Political Independence

          I’m getting rather perturbed with this constant stream of naysayers, who claim that voting is unimportant. One argument trotted out on a consistent basis goes something like this. A liberal individual voting in a very conservative county, in a severely conservative state, has very little likelihood of swaying national, state-wide, and/or county-wide elections due to the sheer numbers game. One vote out of millions will do nothing to change an election. Many people counter with arguments about one’s civic duty to vote, or how people in other parts of the world are willing to die for the right to vote. All of these arguments are persuasive on moral and philosophical grounds, but if we are dealing with avid utilitarian’s, who are hell bent on claiming that the likelihood one’s vote matters is low, none of these arguments prove that the ends justify the means. What all these counter-arguments miss, however, is that there is a pernicious, downright improper assumption running through these anti-voting epithets. That problem is of course the assumption of independence. When I say independence, I’m talking about probabilistic independence, having no thoughts of anything more patriotic or interesting.

           Let’s take a step back and talk about this sort of independence and then it hopefully will become clear why these anti-voting authors’ assumption does not bode well for how the real world works. All independence says is given two events, A and B, knowing that A has already happened, the likelihood of B happening has not changed, and vice versa. Thus, two events being independent translate into two events that have no relationship to one another. Take this simple example. If I go home and decide to cook myself dinner, the likelihood that my next door neighbor, who I have never met, cooks dinner is unchanged. This is for both physical reasons, we don’t share a living space, and social reasons, we don’t have any means of communicating with one another. However, when I decide to cook dinner, my roommate’s likelihood of cooking dinner does change. Either for a physical reason, I’m taking up the stove so he can’t cook, or a social reason, he sees me cooking dinner and decides he can just take some of my food. So we would say that the likelihoods of me and my next door neighbor cooking dinner are independent, while the likelihoods of me and my roommate cooking dinner are dependent.

         Hopefully, one can see where I’m going with this. All those authors who decry about the likelihood one’s vote matters assume that a person’s choice to vote is independent of everyone else’s choice to vote. If everyone’s decision to vote is independent, then the likelihood that I vote having any sort of meaning on the election is rather small. However, if my decision to vote persuades another family member, or friend in my social network, to vote, and their decision also causes another to vote, then the cascading dependencies can really make the numbers a bit more favorable. Let’s go to a simple statistical example I’ve concocted. In the table below, we can see the joint distributions between two people, person A and person B voting, where they have dependent probabilities:

		VOTER B
		P( Vote)	P(Not Vote)
VOTER A	P( Vote)	0.5	0.2
	P(Not Vote)	0.05	0.25

The table is very simple, so bear with me as I walk you through it. For example, sum across both rows and you get the marginal probabilities of A voting and not voting:

Marg. Prob A Votes = P(Voter A Votes | Voter B Votes) + P(Voter A Votes | Voter B Not Votes) = .7

Marg. Prob A Not Votes = P(Voter A Not Votes | Voter B Votes) + P(Voter A Not Votes | Voter B Not Votes) = .3

   

     

       You’ll notice if we sum these two numbers together we get 1, and that makes sense because Voter A can only vote or not vote, thus they will do either/or 100% of the time. We can now ask questions regarding conditional probabilities. Given that voter B has voted, what is the probability that voter A will also vote? To answer this, we restrict ourselves to only the first column and see that voter A votes with P(Voter A Votes) = .5 and voter A does not vote with P(Voter A Not Votes) = .05. However, the sum of these two are only .55 . So to find the probability that voter A votes when voter B has voted, we simply divide P(Voter A Votes) = .5 by our restricted sample space, the marginal probability of B voting, which is equal to .55 . So we have P(Voter A Votes| Voter  B Votes) =  .5/.55 = .91. We can now verify these two voters are dependent because the likelihood that A votes changes whenever B decides to vote or not vote. So doing the same process we would find P(Voter A Votes | Voter B  Not Votes) = .2/.45 = .44 . Now things are getting interesting, given that B votes the probability that A votes nearly doubles. This means that voter B’s decision to vote also increased the likelihood that voter A would vote by a factor of 2.

       Now let’s complicate things a little bit more. Let’s say that we have a pool of 100 voters, what is the likelihood that a single voter could sway the election? Well if we assume that every person’s vote is independent that is very easy, it’s merely 1 in 100, or .01. However, using our numbers from before let’s say voter B decides to vote before voter A. So voter B has a probability of .01 of swinging the election, but because her decision to vote has that added benefit of increasing the probability that A votes by .91 - .44 = .47, the likelihood that voter B’s vote is the decider is now .01 + .01*.47 = .0147.

      What this example is trying to illustrate is that if there are externalities to voting then the likelihood one’s vote matters can start to creep upwards. Given that our social networks are increasing faster and faster with the plethora of social media, these small spillovers start to add up. However, is a person’s choice to vote independent of everyone else’s choice to vote? Recent work by Betsy Sinclair at the University of Chicago, which looked at political canvassers in Los Angeles, seems to suggest that the independence assumption is incorrect. Networks influence political activity via social pressure to conform. Previous research had found that people in social networks where with high rates of political activity conform to social pressure and are more likely to acquiesce and vote. The important point in Sinclair’s work is that the messenger matters, if the politically active person trying to gin up votes is not in the same group as the person they are persuading then the effects on political behavior is small. However, if both people are members of similar groups, then the effects may be very large. For hermits that lack any social networks, the likelihood that there vote matters is infinitesimally small, however, for those people inculcated in vast networks of friends, families, and co-workers, their vote may make more of a difference than pundits make you believe.

CITED:

Sinclair, B., McConnel, M., and Michelson, M. “Local Canvassing and Social Pressure: The Efficacy of Grassroots Voter Mobilization.” Forthcoming Political Communication, July 7, 2010.

Objectively Subjective

Something that has always bugged me is human’s ability to translate subjective, mental information about probabilities, happiness, guilt etc. into objective, quantifiable numbers. For me the problem really became pronounced when reading a paper asking students to assess from 0-100% how likely they felt their answer to a simulated SAT question was correct. Say that you are given 5 choices: A, B, C, D, and E. Ignore for a moment the inherent difficulty in forecasting using data, and instead focus on the process one would go through to make the assessment of how certain they are. First, you would have to think how well do I know this subject area? If your answer is ‘not too well’, then you have to translate that ‘not too well’ into some range. Let’s say I have a 30% chance I know the correct answer with certainty. This number is compared to the 20% chance that if you guess, you got it right. However, now you start going through the answers themselves and determine how ‘reasonable’ they seem. The mental machinations may exclude one obviously incorrect choice, but now we’re stuck with what do we mean by ‘reasonable’ in the context of some finite number. Let’s say I’m 100% certain D is wrong is wrong and 85% sure E is wrong. Knowing this means we might as well only select from A, B and C. With this restricted choice set, my probability of being right, incorporating my prior belief state, is about 35.29%, now isn’t that a nice number? However, we are ignoring one key problem, my initial assumption that I was 30% certain I knew the right answer. How am I to know that because I got cut off earlier in the day by some bozo, I am now just a little more pessimistic in my outlook? Because of me being in this “hot state”, I shave off 10% from my initial assumption. 
            
           This question gets even more interesting when looking at how people make absolute comparisons. George Miller, who recently passed away, was a pioneer in the field of short-term memory, writing a now rather famous paper entitled, ‘The Magical Number SevenPlus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information’.  One experiment of particular interest to this discussion deals with peoples’ ability to discern differences in tones, Prof. Miller sums it up nicely:

“When only two or three tones were used the listeners never confused them. With four different tones confusions were quite rare, but with five or more tones confusions were frequent. With fourteen different tones the listeners made many mistakes. These data are plotted in Fig. 1. Along the bottom is the amount of input information in bits per stimulus. As the number of alternative tones was increased from 2 to 14, the input information increased from 1 to 3.8 bits. On the ordinate is plotted the amount of transmitted information. The amount of transmitted information behaves in much the way we would expect a communication channel to behave; the transmitted information increases linearly up to about 2 bits and then bends off toward an asymptote at about 2.5 bits. This value, 2.5 bits, therefore, is what we are calling the channel capacity of the listener for absolute judgments of pitch. 

 So now we have the number 2.5 bits. What does it mean? First, note that 2.5 bits corresponds to about six equally likely alternatives. The result means that we cannot pick more than six different pitches that the listener will never confuse. Or, stated slightly differently, no matter how many alternative tones we ask him to judge, the best we can expect him to do is to assign them to about six different classes without error. Or, again, if we know that there were N alternative stimuli, then his judgment enables us to narrow down the particular stimulus to one out of N /6.”

The takeaway from all his results is that humans have an innate capacity to make an absolute judgment among 7 different items on a uni-dimensional scale. For example, if someone were given 14 shades of green and asked which ones are different, humans would usually say that 7 of them are the same and 7 are different. Now one must remember that these are questions about single dimensions of OBJECTIVELY knowable items, like color, sound, taste etc. The world out there is filled with the unknown. When pollsters and academics ask questions to subjects relating to “enthusiasm to vote”, “dislike with the president’s economic policy” or “probabilities that your answers are right”, participants are doing their best to bring all these factors together and spit out a number. What I’m saying is that the results that these processes glean may be telling us little about people’s true tastes and instead depend heavily on how many choices participants are given, as well as, other factors related to framing of the questions asked. 

Redistributing Job Insecurity

President Obama seems to be in support of new legislation barring employers from discriminating against the unemployed. Via Catherine Rampell, here is President Obama:

"Well, there is no doubt that folks who have been unemployed longer than six months have a tougher time getting back into the job market. Now, the single most important thing we can do is just have the economy strong so that employers aren’t as choosy because they’ve got to hire because their businesses are expanding.

But we have seen instances in which employers are explicitly saying we don’t want to take a look at folks who’ve been unemployed. Well, that makes absolutely no sense, and I know there’s legislation that I’m supportive of that says you cannot discriminate against folks because they’ve been unemployed, particularly when you’ve seen so many folks who, through no fault of their own, ended up being laid off because of the difficulty of this recession."

This seems to be in line with much of the administration's efforts to try and get those long-term unemployed back to work. Recent musings on the Georgia Program, which seeks to offer government support to get employees trained in new skills, fit in this vein. While it is true that the reason for the massive increase in the duration of the unemployment is because of a concentration of unemployment in those group of older workers that can't seem to find any new job, trying to tackle a demand problem by getting these people back to the work force will do little but redistribute the burdens of unemployment. For example, if a firm decides to go on hiring binge and they say for every person they hire they will fire one of their current workers, most would respond well that's not really hiring at all. The firm is merely swapping one person from the unemployment line for another. This approach to addressing unemployment is exactly the same formula the administration is using. Without some exogenous force pushing demand up, anyone of these people that may be hired will still be hired into firms that are very reluctant to expand. These people will still be competing in a very tight labor market, where jobs are scarce. While the probability of these long-term unemployed getting hired increases with these proposals, this merely reduces the probability of anyone else seeking a job from getting one. A swing and miss I would have to say.

The End of History?

Matthew Yglesias makes the point this morning that the recent events in Tripoli essentially vindicate Francis Fukuyama's theory that western-stlye liberal democracies represent the zenith of political development.  I've been keen to this idea since I began reading Fukuyama's new book, "The Origins of Political Order", which I think better elucidates his widely-ridiculed end-of-history theorizing.

What Yglesias (and, indeed, Fukuyama) argue is that within the countries we consider to be the most repressive on Earth, the governing elite continue to rely on the artifice of elections and popular representation to justify their political dominance.  The Democratic People's Republic of Korea.  Fraudulent Iranian elections.  Hamas in Palestine.  Do these examples not say something about the desirability of democracy in general?

Not to take this point too far, but this idea seems to lend credence to the notion that we should be firm and unwavering in our commitment to universal human rights.  Yes, any appeal to a universal right is bound to stir controversy, but I'm not entirely convinced that Fukuyama was wrong to assume western-style democracy was the end-all-be-all of human politics.  Perhaps it just takes some time.

~Louis~

Death, Recession Style

Wow, I don't even know what to make of the arguments contained in this article from Brad Plummer over at Ezra Klein's house.  Here is the graph that gets the whole thing rolling:

The graph shows that traffic fatalities per mile driven have been on the decline of late; but even more importantly, there appears to be a general trend towards fewer traffic fatalities during all of our post-war recessions.


Plummer, speaking with the economist who composed the above graph, provides the following theories to explain the trend:


1) less drunk driving: during recessions people have less money, therefore they drink less and therefore there are fewer alcohol related fatalities.


2) during good economies people have places to be and people to see, whereas during recessions people have less urgent demands.


Clearly I am in no position to judge the validity of either theory, but I wonder to what extent the immiseration of a recession effects the distribution of fatalities in general.  Could it be that people are dying in different ways during a recession than they would during boom-times and is that showing up in the data as a decrease in traffic-related fatalities?  


Thoughts?

The Need for Chutzpah

What we need is a new and bold jobs plan. This creed seems to be igniting much of the political writers currently. Bernstein likes to talk about his FAST proposal, while Khimm has harped on infrastructure banks and other put people to work programs. However, we have been in this current recession for upwards of 3 years. Since the "recovery" began in the 3rd quarter of 2009, our growth has averaged an abysmal 2.5%. Public opinion in regards to the economy is also wallowing in the doldrums. According to Gallup, only 19% of the public currently think the economy is getting better, while 76% think it is getting worse.

Now neither of these figures definitively prove how the economy will do from this point forward, but I think it points towards something often overlooked in government policy debates, the role of self-perpetuating cycles of pessimism. To add a bit of context, let's travel back to 1933. The economy had been experiencing Depression conditions for nearly 4 years. The number of banks in the country had been cut in half, prices had plunged by nearly a quarter, while investment had fallen off a cliff, reduced 77% by 1933. The economy was in a hole, with no way up. In March, a new, bold and silver-tongued President entered office. One of the first acts in office of FDR was a national banking holiday combined with getting the US off the gold standard by devaluing gold and suspending gold contracts. (Side Note: The US did not formerly set a new peg for gold until Jan. 1934, creating some uncertainty, See Federer and Zalewski) Peter Temin sees not only the policy, but what the policy said about the new regime as highly important. The devaluation of gold was a signal, not only of a singular policy change, but of an entirely different way of economically thinking, one that threw off the fetters of gold. This distinction between policy and regime change is what Temin finds most important:

"So, here is the distinction, which is that if you take an action contrary to a regime that it is seen as being contrary to the regime it will have minimum impact because it will be seen as an aberration and it won't be seen as a large thing. So while it may have some effect, the individual action will have very little effect. If on the other hand the regime changes, then the actions interpreted as changes in regime will seem to have larger effects. The difference...is not in the actions..but in the perceptions of the people who are undergoing these actions and responding to them." (Temin as quoted by Parker, 37)

While all of these individual policies the above authors highlight as good individual projects, I don't think they fully grasp the route forward. The US and the global economy is entering a period of incessant pessimism. It seems the opposite of the optimism bias is inflicting consumer and business decisions. Instead of looking for rays of hope shining out there, bad economic news tends to throw people into a dizzy. Loss-aversion has set in, and people who have been burned over the last three years, are heightened to any new signal of stormy clouds on the horizon. Just like someone who has been mugged is very touchy when walking down what others would perceive to be well-lit streets, consumers are afraid of any hints of economic turmoil in the future. In this air of pessimism, singular government projects such as a payroll holiday, unemployment benefits, FAST! etc. will help to keep the unemployment rate down, but they will not get the mood in the country going again. When people say something bold needs to be done, they need to mean it. There is a reason that the Bush administration reshuffled much of its cabinet between its first and second term, with Condolezza Rice meeting with many allies early on to try and a signal new diplomacy. They too wanted to try and show that they were charting a new course.

Though, the Bush administration inevitably committed actions contrary to its new, and more multilateral image, it speaks to the necessity of both real and symbolic action in the face of negative expectations. I'm saying a stimulus with a real price tag that will shock. We should be thinking multiple trillions here. The American Society for Civil Engineers has already projected it will cost between $130-$240 billion, per year, for the next 15 years to update our infrastructure. This area, plus aids to the states, education revamps, an infrastructure bank should ALL be parts of a package. The key is this package must be BIG! Small packages will only mitigate job losses without providing an impetus for changing expectations. Furthermore, this action should be in concert with more symbolic actions. A new jobs commission, recess appointments to key positions on the Fed, and plausibly a new Treasury Secretary would help. Additionally, the bully pulpit needs to be used. Obama must start harping on the need for more spending now, trying to throw off the shackles of austerity rhetoric. What we are looking for is some chutzpah, will the administration and leaders of congress respond?

What's the matter with the British? Pip Pip.

How are we to understand the recent outbreak of violence, rioting, and looting in the United Kingdom?  Ta-Nehisi Coates, in one of my favorite ongoing series entitled, "Talk to me like I'm stupid", asks to what extent were the UK riots about race?  


There are several interesting ways to look at social deviance in general:


1) Durkheim: deviance and the recourse to violence is the product of anomie, a lack of social norms.


2) Merton/Strain Theory: society tells us how to achieve certain goals, yet the means to achieve these goals are not readily available. 


3) Sutherland/Differential Association Theory: criminal and deviant behavior are learned from childhood.  Seeing one's family and friends successfully achieve goals via deviant acts positively reinforces similar behavior in oneself.  


4) Labeling Theory: deviant acts are only deviant insofar as they are called deviant by society at large.


5) Hirshi/Control Theory: most people are capable of controlling urges to engage in deviant behavior.  Those that are incapable of controlling these urges are not sufficiently "bonded" to society.


6) Marxist Theory: economic and political forces push people in the direction of violence and deviance.  


Certainly this is not an exhaustive list, and the sociological literature on criminology and deviance is vast.  But I bring this up to showcase a recent post on the Monkey Cage by a guest writer, Erik Bleich.  His main argument, stemming from a paper he co-authored about European riots post-1980, boils down to the idea that it's best to take a multi-dimensional view of the UK riots instead of picking and choosing various theories about deviance.  


In practice this means instead of calling solely upon the judicial system and police to deal with the aftermath of rioting, many of the European states in Bleich's study opted for a dual approach: namely, they used both the judicial/police apparatus as well as the welfare state apparatus to punish the rioters while seeing to it that the social origins of the deviance were attacked at the root.  


Interestingly though, the degree to which each apparatus is called upon is related to the government-in-power's ideological leanings.  Right-wing governments are more likely to rely upon the police to punish, whereas left-wing governments are more likely to seek palliative policies to address social decay.  


Based on the theories I listed above, it's not entirely clear which policy is preferable.  Some of them are more fatalistic and seemingly unsolvable through punishment (e.g. Marxist, strain, labeling theories), while others are more likely to be deterred through punishment or re-education (eg. differential association, control theories).


So, to answer Ta-Nehisi's question: it's complicated.