When I was in graduate school, it used to drive me crazy to see newspaper headlines like, “Ozone Depleting Methyl Bromide Levels Rose by 10% Last Year.” The reason that it was growing so much was that the concentration of the gas was really small. In other words, “Concentration of Unimportant Gas Rising Quickly Relative to Low Current Level.”[1] Basically, such articles were just the result of a reporter not knowing what he was doing. He saw a paper in Nature, so he wrote an article. It’s deceptive, but not malicious. There is no conspiracy. In general, it is no big deal.

But I see this kind of thing in conservative political reporting all the time. And it isn’t just a question of ignorance. It is rather a specific attempt to deceive the reader. And I think the reason that it is mostly seen in the conservative press is because politics in this country is already so tilted toward conservatism that there is rarely anything for conservatives to complain about. The supposed liberal president gave the country as conservative a healthcare reform plan as is possible. So it isn’t surprising that liberals have actual evidence-based articles they can write. In order to complain, conservatives are stuck with cherry picking data.

I remember reading David Brock’s book Blinded by the Right. The book tells the story of his life as a conservative hack writer and how he came to write pernicious propaganda like The Real Anita Hill. In his telling of it, it wasn’t so much that he meant to be a propagandist, it was just that he was never trained in how to do journalism properly. I’ve always found this contention a little hard to accept.

Maybe my problem is that I was trained as a scientist. So I have a great focus on the truth. Sometimes, while writing an article, I will find that the numbers don’t back me up. So I try to figure out why that is. It changes what I write. Sometimes, I don’t write about the issue at all if I can’t figure it out. But that clearly wasn’t the case with Brock.

The best case scenario was when Brock started with his conclusion and then went searching for facts to back that up. And he’s a smart guy and was good at this kind of thing. But there were times when he knew that he was lying. For example: when an article attacked the Anita Hill book claiming that Clarence Thomas had rented pornographic video tapes from a local video store. This was important because one of Anita Hill’s main claims was that Thomas would force her to listen to him describe the plots of pornographic films he had seen.

This was during the very earliest days of video rentals. Brock checked with Thomas and asked him if the video store rented players. If they didn’t, then how could Thomas have watched the films? Checkmate! The problem was that Thomas told Brock that he didn’t know if they rented players, because he owned his own. He also admitted that he did rent pornographic films. Brock knew, as clearly as any investigator ever does, that Thomas was guilty and that Anita Hill had been telling the truth. So what did Brock do? He just ignored the issue and wrote his defense, which was generally accepted.

What Brock did would be perfectly fine if he were Clarence Thomas’ lawyer. But as a journalist, what he did was malpractice. It was not even ethical propaganda. He could have apologized for the information he had and presented it in the best possible way. But instead, he just buried it. In his defense, I think that was the beginning of the end. I think that was the point that he realized that he was playing for the wrong team and that his position was, as he said, “a right-wing hit man.”

But the thing is, Brock is absolutely the rule in the world of conservative “journalism.” Michael Hiltzik found a recent example of it, The Latest Bogus Attack on Obamacare: It’s Anti-Innovation! It is about a Wall Street Journal article by Scott Atlas, ObamaCare’s Anti-Innovation Effect. Atlas started with the title and then found whatever data he could to support it.

Hiltzik dismantles Atlas, piece by piece. It is all about how the medical device tax is killing innovation. The whole idea of this tax is that with the increased spending in healthcare because of the law, medical device companies are going to get more sales and thus more profits. That isn’t right, so the idea is to offset this unfair windfall. So even though the medical device industry has made a lot of noise, the tax doesn’t change anything.

But one part of the whole thing stood out to me. It was Atlas’ claim that the Obamacare tax on medical devices was causing companies to move production overseas. There is no doubt that medical device manufacturers are moving production out of the country — just like all manufacturers. But there is absolutely nothing in Obamacare that would encourage them to do that. The tax applies to all companies on their sales inside the United States. But this is part of the cherry picking — in this case putting in information that has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand.

Unlike the reporters who so annoyed me in graduate school, reporters like Scott Atlas are malicious. They are trying to deceive. And this is because their positions are untenable. And note that Atlas is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His specialty is “domestic and global health care policy, particularly the role of government and the free market in pricing, quality, access, and technology innovation.” So he’s got to know what’s going on. But his purpose isn’t to inform — it is to push a particular policy. So he’s no reporter and certainly no scholar; he’s a right-wing hit man. My understanding is that it is a very well paying position.

[1] Methyl Bromide does harm stratospheric ozone. But it is not much of a problem. It always bugged me that farm workers had been trying to get rid of this chemical for years because it is a carcinogen. No one cared. But then it posed a tiny threat to the ozone layer and suddenly people cared. There has always been a bit of a class problem with environmentalism. I don’t think we give enough consideration to this. It just doesn’t cost that much to take care of coal miners at the same time that we regulate coal. We already have the corporations dumping on the American worker, we environmentalists shouldn’t do it. We environmentalists and workers should be in league.

This image was part of a John Bolton “promoted tweet” on Twitter that I saw. Basically, it is just a way for you to give Bolton your email address so he can ask you for money for the important work that he does on behalf of protecting corporate interests in the name of ending abortion or saving the Israelis. I know this is the case because the only thing I could do with it was click on a button that read, “Vote Yes for Israel!”

One person replied to it, “Israel is justified. Anyone who says no…let them have rockets sent to them & smile…” It strikes me as being funny. It isn’t a real question. I think the whole situation is a muddled mess, but I think Israel has a right to self-defense. And I think the Hamas rocket attacks are self-defeating, although I’m not sure exactly what the Palestinians are supposed to do. As they are oppressed in silence, the world just ignores them.

The question is, are these rockets really a question of self-defense? I understand that they are terrible for individual people. But they certainly are no kind of an existential threat. And the question has never been whether Israel has a right to respond. The question is whether their response makes sense. And the question for us is just how long are we going to support Israel. One would think that with all their advantages, they would be the “adults in the room.”

By this, I’m talking about coming to a reasonable settlement. But instead, Israel seems far more interested in making the situation worse. They seem to see the Israel-Palestine situation the way that King Richard III would have. The people don’t like rockets fired at them, but I’m not at all clear that the Israeli leadership doesn’t. The rockets give them more political power, just as they give the Hamas more political power. Meanwhile, the people on both sides lose.

But the John Bolton ad is a good example of why we can’t have a reasonable discussion about Israel-Palestine. The framing has less nuance than a Marvel superhero comic:

There is Hamas — a terrorist group. They have absolutely no reason for anything they do. Then there is Israel — the poor country with the eleventh most powerful military in the world that has nuclear weapons and the largest military in the world (ours) as its staunchest ally. They have never done anything that would upset anyone. They just mind their own business and people hate them for no reason whatsoever.

Do even the biggest supporters of Israel think this? Actually, I think not. The problem is that the average American who barely thinks about sees it this way. And people like John Bolton are more than willing to use that fact. His tweet now has 1,948 retweets and 1,259 favorites. And again: he isn’t interested in helping Israel. This is just a way to get people on his mailing list so he can make money.

Over at Vox on Monday, Brad Plumer wrote a really interesting and oddly exciting article, Solar Power Is Growing so Fast That Older Energy Companies Are Trying to Stop it. It is about how the electric utilities are very concerned about people putting solar panels on their houses, even though less than a half percent of electricity is coming from solar right now. This isn’t just, or even primarily, about the rapidly falling prices of solar technology. Let me explain.

Forty-three states have “net metering” laws that require excess energy collected by homeowners to be bough by the electric utility. This causes a feedback loop. The electric utility still has very high set costs of bringing electricity to everyone’s home. Thus, as less people buy electricity from them, they will be forced to raise the per unit price of electricity. As the price of electricity goes up, so will the pressure for people to install solar panels. According to Plumer, “If rooftop solar were to grab 10 percent of the market over the next decade, utility earnings could decline as much as 41 percent.”

In one way this is great: renewable energy is just around the corner! But we still need the electrical grid. We don’t want to end up with a system where we aren’t guaranteed electricity — you know, like the days when that great free market innovator ENRON was providing (or rather very often not providing) electricity. Even if this weren’t the case, and we could all just switch to solar and say goodbye to (in California) natural gas based electricity, there would be big fights as the utilities tried to keep their lucrative monopolies.

But given that there is a very real need to maintain the electricity grid, this is all turning into a real mess. Plumer mentions how this issue is splitting the conservative movement, where some are actually saying that solar is giving people more choices — which is true. Of course, I don’t especially think this attitude is going to last. Yes, there are Tea Party groups who are very pro-solar. But I’m sure that the ones that stay that way will find their Koch brothers’ oil money dry up and even if the groups don’t disappear, they will have little impact on the debate.

There are, however, many things that can be done to save the electricity utilities. One that is not being talked about is the most obvious: nationalization. But that’s always the way. That is the conservative way and therefore the American Way™. We can’t just solve problems in the obvious way. Like with healthcare, we couldn’t just have a single payer system, with all of its advantages. We had to work out a hugely complicated “free market” system that would appeal to the conservatives, even though none of them voted for it and now they all whine, “Why did Obamacare have to be so complex?!”

As electricity generation becomes more and more individualized and egalitarian, it just makes sense to make the distribution of it nationalized. I wish we could do the same thing with the internet. (Note: nationalize flow not content.) Instead, we are generally stuck with a cable company that totally sucks and a phone company that totally sucks. At least a utility is better than that. But as profits get squeezed, the utilities might start acting very badly — enabled by a corrupt political process, of course.

But it is good news that solar power is going down in price. Let’s just hope that the entire federal government doesn’t become a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries. Then solar panels might be made illegal. And don’t pretend that that couldn’t happen.

Martin Wolf has written an important warning over at The Financial Times, Why Inequality Is Such a Drag on Economies. It is based on studies by Standard & Poor’s and Morgan Stanley that show that rising inequality is actually hurting the economy in the United States. This isn’t news. I’ve written about it before, Individual vs Collective Interests. But it is good to see it getting more coverage.

Let’s be clear: it is obvious that high levels of inequality would be bad for the economy. The idea of Say’s Law is that supply creates its own demand. The problem is that Say has been dead for almost 200 years and the “law” is wrong. If Say’s Law were true, we wouldn’t have recessions. Keynes argued that one of the reasons it isn’t true is that prices don’t automatically adjust to economic changes; if a worker is going to starve with a given wage, he just won’t accept that wage.

But look at what we’ve had in the world for the last six years. There are huge amounts of money cycling all through the economy looking for some place to invest it. And there is no place to invest it. So effectively, the rich (including corporations) are sitting on huge amounts of money. If anyone really believed Say’s Law, companies would just start producing stuff because “supply creates its own demand”! But they don’t, because they aren’t idiots.

It’s interesting that so much conservative economics is found to be completely useless when it comes to practical matters. In general, those who have to predict economic conditions and who have money on the line use New Keynesian kinds of models. I think this tells you all you have to know. There is no doubt that the new classical economists have important lessons for people interested in economics as an academic subject. But in terms of practical matters, why do they stick their noses in? Well, it’s pretty clear: because they have ideological axes to grind.

So no one should be surprised that our ridiculous level of economic inequality should be bad for the economy. The more money accumulated by a smaller and smaller group, the less money there is to buy stuff. Of course, it is so much worse than this because it isn’t just economics. The more money the small group has, the more they can manipulate the political process in their favor.

Martin Wolf discusses all this, but he puts far too big an emphasis on education. This I find mystifying. The young people today with college degrees can’t find jobs to use those degrees. If we had twice as many people with college degrees, we would have even more people who are over-qualified for the poor paying jobs that are available. Our focus should be on creating an economy where one could have a good life with just a high school diploma. Then there might be a market for people with advanced degrees. As it is, talking about college just avoids the issue.

And Wolf understand the issue. He wrote:

So you see the problem right there: we don’t provide decent jobs because the rich are taking all the profit in the economy for itself. And then, we don’t even take care of the poor — more and more of government transfer payments go to the top rather than the bottom. There is a feedback loop here where bad economic policy leads to high inequality which leads to more bad economic policy.

The question is: will this change? The truth is that I’m not hopeful. I discussed the basic problem earlier this year, Impulse Control and Global Warming. All the problems that conservatives claim plague the poor — things like poor impulse control — actually affect the rich to a much greater degree. They may see that for the economy as a whole, it is bad for all the rich to stick it to the poor. But it is still in their best interest to stick it to their own employees. And this can easily go on to the point where the whole society breaks down.

As Wolf noted, “Enormous divergences in wealth and power have hollowed out republics before now. They could well do so in our age.” Yes they could.

H/T: Mark Thoma

For some time, I’ve known that there was a little argument going on between election modelers Sam Wang and Nate Silver. I first noted it months back when I saw Wang poking at Silver about the fact that Wang that perfectly predicted the 2012 election and Silver had not. It always seemed playful to me, but with a serious undercurrent. After all, Silver was the man everyone talked about in 2012, but Wang was just this guy that more serious nerds knew about.

But then on 17 September, Nate Silver wrote, How The FiveThirtyEight Senate Forecast Model Works. Don’t let the title fool you; it was mostly just an exercise in calling Sam Wang an amateur. I discussed the situation at that time, The Senate Model Arguments. It’s gotten rather worse since them.

Silver has sent out a number of tweets that are, well, rude. I should be clear about my position. For quite a long time, I’ve considered Nate Silver a jerk. It isn’t surprising to me at all that he would be good at poker — it is a game that does tend to go with that temperament. And Sam Wang’s model has more told me what I want to hear this election cycle. But in general, I believe Silver’s model more. It is the one that I focus on now. But I’ll admit, a lot of it is style. I like how the model has inertia built in; it doesn’t bounce around like The Monkey Cage model, for example.

But recently, the whole thing seems to have turned ugly. For example, on Monday, Silver tweeted this:

My response to this was like Michael Salerno, “You’re looking petty, Nate. Just do you, my man. Your methods and results speak for themselves.” I was frustrated while the Princeton model was down. But to imply that something was amiss? Also, this tweet goes along with others where Nate Silver’s entire argument is, “The Princeton model is an outlier.” Everyone knows that. It’s what makes it interesting.

If all the Senate election models provided the same results, we would have to wonder what the point was. The truth is, at times, The Monkey Cage model has been a big outlier. But I’ve always been interested in that model because of its basis in (at one time: only) political science fundamentals. What’s interesting about Wang’s model is that it is the simplest. My understanding is that it doesn’t take into account “house effects” — estimates of how good particular polling organizations are. The assumption is that it will all work itself out. This is the wisdom of the crowd approach. Because of this, the Daily Kos model, which is also “polls only,” gives the Republicans a distinctly better chance than the Princeton model.

For whatever reason, Wang has gotten under Silver’s skin. I suspect it is because Silver is very competitive. Wang is a scientist. So regardless of his desire to win (which I don’t doubt), in the end, he can take the high road and say, “Now that the election is over, what have we found out about different approaches to models?” If Silver’s predictions prevail, he will just say he already knew, but Wang will be able to save face. If Wang’s prediction happens to prevail, then everyone else will look very foolish, even though it won’t actually mean that they were wrong or that Wang’s model is better. Silver’s prediction currently gives a 60% chance of the Republicans taking the Senate. That still means the Democrats have quite a reasonable chance of holding the Senate. If I were Silver, it would bug me that I would take a reputational hit if the slightly less likely thing happens.

I wish this would all stop. I think Wang and Silver and everyone else are doing very good and interesting work. I’m glad that we have different approaches to modeling the election. But at this point, I think there is real bad blood between these two men. And “The Ballad of Sam and Nate” may go on long past the election.

I recently read Garrett Epps’ fantastic, Wrong and Dangerous: Ten Right-Wing Myths About Our Constitution. I consider myself pretty well read on this stuff, but I learned a great deal from this little book. But by far I learned the most about the Tenth Amendment.

It is probably because I spent so much time as a libertarian that I got so confused about this amendment. It’s interesting how intellectually inbred one can become in a situation like that. The amendment reads, in it entirety, “The powers not delegated to the Unite States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” But that’s not what I thought it said. Actually, that’s not what I knew it said. I was quite certain that it read, “The powers not expressly delegated to the United States…” This is a huge difference. Because the insertion of that word would make implied power unconstitutional.

Epps gives an example of how ridiculous the misreading is:

In my defense, I made the “express” mistake because I wanted to have legal access to the drugs I most loved. But that isn’t true for the vast majority of those Epps refers to as “Tenthers.” He isn’t blunt about it, so let me be: they are bigots. He points out that nullification — the idea that the states can nullify laws that they consider unconstitutional — was originally proposed by John Calhoun: “the greatest defender American slavery every had.” And the idea went away with slavery. But it came back in — What a surprise! — the 1950s when the south was trying to hang onto segregation.

What’s so interesting about this is that the word “expressly” does come from somewhere: The Articles of Confederation. The Second Article reads, “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” This, of course, was the original idea for the United States: that they would just be a confederation of independent nations. The problem was that it didn’t work.

What’s more, the absolute worst aspect of the Constitution, the acceptance of slavery and the the three-fifths compromise, shows that what was really stopping the United States from being a true nation was the south’s “peculiar institution.” And in a fundamental way, the United States wasn’t really born until the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment — which greatly strengthened the federal government and limited the power of the states.

And if you want to know more about that, you really should check out Epps’ book. But it is important to remember the title of this book. Many of these right wing myths are incredibly dangerous for the nation. It seems that today, what conservatives most want is The Articles of Confederation. As much as they may say that they love the Constitution, what they say shows something else. As Rick Perry has explained, “Federalism enables us to live united as a nation… while we live in states with like-minded people who share our values and beliefs… If you don’t support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol, don’t come to Texas. If you don’t like medicinal marijuana or gay marriage, don’t move to California.” You could substitute “slavery” for the “death penalty” and his argument would make as much sense. Apparently, like most conservatives, he’s never read the Constitution.