Economics, Public Policy, and Whatever Else Interests Me
I remember the day I subscribed to TimesSelect. I couldn't critique the opinions I wanted to without forking over the money. And it was also my prophecy this spring that, "Eventually, we all blog for Google." The two have collided, and the former has died. Felix Salmon lays out the details.
I thought TimesSelect was a wonderful thing. It imposed a $50 per year tax on a readership whose opinions were almost certain to be opposite of mine. I'm going to miss it.
If, contrary to experience, you opened up Paul Krugman's New York Times column (excerpted here by Mark Thoma) expecting economic insights, you will be quite disappointed once again. His thesis today is summed up in the statement:
Arguably, the current state of the Republican Party is such that only extreme narcissists have a chance of getting nominated.
I suppose a lot of things are "arguable," like whether Governor Mike Huckabee, who is both one of the least narcissistic people walking the Earth and the runner-up in this weekend's Iowa Straw Poll of Republican candidates, has a chance of getting nominated. But this is just Krugman being Krugman. What caught my eye was the next statement:
To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a fairly smart guy — and nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid.
Really? What Presidential primary contest is he watching? Here's what Google has to say on the matter:
Much of the political commentary surrounding the election will, in some way or another, be the political fringes on the right and the left calling some candidates stupid; that is, when the rhetoric does not rise to the level of calling them "extreme narcissists" in major media outlets.
I watched some bad television over the weekend. It reminded me of this classic speech by FCC Chairman Newton Minnow in 1961, addressing a group of broadcasters, when television was considered the "New Frontier." It is sometimes known by the last two words of the following excerpt:
But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet or rating book to distract you -- and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
His prescription, it seems, was greater competition:
I have told you that I believe in the free enterprise system. I believe that most of television's problems stem from lack of competition. This is the importance of UHF to me: with more channels on the air, we will be able to provide every community with enough stations to offer service to all parts of the public. Programs with a mass market appeal required by mass product advertisers certainly will still be available. But other stations will recognize the need to appeal to more limited markets and to special tastes. In this way, we can all have a much wider range of programs.
Television should thrive on this competition - and the country should benefit from alternative sources of service to the public.
In the intervening 45+ years, we've seen substantial increases in the number of content providers. Using Minnow's criteria, I think the best programming has gotten better, and the worst programming has gotten worse. That's what competition does when there is variety in tastes and a lofty standard for performance.
All things considered, I rate this debate as highly as any of the other Democratic debates, largely because the YouTube questions did not come from a member of the media. It may have been just The Wisdom of Crowds
From my own vantage point, I thought that, as in previous debates, Senator Clinton entered as the frontrunner and didn't lose any ground to her principal challengers (Obama and Edwards). It will be interesting to see when (or if) Senator Obama starts to draw sharper comparisons in order to close the gap. Of the remaining candidates, I thought Senator Biden made a good showing, particularly on questions related to foreign policy that played to his considerable experience.
Brad DeLong frequently asks, "Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?" Perhaps the answer is that he doesn't subscribe to our local Connecticut Valley Spectator. In this week's edition, contributing writer Eric Francis dissects our local Ruby Ridge in the making. A teaser:
PLAINFIELD - Alice in Wonderland said it best: "If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't."
On Monday, two dozen reporters from as far away as Boston and Washington, D.C. were treated to a first-hand look at the parallel universe of Ed and Elaine Brown when the couple called a press conference on the front porch of their Plainfield home and vowed not to be taken alive by the U.S. Marshals who have been tasked to bring them into custody so they can start serving their five-year federal prison sentences for tax evasion.
Let's give him a Voxy and get him in the White House press corps.
The New York Times article this week about the study of racial bias in NBA officiating by Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers generated quite a bit of commentary. What is amazing is how little people understand, or are willing to understand, about statistics. Here's what the authors claim in the abstract of the study:
We find that--even conditioning on player and referee fixed effects (and specific game fixed effects)--that more personal fouls are awarded against players when they are officiated by an opposite-race officiating crew than when officiated by an own-race refereeing crew.
Much of the reaction among sportswriters has been to take the authors to task for calling the refs racist. (See Mike Wise in his column in Thursday's Washington Post and Kevin Hench at FoxSports.) Having taken a look at the study myself, I am surprised that those who make a living based on the sport would be so dismissive of the result. The main result of the paper is that the foul rate (fouls called per 48 minutes played) increases for black players when the racial composition of the three-person crew of referees goes from black to white. (See Table 4 and the discussion on page 8.) Any honest sportswriter should hold the NBA accountable for the result--why are the outcomes for fouls different across different racial configurations of refs and players?
It is very difficult to posit an explanation for these results that would attribute them to something other than race. First, no one disputes the NBA's claim that it does not assign referees to games based on their race or the racial composition of the two teams. (See page 4 and Table 1 of the study for discussion and evidence.) With (conditionally) random assignment, and the fact that the explanatory variables are fixed characteristics of people (i.e., race), we have the conditions for a clinical trial here, where "controlling" for possibly confounding factors is not likely to be important. Second, the authors do in fact control for a number of "fixed effects," exploiting the fact that their dataset is a panel consisting of a limited number of individuals observed in numerous interactions. This includes characteristics of the player and the refs that don't change over time. As the authors note, the most comprehensive results "are identified only off the differential propensity of teammates to earn extra fouls when the refereeing crew is of the opposite race."
Having said that, I think the authors soft-pedal one possible explanation of the results that would exonerate the refs. The following passage appears on pages 12-13:
The fourth point speaks to a relatively subtle interpretation issue: while we document a correlation between a player’s foul rate and the race of the referee, this may reflect the players responding to the race of the referees, rather than the referees policing opposite-race players more aggressively. Strategic responses by players would lead to an attenuation bias: expecting to receive more fouls for a given style of play, the players may play less aggressively, minimizing the impact of referee discrimination on realized fouls. This suggests that our results understate the amount of discrimination. Alternatively, if players exhibit oppositional responses, they may play more aggressively when policed by the opposite race. Importantly, such oppositional responses suggest that our findings are driven by changes in player behavior, rather than referee behavior. Yet if this were driving our results, one might expect to see effects not just on the number of fouls earned, but on the likelihood of fouling out, as well as other indicators of aggression, including blocks and steals. Instead, we find that blocks and steals actually decline under opposite-race referees.
I'm not persuaded by this reasoning. The player response needn't take the form of aggression--it merely needs to be a general decline in player performance in the presence of opposite-race referees. What if, for example, players find it more difficult to concentrate on their tasks when the refs are of opposite race? Elsewhere in the paper, the authors write, "Player-performance appears to deteriorate at every margin when officiated by a larger fraction of opposite-race referees." So why assume that it's the refs not the players? And why make a statement, "Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you’d win a few more games," even under the possible coaxing of a reporter?
The interpretation of the results that it's the players, not the refs, may also reconcile the results of NBA's internal studies that claim that, on a call-by-call basis, there is no evidence of racial bias. (The NBA has not released the results of these studies, much less the data.) If the players are changing their game based on the racial composition of the refereeing crew, then it is possible that every call or non-call is legitimate, and both studies can be accurate.
I watched the Republican "debate" last evening. For what it's worth, I thought Tommy Thompson gave one of the best answers (on making Iraq more of a legitimate federal system) and one of the worst answers (on not opposing an employer firing an employee for being gay) of the evening. Overall, I think Captain Ed's summary at the NRO symposium was on the mark:
I think the first question we have to answer is “How did MSNBC do?” Answer: Poorly. This presidential debate resembled a game show rather than a political forum. We had three moderators, one of whom insisted on rambling all over the stage to ask questions from the online audience. Those questions made the MTV “Boxers or briefs?” question seem thoughtful and relevant at times. One bright light apparently expected an answer to “What do you dislike most about America?” Lightning-round queries by Matthews left the candidates understandably frustrated when complex questions left no time for good answers. The format also made for uneven candidate participation; we heard less from Rudy Giuliani than we did from Ron Paul.
Mitt Romney had the best night. Calm, warm, thoughtful, and engaging, he looked and sounded like a serious presidential candidate. John McCain and Giuliani didn’t do themselves any favors, and at times did some damage, but managed to rally back to adequacy. Jim Gilmore, Mike Huckabee, and Duncan Hunter made cases as real candidates, while Sam Brownback didn’t quite get over that hump. Tom Tancredo showed no depth outside of immigration. The two embarrassments were Tommy Thompson and Ron Paul. Thompson’s takeaway was that he doesn’t oppose firing people for being gay, while Ron Paul’s was his insistence on answering every question with a discourse on the original intent of the Constitution. Both of them should understand their roles as the GOP’s Crazy Uncle Bobs and return to the attic forthwith.
If Fred Thompson can manage to skip the rest of these debates until the primaries, he might become the consensus Republican nominee. He may have actually won this debate simply by forcing the others to endure this one without him.
I stand by my earlier post on how unhelpful these events with so much time left to go before the election.
Robert Pear writes in today's New York Times that "Citizens Who Lack Papers Lose Medicaid." His opening paragraph:
A new federal rule intended to keep illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid has instead shut out tens of thousands of United States citizens who have had difficulty complying with requirements to show birth certificates and other documents proving their citizenship, state officials say.
I'm going to comment first on the policy and then on the reporting. I think it is crazy that the rule was implemented without a provision that presumed that all children were citizens until a fairly long window elapsed during which their parents or guardians could formally establish their status. Pre-natal care should always be included, for the same reasons. There's no reason why the rule has to have the sort of impact during its phase-in period that Pear's subsequent report documents. Say what you like about illegal immigration, Medicaid, or poverty--none of them are the fault of these kids.
Now go back to how Pear wrote that sentence. I don't think his reporting justifies the use of the word "instead" in that sentence. To do so requires him to show that the policy is not making illegal immigrants ineligible for Medicaid. He has not done that. Here are three excerpts from the article that come closest:
“The largest adverse effect of this policy has been on people who are American citizens,” said Kevin W. Concannon, director of the Department of Human Services in Iowa, where the number of Medicaid recipients dropped by 5,700 in the second half of 2006, to 92,880, after rising for five years. “We have not turned up many undocumented immigrants receiving Medicaid in Waterloo, Dubuque or anywhere else in Iowa,” Mr. Concannon said.
[...]
“We’ve seen an increase in the number of people who don’t qualify for Medicaid because they cannot produce proof of citizenship,” said Albert A. Zimmerman, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Children and Families. “Nearly all of these people are American citizens.”
[...]
Wisconsin keeps detailed records listing reasons for the denial or termination of benefits. “From August 2006 to February of this year, we terminated benefits for an average of 868 people a month for failure to document citizenship or identity,” said James D. Jones, the eligibility director of the Medicaid program in Wisconsin. “More than 600 of those actions were for failure to prove identity.” In the same period, Mr. Jones said, the state denied an average of 1,758 applications a month for failure to document citizenship or identity. In 1,100 of those cases, applicants did not provide acceptable proof of identity.
The last one simply shows the policy is having an effect. It does not identify whether the effect is the intended or (presumably) unintended effect. In the first two, claims are made that the effect is largest among the largest population of Medicaid recipients. The effect may even be disproportionately large among the citizen group. But there is no evidence that it is confined to that group. There is no information in the article about California or Texas or even the paper's home state of New York, where we would expect the largest populations of illegal immigrants to be applying.
The fact that a rule is having unintended consequences does not by itself mean that it is not also having its intended consequences.
James Joyner at Outside the Beltway has a very thoughtful post, "The News Business is a Business," in which he writes:
Austin Cline laments the fact that the news media is giving an “undeservedly large amount of attention” to the death of Anna Nichole Smith and the ensuing legal wrangling and to trivial matters such as Britney Spears’ decision to shave her head. While our politics are virtually 180 degrees apart, we agree on the relative merits of these stories.
The bottom line, though, is that the business of journalism is business. That for-profit businesses lead with the news that they believe, correctly it turns out, that their audience is most interested in should hardly be surprising. That’s how they sell advertising, keep and expand their audience, and ensure their employees can feed their families and pay their mortgages. The fact that “corporations are now pretty much in control of the network news divisions” is nothing new. Further, General Electric and Time Warner are more able to absorb losses than would be a small group of private owners.
More importantly, these fluffy stories pay for the stuff Cline and I find interesting. There’s hardly a dearth of good reporting on matters of war, international affairs, and domestic public policy. Indeed, there’s more of it than most of us can keep up with.
I think that's a pretty reasonable analysis of what's going on, including the appeal to a tradeoff at the end that naturally resonates with an economist. But I think there is something more to it. Even if there is "no dearth of good reporting" (a point on which I do not agree), so-called news organizations are drowning it out with their pre-occupation with non-newsworthy events. We cannot find the signal amidst the noise.
The news media help set a national agenda in this country for topics of broad conversation. Being on that agenda increases the amount of discussion in the public. Being off the agenda decreases the amount of discussion. More discussion leads to more information being made public.
When I read this post at OTB, I found myself thinking back to the summer of 2001, when, with the benefit of hindsight, the news media might have been usefully employed in aggregating up the disparate pieces of information that led to 9/11. Instead, what were the big stories that summer? The ones I remember most were the mania associated with the TV show "Survivor" and, even more so, the disappearance of Chandra Levy. The question is not so much what these so-called news entities were showing, it's what they were not showing because they were showing this other stuff.
The preoccupation with Chandra Levy's disappearance that summer was so consuming for these so-called news organizations that some people have theorized that her disappearance must have been related to 9/11. Want to convince yourself? Do a Google search for "Chandra Levy." As of this writing, the top five hits are the entry in Wikipedia, two stories at CNN.com about her body being found, and then these two from conspiracy theorists.
There is another problem. The news business is a business, to be sure, but it is supposed to be a serious business. These sagas of missing or crazy people just don't rise to the level of seriousness required of a news organization. It is beneath them, and they should recognize it as such. And people notice this lack of seriousness--they begin to impart that lack of seriousness to the whole brand, even when something big happens and we really then do need a serious news organization. And we are all worse off for it.