andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-195 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: This assessment by Tyler Cowen reminded me that, in 1980, I and just about all my friends hated Jimmy Carter. Most of us much preferred him to Reagan but still hated Carter. I wouldn’t associate this with any particular ideological feeling—it’s not that we thought he was too liberal, or too conservative. He just seemed completely ineffectual. I remember feeling at the time that he had no principles, that he’d do anything to get elected. In retrospect, I think of this as an instance of uniform partisan swing: the president was unpopular nationally, and attitudes about him were negative, relatively speaking, among just about every group. My other Carter story comes from a conversation I had a couple years ago with an economist who’s about my age, a man who said that one reason he and his family moved from town A to town B in his metropolitan area was that, in town B, they didn’t feel like they were the only Republicans on their block. Anyway, this guy described himself as a “
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2 Most of us much preferred him to Reagan but still hated Carter. [sent-2, score-0.343]
3 I wouldn’t associate this with any particular ideological feeling—it’s not that we thought he was too liberal, or too conservative. [sent-3, score-0.215]
4 I remember feeling at the time that he had no principles, that he’d do anything to get elected. [sent-5, score-0.223]
5 In retrospect, I think of this as an instance of uniform partisan swing: the president was unpopular nationally, and attitudes about him were negative, relatively speaking, among just about every group. [sent-6, score-0.733]
6 Anyway, this guy described himself as a “Jimmy Carter Republican. [sent-8, score-0.139]
7 ” Me: You mean you liked Carter’s policies on deregulation? [sent-9, score-0.268]
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same-blog 1 1.0 195 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-09-President Carter
Introduction: This assessment by Tyler Cowen reminded me that, in 1980, I and just about all my friends hated Jimmy Carter. Most of us much preferred him to Reagan but still hated Carter. I wouldn’t associate this with any particular ideological feeling—it’s not that we thought he was too liberal, or too conservative. He just seemed completely ineffectual. I remember feeling at the time that he had no principles, that he’d do anything to get elected. In retrospect, I think of this as an instance of uniform partisan swing: the president was unpopular nationally, and attitudes about him were negative, relatively speaking, among just about every group. My other Carter story comes from a conversation I had a couple years ago with an economist who’s about my age, a man who said that one reason he and his family moved from town A to town B in his metropolitan area was that, in town B, they didn’t feel like they were the only Republicans on their block. Anyway, this guy described himself as a “
2 0.22550534 551 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-02-Obama and Reagan, sitting in a tree, etc.
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: God is in every leaf of every tree , but he is not in every leaf of every parable. Let me explain with a story. A few months ago I read the new book, Doing Data Science, by Rachel Schutt and Cathy O’Neal, and I came across the following motivation for comprehensive integration of data sources, a story that is reminiscent of the parables we sometimes see in business books: By some estimates, one or two patients died per week in a certain smallish town because of the lack of information flow between the hospital’s emergency room and the nearby mental health clinic. In other words, if the records had been easier to match, they’d have been able to save more lives. On the other hand, if it had been easy to match records, other breaches of confidence might also have occurred. Of course it’s hard to know exactly how many lives are at stake, but it’s nontrivial. The moral: We can assume we think privacy is a generally good thing. . . . But privacy takes lives too, as we see from
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Introduction: Rachel Schutt and Cathy O’Neil just came out with a wonderfully readable book on doing data science, based on a course Rachel taught last year at Columbia. Rachel is a former Ph.D. student of mine and so I’m inclined to have a positive view of her work; on the other hand, I did actually look at the book and I did find it readable! What do I claim is the least important part of data science? Here’s what Schutt and O’Neil say regarding the title: “Data science is not just a rebranding of statistics or machine learning but rather a field unto itself.” I agree. There’s so much that goes on with data that is about computing, not statistics. I do think it would be fair to consider statistics (which includes sampling, experimental design, and data collection as well as data analysis (which itself includes model building, visualization, and model checking as well as inference)) as a subset of data science. The question then arises: why do descriptions of data science focus so
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Introduction: A lot of people are asking, How could the voters have swung so much in two years? And, why didn’t Obama give Americans a better sense of his long-term economic plan in 2009, back when he still had a political mandate? As an academic statistician and political scientist, I have no insight into the administration’s internal deliberations, but I have some thoughts based on my interpretation of political science research. The baseline As Doug Hibbs and others have pointed out, given the Democrats’ existing large majority in both houses of Congress and the continuing economic depression, we’d expect a big Republican swing in the vote. And this has been echoed for a long time in the polls–as early as September, 2009–over a year before the election–political scientists were forecasting that the Democrats were going to lose big in the midterms. (The polls have made it clear that most voters do not believe the Republican Party has the answer either. But, as I’ve emphasized before
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Introduction: This assessment by Tyler Cowen reminded me that, in 1980, I and just about all my friends hated Jimmy Carter. Most of us much preferred him to Reagan but still hated Carter. I wouldn’t associate this with any particular ideological feeling—it’s not that we thought he was too liberal, or too conservative. He just seemed completely ineffectual. I remember feeling at the time that he had no principles, that he’d do anything to get elected. In retrospect, I think of this as an instance of uniform partisan swing: the president was unpopular nationally, and attitudes about him were negative, relatively speaking, among just about every group. My other Carter story comes from a conversation I had a couple years ago with an economist who’s about my age, a man who said that one reason he and his family moved from town A to town B in his metropolitan area was that, in town B, they didn’t feel like they were the only Republicans on their block. Anyway, this guy described himself as a “
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Introduction: A lot of people are asking, How could the voters have swung so much in two years? And, why didn’t Obama give Americans a better sense of his long-term economic plan in 2009, back when he still had a political mandate? As an academic statistician and political scientist, I have no insight into the administration’s internal deliberations, but I have some thoughts based on my interpretation of political science research. The baseline As Doug Hibbs and others have pointed out, given the Democrats’ existing large majority in both houses of Congress and the continuing economic depression, we’d expect a big Republican swing in the vote. And this has been echoed for a long time in the polls–as early as September, 2009–over a year before the election–political scientists were forecasting that the Democrats were going to lose big in the midterms. (The polls have made it clear that most voters do not believe the Republican Party has the answer either. But, as I’ve emphasized before
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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: 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
Introduction: A few years ago Larry Bartels presented this graph, a version of which latter appeared in his book Unequal Democracy: Larry looked at the data in a number of ways, and the evidence seemed convincing that, at least in the short term, the Democrats were better than Republicans for the economy. This is consistent with Democrats’ general policies of lowering unemployment, as compared to Republicans lowering inflation, and, by comparing first-term to second-term presidents, he found that the result couldn’t simply be explained as a rebound or alternation pattern. The question then arose, why have the Republicans won so many elections? Why aren’t the Democrats consistently dominating? Non-economic issues are part of the story, of course, but lots of evidence shows the economy to be a key concern for voters, so it’s still hard to see how, with a pattern such as shown above, the Republicans could keep winning. Larry had some explanations, largely having to do with timing: under De
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Introduction: This announcement might be of interest to some of you. The application deadline is in just a few days: The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health is seeking an additional experienced statistician to join our Office of Clinical and Regulatory Affairs team. www.usajobs.gov is accepting applications through April 22, 2011 for the general announcement and April 21 for status (typically current federal employee) candidates. To apply to this announcement or for more information, click on the links provided below or the USAJobs link provided above and search for NIH-NCCAM-DE-11-448747 ( external ) or NIH-NCCAM-MP-11-448766 ( internal ). You have to be a U.S. citizen for this one.
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Introduction: Last night I spoke at the Columbia Club of New York, along with some of my political science colleagues, in a panel about politics, the economy, and the forthcoming election. The discussion was fine . . . until one guy in the audience accused us of bias based on what he imputed as our ethnicity. One of the panelists replied by asking the questioner what of all the things we had said was biased, and the questioner couldn’t actually supply any examples. It makes sense that the questioner couldn’t come up with a single example of bias on our part, considering that we were actually presenting facts . At some level, the questioner’s imputation of our ethnicity and accusation of bias isn’t so horrible. When talking with my friends, I engage in casual ethnic stereotyping all the time–hey, it’s a free country!–and one can certainly make the statistical argument that you can guess people’s ethnicities from their names, appearance, and speech patterns, and in turn you can infer a lot
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