The British Conservatives have been covering the country with horrible posters asking questions like “How would you feel if a bloke on day-release [from prison] attacked your daughter?” Some enterprising character has now produced a design-your-own-Tory-poster website. Here’s my own feeble effort:

(via Nick Barlow)

Avian flu sounds pretty nasty, and a pandemic would be a disaster. But John Sutherland, “writing in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1462141,00.html , is in the grip of statistical confusion when he asserts that it could kill 70 per cent of the population. As I understand it, the virus kills 7 out of 10 people that it infects, and the number infected is far below 100 per cent. Moreover, the 7 out of 10 figure may well be an exaggeration, since people who recover and don’t die are less likely to be be included in the figures than those who do. The WHO “impact assessment”:http://www.who.int/csr/disease/influenza/preparedness2004_12_08/en/ isn’t encouraging (2 to 50 million dead, but could it be worse than that). I’m sure we have some epidemiologists among our readers. Any thoughts?

Backword Dave notes, cogently:

I hate those in power. I look up, and others see the stars; I see the shit up our leader’s arses.

Since it’s National Poetry Month in America and there isn’t enough scurrilous Welsh Nationalist verse on the internet, I reproduce below the fold the poem to which Dave is alluding; “Anglomaniac Anthem” by Harri Webb
[click to continue…]

I’ve been working my way through the archive of Steve Earle’s radio show on Air America. The sound quality is variable, but the content isn’t and they’re great for burning to CD and listening to when driving places. My favourite so far is with Emmylou Harris as guest. She chooses a variety of political songs including Johnny Cash’s Ballad of Ira Hayes, Joan Baez’s Birmingham Sunday and Woody Guthrie singing Plane Wreck at Los Gatos. Plane Wreck is a good song to hear at any time, but, here in the UK, with the parties competing to stigmatize the “economic migrants” (such as the cockle-pickers who died at Morecambe Bay) it has an immediate relevance. Recommended.

[Update: the server for the archive seems to be down because of exceeded bandwidth. This is probably due to the link here — sorry! I’ve deleted the link, but those who want to should try googling for it in a couple of days.]

A very interesting article about the Heritage Foundation, Malaysia, and and sums of money flowing to the Foundation president’s wife in the Washington Post, which I hope to write more about tomorrow or on Monday (there are some interesting and complicated issues that I want to think about a bit more). In the meantime, I want to point out this fascinating little paragraph about the Index of Economic Freedom (previously discussed here and here).

Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr., former editor of the annual Index of Economic Freedom, published by Heritage and the Wall Street Journal, said that in 2002 Feulner [the president of Heritage] pressed him to give Malaysia a better ranking. When the staff objected, Feulner backed off on changing the ranking, Driscoll said, but changed the text to make it more positive.

Heritage said Driscoll’s account “is incorrect. . . . If Dr. Feulner had any concerns about the Malaysia score, his name would not be on the book.”

As you prefer, you can read this as a testament to the honesty of the Index’s staff, or as damning evidence of Heritage’s intention to cook the books. Either way, it’s a rather interesting datum on the politics behind the Index (and how the text of the Index report is shaped by the political and/or financial interests of its backers).

In the comments thread to Chris’ post on tactical voting, Michael Otsuka very sensibly suggests

I believe there’s an extensive, sophisticated social science literature on the expected utility of voting in elections which has made some progress beyond the speculations posted above. Could anyone who’s up-to-speed post a reference to an accessible summary to save us the trouble of trying to reinvent the wheel?

This brings me to one of those papers I’ve been meaning to write for years (I wrote a several drafts of a joint paper with Geoff Brennan, but we never quite converged), and which has finally (2005!) been written by someone else. The idea was to prove an assertion I’ve made quite a few times in academic papers, and here at CT, that, as long as voters have ‘social’ rather than ‘egoistic’ preferences, the expected utility of voting is independent of the size of the electorate, and potentially large enough to justify high levels of participation. You can read this paper by Edlin, Gelman and Kaplan (PDF file). There’s an excellent appendix on why the probability of a decisive vote is of order 1/n.

There’s still the question of why people vote when one side or the other is bound to win. EGK have a go at this, and in my paper[1] on the subject, I say

This approach, in which b [the social benefit of the preferred party winning] is a simple step- function, may be replaced by a more sophisticated one in which b depends not only on the party elected, but on the size of its majority. This would be consistent with the fact that there is a substantial, though normally reduced, turnouts in elections which are perceived as foregone conclusions.)

That’s not a complete solution, and I think it’s also important to consider that voting per se is considered as a social duty or as yielding social benefits, but I think it’s at least as important as expressive motives.

fn1. Quiggin, J. (1987), Egoistic rationality and public choice: a critical review of theory and evidence’, Economic Record 63(180), 10–21.

At Larvatus Prodeo, and at Catallaxy, they’re debating the question of whether you can dismiss an author based on ‘a brief skimming’, which I’ll take, along with some participants in the discussion, to mean five minutes of reading.

My answer to this question, which arises pretty regularly in blog debates is “Absolutely”. At skimming or fast reading speed, five minutes gives you 5000 words, which is more than enough to conclude that a writer is guilty of gross logical or factual errors, pretentious or illiterate prose, repetition of tired and long-refuted arguments, or simple inanity. The idea, commonly put forward in defence of various indefensible types, that you can’t criticise someone unless you have read every word they have ever written is simple nonsense. It’s true that there are people who produce the odd pearl among an output more generally fit for swine. But in such cases, it’s up to their defenders to point out the gems: the volume of words is so great, and the average quality so low, that a demand to read everything is simply impossible.

I should concede that, on one or two occasions, I’ve got into trouble through misreading someone in the first five minutes (or even less), after which pride and prejudice has done the rest. But in general, five minutes is enough to form a well-founded negative judgement.

Brad DeLong has a great post on the puzzle of low US interest rates (made more puzzling by the sharp decline over the past week or two). It seems obvious that this can’t last, but entirely unclear when it will come to an end. The reasons he and I (and more relevantly George Soros and Warren Buffett) aren’t betting on, and therefore accelerating, the end are argued pretty well, I think.

I’ll add my own contribution to the discussion over the fold. The focus is on Australia, but most of the arguments are equally applicable to the US. It’s a comparison of views of the economy based on flows of goods and services and those based on asset prices. On the former (traditional) view, the signs of impending disaster are everywhere. On the latter view, it’s sunny skies as far as the eye can see.
[click to continue…]

Rabbi David Saperstein condemns Frist’s telecast in exactly the right terms – as an attack on religious freedom.

The telecast is scheduled to take place on the second night of the Passover holiday, when Jews around the world gather together to celebrate our religious freedom. It was in part for exactly such freedom that we fled Egypt. It was in part for exactly such freedom that so many of us came to this great land. And it is in very large part because of exactly such freedom that we and our neighbors here have built a nation uniquely welcoming to people of faith – of all faiths. We believe Senator Frist knows these things as well. His association with the scheduled telecast is, in a word, shameful.

I can only applaud. Via Atrios

Just to calm down some of the latest round of breathless boosterism about prediction markets (to be fair, the Tierney article is actually quite interesting, but breathless boosterism is what it is), I thought I’d provide my usual financial service to the CT community by putting on the green eyeshade, firing up Excel[1] and seeing if the prices are “all that”.
[click to continue…]

The Onion had a fun pair of articles recently, singling out bad scenes in great movies and great scenes in bad movies. We can play, too. My picks:

Great Scene, Bad Movie:

A Guy Thing

It’s a deeply mediocre romantic comedy with an extremely dodgy premise: Jason Lee takes home a dancer from his bachelor party (Julia Stiles) who turns out to be the cousin of his fiancee (Selma Blair). Hijinks ensue. When a movie begins with the hero attempting to cheat on his fiancee, and ends (SPOILER ALERT, LIKE YOU COULDN’T GUESS) with the hero leaving her at the altar, I didn’t find it nearly charming enough to overcome the ill-will it generated.

However, it does have a very funny scene in the middle. Through the magic of the internet, I don’t have to describe it; you can watch almost the whole scene here, by watching both clips 4 and 5.

Bad Scene, Great Movie:

It’s A Wonderful Life

I love It’s A Wonderful Life. But what’s up with the scene in which we learn that, if George Bailey had never been born, his wife would have been a spinster! With glasses! Who works at the library! Oh, the humanity!

Your picks?

How many surveys can one man produce? “Yet another Chris Lightfoot effort”:http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/ , which places you on two axes: “crime and punishment, internationalism” (where I’m apparently “very left-wing”) and “economics, etc.” where I turn out to be a “centrist”. Again, rather Britocentric I’m afraid. (You can see my position “here”:http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/scripts/quiz?s=AAGBHBEFDBAEABEEEDAABCCBDDBBDDBDBCBEBBBDDA . ) (Hat tip: Robin Grant – who is collecting results over at “perfect.co.uk”:http://www.perfect.co.uk/2005/04/political-survey-2005 )

Essays from essay banks are “crap”:http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2020840 , according to the THES :

bq. Students who think they can beat plagiarism detection software by paying an internet ghostwriting service to produce bespoke essays may want to think again, writes Phil Baty. An experiment at Loughborough University, in which students bought essays from internet services that write one-off pieces of work to order, found that they were of poor quality, sometimes riddled with mistakes and unlikely to earn more than a third or lower second-class grade. …

bq. The lowest-marked essay was by Essays-R-Us (www.essays-r-us.co.uk), which charged £205 and produced work that barely scraped a third, with 42 per cent. Professor Oppenheim said the essay had basic errors and suffered from “appalling” English. … The best essay was delivered by Degree Essays UK (www.ukessays.com) , part of Academic Answers Ltd, which is registered at Companies House. The service described itself as “the best essays and dissertation service in the UK” and said its essays were “guaranteed to be of a 2.1 or a first class standard”. However, Loughborough gave its essay 56 to 58 per cent – a lower second.

(via “Black Triangle”:http://blacktriangle.org/blog/ . )

Bill Frist’s telecast in which he appears with a clatter (right collective noun? would clangour be better?) of Republican-friendly fundamentalists to denounce filibusters of conservative judges as an attack on “people of faith” is unsurprisingly getting a lot of play in the left-blogosphere. But it strikes me that both this and the bungled Republican attempt to make political hay from the Terry Schiavo case provide open ground for a strong Democratic counter-attack. There’s good reason to believe that Frist’s move is a sign of weakness rather than of strength. If this Washington Post article is correct, Frist is pushing the nuclear option not because he thinks that this is a good issue for the Republicans, but because he fears that he won’t stand a chance of getting the Republican nomination in 2008 unless he has the religious conservatives on his side. Going to war over the filibuster is a very risky manoeuvre. The Republican party tried to use the Schiavo case to drum up public support in preparation for this fight, but it backfired. They now find themselves in the worst of both worlds – a general public which is suspicious of Republican efforts to rig the judicial system, and a conservative base which is fired up, and demanding that the Republicans ram through conservative judicial nominations to prevent anything like the Schiavo case from happening in future.

The way to fight back against this isn’t to make arguments about the corruption of the political process. This is the deeper problem – but it’s an abstract one, and unlikely to resonate. There’s a much more straightforward case against the Republicans. Their attempt to bend the judiciary to their will is really about building the foundations of a state-imposed religion. It’s an effort to impose religious norms on people’s private and family lives. More precisely: it aims to take complex decisions out of the realm of the family, and make them subject to the rule of judges who are expected to kowtow to the whims of lawmakers, regardless of their constitutional duties. The United States of America was founded by Dissenters, Unitarians and others who had fled from the tyranny of state-sponsored religion in Britain. As a result, one of the core American values is freedom of religion, and the maintenance of an open space in which people can pursue their own faiths and beliefs, free of interference from the state.

Every time that Republican legislators start talking about the attack on people of faith, Democrats should counter by saying that Republicans are trying to forcibly shove a state-sponsored set of religious values down people’s throats, and to prevent people from making their own decisions in the light of their own values and beliefs. They should point again and again to the outrageous statements made by DeLay, Cornyn and others during and after the Schiavo case – and use the Schiavo controversy as an example of the sort of decision that Republicans would like to take out of the hands of families, and hand over to judges. There’s a real argument to be made that it’s the Republicans rather than the Democrats who are attacking “people of faith,” by trying to impose a one-size-fits-all set of religious values through rigging the judicial system. It’s an argument that might even appeal to a few Christian fundamentalists, since they’ve been on the receiving end of similar treatment in the past. As Godfrey Hodgson tells us, the current resurgence of fundamentalism in American politics is in part a reaction against efforts by the state to ban home-schooling in an earlier era. The Democrats (I should note that I’m not a Democrat myself, but am on their side in this fight), should be hammering home this argument again, and again, and again.