steinsaltz

Beware the Dijsselbomb!

Why are rich people so squeamish about the truth?

Some very smart people have taken to the Internet to ridicule Eurogroup president and Netherlands finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem for his inappropriate attack of clear speech. He said that “the Cyprus deal will serve as a template for future bank restructurings in the euro zone.” Sounds like something to cheer: Deposit insurance has been affirmed, but implicit taxpayer guarantees for wealthy bank creditors have been repudiated.

But instead we have Matt Yglesias saying “That’s the kind of remark that it would be very sensible for, say, a blogger to make. But Dijsselbloem is president of the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, and a guy in his role is supposed to be reassuring people. Instead he caused them to panic.” And so Meneer Dijsselbloem issued another statement saying that of course the Cyprus bailout isn’t a template for anything, because every financial crisis is a unique special flower and no other European tax haven is an island and you can’t step into the same river twice… Continue reading “Beware the Dijsselbomb!”

Reprobationist childrearing

This article about the differences between parental attitudes and obsessions in the US from those in other western nations (in this case, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and Spain) reminded me of my own perplexity about the general culture of childrearing among ambitious middle-class Americans. (When I say Americans, I really mean Anglo-Americans. I think the Americans would have seemed less of an outlier if the original study had included Canadian or British parents.) In particular, why are parents in these countries (and their governments — particularly in the UK) so concerned with training their children in age-inappropriate skills — reading at 4, playing violin at 3 — and so keen to find evidence that their children are prodigies? This despite the clear evidence of child development research that early training in reading is largely counterproductive.

The article points out that the Anglo-American parents are uniquely concerned with convincing themselves (and reassuring their friends) that their children are “intelligent”. Why? Well, in our increasingly winner-take-all societies, there’s obviously a lot of anxiety for the future status of ones children: Modest success no longer seems feasible, so one is left straining to heave ones children into the ranks of the winners, lest they sink into the vast mob of losers. Despite all the evidence that the main criterion for success is having successful parents, it seems to me that there’s been an enormous amount of propaganda in recent decades for the notion that intelligence determines all, and that intelligence is innate.

This is where reprobationism comes in, the Calvinist doctrine that God has chosen the elect, those who ultimately will be saved, from the beginning of time, and there is nothing a damned goat can do, neither faith nor good works, to ascend to the saved sheep. Continue reading “Reprobationist childrearing”

World’s greatest healthcare (TM)

What does it mean when a US politician like Chris Christie tells the Republican National Convention the US has “the world’s greatest healthcare system”? Is it like when kids buy a “World’s Greatest Dad” mug for Father’s Day: An expression of affection for an ill-favoured thing, but mine own?

One of my formative political experiences was the summer during graduate school, when I listened on the radio to broadcasts of the US Senate debating the Clinton healthcare proposals. What struck me above all was how the senators universally (it seemed) invoked the unmatched excellence of American health care. “The envy of the world”, “best health care in the world”. The only difference of opinion was, of course, that opponents of the reform said that tinkering with this paragon of perfection would inevitably be disastrous, while supporters argued for making this blessing available to more people.*

So, the politicians certainly appear to believe it, and to believe that it should have policy implications; or to believe that a significant portion of the public believes it; or to believe that a significant portion of the public will respond favourably to the assertion, even if they suspect it is untrue. Is it cognitive dissonance? We’re America dammit, and being the sort of people we are, we certainly wouldn’t put up with a ramshackle healthcare system.

Continue reading “World’s greatest healthcare (TM)”

More reflections on 9/11 and the Iraq war

I left out a few points that I wanted to make in my post on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War:

About a week after, I wrote in my diary that I had the disturbing impression, reading the comments of journalists, politicians, and intellectuals, that a significant subset of them were in a certain way pleased: not that the country was attacked, certainly not at the tremendous loss of life, but that life had turned serious. The country had been wallowing in nostalgia for the “Greatest Generation” — Tom Brokaw’s book had been published just a few years earlier — while the current youth (a group which I was just growing out of, being then aged 33) had its culture defined by ironic detachment. So we had articles on “The Age of Irony Comes to an End“. It was mainly just another way to bash young people, which is always popular, but it also appealed to a deep-seated desire to be the protagonists of history, solving problems of historic dimensions. And there are no victory parades for conserving energy and stopping runaway global warming. This was confirmed for me when people started quoting incessantly W H Auden’s 1939 disdain for the “clever hopes” expiring “of a low dishonest decade”. Continue reading “More reflections on 9/11 and the Iraq war”

Evidence, WMD, and the Iraq War: Reflections on Tony Blair and Colin Powell

With the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, it’s an appropriate time to comment on two elements of the public discussion of the war, in the US and the UK, that puzzle me.

The insistence, particularly among lefties who supported the war then and have reconsidered the matter since then, that everyone thought Saddam Hussein had active nuclear and chemical programs. At the time, I strongly opposed the war — because I thought it was an inappropriate distraction from Afghanistan, I didn’t like the way it was being ginned up, the WMD argument didn’t seem to me sufficiently important relative to the trouble it was likely to stir up –but I had every anticipation that the US military would march in and would find the missing nuclear program, and that this would be waved in the face of everyone who was still legitimately skeptical. I assumed there was a lot of secret information that more or less proved to anyone entitled to see it that this work was going on. It seemed more likely than not, until… Until Colin Powell’s speech to the UN. I found that speech astonishing. My thought was, surely they are pulling out all of the most convincing bits from their secret dossier, and that’s it? Continue reading “Evidence, WMD, and the Iraq War: Reflections on Tony Blair and Colin Powell”

Statisticians of the World, Unite!

You have nothing to lose but your Markov chains!

From “A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485”, by Nicholas Vincent:

Finally, as in all modern debates from which statistics and the spirit of Karl Marx are never far distant, it has been argued that, by 1200, Philip of France was far richer than the King of England and therefore ideally placed to seize the Plantagenet lands.

Statisticians or Stakhanovites? You decide…

Daniel Kahneman, Social Psychology, and Finance

I’ve been a booster of the Tversky-Kahneman cognitive-bias revolution since I read their article in Scientific American as a high school student. (To be honest, I’d always lazily thought of it as Tversky’s work, but Daniel Kahneman has had the good sense not to die prematurely, and to collect a Nobel memorial prize.) And I’ve greatly enjoyed Kahneman’s new popular book on his collected lessons from many decades of research on cognitive biases.

Putting that together with my longstanding contempt for the finance profession (expressed at greatest length here, but more generally listed here), I was particularly delighted to start in on the chapter titled “The Illusion of Validity”, where Kahneman lays into the self-serving illusions of finance professionals. It turns out, though, that this chapter is an intellectual trainwreck, with oversimplifications piling up on crude distortions, while the whistle of self-satisfied self-promotion shrills incessantly in the background. It’s both insufferable and so poorly reasoned that it begins to call the reliability of the rest of the book into question. Kahneman doesn’t claim to be free of the cognitive biases he analyses in others, but you might expect more self-awareness.

Continue reading “Daniel Kahneman, Social Psychology, and Finance”

Fascism in America

Today we have conquered the health-care insurance exclusion for pre-existing conditions. Tomorrow, Poland!

Nuremberg rally — Die NRA sind unser Unglück!

I remember many years ago when I first saw a car bumper sticker saying “First round up the guns, then round up the Jews!”, which I assumed to be suggesting that the owner disapproved of both confiscations. Just now, the “Nazi gun control” trope is all over the place: for instance, here and here and even here.
It’s weird, because this story seems to have literally zero basis in fact. I’ve read quite a few books about the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism, and the Third Reich, and I’ve never come across any reference to a Nazi interest on the question of private gun ownership. Sure, Jews were forbidden to have guns, but they were also forbidden from owning cats. It’s not that the Nazis feared the wrath of the Hebrew feline defenders.

The only reference I’ve come across to a nexus between Nazi ideology and private guns (as opposed to military armaments, in which they obviously had an abiding interest) is a passage in Ian Kershaw’s masterful biography of Hitler. Discussing the extraordinary thoroughness of the campaign of “Gleichschaltung” — the “coordination” of all institutions, whether large or petty, with Nazi goals and ideology — in 1933, he quotes an “activity report” from the small town of Theisenort (population about 750) in Upper Franconia:

The Veterans’ association was coordinated on 6.8.33, on 7.8.33 the Singing Association in Theisenort. With the Shooting Club in Theisenort this was not necessary, since the board and committee are up to 80 per cent party members.

So there would have been no need to round up the weapons of regime opponents, because the shooting enthusiasts were all Nazis to begin with. That doesn’t really support the whole bulwark against fascism idea. Continue reading “Fascism in America”

Screens or Weights?

I probably shouldn’t be spending so much of my time thinking about U.S. election polls: I have no special expertise, and everyone else in the country has lost interest by now. But I’ve just gotten some new information about a question that was puzzling me throughout the recent election campaign: What do pollsters mean when they refer to a likely voter screen? Continue reading “Screens or Weights?”

Are you demographic?

As a sometime demographer myself, I am fascinated by the prominence of “demographics” as an explanatory concept in the recent presidential election, now already slipping away into hazy memory. Recent political journalism would barely stand without this conceptual crutch, as here and here and here. A bit more nuance here. Some pushback from the NY Times here.

The crassest expression of this concept came in an article yesterday by (formerly?) respected conservative journalist Michael Barone, explaining why he was no longer confident that Mitt Romney would win the election by a large margin. Recall that several days before the election, despite the contrary evidence of what tens of thousands of voters were actually telling pollsters, he predicted 315 electoral votes for Romney, saying “Fundamentals usually prevail in American elections. That’s bad news for Barack Obama.” In retrospect, he says,

I was wrong because the outcome of the election was not determined, as I thought it would be, by fundamentals…. I think fundamentals were trumped by mechanics and, to a lesser extent, by demographics.

Continue reading “Are you demographic?”