January 4, 2013

More birth tourism fraud

In the L.A. Times:
In suburbs of L.A., a cottage industry of birth tourism 
Companies operating 'maternity hotels' cater to pregnant women from Chinese-speaking nations who want an American-citizen newborn.

A couple of years ago, I had a Chinese birth tourism fraud website translated into English so I could analyze the cash value of the eight benefits the fraudsters proposed for having Chinese babies in the U.S. Obviously, being an American citizen has scarcity value, which Chinese con-moms want to deplete for the benefit of their offspring. The cash value can add up to a huge number. 

The fundamental problem is that we are never supposed to notice that America exists, as the Founders explained in the Preamble to the Constitution, "for ourselves and our posterity."

I concluded:
Yet the reigning dogma promulgated today is the more, the merrier! We Americans should be proud and happy that tens of millions of foreigners are conniving their way in. The more immigrants that jostle us, the more awesome we know we must be. 
U-S-A! U-S-A! 
Tellingly, this kind of silly thinking is never even brought up when it comes to protecting the scarcity value of municipal residence. The liberals of Beverly Hills, for example, carefully police the scarcity value of living in Beverly Hills. 
Why would they want more people piling into Beverly Hills? They like it the way it is. And why would they want to let the children of non-Beverly Hillsians attend Beverly Hills public schools? 
Actually, Beverly Hills does let some non-residents send their children to Beverly Hills High. But are these lucky exceptions "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free?"
Don't be ridiculous. The outsiders who are allowed into Beverly Hills public schools are the grandchildren of long-time Beverly Hills residents—the children of Beverly Hills public school alumni who now can't afford to live in Beverly Hills. ...
Seriously, the voters of Beverly Hills understand the part about "for ourselves and our posterity" just as well as the Founding Fathers did and the Chinese do. 
And good for them. They built excellent schools in Beverly Hills. So why shouldn't they take measures to help their descendants' benefit from their scarcity value? 
But why shouldn't Americans be allowed to think of America the way that Beverly Hillsians think of Beverly Hills?

January 3, 2013

In defense of Quentin Tarantino

You hear endlessly about how the movie director is obsessed with low-budget 1970s junk films, but his default cinematographic style is old-fashioned classic, with a big budget Golden Age of Hollywood sheen. Many of his films look like Victor Fleming directed them, with David O. Selznick sending a flurry of memos to make sure the set looks perfect. 

Tarantino would have been a fine director of Technicolor films, which required a heavy three-strip camera and bright lighting. Tarantino likes to find the single best spot to place his camera and then leave it there. He's not exceptionally good at either moving the camera or at choreographing movement in front of the camera, but his camera is always planted pointing in just the right direction. 

No shaky-cam for Quentin. Not much grainy video, either. He interpolates a number of cheesy-looking segments, but his default look is grand.

He likes bright sunshine and rich colors. He's one of the few contemporary directors who doesn't believe that dark themes require dark palettes.

He likes nice scenery for the sake of nice scenery. In Texas, his German hero announces: We'll go north to the mountains for the winter and then we'll go to Mississippi after the snow melts (which he repeats three times because everything is repeated in the movie). So, then you see the cowboys picturesquely wandering around on horseback in six feet of snow with the sun rising on the Grand Tetons. 

Why not go to Mississippi in the winter and Wyoming after the snow melts? Wouldn't that be easier on the horses?

Because it looks nicer that way:

Like a late 1930s director, Tarantino figures the canyon country northwest of L.A. makes a reasonable substitute for just about anywhere that snow isn't required. Thus, the incredibly bad scene late in Django Unchained with Quentin, looking awful, doing a cameo as an idiot with -- for no apparent reason -- an Australian accent. It's supposed to be set in the mountains of Mississippi, but L.A. area viewers will be debating whether that's Malibu Canyon or Placerita Canyon standing in for America's least canyonish state. In either canyon, you can be sure of bright sunshine most days other than late spring, and, in the final analysis, isn't that what truly matters?

Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown was the turning point in his career. It made a nice profit on its modest budget, and was well regarded, especially by those who hadn't much liked Pulp Fiction. He then turned his back, however, on making mature movies.

I have a vague theory that his lack of affection for Jackie Brown has to do with it being unspectacular looking. Tarantino did a good job of capturing what the South Bay area of L.A. looks like in spring -- soft and unthreatening, with some marine layer haze muting the sunshine, and a lot of fairly pleasant but mundane sprawl to look at. There's a running joke in the movie that the scary behavior of the characters isn't in accord with the mild-looking setting. The movie opens with a song about the mean streets of Harlem, but much of the action takes place in the Del Amo Fashion Center mall in Torrance.

But, Tarantino is not in business to make realistic-looking movies, he's in business to make movie-looking movies.

Encyclopedist David Thomson remarks somewhere that movie stills have more power to colonize the imagination than actual movie footage because the mind remembers still images better than moving images. Tarantino is one of the great creators of glamorous pictures, even if he's not all that at moving pictures.

"Django Unchained"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is, among much else during its leisurely 165-minute running time, an adolescent male revenge fantasy about an omnipotent mass shooter wreaking carnage upon dozens of victims. I suspect the film would have appealed profoundly to the late Adam Lanza. 
You might think that this wouldn’t be the best time for a quasi-comic daydream/bloodbath about a deadeye gunman who always fires first and is immune to the thousands of bullets shot at him. But the recent unpleasantness in Sandy Hook has gone almost unmentioned in the critical hosannas greeting Django…because, you see, the invulnerable hero is a black gunman shooting bad (i.e., Southern) white people. 
It’s not much more complicated than that.

Read the whole thing there.

Career Arcs: Woody Allen

Woody Allen movies don't make for quite as apples to apples comparisons as Bertie and Jeeves novels or Aubrey and Maturin novels, since some are intentionally serious and unappealing. But they are still worth plotting out inflation-adjusted domestic box office over time (data from BoxOfficeMojo). 

The Gross column is in millions of today's dollars. The Versus Mean column compares box office to Woody's mean box office (a little under $30 million current dollars). Thus, Annie Hall's $133 million in today' dollars is 350% more than (or 4.5 times) his $30 million mean. 

Title Release  Age  Gross V. Mean Rank
Everything You Always … 1972  36 82 178 4
Sleeper 1973  37 81 172 5
Love and Death 1975  39 76 157 6
Annie Hall 1977  41 133 350 1
Interiors 1978  42 35 17 9
Manhattan 1979  43 124 317 2
Stardust Memories 1980  44 30 1 10
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy 1982  46 24 (19) 18
Zelig 1983  47 29 (2) 12
Broadway Danny Rose 1984  48 25 (17) 17
The Purple Rose of Cairo 1985  49 23 (22) 19
Hannah and Her Sisters 1986  50 84 181 3
Radio Days 1987  51 29 (1) 11
September 1987  51 1 (97) 39
Another Woman 1988  52 3 (90) 37
Crimes and Misdemeanors 1989  53 36 21 8
Alice 1990  54 14 (54) 25
Shadows and Fog 1992  56 5 (83) 33
Husbands and Wives 1992  56 20 (33) 21
Manhattan Murder Mystery 1993  57 21 (28) 20
Bullets Over Broadway 1994  58 25 (16) 16
Mighty Aphrodite 1995  59 12 (61) 27
Everyone Says I Love You 1996  60 17 (44) 24
Deconstructing Harry 1997  61 18 (40) 22
Celebrity 1998  62 8 (72) 29
Sweet and Lowdown 1999  63 6 (79) 31
Small Time Crooks 2000  64 25 (16) 15
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion 2001  65 10 (65) 28
Hollywood Ending 2002  66 6 (78) 30
Anything Else 2003  67 4 (86) 35
Melinda and Melinda 2005  69 5 (84) 34
Match Point 2005  69 28 (7) 13
Scoop 2006  70 13 (58) 26
Cassandra's Dream 2008  72 1 (96) 38
Vicky Cristina Barcelona 2008  72 25 (15) 14
Whatever Works 2009  73 6 (81) 32
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger 2010  74 3 (89) 36
Midnight in Paris 2011  75 55 86 7
To Rome with Love 2012  76 17 (44) 23

We are missing box office data for his early comedies like Take the Money and Run.

Before those, he was a joke-writing prodigy making thousands of dollars per week as a teenager in the mid-1950s. It took him longer to develop as a stand-up comic, then as a movie star and director, getting started in movies just before turning 30.

His comedies in the first half of the 1970s like Sleeper did consistently well, then he peaked with Annie Hall and Manhattan in the late 1970s when he was in his early 40s.

True fact: as originally filmed, Annie Hall was a two hour and 20 minute murder mystery. Allen's editor, Ralph Rosenblum, convinced him to dump the entire crime plot (which was resurrected years later in Manhattan Murder Mystery), add some voice-over, and voila, he had a short romantic comedy. Although Annie Hall won the Oscar for Best Picture, Rosenblum wasn't even nominated for Best Editing. (Granted, Star Wars won, and deserved to win, Best Editing, but still ...)

Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986 was a big peak, followed by Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1991. Then he made 21 straight movies that failed to reach his mean, which has to be some kind of record.

My impression is that Allen doesn't run over budget, so his financial backers know that although they will probably lose money, their losses will be limited. So, they are more patrons than investors, but they also have a chance of making a profit. So, funding a Woody Allen movie is like buying a ticket in a charity raffle. And, Allen's prestige and popularity with Oscar voters means that big movie stars will work in his films cheap, so his patrons get extra vicarious glamor from dropping a quite finite amount of money on his projects.

And then, just when it seemed completely hopeless, at age 75 he made 2011's very entertaining Midnight in Paris.

January 2, 2013

The Great Hispanic Hope: Eric Garcetti

Isn't great that we no longer live in the Mad Men era when political leaders had to be Don Draper-lookalikes? Finally, in this age of diversity, we can have leaders who look like the new, rising America! Just because Eric Garcetti doesn't look like the man in the Arrow Shirt ad shouldn't keep the Silver Lake Democrat from becoming mayor of Los Angeles. From the Los Angeles Times:
Eric Garcetti invokes Latino-Jewish ancestry in mayor's race 
... A top contender to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Garcetti prides himself on his ease with the city's diverse cultures. He sees his mixed ancestry ("I have an Italian last name, and I'm half Mexican and half Jewish," he says) as a powerful part of his appeal in a city where voters for decades have split along racial and ethnic lines in mayoral elections. 
But as the campaign begins to capture public attention, a big question is whether Garcetti can re-create the surge of Latino support that helped secure Villaraigosa's historic election eight years ago as the first Latino mayor of modern Los Angeles.

Garcetti has always stood by his raza. Kevin Roderick writes:
While at Oxford [in 1994], Garcetti phoned Times columnist George Ramos with the scoop that he was leading a student hunger strike to protest California's passage of Proposition 187, the measure intended to cut off most public services for illegal immigrants. As a fourth-generation Angeleno of Mexican heritage, Garcetti said he felt compelled to make a transatlantic statement of solidarity.

Eric Garcetti grew up on the mean streets of Encino, in the barrio of Brentwood, and in the broken-down classrooms of the Harvard-Westlake School. His father (right) was a lowly two-term Los Angeles County District Attorney who did such a bang-up job prosecuting O.J. His grandfather had to scrape by owning a national menswear corporation.

The only more authentic Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles are the Weitz Brothers.

Career arc: P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves Novels

Baseball statistician Bill James popularized the notion of a career arc for a baseball player, which showed that teams had to discipline themselves not to overpay for famous free agents: you shouldn't be offering a five year contract to a 31 year old that's based on  assuming he'll perform as well as he had over the previous five years. In James' analysis, ballplayers peaked at around age 27 (although developments over the last generation might have pushed that peak back a year or so).

Most such analyses of peak age are pretty depressing. By the time you start wondering what the peak age is in your field, you are probably past it. 

So, here's a more encouraging table: P.G. Wodehouse's 15 comic novels about Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves. Born in late 1881, Wodehouse didn't publish his first Jeeves novel until he was about 37 and published his last in his 90s. 

Jeeves novels are good for making apples to apples comparisons of the impact of age on career performance. Usually, changes in style make comparing an artist's work over time mostly a matter of personal taste. How does Steven Spielberg's Lincoln compare to his Jaws? Well, your mileage may vary depending upon whether you like uplift or terror. Jeeves novels, however, are all written in a single style to a single standard with a single intention: to please readers.

Goodreads offers ratings by an average of 3,751 readers for each Jeeves novel. On a 1 to 5 scale, the average Jeeves novel is rated 4.24. In the table below, red numbers are ratings below the mean of 4.24, black numbers above the mean. 

1882 4.24 3751
Novel Year Age Rating Raters
 My Man Jeeves (Jeeves, #1) 1919 37 (0.13) 2260
 The Inimitable Jeeves (Jeeves, #2) 1923 41 (0.00) 2215
 Carry on, Jeeves (Jeeves, #3) 1925 43 0.02 2749
 Very Good, Jeeves! (Jeeves, #4) 1930 48 0.10 (727)
 Thank You, Jeeves (Jeeves, #5) 1934 52 0.02 638
 Right Ho, Jeeves (Jeeves, #6) 1934 52 0.05 3346
 The Code of the Woosters (Jeeves, #7) 1938 56 0.11 3309
 Jeeves in the Morning (Jeeves, #8) 1946 64 0.11 (1076)
 The Mating Season (Jeeves, #9) 1949 67 (0.00) (1853)
 Ring for Jeeves (Jeeves, #10) 1953 71 (0.20) (2839)
 Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (Jeeves, #11) 1954 72 0.05 (1533)
 How Right You Are, Jeeves (Jeeves, #12) 1960 78 (0.03) (1966)
 Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (Jeeves, #13) 1963 81 0.05 (752)
 Jeeves and the Tie That Binds (Jeeves, #14) 1971 89 (0.01) (1894)
 Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (Jeeves, #15) 1974 92 (0.07) (1879)

The consistency of ratings over time is the most striking fact. But a few temporal patterns can be discerned due to the huge sample sizes of raters. My Man Jeeves at age 37 was a rookie effort, falling 0.13 points below his career mean. Wodehouse hit a long peak from his early 40s into his early 60s with six straight Jeeves novels rated above his career average, but his ratings slip only marginally in his old age.

Another input is the number of raters for each book, with a mean of 3751. The last column notes whether the number of raters was above or below the mean. The number of raters is a measure of the fame or popularity or availability of the book. I suspect that a high rating from a large number of raters is better than an equal rating from a small number of raters since smaller audiences reflect more hardcore fans. The last eight novels all have below average numbers of raters, suggesting that the fairly high ratings of these books are probably a little generous.

The peak is probably 1938's (age 56) The Code of the Woosters. The topical political satire of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascist Blackshirts, as Bertie's nemesis Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Blackshorts, makes the book stand out. 

The next novel was 1946's (age 64) Jeeves in the Morning (formerly Joy in the Morning), which Wodehouse had a lot of time to work on while he was interned by the Nazis (he was caught at his beach home in France in 1940). It has equally high ratings as Code of the Woosters, although fewer raters. In 1982, Alexander Cockburn designated Code and Morning to be the peaks of the series.

Ring for Jeeves (age 71) is the most obvious dud, but Wodehouse rebounded well. For example, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, published when he was about age 81, garnered above average ratings from over 3,000 raters. That's pretty extraordinary.

Statistically minded Wodehouse fans can do the same exercise for his Blandings Castle novels.

Here's the Goodreads page for Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin 20 sea story novels. The first, Master and Commander, published when he was 54, has the lowest rating, 4.07 out of 5. (It offers a lot of nautical know-how. Is there a better introduction to the series?)

O'Brian appears to have hit his peak in his sixties and then maintained something close to that into his eighties. The highest rated book, The Letter of Marque (4.40), was published at age 73.

(By the way, a five-point scale isn't fine enough for high-quality series like Wodehouse and O'Brian.)

On the other hand, the number of raters falls with each book published, suggesting that readers typically start at the beginning of the series and only the most hardcore fans finish all 20 books. So, once again, the ratings of the later books may be a little generous due to a selection effect.

But, overall, pretty impressive.

Supercommenter Jason Malloy's links page

For years, Jason Malloy has been one of the outstanding commenters on the Internet, but he's always maintained a low profile in terms of having his own site. Now he has a small webpage with links to important news stories in the human sciences.

The Telegraph: Obituary for Arthur Jensen

The British broadsheet runs a welcome obit for the great psychologist who died last fall.

January 1, 2013

The War on Drugs

Anti-Gnostic writes in the comments:
It’s not that the War on Drugs creates criminals (other than as a marginal phenomenon). It’s that the War on Drugs puts the trade in the hands of criminals. If drugs were the root cause, college campuses would be filled with the same kinds of violent turf battles, gun fights, beheadings, etc. When was the last time anybody had to risk their life buying marijuana in a criminal ghetto? 
The War on Drugs needs to be ended in order to deprive criminals of their funding. Criminals have very few sustainable talents outside of violence and intimidation. We’ve legalized gambling, enabled payday/pawn/title loans, and nobody’s getting kneecapped anymore. We’ve decriminalized alcohol and enacted sunshine laws for municipal government. (We also started handing out municipal contracts to “minorities” instead of guys whose last names end in vowels, but that’s another thread). What are all the guidos doing now? They’re on disability and telling their higher IQ offspring to go into real estate or outside sales, which is a hell of a lot better than beating up shopowners and hijacking trucks.

My main concern would be that legalization might wind up unleashing the full power of American marketing and logistics on selling drugs. For instance, Steve Wynn and Donald Trump are a lot better at promoting gambling than Bugsy Siegel was (although they are still geographically restricted).

Walmart could sell drugs a lot cheaper than drug dealers can. 

By way of analogy, in making loansharks more or less obsolete over the last generation, did we unleash the subprime bubble? Angelo Mozilo was a lot better at promoting high interest loans than Rocky Balboa's old boss was. 

This need for a legal but semi-crippled market for dangerous drugs doesn't seem like an impossible problem to solve, just a difficult one.

December 31, 2012

Has anybody ever calculated white murder rates by state?

Whenever gun control becomes a hot topic, you see white liberals going through a set pattern of contortions, one most fully worked out in Michael Moore's Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine:

- Racist white rednecks in the sticks want guns because they have racist fears of urban blacks;

- So, we must disarm everybody to stop rednecks from killing so many

Deconstructed, this bizarre theory actually makes a fair amount of sense:

- Liberal whites in the cities want gun control because they have realist fears of urban blacks;

- So, we must disarm everybody to stop blacks from killing so many.

But, white people don't like talking about black people, they like talking about how much they hate other white people.

They especially like coming up with theories about other kinds of white people. For example, the state with the highest homicide rate is usually Louisiana. Just think what savage redneck monsters white people in Louisiana must be. Didn't you watch Deliverance or read Albion's Seed?

(Of course, the murder rate in Louisiana is only about half of that in Washington D.C.. Has anybody checked out what Ezra Klein, Chris Matthews, Cokie Roberts are up to?)

They really don't like it when I point out that state-by-state differences in murders are dominated by the percent black.

Anyway, I read a lot of theories about differences in white homicide rates between the states, but does anybody have any good numbers?

The Bureau of Justice Statistics will tell you the homicide rates for the whole country for blacks and "whites" (whites plus Hispanics), but I can't find rates by states.

It's not hard to find homicide rates per state overall, but not by race.

Here's an unsourced table on what percent of homicide victims are by race by state, which might be a piece of the puzzle.

Finally, it would be best to have a decade or so of data since murder rates in small states jump around semi-randomly.

Last chance for tax deductible panhandle

I really appreciate your support.

First, you can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking clicking here.

Second, you can make a non-tax deductible contribution by credit card via WePay by clicking here

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.


Inequality and murder rates

One of the standard acceptable explanations for high crime rates is "inequality." 

The most realistic implication is that the poor are driven mad by the sight of the rich, and thus engage in crime. This is not wholly unreasonable, prima facie, yet it's hard to think of persuasive American examples these days.

For instance, inequality has grown enormously in New York City since Wall Street turned up in 1982. Yet, crime is quite low in NYC these days. Perhaps, in contrast to the theory, rich people can afford to hire a lot of cops and private security, driving crime rates down for everybody?

The murder rate in Newark is about four or five times higher than in New York, but there has to be fewer rich people in Newark than in New York, right?

In contrast, there are few rich people left in Detroit, but the number of murders there in 2012 is the highest since the crack year of 1994.

Here is the FBI's table of murders per 100,000 in 2009 (city only, not metro area). At the top of the list, New Orleans and Washington DC have some rich people (maybe Oakland), but most of these murder capitals are pretty bereft of The One Percent these days.

Another respectable theory is that "homogeneous" cities are, uh, easier to police. But Honolulu has a low murder rate.

The last popular theory is that heavily armed rednecks are murdering everybody, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence for that idea in this table, either.

New Orleans, LO 52
St. Louis, MO 40
Detroit, MI 40
Baltimore, MD 37
Baton Rouge, LA 34
Newark, NJ 29
Birmingham, AL 29
Oakland, CA 26
Washington, DC 24
Buffalo, NY 22
Kansas City, MO 21
Memphis, TN 20
Philadelphia, PA 20
Cleveland, OH 19
Richmond, VA 19
Norfolk, VA 18
Tulsa, OK 18
Cincinnati, OH 16
Chicago, IL 16
Montgomery, AL 15
Atlanta, GA 14
Savannah-Chatham Metro, GA 14
Miami, FL 14
Rochester, NY 14
Nashville, TN 13
Dallas, TX 13
Houston, TX 13
Pittsburgh, PA 12
Jacksonville, FL 12
Indianapolis, IN 12
Orlando, FL 12
Milwaukee, WI 12
Oklahoma City, OK 12
Jersey City, NJ 12
Toledo, OH 11
Stockton, CA 11
Columbus, OH 11
Albuquerque, NM 11
Modesto, CA 10
Louisville Metro, KY 10
Mobile, AL \3 10
Akron, OH 10
Greensboro, NC 9
Durham, NC 9
Fresno, CA 9
Long Beach, CA 9
Bakersfield, CA 8
Los Angeles, CA 8
Las Vegas MPD, NV 8
Boston, MA 8
Phoenix, AZ 8
Laredo, TX 7
Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC 7
Santa Ana, CA 7
North Las Vegas, NV 7
San Antonio, TX 7
Fort Wayne, IN 7
Glendale, AZ 7
Wichita, KS 7
Omaha, NE 7
Winston-Salem, NC 6
Tucson, AZ 6
Sacramento, CA 6
Fort Worth, TX 6
Aurora, CO 6
Lubbock, TX 6
Tampa, FL 6
Denver, CO 6
New York, NY 6
San Francisco, CA 6
Chesapeake, VA 5
Riverside, CA 5
Anchorage, AK 5
Minneapolis, MN \1 5
St. Paul, MN 5
St. Petersburg, FL 4
Lexington, KY 4
Virginia Beach, VA 4
Scottsdale, AZ 4
Corpus Christi, TX 4
Reno, NV 4
Yonkers, NY 4
Hialeah, FL 4
Colorado Springs, CO 4
Seattle, WA 4
Spokane, WA 3
Raleigh, NC 3
Portland, OR 3
Garland, TX 3
Arlington, TX 3
San Diego, CA 3
Mesa, AZ 3
San Jose, CA 3
Boise, ID 3
Austin, TX 3
Anaheim, CA 3
Irving, TX 2
Lincoln, NE 2
Chandler, AZ 2
El Paso, TX 2
Chula Vista, CA 2
Gilbert, AZ 2
Madison, WI 2
Honolulu, HI 2
Henderson, NV 2
Plano, TX 1
Irvine, CA 1
Fremont, CA 1


Forecasting v. All-Else-Being-Equal policy analysis

Philip Tetlock's 2005 book Expert Political Judgment raised amusing doubts about the accuracy of professional public affairs forecasters. 

Tetlock was particularly derogatory about dogmatic "hedgehogs." Economist John H. Cochrane suggests in a Cato Unbound piece, however:
It was once hoped that really understanding the structure of the economy would also help in the sort of unconditional forecasting that Gardner and Tetlock are more interested in. Alas, that turned out not to be true. Big “structural” macroeconomic models predict no better than simple correlations. Even if you understand many structural linkages from policy to events, there are so many other unpredictable shocks that imposing “structure” just doesn’t help with unconditional forecasting. 
But economics can be pretty good at such structural forecasting. We really do know what happens if you put in minimum wages, taxes, tariffs, and so on. We have a lot of experience with regulatory capture. At least we know the signs and general effects. Assigning numbers is a lot harder. But those are useful predictions, even if they typically dash youthful liberal hopes and dreams.
Doing good forecasting of this sort, however, rewards some very hedgehoggy traits. 
Focusing on “one analytical tool”—basic supply and demand, a nose for free markets, unintended consequences, and regulatory capture—is essential. People who use a wide range of analytical tools, mixing economics, political, sociological, psychological, Marxist-radical and other perspectives end up hopelessly muddled. 
Keeping analysis “simple and elegant” and “minimizing distractions” is vital too, rather than being “comfortable with complexity and uncertainty,” or even being “much less sure of oneself.” Especially around policy debates, one is quickly drowned in mind-blowing detail. Keeping the simple picture and a few basic principles in mind is the only hope.

In other words, there is a big difference between macro and micro forecasting. Macro forecasting needs all the factors, and nobody understands all the factors. Micro forecasting, in contrasting, can benefit from theory. Micro forecasting is policy analysis, which benefits from using the economic concept of "all else being equal."

For example, in the late 1970s, the state of California passed a law allowing local municipalities to impose rent control on landlords. In microeconomic theory, this is not a good idea. And indeed, living in Santa Monica in 1981-82, as a newly minted economics major, I could observe rent control in action: my landlady treated me with all the warmth of a Serb hosting German soldiers in WWII. She invested nothing in the upkeep of the apartment in the 22 months I was there. 

On the other hand, the rent was a helluva deal for a place where I could bike to the beach a few times per week. I had no intention of moving out if I could find a job anywhere in the L.A. area. I figured that in five years the apartment building would look like a wreck from neglect, but I'd probably still be legally squatting in it, writing my $250 per month rent-controlled check. (I slowly figured out that Santa Monica had been undervalued in the past because, before antibiotics and smog, newcomers to Southern California had wanted to live inland in drier places like Pasadena to avoid TB; but by 1981 the whole climatic logic had long-since reversed, so demand for Santa Monica apartments was finally soaring.)

In the long run, it's clear that rent-control is not really a good idea. Not many municipalities in California still have it. On the other hand, ones that do, such as Santa Monica, West Hollywood, and Berkeley, are typically not post-apocalyptic wastelands, either.

Indeed, the rent-controlled municipalities tend to be ones favored by geography, and thus attract smart, well-heeled people, who figure out ways to make it work.

To make an all-else-being-equal forecast about the impact of imposing a policy of rent control on Santa Monica, you only need to know that it would cause less investment in apartment buildings than would happen otherwise.

On the other hand, to make an unconditional forecast about what Santa Monica would wind up like, you'd need to understand a lot more factors, especially about human capital, which economists are not very bright about.

And that's the bigger lesson to be learned.

Marriage Gap, one more time

From a Democratic group working to get more single women to show up to vote, Voter Participation Center, on the 2012 election:

As more data is available from the exit polling, the extent of the marriage gap – the differences in candidate choice between married and unmarried women – becomes more obvious and undeniable. And as this chart make clear: the marriage gap transcends all racial, age, income, education and other distinctions. Young or old, rich or poor, white, black or Hispanic, unmarried women voted overwhelmingly in 2012 to reelect President Obama.

2012 Voter Returns: Obama vs. Romney

Married Women
Obama – Romney
Unmarried Women
Obama – Romney
Marriage Gap
National46 – 5367 – 3143
Battleground States46 – 5365 – 3339
White women37 – 6252 – 4631
Women of color78 – 2291 – 728
Latina67 – 3285 – 1238
African-American95 – 597 – 25
College-educated49 – 4967 – 3136
Non-college41 – 5868 – 3154
Under 5047 – 5171 – 2649
Under 3053 – 4571 – 2637
Under 30 and white34 – 6354 – 4340
50 and over38 – 6151 – 4826
Seniors42 – 5856 – 4329
$50,000 and over45 – 5462 – 3635
With kids48 – 5174 – 2453
Without kids43 – 5564 – 3442
Union Households54 – 4382 – 1655
Non-Union Households43 – 5567 – 3049

I don't like how the righthand "Marriage Gap" column is double-counted, although that seems to be the standard way that gaps get talked about. People like double-counting because it makes whatever gap you are worked up over seem too huge to grasp mentally --  e.g., the Race Gap in Texas was something like 150 points!

But even if you divide the Marriage Gap figures by two, the way I like, they're still a big deal.

December 30, 2012

Tetlock & Forecasting: Foxes v. Hedgehogs, Three Dog Night v. Ramones

This is the time of year when many pundits make predictions (and a few pundits even assess how their predictions of last year worked out), but not me. Granted, I'm always willing to make some predictions -- Compton will be outperformed by San Marino in school test scores! Switzerland will be a nicer place to live than the Congo! -- but nobody seems to find those very interesting.

Political scientist Philip Tetlock published a well regarded book in 2005 Expert Political Judgment recounting the results of having 284 experts make 83,000 forecasts. 

Something I've never seen discussed in all the writing about Tetlock's study is whether his experts were allowed to pick and choose which questions to answer. Or did they, being famous experts, simply volunteer their opinions on everything he asked them?

Let me quote from Robin Hanson's write-up of it:
Tetlock is Professor of Leadership at UC Berkeley, with a background in psychology and political science.  He ran an experiment for many years from the 80s through the early 2000s in which he invited experts on foreign affairs and political science to make predictions about political and economic trends in countries around the world.  Tetlock tracked and evaluated those predictions, developing a large database of both accurate and inaccurate predictions.  ... 
One of the psychological measures or metrics which Tetlock found was well correlated with expert accuracy goes back to a distinction introduced by Isaiah Berlin in his book, The Hedgehog and the Fox. I haven’t read that book, but based on Tetlock’s presentation, Berlin distinguished between two cognitive styles to which he gave these colorful names.  The hedgehog is said to know one thing and know it well.  He sees events and trends in terms of his big idea, and aggressively extends it into new realms.  Hedgehogs tend to be confident in the applicability of their fundamental concepts and impatient with those who "do not get it". 
Foxes in contrast know many small things which they bring to bear in their analyses in a dynamical and flexible way.  They tend to be uncertain and flexible, "on the other hand" types who are skeptical about their own predictive ability and in fact about the whole enterprise of making predictions in such an intractable realm.

Not surprisingly, the foxes did better on average at predicting foreign policy events on Tetlock's surveys. (Hanson presents Tetlock's results here.) According to Tetlock:
“The less successful forecasters tended to have one big, beautiful idea that they loved to stretch, sometimes to the breaking point. They tended to be articulate and very persuasive as to why their idea explained everything.”

Assume there are two polar routes to becoming a prominent forecaster. One is the fox route where you never have any big new ideas, but you strike people as boringly sensible about a lot of stuff (I associate this path with the name David Gergen, although for all I know he may have been routinely wrong about everything -- he was too boringly sensible sounding for me to pay enough attention). Or you can make your name by being right about one new thing once, then pound it into the ground over time as returns diminish. (Maybe Jack Kemp and cutting taxes).

The foxes may be better about predicting a few dozen events. Yet, from the perspective of history, it's the hedgehogs who matter. 

Consider popular music as an analogy. 

The foxiest band of the rock era may have been Three Dog Night, an agglomeration who had a number of major hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s without trying to develop a distinctive sound. They had three different lead singers, they hired experts to play the instruments, and they seldom wrote their own songs, instead preferring tunes by professional songwriters such as Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, Harry Nillson, and Hoyt Axton.

The rock era was longer on hedgehogs than multifaceted foxes, and perhaps the hedgehoggiest band of them all was The Ramones. Occasionally, they would try a little bit different style, but over a 20 year period, their best stuff sounded like their first single Blitzkrieg Bop, a 1976 song that in the 1990s started to get licensed for commercials, and still makes a fortune in licensing (e.g., in 2012 it became the theme song of NFL Thursday Night Football).

The Ramones didn't have the musical talent of Three Dog Night, but for a little while (July 4, 1976 in London) they really were the future of rock and roll. For example, The Clash saw the Ramones on this tour, and their first single White Riot is pure Ramones. But, by nature, The Clash were foxes, so foxish that the doors flew off in a half decade.

P.S. I see Mr. Rockrobster23 came up with the hedgehog v. fox distinction for the Ramones v. Clash back in 2009.