensations or a sense of unfairness, to mention just a few of the mental states associated with insula activation. And of course the possibility remains that the insula activation engendered by Edwards represents other feeling altogether, yet to be associated with the insula. The Romney amygdala activation might indicate anxiety, or any of a number of other feelings that are associated with the amygdala – anger, happiness, even sexual excitement.

Some of the interpretations offered in the Op Ed piece concern the brain states of subsets of the subjects, for example just the men or just the most negative voters. Some concern the brain states of the subjects early on in the scan compared with later in the scan. Some concern responses to still photos or to videos specifically. With this many ways of splitting and regrouping the data, it is hard not to come upon some interpretable patterns. Swish those tea leaves around often enough and you will get some nice recognizable pictures of ocean liners and tall handsome strangers appearing in your cup!

How can we tell whether the interpretations offered by Iacoboni and colleagues are adequately constrained by the data, or are primarily just-so stories? By testing their methods using images for which we know the “right answer.” If the UCLA group would select a group of individuals for which we can all agree in advance on the likely attitudes of a given set of subjects, they could carry out imaging studies like the ones they reported today and then, blind to the identity of personage and subject for each set of scans, interpret the patterns of activation.

I would love to know the outcome of this experiment. I don’t think it is impossible that Iacoboni and colleagues have extracted some useful information about voter attitudes from their imaging studies. This probably puts me at the optimistic end of the spectrum of cognitive neuroscientists reading this work. However, until we see some kind of validation studies, I will remain skeptical.

In closing, there is a larger issue here, beyond the validity of a specific study of voter psychology. A number of different commercial ventures, from neuromarketing to brain-based lie detection, are banking on the scientific aura of brain imaging to bring them customers, in addition to whatever real information the imaging conveys. The fact that the UCLA study involved brain imaging will garner it more attention, and possibly more credibility among the general public, than if it had used only behavioral measures like questionnaires or people’s facial expressions as they watched the candidates. Because brain imaging is a more high tech approach, it also seems more “scientific” and perhaps even more “objective.” Of course, these last two terms do not necessarily apply. Depending on the way the output of UCLA’s multimillion dollar 3-Tesla scanner is interpreted, the result may be objective and scientific, or of no more value than tea leaves.

According to CNN’s Candy Crowley, Joe Biden made an interesting point when asked if he would serve as Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential nominee (mp3 from CNN’s Race to ’08 podcast):

DICK ULIANO [CNN]: [W]ould [Biden] accept a vice presidential slot, say, on a Hillary Clinton ticket or Barack Obama?

CROWLEY: I believe the answer — the quote was absolutely not. But it was a definitive no from him. Interestingly, he said, when I asked him why not, he said Bill Clinton in the White House. Basically vice president would be a ceremonial job.

It makes perfect sense. Most vice presidents are irrelevant, so why would a prominent Democrat want to have even less power than a normal VP?

When you read about brain-scanning studies like the one in today’s New York Times, remember that interpreting fMRI data is more art than science and that the sample sizes are tiny and unrepresentative. I don’t know how to interpret any of the claims in the article without way more information, which will hopefully be forthcoming in the authors’ academic work.

Many people are concerned about the misuse or misinterpretation of this technology because brain scanning carries perceived scientific authority — so much so that even irrelevant neuroscientific information can be perceived as more persuasive. As a result, even preliminary and not particularly newsworthy studies like this one may receive a great deal of hype.