Conlections

President Obama is NOT against SOPA

2012-01-18T17:21:00.003-06:00

Just now the Obama campaign sent out this e-mail touting the President's opposition to .... uh... well, read it:

Adam --

I wanted to make sure you heard the news about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Over the weekend, President Obama's administration said that legislation addressing online piracy is needed this year -- but it will not support any bill that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the global internet.

Answering thousands of Americans who signed petitions asking the President to protect the open and innovative internet, the administration laid out what they will -- and will not -- accept when it comes to addressing online piracy.

Folks spoke out on this issue -- and President Obama listened.

Stand with the President in support of a free and open internet:

http://my.barackobama.com/Open-Internet

Online piracy hurts our economy, threatens middle-class jobs, and undermines the work of some of our most creative companies and entrepreneurs. The right solution will provide new tools in this fight while adhering to the basic principles that have inspired the internet age.

Thanks for all you do to support them.

-- James

James Kvaal
National Policy Director
Obama for America

Let's be clear. If the President were opposed to 'reducing freedom of expression' he would issue a veto threat on this bill and the Senate counterpart. Why is it that people my age understand this so well but he doesn't?

Whip Count Data Made Available

2012-01-17T14:02:00.004-06:00

One interesting part of congress is the way member's issue positions evolve prior to a roll call vote on that issue. The roll call vote ignores all of the 'politics' that goes on before the vote. That is, the arm twisting, the promises, the compromises, etc. One way to see what members think before the final vote is by looking at a pre-vote whip count. The majority and minority whip acts as the member of the leadership who tries to get their party members to vote the party line on a given issue.

Previously, very few of these whip counts have been made public but thanks to C. Lawrence Evans and his student research assistants, a large swath of the historical data has been made public. This is quite exciting. You can see all the relevant information like code books and such at the link. Further, here is the e-mail sent to the political science methodology listserv and also the legislative studies listserv announcing the data:

I am pleased to announce the first release of the Congressional Whip Count Database, which provides extensive data about the whip polls conducted by party leaders in the U.S. House prior to major roll call votes on the floor, 1955-86. Data, codebooks, and other relevant information can be accessed via my website:http://wmpeople.wm.edu/clevan
The data are based on records included in the personal papers of former congressional party leaders. Included in this release are coded data about over 650 whipped questions and nearly 150,000 individual-level responses by lawmakers.
The project has received support from the National Science Foundation (Award SES-0417759), The Carl Albert Center, The Dirksen Congressional Center, and the Roy R. Charles Center of the College of William and Mary. I apologize for repetitive postings.
Larry Evans
C. Lawrence Evans Dept. of GovernmentCollege of William and Maryhttp://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/clevan

Paul Krugman's Academic Thought Process

2011-12-31T11:04:00.000-06:00

Earlier today a graduate school friend linked to Paul Krugman's research process and a 'guide to thinking.' I was going to save it but it is probably more useful to just post it here in full. So here it is, in it's entirety and it can also be found here.

HOW I WORK

My formal charge in this essay is to talk about my "life philosophy". Let me make it clear at the outset that I have no intention of following instructions, since I don't know anything special about life in general. I believe it was Schumpeter who claimed to be not only the best economist, but also the best horseman and the best lover in his native Austria. I don't ride horses, and have few illusions on other scores. (I am, however, a pretty good cook).

What I want to talk about in this essay is something more restricted: some thoughts about thinking, and particularly how to go about doing interesting economics. I think that among economists of my generation I can claim to have a fairly distinctive intellectual style -- not necessarily a better style than my colleagues, for there are many ways to be a good economist, but one that has served me well. The essence of that style is a general research strategy that can be summarized in a few rules; I also view my more policy-oriented writing and speaking as ultimately grounded in the same principles. I'll get to my rules for research later in this essay. I think I can best introduce those rules, however, by describing how (it seems to me) I stumbled into the way I work.

ORIGINS

Most young economists today enter the field from the technical end. Originally intending a career in hard science or engineering, they slip down the scale into the most rigorous of the social sciences. The advantages of entering economics from that direction are obvious: one arrives already well trained in mathematics, one finds the concept of formal modeling natural. It is not, however, where I come from. My first love was history; I studied little math, picking up what I needed as I went along.

Nonetheless, I got deeply involved in economics early, working as a research assistant (on world energy markets) to William Nordhaus while still only a junior at Yale. Graduate school followed naturally, and I wrote my first really successful paper -- a theoretical analysis of balance of payments crises -- while still at MIT. I discovered that I was facile with small mathematical models, with a knack for finding simplifying assumptions that made them tractable. Still, when I left graduate school I was, in my own mind at least, somewhat directionless. I was not sure what to work on; I was not even sure whether I really liked research.

I found my intellectual feet quite suddenly, in January 1978. Feeling somewhat lost, I paid a visit to my old advisor Rudi Dornbusch. I described several ideas to him, including a vague notion that the monopolistic competition models I had studied in a short course offered by Bob Solow -- especially the lovely little model of Dixit and Stiglitz -- might have something to do with international trade. Rudi flagged that idea as potentially very interesting indeed; I went home to work on it seriously; and within a few days I realized that I had hold of something that would form the core of my professional life.

What had I found? The point of my trade models was not particularly startling once one thought about it: economies of scale could be an independent cause of international trade, even in the absence of comparative advantage. This was a new insight to me, but had (as I soon discovered) been pointed out many times before by critics of conventional trade theory. The models I worked out left some loose ends hanging; in particular, they typically had many equilibria. Even so, to make the models tractable I had to make obviously unrealistic assumptions. And once I had made those assumptions, the models were trivially simple; writing them up left me no opportunity to display any high-powered technique. So one might have concluded that I was doing nothing very interesting (and that was what some of my colleagues were to tell me over the next few years). Yet what I saw -- and for some reason saw almost immediately -- was that all of these features were virtues, not vices, that they added up to a program that could lead to years of productive research.

I was, of course, only saying something that critics of conventional theory had been saying for decades. Yet my point was not part of the mainstream of international economics. Why? Because it had never been expressed in nice models. The new monopolistic competition models gave me a tool to open cleanly what had previously been regarded as a can of worms. More important, however, I suddenly realized the remarkable extent to which the methodology of economics creates blind spots. We just don't see what we can't formalize. And the biggest blind spot of all has involved increasing returns. So there, right at hand, was my mission: to look at things from a slightly different angle, and in so doing to reveal the obvious, things that had been right under our noses all the time.

The models I wrote down that winter and spring were incomplete, if one demanded of them that they specify exactly who produced what. And yet they told meaningful stories. It took me a long time to express clearly what I was doing, but eventually I realized that one way to deal with a difficult problem is to change the question -- in particular by shifting levels. A detailed analysis may be extremely nasty, yet an aggregative or systemic description that is far easier may tell you all you need to know.

To get this system or aggregate level description required, of course, accepting the basically silly assumptions of symmetry that underlay the Dixit-Stiglitz and related models. Yet these silly assumptions seemed to let me tell stories that were persuasive, and that could not be told using the hallowed assumptions of the standard competitive model. What I began to realize was that in economics we are always making silly assumptions; it's just that some of them have been made so often that they come to seem natural. And so one should not reject a model as silly until one sees where its assumptions lead.

Finally, the simplicity of the models may have frustrated my lingering urge to show off the technical skills I had so laboriously acquired in graduate school, but was, I soon realized, central to the enterprise. Trade theorists had failed to address the role of increasing returns, not out of empirical conviction, but because they thought it was too hard to model. How much more effective, then, to show that it could be almost childishly simple?

And so, before my 25th birthday, I basically knew what I was going to do with my professional life. I don't know what would have happened if my grand project had met with rejection from other economists -- perhaps I would have turned cranky, perhaps I would have lost faith and abandoned the effort. But in fact all went astonishingly well. In my own mind, the curve of my core research since that January of 1978 has followed a remarkably consistent path. Within a few months, I had written up a basic monopolistic competition trade model -- as it turned out, simultaneously and independently with similar models by Avinash Dixit and Victor Norman, on one side, and Kelvin Lancaster, on the other. I had some trouble getting that paper published -- receiving the dismissive rejection by a flagship journal (the QJE) that seems to be the fate of every innovation in economics -- but pressed on. From 1978 to roughly the end of 1984 I focussed virtually all my research energies on the role of increasing returns and imperfect competition in international trade. (I took one year off to work in the US government; but more about that below). What had been a personal quest turned into a movement, as others followed the same path. Above all, Elhanan Helpman -- a deep thinker whose integrity and self-discipline were useful counterparts to my own flakiness and disorganization -- first made crucial contibutions himself, then talked me into collaborative work. Our magnum opus, Market Structure and Foreign Trade, served the purpose of making our ideas not only respectable but almost standard: iconoclasm to orthodoxy in seven years.

For whatever reason, I allowed my grand project on increasing returns to lie fallow for a few years in the 1980s, and turned my attention to international finance. My work in this area consisted primarily of small models inspired by current policy issues; although these models lacked the integrating theme of my trade models, I think that my finance work is to some extent unified by its intellectual style, which is very similar to that of my work on trade.

In 1990 I returned to the economics of increasing returns from a new direction. I suddenly realized that the techniques that had allowed us to legitimize the role of increasing returns in trade could also be used to reclaim a whole outcast field: that of economic geography, the location of activity in space. Here, perhaps even more than in trade, was a field full of empirical insights, good stories, and obvious practical importance, lying neglected right under our noses because nobody had seen a good way to formalize it. For me, it was like reliving the best moments of my intellectual childhood. Doing geography is hard work; it requires a lot of hard thinking to make the models look trivial, and I am increasingly finding that I need the computer as an aid not just to data analysis but even to theorizing. Yet it is immensely rewarding. For me, the biggest thrill in theory is the moment when your model tells you something that should have been obvious all along, something that you can immediately relate to what you know about the world, and yet which you didn't really appreciate. Geography still has that thrill.

My work on geography seems, at the time of writing, to be leading me even further afield. In particular, there are obvious affinities between the concepts that arise naturally in geographic models and the language of traditional development economics -- the "high development theory" that flourished in the 1940s and 50s, then collapsed. So I expect that my basic research project will continue to widen in scope.

RULES FOR RESEARCH

In the course of describing my formative moment in 1978, I have already implicitly given my four basic rules for research. Let me now state them explicitly, then explain. Here are the rules:

1. Listen to the Gentiles

2. Question the question

3. Dare to be silly

4. Simplify, simplify

Listen to the Gentiles

What I mean by this rule is "Pay attention to what intelligent people are saying, even if they do not have your customs or speak your analytical language." The point may perhaps best be explained by example. When I began my rethinking of international trade, there was already a sizeable literature criticizing conventional trade theory. Empiricists pointed out that trade took place largely between countries with seemingly similar factor endowments, and that much of this trade involved intra-industry exchanges of seemingly similar products. Acute observers pointed to the importance of economies of scale and imperfect competition in actual international markets. Yet all of this intelligent commentary was ignored by mainstream trade theorists -- after all, their critics often seemed to have an imperfect understanding of comparative advantage, and had no coherent models of their own to offer; so why pay attention to them? The result was that the profession overlooked evidence and stories that were right under its nose.

The same story is repeated in geography. Geographers and regional scientists have amassed a great deal of evidence on the nature and importance of localized external economies, and organized that evidence intelligently if not rigorously. Yet economists have ignored what they had to say, because it comes from people speaking the wrong language.

I do not mean to say that formal economic analysis is worthless, and that anybody's opinion on economic matters is as good as anyone else's. On the contrary! I am a strong believer in the importance of models, which are to our minds what spear-throwers were to stone age arms: they greatly extend the power and range of our insight. In particular, I have no sympathy for those people who criticize the unrealistic simplifications of model-builders, and imagine that they achieve greater sophistication by avoiding stating their assumptions clearly. The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth. By all means express your thoughts in models, as pretty as possible (more on that below). But always remember that you may have gotten the metaphor wrong, and that someone else with a different metaphor may be seeing something that you are missing.

Question the question

There was a limited literature on external economies and international trade before 1978. It was never, however, very influential, because it seemed terminally messy; even the simplest models became bogged down in a taxonomy of possible outcomes. What has since become clear is that this messiness arose in large part because the modelers were asking their models to do what traditional trade models do, which is to predict a precise pattern of specialization and trade. Yet why ask that particular question? Even in the Heckscher-Ohlin model, the point you want to make is something like "A country tends to export goods whose production is intensive in the factors in which that country is abundant"; if your specific model tells you that capital-abundant country Home exports capital-intensive good X, this is valuable because it sharpens your understanding of that insight, not because you really care about these particular details of a patently oversimplified model.

It turns out that if you don't ask for the kind of detail that you get in the two-sector, two-good classical model, an external economy model needn't be at all messy. As long as you ask "system" questions like how welfare and world income are distributed, it is possible to make very simple and neat models. And it's really these system questions that we are interested in. The focus on excessive detail was, to put it bluntly, a matter of carrying over ingrained prejudices from an overworked model into a domain where they only made life harder.

The same is true in a number of areas in which I have worked. In general, if people in a field have bogged down on questions that seem very hard, it is a good idea to ask whether they are really working on the right questions. Often some other question is not only easier to answer but actually more interesting! (One drawback of this trick is that it often gets people angry. An academic who has spent years on a hard problem is rarely grateful when you suggest that his field can be revived by bypassing it).

Dare to be silly

If you want to publish a paper in economic theory, there is a safe approach: make a conceptually minor but mathematically difficult extension to some familiar model. Because the basic assumptions of the model are already familiar, people will not regard them as strange; because you have done something technically difficult, you will be respected for your demonstration of firepower. Unfortunately, you will not have added much to human knowledge.

What I found myself doing in the new trade theory was pretty much the opposite. I found myself using assumptions that were unfamiliar, and doing very simple things with them. Doing this requires a lot of self-confidence, because initially people (especially referees) are almost certain not simply to criticize your work but to ridicule it. After all, your assumptions will surely look peculiar: a continuum of goods all with identical production functions, entering symmetrically into utility? Countries of identical economic size, with mirror-image factor endowments? Why, people will ask, should they be interested in a model with such silly assumptions -- especially when there are evidently much smarter young people who demonstrate their quality by solving hard problems?

What seems terribly hard for many economists to accept is that all our models involve silly assumptions. Given what we know about cognitive psychology, utility maximization is a ludicrous concept; equilibrium pretty foolish outside of financial markets; perfect competition a howler for most industries. The reason for making these assumptions is not that they are reasonable but that they seem to help us produce models that are helpful metaphors for things that we think happen in the real world.

Consider the example which some economists seem to think is not simply a useful model but revealed divine truth: the Arrow-Debreu model of perfect competition with utility maximization and complete markets. This is indeed a wonderful model -- not because its assumptions are remotely plausible but because it helps us think more clearly about both the nature of economic efficiency and the prospects for achieving efficiency under a market system. It is actually a piece of inspired, marvellous silliness.

What I believe is that the age of creative silliness is not past. Virtue, as an economic theorist, does not consist in squeezing the last drop of blood out of assumptions that have come to seem natural because they have been used in a few hundred earlier papers. If a new set of assumptions seems to yield a valuable set of insights, then never mind if they seem strange.

Simplify, simplify

The injunction to dare to be silly is not a license to be undisciplined. In fact, doing really innovative theory requires much more intellectual discipline than working in a well-established literature. What is really hard is to stay on course: since the terrain is unfamilar, it is all too easy to find yourself going around in circles. Somewhere or other Keynes wrote that "it is astonishing what foolish things a man thinking alone can come temporarily to believe". And it is also crucial to express your ideas in a way that other people, who have not spent the last few years wrestling with your problems and are not eager to spend the next few years wrestling with your answers, can understand without too much effort.

Fortunately, there is a strategy that does double duty: it both helps you keep control of your own insights, and makes those insights accessible to others. The strategy is: always try to express your ideas in the simplest possible model. The act of stripping down to this minimalist model will force you to get to the essence of what you are trying to say (and will also make obvious to you those situations in which you actually have nothing to say). And this minimalist model will then be easy to explain to other economists as well.

I have used the "minimum necessary model" approach over and over again: using a one-factor, one-industry model to explain the basic role of monopolistic competition in trade; assuming sector-specific labor rather than full Heckscher-Ohlin factor substitution to explain the effects of intraindustry trade; working with symmetric countries to assess the role of reciprocal dumping; and so on. In each case the effect has been to allow me to tackle a subject widely viewed as formidably difficult with what appears, at first sight, to be ridiculous simplicity.

The downside of this strategy is, of course, that many of your colleagues will tend to assume that an insight that can be expressed in a cute little model must be trivial and obvious -- it takes some sophistication to realize that simplicity may be the result of years of hard thinking. I have heard the story that when Joseph Stiglitz was being considered for tenure at Yale, one of his senior colleagues belittled his work, saying that it consisted mostly of little models rather than deep theorems. Another colleague then asked, "But couldn't you say the same about Paul Samuelson"? "Yes, I could", replied Joe's opponent. I have heard the same reaction to my own work. Luckily, there are enough sophisticated economists around that in the end intellectual justice is usually served. And there is a special delight in managing not only to boldly go where no economist has gone before, but to do so in a way that seems after the fact to be almost childs' play.

I have now described my basic rules for research. I have illustrated them with my experience in developing the "new trade theory" and with my more recent extension of that work to economic geography, because these are the core of my work. But I have also done quite a lot of other stuff, which (it seems to me) is also in some sense part of the same enterprise. So in the remainder of this essay I want to talk about this other work, and in particular about how the policy economist and the analytical economist can coexist in the same person.

POLICY-RELEVANT WORK

Most economic theorists keep their hands off current policy issues -- or if they do get involved in policy debates, do so only after the midpoint of their career, as something that follows creative theorizing rather than coexists with it. There seems to be a consensus that the clarity and singleness of purpose required to do good theory are incompatible with the tolerance for messy issues required to be active in policy discussion. For me, however, it has never worked that way. I have interspersed my academic career with a number of consulting ventures for various governments and public agencies, as well as a full year in the US government. I have also written a book,The Age of Diminished Expectations, aimed at a non-technical audience. And I have written a pretty steady stream of papers that are motivated not by the inner logic of my research but by the attempt to make sense of some currently topical policy debate -- e.g., Third World debt relief, target zones for exchange rates, the rise of regional trading blocs. All of this hasn't seemed to hurt my research, and indeed some of my favorite papers have grown out of this policy-oriented work.

Why doesn't policy-relevant work seem to conflict with my "real" research? I think that it's because I have been able to approach policy issues using almost exactly the same method that I use in my more basic work. Paying attention to newspaper reports or the concerns of central bankers and finance ministers is just another form of listening to the Gentiles. Trying to find a useful way of defining their problems is pretty much the same as questioning the question in theory. Confronting supposedly knowledgeable people with an unorthodox view of an issue certainly requires the courage to be silly. And of course, ruthless simplification is worth even more in policy discussion than in theory for its own sake.

So doing policy-relevant economics does not, for me, mean a drastic change in intellectual style. And it has its own payoffs. Let's be honest and admit that these include invitations to fancier conferences and speaking engagements at much higher fees than an academic purist is likely to get. Let's also admit that one of the joys of policy research is the opportunity to shock the bourgeoisie, to point out the hollowness or silliness of official positions. For example, I know that I was not the only international economist to have some fun pointing out the absurdities of the Maastricht Treaty, and was not above some wicked pleasure when the ERM crisis I and others had long predicted actually came to pass in the fall of 1992. The main payoff to policy work, though, is intellectual stimulation. Not all real-world questions are interesting -- I find that almost anything having to do with taxation is better than a sleeping pill -- but every couple of years, if not more often, the international economy throws up a question that gives rise to exciting research. I have been stimulated to write theory papers by the Plaza and the Louvre, by the Brady Plan, NAFTA, and EMU. All of them are papers that I think could stand on their own, even without the policy context.

There is, of course, always a risk that an economist who gets onto the policy circuit will no longer have enough time for real research. I certainly write an awfully large number of conference papers; I am a very fast writer, but perhaps it is a gift I overuse. Still, I think that the big danger of doing policy research is not so much the drain on your time as the threat to your values. It is easy to be seduced into the belief that direct influence on policy is more important than just writing papers -- I've seen it happen to many colleagues. Once you start down that road, once you begin to think that David Mulford matters more than Bob Solow, or to prefer hobnobbing with the Ruritanian finance minister to talking theory with Avinash Dixit, you are probably lost to research. Pretty soon you'll probably start using "impact" as a verb.

Fortunately, while I love playing around with policy issues, I have never been able to take policy makers very seriously. This lack of seriousness gets me into occasional trouble -- like the time that a gentle parenthetical joke about the French in a conference paper led to an extended diatribe from the French official attending the conference -- and may exclude me from ever holding any important policy position. But that's OK: in the end, I would rather write a few more good papers than hold a position of real power. (Note to the policy world: this doesn't mean that I would necessarily turn down such a position if it were offered!)

REGRETS

There are a lot of things about my life and personality that I regret -- if things have gone astonishingly well for me professionally, they have been by no means as easy or happy elsewhere. But in this essay I only want to talk about professional regrets.

A minor regret is that I have never engaged in really serious empirical work. It's not that I dislike facts or real numbers. Indeed, I find light empirical work in the form of tables, charts, and perhaps a few regressions quite congenial. But the serious business of building and thoroughly analyzing a data set is something I never seem to get around to. I think that this is partly because many of my ideas do not easily lend themselves to standard econometric testing. Mostly, though, it is because I lack the patience and organizational ability. Every year I promise to try to do some real empirical work. Next year I really will!

A more important regret is that while the MIT course evaluations rate me as a pretty good lecturer, I have not yet succeeded in generating a string of really fine students, the kind who reflect glory on their teacher. I can make excuses for this failing -- students often prefer advisers who are more methodical and less intuitive, and I all too often scare students off by demanding that they use less math and more economics. It's also true that I probably seem busy and distracted, and perhaps I am just not imposing enough in person to be inspiring (if I were only a few inches taller ...). Whatever the reasons, I wish I could do better, and intend to try.

All in all, though, I've been very lucky. A lot of that luck has to do with the accidents that led me to stumble onto an intellectual style that has served me extremely well. I've tried, in this essay, to define and explain that style. Is this a life philosophy? Of course not. I'm not even sure that it is an economic research philosophy, since what works for one economist may not work for another. But it's how I do research, and it works for me.

Trust in Government Revisited (by those who closed the question)

2011-12-27T12:00:00.000-06:00

Yesterday Larry Bartels and Marc Hetherington wrote in the political science blog The Monkey Cage that there "remains surprising trust in government" even if the aggregate levels are low. This is an interesting argument for Hetherington to make since he published a well regarded series of articles and a book pointing out the decline of trust in government over time and explaining all sorts of implications from the phenomenon.

I've been working for the last few months on the question of political trust, of which trust in government obviously is a component, and one lesson I've taken to heart is the way scholars conceptually define various types of political trust needs to be re-examined. Trust in Government included. To that end, I'm coming from the point of view that quantitative scholars who explicitly study political trust seem to conflate trust in government with political trust overall. As such, I'm hungry for more precise and meaty conceptual definitions of trust. So the argument Bartels and Hetherington are making is music to my ears.

Still though, are they right? Are the "fundamentals of trust in government strong" to steal a phrase? It seems like political scientist / statistician Andrew Gelman still had more questions. This comment comes from the original Monkey Cage post:

I’m confused. You write, “38% said they trust the Department of Health and Human Services . . . Although 38% might not sound that high, it is about the same percentage of Americans who said they trusted the government at the end of Ronald Reagan’s term in office.”
I have four comments/questions:
1. Yes, 38% doesn’t sound so high to me!
2. I also don’t see 38% support for the EPA as very impressive. The EPA protects the environment, and most people like the environment! Maybe Tennessee is just different from the rest of the country in that way.
3. I wonder about your comparison. Shouldn’t you be comparing support for HHS now to support for HHS in 1988? Given your evidence above, it seems plausible that “the government” was less popular than individual agencies then too.
4. Is 1988 a good baseline? After Iran-Contra, the U.S. government didn’t seem very trustworthy (and 1988 was before the fall of the Soviet Union so it was difficult to retroactively say that Iran-Contra was ok in the grand scheme of things).
I guess what I’m saying is, I’d like to see the series for trust in “the government” and also trust in individual agencies.

I think we need to see more evidence before determining if they're right but ironically I'm of the position that the work on trust in government is what graduate students call "overtilled" (an aside, I just discovered that Douglas Arnold coined that phrase in a 1982 article). As I commented earlier in this post, it is a tad paradoxical albeit scientifically noble that Hetherington is re-addressing his earlier position because his work seemed to be a definitive end to that line of inquiry. If there is something to the idea of a dual layered form of trust in government then wonderful and important work can be done but I think other types of political trust warrant more attention.

Lastly, it might be useful to point out that previously to Bartels-Hetherington blog post, Marc Hetherington measured trust in government using four questions from the American National Election Study. They are as follows, with his coding of responses in parenthesis:

How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right-just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time? (1. Just about always 0. Most of the time -1. Some of the time)
Do you think that people in government waste a lot of the money we pay in taxes, waste some of it, or don't waste very much of it? (1. Not very much 0. Some -1. A lot)
Would you say the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all the people? (1. For the benefit of all -1. Few big interests)
Do you think that quite a few of the people running the government are crooked, not very many are, or do you think hardly any of them are crooked? (1. Hardly any 0. Not many -1. Quite a few)

Reasonable people could raise any number of objections to these questions but my point in posting them was for others to understand how much of a break the Bartels-Hetherington post is from Hetherington's previous work. Also, if I can repeat once more, I applaud the effort to 'complicate' the status quo on political trust but I think there are more important questions to examine in the realm of political trust.

Women as Chief Executive Officers

2011-11-29T18:26:00.001-06:00

Source: This week's economist's special report

So much for the narrative that women are breaking into the business world, eh?

The Delicate Balance

2011-11-28T19:20:00.001-06:00

Earlier today a friend of mine from College wrote a few words about an attack on the humanities by Florida Governor Rick Scott. Defenses of the humanities aren't all together new but Josh's defense is unique in that it doesn't prompt quiet sighs like many other such defenses. I don't really need to summarize it as it is quite short so just read it yourself but if that isn't persuasive, read it anyway since it is well written.

That all said I want to respond to what Josh wrote. Having attended the same college he is currently attending, I share the same general perspective that economic marketability ought not be the criterion with which human pursuits are judged. People in most ways of living need to be able to think critically and originally, as Josh implies, and also should be able to appreciate the culture that society has created. Okay, fine, but are the humanities always the only or even the best way of accomplishing this?

In an attempt to understand jealousy we could read The Scarlet Letter or you could investigate the social psychology literature on jealousy. To understand empathy we could watch something like Romeo and Juliet or we could volunteer at a homeless shelter. These examples may not seem controversial on the face but the domains my examples draw upon are generally thought of under the purview of the humanities, at least in the academic sense of the word and there is clearly more than one way to address said pursuits.

My point is that there is a very delicate balance that needs to be struck in educating people. We can't focus entirely on supposed economic pursuits but we shouldn't just focus on literature or pursuits generally conceived under the auspices of the humanities.

A second but related point involves learning how to do it all. When I was a freshman in high school, my geography teacher had this quote in big letters on his wall:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

In general terms, this is my view towards education. Someone should know a few good Shakespeare sonnets but also know how to read a linear regression output. Someone who can draw tears to her audience's eyes with a moving speech should also be unafraid of mathematical exponents. Drawing on what I wrote earlier in this post, highly paid engineers should be able to speak to their author neighbors about the 'classics' and 'starving artists' should be able to speak with the doctor about music.

So as Josh says, the humanities should be defended, but really, Homo sapiens sapiens should just be good at being human.

Tommy J on Abortion and Native Americans

2011-06-23T15:34:00.000-05:00

I've spent part of today perusing Thomas Jefferson's papers, specifically Notes on the State of Virginia, which stands the time as required Jefferson reading. One thing about Jefferson is that he is such a strong writer that 'offensive' things he might say seem dry and scientific in nature. Take this passage, which treats Native Americans as wild animals and calmly explains that the way they utilized "voluntary abortion" is nature's way of helping their 'race' survive.

They raise fewer children than we do. The causes of this are to be found, not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance. The women very frequently attending the men in their parties of war and of hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them. It is said, therefore, that they have learnt the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a considerable time after. During 30 these parties they are exposed to numerous hazards, to excessive exertions, to the greatest extremities of hunger. Even at their homes the nation depends for food, through a certain part of every year, on the gleanings of the forest: that is, they experience a famine once in every year. With all animals, if the female be badly fed, or not fed at all, her young perish: and if both male and female be reduced to like want, generation becomes less active, less productive. To the obstacles then of want and hazard, which nature has opposed to the multiplication of wild animals, for the purpose of restraining their numbers within certain bounds, those of labour and of voluntary abortion are added with the Indian. No wonder, then, if they multiply less than we do.

The link that I culled this from is here.

Discomfort with Jose Vargas' Undocumented Immigrant Piece

2011-06-23T14:38:00.000-05:00

The coverage of Jose Vargas' undocumented immigrant piece (Linked Here) has been largely positive. It makes sense right? Here is a journalist who, from no fault of his own, 'illegally' came to America and in a very real sense 'pulled himself up by the bootstraps.' Even more, he had to work harder than many American born young adults because of the legal pressure to appear American.

If his story is so inspiring, then why do I feel so conflicted it? I think it has something to do with his purposes. Of course there is 'news value' in what he has to say but he didn't write it for the news value, he wrote it to elevate immigration back to the national scene with his Define America group. Vargas used (martyred?) himself for an issue. I hadn't been able to articulate this feeling until I read this story but it makes me feel uneasy when politics is personal. It makes me feel uneasy when you can't talk about policy in a detached way. Now, implicitly, anyone who engages with Vargas or his group will have to tread lightly for risk of personally offending him.

In some respects, the left is far 'worse' at identity politics than the right but this concern isn't just with outspoken folks on the left. The right does the same thing with guns or religion. Policy makers who try to have a dry policy discussion about guns have to tread as lightly as those dealing with immigration for fear of politics becoming personal. In some respects, even more lightly because (and not to be crass), those with gun addictions far outnumber illegal immigrants with Pulitzer prizes.

I realize this position itself might seem a bit offensive. Many of my friends would argue that politics SHOULD be personal. They might argue that anti-gay politicians ARE implicitly attacking them on a personal level. To suggest otherwise is naive or even callous. It is hard for me to argue with them, but look at the other side of the ideological spectrum. Do you remember when then candidate Obama's "guns and religion" comment that caused such endless consternation?

Where is the middle ground? I became a Democrat because of JFK and LBJ's commitments to the poor and downtrodden with the New Society and such and isn't that just the same as what I've been rallying against in this entire rambling post? If people oppose New Society programs wouldn't my natural reaction be to accuse them personally of not caring about the poor or young? Yes, but I don't think it should be. I think that the middle ground lies somewhere in there.

Sanity Vs Annoyingness: My graphical perception of the first GOP debate

2011-06-13T23:26:00.004-05:00

Since I am a bit tired, I don't want to do a big write up on my perception of the first GOP debate of the 2012 campaign season. Though, if for some reason you are interested, I live tweeted the whole thing. Instead, I made a graph.

The scale is from -10 to 10 on both axis. A sentence about each candidate might be in order.

Bachman: Her constant red meat bomb throwing may have done her well for the tea party folks, but it came off as annoying to me. Likewise, her inconsistent responses on gay marriage turned me off on the sanity meter too. She is relatively fluid on the sanity meter but probably not the annoyingness meter.
Cain: I was all about Cain striking the good balance between craziness and annoyingness, but when he gave his answer on Muslims -- which was by far the craziest exchange of the night -- he lost it for me. After that, he may have done all right on the sanity meter, but he kept doing the little things right wing Republicans do that annoy me greatly. He is probably soft on sanity but not on annoyingness.
Paul: Ron Paul was in his own world. He seemed like an angry college professor, which is where I think he wanted to be. If I was measuring straight "perception of intelligence" he would have nailed that scale but since I was using sanity, he was on par with Newt. I think this is because the tea party (read: Ron Paul) line has become pretty main stream in recent years. I think Ron Paul is soft on both categories for me.
Santorum: Santorum was the sleeper candidate. He didn't try to appeal to the base like Bachman or Cain did (except on abortion), but he still said those things that make me cringe (Obama doesn't fight our enemies even though he had OBL executed).
Pawlenty: T-Paw didn't seem nuts but he didn't seem like anything really. The only reason he scored so highly on the annoyingness meter is because he kept bringing up his time as Minnesota's Governor in a positive light. This bothers me as we're about to go through the worst shutdown in Minnesota's history as a direct result of his administration.
Gingrich: Really, Gingrich only had one crazy slip up (on Muslims), but he seemed to be playing the deal maker of the GOP with his comments on coalition building and not running over the minority. I have a soft spot for those sort of people as it seems they aren't willing to burn down the house for political achievement.
Romney: Romney performed as expected. Boring, but what the front runner should probably seek to accomplish.

Perhaps over the rest of the campaign season I will update this graph (or add/subtract variables) as the debates progress. I think this sort of exercise is useful, albeit a bit offensive.

The Execution of an Animal

2011-06-09T22:42:00.003-05:00

While I eat meat (and constantly feel bad for it), there is never a reason to execute an animal. Today, the front page of the Star Tribune was as follows:

But why? Why did that have to happen? Supposedly some wolf escaped from the zoo and then the zoo officials chose to shoot it with a live round instead of a tranquilizer. I can't find the story, so take this with a grain of salt, but two summers ago the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources shot and killed a bear in a similar manner. The bear had some candy jar on it's head and DNR officials felt it posed a threat to humans, so when they found it a week later with the jar still on it's head, they killed it. Again, why?

It just seems so offensive that an escaped wolf had to die. The above the fold picture was taken by a zoo goer. How did the wolf pose a danger to other zoo folks? Even if a singular wolf posed a danger (Mexican Gray Wolves hunt in packs), there was never a reason to kill it.

Update: Longtime friend Josh found the story about the bear and posted it in the comments, and I am putting the link here.

Politicizing the Constitution

2011-05-24T17:09:00.003-05:00

Ezra Klein today has a post today warning against politicizing the preamble to the Constitution. He basically argues that any political belief should be able to be justified within the American trinity of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and people shouldn't use the Constitution to justify their policy preferences. I think warning against politicization of the Constitution, broadly, is a strategy that cost liberals big time. Conservatives have shown they are willing to refer back to their conception of what the founders believe and if Conservatives become the sole defenders of the Constitution, it isn't something liberals will be able to rebound from. Not politicizing the Constitution will be a one sided battle.

A workable example of a broad understanding of the preamble is what constitutes a "basic urban service."
The political science literature on this question defaults back to Constitutional text. More specifically, a basic service advances the public or private life by: preserving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and promoting public enlightenment, happiness, domestic tranquility and the general welfare. The broadest view is taken by a little 1977 book called Equality and Urban policy and it's author writes that, ``The services performed by municipalities are the most vital to the preservation of life (police, fire, sanitation, public health), liberty (police courts, prosecutors), property (zoning, planning, taxing), and public enlightenment (schools, libraries)." A later addition adds that the pursuit of happiness includes parks and recreational services. The promotion of the general welfare includes streets, transportation, social services and that domestic tranquility includes public housing and environmental protection. Conservatives obviously would disagree with this characterization and therein lies the rub.

The politicization of the preamble -- and the Constitution in general -- is at the heart of policy disagreement. By giving in and conceding that perhaps Medicare (or the Affordable Care Act, or public education, taxation, libraries, social security...) would run afoul of the framers, only Conservatives win. Instead, why not fight back and argue that the government does and can provide services to preserve life, liberty, and property.

Quick Thought on Group Polarization

2011-05-24T11:33:00.000-05:00

I haven't read the literature on this too well, but when people talk about polarization they seem to usually talk about partisan polarization (ie the lack of ideological overlap between the parties) or wealth inequality (ie how much more the rich make than the poor). Why isn't there attention to the way non political or economic groups are polarized in American politics? I mean things like the strong differences between northern and southern, rural and urban, and the like.

I know that the comparativists call this issue cleavage and it is broadly defined to fit what I'm talking about but it doesn't seem like commentators or political scientists are talking about this issue.

Books to read this summer

2011-05-23T15:30:00.002-05:00

The university's expectation for me this summer is to do `research' in things that interest me. As I'm still a noob student, I take this as reading as much as I can. So! Here is a list of the books I'm going to try to read this summer. Additionally, I'll try to review them in some length here. By writing about these books it gives me something concrete to do and since I'm so used to taking notes on books anyway, it'll keep me in practice. Any other suggestions would be lovely.

Pure Political Science

Lupia and McCubbins - The Democratic Dilemma
Lee - Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate
Poole and Rosenthal - Ideology and Congress
Howell - Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action

These three books are relatively diffuse. The Lupia and McCubbins work is a pretty well known rational choice book on voting behavior. While I'm not that keen on rational choice as a theory, I like it methodologically. Their book builds a nice delegation model as part of their model and I think delegation models are fun. The Francis Lee book, I'm told, is sort of a merge between traditional party explanations of Congress and more individual level psychological processes. That is, members of Congress have psychological attachments to their party as a "team" and the MCs want their team to win. The Poole and Rosenthal ideology book is kind of old now but they created the now standard measurement for measuring Congressional ideology. Nate Silver even used it recently. Lastly, the Howell book argues that Presidents are basically free to do what they want. Obviously that one sentence description doesn't do his point justice but I had to write something. When I took the American Core in the fall (like a reading intensive introduction to American Politics), we read a few chapters from the book and I wrote a very favorable response concerning his argument.

Statistical

Huff - How to Lie with Statistics
King - Unifying Political Methodology: The Likelihood Theory of Statistical Inference
Morrison - The Significance Test Controversy: A Reader

The Huff book is considered a classic, albeit outdated, example of literally how to lie with statistics. It is a nice short argument that points out that people use very precise concepts imprecisely to cause confusion. In the fall I am slated to take a course on Maximum Likelihood Estimation, covered in the King book, but it might get canceled so I figure I should read something on it anyway. Gary King is the pre-eminent political methodologist around today and writes in a very readable style. Lastly, I've been thinking a lot about Null Hypothesis Significance Testing and as it turns out, many other people have as well. The Morrison book is in the vein of questioning the validity of NHST.

Historical

Bridges - Morning Glories, Municipal Reform in the Southwest
Larson - A Magnificent Catastrophe
Wood - Empire of Liberty

I love American history from about 1790 - 1815. They call it the early republic period, I guess. Anyway, the Larson book is about the 1800 election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The subtitle is "The tumultuous Election of 1800" and I've heard people say the 1800 election was one of the dirtiest in American history. The Gordon Wood book is part of the Oxford series on American History which is supposedly very good. Gordon wood is the researcher for the early republic period so it should be good. The Bridges book sticks out because it is about the Progressive era. This last semester I wrote a paper about how municipal reform 100 years ago influences the way urban service distribution (snow plowing, in my case) works today. The Bridges book is a widely cited chunk of research on the municipal reforms of the Progressive era.

Fiction

Eggers - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Vidal - 1876

I don't read a lot of fiction or really know what either of these books are about. I was supposed to read Gore Vidal's 1876 my senior year of of undergrad, but I never did. Better late than never, eh?

Anyway, as I said above. I'll try to review these books as I go. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

Quick Question Concerning GOP Budget

2011-02-10T19:54:00.003-06:00

I thought the Tea Party folks didn't like spending money. Ezra Klein compiled a table laying out the House leadership's priorities.

It is worth looking at yourself but what it seems like the take away message is cut tons from everything except defense. And then give an increase to defense.

Take a look.

So my question is, if the Tea Party wants to resolve our budget woes, why are they increasing any part of the budget?

Senate Earmark Ban

2011-02-09T17:27:00.016-06:00

Ezra Klein beat me to it here but the article he cites is in the New York Times anyway.

The way some politicians have railed against earmarks borders on demagoguery. Senate Appropriations Chairman Inouye, while announcing a moratorium on earmarks in his committee, accurately described earmarks as "...[A] right of members of Congress to direct investments to their states and districts under the fiscally responsible and transparent earmarking process..."

That's all they are. Bravo Senator Inouye.

Music Piracy and its Followers

2011-02-09T15:08:00.001-06:00

Earlier today I read Fred Wilson's Anatomy of a Pirate where he was "forced" into downloading music illegally.

Fine, but I'm not sure he can get implying he is the archetypal music pirate. In 2008, "the average teenager had 800 illegally procured tracks" and a widely cited 2008 report claimed that 95% of MP3 downloads were illegal.

My point? Perhaps Fred Wilson should think twice before lumping himself in with music pirates...

Wikileaks Analysis

2010-07-29T17:26:00.000-05:00

Drew Conway, an NYU Ph.D student, quantitatively studies terrorism and conflict more generally. Further, he's very good at it. As all of you know probably know, Wikileaks 'leaked' ~75k battlefield reports from the war in Afghanistan.

Here is Drew Conway's first take

My motivation in creating this chart was to do a very quick assessment of the trends in the data. Given the nature of the reports, we would expect a noticeable degree of seasonality (peaks and valleys) given the natural ebb and flow of war. Any drastic deviations from this expectation could indicate a strong degree of selection on the part of Wikileaks. As you can see, however, the data generally do fit this expectation. Note the dramatic upward trending seasonality present in the heavy reporting areas of RC EAST and RC SOUTH. Perhaps more interestingly, though, is the sudden increase in the number of NEUTRAL reports present in the data for RC EAST and RC CAPITAL for the period roughly between mid-2006 and mid-2008.

Everyone who has an interest in politics should be paying attention to this story. People who care about war, about Congress, about public opinion, or about Presidental power should have an interest in this story.

Religion while young to old

2010-07-28T08:24:00.002-05:00

I follow a blog that posts good (and bad) interesting graphs. It doesn't need much description but I think the black protestant 'column' is the best.

EDIT: The Link!

Unrelated, but who was Kevin Rudd?

2010-06-23T22:18:00.000-05:00

I'm being facetious of course, but how long was the Rudd overthrow on the burner before American news talked about it? Why did America care so much about the Brit'ish election only to basically ignore this?

Serial Speakers and One Minute Speeches

2010-06-22T16:34:00.000-05:00

If anyone is interested, here are the slides for my undergraduate senior paper. There is probably enough text to understand it without me having to talk or you actually reading the paper.

One Minute Speech Favs

2010-06-21T02:04:00.001-05:00

As many of you may know, I've been collecting one minute speeches for over a year now for an ongoing project I'm helping with. It's gotten to the point now where I'm trying to clean up the data and make sure it is the most accurate as it could be. Since I actually have all the speeches on my computer (and think more people should be aware that these exist), I thought I'd share two of my favorites:

1. Rep. Engel (D-NY) on January 5, 1996.

Mr. ENGEL. Mr. Speaker, from the home office in Bronx, NY, the top 10 reasons why House Republicans shut the Government down: No. 10, they are not essential. No. 9, they never liked the Washington Monument anyway. No. 8, if Medicare can wither on the vine, why should not Federal workers? No. 7, furloughed employees will have more time to read Time magazine's Man of the Year story. No. 6, it does not matter whether people work or not; Republicans have been gutting worker protection laws all year long. No. 5, the CR to reopen the Government will contain a clause allowing the Speaker to leave the President's plane by the front door. No. 4, Republicans say furloughed workers will not dare to bitch when we give a tax break to the rich. No. 3, the EPA will not be able to monitor the hot air coming from the freshman House Republican caucus. No. 2, Republicans are writing a new poem entitled, `If Government Can Be Shut, Then Medicare Can Be Cut.' And the No. 1 reason why House Republicans have shut the Government down: To give more time for furloughed workers to return those unwanted Christmas gifts.

2. Rep. Traficant (D-OH) on February 12, 1997

Mr. TRAFICANT. Mr. Speaker, headlines said: Bailout a success, Mexico repays Uncle Sam.
Yellow brick road time. Do not bet your pesos on it. Reports now say that all of the money used to repay the loan was borrowed at interest rates so high they would make John Gotti blush.
Folks, I say there is a big con game going on here. Mexico is in a shambles, and what is worse, the cancer from Mexico is spreading to Uncle Sam. Eighty percent of all narcotics are now coming across the border, and there are two giant sucking sounds here, folks: No. 1, American jobs going to Mexico; and, No. 2, Mexican cocaine going up American noses. Beam me up. If this is a success, then General Custer at Little Big Horn's victory must have been called a victory. Let us stop the propaganda. Let us get a trade policy with Mexico. Because the truth is, it simply sucks.

Counterweight statement on Joe Basel

2010-01-27T00:58:00.000-06:00

Sent to a campus listserv tonight:

Dear University community,
In light of recent events the staff of The Counterweight would like to remind you that although this publication, its current staff, and alumni writers and staff have a long-time relationship with Mr. Basel, neither The Counterweight nor its current or former staff members approve of his actions. It is unfortunate that Mr. Basel chose to direct his activist passions in a thoughtless manner. For our part, The Counterweight will focus on promoting the marketplace of ideas through civil discourse as well as thoughtful analysis of these ideas as it did at its founding, does now, and will forever.

Paul Gecas
Editor-In-Chief

Kristin Youngblom
Managing Editor

Robert Henjum

Publisher

Stealin' Secrets.

2010-01-26T19:48:00.000-06:00

Well, looks like they finally picked it up.

With all of the controversy surrounding the attempted bugging of Senator Mary Landrieu's phone, we need to clarify that the person who did almost all of the actual work was Joseph Basel. If this is the same Joe Basel, which is highly likely, he attended the University of Minnesota at Morris and was a founding editor of the super right wing (and moderately crazy) Counterweight. Disclaimer, I've written for the Counterweight.

The MN Independent has all of that stuff, which is good. There are a few things that most media outlets won't know about him, however.

1. During the 2005-2006 academic year, Joe anonymously hung signs around campus from the website Protest Warrior which proclaimed "End Racism? Kill all white men." Regardless of the coulda shouldas, it caused a huge controversy and generated tremendous angst around campus.

2. It was alleged, though I haven't confirmed it, that he attempted to impeach the student association President impeached for hiding (and subsequently confirming) the fact that he is gay.

There are several other fun facts about Joe, but they're not things that people need to know yet. I just think that people should know that we at Morris aren't surprised this happened.

The anti-Democratic left

2010-01-24T19:01:00.000-06:00

What is with these people? The Paul Krugmans, and the lefty bloggers, and now the Ed Shultzes are using their public personas to attack the Democratic President of the United States. They're so afraid that the Democratic party is going to leave their ideals behind and become Republican lites.

Of course they won't. Barack Obama campaigned as a liberal Democrat and wasn't even afraid to call himself a liberal. What do they think will happen? President Obama will listen to Senator McCain and suddenly abandon all of the things he said he would attempt to do? Why? Why would he do that? The rumor is that his State of the Union address will be dedicated to reshaping his current agenda. If he was going to leave behind liberal health care reform and environmental protections, wouldn't he change the topic of his speech to match 'new priorities'?

The anti-Democratic left needs to shut up, vote in their primaries to shape their party and get over their faux outrage. The Republican party polls less than the "Tea Party Party". Do Liberals want that for the Democratic party? It's time to take advantage of the tiny Republican minority and pass as much as you can.

"Formula for a Meltdown"?

2010-01-24T10:34:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reviewed Scott Patterson's new book about the "Quants" or sometimes known as the guys who supposedly caused the entire financial meltdown. Before I begin, however, when you peruse the review, did you notice that Scott Patterson is also the author of the review? Am I missing something?

Anyway, I plan to get this book when it comes out but until then we're stuck in current events mode. Why does everyone blame the quantitative analysts who modeled market behavior? They exist (existed?) to do one thing: provide support for actual economic analysts. The whole endeavor for these people, it seems like, was an academic experiment. Their mission was to determine how a given market would preform at a given time? The only people worth blaming are the supposed financiers who never objected to anything the models said.

First things first, if you trust the anti quant work, a lot of these people are physicists who decided to try their skill at other things. Great. Now highly educated people would try to make people richer by figuring out what the market would do. They developed their models, which seemed to work, and then everything collapsed. Statistical analysis is blind. Like programming, garbage in, garbage out. If the modelers didn't have a good knowledge of what the market consisted of, it was the existing analytical infrastructure that should have corrected the mistakes of the models. How would someone not highly experienced in the ways of financial troubles know the ins and outs of bubbles? The whole point of statistics is to accurately predict. If the math people were left to their own devices, it was the nonmath people's fault.

Additionally, models improve over time and hopefully provide a better prediction. Once, for instance, a traditional analyst had educated the techie about the ins and outs of bubbles, they could have changed the model and the model would have been that much better. Did these people have an open and honest conversation about expectations and the like or were the trads (Quantitative analysts get called Quants, I'll call traditional analysts trads) too scared of losing their jobs so they withheld information or something worse?

Maybe this next part is just an academic thought, but it seems like this is a good plug for transparency. If the datasets and equations being used were more open and had more people looking through them, perhaps the models would have been updated quicker and this whole thing would have been averted.