Category: Politics

Making sense of the predictions

I absolutely agree that Sam Wang and the Princeton Election Consortium have a good argument for there being a 99+% chance of Clinton winning. Unfortunately, I think there’s only about a 50% chance of his argument being right. It could also be that Nate Silver is right, that there is a 65% chance. Putting that all together, I come down right about where the NY Times is, at about an 85% chance of escaping apocalypse.

I’ve written a bit more about how I think about the likelihoods here. But a fundamental problem with the PEC estimate is that it clearly puts very little weight on the possibility of model failure. A fundamental problem with the 538 estimates is that they are very clearly not martingales. That is, they are not consistent predictions of the future based on all available information. One way of saying this is to note that a few weeks ago Clinton had close to a 90% estimated victory probability. Now it’s 65%. That seems like a modest change, but if the first estimate was correct, the current estimate reflects an event that had less than a 1 in 3 chance of happening. So we’re more than halfway there. But does anyone really think that the events of the past month have been that unlikely?

The smoking gun

US Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is all in favour of selective leaks from the FBI about ongoing investigations:

HH: It’s just a practical impossibility. But he might find a smoking gun. If he does, do you think he has an obligation to tell the American people about it?

PR: Yeah, look, I understand why he did what he did, because imagine if he didn’t, and we found out after the fact that he was sitting on this before the election. So I clearly understand why he did what he did. Hillary Clinton has no one to blame but herself, and she and Republicans are saying if you’ve got something you’ve got cleared, put it out there. So yeah, I think if he’s gone through the process that he needs to go through to vet evidence, and he’s got it, he should do it. I do agree with that. More disclosure is better, clearly.

Ordinarily, the crime-fiction term “smoking gun” involves investigation into, you know, a murder, there’s a body, there’s a suspect, and there’s a gun in his/her hand that seems to have just been used. In this case we must imagine a scene like the following:

JW: We see here the smoking gun. What do you make of it, Holmes?

SH: Yes, very odd that this gun has been smoking for the past four years. This is proof that Mrs Clinton is a murderer. It remains only for us to determine who has been murdered.

What is the actual crime that the “smoking gun” is supposed to be incontrovertible proof of? What lurid fantasies do the Republicans and the FBI have of the contents of these missing emails? Contacts with Libyan rebels informing them of the weak points in Benghazi consulate security? The communication that lured Vince Foster into the park? Arrangements to pay a dozen different women to falsely accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault?

Waiting for Armageddon

The US presidential election is now just 4 days away. It seems to me that people are not taking the danger seriously. In particular, last week, in the hour after the FBI started its intervention to bring on the apocalypse (more work for them, I suppose), it was reported that the S&P500 stock index fell by about 1%. If we suppose that the FBI’s announcement made a Trump victory 2% more likely, that suggests an expectation that Trump would wipe 50% off the value of the stock market. Yet that doesn’t seem to be incorporated into the current value of the markets. It’s almost as though investors are in denial: When forced to focus on the Trump danger they rate it apocalyptic, but as soon as the news quiets down — within minutes — they go back to treating the probability as 0.

I’d like to believe Sam Wang’s projections, that the election result is all but certain for Clinton. Nothing is all but certain, least of all the future. Nate Silver’s reasoning, leading to about a 2/3 chance for Clinton, seems to me very sound: Trump will win only if he wins about half a dozen states where he has about a 50% chance. That sounds like about a 2% chance, except that they are unlikely to be independent. The reality is likely to be somewhere between 2% and 50%. Where it is, is almost impossible to judge. I’m slightly more hopeful than that because I believe in the power of Clinton’s organisation. But how much more?

But even 2%, for the risk of a crybaby fascist as president, is far too much. It’s not clear to me how the US can come back from this disaster, even if Trump loses.

Moving the goalposts

Reactions to the high court’s ruling that Brexit requires approval of parliament can only be understood in the context of the fundamental unseriousness of British politics. It’s all sport, and they won, so you can’t take away their victory.
But “their victory” involves taking away people’s rights, so there’s a parliamentary procedure. That’s how politics differs from sport. If you win the championship, as the cliché goes, they can never take that away from you. In politics every victory is immediately followed by a struggle over what the victory means.

The Daily Mail calls the judges “Enemies of the People” who “defied 17.4 million Brexit voters.” The Sun’s headline attacked the lead plaintiff for being foreign-born. The Daily Express said that three judges have “blocked Brexit”.

How odd, as many have pointed out, that the Brexit supporters suddenly object to parliamentary sovereignty.
Continue reading “Moving the goalposts”

The Brexit spiral begins

I’ve been warning since the Brexit vote that there could be a xenophobic feedback spiral:

We face years of escalating frustration on both sides of the negotiating table, as the British are confronted with the reality of a Europe that has no interest in making the fantasies of the Conservative Party come true. The British public will become more bloody-minded, unwilling to be dictated to by a bunch of foreigners, leading to a feedback loop of retaliation against the hostages, the EU citizens living in Britain and the British living in the EU. It could get very ugly.

According to the Guardian,

The chairman of JD Wetherspoon has fired a warning shot that the pub chain could stop selling drinks brands from other European countries if senior EU leaders maintain a “bullying” approach to Brexit negotiations.

For Britain to take a decision that harms its neighbours — with rhetoric that positively seems to relish the gratuitous harm to its neighbours — is a matter of high principle. Sovereignty! But when the neighbours respond in kind it is “bullying”.

I never heard of this chain, but then, the negotiations haven’t even started.

Stranger than fiction

Over the many decades when a female president had become conceivable but not yet real, fictional representations purveyed all kinds of notions — some silly, some serious, some sexist — of the first female president. (Jokes about the closet space in the White House were, as I recall, a staple.) But I can’t recall that anyone supposed that the first presidential campaign to feature a woman candidate would have her up against an opponent who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals, or that we would have the following exchange between her opponent and the sitting vice president:

Biden said of Trump on Saturday: “The press always asks me, don’t I wish I was debating him? No, I wish we were in high school and I could take him behind the gym. That’s what I wish.”

Casting scorn on Biden’s physical strength, Trump said, “Mr Tough Guy, you know he’s Mr Tough Guy, you know when he’s Mr Tough Guy? When he’s standing behind a microphone by himself.” Trump added: “He wants to bring me to the back of the barn? Oooooooooh. Some things in life you could really love doing.”

A fiction writer would hardly have dared to imagine the campaign to feature such a running parody of male pathology. It would have been ridiculed as insular feminist propaganda.

Maybe it will come out next that Trump has been scrawling Clinton’s telephone number on bathroom walls.

Trumping the Tories

One of the great innovations of the Donald Trump presidential campaign has been its exaltation of the element of surprise. My interpretation is that it started as a clever bluff for any detailed questions about plans for his presidency, of which he has none, in the sense that we would ordinarily understand that concept, but evolved into an ideology. It’s not just his war plans that he’s playing close to the chest. His immigration plans, his economic plans, even his decision to contest the election or not, are supposed to be “surprises”, and he mocks those so foolish as to reveal their secret plans.

(The idea that you might have allies who ought to coordinate their actions with yours, or other governing bodies that have a constitutional right to be consulted and informed, is beyond his worldview.)

This is all in keeping with Trump’s world-view, in which statesmanship is just a real estate swindle negotiation writ large. What is more surprising is that the generally more sensible British Tories have adopted a similar approach to Brexit negotiations:

The international development secretary, who was a prominent leave campaigner and is said to be among the ministers on Theresa May’s Brexit committee, said a debate in the House of Commons over the terms of UK’s departure would give the game away to Brussels.

“If I were to sit down and play poker with you this morning, I’m not going to show you my cards before we even start playing the game,” she told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show.

Her comments came in the wake of an attempt by a powerful cross-party group of MPs to force a parliamentary vote on whether the government should reveal its plans for the UK’s future outside the EU before negotiations begin…

 

Of course, you might be inclined to say that the UK’s exit from the EU is a serious constitutional matter, not a poker game. But then, that would just mean you don’t understand the mentality of British politics.

Joking around

One of the bizarre features of US politics is that, among the many roles that presidents are required to take on — commander in chief of the armed forces, head of the federal bureaucracy, regal head of state — they are also expected to act as stand-up comedians on certain ritual occasions. So naturally candidates are expected to do so as well, to prove they have what it takes. The occasion is the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner, an event in honour of the first Catholic major party presidential candidate (in 1928), former NY governor Alfred Smith.

Donald Trump has suffered from the inability of large parts of the public to appreciate — or indeed, to recognise — his idiosyncratic humour, whether he’s been joshing about Barack Obama being the founder of ISIS or not accepting an election loss or encouraging Russian hackers to break into his opponent’s email accounts. So it is hardly surprising that his appearance at the dinner was not well received:

Donald Trump was loudly booed at the annual Al Smith charity dinner in New York on Thursday—an evening typically reserved for good-natured humor and a rare opportunity for presidential candidates to demonstrate a capacity for self-deprecation—when he attacked Hillary Clinton with the aggressive language frequently used at his campaign rallies.

What interests me about this is what it says about the nature of humour in general, and political humour in particular. Barbed jokes are naturally easier to enjoy when the target is someone you dislike, though that is somewhat balanced, at least for mature and responsible people, by a discomfort at “punching down”: It is uncomfortable to see the weak being trampled on, even if they are contemptible for other reasons.

I do have the impression that there is an asymmetry between left and right in this respect,  at least in the US. No one likes seeing their sacred cows being gored, but it seems to me that US liberals really enjoy seeing their champions taken down a peg, and are able to find deeper humour in their opponents through greater willingness to imagine their worldview. I think this is why successful political satire in the US has come to be almost exclusively a province of the left. Continue reading “Joking around”

Political doping

Who would have imagined that elections could be swayed by political-performance-enhancing drugs?

Trump, in full “unshackled” mode, told a crowd of supporters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that Clinton, who has won both presidential debates according to most polls, seemed “pumped up” at the beginning of the second debate last Sunday, but that he thought her energy then waned as the debate went on. So, in Donald Trump’s reality, it of course stands to reason that she was thus “pumped up” on some kind of performance-enhancing drugs, and they should both take drug tests before the third debate.

I dispute the claim that this is fully unshackled. If Trump were fully unshackled, he would demand that Clinton be subjected to a medical gender test, like South African runner Caster Semenya. After all, as Trump has so eloquently put it in the past

Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote.

(“Frankly” is great. He’s giving us the straight dope now, as opposed to the politically correct pabulum that he is otherwise forced to espouse.) She should have to prove, then, that she’s not a man. It clearly wouldn’t be fair to allow Hillary Clinton to run for president as a woman, with all the advantages that women are known to enjoy in presidential campaigns, while actually benefitting from a higher testosterone level than her male opponent.

Imagine if it didn’t come out until after the election that Hillary was doping. What would we do then? Would her victory be annulled? Would she be banned from political competition for four years? If her testosterone levels are too high, would she be forced to take suppressing hormones? Would she be required campaign as a man? Perhaps she’d have to sexually assault a campaign worker, to even things out? The mind boggles.