Comments on: Creative accountants?

By: ChrisPer

ChrisPer — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 10:07:50 +0000

I guess we should be glad this insulting tripe is dished up in a context where it doesn’t matter, instead of in a campaign to criminalise red necks or driving SUVs. And they wonder how the good people of Germany went so far along under the Nazis. Sheesh.

By: AIK

AIK — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 04:07:08 +0000

Another great piece of reasoning…”C.E.O.’s are classic spreadsheet people. According to a sample gathered by PoliticalMoneyLine in July, the number of C.E.O.’s donating funds to Bush’s campaign is five times the number donating to Kerry’s.” Which, of course, is because they all majored in business in college and has nothing to do with the fact that Bush’s economic policies explicitly favor them

By: bellatrys

bellatrys — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 00:07:52 +0000

kim – what about Jewish engineers? Does that cancel out? Seriously, I’d have thought Brooksie would have learned better than this kind of careless generalization, considering how badly he got burnt for doing what for us ordinary mortals would be called cooking your data or just making shit up, with the business about what food was available where trying to prove that there were two kinds of people…

By: abb1

abb1 — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 21:14:23 +0000

…have decided not to believe the lies of socialists, paragraph people have decided not to believe the lies of neo-statist right wingers. Hmm, you make it sound like this is a matter of faith, but there is plenty of empirical evidence: lying socialist weasels rule countries like Sweden, Holland and France while lying neo-statist right wingers rule places like Nicaragua, El Salvador and Colombia. Statistics are available – why bother listening to any of ‘em liars?

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 21:00:06 +0000

Steve, my point was (granting Brooks’ data) that “numbers people” seem willing to believe lies about numbers. You seem to agree. Or do you believe that Bush is telling the truth about the Budget?

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 17:48:43 +0000

Matt, if you can say “I wasn’t a moderate Democrat before but someone who tended to be more to the left than most Democrats.”—then how the heck could you need anything to alientate you from Republicans? Sounds like you’ve only solidified where you are at, and tossed in talking points to support it, rather than made any real change.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 17:42:59 +0000

Guess I need to comment that ancedotal evidence is favored by Democrats, real statistics by Republicans—or why would the general response by the paragraph people here be to cite to ancedotal anolomies in response to numbers? One interesting trend that everyone is ignoring, other than the lack of development of spell checkers for comment engines, is that both parties routinely tell lies, and the real division in America is over the lies people disbelieve. Numbers people, as a statistical group (with, of course, exceptions to be found in Massachusetts, for example) have decided not to believe the lies of socialists, paragraph people have decided not to believe the lies of neo-statist right wingers. That tells us something, though no one here seems to want to listen or to demonstrate an understanding of math or statistics.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 17:23:31 +0000

Giles, as I think my post made clear, I wasn’t a moderate Democrat before but someone who tended to be more to the left than most Democrats. And it’s not a feedback effect that’s made me more of a partisan Democrat (many academics are Nader-voter types), but watching the way Republicans behave in power—government shutdowns, trumped-up impeachments, election theft, bankrupting the country to give tax cuts to the wealthy, ignoring the threat of spreading nuclear weapons in order to fight a war against a country that posed no threat, torturing prisoners and refusing to hold thorough investigations. Those are the facts to which I am responding.

By: David Sucher

David Sucher — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 16:25:46 +0000

I think that The NYT must have made a clerical error and publised a submission from Mel Brooks. The idea that accountants used to vote Democratic is a funny, at the least, if you know accountants.

By: Kim

Kim — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 15:54:51 +0000

I’m not enthralled with the numbers/paragraph distinction, but Brooks (perhaps unwittingly) makes another point that IS backed up by data: there is tremendous heterogeneity in the political behavior of members of different occupations, even those that sociologists, political scientists, pundits, and the lay public typically lump together as birds of a feather. I’m working on a paper that looks at the relative strength of “big-class” vs. occupation politics, where “big classes” are the standard academic formulations of the class structure that group “like” occupations into 6-12 aggregate categories. It turns out that knowing whether a person is an engineer or an author/journalist gives you as much information about their propensity to vote Democrat or Republican as knowing whether he or she is an Evangelical Protestant or a Jew. (Engineers are as likely to vote Republican as Evangelical Protestants, authors/journalists are as likely to vote Democrat as Jewish voters.) Also, although the relationship between big class and vote choice has been weakening in the last 3 elections, the relationship between occupation and vote choice is, if anything, strenghtening.

By: Jason McCullough

Jason McCullough — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 04:34:50 +0000

“Was that deliberate irony?” I dunno, I work one of the biggest software houses in the country. My anecdote’s better.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 03:50:23 +0000

I think DenBeste may have quit blogging, but is now ghost-writing columns for David Brooks. Sure looks to me like the return of the empiricists vs. p-idealists. There are two kinds of people in the world: people who divide the world into two kinds of people, and you other folks.

By: praktike

praktike — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 01:36:43 +0000

I got a pretty big laugh out of this bit of Brooks “sociology by anecdote.” I work with nothing but spreadsheet technical people, and they’re something like 80/20 Kerry voters. Was that deliberate irony?

By: ruralsaturday

ruralsaturday — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 01:23:58 +0000

There’s a lot of idiots of all stripes out there. “Party of Lincoln”? My ass. By that measure George Washington is no longer represented. Thomas Jefferson, of the Democratic Republican Party, is in a fugue state. And Teddy Roosevelt gets legitmately claimed by both the Republican and Progressive parties simultaneously. My royal Irish ass. Karl Rove has as much affinity with, and connection to, Abraham Lincoln, as Paris Hilton does Virginia Woolf.

By: SomeCallMeTim

SomeCallMeTim — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 01:00:26 +0000

“[W]eakness, incompetence or simple lack of knowledge,” could also be the simplest explanation for their support for Republicans. Really not meant as snark – I think Brooks overstates the (implied) intelligence and competence of the groups which he claims as Republican bastions. There are a lot of idiot CEOs out there.