October 2009

Jeremy Freese is doing some analysis:

So, the General Social Survey reinterviewed a large subset of 2006 respondents in 2008. They have released the data that combines into one file the respondents interviewed for the first time in 2008 and the 2008 reinterviews of the respondents originally interviewed in 2006. In a separate file, of course, you can get the original 2006 interviews for the latter people.

What has not yet been released, however, is the variable that would identify what row in the first file corresponds to what row in the second file. In other words, you know that person #438 in the reinterview data is somebody originally interviewed in 2006, but you don’t know what person in the 2006 data there are.

Well, especially because the last thing I need to be doing right now is procrastinating, that sounded like a challenge. Just as I have learned that just because there are no microwave instructions for a frozen dinner doesn’t mean you can’t microwave it, just because there isn’t a merge variable doesn’t mean you can’t merge the data. At least if no secure data agreement is involved.

All I have to say is: holy crap. You’d think knowing somebody’s sex, survey ballot (which was kept the same both times), zodiac sign, year of birth, self-identified race, region where they lived where they were 16, whether they lived with their parents when they were 16, whether they lived in the same place they did growing up, who they said they voted for in 2004, their marital status, their education, what they say they did for a living, how many years their mother went to school, inter alia, would allow you to pretty easily pinpoint who is who. I am here to tell you this is not the case.

I was able to devise some convoluted scheme and check how well it was doing thanks to a pretty big clue that I’ll refrain from posting, but even then there ended up being 50 cases that out of 1500 that I wasn’t sure who they were. In general the experience affirmed a fundamental suspicion I’ve had about analyzing survey data: the data seem so much less real once you ask the same person the same question twice.

The real distinction between qualitative and quantitative is not widely appreciated. People think it has something to do with counting versus not counting, but this is a mistake. If the interpretive work necessary to make sense of things is immediately obvious to everyone, it’s qualitative data. If the interpretative work you need to do is immediately obvious only to experts, it’s quantitative data.

More bookblogging! It’s all economics here at CT these days, but normal programming will doubtless resume soon.

Most of what I’ve written in the book so far has been pretty easy. I’ve never believed the Efficient Markets Hypothesis or New Classical Macro and it’s easy enough to point out how the occurrence of a massive financial crisis leading to a prolonged macroeconomic crisis discredits them both.

I’m coming now to one of the most challenging section of my book, where I look at why the New Keynesian program (with which I have a lot of sympathy) and ask why New Keynesians (most obviously Ben Bernanke) didn’t, for the most part, see the crisis coming or offer much in response that would have been new to Keynes himself. Within the broad Keynesian camp, the people who foresaw some sort of crisis were the old-fashioned types, most notably Nouriel Roubini (and much less notably, me) who were concerned about trade imbalances, inadequate savings, and hypertrophic growth of the financial sector. Even this group didn’t foresee the way the crisis would actually develop, but that, I think is asking too much – every crisis is different.

My answer, broadly speaking is that the New Keynesians had plenty of useful insights but that the conventions of micro-based macroeconomics prevented them from forming the basis of a progressive research program.

Comments will be appreciated even more than usual. I really want to get this right, or as close as possible
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To amplify what Kieran has just said – political scientists are going to be very, very happy today. I had seen Lin cited as a 50-1 outsider by one betting agency a few days ago, and had been surprised that she was at the races at all, given that economists tend (like the rest of us) to be possessive of their field’s collective goodies. I’m delighted to see that my cynicism was completely misplaced. But this is also a very interesting statement of what the Nobel committee see as important in economics.

Lin’s work focuses on the empirical analysis of collective goods problems – how it is that people can come up with their own solutions to problems of the commons if they are given enough room to do so. Her landmark book, _Governing the Commons_, provides an empirical rejoinder to the pessimism of Garret Hardin and others about the tragedy of the commons – it documents how people can and do solve these problems in e.g the management of water resources, forestry, pasturage and fishing rights. She and her colleagues gather large sets of data on the conditions under which people are or are not able to solve these problems, and the kinds of rules that they come up with in order to solve them.
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I just heard this from a passing radio and initially didn’t quite believe it. Ostrom, in particular, is a terrific choice. She’s at the other end of the spectrum defined on one side by Freakonomics. Which is to say her work is not flashy, it’s very thorough, and it arrives at, you know, correct answers. I bet the Political Scientists are very, very happy today.

Over the fold, yet more from my book-in-progress, Zombie Economics: Undead ideas that threaten the world economy. This is from the Beginnings section of the Chapter on Micro-based Macro, and covers the breakdown of the Phillips curve and the rise of New Classical and Rational Expectations macro. This (along with the bits to come on DGSE models) is probably the section on which my own background is weakest, so feel free to point out my errors.

I’ve now posted drafts of the first three chapters (+Intro) at my wikidot site, so you can get some context. In particular, before commenting on omissions, take a quick look to see that the point hasn’t been covered elsewhere.

Micro-based macro is here

I’ve got a lot out of comments and discussion so far, and I hope some of this is reflected in what you are reading.

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What is your best theory about how this image was generated? (I got it from Amazon.)

Seriously. This can’t be a picture of a published book, can it? On the other hand, it’s an image of a book published in 1984, so presumably they made the image by scanning an old book. I am curious whether such a monstrosity exists in real life. It’s not just the misspelling. It’s like a full course in how not to design a book cover.

That is all.

Jonah “organic honey at Dachau” Goldberg wonders, “Is ‘Nazi’ the only label our culture understands as irredeemably evil?”

Additional Corner hilarity: someone ought to tell n00b Lee Edwards about his colleague Andrew McCarthy’s views. Edwards puts forward Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer as a more plausible Nobel Peace prize-winner, as she supports peaceful dissent from the Chinese government over its “deliberate and often brutal campaign to suppress the Uighur language, culture, and religion (the Uighurs are Muslim).” I couldn’t agree more, but there’s that niggling “Muslim” detail. McCarthy opposed the release of any of the 17 Uighur detainees at Guantanamo, calling them “alien jihadists” who are “affiliated with a terrorist organization and have received terrorist paramilitary training.” Likewise, during the recent conflict between Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang, McCarthy deferred to “accounts of some witnesses to state-controlled media” in his sober assessment entitled “Hard to Believe the Lovable Uighurs Could Be Involved in Terrorism . . . ” Then again, this is the same McCarthy who observed that “as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.” Thus, as a man of the hard Right, McCarthy is more comfortable with a totalitarian Communist regime than he would be with a free Chinese society. I feel something has gone sort of wrong there, but–SCARY MUSLIMS OMG!

The _Financial Times_ has an “excellent article”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0abb8eca-b45b-11de-bec8-00144feab49a.html summarizing the institutional issues facing the EU if, as expected, Lisbon passes. Read it for the substance. But enjoy it for this suggestion, which I haven’t seen floated before:

However, as became clear this week, many smaller EU member states do not want a high-profile president. Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands circulated a document contending that the first president should be “someone who has demonstrated his commitment to the European project and has developed a global vision of the Union’s policies, who listens to the member states and the institutions, and who is sensitive to the institutional balance that corresponds to the Community method”. Translated from Eurospeak, this means a person with a lower profile than Mr Blair and from a country more deeply committed than the UK to the European ideal. Across Europe there is a recognition that the EU would do its image a favour if it awarded the job to a woman, one possibility being Mary Robinson, Ireland’s former head of state.

Depending on how Vaclav Klaus’s “brinkmanship”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f5193342-b4eb-11de-8b17-00144feab49a.html plays out, the new president will have to be chosen pretty soon. It would be very, _very_ sad to see wingnuts’ heads exploding again in just a few weeks time …

I’ve been doing my best to resist getting pulled back in by Clive Crook. I really have. I nearly succumbed when I read “his Monday FT column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2ca5e1e4-b112-11de-b06b-00144feabdc0.html, in which otiose self-congratulation dukes it out with utter lack of self-knowledge for seven hundred words but pulled myself back from the brink (self-congratulation wins, but it’s a very close call). But his “follow-up blog post”:http://clivecrook.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/10/history_legitimacy_and_reason.php has propelled me into the abyss.

Mr. Crook has a theory of what is wrong with American politics. It involves partisanship, of the kind not practiced by himself and his friends.
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Wow, that was fast! President Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I am sure many Americans (and others) will be thinking “It’s too soon. He hasn’t done anything yet!” Or even “Dude can’t even pass health care already, but he’s been elevated to international sainthood?”.

But this isn’t about domestic politics, or about what he’s done yet. President Obama has changed how the world feels about America. He’s lifted the planet’s mood. This guy is global Prozac.

There’s more to it than just the Bush presidency being a total downer for everyone in the world who cares about multi-lateralism or just wants to do business with the US. The tidal wave of bad faith Bush’s presidency created washed away any chance of progress in so many international initiatives.

Obama’s not a game changer per se, but he’s changed how people feel about playing the game, or whether they even want to.

Or, as the Nobel committee says;

“Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play”.

Of course that’s not the view of everyone outside of America. I’m at an informal meeting of donors, government reps and NGOs to talk about independent media and economic development. It’s a pretty international crowd, and opinions are about evenly split on whether Obama’s peace prize is sublime or ridiculous. [click to continue…]

Another installment of my slowly-emerging book on Zombie Economics: Undead ideas that threaten the world economy. This is from the Beginnings section of the Chapter on Micro-based Macro. I’ve now posted drafts of the first three chapters (+Intro) at my wikidot site, so you can get some context. In particular, before commenting on omissions, take a quick look to see that the point hasn’t been covered elsewhere.

Micro-based macro is here

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He has just introduced an “amendment to prevent the NSF from funding political science research”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Coburn_NSF.pdf (PDF). Apparently, Fox News and CNN pundits can do our job better than we can.

bq. The largest award over the last 10 years under the political science program has been $5.4 million for the University of Michigan for the “American National Election Studies” grant. The grant is to “inform explanations of election outcomes.” The University of Michigan may have some interesting theories about recent elections, but Americans who have an interest in electoral politics can turn to CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who pour over this data and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.

Whether the answers provided by this ‘myriad of viewpoints’ are good ones, I will leave as an open question. I obviously have a dog in this fight as a political scientist who will probably apply for NSF funding in the future. But I also think that there are measurable Good Things (in terms of understanding how our system of politics works etc) that come from good empirical work in political science. And the politics of Coburn’s amendment are not precisely difficult to discern (among his stated objections are that this money has gone to fund research concluding that the US is increasingly willing to torture suspected terrorists, and carefully unspecified work – doubtless some form of shameless subsidized leftwing punditry – by Paul Krugman). If you feel that political science doesn’t deserve any funding, feel free to say so in comments. If you disagree with Coburn (and are a political scientist) and live in the US, get on to your senator’s office to say so (and ideally, contact your university’s research vice president’s office or whatever while you are at it – they are likely to have good contacts). This may come up for a vote today.

Update: “Senator contact information here”:http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

More translation mysteries tonight. Conservapedia is calling for a Conservative Bible Project.

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;[5] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

They are basically planning to start with the King James Bible and then just make it say what they think it should. Not only do they apparently regard it as inessential to involve anyone with knowledge of the original texts – although they off-handedly contemplate this as a possibility – they are touting ‘mastery of English’ as one of the benefits those who help with the project can expect to reap. What can one say? I find it hard to believe the whole thing isn’t some sort of elaborate, Borat-style hoax. Could it be? (Is Conservapedia for real?) Discuss.

via Sadly, No!