andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-84 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute reports: Goldman Sachs’ latest forecast (and they’ve been pretty accurate so far) is that unemployment will rise to 9.9% by early 2011 and trend down to 9.7% for the last quarter of 2011. Obviously, this is a simply awful scenario but it seems one that is being accepted. That is, we seem to be in the process of accepting the unacceptable. Note that this scenario probably assumes the passage of the limited efforts now being considered in Congress. One might be surprised that Obama and congressional Democrats are not doing more to try to bring unemployment down. On the other hand, just to speak in generalities (not knowing any of the people involved), I would think that Obama would be much much more worried about the economy doing well in 2010 and then crashing in 2012. A crappy economy through 2011 and then improvement in 2012–that would be his ideal, no? Not that he would have the ability to time this sort of thing. But perhap
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1 Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute reports: Goldman Sachs’ latest forecast (and they’ve been pretty accurate so far) is that unemployment will rise to 9. [sent-1, score-0.278]
2 Obviously, this is a simply awful scenario but it seems one that is being accepted. [sent-4, score-0.17]
3 Note that this scenario probably assumes the passage of the limited efforts now being considered in Congress. [sent-6, score-0.167]
4 One might be surprised that Obama and congressional Democrats are not doing more to try to bring unemployment down. [sent-7, score-0.094]
5 On the other hand, just to speak in generalities (not knowing any of the people involved), I would think that Obama would be much much more worried about the economy doing well in 2010 and then crashing in 2012. [sent-8, score-0.316]
6 A crappy economy through 2011 and then improvement in 2012–that would be his ideal, no? [sent-9, score-0.243]
7 Not that he would have the ability to time this sort of thing. [sent-10, score-0.075]
8 Here’s what I wrote a few months ago : A major storyline of the 2008 election was that it was the Great Depression all over again: George W. [sent-12, score-0.262]
9 Bush was the hapless Herbert Hoover and Barack Obama was the FDR figure, coming in on a wave of popular resentment to clean things up. [sent-13, score-0.154]
10 The stock market crash made the parallels pretty direct. [sent-14, score-0.624]
11 One could continue the analogy, with Bill Clinton playing the Calvin Coolidge role, mindlessly stoking the paper economy and complicit in the rise of the stock market as a national sport. [sent-15, score-0.789]
12 Public fascination with various richies seemed very 1920s-ish, and we had lots of candidates for the “Andrew Mellon” of the 2000s. [sent-16, score-0.152]
13 But history doesn’t really repeat itself–or if it does, it’s not always quite the repetition that was expected. [sent-18, score-0.076]
14 Conservatives, too, may have switched from thinking of Obama as a scary realigning Roosevelt to viewing him as a Hoover from their own perspective–as a well-meaning fellow who took a stock market crash and made it worse through a series of ill-timed government interventions. [sent-20, score-0.615]
15 Anyway, I’m not claiming to offer any serious political or economic analysis here, just pointing out that the 1932 election was a full three years after the 1929 stock market crash, so Obama’s stepping into the story at a different point than when Roosevelt stepped in to his. [sent-23, score-0.624]
16 Or maybe we’re still on track for Obama to “do a Reagan,’ ride out the recession in the off-year election and sit tight as the economy returns in years 3 and 4. [sent-24, score-0.416]
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Introduction: Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute reports: Goldman Sachs’ latest forecast (and they’ve been pretty accurate so far) is that unemployment will rise to 9.9% by early 2011 and trend down to 9.7% for the last quarter of 2011. Obviously, this is a simply awful scenario but it seems one that is being accepted. That is, we seem to be in the process of accepting the unacceptable. Note that this scenario probably assumes the passage of the limited efforts now being considered in Congress. One might be surprised that Obama and congressional Democrats are not doing more to try to bring unemployment down. On the other hand, just to speak in generalities (not knowing any of the people involved), I would think that Obama would be much much more worried about the economy doing well in 2010 and then crashing in 2012. A crappy economy through 2011 and then improvement in 2012–that would be his ideal, no? Not that he would have the ability to time this sort of thing. But perhap
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Introduction: This post is by Phil Price. Bill Kristol notes that “Four presidents in the last century have won more than 51 percent of the vote twice: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan and Obama”. I’m not sure why Kristol, a conservative, is promoting the idea that Obama has a mandate, but that’s up to him. I’m more interested in the remarkable bit of cherry-picking that led to this “only four presidents” statistic. There was one way in which Obama’s victory was large: he won the electoral college 332-206. That’s a thrashing. But if you want to claim that Obama has a “popular mandate” — which people seem to interpret as an overwhelming preference of The People such that the opposition is morally obligated to give way — you can’t make that argument based on the electoral college, you have to look at the popular vote. That presents you with a challenge for the 2012 election, since Obama’s 2.7-point margin in the popular vote was the 12th-smallest out of the 57 elections we’ve had. There’s a nice sor
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Introduction: I saw this picture staring at me from the newsstand the other day: Here’s the accompanying article, by Michael Scherer and Michael Duffy, which echoes some of the points I made a few months ago , following the midterm election: Why didn’t Obama do a better job of leveling with the American people? In his first months in office, why didn’t he anticipate the example of the incoming British government and warn people of economic blood, sweat, and tears? Why did his economic team release overly-optimistic graphs such as shown here? Wouldn’t it have been better to have set low expectations and then exceed them, rather than the reverse? I don’t know, but here’s my theory. When Obama came into office, I imagine one of his major goals was to avoid repeating the experiences of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in their first two years. Clinton, you may recall, was elected with less then 50% of the vote, was never given the respect of a “mandate” by congressional Republicans, wasted
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Introduction: Barack Obama’s win has a potentially huge effect on policy. The current budget negotiations will affect the level and direction of government spending and on the mix of taxes paid by different groups of Americans. We can guess that a President Romney would have fought hard against upper-income tax increases. Other areas of long-term impact include the government’s stance on global warming, foreign policy, and the likelihood that Obama will nominate new Supreme Court justices who will uphold the right to abortion announced in Roe v. Wade. When it comes to public opinion, the story is different. The Democrats may well benefit in 2014 and 2016 from the anticipated slow but steady recovery of the economy over the next few years—but, as of November 6, 2012, the parties are essentially tied, with Barack Obama receiving 51% of the two-party vote, compared to Mitt Romney’s 49%, a split comparable to Al Gore’s narrow victory in 2000, Richard Nixon’s in 1968, and John Kennedy’s in 1960.
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Introduction: I saw this picture staring at me from the newsstand the other day: Here’s the accompanying article, by Michael Scherer and Michael Duffy, which echoes some of the points I made a few months ago , following the midterm election: Why didn’t Obama do a better job of leveling with the American people? In his first months in office, why didn’t he anticipate the example of the incoming British government and warn people of economic blood, sweat, and tears? Why did his economic team release overly-optimistic graphs such as shown here? Wouldn’t it have been better to have set low expectations and then exceed them, rather than the reverse? I don’t know, but here’s my theory. When Obama came into office, I imagine one of his major goals was to avoid repeating the experiences of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in their first two years. Clinton, you may recall, was elected with less then 50% of the vote, was never given the respect of a “mandate” by congressional Republicans, wasted
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Introduction: I don’t exactly disagree with the two arguments that I reproduce below, but I think they miss the point. Is “the battle over elitism” really central to this election? First, the easy one. Peter Baker in the New York Times, under the heading, “Elitism: The Charge That Obama Can’t Shake”: For all the discussion of health care and spending and jobs, at the core of the nation’s debate this fall has been the battle of elitism. . . . Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist, said Mr. Obama had not connected with popular discontent. “A lot of people have never been to Washington or New York, and they feel people there are so out of touch,” he said. . . . Rather than entertaining the possibility that the program they have pursued is genuinely and even legitimately unpopular, the White House and its allies have concluded that their political troubles amount to mainly a message and image problem. I think this is misleading for the usual reason that these message-oriented critiques are
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Introduction: Bob Erikson, one of my colleagues at Columbia who knows much more about American politics than I do, sent in the following screed. I’ll post Bob’s note, followed by my comments. Bob writes: Monday morning many of us were startled by the following headline: White House strenuously denies NYT report that it is considering getting aggressive about winning the midterm elections. At first I [Bob] thought I was reading the Onion, but no, it was a sarcastic comment on the blog Talking Points Memo. But the gist of the headline appears to be correct. Indeed, the New York Times reported that White House advisers denied that a national ad campaign was being planned. ‘There’s been no discussion of such a thing at the White House’ What do we make of this? Is there some hidden downside to actually running a national campaign? Of course, money spent nationally is not spent on targeted local campaigns. But that is always the case. What explains the Democrats’ trepidation abou
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen posts the following note from a taxi driver: I learned very early on to never drive someone to their destination if it was a route they drove themselves, say to their home from the airport . . . Everyone prides themselves on driving the shortest route but they rarely do. . . . When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route—always, I’m ethical—but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove . . . In the end, experts they consider themselves to be, people are a tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses. I take a lot of rides to and from the airport, and I can assure you that a lot of taxi drivers don’t know the good routes. Once I had to start screaming from the back seat to stop the guy from getting on the BQE. I don’t “pride myself” on knowing a good route home from the airport, but I prefer the good route. I’m guessing that the taxi driver quoted above is subject to the same illusions
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Introduction: When I was a kid they shifted a bunch of holidays to Monday. (Not all the holidays: they kept New Year’s, Christmas, and July 4th on fixed dates, they kept Thanksgiving on a Thursday, and for some reason the shifted Veterans Day didn’t stick. But they successfully moved Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Columbus Day. It makes sense to give people a 3-day weekend. I have no idea why they picked Monday rather than Friday, but either one would do, I suppose. My question is: if this Monday holiday thing was such a good idea, why did it take them so long to do it?
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Introduction: Siobhan Mattison pointed me to this . I’m just disappointed they didn’t use my Fenimore Cooper line. Although I guess that reference wouldn’t resonate much outside the U.S. P.S. My guess was correct See comments below. Actually, the reference probably wouldn’t resonate so well among under-50-year-olds in the U.S. either. Sort of like the Jaycees story.
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Introduction: In her essay on Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, Claudia Roth Pierpoint writes: The much remarked “readability” of the book must have played a part in this smooth passage from the page to the screen, since “readability” has to do not only with freedom from obscurity but, paradoxically, with freedom from the actual sensation of reading [emphasis added]—of the tug and traction of words as they move thoughts into place in the mind. Requiring, in fact, the least reading, the most “readable” book allows its characters to slip easily through nets of words and into other forms. Popular art has been well defined by just this effortless movement from medium to medium, which is carried out, as Leslie Fiedler observed in relation to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “without loss of intensity or alteration of meaning.” Isabel Archer rises from the page only in the hanging garments of Henry James’s prose, but Scarlett O’Hara is a free woman. Well put. I wish Pierpoint would come out with ano
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