James, in comments to my Condorcet post, writes

bq. It will only anger the American voter to suggest that foreign nationals should be involved in electing the US President.

Of course (some) foreign nationals are allowed to vote in British general elections (Henry, Kieran and Maria would be if they were resident). I’m guessing that there are other countries that also allow (some) foreign nationals to vote in national elections. [1] Information?

fn1. EU citizens can vote in countries other than their own in European elections and in the UK I think they can vote in local elections too.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden makes a very interesting aside in a long post about how GWB’s way of dealing with criticism reminds her of vituperative slushpile authors with middle-management backgrounds.

bq. You know how topical jokes are generally formed by adapting earlier groups of cognate jokes? I’ve been looking into the current batch of GWB jokes, and find that many of the jokes from which they’re drawn were originally about Stalin. But I digress.

This seems to me quite telling. Mark Schmitt makes a good case for GWB as a “bad CEO,” but the administration’s refusal to brook criticism and wilful contempt for “reality” seems more grotesque and dangerous than that. It verges on what the French call _ubuisme_ (from Alfred Jarry’s _Pere Ubu_). When I read Ron Suskind’s article on the administration, I couldn’t stop thinking of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book on the last days of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, The Emperor.

bq. It was a small dog, a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu. He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor’s great bed. During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor’s lap and pee on dignitaries’ shoes. The august gentlemen were not allowed to flinch or make the slightest gesture when they felt their feet getting wet. I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth. This was my job for ten years.

What is the US Presidential election about? Well, one possible answer is that it is about which of George W. Bush and John Kerry would make the best President of the United States. Now there’s certainly room for disagreement about the relevant qualities to be best President, but much of the media and blogospheric discourse is couched in such a way as to appear to be discussing a matter of fact: best translates as “most competent”, “wisest” etc. I’m going to assume — for the purposes of this post alone and contrary to my saner instincts — that a matter of fact is indeed involved. Given that simplifying assumption, the matter of determining who would be the best President by a democratic vote is something we might justify by invoking Condorcet ’s jury theorem. According to the jury theorem (which I cite in Zev Trachtenberg’s formulation [1])

bq. the probability that majority is correct ( _Pm_ ) is given by the formula
v ^h-k/(v ^h-k+e ^h-k ), where number of voters = n = h+k , where _h_ is the number of voters in the majority, _v_ is the probability that each voter will give the correct answer, and _e_ is the probability that each voter will give the wrong answer.

This has the remarkable consquence that just in case we expect each voter’s competence slighly to exceed the tossing of a fair coin (say we expect each voter to be right 50.1 per cent of the time), and just in case we can interpret “each voter” to mean “the average voter”, then with an electorate of, say, 100 million, the probability of a majority getting the result right approaches one. Of course, there’s a flip side to this: if the each voter has a < .5 probability of getting the right result, the majority will almost certainly be wrong! So what should we think, _ex ante_ , about the competence of the average American voter? The votemaster at the excellent electoral-vote.com opines:

bq. Are the voters stupid? It is not considered politically correct to point out that an awful lot of voters don’t have a clue what they are talking about. A recent poll from Middle Tennessee State University sheds some light on the subject. For example, when asked which candidate wants to roll back the tax cuts for people making over $200,000 a year, a quarter thought it was Bush and a quarter didn’t know. And it goes down hill from there. When asked which candidate supports specific positions on various issues, the results were no better than chance. While this poll was in Tennessee, I strongly suspect a similar poll in other states would get similar results. I find it dismaying that many people will vote for Bush because they want to tax the rich (which he opposes) or vote for Kerry because they want school vouchers for religious schools (which he opposes).

(Lest Carol Gould or her apologists think that this post reflects the anti-Americanism of a sneering Brit, let me say (a) I’m quoting an American and (b) that I’m far from convinced that citizens of the UK would fare much better than the people of Tennessee were _their_ competence to be evaluated in a similar poll.) [2]

fn1. Trachtenberg, _Making Citizens_ p. 281 n. 6

fn2. A commenter to a recent post of mine asked, sarcastically, whether the I thought flipping a coin would have been superior to having the Supreme Court decide on the outcome in 2000. Actually, I do think flipping a coin would have been a better method then. Whether it would be a better method than having the US electorate decide is questionable, although _if_ voter-competence is such that individuals are more likely to get the wrong answer than the right one, it would yield a better chance of choosing the best President. Observant and thoughtful readers will also notice that, since Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote in 2000, I ought to believe that either Bush was the right answer then or that average voter competence has declined below the .5 level in the past four years….or perhaps I should believe that voter competence then as now exceeds .5 and that Kerry will inevitably triumph, or …..you do the permutations.

Sinclair Broadcasting, the company which is forcing its stations to run an anti-Kerry film this week, fired one of its bureau chiefs for speaking out against its decision. As Joe Gandelman at the Moderate Voice points out, this rather strongly undermines the premise that the film is a news event.

In the event of a Kerry victory, Sinclair is painting a big bulls-eye on themselves that says “FCC, screw here”. But even if Bush wins, they’ll be too radioactive for the new Bush administration to help. Kerry supporters are furious at Sinclair’s unprecedented descent into blatant electioneering on public airwaves. They’ll continue the boycott of their advertisers, challenge the FCC licences, and use every means possible to punish Sinclair. Either way, Sinclair is not going to get the deregulation they need to stay viable.

In the words of Lehman Brothers, airing the film “has no upside and only multi-dimensional downside”. And it’s not as if this company was in a strong position to pull a stunt with their shareholders’ money. From their most recent 10-K:

[click to continue…]

Kudos to Duke for collecting and making public data about the time to degree and the rates of completion in their PhD programs. I would be curious to see similar data from other campuses. It’s unclear how many schools collect such data systematically and they certainly don’t make them public very often as the details are usually not very glamorous and can seem pretty discouraging. But it’s important information for people to have as they prepare for their graduate school experiences. It can also help students from other campuses as they try to argue for better/longer support for their training.

I couldn’t (but why oh why?) let Kieran be the only one with interesting flight experiences. The other day I was on a flight that taught me why you don’t want to take the last flight out.. and why giving flight attendants the power to throw people off planes may not be such a good idea.

We were sitting in the waiting area quietly waiting for the plane to board. Twenty minutes before boarding we were told that the flight crew’s plane was getting in late so we would be boarding late. The person telling us had a nice sense of humor and everyone seemed pretty low-key about the issue. Eventually the crew arrived and we boarded the plane. Some people didn’t seem so calm anymore. There was some bitterness going around about fitting luggage into various compartments. One of the flight attendants was among the most annoyed people. And sure, passengers can be very annoying, but her reactions seemed a bit excessive.

At this point we were only about fifteen minutes behind schedule. But nothing happened. And still nothing happened. Eventually we were told that we would not be taking off for another half an hour as we were the last flight out and so we had to wait for one more plane that had passengers connecting to our flight. Take note: go for earlier flight next time.

A man in the row in front of mine noticed that there was a cart of luggage still sitting next to our plane. He mentioned it to above referenced bitter flight attendant. She clearly had no idea what was going on and dismissed his comment as none of our business. So he asked again. Next, the following exchange took place: