Mad Social Scientist

David Brooks writes about an important topic in today's NYT: the benefits of free trade for developing nations. He notes that in recent years, growth in developing nations has risen at historic rates. He also cites work by Sala-i-Martin, who finds that inequality globally has fallen, even as it has risen in many nations.

Some thoughts:

1. Partly, this is a reshuffling of inequality, from something that divided rich nations from poor nations, to something that divides middle and lower classes within nations. But because I take the view that an impoverished Congolese is as bad as an impoverished Canadian, I view the net decrease in inequality and poverty as a good thing.

2. Whether higher growth is mainly a result of globalization is an open question. As a friend once pointed out to me, it is very difficult to find any examples of countries that developed without protectionist policies. (I hasten to emphasizes there are many examples of countries with protectionist policies that failed to develop; my friend was wondering if they are a necessary condition, not supposing they were sufficient). Maybe whatever stage of development we're in (late late super late?) allows or even requires free trade development policies. I don't know. But it is an open question.

3. Setting aside the growth question, the changing patterns of inequality do fit with a basic Stolper-Samuelson view of trade betwen rich and power nations, which (put crudely) should make the poor and rich within nations more alike (while producing efficiencies all around, of course).

4. I've always been a free trader, but I've also always been in favor of strong welfare states. And despite American's parochial assumptions that the left is always protectionist, many left-wing parties throughout Europe's smaller countries have long been welfare state free traders. And if you believe point (3), this approach makes a lot of sense: capture the efficiency gains from trade, and use your growing wealth to ensure economic security and an income floor for all your citizens. You can have falling inequality across nations and within nations, if you build up the welfare state even as you tear down tariffs.

5. I simply note (the literature is too large to summarize, and it's late) that welfare states can persist, grow, and even thrive in economies open to world trade, even in today's "era of limits".

6. Institutions involved in globalization, like the IMF, often twist developing countries arms to get them to adopt not just free-trade, but a whole neo-liberal brew of rigid monetary policy and austere public spending, even during recessions. We taint the benefits of free trade when we tie them to this sort of economic blackmail.

7. The American left should pair the welfare state and free trade more often in its rhetoric. If you admit the later is unstoppable, insist on the former.

8. The right should be ashamed of touting the benefits of free trade for the poor as the ranks of the poor grow in the US as a result of their half-assed policies.

9. Finally, a note for David Brooks. Cut the caricatures. The left is more than Bono and Springsteen. There are lots of smart people engaging these issues, but instead of taking on their arguments, you take potshots at singers. Classy.

And spare us homilies like "if you really want to reduce world poverty, you should be cheering on those guys in pinstripe suits at the free-trade negotiations and those investors jetting around the world"? Everyone is involved in globalization. Why single out investors for praise, and not hard-working laborers or farmers? Investor-worship went out of fashion with compulsive Nasdaq watching.

The first hopeful news to emerge from Iraq in ages: Iraqi leaders are going to talk with "insurgent leaders" in Jordan. I'm a big believer in the idea that elite contact and bargaining is an essential step in resolving this sort of conflict, so I see this as a positive step.

It's not like things could get much worse.

As I predicted after the election, the Republicans are looking for a chance to pull out of Iraq post haste. They've started up the media campaign with comments from right wing think-tanks; soon they be echoing this call as if it weren't their idea.

Then, sometime after the elections (March? April?), most of the military will pull out. We'll keep some bases, I expect, as trophies, and forward positions for the next war (Iran). Iraq will collapse into civil war, or worse.

But still, do they have to pour salt in our wounds? Take this quote:

"Our large, direct presence has fueled the Iraqi insurgency as much as it has suppressed it," said Michael Vickers, a conservative-leaning Pentagon consultant and longtime senior CIA official who supported the war.
...
"The end of the foreign occupation will seriously undermine the terrorists' claims that their acts of violence against Iraqis are somehow serving the interests of Iraq," according to "Exiting Iraq," published by the conservative-leaning Cato Institute. Moreover, "The occupation is counterproductive in the fight against radical Islamic terrorists and actually increases support for Osama bin Laden in Muslim communities not previously disposed to support his radical interpretation of Islam."

Yes, that's the rightwing saying that Michael Moore and Howard Dean were right. Do you think they realized this just yesterday? Or a year ago? Yes, they played all those Red Staters for suckers, knowing all along (as any reasonably intelligent toaster oven would) that invading Iraq has made us much less safe.

Clear Channel, the largest owner of radio stations in the country, now recognizes Bush as Il Duce. Really.

The daily march to fascism continues.

Two races from the 2004 elections roll on: the Washington gubernatorial race, which the Republican Rossi now leads by 42 votes out of 2.8 million cast, and a Texas State House race that in which a Democratic challenger appears to have beaten the chair of the Appropriations committee by a mere 32 votes.

In Washington, the Democrat Gregoire is requesting a third count, this time by hand, after the initial count found Rossi ahead by 261, and the automatic machine recount cut that lead to 42. Rossi's people are starting to complain; as in Florida in 2000, the refrain is that it's taking too long to count all the votes. (A recommendation to Gregoire: hold the recount state-wide, not just in your strongest counties. It may be more expensive, but it's the principled thing to do. And if AL Gore had done it in 2000, he would be president today).

In Texas, Republican Heflin isn't waiting for a recount. He just wants the State Legislature to seat him, or hold a new election, alleging election fraud.

I tend to think the point of elections is to make sure the person preferred by a majority wins. Sometimes, that means counting careful, when the results are really close---whether your side is ahead or behind. And when it comes to other countries, Republicans still seem to agree. Colin Powell today condemned the Ukrainian elections for failing to meet international standards, and said the US would refuse to accept the outcome until the counting was made more transparent.

One wishes the Bush administration held itself to the same standards.

Three quotes to remember:

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. ---Nietzsche

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. ---Orwell

They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace. ---Tacitus

We went to Iraq on a flimsy excuse---a claims of "pre-emptive" self-defense that looked weak from the outset, and turned out to be totally baseless. We turned on a dime, and began insisting we were invading and occupying Iraq for the good of Iraqis, the Middle East, and the world. So difficult a moral tightrope---to fight a war to make peace, to destroy a regime to build up a better one as alien occupiers---would have given pause to a saint. Against the corrupting effects of war and the unpredictability of occupying a hostile country, it takes self-sacrifice and humility to stay good guys, instead of brutal bastards.

But we really went to Iraq looking to kick some ass, get some "revenge", secure some oil, threaten Iraqs neighbors, bully domestic opponents of war, and whip the public into a frenzy of fear. So moral corruption isn't so much a danger as part of the plan.

Our country is now the one that bombs innocents in their homes, invades countries without provocation, tortures prisoners who have not been so much as tried, allows its soldiers to kill civilians and pillage their homes if that's the easiest way to suppress the insurgency, and allows children under our rule to starve and die. There isn't much point in arguing whether we have made things better than they were under Saddam Hussein. We have become Saddam Hussein.

But that's not enough for many in our country. They want to revel in this evil. They want to give a medal to the Marine who shot an injured, unarmed captive in the head. And they condemn as a traitor the journalist who simply recorded the action. They even joke crudely about having him killed by the USMC. Is this your America? America is about freedom of speech, about showing the people the truth, and about protecting the innocent (or at least it used to be--now you can be locked up for a year for being Muslim). The Iraq war has brought out a fascist streak in the American public that terrifies and appalls me.

What next? When the neo-cons gin up the propoganda for a bombing campaign against Iran, how many in our country will say "Enough"? And how many will say "Yee-ha! Let's kill those Ay-rabs [sic]!"

Red-State moralists, the question is for you.

Growing up in Houston, I always wondered about squirrels' suicidal behavior during encounters with their major predator, the car. This article explains a lot.

My friend Rob is very upset about American war crimes, too. He takes this sort of thing very seriously, having a bit more faith in American institutions (constitutional and military) than I, and is consequently even more infuriated when they are perverted.

But I can't but repeat Rob's determined response to the election, which I am sure he would apply here, too:

"You know, General, we've had the Devil's own due; haven't we today?"
"Yup. Whip 'em tomorrow, though."
-Generals Sherman and Grant after the first day of the Battle of Shiloh

It's going to be a hard struggle, but it could be harder.

Primate section.

A lovely illustration of how amazing it is when order arises from chaos, and how precarious.

but a record of the not too distant future that somehow travels back to us.

It's high time the Democrats forcefully defined themselves. Call it branding if you must, but it needs be done.

I like "National Security First. Presidential Yachts Later. Much Later."

Some bitter humor here:

Senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq say it is increasingly likely they will need a further increase in combat forces to go after remaining areas of resistance in the country.

Wouldn't that be, say, all of Iraq? I mean, you can't even get from the airport to the city of Baghdad without a small private army. The only places we control are the ones that substantial troops are standing on.

More bitter humor: Bush's support for the 9/11 commission's recommendations was, as anyone could have guessed, a sham abandoned as soon as Ohio went red. The "Pentagon" torpedoed this, but Bush "supported" it? I think Bush could overrule Rummy on this if he desired. Rumsfield kind of owes Bush big; on account of not being fired for gross incompetence.

Sigh. I guess the upside of being bogged down in Iraq is that it will be harded to invade Iran. But then, they may just want to bomb the crap out of Iran instead.

Andrew Gelman has a statistical inference blog for his research group at Columbia. A useful resource, and an interesting idea for promoting a group of grad students.

Even if you're not a statistics person, this post will be of interest. It critiques a recent working paper by some Berkeley scholars (who purport to find unexplained effects of evoting technology in Florida, even controlling for past votes); turns out this finding rests entirely on two outliers, both of them large Democratic counties. A great reminder to always look at the data, even if you're going to throw it into a "fancy" regression (and especially if that regression isn't robust!). For bivariate relationships, the scatterplot has yet to be outdone.

Wow. Now if they can just get full text books on line, I'll never need to go to the bricks and mortar library again!

I love the balancing job in this article. A falling dollar will bring jobs to manufacturing exporters in Iowa, but may provoke a massive financial crisis in the medium term. But don't forget that factory in Iowa!

Of course a falling dollar is good for exporters, and, during an economic slump, is a pretty desirable thing. I've had to explain this to people who assume a "strong" dollar is always good more times that I care to remember. And a (gently) falling dollar would probably be a part of a sensible economic policy, if our government had one.

But why would we want to run an economic policy during a weak recovery that combines a.) a huge structural budget deficit that has relatively little stimulative effect, given the tax policies that created it, b.) reliance on foreign bondholders to finance the deficit, and c.) no realistic plans to cut the deficit, but lots of promises to further monkey around with the tax system?

That's just crazy.

But then, what's crazy today, anyway? The Republicans are now talking about eliminating the employer health insurance tax deduction to pay for more tax cuts for the rich and investor class. The health insurance tax deduction is the American health care system, at least for working people. It's a dumb way to run a health care system, but not as dumb as having no system at all.

Maybe the R's have decide there should be more uninsured. Maybe they think Americans would like to have a society where everyone buys their own health insurance, on their own, with after tax dollars. Or maybe they're closet Marxists working to "heighten the contradictions". I really don't know anymore.

But if they pull of this crackpot scheme, I know what business the Democratic Party should get into---the health care business.

Here is a zoomable 2.5 gigapixel image from Delft. Pick something interesting near the horizon and zoom in.

One thing that surprises me is how quickly, even with a 2.5 gigapixel image, you reach the end of the zooms. (Well, 2.5 billion isn't that many, when you consider it is the resolution of a 50k by 50k matrix, so anything "shorter" than 1/50k of the initial view won't be discernable.) There sure is a lot of data hitting our eyes.

I'm reminded of a "scientific" paper I just read in the Annals of Improbable Research, on a cheap new alternative to electron microscopy: the ordinary office copier, set on iterative zoom. The authors claimed to "image", through 48 enlargements, a single deuterium atom (and, oddly, a discrete noncollapsed representation of the quantum fuzziness around it---but I never did understand quantum, so I'm sure the oddness is all in my perception).

Imagine what the creators of the Xerox Quantum Microscope could do with a 2.5 gigapixel image!

RegExp's are truly powerful, but I hadn't fully appreciated the possibilities for humor (and in particular, as a tool to drive trolls nuts).

Hmm. Two techie posts in one day. Bt dnt wrr, t's nt trnd, r nthng.

A very cool VDQI of attempted TCP connections on a network. The subject is a bit technical (not to mention techie), the write-up could be clearer, and you'll need to decompress the movie to watch it, but it's worth a look. The basic question is how to display, dynamically, attacks on the ports and addresses of a network.

I think this is a great VDQI for several reasons:

1. It is a sucessful implementation of a 3D scatterplot. Very rare. The key is that we're not so interested in pinning down the locations of particular points, but instead we are interest in noticing 3-D patterns, which is much easier. Even more important; this is a real time display, and adding a time dimension to 3D VDQIs makes them easier for our brains to decipher, because we can use the (illusion of) movement to start figuring out the depth of objects.

2. The use of color, about which I was skeptical at first, seems well done. The choice of axes helps motivate things too: stuff near the floor is the bad guys trying to break in.

3. The metaphor is perfect for the audience. Techies ~= Trekkies, and this is straight out of sci fi displays of baddies attacking in space. And the audience ate that up---and "got" it faster than most people would.

4. The creators classify common (and memorably named) patterns of attack (see the write up for the barber's pole or the lawnmower). Very cool, and this bit of info makes the whole package much more dicipherable.

The only complaint I have is the spinning, which (except when user controlled) does nothing for me.

We're still counting the governor's race, and it's agonizingly close.

It's reassuring to know that my new state seems to actually care who wins, and has laws ensuring a recount of close elections, by hand if necessary. A few years ago I would have assumed most Americans would agree with idea that we should count all the votes and make sure we determine the winner correctly, but then, what do I know? I'm just a political scientist.

Maybe it's all just a big confusion; the rest of us keep thinking they're talking about Jesus of Nazareth, but really they are talking about this other guy, Jesus Smith, from East Texas. Clever little substitution, really.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. ---Nietzsche

From Eric Umansky (picked up by Brad DeLong). See also this disheartening piece.

Clearly, most civilians left before the assault. It's unclear how many stayed behind. And it's unclear how many of those were wounded. We may never know. But here are two reports from civilians inside the town. The first is from an A.P. reporter who fled:

``I decided to swim ... but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.''

He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he ``helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands.''

``I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards.''

The second is from a local doctor, as recounted by the LAT:

Late Tuesday, a bomb struck one side of the makeshift medical center. Ghanim ran out.

A second bomb hit, crashing through the roof and destroying most of the facility. Ghanim believes it killed at least two of the young resident doctors working there and most of the patients.

"At that moment I wished to die," he said. "It was a catastrophe."

Afterward, he said, he half-ran, half-wandered through Fallouja, dodging explosions that seemed to be everywhere. He took shelter in an empty house and did not move.

"Time stopped. I don't know how long I was there," he said. "The tanks hit anything that moved.

"I saw the injured people on the street, covered in blood, staggering, screaming, shouting, 'Help me! Help me!' but we could not get out and help them because we would be killed.

And this Reuters report picked up by Kos. (See also this followup)

The U.S. military has begun an investigation into possible war crimes after a television pool report by NBC showed a Marine shooting dead a wounded and unarmed Iraqi in a Falluja mosque, officials said on Monday [...]

The pool report by NBC correspondent Kevin Sites said the mosque had been used by insurgents to attack U.S. forces, who stormed it and an adjacent building, killing 10 militants and wounding the five.

Sites said the wounded had been left in the mosque for others to pick up and move to the rear for treatment. No reason was given why that had not happened.

A second group of Marines entered the mosque on Saturday after reports it had been reoccupied. Footage from the embedded television crew showed the five still in the mosque, although several appeared to be already close to death, Sites said.

He said one Marine noticed one of the prisoners was still breathing.

A Marine can be heard saying on the pool footage provided to Reuters Television: "He's fucking faking he's dead. He faking he's fucking dead."

"The Marine then raises his rifle and fires into the man's head. The pictures are too graphic for us to broadcast," Sites said.

The report said the Marine had returned to duty after being shot in the face a day earlier.

Sites said the shot prisoner "did not appear to be armed or threatening in any way."

Remember, almost 1200 US soldiers have died in Iraq (already about 70 this month), and tens of thousands of Iraqis. How many? The US refuses to count, which, combined with tales like those above, makes me think the number is on the high side. The Lancet study may be right.

Suppose it is, and we've flushed more than 100,000 lives down the drain so far. Why? For a war of choice that couldn't have ever improve US or regional security? To make Iraqis' lives *better*? To bring them freedom? If the above is "freedom", I'll take "tyranny".

Insightful man, Orwell. Just off by 20 years.

I think the Republicans need a new name. One that reflects the breadth of a party whose officials run as "God's Own Politicians", then turn around and steal money from taxpayers and deaf kids for a wild time at the plastic surgeons. Pharisees for Fascism, perhaps?

Myabe there's a method to the madness. They want Jesus to come back, right? But he's not cooperating. They've tried praise, and prayer, and good works (well, maybe), and ascetism, and Calvinism, and withdrawing from society, and leading society, and predicting the end, and accepting they cannot know the hour, and converting the heathens, and leaving the heathens be, and stirring up trouble in the Holy Land, and kicking Muslim ass, and Nothing. Ever. Works.

But have they tried---I mean really tried---to make God angry, so angry he comes back early to generally kick ass and take names? Not petty stuff like killing millions of innocents or treating whole nations as inferior because of their skin color; God's got a pretty high pain tolerance for that kind of thing, evidently. No, there's just one thing that really sets Jesus off: the rank hypocracy of subverting his temple for private gain. So maybe it's all a plan, to get Jesus good and pissed, so he'll come down and knock over their tables, and say "that's it; I was going to give you another 10,000 years, but I just can't take this hypocricy anymore; we're ending it now", and then the Pharisees for Fascism say "ha ha, it was all just a trick to bring on the Second Coming, and we got you", and then the world ends.

On second thought, maybe that's not such a good plan. Which of course is further evidence that it is, in fact, unfolding.

would Bush have won?

Also from the "now they tell us" file: Brent Scrowcroft for Kerry's foreign policy.

Question: if Bush ran on values and terror-mongering, how long till he jettisons both?

Bonus: Nice snarky question from Timothy Noah on AG, our prospective AG.

Sigh. Poking fun at Bush helped me through the last four years, but four more. Good God, we're in trouble. Well, if you're as bummed as me, try this.

Mozilla Firefox can handle over a dozen open tabs in a single window without taxing the processor. But open multiple tabs in multiple windows, and Firefox will start wheezing like a grampus (whatever that means; always have meant to look it up).

I've been using Firefox for a couple of weeks now, and mostly like it. But until I found out about the efficiency of opening all your tabs in one window, I was thinking of going back to IE, which can have twenty or more windows open without weighing my computer down.

Now, if Firefox would add a "Save as single meta-html file" option, I'd be set.

I finally read it, and it looks as well done as could be under the circumstances. There's an odd habit in the media and blogosphere to discuss a study without ever directly linking it (and thus encouraging others to discuss it with first hand knowledge); I sure had to look around a while to find the link this study.

One thing I hadn't realized is that most of the violent deaths the Lancet people encountered were from air strikes. Just like the first Iraq war, it appears the publicity of smart bombs and the reality are far apart.

Maybe I'll have my students replicate this for a homework next quarter...

One side of the debate in America has the intellectual consistency of jello (as Eric Alterman points out):

If the Olympics were ever to introduce a competition for intellectual acrobatics, the hands-down gold medal winner this year would be Dick Morris. On October 23, just before the video surfaced, the disgraced Clinton adviser asked Sean Hannity, "Do you hear a peep out of them? Do you hear a bin Laden tape?" A deeply impressed Hannity declared Morris to be "100 percent right." Likewise, two days later, speaking to Bill O'Reilly, America's most famous foot-fetishist explained, "Al Qaeda attacked us in Spain before the election. Al Qaeda attacked Australia before the election. Hamas and Hezbollah attack Israel before every election, and there has been no Al Qaeda attack anywhere in the world in months. No bin Laden tape, no threats coming out of it, and I think that Al Qaeda is voting with its silence for John Kerry."

But it turns out that in Morris's universe, bin Laden votes for Kerry when he's silent and he votes for Kerry when he's not. After the tape's release, Morris told Fox viewers that "obviously" the tape was "a design on [bin Laden's] part to help Kerry, and that's going to backfire massively." Hannity earned a silver with his own Pythonesque pirouette on his previous pronouncement: Bin Laden, he now said, had "come out and virtually tr[ied to] influence the election today in favor of John Kerry."

It's going to be a long four years.

"It's like a Horatio Alger story, but with more fascism!" --Giblets

"I don't know what science fiction he is reading," said LaHaye. "We believe the Rapture is going to come, not his nonsense that Christ came back in 68 A.D."

Brad DeLong has a very nice post on Social Security. His starting point is a thought that confused me (or perhaps beguiled is the better word) as an undergrad econ major. To wit (and I will give the game away by stating assumptions clearly), assume a closed economy, with static production technology, and with overlapping generations of agents who retire in their last period of life. Goods produced in each period must be consumed in that period (they are perishable). Suppose there are N people at any given time, consisting of p*N, 0 < p < 1 workers and (1-p)*N retirees. Also assume that each worker produces g goods per period. Under these assumptions, total consumption in each period will be p*g, average consumption will be p*g/N, and so if the fraction of workers p declines, there will be less to go around regardless of who gets what. We haven't specified an allocation mechanism, but we don't really need to under these assumptions. Unless goods themselves (and not written promises of them) can be produced in an earlier generation and saved for a later one, it doesn't matter how you split the pie among a growing number of retirees---it will be smaller per person.

Social Security is a method for reallocating present production among workers and retirees. It does not involve the saving of goods, or very much saving of promissory notes for that matter. So Kevin Drum wonders what the big deal about how it is structured (private vs government accounts): won't the pie shrink the same either way?

Hopefully, you are quicker than I was when presented with this as an undergrad. If we relax the assumption that the economy is closed, then consumption in a given period could rise above p*g, through international investment or borrowing. But the big point is one BDL raises: if the production technology is endogenous, then more investment early on with increase g over time, so that domestic production can keep up even though p is shrinking. So there is at least a possible argument for private investment of social security funds leading to long run efficiencies. Notice, however, that the investment need not be done by individual accounts; it could be done by the government as a whole. Notice also that what we really need is net private investment to rise. Borrowing money to put in private accounts does jack squat.

(with apologies to Burnt Toast)

Several articles worth reading on the Falluja assault. Surprisingly, the Slate news roundup is probably the place to start, since it gives as good a picture as we have of what's going around in Falluja and around Iraq. Not only do we seem to be losing this war, but the guerillas seem to be calling the shots---during our long planned, and long advertized attack on Falluja, they mount a counter-attack on Mosul and draw away a substantial fraction of our forces. They can do this indefinitely, folks.

Two posts from an ex-Marine (Bing West) in Iraq are interesting. The first presents a soldier's eye view of the battle, which sounds for all the world like a video game. Now, the marines are fighting for their lives too, and I don't mean to diminish that. But it is truly frightening how modern war works, and I worry about the long-term consequences.

The second post, a defense of US tactics in Falluja, is very telling. West winds-up with this statement:

At the operational level, battle is about killing until the enemy forces are destroyed or surrender.

which raises an obvious question: who are the enemy in Iraq? If it is a populace that resents occupation, and resents it more with each insurgent or bystander killed, then we will never attain this goal until Iraq itself is destroyed, or utterly oppressed. Neither end is consistent with our stated goal of establishing a stable, democratic Iraq from which we can withdraw. Clearly, if we are to retain this goal, you either must believe the insurgents are clearly separate from Iraqi society, or you must recognize that winning in Iraq isn't about winning "battles", as the Marines define them, but avoiding the need for them.

West isn't unaware of the difficulties. He selectively cites opinion polls to claim that the Iraqis are on our side, not the insurgents', but I think the same polls show deep resentment of the US, and large swaths of the country that are on the insurgents' side(s). More important, he defines the problem of Iraq in a misleading way.

The insurgents are an amalgam of jihadists who must be destroyed, former regime elements who must be neutralized or destroyed, and unemployed, uneducated, emotional youths who are being manipulated and who must be won over. Too many Sunni imams, fearful of losing temporal power, are preaching hate and despair to the desperately ignorant. American troops can stand against those who bear weapons against them. But U.S. soldiers cannot persuade Iraqis to support a new form of government that brings a dramatic shift in the Iraqi centers of power.

It would be nice if we could blame it all on "jihadists" and nasty rabble-rousing clerics misleading those innocent poor "emotional" youths who, but for their influence, would welcome their American saviors. But this is drivel. The hatred for America and resentment of American tactics, bombing, sanctions, and demonization runs deep and wide in Iraq. The "rabble-rousers" have to keep up with the mass's anger, not the other way around. Many of the men who take up arms do so because their relatives have been killed, or their towns assaulted, and they see no hope. I would not call them "good guys" of "freedom fighters", because they aren't fighting for a free society. But they are fighting for their own conception of independence and nation, and if we underestimate that, as West does, we will someday leave Iraq in disgrace and defeat.

On this point, West relates a fascinating anecdote, but I think in his eagerness to defend the Marines qua soldiers, he fails to realize its devastating implications for our strategy

Based on his visits to Fallujah, Patrick Graham wrote that "it is the sniper the people of Fallujah fear more than anything else." Yet the sniper is the most discriminating of weapons, suggesting that the "people" Graham referred to were the jihadist fighters. I was on a roof during the April siege in Fallujah with a Marine sergeant who was a sniper. One afternoon, he told me, he saw an old man hobble out of his house, supported by his teenage son. They shuffled next door and returned with a few groceries. The son paused to look toward the Marine position before going indoors. On a hunch, the sniper kept watch, and a half-hour later, the young Iraqi sneaked out with a rifle, hid behind a wrecked car, and aimed in. The sniper shot him in the street. From the house came a sharp cry. A few minutes later, the old man hobbled slowly out and, step by faltering step, dragged the body back into the courtyard. The sniper watched through his scope as the old man began to dig a grave.

Was the Marine sniper justified in shooting the combatant? Hell yes. A soldier on the battlefield has every right to defend himself, almost anyone would agree. But that's not the point. The real point is that if we define as a "jihadist" anyone who picks up arms to defend his town against an foreign occupying army, we will lose. (As usual, a defender of the war seeks to redefine critic's barbs as aimed at GIs, when we're really sympathetic to soldiers' plight, and angry at the generals and political leaders for putting them in a hopeless situation.)

The world is not made up of evil terrorists and good liberating armies. Most people are in between, and we have convinced many, if not most Iraqis that we are their enemy. We did that, by torturing and imprisoning innocents, humiliating proud fathers in front of their families, by invading on false pretexts, manipulating their economy for profit and their lives for domestic political advantage, by holding our lives precious and theirs cheap, by sending our least qualified and most corrupt to run their society, instead of our best and brightest, by annointing as puppet ruler a CIA man, by destroying the security of their society and grinding their economy to a halt. As they take up arms against us now, our men can and should defend themselves, but our generals should never suppose that if we keep shooting the insurgents, they will eventually be purged from Iraqi society. Every step in that direction just makes them more a part of that society.

If I were an Iraqi, I would work with the interim government, not because of lofty dreams of democracy and freedom, but because of the desparate need for security. If I were an Iraqi, I would accept mild authoritarianism as the best feasible outcome, rather than throw in with insurgents who, if victorious, would likely make Iraq a hellhole. But I am glad I am not an Iraqi. We have given them no good options, and should not be surprised then that they resist our occupation.

***

Brigands of the world, after the earth has failed their all-devastating hands, they probe even the sea; if their enemy be wealthy, they are greedy; if he be poor, they are ambitious; neither the East nor the West has glutted them. . . . They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.

Tacitus, Agricola

Ask not what these soldiers must do to be worthy citizens, but how America can change to become worthy of them.

It's been over a week, and I still think there's a need to understand what exactly caused the large discrepancy between exit polls and vote totals on election night. I have seen a number of pages on the net purporting to show evidence of (or more circumspectly, evidence consistent with) rigged counting, but haven't found any of it very persuasive.

Now comes a paper from Steven Freeman, a UPenn political scientist, noting that the end of day exit polls were far off. I was willing to believe that the mid-day totals could be off, if Democrats were racing to get to the polls for some reason, but end of the day? Historically, those are right on the money. As Freeman points out, the publically provided reasons for exit poll failure seem a bit farfetched (my favorite silly argument is that exit-pollsters oversample women because they want to chat them up; you'd think exit polls all through history would be biased if this were so).

Freeman points out that if we take the confidence intervals on the polls seriously, the likelihood of simultaneously getting such large pro-Bush margins in Florida and Ohio, and such a narrow Kerry victory in Pennsylvania, is vanishingly small. By itself, this is quite disturbing.

But he also points out this pattern was consistent across all the battlefield states, save MI, IA, and WI. But instead of making the election fishier, this makes me more worried about the exit polls. Widespread fraud, even in states with Democratic election officials, seems a bit hard to pull off. Systematic failure to choose representative precincts, perhaps? Systematic errors in data processing? It happens. So open up the polling records.

I really think we need to know the answer to this question. Moreover, I would feel better if a trusted international group of election monitors did their own count of the ballots of some of the key states. Part of the reason for suspicion is distrust of the officials who are supposed to safeguard the election. Katherine Harris was the very opposite of a dispassionate vote counter, and her actions cast a pall over the officials of the rest of the country, fairly or unfairly. And when you hear Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell say "The last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress", well, you can't help but want a second opinion on the count.

It would go a long way towards restoring legitimacy, and if Bush has been honest, he has nothing to fear.

I find mad science amusing, but stupid science is just frightening. Apparently one of Bush's "scienticians" thinks global warming is an anti-American plot. (Note that his bio refuses to say what his degree is in, but since it's from trh LSE, I'm betting it's a Masters in Economics, at best. Not exactly a climatologist, but I guess all those guys are "in on the conspiracy" Sheesh. Doesn't it take a qualified person to determine who isn't qualified?)

When future generations look back and curse George W. Bush's name---and they will---their biggest complaint will be his obstruction on global warming.

I was forwarded a dated but revealing article on the Iraqi occupation. Sure sounds like it's all irrevocably gone to hell, doesn't it?

The attack of Falluja might have helped if it were done months ago, but instead it was telegraphed to the insurgents but delayed for Bush's sake. Most of the insurgents have already left, they just kidnapped some of Allawi's family, and the Sunnis are threatening to back out of the election. The insurgency is coming out of this week at least as strong as it entered it. I also read in early accounts that the Iraqi forces assigned to fight in Falluja mostly deserted. The current puppet government is falling the minute we leave. Most Americans, regardless of ideology, can agree on two things: we must not fail in Iraq, yet we are failing, miserably.

Freedom is on the march, all right. And pretty soon, it will be marching double time out Iraq, to leave those wretches to their fates.

This paper details a Turning machine (a building block for a universal computer) made entirely of very simple cellular automata. It's just a grid, where the cells blink on if two neighbors are on, blink off if three neighbors are on, and stay as they are otherwise. It turns out the given the right starting grid and those simple rules, you have a computer capable of processing input, storing data, and producing output. Amazing.

The rules are called the "Game of Life". Daniel Dennett notes that other people have produces self-replicating structures in Life. He thinks these two creations make the evolution of sentient beings a lot less mysterious, and I think he has a point.

Has Bush fulfilled his obligation to the Mall Security Reserve?

If you have a strong stomach, or a burning desire to leave the Red States to their fate, read this proposal to force all the most dynamic parts of our country out, into the embrace of Canada. Yes, this is written by someone who thinks the South and West would be better off without New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey.

And if they force us out, I presume they keep all the debt. The 12 expellees would instantly be the worlds richest and most dynamic economy, progressive like Europe, unburdened by an ounce of debt, and educated to the hilt. (In fact, our biggest concern would be the possibility of a Confederate invasion).

I just ask for one thing: We get DC. After all, Maryland ponied up the land in the first place. And they'd want to be with us. Trust me.

I noted earlier the danger of a currency crisis (sharp decline in the dollar, rise in interest rates) as a result of the ballooning Bush deficit. Currency traders have certainly reacted negatively to the re-election of Mr. Deficits Don't Matter.

See BDL here and here. I've heard of "damning with faint praise." What John Taylor is doing is more like "frightening with weak reassurance." We don't need to worry about the dollar because Bush has pledged to cut the deficit in half by 2009? The same pledge that doesn't include spending on Iraq or Afghanistan, or his planned reduction of the AMT, or anything else new? The same pledge that isn't even linked to the actual deficit, but to some cockamamie overestimates of the deficit for last year? Great. Now I'll go shift my remaining investments overseas.

My friend Victor note that China is about to switch to a basket peg, and is selling dollars in anticipation, which will put continuing pressure on the dollar.

One of the comments to Brad DeLong's page includes this amusing note:

...some time ago I saw an interview with Jeremy ("Stocks for the Long Run") Siegel of Wharton and Robert ("Irrational Exhuberance") Shiller of Yale. In response to the interviewer's question about where their own personal assets were invested, both replied "Outside the U.S."

It was no secret that real conservatives (at least, non-fascist, non-imperialist, non-evangelical conservatives) despise Bush. Here is what a former Republican official, WSJ assoc editor, and Olin Fellow has to say about the rampaging moron-in-chief.

I like that he stands up for the French. Bulletin to ditto-heads: France is America's oldest ally. They helped us win the Revolutionary War. They sold us half our country for a song. They gave us the Statue of Liberty as a token of esteem. They loved us for saving their bacon in WWII. They are not our enemies, nor do they want to be, but that we insist on it.

I'm a skeptic of the whole idea of presidential "mandates". Talk of such things seems to me a weak effort to draw out of public will from the disparate votes of a 300 million member democracy. Our democracy speaks with millions of voices, not one. People make their vote choices for dozens of reasons, and no one agrees on the whole agenda of either candidate. Being elected by a majority doesn't even guarantee a majority support any of your policy proposals. So I address the topic of whether Bush received a "mandate" with a grain of salt: few if any presidents (maybe only FDR '32, and that too is debatable, since he implemented different policies from the ones he ran on!) ever received such a thing.

Bush received a bare majority of the vote. It's an improvement on his last election, which he lost, yet treated as carte blanche to implement all his policies without throwing a bone to the Democrats. So naturally, he interprets a 51-48 squeaker as a "mandate", rather than a deeply divided nation containing 58 million who love him and 55 million you hate him passionately. Using terror attacks, war, and the tools of incumbency (Marine One helicopter landings, anyone?) to spook voters into returning the incumbent, and he got just 51%? It's more than I wanted him to get, more than I expected, but even if you believed in mandates, this wouldn't be one.

He didn't even talk about his domestic policies, expect in the vaguest terms (a desire to reform the tax system, and to privatize Social Security, and a tight-lipped refusal to discuss details because a.) he knows they would be unpopular, and b.) he's too stupid to explain them). If Bush has a mandate it is to crush terrorists and win in Iraq. Period, full stop, end of mandate. It does not include Social Security, the tax system, the establishment of a state religion, the packing of the SC with ideologues, or the destruction of all minority rights in Congress. If Bush had run on those things, he would have lost, and Karl Rove knows it (Lord knows what Bush knows).

What would Bush say if he had won 55%? Would he be rounding up Democrats and sending them to camps, because the people had spoken?

For more on the topic, read this piece by two of our most politically engaged political scientists. I wish I had their energy and optimism, but the election has laid me low.

A topic for another time: to the extent Bush believes in democracy at all, it seems to be the plebiscitory democracy of Napoleon. He think he embodies the people now, and whatever he thinks must be their will. We get one shot every four years to do as we're told and vote for him (or else the nation will be destroyed by our enemies), and the rest of the time, the people don't even exist. Just l'emporer Bush, "democrat".

No doubt that is the democracy planned for Iraq. And Bush hand-picked their leader. Have fun Iraqis. (Oh, and enjoy the state of emergency, a sure sign that "freedom is on the march", as we were told so many times by Allawi and Bush).

Not as good as the Jesusland proposal, but amusing nonetheless.

I wish, though, we could discuss realistic reforms, like uniform balloting under a single non-partisan authority (perhaps even with international observers for a while).

Democrats are (and should be) thinking of who to run in 2008. I've already stated my preference (Edwards-Obama). We should be open to other possibilities, of course. But one oft discussed candidate should be nipped in the bud now: Hillary Clinton. There is much to like about Hillary, but she would be an awful candidate, and probably a subpar president.

I'm sorry, but anyone who watched the DNC, and the parallel speeches of Bill and Hillary, knows that Hillary is no Bill Clinton. She hasn't the political acumen, the speaking chops, or the ability to make moderate voters feel safe. And she mobilizes the right like the Second Coming. We just can't afford that.

From the BBC. Still think we went to Iraq to help the Iraqis?

"The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him."

-Lt Col Gareth Brandl

We continue to regress to the Middle Ages. The world is going to decide that we and the Wahabists deserve each other.

What's the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?

Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.

Very nice cartograms of the election result, generated via a new algorthm that blows past computer-drawn cartograms away. (The algorthm should make cartograms much more user-friendly and prevelant, I think; the code is here.)

But beware the histogram purporting that 307 counties had 99% returns for Kerry. That's impossible. This histogram cannot possibly be right. (Update: these histograms were wrong, and have been taken down.)

W has finally decided to fulfill his commitment to the Air Force National Guard. Though he might be under the influence, if you know what I mean.

Bad things that *could* be happening in the coming years:

1. The end of Social Security as we know it, through a privatization that guts benefits for anyone under 45

2. All out assault on insurgent strongholds in Iraq, followed by some sort of election (perhaps limited to safer regions), followed by an American pullout, followed by civil war

3. Deep cuts in non-defense spending

4. More tax cuts for the rich and corporations, and a continuing budget deficit

5. A right-ward shift in the SC and judiciary, with consequences lasting years. Repeal of Roe v Wade possible for the first time.

6. Continued blurring of the line between church and state

7. Increased extraction in the US---oil, coal, timber, etc---especially on federal lands

8. Continued erosion of Congressional power to the presidency

9. Continued lack-luster economic performance

10. A permanent decline in the quality of media reporting and investigation of the activities of the federal government, and a growing conservative tint to media coverage. Increased media concentration

11. Increasingly Orwellian and fascist national discourse; opponents of the President increasingly described as disloyal or anti-American

12. Growing economic inequality, and growing concentration of political power in the hands of the superwealthy and their heirs

13. Increased xenophobia and tensions with former allies in Europe; closer relations with Russia and Israel

14. Efforts to erode the remaining checks on majority power, especially in the Senate

15. A currency crisis, with the dollar falling, interest rates rising, and consumer debt loads leading to widespread bankruptcy and foreclosure (which would let the air out of the housing bubble, then who knows?)

16. If Bush can find the troops, more foreign adventures in Iran or Syria

Heaven help us if there is another significant terrorist attack on the US. In that case I would expect another foreign war and substantial new restrictions on civil liberties in the US.

I like the Daily Mirror cover shown in this roundup.

I keep tabs on the Houston Chronicle, sole major paper in the town where I grew up. The letters to the editor are often doozies of specious reasoning, hilarious ignorance, or Biblical fundamentalist intolerance. But I saw one today that looks like it descended from an alien political culture. Here's a quote from a letter praising Bush's victory:

I feel safe and have no hesitation to put up my son for this war. If I lose him, I shall be more than dead. If he dies, I die, too. But that is what I am willing to place on the altar of freedom. Thanks be to God.

What century are these people from? If the Republican coalition really thinks like this, we're in trouble.

In case you feel the need to move north.

Here'a color image plot of the election returns by county. I'm a bit wary of the political message of the plot. From making lots of similar plots, I know that it is hard to objectively convey variance in such a plot, because the color scale can be stretched or squished. You can make everything from 20 - 90% look purplish, or instead just regions from 40-60%. What these plots are best at is telling you where things are more red or more blue, but not how far from the poles they are. (Note further than there is no color scale attached to the linked plot. And final, there is the famous areal unit problem. This plot takes county boundaries for granted. But the choice of boundary can make the map look more divided are more unified. (In the limit, the plot converges to a single purplish shape, or 120 million red and blue squares.) Is the county-ization of the US making the plot look more unified than, say, precinct boundaries? I think so.

I'm not in the best position to think about what the Dems should be doing now. I'm too depressed and angry. And my natural aversion to stupidity---and Bush's base is a pageant of idiocy unmatched in modern American history---makes me want to throw up my hands and say "Enough! You want to see the consequences of handing over all the reins of power to a lazy, semi-literate ignoramous with troglodyte friends and an itch to revolutionize the country and the world? Then welcome to your future, and all the wars, red ink, and fearmongering you can stomach."

But since the appetite for this menu is apparently bottomless in some quarters of our country, perhaps we should think how to play for voters silly enough to vote on issues of sexual mores. Robert Wright has some suggestions, and though they amount to pandering, I see no safer option when faced with a dangerously ill-educated majority.

A double entry: a mad social science visual display. I give you the new map on North America. Works for me.

Also, NYC feels the pain. First 9/11, now four more years of W, voted in by people who vote on "terrorism" but don't live under its shadow or threat.

I'm even willing to link you to Maureen Dowd on the subject.

Read two emails Andrew Sullivan got today. If, like me, you wonder whether the Bush Republican party is veering headlong towards fascism, you have to worry that they have found their scapegoats: gays. Look at the emails: our opponents aren't moral Christians---they are brown shirts in the making, or throwbacks to the Klan, take your pick.

The rest of us have a choice: we can triangulate, and leave the gays to their fate. Or we can fight for their civil rights and human dignity. We have a duty to stand up for the rights of our fellow citizens, especially now that the majority has spoken against them. We've done this before as a country, several times, and every times the progressives have won, after a long struggle. We will win again, no matter how long it takes.

My good friend Ryan is starting a blog, and opens by discussing his experience observing an Arkansas polling place. Gotta love the "heartland", where the people are honest, and true, and mutter about the blacks under their breath.

A long post on gay marriage from June. My view hasn't changed, and I'm prepared to continue to call a bigot a bigot.

A Mad Social Science idea from May: a dual executive (a President and Prime Minister), where the prez is a moral paragon figurehead, and the prime minister a policy guy. The rub? Voters can only vote in one of the two contests. So if you want a high priest, you can have him. But don't get in the way of the sane among us trying to run the country.

And if that fails, Obama-Stewart '12.

But let's not kid ourselves: this country has a structural Republican majority that is largely unconcerned with economic performance, foreign policy success, and anything that seems real to educated people in the reality based community. Our elections are going to look more like censuses for some time---and the good guys (and I mean that in every sense of the word, folks) are on the losing side of the count.

If we couldn't win in 2004, with Bush running on the worst record of any president in memory---perhaps in history, save Herbert Hoover---and with more personal responsibility for that failure than any president before him; if we couldn't explain to the people of even the most backwards state that this is the worst administration in history, that we could do better with almost anyone; if we can't overcome the middle America's hatred for the better educated, more worldly, more sensitive party of the cities, with the fruits of Bush's mindless thuggery and budget ransacking on full display, then I fear nothing short of a depression will do. And with these folks, so untethered from reality they would make the reasonable voters of 1932 weep, would probably still believe it was someone else's fault.

The evangelical voters finally showed up, and boy are they a backwards bunch; an Afghanistan in our own backyard (Coburn & DeMint: America's answer to the Taliban). It amazes me that someone could seriously believe they have a strong moral sense, yet think that preventing "gay marriage" is a more important moral issue than those raised by Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and preemptive war. Thousands of Iraqi's dead, versus the right to hospital visits and inheritance for Steve and Steve. There's one for the moral philosophers.

Abortion is a more difficult issue, because if you really believe a zygote has a soul, you will consider killing it murder. But it is disconcerting, to say the least, to see people so concerned about innocent zygotes, yet so unconcerned about innocent Iraqis. Yee-ha foreign policy and a tender concern for the unborn don't mix because of morality. They mix because of religous fervor, a movement that draws not on moral sense, but on fear of the modern world, traditionalism, and the cult of high priests like Bush.

Most Republicans wouldn't know a real morality if it slapped them in the face.

Just saw a great point on the Daily Show: Red State voters voted Republican, they say, because of fear of terrorism and gays. But all the terrorist attacks hit cities in Blue States (and will likely continue to target them), and most gays live in the Blue state cities (because they aren't welcome in the backwards Red States). NYC, full of gays and terror bullseye numero uno, turned out huge for Kerry. If anyone should be afraid or hurting, it should be the New Yorkers. So why the paranoia in Ohio?

Reminds me of a story my old roommate told, about talking to an Austrian in a small town who blamed that town's problems on its Jewish population. Which turned out to be six people.

As you can see, I'm rather angry about the election. A different kind of anger from 2000. In 2000, I was furious about election theft, one of the highest crimes possible in a democracy. I wanted Bush impeached every day for the last four years. Now, I am furious not at Bush (who seems more and more like the abstract "evil" he keeps promising to fight), but at the millions who voted to ratify his performance, choices, and agenda. They just reelected the worst president---and worst human being---ever to occupy the White House. I have never been more alienated or ashamed of my country. I am still American; I still hold dear American values, but I fear they will go out of fashion, in favor of an Orwellian brew of deception, fear, and theocracy.

More soon on what I think the Bush agenda will entail. I believe he now has the power and will to radically reshape our country. It will not be pretty. Despite my disdain for constitutional monarchy, I'm already looking longingly at the UK.

"Okay, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?"

You have to feel inspired and hopeful when you see the lengths people went to to vote, and get out the vote: standing in line for up to eight hours, going despite fears your vote wouldn't "matter" if you didn't live in a swing state, that the machines might eat the votes, or that nosy observers might challenger your right to vote. It's really the first hopefully thing I've seen about America since Nov 2000.

But Jebus, can this administration really be what a majority of American voters want? I'm with Zaphod on this one. We got the procedures mostly right (though we really could run elections much better), but somehow, we flubbed up the whole making-a-wise-decision thing.

This whole Dare to Be Stupid thing has worn out its welcome.

Well, the exit polls didn't pan out, did they?

At least turnout was high. But the popular vote victory for Bush is profoundly depressing. Apparently, lots of Americans really like idiotic mismanagement, disastrous foreign wars, red ink and tax cuts for the rich, gay bashing and the triumph of emotion over reason. And now we may all pay for it for a long time.

But as I write, it's not yet time to give up hope. All hinges on Ohio, where the election is close, and may come down to absentee and provisional ballots. Which means we may not know the outcome for weeks.

MyDD catches this info from CNN:

Ohio - African American precincts are performing at 106% what we expected, based on historical numbers. Hispanic precincts are at 144% what we expected. Precincts that went for Gore are turning out 8% higher then those that went Bush in 2000. Democratic base precincts are performing 15% higher than GOP base precincts.

Florida - Dem base precincts are performing 14% better than Bush base precincts. In precincts that went for Gore, they are doing 6% better than those that went for Bush. African American precincts at 109%, Hispanic precincts at 106%.

Pennsylvania - African American precincts at 102% of expectations, Hispanics at 136% of expectations. The Gore precincts are doing 4 percent better than bush precincts.

Michigan- Democratic base precincts are 8% better than GOP base states. Gore precincts are 5% better than Bush.

People are turning out to show they won't be discouraged, intimidated, or divided. Karl Rove has been running the Republican campaign, and his strategy has been to accuse Democratic candidates of disloyalty, to try to discourage or bar Democratic and minority voters, and to suppress turnout with talk of an "inevitable" victory for the war incumbent.

We've had confirmed reports of every dirty trick in the book---fake phone calls to voters saying John Kerry is for gay marriage, fake "gay" Kerry supporters hanging around polling places in Florida, intimidating letters sent to black voters, challenges to tens of thousands of legally registered voters living in densely Democratic or black districts, the intentional destruction of Democratic voter registrations, the theft of Democratic absentee ballots by people posing a poll workers, the politicization of Osama bin Laden, and, to add insult to injury, fabricated accusations of Democratic dirty tricks that fall apart in hours, but create the impression that "everyone's doing it".

But people apparently know the score. (In a shock to me, it turns out that 45% of Americans consider Bush to be an illegitimate president.) They are standing in line for hours for a chance to vote, whether they live in Florida or New York. They want their vote to be counted.

Nothing would make me happier than a huge turnout repudiating the divisive, un-American, and anti-democratic tactics of the Bush campaign. The best way to stop dirty tricks is to show they won't work. Let's end Karl Rove's career tonight.

I've pointed out before my doubts regarding the Iowa Electronic Markets. Chief among the is the impression that participants don't get serious about their "investments" until the very lst day. IEM performs about as well as a met-analysis of polls (which is, in a sense, what it aspires to be), but only on the day before the election. Before that, my impression for several elections of observation, is that it underperforms pretty much any intelligent reading of the polls.

So right on schedule, after months of leaning absurdly towards a large Bush victory, the IEM converges on what has seemed likely since the debates started---a Kerry win:

Symbol Bid Ask Last Low High Average
DEM04_G52 0.214 0.257 0.230 0.130 0.258 0.186
DEM04_L52 0.351 0.370 0.370 0.301 0.370 0.329
REP04_L52 0.255 0.300 0.300 0.300 0.398 0.358
REP04_G52 0.094 0.095 0.095 0.050 0.163 0.129

My explanation is simple: IEMers are playing with small sums (<$500), in a shallow but heavily watched market. Up to the last minute, the rational use of your money is to push the appearance of an advantage towards your preferred candidate (think of it as a form of campaign contribution). But on election eve, it's too late to sway the electorate, and all that is left is to try to salvage your investment by trading efficiently. Hence the last day convergence on the "truth".

I'm not really read up on the literature on the effect of newspaper endorsements, but my guess is they have a significant effect on races low on the ballot (where info is scarce, even among the most informed voters), and virtually no effect on presidential elections (if you are undecided a week before the election, you probably aren't a reader of your newspaper's editorial page).

So if presidential endorsements are interesting at all, it is because they say something about the media. It is well known that most reporters and editors are liberal, relative to the public, but that most publishers are fairly conservative (they own businesses, after all). Because endorsements are rather unambiguous statements of a newspaper's leaning, if a publisher is ever to impose his preferences, one expect it will be through endorsements. But there is another factor: attentive partisan readers may be ticked off if the newspaper backs the other guy, so in red areas, expect the newspaper to back the red candidate for economic reasons, and vice versa.

So endorsements probably reflect a tug of war between readers, publishers, and editors, in declining order of influence. Many endorsements are clearly boring, poorly constructed efforts to please the first two groups; my native newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, had one of those supporting Bush this year; it was so pathetic that they got (and printed, perhaps as revenge against the publisher) a raft of unusually incisive letters tearing the endorsement to shreds.

The most interesting endorsements are those that go against type. A newspaper that backed Gore but now wants Bush; a paper that backed Bush in 2000 but now wants Kerry to win---those carry meaningful information. They say that either the publisher or editor couldn't take it anymore (damn the readers!) or that the readers have drifted, and the paper is keeping up (or, more prosaically, that the newspaper is under new management).

Editor and Publisher has a running tally of endorsements. Kerry is up 208-190 (with a circulation of 20.7 to 14.5 million). But what's most interesting is the number of switchers. I count 41 papers that backed Bush in 2000, but now support Kerry. I find only 8 running from Gore to Bush.

How many papers sticking with Bush wish they could endorse Kerry, but fear a reader backlash? My guess is quite a few, including the Houston Chronicle. Oh well. Not everyone is a profile in courage.

Back in August, I offered my election predictions. I predicted that the states would fall exactly as they did in 2000, except that Bush would win Florida, and Kerry would win Ohio and New Hampshire. I expected an overall popular vote of 51 to 46 for Kerry, and a Kerry electoral college victory with 292 votes.

Updating my predictions on election eve, I find that very little has changed. I stand by my predictions, with the caveat that I now think Florida is likely to go for Kerry, which would bring the total Kerry electoral votes up to 317. My popular vote guess still seems to be in the right ballpark (if I had to guess again, I might shave a point, to 50-47). But overall, I think this election is going to run as we've always expect--a close, hard fought contest coming down to Florida and Ohio, with worried glances at Wisconsin.

Here are the best summaries of state polls on the web: Sam Wong's meta-analysis gets top honors. (His predictions are also close to mine, which makes me feel better about my guesses). A nice collection of state polls can be had through the Votemaster, but beware---he doesn't average across polling organization, he just takes the "latest", which at this point (with many polls a day) is rather silly.

Despite these cheery predictions, the election is still balanced on a razor's edge. It will come down to turn out, and my predictions assume the Dems will do a better job there. So go out and prove me right:

VOTE TOMORROW.

But don't stop there. There's 36 hours to go. You can spend it calling voters in swing states to remind them to vote, or help them find their polling place or a ride to it. This really works, people---it's the most effective way to raise turnout and win close elections. And it takes volunteers. So even if you're not in a swing state, make your voice count!

JOIN A GET OUT THE VOTE PHONE PARTY.