Fact Free Discourse is Dangerous but Inevitable July 14, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Brendan Nyhan
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On this blog I have been persistently lamenting our political discourse in which facts play almost no role. On issues from health care, to the causes of recession, to Obama’s citizenship, outright lies seem to percolate to the top of our political discourse and endlessly circulate immune to challenge or refutation.
Recent political science research shows why, and it is discouraging for anyone who believes in democracy.
In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?
Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
[...] This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right. [...]
New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.
I don’t know what the solution to this is. But if we don’t find it quickly we will continue to suffer as a nation. The more we are dependent on technology and global connectedness, the more facts will matter in adjudicating disputes. We simply cannot afford to allow know-nothings to govern our discourse.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Why Recession and Unemployment Will Continue July 13, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: inequality, Robert Reich
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In most of the discussions of recessions, stimulus, bailouts etc. the real reason why our economy flounders is seldom mentioned. But Robert Reich hits the nail on the head today.
Missing from almost all discussion of America’s dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June’s decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent.
In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.
Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Americans’ earnings are back in the stratosphere: Wall Street traders and executives, hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers, and top corporate executives. As hiring has picked up on the Street, fat salaries are reappearing. Richard Stein, president of Global Sage, an executive search firm, tells the New York Times corporate clients have offered compensation packages of more than $1 million annually to a dozen candidates in just the last few weeks.
We’re back to the same ominous trend as before the Great Recession: a larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground.
And as long as this trend continues, we can’t get out of the shadow of the Great Recession. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing.
As Reich points out, this is not a new phenomenon.
America’s median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class could boost its purchasing power was to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn’t pay their bills, and banks couldn’t collect.
Each of America’s two biggest economic downturns over the last century has followed the same pattern. Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation’s total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America’s total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928–with 23.5 percent of the total.
These facts were papered over by Obama’s stimulus plan that dumped a lot of cash into the economy to prevent an utter catastrophe. But as the effects of that stimulus wanes, reality will set in although I suspect much of the public and the media will not acknowledge it. If we don’t find a way to shift more money to the middle class we will face permanently high unemployment, increasing poverty, and continuing decline in our living standards.
That of course will hurt global corporations as well since demand for their products will be sluggish. But I’m sure they will find a way to blame liberals.
Reich ends his piece on a note of optimism.
When they understand where this is heading, powerful interests that have so far resisted fundamental reform may come to see that the alternative is far worse.
But this is Tuesday, not my optimistic day.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Obama Derangement Syndrome (academic edition) July 12, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: conservatism and economics, President Obama
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This is what happens when you are so enamored of an ideology that all reason is suspended. Even well-trained, intelligent economists can succumb to ODS (Obama Derangement Syndrome.)
Economist Mark Thoma asks:
What has happened to Ed Prescott?:
Stephen Williamson: …Ed Prescott did pathbreaking work in the economics profession, and his Nobel prize is well-deserved. His work with Finn Kydland made macroeonomists more quantitatively disciplined, and serves as a benchmark for most of the work done in macro in the last 30 years, including New Keynesian economics, models with financial frictions, and incomplete markets models. However, I doubt that there were any people in the room yesterday who took Ed seriously. Ed’s key points were: 1. Monetary policy does not matter. 2. Financial factors are the symptoms, not the causes, of the recent downturn. 3. The recession was due to an Obama shock, i.e. labor supply fell because US workers anticipate higher future taxes. Bob Hall suggested that this would require a Frisch labor supply elasticity of about 27, which seems ridiculous. However, Ed stuck to his guns and thus seemed – well, ridiculous. As a basic framework, the real business cycle model is obviously useful – you can’t argue with a basic framework of preferences, endowments, technology, and optimal choice. I think we know by now, though, that financial factors have a lot to do with what we are measuring as TFP (total factor productivity). We certainly should not be listening to suggestions that central banks are irrelevant – these institutions can clearly reallocate resources in a big way when they want to.
Prescott isn’t alone in pushing the “Obama shock” idea. The claim is that the recession is due to a labor supply shock where workers collective decide to work less due to one government program or another, or some type of technology shock.
So let me get this straight. There are professional economists who think that, beginning in late 2007 when Obama was still a U.S. Senator, substantial numbers of people decided to stop working because they were afraid that in 2009he would become President and their taxes would increase?
I would guess a third-grader would know that is ridiculous.
First of all, I don’t know anyone who makes a decision about whether to work or not based on future tax rates. Secondly, if I did make my decisions to work based on future taxes and I thought taxes would go up, wouldn’t I work harder now to take advantage of the lower present rates and protect myself against future losses? Finally, one of the first things Obama did upon taking office was lower taxes. So wouldn’t these workers be scrambling to find jobs now to take advantage of the low tax rates while they last?
What is going on here is that right-wing economists have a lot invested in the “efficient markets hypothesis”—the view that free markets always get the allocation of resources and hence prices right. When the market doesn’t get it right they have to invent some ad hoc explanation of the anomaly that protects their pet theory.
Obama sends right-wing ideologues over the edge. Their brains are so addled they cannot come up with even a remotely plausible hypothesis.
Their intellectual dishonesty is mind-boggling.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Judgment Day July 11, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy, Science.Tags: science-fiction, time travel
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I don’t find thought experiments about the nature of God very interesting—but throw in time travel and I perk up a bit.
Mike Lebossiere poses the following puzzle:
Sally is working on a time travel project and during one experiment, her own smartphone appears in the lab. Startled, she checks her pocket and finds that her phone is there. Yet it also appears to be on the table. Picking it up, she finds that video has been recorded on it. Much to her horror and dismay, it seems to be a video of her saying that she has killed her husband for having an affair with her friend, only to find out after that she was wrong. In the video, she can she the body of what seems to be her dead husband. The video closes with her future self saying that she is sending back the phone to tell her past self to not kill her husband; future Sally then shoots herself in the head as the phone is being sent into the past.
Being something of a skeptic, Sally checks the phones carefully and finds that (aside from some blood on the future phone that matches her husband’s blood type) the two are identical. This convinces Sally and she does not kill her husband.
Now, let God be brought into the picture, at least hypothetically. If one prefers to leave God out of this game, then an omniscient observer who judges people for their deeds and misdeeds can be used in His place.
In this scenario, what would God actually “see” and how would He judge?
On one hand, the future Sally did kill her husband and send the phone back. After all, without those events, then the phone would not have the video recorded on it and would not have been sent back. As such, God would judge that Sally was guilty of suicide and murder, hence worthy of divine punishment. Also, both Sally and her husband would be dead and thus would have gone off to the relevant afterlife (assuming there is such a thing).
On the other hand, the time traveling phone prevented Sally from killing her husband and committing suicide. Thus, Sally would not be judged for these deeds. Also, neither Sally nor her husband would be dead. In effect, that future event never will be, although it must have been (otherwise there would be no phone).
[…]
One classic view of God and time is that God perceives all of time “at once.’ To use an analogy, God’s perspective is like being able to see the entire filmstrip of a movie at once. The past, present and future are just positions on the strip relative to a specific film cell. Hence, He does not see any changes in the past-He merely sees as the events that did occur, shall occur and are occurring all “at once.” So, God would “see” the phone appear from a future that never was to save Sally from committing a murder that never will be.
I think this just points out that the idea of time travel is logically incoherent. The whole idea of going back in time to “undo” an event that has occurred requires that the event both did happen and did not happen. That is a logical contradiction. The future event would have to have happened in order for it to be caused to not happen. Since the “undoing” event is in a cause effect relation with the undone event which must exist for the undoing event to occur we have backward causation going on.
And it is not obvious that backward causation is a coherent idea. It would seen that the outcome of an event must happen only after the event. Although quantum mechanics seems to allow for backward causation (if I understand it correctly) surely there is no experimental result that depends on that idea.
So what would God see? It is a widely accepted view that God is a rational being and thus can neither see nor coherently think contradictory states of affairs. If time travel is logically impossible then trying to imagine how an omniscient being would view it doesn’t help.
Of course, if Sally is the sort of person who would murder her spouse for infidelity then God may have all the justification God needs.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Boundless Stupidity July 8, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan
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Obama may be the first President in history to face three simultaneous disasters: the economic crisis that may plunge us into a depression, ecological disasters, in the short run caused by the BP oil spill and in the long run by climate change, and the perpetual wars in the Middle East that waste our human and financial resources.
The most immediate threat to our welfare is the call for governments to reduce budget deficits during a time of sluggish growth, extremely high unemployment, and moribund housing and financial markets. Budget deficits are bad if they cause investors to demand higher interest rates or they cause inflation to increase substantially. But there is utterly no evidence that interest rates are increasing—interest on government bonds is at record lows. And no inflation is in sight. In fact some economists are predicting deflation, which will be devastating to the economy and is more likely if governments stop spending. Calls to reduce budget deficits are nothing but right-wing ideological claptrap.
The effects of the oil spill will be felt for decades on the Gulf coast and will be followed by the gradual collapse of our ecosystems around the world as the effects of climate change accelerate causing massive economic and social dislocation. Meanwhile we dump billions of dollars into wars without purpose and with no end in sight.
Jonathan Taplin recently posted a summary of how we got into this mess that is spot on:
…since Ronald Reagan, a conservative mentality has gripped our country that rejected Nixon’s embrace of environmentalism and ignored the laws liberal Republicans had helped pass to protect the planet. Since Reagan a Neo-conservative foreign policy elite has rejected the warnings of Dwight Eisenhower and built a war machine unprecedented in world history and projected American power throughout the Arabian Gulf region at a cost of $1 trillion per year. And finally a conservative group of economists (The Chicago School) has empowered a group of Bond Traders (the Vigilantes) into threatening our government (and others around the world) to slash spending at the very moment our economy is poised to plunge into a depression.
The Bond Vigilantes Taplin is referring to are global investors (the people who caused the financial mess) who now claim that unless governments reign in their spending they will stop buying government bonds. As the record low interests show, this is bunk. Investors seem to like U.S. bonds just fine. But it is influential bunk—the public as well as the business community have bought into the idea that government spending is inherently bad. If we act on their recommendations it will send the U.S. economy over a cliff.
As Taplin notes: “And ironically, when you look at the chart above, it’s so clear what caused the deficit—the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Here is the chart Taplin refers to:
The share of the deficit caused by Obama’s attempts to stimulate the economy are miniscule when compared to Bush era military spending and tax cuts.
This has to be the biggest con in human history. Conservative policies nearly destroyed this country and the public blames Obama while clamoring for—more conservative policies. The utter stupidity of the American public is boundless.
We deserve what we get.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Teaching to the Test July 7, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Education.Tags: education reform, no child left behind
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A recent study of achievement in college courses by Scott Carrell and James West suggests that teaching to the test does not produce long-term learning. They draw their sample from the U.S. Air Force Academy. Students are randomly assigned to professors in a variety of introductory and upper division courses and all sections of each course have identical syllabi and exams. Here is their conclusion:
Our results indicate that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement, on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes. Academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous value added, but positively correlated with follow-on course value-added. Hence, students of less experienced instructors who do not possess a Ph.D. perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course, but perform worse in the follow-on related curriculum.
The authors hypothesize about the mechanisms at work here:
One potential explanation for our results is that the less-experienced professors may teach more strictly to the regimented curriculum being tested, while the more experienced professors broaden the curriculum and produce students with a deeper understanding of the material….Another potential mechanism is that students may learn (good or bad) study habits depending on the manner in which their introductory course is taught. For example, introductory professors who “teach to the test” may induce students to exert less study effort in follow-on related courses.
Results like this, if confirmed in subsequent studies, may explain why policies like “No Child Left Behind” don’t work. The high-stakes testing regimes that have been implemented in K-12 tend to produce high test scores in the early grades but those gains are lost as students advance to higher grades. The problem is that the early gains are illusory—they are not gains in skill or understanding but simply reflect how well students learned material designed to produce a test score.
This is not education.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Why Are We Still in Afghanistan? July 6, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Obama's Afghanistan policy
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CIA director Leon Panetta said last week that al-Qaeda has only a few militants left in Afghanistan:
“I think at most, we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100, maybe less. It’s in that vicinity. There’s no question that the main location of al-Qaeda is in tribal areas of Pakistan,” he said. Panetta added that “winning” in Afghanistan means “having a country that is stable enough to ensure that there is no safe haven for al-Qaeda or for a militant Taliban that welcomes Al Qaida.”
The original reason we sent troops to Afghanistan was to eliminate al-Qaeda—a task that has been largely accomplished according to Panetta. But we lose about 100 troops per month and spend $100 Billion per year trying to eliminate the Taliban, who unlike al-Qaeda are indigenous to Afghanistan. In this task we get very little cooperation from the locals or the Afghan government. Our chances of succeeding under those circumstances are not good.
So why are we still there if our original goal is accomplished?
Now the administration is claiming the reason we stay is to prevent al-Qaeda from gaining a foothold in Pakistan and returning to Afghanistan if and when we leave.
But on Tuesday, Obama’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter claimed there are only about 300 hundred al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan. Here is Leiter in an interview with Newsweek’s Michal Isakoff
Leiter: I think [CIA director] Leon Panetta said on Sunday, and I agree with him, that in Afghanistan, you have a certain number, a relatively small number, 50 to 100. I think we have in Pakistan a larger number.
Q: How many?
Leiter: Upwards –more than 300, I would say.
So between Afghanistan and Pakistan combined, there are a few hundred Al Qaeda members total. All of this ongoing war and those hundreds of billions of dollars spent and those deaths and the decade of occupation, and those bombings and shootings and drone attacks and lawless prisons and habeas-stripping court precedents: it’s all (ostensibly) for a few hundred extremists total hiding in remote tribal areas. A few hundred.
This is a senseless policy and Obama needs to end it soon.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Longevity Genes—Who Wants to Know? July 5, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Technology.Tags: ethics and technology
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Scientists have apparently uncovered a cluster of “longetivity genes” which protect some people from succumbing to a variety of diseases.
When it becomes affordable to have one’s genome sequenced, perhaps in a few years, a longevity test, though not a foolproof one, may be feasible, if a new claim holds up. Scientists studying the genomes of centenarians in New England say they have identified a set of genetic variants that predicts extreme longevity with 77 percent accuracy.
The centenarians had just as many disease-associated variants as shorter-lived mortals, so their special inheritance must be genes that protect against disease, said the authors of the study, a team led by Paola Sebastiani and Thomas T. Perls of Boston University. Their report appears in Thursday’s issue of Science.
The finding, if confirmed, would complicate proposals for predicting someone’s liability to disease based on disease-causing variants in the person’s genome, since much would depend on whether or not an individual possessed protective genes as well.
This discovery should make it possible to tell individuals the odds of them making it to 100 years old.
Would it be good to know your odds or not? The answer would seem to be a matter for individuals to answer.
Many people say they would not want access to this information. They prefer the uncertainty, the adventure of not knowing when they are likely to die, and they would experience the demand to organize their lives around knowledge of such probabilities as a burden. Others would want this information to help them plot out a strategy for living past 100.
So what are you—an adventurer or a planner?
Insurance companies will no doubt be very interested in this information and adjust rates accordingly. Should insurance companies mandate that individuals acquire such a test? If you are an adventurer it would be an egregious infringement of personal liberty to require individuals to have access to this information.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Malaise on the Left July 1, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Bob Herbert, Obama Administration
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I admire Bob Herbert as a columnist but I disagree with this:
Mr. Obama and the Democrats have wasted the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity handed to them in the 2008 election. They did not focus on jobs, jobs, jobs as their primary mission, and they did not call on Americans to join in a bold national effort (which would have required a great deal of shared sacrifice) to solve a wide range of very serious problems, from our over-reliance on fossil fuels to the sorry state of public education to the need to rebuild the nation’s rotting infrastructure.
All of that could have been pulled together under the umbrella of job creation — short-term and long-term. In the immediate aftermath of Mr. Obama’s historic victory, and with the trauma of the economic collapse still upon us, it would have been very difficult for Republicans on Capitol Hill to stand in the way of a rebuild-America campaign aimed at putting millions of men and women back to work.
I too wish Obama had done more to advocate for a much, much larger stimulus package from the very beginning. But it is simple nonsense to argue that the Republicans would have found it difficult to oppose a job creation plan and that Obama could have actually succeeded at pushing such a bill through the Senate. Republicans filibustered Obama’s stimulus; they have filibustered unemployment extensions every time they have been proposed. They have filibustered education reform, infrastructure development, green jobs bills. Every Democratic proposal has been met with implacable opposition. Surely they would have opposed an even more robust initiative to create jobs.
In fact, given the opposition of Republicans and the ignorance of the public, Obama has accomplished as much as was realistically possible. The large, yet inadequate stimulus package, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, healthcare reform, withdrawal from Iraq, and hopefully financial reform are significant accomplishments.
Yet, I share the sense of dissatisfaction people like Herbert articulate, not because Obama lacks accomplishments but because he has not been an ideological leader. It is ironic that the former professor has done little to educate the public about where we have been and where we should be going. Pragmatic problem solving is fine and necessary; but we need leadership, a sharply defined vision of the kind of society we should aspire to, and a vocabulary by which to transform the national discourse. This is a tall order in the midst of the multiple disasters left by the previous administration. But it is nevertheless necessary at this historical moment.
M.J. Rosenberg gives voice to a similar sense of dissatisfaction:
We had hoped for much more. We wanted to feel what our grandparents and great-grandparents felt for FDR — that he was out there battling for working people, the unemployed, and, frankly, an America strikingly different than the one they were living in….I want FDR style politics and TR [Teddy Roosevelt] style rhetoric (“the bully pulpit”). Right now, I don’t see it. Neither does columnist Herbert. And, yes, I recognize the constraints. But Presidents have to transcend them, or at least be seen as fighting like hell. I don’t see that happening.
Obama’s presidency by any objective standard has been one of the most successful in history. But our time requires more than competence. We need moral transformation.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
