Category Archives: Politics

Sacred narratives of American liberals and conservatives

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Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues American liberals and conservatives have powerful and “sacred” cultural narratives:

A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith once summarized the moral narrative told by the American left like this: “Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle, as Smith put it, “is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”

This is a heroic liberation narrative. For the American left, African-Americans, women and other victimized groups are the sacred objects at the center of the story. As liberals circle around these groups, they bond together and gain a sense of righteous common purpose.

Contrast that narrative with one that Ronald Reagan developed in the 1970s and ’80s for conservatism. The clinical psychologist Drew Westen summarized the Reagan narrative like this: “Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” For example, “instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hard-working Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens.” Instead of the “traditional American values of family, fidelity and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex and the gay lifestyle” and instead of “projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform and burned our flag.” In response, “Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”

This, too, is a heroic narrative, but it’s a heroism of defense. In this narrative it’s God and country that are sacred — hence the importance in conservative iconography of the Bible, the flag, the military and the founding fathers. But the subtext in this narrative is about moral order. For social conservatives, religion and the traditional family are so important in part because they foster self-control, create moral order and fend off chaos. (Think of Rick Santorum’s comment that birth control is bad because it’s “a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”) Liberals are the devil in this narrative because they want to destroy or subvert all sources of moral order.

I wonder at times if any public political debates are really about the particular issues at hand or are really proxy battles between these large cultural narratives.

It does seem easy to suggest that politicians and others needs to get outside of their own narratives and be able to compromise. However, there are benefits to being part of a larger narrative: the individual has purpose and meaning plus there is strong social support in being part of a larger group. If it were easy to cross these boundaries, people could do it more easily but there are also sanctions that groups can impose on members who stray. Current conditions suggest there may be little benefit for politicians who stick their neck out. See this recent story about how some members on both sides tried to reach a deal over the debt ceiling last summer but the larger parties helped it fall apart.

Obama campaign data mining information for fundraising, voters

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Politico reports on how the Obama campaign is using data mining in its quest to win reelection:

Obama for America has already invested millions of dollars in sophisticated Internet messaging, marketing and fundraising efforts that rely on personal data sometimes offered up voluntarily — like posts on a Facebook page— but sometimes not.

And according to a campaign official and former Obama staffer, the campaign’s Chicago-based headquarters has built a centralized digital database of information about millions of potential Obama voters.

It all means Obama is finding it easier than ever to merge offline data, such as voter files and information purchased from data brokers, with online information to target people with messages that may appeal to their personal tastes. Privacy advocates say it’s just the sort of digital snooping that his new privacy project is supposed to discourage…

There’s an added twist for Obama: He’s making these moves at the same moment his administration is pushing the virtues of online privacy, last month proposing a consumer bill of rights to protect it.

This has been brewing for some time: back in July 2011, Ben Smith reported that the Obama campaign was advertising for “Predictive Modeling/Data Mining Scientists and Analysts.”

I really want to ask: what took so long? This is a gold mine for candidates.

I’ll be curious to see how far these hypocrisy charges go. If companies are going to make money off the Internet, don’t they have to have some of these abilities to put information together? Which group do people trust less to have their information: corporations or political parties?

“Copyright math”

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Since this blog regularly covers issues ranging from intellectual property law to statistics, Rob Reid’s recent TED talk on “Copyright Math” seems particularly salient:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/GZadCj8O1-0

Do politicians understand how polls work?

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A recent CBS News/New York Times poll showed 80% of Americans do not think their family is financially better than four years ago:

Just 20 percent of Americans feel their family’s financial situation is better today than it was four years ago. Another 37 percent say it is worse, and 43 percent say it is about the same.

When asked about these specific results, Harry Reid has this to say about polls in general:

“I’m not much of a pollster guy. As everyone knows, there isn’t a poll in America that had me having any chance of being re-elected, but I got re-elected,” he told TheDC.

“I think this poll is so meaningless. It is trying to give the American people an idea of what 300 million people feel by testing several hundred people. I think the poll is flawed in so many different ways including a way that questions were asked. I don’t believe in polls generally and specifically not in this one.”

The cynical take on this is that Reid and politicians in general like polls when they are supportive of their positions and don’t like them when they do not favor them. If this is true, then you might expect politicians to cite polls when they are good but to ignore them or even try to discredit them if they are bad.

But, I would like to ask a more fundamental question: are politicians any better than average Americans in understanding polls? Reid seems to suggest that this poll has two major problems: it doesn’t ask questions of enough people to really understand all Americans (a sampling issue) and the questions are poor which leads to biased answers (an issue of how the questions are worded). Is Reid right? From the information at the bottom of the CBS story about the poll, it seems pretty standard:

This poll was conducted by telephone from March 7-11, 2012 among 1009 adults nationwide.

878 interviews were conducted with registered voters, including 301 with voters who said they plan to vote in a Republican primary. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The margin of error for the sample of registered voters could be plus or minus three points and six points for the sample of Republican primary voters. The error for subgroups may be higher. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.

Yes, the number of respondents seems low to be able to talk about all Americans but this is how all major polls work: you select a representative sample based on standard demographic factors (gender, race, age, etc.) and then you estimate how close the survey results are to the actual results if we asked all American adults these questions. This is why all polls have a margin of error: if you ask less people, you are less confident in the generalizability of the results (which is why there is a larger 6% gap for the smaller Republican primary voters subgroup) and if you ask more people, you can be more confident (though the payoff of asking more people usually diminishes between 1200-1500 respondents so it is not worth asking more at some point).

I don’t think Reid sounds very good in this soundbite: he attacks the scientific basis of polls with common objections. While polls may not “feel right” and may contradict anecdotal or personal evidence, they can be done well and with a good sample of around 1,000 people, you can be confident that the results are generalizable to the American people. If Reid does understand how polls work, he could raise other issues. For example, he could insist that this is a one-time poll and you would want to measure this again and again to see how it changes (perhaps this is an unusual trough?) or you would want other polling organizations to ask the same question and triangulate the results between the surveys (like what Real Clear Politics does by taking averages of polls). Or he could suggest that this question doesn’t matter much because asking about four years ago is a rather arbitrary point and philosophically, does life always have to get better over time?

Post political content on Facebook and risk losing friends

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Results from a new study show that 18% of adults on Facebook say they have responded to political posts by friends by dropping those friends or blocking their posts:

Eighteen percent of the 2,253 adults surveyed by Pew said they had blocked, unfriended, or hidden a friend on a social network over a political post. It isn’t hard to see why: The Pew survey found that because people who post about politics tend to be very liberal or very conservative, the offending posts are more likely to be out of line with other people’s views. Indeed, only one in four users surveyed by Pew said they “usually” or “always” agree with their friends’ political posts; 73 percent said they only sometimes or never do.

Though most people—roughly two in three—take no action over political posts they disagree with, some 28 percent said they counter with a comment or competing post, another behavior the Pew survey said leads to friends going their own way.

Despite everyone’s apparent distaste for other people’s political views, the survey found most users continue to post their own: 75 percent of adults who use social sites said their friends post political content, and 37 percent said they post at least some of their own.

My interpretation (filtered through my own research): political comments (and some discussion?) are common on Facebook but it doesn’t appeal to everyone and some people can go over the line (either through posting more “extreme” political posts or posting too many political comments).

I would be interested to hear a lot more about this: what is the threshold for appropriate political posts? Why are some users so uninterested in political posts to go so far as to block/drop friends? Are there similar areas of discussion, perhaps religion, that evoke similarly strong reactions from other users?

A new world where weak social ties can spread videos like Kony 2012

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The Kony 2012 video has been watched over 65 million times on YouTube. While there has been much commentary about how the video lacks nuance, there is another interesting issue to consider: how exactly did it spread so quickly? One columnist suggests the sociological idea of weak ties provides some insights:

Many years ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter published a seminal article in the American Journal of Sociology on the special role of “weak ties” in networks – links among people who are not closely bonded – as being critical for spreading ideas and for helping people join together for action.

An examination of the spread of the Kony video suggests that one weak tie in particular may have been critical in launching it to its present eminence. Her name is Oprah Winfrey and she tweeted: “Have watched the film. Had them on show last year” on 6 March, after which the graph of YouTube views of the video switches to the trajectory of a bat out of hell. Winfrey, it turns out, has 9.7 million followers on Twitter…

In this online world of weak ties, famous tweeters like Oprah Winfrey have more influence than they have ever had before. Even though television shows or movies might be larger cultural works, new developments like Twitter and Facebook allow anyone with some influence to reach a large number of people quickly. With Winfrey located closer to the middle of a global cultural network, her suggestion can resound throughout the world.

The same columnist also considers what might happen as the result of these weak ties. In other words, what does it matter that over 65 million people saw this video?

The really interesting question, though, is whether this kind of development will further ratchet up the pressure on democratic politicians. The last two decades have shown how 24/7 media coverage of foreign atrocities can lead western leaders to morally driven interventionism.

We’ll have to see how this plays out. The Kony video itself claims that these sorts of media efforts work as they already pushed the United States to send 100 military advisers to central Africa. Additionally, they say this happened “because the people demanded it.” But they also suggest their viral efforts are not enough: the video talks about targeting a collection of political and cultural leaders, “20 culture-makers and 12 policy-makers.” Take these figures, such as Oprah Winfrey or Condoleezza Rice, out of the campaign and would as many people, in the public or on Capitol Hill, pay attention? Could just the public put enough pressure on governments through social media or viral videos? Also, the video itself is quite a production (a number of people involved in making it, per the credits on the YouTube video) from an established organization. This is a little different from a 10 year making a video in her bedroom.

This is not to take away from the fact that this videos has reached a tremendous amount of people. But if we want to understand why all those people paid attention, the story is much more complicated. Mass numbers can have an influence but powerful people are more centrally located within social networks and have more influential ties. If Kony 2012 is going to have legs and lead to lasting change, weak ties may not be enough.

High rents and the lack of politics

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Forbes recently published a two part interview with law professor David Schleicher discussing his recent paper City Unplanning.  Schleicher discusses the perversity of zoning restrictions and begins by noting that, in many cases, rents and rental units available have nothing to do with each other:

In a number of big cities, new housing starts seem uncorrelated or only weakly correlated with housing prices and the result of increasing demand while holding supply steady is that price went up fast. The average cost of a Manhattan apartment is now over $1.4 million and the average monthly rent is over $3,300.

The only explanation is that zoning rules stop supply from increasing in the face of rising demand.

Effectively, Schleicher argues that new developments in big cities are subject to a form of NIMBYism which is effective to the extent it is apolitical:

Local legislators may prefer more development than we have now to less, but have stronger preferences for stopping development in their districts because these projects would hurt homeowners in their neighborhoods—either directly through things like increased traffic or indirectly through increasing the supply of housing, harming the value of existing houses.

This is a prisoner’s dilemma and absent a political party to organize the vote in local legislatures, one-by-one votes on projects will result in “defect” results, or situations where every legislator builds coalitions to block projects in their own district and nothing gets built [emphasis added].

I couldn’t quite understand Schleicher’s point from the interview, but it is much better explained in the full paper:

Importantly, most cities do not have competitive party politics – they either have formally nonpartisan elections and/or are entirely dominated by one party that rarely takes local-issue specific stances. Absent partisan competition, there is little debate over citywide issues in local legislative races and there is no party leadership to organize the legislature, making the procedural rules governing the manner in which the legislature considers land use issues far more important. The content of the land use procedure generates what one might call “localist” policy-making: seriatim [i.e., one-off] decisions about individual developments or rezonings in which the preferences of the most affected local residents are privileged against more weakly-held citywide preferences about housing.

It’s an intriguing thesis positively, but I’m not sure what I think of Schleicher’s point normatively.  Local voters generally do seem to prefer NIMBY outcomes in order to avoid threats (e.g., increased traffic, lowered property values) to their existing assets (i.e., homes and businesses).  But if local voters achieve this result through the mechanics of “weak” local politics, isn’t that an example of the political system “working”?

Put another way, high rents may be undesirable, but they are largely an outsider problem.  Current residents (insiders who can vote) first and foremost want to protect themselves from the problematic vicissitudes of new development (which will, if it is built, be populated with outsiders who obviously cannot vote unless it is built and they take up residence).  If current residents/voters achieve this goal through voting for “apolitical” council members, (1) isn’t this actually a highly political choice, and (2) isn’t this precisely how voting and elections are designed to work?

NASA on Vegas and sprawl

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NASA recently posted a video on Flikr showing 28 years of development in Las Vegas as seen from space:

When Landsat 5 launched on March 1, 1972, Las Vegas was a smaller city. This image series, done in honor of the satellite’s 28th birthday, shows the desert city’s massive growth spurt since 1972. The outward expansion of the city is shown in a false-color [i.e., red = green space like parks and golf courses] time lapse of data from all the Landsat satellites.

Photos of Greenbelt Communities

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The New York Times’ Lens Blog has photos and a write-up of “New Deal Utopias”:

Known as Greenbelt Communities, these three federally built developments combined the suburb’s closeness to nature with the social and economic advantages of cities. Built originally for displaced farmers and poor or working families, they encouraged cooperation and community spirit. They also provoked accusations of socialism, and any further developments were stopped after a court ruling declared the federal government’s role in building these developments unconstitutional.

It’s always interesting to see a major media treatment of one’s backyard (many of the Greenbelt, MD photos were taken within a half mile or so of the residence my wife and I just moved into at the end of December).  I don’t feel like I’ve lived here long enough to have any major insights to add to the article, but it does strike me that Greenbelt, MD is a very tight-knit and walkable community.

Pedestrians in a world of driverless cars

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Many bloggers are starting to tease out the social and infrastructure implications of driverless cars, including David Alpert over at the Atlantic:

[Driverless cars] will bring many changes, but when it comes to the car’s role in the city, they may just intensify current tensions.

David suggests that new technology will simply exacerbate current trends by “trigger[ing] a whole new round of pressure to further redesign intersections for the throughput of vehicles above all else”:

If autonomous cars travel much faster than today’s cars and operate closer to other vehicles and obstacles, as we see in the [University of] Texas team’s simulation , then they may well kill more pedestrians. Or, perhaps the computers controlling them will respond so quickly that they can avoid hitting any pedestrian, even one who steps out in front of a car.

In that case, we might see a small number of people taking advantage of that to cross through traffic, knowing the cars can’t kill him. That will slow the cars down, and their drivers will start lobbying for even greater restrictions on pedestrians, like fences preventing midblock crossings.

Our metropolitan areas could then look, more and more, like zoos for humans interlaced with pathways for the dominant species, the robot car.

Personally, I think one of these scenarios (i.e., “travel much faster…[and] kill more pedestrians”) is unlikely.  Initially, driverless cars will almost certainly be much more expensive than equivalent conventional vehicles.  A car that is both (1) more expensive and (2) more dangerous seems unlikely to sell well, to say nothing of the likelihood that such lawsuit-magnets would be sued utterly out of existence.  To catch on with a mass market, driverless cars will at least need to uphold safety’s current status quo.

As far as David’s second fear (“metropolitan areas [that] look, more and more, like zoos for humans”), I’m unclear how much that differs from current development patterns.  While there are plenty of examples of “walkable” cities, much of contemporary American infrastructure is extremely unfriendly to pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-car users.  To the extent that cars dominate today’s roads, a move to driverless cars seems only to continue, rather than augment, that trend.