This post serves less as a public announcement than as a private means of self-commitment with added dollops of embarrassment should I renege, that I am not going to be blogging for the next few weeks (except perhaps one post to introduce a guest blogger), so as to get the damn book that I am writing finally done and ready. When you read me again, all going well, I should have a bouncing 350-page-or-so manuscript to announce. I reserve the right to change my mind in the case of truly dire exigencies – but they will have to be truly dire.
Brian Knight and Nathan Shiff have a “paper”:http://weber.ucsd.edu/~jlbroz/PElunch/knight_schiff_momentum.pdf on momentum and voter choice.
This paper provides an investigation of the role of momentum and social learning in sequential voting systems. In the econometric model, voters are uncertain over candidate quality, and voters in late states attempt to infer the information held by those in early states from voting returns. Candidates experience momentum effects when their performance in early states exceeds expectations. The empirical application focuses on the responses of daily polling data to the release of voting returns in the 2004 presidential primary. We find that Kerry benefited from surprising wins in early states and took votes away from Dean, who held a strong lead prior to the beginning of the primary season. The voting weights implied by the estimated model demonstrate that early voters have up to 20 times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates, demonstrating a significant departure from the ideal of “one person, one vote.” We then address several alternative, non-learning explanations for our results. Finally, we run simulations under different electoral structures and find that a simultaneous election would have been more competitive due to the absence of herding and that alternative sequential structures would have yielded different outcomes.
I’ve not even a scintilla of the technical expertise that would be required to assess the claims of the paper. And they could certainly have chosen a better election year to make it in (later votes in the primary process clearly count for quite a bit more than usual this time around). But the basic underlying argument – that peoples’ primary votes in Iowa will usually count for some multiple of the influence that people’s votes in, say, Pennsylvania count for, seems to me to almost certainly be true. So is this something that people should be concerned with on basic grounds of equity etc? Does this provide enough grounds that people should push for reform (either through having all primaries on one day, or perhaps semi-randomizing the allocation of slots in the calendar if that isn’t feasible)?
Obviously, there are similar inequities in the apportionment of US Senate seats by population – but that is built into the system by design, and can’t be gotten rid of without constitutional change. Calendaring is in the remit of the parties and the states themselves. My memory is that a couple of states benefitting from the current set-up have sought to make their threats more credible through amendments to their domestic constitutions, but I am skeptical that these commitments would in fact be credible if every one else converged on a single date or changed system. This is, indeed, one of those cases where we would be better off if the simplest one-shot game theory prediction came true (i.e. the outcome in which every state party converges on the equilibrium of the earliest possible date). So would this be a bad idea?
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I invited my political philosophy undergraduate class to attend the conversation about No Child Left Behind, and several of them came along. I told the students beforehand that it would be fun, because lots of people would be annoyed with what I had to say, and that certainly someone would accuse me of using a “deficit model” of poverty. The thing is, if you didn’t already know what the “deficit model” of poverty is, and heard the talk (which you can read here), you couldn’t discern that I was saying anything rude or insulting. So after I had spoken, I could see a couple of my students at the back puzzling at why anyone would give me a hard time. But then it came, second question, and I watched one of them open her eyes in thrilled disbelief, as if I were some sort of soothsayer. I’ll forward this link to her to apologise for giving her that impression.
How, my student may have wondered, could I have known that I would be accused of holding a deficit model of poverty?
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Welcome to Education Optimists, a new blog written by my colleague Sara Goldrick-Rab, and her husband Liam Goldrick. Sara is in the EPS department at Madison, and Liam is Policy Director at the New Teacher Center. My prediction is that you can expect smart, well-informed, and heterodox commentary there. To start you off, here is Sara’s warning about the new TEACH grant program, which offers a $4000 per year grant to students willing to commit to getting an education degree and then spend 4 years teaching in high poverty schools in a particular subject area:
Beware: If a student does not fulfill the terms of the grant it is automatically converted into an unsubsidized loan, with interest accruing starting when the loan began.
One can easily imagine many ways a student could fail to fulfill the terms of the grant.
Here are but a few examples:
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There are all kinds of games you can play with this List of Top 100 Public Intellectuals, including Watch People’s Heads Explode! As a guest here I believe myself entitled to say, really? No Timberites? Tchah.
The stated criteria: “Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.” The large number of Iraq-war supporters would seem to suggest “influence … far beyond the borders of their own country” hugely outweighs “distinction in their particular field.”
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Over at our joint I’ve been doing a fair bit of “this day seventy-five years ago” because of the anniversary of Roosevelt’s hundred days and, well, because. This one may hold some interest for an international readership:
On this day in 1933, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald delivered an address from the National Press Club in Washington, DC, discussing the common problems of the US and UK: “In America at this moment and in Great Britain there are millions of men who want work and can’t get it…. Governments cannot be indifferent to a state of things like that.”
MacDonald looked forward to “wise international government action,” to be established at the upcoming international economic conference. He hoped it would revive “a freely flowing international exchange,” i.e., trade—“Self-sufficiency in the economic field on the part of nations ultimately ends in the poverty of their own people.”
He was mindful of the apparent irony in Britain’s having taken the nationalist, defensive action of going off the gold standard: “Can you imagine that in the early days of that crisis we said gayly and light-heartedly, ‘Let it rip. Let it rip. We will go off gold. There are benefits in being off gold, and we will reap them.'” Obviously he meant the answer to be “no.”—“And so on this currency question, agreement is the only protection.”1
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Our long national nightmare is almost over: today, after seven hard weeks of bowlin’ and shootin’ and drinkin’, the people of Pennsylvania will finally get to vote in our primary. It’s been a critical time in this electoral cycle, a time during which American news media were able to dig hard and deep into the issues that underlie the moral and constitutional crisis to which the Bush Administration has brought us: did Barack Obama meet <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Spies”>August Spies</a> at a fundraiser in 1886 before founding the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928? And what about Cindy McCain – <a href=”http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/05/can-cindy-mccain-really-be-that-perfect/”>can she really be that perfect?</a>
So I thought I’d write a little something about the candidates’ policy positions on disability, because apparently (a) no one knows that the candidates have policy positions on disability and (b) policy positions on disability are not as important as flag pins. Granted, disability policy never swings an election. And why should it? Unless you yourself have a disability, or unless you know someone with a disability, or unless you’re concerned about things like employment or health care, or unless you might get sick or injured someday, or unless you’re planning on aging, disability policy is irrelevant to you.
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By request, a quick bibliography on academic freedom off the top of my… well, not the top of my head, but the top of my EndNote file. With some annotations. I tried to do hanging indents, but WordPress defeated me.
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I suspect that I disagree with Eric (and very likely other CTites) on how we should think about academic freedom. To clarify this (and also to figure out better for myself why I think what I think), some propositions below. [click to continue…]
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Greetings from <a href=”http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com”>the edge of the American West</a>, in the neighborhood of which friendly folks have been urging academics to brush up on <a href=”http://www.law.berkeley.edu/news/2008/edley041008.html”>how to fire each other</a>. In the midst of everyone scurrying around and <a href=”http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/bylaws/so1039.html”>reading rules</a> and shouting, some of us noticed an article (<a href=”http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/14/080414fa_fact_kramer”>not really online</a>) in <em>The New Yorker</em>, which makes one wonder, is it maybe bad for academic freedom to have a free speech expert as university president?
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I’ve been remiss in not posting anything about the results of the Italian election – the result of a number of deadlines crashing in on me at once. But in lieu of proper analysis, it’s worth noting that the biggest winner in the elections – the _Lega Nord_ – is one of the most genuinely revolting political parties in the Western world. The picture below (nicked from “Foreign Policy’s Passport blog”:http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/8692) gives some idea of what their winning electoral strategy involved.
According to _Passport_, it appears that Lega leading light Roberto Calderoli is likely to become deputy Prime Minister. Regular CT readers may “recall”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/18/follies-berlesque/ his resignation from a previous government after wearing a t-shirt with one of the Danish anti-Muslim cartoons; he has distinguished himself in the meantime with his dismissal of the French football team as “negroes, communists and Muslims” after Italy beat them in the infamous Zidane-headbutt game and by threatening to have a pig ‘defile’ a site in Bologna where a mosque was to be built. US readers who aren’t familiar with European politics should try to imagine a political party with a program co-written by Mark Steyn, David Duke and Tom Tancredo, and they’ll be at least half-way there.
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Gareth Wilson brings something up in comments to this post. What do the parents among you say when your children ask you if your family is rich? I say, yes, we’re rich. Living in Asia as we do, our family has lots of chances to see really poor people in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. We see these people because we’re going on family vacations to stay in villas in Bali. There doesn’t seem to be much to say about that except, being rich sure is great, eh? I tend to say, well, that doesn’t mean we can buy just anything we want, and we’ll often see other people we know having great things we can’t afford, but on the whole, we’re rich. This is ideally meant to inspire charitable thoughts rather than mercenary self-satisfaction. Am I going to deprive my children of their God-given American right to insist they are middle-class? And when is Richie Rich Euros going to come out and serve as the grave monument for the mighty US dollar?
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This is by way of announcing that “Eric Rauchway”:http://history.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Rauchway_Eric will be guest-blogging with us for a week. Eric’s been blogging up a storm together with Ari Kelman at “The Edge of the American West”:http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/ for a few months; a combination of history, contemporary politics, cutting edge Sesame Street commentary and literary stuff. Sort of like us in other words. We’re very happy he’ll be guesting for a while.
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This NYT article, The Decline of the $20 Wage”, on the vanishing blue-collar worker with a middle-class income is both depressing and…confusing. Adjusting the numbers for inflation is at least alluded to initially:
Leaving aside for a moment those who have lost their jobs, what of those who still have them? Once upon a time, a large number earned at least $20 an hour, or its inflation-adjusted equivalent, and now so many of them don’t.
However, from this point on the article seems to talk about wages which were $20-an-hour or above in the past–even as far back as the 70s–and are now less than $20 in nominal terms.
The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts. And it is on its way to extinction….
Hourly workers had come a long way from the days when employers and unions negotiated a way for them to earn the prizes of the middle class — houses, cars, college educations for their children, comfortable retirements. Even now a residual of that golden age remains, notably in the auto industry. But here, too, wages are falling below the $20-an-hour threshold — $41,600 annually — that many experts consider the minimum income necessary to put a family of four into the middle class….
Since [the 1970s] the percentage of people earning at least $20 an hour has eroded in every sector of the economy, falling last year to 18 percent of all hourly workers from 23 percent in 1979 — a gradual unwinding of the post-World War II gains.
The decline is greatest in manufacturing, where only 1.9 million hourly workers still earn that much. That’s down nearly 60 percent since 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
The shrinkage is sometimes quite open. The Big Three automakers are currently buying out more than 25,000 employees who earn above $20 an hour, replacing many with new hires tied to a “second tier” wage scale that never quite reaches $20. A similar buyout last year removed 80,000 auto workers. Many were not replaced, but many were, with the new hires paid today at the non-middle-class scale, and with fewer benefits.
Surely $20 an hour in the 70s would be $60 or so an hour now, adjusted for inflation? It makes a big difference to this article and the author has totally failed to explain the issue. ‘Fewer people of this class make even 1/3 as much per hour as they did 30 years ago’ is a very different message from ‘fewer people of this class make this inflation-adjusted wage.’ It seems clear the article implies the former but muddies the waters with the nominal wage, ironically further masking the dramatic decline of the blue-collar middle class.
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Anyone reading blogs over the last few years know how obsessive the wingnut element can get over faked, altered and “faked” photographs. Sometimes there’s a case to answer; sometimes there’s a picture that contradicts their narrative and they’re shrilly convinced that “it isn’t trooo!” We saw instances of both in the recent Lebanon war. Now the great-granddaddy of such controversies “looks set for reinvestigation”:http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/news/Robert_Capa_photo_investigators_defend_war_picture_news_252312.html : did Robert Capa stage his most famous picture, the “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War? The International Center of Photography in New York has acquired a suitcase discovered in Mexico last year containing Capa negatives abandoned when he fled from Paris in 1939.
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