Not All Democrats Are The Same, Media Edition

Leaning left – Michigan Daily Column by Karl Stampfl:

It’s old news: College professors, including those at the University, skew politically to the left.

According to the most recent Federal Election Commission filings, people who listed the University of Michigan as their employer have contributed a total of $125,298 to the presidential candidates. Of that, Republican candidates received $27,113. Democratic candidates got $98,185. That’s kind of a big difference. Of the money that went to Democrats, Hillary Clinton trounced all the GOP hopefuls combined with $34,394, and Barack Obama did even better, raising $55,887, twice as much as the Republicans. Of 492 contributions by University affiliates, 52 went to Republicans and 450 to Democrats.

Of course, those filings reports are an inexact measure for several reasons – the Democratic race has lasted longer, for one – but they paint a generally accurate picture.

Still not convinced?

Frankly, no. Here’s the comment I posted on the Daily’s site (slightly edited):
I like the theory behind this column, but I’m afraid it’s lacking some nuance in terms of the substance. The world is not divided into two camps, liberal and conservative, and balance or diversity of thought does not consist of hearing from both those sides. That perception of the political landscape, made easy and intuitive-seeming by the two party system in this country, is constantly reinforced by media coverage. But, if you look across the world, it doesn’t hold up.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

If you compare the views of college professors to political views worldwide (at least in much of the developed, Western world), I think they are much more representative. Some conservatives, a fair number of moderates, and some extreme liberals. There is diversity, it just happens that most of that diversity falls in the spectrum associated with the Democratic party in the United States. But that doesn’t mean it’s some sort of uniform liberal blob that converts you to a particular dogmatic way of thinking. Just try to get a moderate Democratic economics professor to agree with a radical socialist sociology professor about development and I think you will see my point. Just knowing who someone votes for, or donates money too, doesn’t tell you everything about their politics or ideology.

Is Economics a Science? From Nobel Prizes to Public Opinion

So, one of the questions that I like to think about on a lazy Sunday afternoon is, what makes something a science? By this I do not mean the philosophical question of what constitutes valid methods for uncovering truth, etc. Rather, I want to know why some disciplines/fields/courses of study are seen as scientific or science-like and others are not, and by whom. For example, do the practitioners think they are doing science? What does that mean to them? How about politicians? The public at large?

For example, I would argue that there is something of a debate within Sociology about the status of the discipline. George Steinmetz lays out a large piece of this debate in his article, “Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and “Small N’s” in Sociology.” Steinmetz takes up the side of critical realism against what he calls “methodological positivism”, which is a standpoint with a particular ontology, epistemology and methodology all inspired by a particular vision of science. Steinmetz also examines some postmodern critiques and contrasts them with both critical realism and methodological positivism. The details aren’t essential here, all I’m trying to show is that within Sociology there are related debates about both the meaning of ‘being a science’ and whether or not Sociology is or ought to try to be a science.

But what about economics?

History, Sociology, Science(!), and a Personal Note

First, a quote from an article by historian Isaiah Berlin from this 1960 essay, “History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History”

For one of the central differences between such genuine attempts to apply scientific method to human affairs as are embodied in, say, economics or social psychology or sociology, and the analogous attempt to apply it in history proper, is this: that scientific procedure is directed in the first place to the construction of an ideal model, with which the portion of the real world to be analysed must, as it were, be matched, so that it can be described and analysed in the terms of its deviation from the model. But to construct a useful model will only be feasible when it is possible to abstract a sufficient number of sufficiently stable similarities from the things, facts, events, of which the real world – the flow of experience – is composed. Only where such recurrences in the real world are frequent enough, and similar enough to be classifiable as so many deviations from the self-same model, will the idealized model that is compounded of them – the electron, the gene, the economic man – do its job of making it possible for us to extrapolate from the known to the unknown.

I really like this conception of science, models and the connection to the social sciences. I would add a slight corollary – very few of the things social scientists (even economists) care about exhibit the kind of stability and repetition you need to make a lot of generalizations very useful as anything more than heuristics, and the models that seem the most general and applicable (“the economic man”) may do as much harm as good if taken to be too literal or true (compare with the previous post on economics). My tendency is to view knowledge as hard. As a good friend of mine likes to quote, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”*

Second, on a personal note, I have decided to take my prelim exam (in Economic Sociology and Organizations) this fall, which means my summer will be devoted to reading classic and contemporary works in that field and little else. As such, this blog may swing away from observations about politics and towards interesting tidbits I find in that literature, or perhaps even summaries of the works I find most interesting. I apologize in advance to anyone hoping for more politics and less sociology and economics. It also means my posting may get a bit more erratic. I hope I can make the material as interesting as possible, while still being generally useful for myself (as is the purpose of a commonplace book). Thanks for reading.

* Attributed to Niels Bohr, a quantum physicist.

What Economists Knew About Knowing

In his excellent book, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, economics journalist David Warsh lays out the fascinating back story (in a broad sense) of a single important economics paper – “Romer 1990″. In this paper, titled “Endogenous Technological Change”, Paul Romer lays out a new model for understanding the growth of a nation which finally brought knowledge – in the form of improvements in technology – into the model. Previous growth models (such as the famous Solow model) had left such improvements to the ‘residual’, and thus failed to explain a great deal of the changes that occurred in 20th century economies.

(Warning – this post is rather lengthy!)

Inequality Matters: Only the Poor Die Young?

Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation – New York Times:

In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.

After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that “life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000.”

“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).

One of the most interesting findings reported in this story disputes the inevitability of the link between income inequality and gaps in life expectancy:

Some health economists contend that the disparities between rich and poor inevitably widen as doctors make gains in treating the major causes of death.

Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejected that idea. Professor Krieger investigated changes in the rate of premature mortality (dying before the age of 65) and infant death from 1960 to 2002. She found that inequities shrank from 1966 to 1980, but then widened.

“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”

The creation of Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities, Professor Krieger said.

I don’t have any particular insight into the phenomenon, but I thought the story was worth posting. The various sources to which the gap (and its increase) is attributed are quite interesting – everything from a ‘blame the victim’ set of behavioral sources (poor diet, unsafe behavior, etc.) to racism (doctors treating black patients, who tend to be poorer, worse than whites) to more directly economic (poor people are less likely to be able to afford the best health care, or have health insurance at all). Which sources you see as most important will wildly alter the kind of policies this finding would be mustered to support – anything from health education programs in inner cities to a bill of rights for patients with some sort of teeth to universal health care.

Judge Posner Rationalizes Punishing the Poor More

I very much enjoy reading the joint blog of economist Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner because sometimes you happen upon a gem of rational choice reasoning. A recent pair of comments (only Posner’s is linked) touch on the idea of individual responsibility and what it means, in particular in the context of the housing collapse and proposed bailouts at various levels. Posner takes this difficult topic and spins it into a defense of harsher penalties for the poor:

The Becker-Posner Blog: Individual Responsibility–Posner’s Comment:

Criminals will sometimes try to place the blame for their crimes on a bad upbringing. That is nothing new. A criminal (or his lawyer) will make any argument that might reduce his sentence; he would be irrational not to do so. And it is plausible that a bad upbringing, along with a low IQ, increases the likelihood that a person will become a criminal, by reducing his alternative legal opportunities. But as Becker points out, most people with a bad upbringing (and equally most people with low IQs) do not become criminals. This has, to my mind, a practical rather than a moral significance. It suggests that the threat of punishment can deter even a person who has had a bad upbringing. So by adding that threat to the considerations that a person will weigh in deciding whether to commit a crime, society can reduce the crime rate. We may even want to punish the criminals with the bad upbringings more heavily than other criminals, in the belief that they can be deterred only by a threat of heavier punishment. On this approach to crime and punishment, we punish criminals not because they “freely” chose to do bad things, but because by punishing them we can at tolerable cost reduce the prevalence of activities that generate net negative social costs. We make people do the “right” thing not by appealing to the exercise of their free will but by increasing the cost to them of doing the wrong thing. [Emphasis added.]

Is it just me, or does this read like a justification for mandatory minimums, harsher penalties for crack than powdered cocaine, etc.?

Not The Most Important Story About Race This Week

I’m guessing that almost everyone has seen or heard about Senator Obama’s speech on race. If you haven’t check it out on youtube or read the transcript. I enjoyed the speech, and agree with many of the commentators that Obama did an excellent job broaching one of the most divisive issues in America today, and he did it with nuance uncharacteristic of a presidential candidate. We’ll see whether or not that nuance has a big impact on the electorate. I was particularly impressed with the way he captured white anger at certain features of the American racial system these days:

Your Morning Goffman

via chris uggen’s weblog: From Goffman’s (1983) “The Interaction Order”,

“I have no universal cure for the ills of sociology. A multitude of myopias limit the glimpse we get of our subject matter. To define one source of blindness and bias as central is engagingly optimistic. Whatever our substantive focus and whatever our methodological persuasion, all we can do I believe is to keep faith with the spirit of natural science, and lurch along, seriously kidding ourselves that our rut has a forward direction. We have not been given the credence and weight that economists lately have acquired, but we can almost match them when it comes to the failure of rigorously calculated predictions. Certainly our systematic theories are every bit as vacuous as theirs: we manage to ignore almost as many critical variables as they do. We do not have the esprit that anthropologists have, but our subject matter at least has not been obliterated by the spread of the world economy. So we have an undiminished opportunity to overlook the relevant facts with our very own eyes. We can’t get graduate students who score as high as those who go into Psychology, and at its best the training the latter get seems more professional and more thorough than what we provide. So we haven’t managed to produce in our students the high level of trained incompetence that psychologists have achieved in theirs, although, God knows, we’re working on it.”

Gingrich on Corporate Influence

No time for a long post today – I am back in town but still on a trip of sorts – but I thought I would call your attention to this interesting interview with Newt Gingrich in the Freakonomics blog on NYTimes.com:

Newt Gingrich Answers Your Questions – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog:

Q: Do you think that corporations have too much power in government, through lobbyists and monetary incentives? What should be done to correct what I see as an imbalance of power between voters and the rich/powerful?

A:There is a direct relationship between the size, influence, and power of a government and the influence of lobbyists on that government. If we are serious about limiting the ability of lobbyists to dictate government policy, we should be serious about limiting the size and scope of the government’s power. Until that happens, the wealthy and powerful will always be able to have influence through lobbying.

Slate On Primaries (Not) Predicting General Elections

What do the primaries tell us about Clinton and Obama as general election candidates? – By Jeff Greenfield – Slate Magazine:

It’s the political equivalent of “tastes great!” vs. “less filling!” among light-beer lovers: the Clinton-Obama battle over who will be a better general-election candidate based on the primary results. The Clinton campaign says she’d be the better fall candidate because she’s stronger with her party’s core of white working- and middle-class voters in Democratic states. The Obama campaign argues that he’d be better in the fall because he can attract independents, bring new younger voters to the polls, and compete in traditionally red states.

Who’s right? Neither side. Why? Because they are both arguing from the false assumption that primary contests can provide a guide to the fall campaign. Look back across recent political history and you’ll be hard-pressed to find such a link
…
In the case of the current battle, we’re divining, for example, whether Obama can draw white voters based on those who have decided to vote in Democratic primaries. We don’t really know how this historic contest between a woman and an African-American is playing with white voters who are not part of the primary process. Maybe race and gender matter a lot less than they would have a few decades ago; maybe such voters are sitting this round out and will flock to the white guy in the fall. We are unlikely to get a persuasive answer to this question until the fall. Nor do we have any real clue about whether Clinton’s showing among white working-class voters would mean much of anything should she be the Democrat to confront John McCain … or whether a campaign focused on the economy as opposed to national security would pull such voters to either Democrat. Can we guess? Sure. Can the primaries offer us actionable intelligence? Highly unlikely.

Not much to add to that, but I thought I’d throw the link out and acknowledge that some media outlets do indeed recognize the silliness of arguments about primaries predicting generals (Obama’s “I put red-states in play” argument or Clinton’s “I win big (swing) states” argument being two examples, that may or may not be true, but are not really supported by primary results alone).