Archive for the Politics Category

Seeing the Light

February 16, 2009 by Sanjay.

My non-agenda for this blog, I told myself, was to write about whatever interested me. And, like most people, I have convinced myself of my impressively wide range of interests. Imagine my surprise then, when I looked at the “word cloud” generated by the ultra-cool web site Wordle. Click on it to see the full-size picture:

Wordle: SanjaysNewBlogPic

I’m political! Who knew!!

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How We Think Today

September 18, 2008 by Sanjay.

I have been following the 2008 US electoral cycle with keen interest, chortling pleasure, and an occasional prickling of concern.

Interest, because the world is clearly at an inflection point - the old order changeth, giving way to the new, etc. How Americans choose to deal with the changing reality is reflected in their political choices. And who is elected to lead America will undoubtedly have a major impact on history.

Pleasure, or more accurately - schadenfreude - because while presidential politics is the highest stakes game there is, its principals are so nakedly trying to learn as they go along, slipping and sliding to political perdition along the way. Not just John “My Friends” McCain, but also Carly “Not Qualified to Run HP” Fiorina, Jeremiah “My Kingdom for a Mic” Wright, the “monstrous” Samantha Powers, the ever-hapless Tucker Bounds, and many more.

And finally, concern, because if these “leaders” don’t know what they are doing, who does? I feel a bit like Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities:

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

But the most interesting phenomenon has bloomed following the Sarah Palin selection as McCain’s running mate. This breathtakingly stupid decision has split right-leaning opinionators into two stark camps: those trying to deal with it analytically, and those attempting to trans-subtantiate a lipsticked pig into a silk purse.

David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and a few other pundits are currently marvelous exemplars in a slow-mo “five stages of grief” type of enlightenment. (David Frum is the only pundit who instantly recognized the light at the end of the Rupublican Convention as that of a freight train.) These folks started off rah-rah-ing Palin. Since then, they’ve been talking themselves and their readers back off the ledge.

(Parenthetically, it’s hard enough being a journalist and committing your judgments to forever-Googleable bits. Add to that the pressure of having to opine in real-time, on television and blogs, and you have a logorrheic masochist’s dream profession.)

Others - sad to say they’re the majority - doggedly continue to ascribe the relentlessly unfolding messiness of the Palin selection on the ever-convenient “liberal media”. (Parenthetically, it remains surprisingly common for American commentators, even many who have traveled the world and theoretically gained perspective on the domestic US scene, to fail to understand the fundamental conservativeness of mainstream American media.) My Facebook friend and Forbes Online editor Rich Karlgaard is in the latter camp. Rich has even resorted to selectively quoting from the firebrand narcissist Camille Paglia’s Salon column on Palin’s supposed ur-feminism to bolster his repeated contention that Palin is a “good thing” for McCain and (scarily) for the country.

Until recently, I would have rolled my eyes at attempts to square the circle by an otherwise intelligent man. But I was reminded of something another lifelong Republican friend (the improbably named Pierre Redmond) once told me - “Sanjay, to do anything meaningful you have to pick a team. You can’t go through life evaluating everything everytime.” (That’s a rough paraphrase.) I believe that a misplaced “team affiliation” lies at the root of the wilful-seeming analytical blindness displayed by Palin-boosters.

To begin with, you pick a team - in Rich’s case “free-market conservativism” - that has an internally consistent analytical framework. Should the framework be resilient enough, it allows you to build on previous analysis without having to revert to first principles. That is all to the good. But what happens when your team decides to change games? Alert observes figure this out quickly. It’s not difficult. But what is difficult is deciding what to do next. Should you switch teams? Should you attempt to influence your team to reset the game? I figure that the more closely you emphasize with your team’s “brand”, the easier it is to go along with the new game. And it’s human nature to rely on brands rather than the reality behind them.

Breaking with one’s team is wrenching at best, unthinkable for most. It isn’t having to reexamine ideological underpinnings that’s the worst. It’s the Solomonic cleaving of social assumptions - old friends who now disapprove of your views, your freakish and presumptive new fellow travelers, etc. - that present the greatest disruption risk. Only the boldest, the true free-thinkers, are thus capable.

I’ve long found there to be a structural inverse correlation between free thought and modern conservatism. The finest counter-example to that notion was William F Buckley Jr. I’ve also been impressed by Andrew Sullivan, a prolific blogger at The Atlantic, even though his book The Conservative Soul: How we Lost it, How to Get it Back, is ultimately unpersuasive in its attempt to redirect the current of American conservatism.

Today I read a remarkable article by Wick Allison, the former editor of National Review (another WFB connection!) titled A Conservative for Obama. Its defense of conservatism and its rationale for a break with the Bush-McCain brand is remarkably cogent. (Its dour description of liberalism, not so much. But that’s a quibble.) Here’s Allison’s core argument for ditching his team:

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results…. But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts - a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war - led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Wick Allison now joins my (very short but growing) list informally titled “a thinking-man’s conservatives”.

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Telling Truths in America

August 20, 2008 by Sanjay.

Today’s NYT has an in-depth examination of Barack Obama’s tax philosophy and proposals. While interesting in and of itself, the article is especially useful in showing how the candidate thinks… in fact, in showing the candidate’s startlingly live intellect. A mind in a national-level politician is a strangely exotic notion, given George W Bush’s depressing inarticulation and John McCain’s distressing tic of seeming like he’s reading a teleprompter even when he isn’t.

Towards the end of the article, Obama quotes from Robert Kennedy’s “Soul of America” speech from the ‘68 campaign. Delivered less than three month before his assassination, the speech has the trademark Kennedy humor, a characteristic appreciation of history, and most of all, a richly poetic vein doomed to lie fallow in American politics until Senator Obama’s emergence at the 2004 Democratic convention.

Obama picks one of his “favorite quotes” from the following wonderful riff on the limitations of Economics:

[the] Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

That is, indeed, a clever juxtaposition. It’s not difficult to see why Obama, RFK’s stylistic descendant, highlights the section. However lyrical though, it is far from the rhetorical gut of the speech. That is RFK’s truth-telling of the country’s two major challenges - Vietnam and its attendant unrest and alienation, and domestic poverty:

…we as a people, we as a people, are strong enough, we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand. This country needs honesty and candor in its political life and from the President of the United States. But I don’t want to run for the presidency - I don’t want America to make the critical choice of direction and leadership this year without confronting that truth. I don’t want to win support of votes by hiding the American condition in false hopes or illusions. I want us to find out the promise of the future, what we can accomplish here in the United States, what this country does stand for and what is expected of us in the years ahead. And I also want us to know and examine where we’ve gone wrong. And I want all of us, young and old, to have a chance to build a better country and change the direction of the United States of America.

RFK spends the rest of his speech - some 2800 words - describing Appalachian poverty, the mess in Vietnam and laying out the hard work ahead.

Critiquing the recent Rick Warren theofest starring the two major party candidates, my wife observed that Obama “dumbed down” his delivery for the (largely right-leaning) evangelicals, that Obama soft-pedaled to avoid antagonizing the (largely white) audience. Her comments reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ similar complaint about Senator Obama’s timidity:

Obama can’t bring the same moralism to bear on the wider he country which he applies to the black community, that he can’t point out to Americans that oil prices going up is a good thing. Polluting the world your children will inherit is a moral issue. A system that allows people to buy homes with no money down is a moral issue. Telling people that the best thing they can do after the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, is go out an shop is a moral issue.I hear all of this talk about Obama as a post-racial candidate–but that only applies when its time for white people to pat themselves on the back. A truly post-racial candidate would be free to preach morals not just to African-Americans, but to all Americans.

The parallels between RFK’s and Obama’s respective situations are remarkable: Vietnam vs. Iraq, widespread poverty vs. the current economic meltdown. Perhaps Obama should hew less to advisors-generated tactics and focus more on speaking his mind a la RFK. Maybe “the real Obama” is more like RFK than Hillary Clinton.

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Follow the Many

June 25, 2008 by Sanjay.

The success of prediction markets in the electoral arena hinges on the idea that while talk is cheap, nothing sharpens the mind like real money. Combining the wisdom of the crowd with real money yields better predictions.

So, if how third-party observers choose to use their money tells us what they really think, can the same be said for campaign expenditures? (Key: Expenditures as opposed to campaign rhetoric.) Now, we could dissect the strategy of either presidential campaign (e.g., the famous McCain Strategy Briefing). But we have to contend with incomplete information, possible misdirection, and sample bias. It may be more instructive to analyze the financial actions of the most interested market actors: congressional candidates.

We want to know - where are congressional candidates up for election putting their hard-bought campaign dollars? Are Republican candidates, for instance, tying themselves to the GOP candidate? Or are they assuming a posture of independence from the party establishment? (It goes without saying that all candidates in the 2008 cycle are either attacking or ignoring President Bush.) How much of each candidate’s campaign expenditure co-opts the Obama theme of “change”, how much focuses on the candidate’s individual brand, how much on party affiliation, how much on the economy, etc.

From data on each candidate’s media expenditure - along a breakdown similar to that implied above - we can find regression coefficients that essentially mimic the market price for each “meme”. These market prices could be aggregated regionally or nationally or through district segmentation (”hard red”, “leans blue”, etc.). Extrapolating based on such prices at the state level should provide a better forecast of the electoral dominos than opinion survey-based polling.

An illustrative instance comes from the following ad released by Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR). He is not only allocating dollars to the “bipartisanship” meme, he is explicitly attempting to leverage the Obama brand.

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The Unbearable Rightness of Being Happy

April 1, 2008 by Sanjay.

In his recent column in The Economist, subtitled Why conservatives are happier than liberals, “Lexington” quotes Syracuse University economist Arthur Brooks’ research finding that:

In 2004 Americans who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” were nearly twice as likely to tell pollsters they were “very happy” as those who considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” (44% versus 25%). One might think this was because liberals were made wretched by George Bush. But the data show that American conservatives have been consistently happier than liberals for at least 35 years.

Explanations are offered - conservatives are more likely to be married, parents, and churchgoers, and that “the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one”. Strangely, Lexington does not mention the obvious: that people happier with the status quo are more likely to be conservative. Contentment breeds conservatism, not necessarily the reverse.

Professor Brooks also reaches another interesting conclusion through his survey-based research: that partisans are happier than moderates:

Some 35% of those who call themselves “extremely liberal” say they are very happy, against only 22% of ordinary liberals. For conservatives, the gap is smaller: 48% to 43%. Extremists are happy, Mr Brooks reckons, because they are certain they are right. Alas, this often leads them to conclude that the other side is not merely wrong, but evil. Some two-thirds of America’s far left and half of the far right say they dislike not only the other side’s ideas, but also the people who hold them.

Intuitively, this seems more reasonable, if summarily disheartening. (Caveat: I have not read the original research. A brief look at Prof. Brooks’ column titles - yes I know editors write taglines, not columnists - that include Liberal Hatemongers and The Upside of Bush’s Foreign Policy creates the suspicion that we aren’t dealing with a detached observer. Then again, perhaps it is better to be happy than to be true.)

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The Know-Nothings Live

March 18, 2008 by Sanjay.

The tenor of much of the vituperation (see this, this or this for particularly fine examples) following Senator Obama’s “race speech” reflects a particularly pathetic status quo-ist obduracy. For the first time in a very long time along comes an American politician who might represent something other than the usual elementary schoolyard political dialectic. And because he represents a threat to their self-interest, these folks - whether dogmatic Republicans or Democratic machine apparatchiks - deliberately blind themselves to the huge potential upside for American society as a whole. The risk, apparently, isn’t worth taking. The optimism that was the hallmark of American spirit is a thing of the past. Scared is the new black.

Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic prints a reader’s email that reflects some of my own puzzlement and dismay at this reflexive and willfully cynical anti-Obama-ism:

I’ll state right away that I am a McCain supporter. Still, I am very much drawn to Obama. It’s not a silly, unthinking attraction. It has nothing to do with his race, and I have very little love for the Democratic party. I am also aware that he, in many ways, is just another politician. In other ways, he is anything but another politician.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), I was at my bank when Obama began his speech. I sat down with a group of people (all white, male and female) and watched. The collective groans coming from the group surprised me. Even when Obama was reaching out, saying things I felt were absolutely true, sincere and conciliatory, he was met with derision.

A couple people felt the need to talk back to the television as if Obama could hear them (as if their opinions were appropriate at that moment). This was done in public, in the midwest. A fairly moderate town overall. Maybe I’m out of touch, but what has happened over the past 16 years to my country?

Then I left, got in my car, turned on the radio and already Laura Ingram was taking soundbites of Obama’s speech and mocking them, dismissing them out of hand while her listeners chimed in, supporting their queen of talk. I hate this all so much. But then I remembered that Obama will still probably get the nomination and face McCain. One is already great man, the other, Obama, may have taken his first step on his way to greatness. I hope America was listening.

An “offense is the best defense” attitude would be frustrating if it weren’t so historically classic: which leader of consequence hasn’t engendered reactionary backlash? Needless to say, historical appreciation doesn’t necessarily provide succor.

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Arguing Remembrance Past

March 4, 2008 by Sanjay.

As a sort of a last-minute save, I recently agreed to give a talk on “practice development” at an upcoming INFORMS conference. After some discussion, the primary organizer agreed to extend my submission deadline by five days. The slides for the printed conference proceedings are now due four days hence. After some late night work, I have was able to pull out a title and a generic-enough abstract. But fleshing out a talk from the ideas fluttering around one’s brain - all the while not contradicting either the title or abstract - is a challenge. There is not a lot of time.

To promote authorial peristalsis, I took tough steps! I flew to Davis to discuss my presentation plan with my colleague and friend, Professor Hemant Bhargava of the University of Calfornia at Davis. Unfortunately, we spent most of the time discussing Hemant’s fascinating new research on complex pricing, e.g., multi-attribute pricing as used by mobile phone providers. On most cell phone plans, you pay a flat monthly fee f, for which you get a quota of q minutes, and if you exceed your quota, you pay p cents per additional minute. This triple-attribute pricing can be labeled “fqp pricing”. In contrast, airline pricing is single-attribute: you pay a flat fee. Airlines exploit the price elasticity curve by offering multiple options, like items on a menu, at different price-points. Hemant can show that done right, multi-attribute pricing allows a vendor to drastically reduce the number of items on a service menu. It is, in an economic sense, much more efficient.

I did get the chance to get Hemant’s views on “what is to be done” in OR practice. This discussion during a lovely, if short, hike around Lake Beryessa convinced me that I have something new to say about the state and trajectory of the art. No progress on the talk itself, though!

My “concrete step” today focused on reading Sociological theory on what defines a practice. Using scholar.google.com as my primary “library”, I read up on the historical development of professions. (Did you, for instance, know that medicine, the law, and divinity are the original “status” professions?) Sadly, my all-too-necessary investigation, by some non-replicable clickstream, deposited me at an article by Professor Amartya Sen, titled Imperial Illusions. At that point I abandoned all hope of progress on my talk and began reading the long article sans fig leaf.

In the essay, originally published in The National Review, Sen purports to use the British imperial adventure in India to illuminate today’s American empire-except-in-name:

It has been suggested that the annals of the British empire are relevant to significant policy issues in the world today. The British empire is invoked persistently these days to discuss the demands of successful global governance. It is used to persuade the United States to acknowledge its new role as the unique imperial power today,… “Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited?”

To release the cat up-front: Sen does nothing of the sort. Instead, he digresses, most enjoyably I confess, into describing the susage-making of eigtheenth century colonialism. For instance, here is his description of the endemic corruption spawned by the East India Company:

If Americans are to be inspired by the disciplined regularity of early British rule in India, they would do well to avoid reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, particularly Smith’s discussion of the abuse of state power by a “mercantile company that oppresses and domineers in the East Indies. ” While most of the loot accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation in all this by the political and business leadership in Britain. Indeed, nearly a quarter of the members of Parliament in London owned stock in the East India Company in the 1760s, the decade that followed Plassey (as Robert Travers discusses in his illuminating book Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal). The commercial interests at the beginning of the empire in India reached far into the British establishment.

(Italics mine.) Hm… Halliburton, anyone?

Sen underlines (for the primarily American audience of TNR) the rapaciousness of British colonial policy. In the process, he applies his formidable intellect to the rather workmanlike task of illuminating the received dialectic of British rule in the West: at its core, the British empire was moral. (And the corollary, that “British morality” was the key factor in Gandhi’s success with non-violence.)

History, they say, is written by the victors. Post-WWII Britain emerged from losing the jewel in its crown with remarkably clean skirts. And due to the subsequent ascendence of its cultural progeny - the USA - the “essentially moral-hearted colonizer” narrative is distressingly alive in the Western public discourse on colonialism. It’s good to have someone of Sen’s stature helping re-assemble history.

None of this helps me prepare my talk. Nevertheless, it’s good to read the original argumentative Indian.

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