Or at least, if she is, she's my kind of nut

Cristine O'Donnell, seven years ago, giving a reasonably good short talk on the women in The Lord of the Rings. Along with her niece, who is the real enthusiast—but has some tendency to confuse the movie with the book.

A much more attractive picture than one gets from news stories on the campaign.

Again Arctic Ice

"Researchers say projections of summer ice disappearing entirely within the next few years increasingly look wrong.

At its smallest extent, on 10 September, 4.76 million sq km (1.84 million sq miles) of Arctic Ocean was covered with ice - more than in 2007 and 2008, but less than in every other year since 1979." (BBC news story)

Long term readers of this blog will remember my posts a while back on the subject of the area of arctic sea ice. A web page produced by NASA/JPL claimed that the latest data showed it continuing to decrease. The actual data, available on the web from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, showed that the decline had reversed, at least temporarily, about two years earlier. Commenters attempting to defend the NASA/JPL claim argued, in effect, that the reversal was only random variation, and the trend was still down.

That was somewhat over a year ago. As the quote above suggests, the evidence so far suggests that they were wrong. The minimum sea ice extent for this year is below last year's but above the figures for the two previous years. It is below the figure for still earlier years, due to the previous decline, but so far there seems no reason to believe that that decline has continued—which was the claim that I challenged.

And, if the BBC story is to be believed, researchers in the field have begun to adjust their predictions accordingly.

Is Christine O'Donnell a Nut?

Reading news stories, including a recent story by Michael Moynihan in Reason, the answer seems to be yes. Following up the detailed claims in those stories, it isn't so clear.

One of Moynihan's claims is that "O’Donnell lied about attending a Master’s degree program at Princeton University." That's a strong claim; the only support is a link to an article critical of O'Donnell by John McCormack in the Weekly Standard. He bases it on her claims in a lawsuit against her previous employer, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative group. To his credit, he provides a link to the claims. I read it, partly out of curiosity about O'Donnell, partly because I had connections with ISI long ago, in its earlier incarnation as a libertarian organization called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists.

As best I can tell, nowhere in her claims does she say that she attended a Master's degree program at Princeton. By her account, when ISI originally offered her a position in February of 2003, one of her reservations was that she had applied to Princeton's Master's degree program for the following fall. ISI assured her that she would be given enough time, up to one day a week, to attend classes—presumably she was applying to a part-time program—but then reneged on that agreement, with the result that she was forced to withdraw. A careless reader might take that as meaning that she took classes for a while and then had to cancel. But given that her employment started in March and she was planning to start taking classes the following fall, it looks more as though she applied, was accepted, but then withdrew when she discovered that she wasn't being given the necessary free time. She says that she got a full refund of her tuition, which would be a little surprising if she had actually attended classes for a while before withdrawing.

Getting curious, I followed up on some of the other evidence offered that she was a nut. One repeated claim was that she was, in Moynihan's words, "opposed to the sinister habit of masturbation," which makes it sound as though she had been campaigning against it. Another story describes her as the "masturbation hating candidate" and links to another informing us that "One of the most notable things on her political résumé is her well-publicized position against masturbation."

All of this seems, as far as I can tell, to be based on a single comment made in the course of an MTV program on sex in the nineties. O'Donnell asserted that the bible says that lust in your heart is to commit adultery, and that you cannot masturbate without lust—both, I think, correct statements. As best I can tell, that is the sole basis for the claims of "well publicized position" and "masturbation hating candidate."

I don't take the bible as a source of truth, but quite a lot of people do, and the fact that O'Donnell does, or at least did at one time, isn't evidence that she is a nut.

Another charge is that "she suggested that age-appropriate sex education, even for kindergarteners, could convince children that strangers with candy were "not so creepy." Following the link kindly provided by the Huffington Post, one finds a reasonable enough argument—that if small children are accustomed to discussing intimate matters with their teacher, they will be less likely to be frightened by a similar conversation from another adult. I'm not sure she is right, but the appearance of crazy views is coming from the way the view is described by her critic, not from what she actually said.

Reading O'Donnell's charges against ISI, I was struck by a point that none of the stories seems to have noticed. While she objects to quite a lot of things about their treatment of her, the central complaint is that they are, or at least wish to appear to be, Christian fundamentalists who believe that women ought always to be under the authority of men. She got fired, by her account, when she objected to being made the subordinate of a recent (male) hire who had been brought in as her assistant—a change made to make sure that she was under the "cover" of a male during a period when the vice-president she reported to was going to be absent.

Running through much of the criticism of O'Donnell is the implications that she is committed to fundamentalist Christianity. It is surely at least worth mentioning that a large part of the reason she sued her employer was, by her own account, the fact that they were.

Finally, it's worth noting that a good deal of the material used to make O'Donnell look nutty is coming from her activities in the nineties, when she was a twenty-something crusading for sexual purity. It would be interesting to see a similar selection for left of center candidates.

O'Donnell may really be a nut, of course. Sarah Palin was badly misrepresented by her critics during the campaign, but even without the misrepresentation her actual views do seem a bit odd.

Part of what first got me interested in O'Donnell was the dual issue she appears to raise for not only Tea Party supporters but libertarians as well—and, for that matter, for some on the left. The first half of the issue currently appears as the argument that the Tea Party is the best thing that could have happened to the Democratic party, since it is forcing on the Republicans candidates whose views are too far from the center to win—what my wife, remembering an earlier example, refers to as the McGovern effect.

The other half is the nature of the candidates. Tea Party candidates, or LP candidates, or Socialist candidates for that matter, are unlikely to have a background as high level elected officials or much experience in electoral politics. Their willingness to run in what everyone else sees as a hopeless cause may reflect either a wildly unrealistic view of the world—I still remember the people who, back in 1964, thought Goldwater would be elected by the "silent majority"—or blind fanaticism. They are, in other words, quite likely to be nuts. Which might create difficulties for electing them, and further difficulties if they do get elected.

Following up the charges against O'Donnell, I am struck by the other side of that story. Almost anybody can be made to look nutty by a suitable selection of past comments—consider that the current Vice President is a man who apparently believes that FDR was President at the time of the stock market crash and went on national TV to reassure people. Given a press sufficiently hostile to one candidate and friendly to another, it isn't that hard to create the illusion that the outsiders are all nut cases, their opponents all reasonable folk.

Text vs Speech

My wife, after reading my previous post, commented that it would be much harder for a service person to ignore requests to drop the canned and content-free responses and actually deal with the problem if the interaction were face to face rather than through typed text on a computer screen.

I was reminded of another conversation with her yesterday, after an extended World of Warcraft session in which we (and our son and daughter) had all participated. One of the other players, after leaving the group, had complained extensively and (by her account) unreasonably on the relevant chat group. My wife commented that the player in question came across as a much nicer and more reasonable person in voice communication than in text. She suggested that perhaps, to him, typed conversations were not entirely real, or at least much less real than voice communications. If the conversation is not real, the person on the other side of it is also not real, so being rude, even unjustifiably rude, doesn't really count—rather like being rude to a non-player character, a computer generated "person."

All of which may perhaps link back to an old puzzle of mine—why the mass lecture did not disappear after the invention of the printing press. And perhaps also to my experience, some years back, giving public lectures at long distance. I did it once over the telephone, and the experience was, from my end, very unsatisfactory, like talking into a hole. The second time was with video as well as audio—I could see the audience and they could see me—and it felt much more real.

ELIZA is alive and well and working for Comcast

I've been having problems with my internet connection and, as a result, have spent a good deal of time on chat sessions with Comcast "analysts." I was struck by how large a fraction of their side of the conversation appeared to be automated—standard phrases with no informational content, designed to appease the customer. Examples:

"Let me welcome you with genuine assurance that I will be providing you quality Comcast customer service today. Before anything else, let me extend my apologies for any inconvenience this internet issue has caused you. Still doing fine, I suppose, David?"

The last bit echoed a standard phrase along the lines of "how are you doing today." It was irrelevant to the conversation (as such phrases in ordinary conversation often are) but appeared to be an automatic opening.

Somewhat more bizarrely, when I answered that I was fine but my internet connection was not, the response was:

"I am glad to know that you are doing fine, David"

That exchange was followed, typically, by some version of:

"I understand the importance of your internet service and I do apologize if you are having problems with it right now, David. Don't worry, I'll be glad to assist you with that. Rest assured that I will do my best to remedy the situation."

One variant included an assurance that the problem would be dealt with by the end of our session, which not only was not true but could not have been believed by the analyst, assuming she noticed that this was the third or fourth time I had tried to get the problem solved.

During a break in the conversation made necessary by something the analyst was doing, I was treated to a brief ad for some additional service Comcast offered, put as if it were a further part of the conversation. When I explained that I wasn't interested in access to television, not having or wanting a TV set, the response was:

" Oh I see. That's alright, David."

A little later the same analyst who had already offered apologies and assured me of quality concast service, responded to my description of the problem and my most recent exchange with a previous analyst with:

I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you, David. I know how important it is to use your service as expected. I am willing to help you the best way I can.

When, in irritation, I told a later analyst that: "It would be better if Comcast analysts didn't spend time asking me how my day was, but instead just dealt with the problem."

The response was:

"I'm sorry to know that, David."

Shortly followed by the exchange:

"As I understand your concern, you are having issues with your internet connection, is that right?"

David>Yes.

David> It would also help if analysts read what I wrote and responded to it, instead of following a canned routine.

(analyst) Thank you for confirming.

Shortly followed by:

"David, I understand your need to have your internet connection up and working as expected. I know very well how important it is nowadays to have an internet connection all the time. I can certainly relate to this concern."

I'm not sure that I should have been either surprised or displeased at the nature of the conversations. Automated responses, whether programmed in silicon or carbon, save the responder time and effort and are common enough in ordinary social exchanges. The fact that analysts claimed to have access to the record of my previous sessions but showed no evidence of having absorbed the relevant information was irritating, but again might represent a reasonable compromise on their end between the quality of the service they provided and the cost in time of providing it. And some fraction of what the analysts said was actually relevant to the conversation.

But I was repeatedly reminded of ELIZA, an early computer program that created the illusion of a human being by a fairly simple set of pre-programmed responses inspired by Rogerian psychotherapy.

I suggested to one analyst that she might want to look up ELIZA. The response?

"Thank you for patiently waiting, David."

The Living Dead: Thoughts on Macro and Depressions

Macro is not my field. One of the reasons it is not my field is that, so far as I can tell, it lacks a theoretical structure as solid or as well supported as price theory—popularly but misleadingly called "Micro." One result is that a course on the subject is a tour of either a cemetery or a construction site.

The cemetery is the orthodox Keynesian account according to which a depression is the result of insufficient demand due to the exhaustion of investment opportunities, monetary policy is useless because the economy is in a liquidity trap, and the proper solution is for the government to run a large deficit, converting the excess savings into government expenditure. That was the accepted wisdom fifty years ago. As best I could judge, as observer not participant, it fell out of favor among academic economists in the ensuing decades, due to both theoretical and empirical problems.

The construction site is the attempt to replace the old orthodoxy. Some of it gets labeled "monetarism," some "neo-keynesianism," some other things. None has been sufficiently successful to have achieved the status of a new orthodoxy.

That is one reason why the old orthodoxy maintained its popularity in popular culture, including that of politicians and journalists. A second is that it provides a justification for large scale deficit financing, something politicians, left and right, are fond of doing whenever they have a plausible excuse. The old orthodoxy reappeared a few years ago in full force, complete with its old claim to be what everyone who knows anything about the subject believes, and was used to justify deficit spending on a scale large even compared to the deficit spending of the previous administration.

Think of it as the rise of the living dead.

All of which leaves open the question of why things went wrong, in the Great Depression and the recent Great Recession, and what should be done to fix them. I do not have a confident answer to those questions, but there is one possible answer which I find at least plausible. It is an explanation not of why a depression or recession starts—that, in the two cases of interest, seems to depend on special circumstances—but on why it is so severe and lasts so long.

The Great Depression of the thirties and the current Great Recession have one feature in common that has not, I think, received sufficient attention—the government response to them. Hoover reacted to the 1929 stock market crash by sharply increasing federal expenditure; by 1932 it was fifty percent higher than in 1929 in nominal terms, twice as high in real terms, three times as high measured as a share of national income. FDR went on to enormously expand the role of government in the economy, creating our modern regulatory state. Obama followed a similar policy on a smaller scale, expanding government involvement (already very large) in the health care and financial industries, bailing out failing firms on a scale I think unparalleled in U.S. history, threatening additional large scale interventions to deal with global warming.

The result, in each case, was to greatly increase the uncertainty of the environment within which private actors were making their decisions. If you do not know what the future is going to be like, there is much to be said for postponing any decision that depends on the future, whether an investment in physical capital or human capital. It is risky to hire new employees if you do not know whether, a few years hence, it will be legal to fire them. It is risky to build a new factory, in any industry where energy is a major cost, if you do not know whether next year's legislation will sharply raise the cost of energy—better to wait to choose your design until you have a clearer idea of what your costs are going to be. It is risky to choose a profession, or change professions, when you do not know whether the growth field is going to be health care or bankruptcy law. Multiply such considerations many fold, and you may have an explanation of why the recovery from the initial shock, in both cases, was so slow.

Arguably, the U.S. economy is suffering from a disease in part iatrogenic. Which may explain why the doctor can't understand what went wrong.


Post Script on Labels. They sound clear enough—micro deals with small things, macro with large. But it isn't true. The world wheat market or the world oil market is properly understood with supply curves, demand curves, conventional analysis of choice over time, and similar "micro" tools. Hence, in my view, the proper labels are "price theory" and "disequilibrium theory." Understanding disequilibrium—loosely speaking, the sort of situation that price theory tells us can't exist but that sometimes does—is a hard problem.

Assuming Your Conclusions

A recent Washington Post news story describing a speech by Christina Romer, the outgoing chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, provides a nice example of how to implicitly assume your conclusion. The author writes:

At week's end, Romer will leave the council chairmanship after what surely has been the most dismal tenure anybody in that post has had: a loss of nearly 4 million jobs in a year and a half. That's not Romer's fault; the financial collapse occurred before she, and Obama, took office. But she was the president's top economist during a time when the administration consistently underestimated the depth of the economy's troubles - miscalculations that have caused Americans to lose faith in the president and the Democrats.

The implication, reinforced elsewhere in the piece, is that the Democrats did the right thing, just not enough of it. Their only mistake was not making the stimulus even bigger. If only they had spent even more and taxed even less, the economy wouldn't be in such miserable shape.

That is one possible interpretation of what happened. Another is that Romer is like a medieval physician explaining to the grieving relatives that if only he had bled the patient a few more times, he would have recovered. One way to judge a scientific theory is by comparing what it predicts to what happens. One of Romer's predictions was that unemployment would peak at 8%. It didn't. I do not know whether Romer has considered the possibility that the reason her prediction was wrong was that her theory was wrong, but pretty clearly the author of the piece has not.

He merely takes for granted the Keynesian orthodoxy of fifty years ago, according to which the right way of dealing with a recession is to run a deficit, and the worse the recession the bigger the deficit should be. The administration followed that prescription, things didn't get better, so obviously the deficit was not big enough. The alternative possibility, that the reason things didn't get better might be that they were following the wrong policy, simply didn't occur to him.