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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Saturday, June 19, 2004 :::
I was wandering around the AEI site the other day, and I encountered an interesting summary of the Chinese economy. Interesting to me, anyway.
::: posted by Steven at 2:16 PM
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Largely in response to Eric's comments, I'd like to point out that the electoral college as originally conceived was expected to elect George Washington as many times as he could be talked into it, and then to very rarely actually give a majority of the votes to any candidate. It was viewed largely as a nominating committee, giving the House of Representatives a short list of candidates from which to select a president. It didn't work out the way they envisioned, and, if it had, it may not have worked out the way they envisioned; regularly having the legislative branch elect the chief executive may or may not have proved to be a good idea. But it's my understanding that that was the idea.
::: posted by dWj at 1:22 PM
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I should go to bed, but I want to say a thing or three:- A friend of mine told me tonight about a site where he writes on occasion. I neither endorse nor unendorse it at this point, but I plan to check it out later, and if you have too much free time on your hands, you may as well.
- Regarding racial silliness, I bow to my brother's comments on disparate impact. If you didn't read them, I've just given you an other chance to redeem yourself.
- We've discussed the electoral college a bit over the last day or two, and it occurred to me tonight that the golden example of the college, in the winner-take-all is the election of 1860. It's widely known (I think) that the winner got a minority of the popular vote. What's less well known is that, even if all of his (three) opponents had merged, he would have won the election without polling the House. Only a couple or so of the states that he won gave him less than a majority. Many of the states he lost didn't even allow him on the ballot, so he scored zeros. He was overwhelmingly opposed (at least in the vote, which is the only measure of democracy one should allow) in one region of the country, but generally supported in the rest, so he won the electoral college as constituted in its current, winner-take-all* fashion. In other words, he didn't win deep support, but he won broad support.
For the purposes of this exercise, please set aside your opinion of the man who happened to be elected President in 1860.
Three points if you can guess which word made me pull out my thesaurus for the first time in several years. I'd offer ten, were I thrilled with the result, but I didn't really end up much better than I started.
* "Winner take all" except for Maine and Nebraska, which is close enough. If you don't know about the Maine/Nebraska exception, and you care, email me and I'll write a brief follow-up.
::: posted by Steven at 2:46 AM
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Friday, June 18, 2004 :::
Incidentally, I note that one of my favorite blogs has gone to the one-page-per-entry archive format. I guess I don't think that format is so bad where links are provided to the preceding and succeeding entry, but it's hard to give context to them this way; sometimes when posts get orphaned, they just look incorrigibly weird.
::: posted by dWj at 10:33 PM
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Seeing as how my opinions on the Electoral College have been fairly well predicted, I will make only two short remarks on the matter:
I don't like the application of the word "defect" to the fact that the Electoral College gives a greater weight to the votes of rural states. I suppose that "defect" is correct, within its dictionary meaning, but it is hard for me to think of this as a "defect" considering that it was part of the original purpose for having an Electoral College.
Dean accurately surmises that my preference for first-past-the-post elections, which tend to produce stable, two-party systems where sectionalism is not rampant, extends to the Electoral College. However, while I must admit that there are benefits to multiparty representation in most legislative bodies, I just don't see it for the Electoral College. The College is a body that meets only once in between elections and votes only twice at that time. Leaving aside the fact that the separate voting in each state would tend to hinder negotiation, the most likely outcome of a minor party holding the balance of power would be the trading of the Vice Presidency to the minor party, or another major party, or the selection of a President from the plurality party who was not the favored choice of the plurality party and therefore probably not one of the people the voters thought that they were voting for on Election Day. A more likely outcome would be throwing the election to our gerrymandered House of Representatives (under the rule, mind you, that each state delegation votes together) and our filibustering Senate. I don't see how the average voter, the federal government, or the Republic in general would benefit from this.
::: posted by Eric at 7:50 PM
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Racial silliness:The lawyers say Johnson & Johnson's use of credit checks to screen applicants discriminates against African-Americans who've historically had less access to credit than whites. Silly enough, I think, before we seethat Matthews applied for the position of tax specialist in the company's global patent office, a job "involving the timely payment of fees." They weren't just looking for someone who wasn't irresponsible; they were looking for someone who wasn't irresponsible in the exact kind of way that would likely expose the company to massive liability. And it's a good thing they were specific, because apparently this racial silliness has a recognized legal basis:In some previous cases, the EEOC has found that checking the credit of job applicants is discriminatory."It's our position that excluding people with poor credit may have a disparate impact on some minority groups and therefore may be discriminatory under civil rights law, but that is assessed on a case-by-case basis," said David Grinberg, an EEOC spokesman. The failure to use this appropriate screen has a "disparate impact" on all other groups, then; if it makes natural sense to use it, it would just as plausibly be discriminatory to unnaturally abstain from using it. If set A of employment screens results in a different racial balance than set B of employment screens, is it simply up to the EEOC to tell us which set is appropriate?Humor me for as long as you like as I continue on my rant on "disparate impact". There were people who said restraining the growth in welfare was racist because it had "a disparate impact". Taking their facts for granted, this would imply that welfare was a racist program to begin with, as it had a "disparate impact". But maybe "do nothing" isn't the racially neutral basis from which these people want to determine that any racially disparate deviation is racist; maybe the status quo is sancrosanct unless changes to it are racially neutral. In that case, desegregation was racist; it had a different impact on different races. Would it have been morally preferable that they leave alone the situation that had been in place for lifetimes? This simply gets left out, this question of the control comparison; it goes unanswered how the preordained relative racial impact is to be determined. If pre-natal testing for genetic diseases were added to the health plan, but testing for sickle-cell anemia were explicitly left out, this could well be viewed as racist; there was never testing for sickle cell anemia before, but leaving it out of genetic testing might be an unnatural exception to the new program. Why is leaving a credit check out of employment screening any more natural? Is employment itself simply racist, such that it needs to be fixed up by bolting on such contrivances as a lack of a credit check? What a world.
::: posted by dWj at 6:44 PM
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Up in Canada, the Conservatives are doing surprisingly well in the polls. The election is on the 28th.
::: posted by Steven at 2:56 AM
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Dean, I've seen Harold Ford mentioned as a potential running mate for Kerry, but it turns out he's a little bit too young.
With respect to the electoral college, I do tend to agree with you, Dean, though I don't think a system would last very long if it resulted in the selection of a president who hadn't been the candidate of any party.
::: posted by Steven at 2:55 AM
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Thursday, June 17, 2004 :::
The Illinois Tollway Authority unanimously approved a measure early this week to rename its section of I-88 after Ronald Reagan.
::: posted by dWj at 10:58 PM
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Kitchen Cabinet points to Kaus, where I find a prattle about the electoral college (do a search for "Jorge Klor de Alva"). The observation that it is, in fact, it no state's interest for itself not to be winner-takes-all is entirely apposite, but what I find interesting here are the implicit assumptions that "the third-party problem" with it is, in fact, a bad thing, and that giving the states each two electors before accounting for population is "a major defect". (Eric will agree with his first assumption, but not his second. My brother will disagree with his second as well; I think he'll tend closer to me on the first, but I'm not sure of that.)
::: posted by dWj at 6:57 PM
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I've been brainstorming for dark horse potential running mates for Kerry.- Richard Holbrooke. If he were chosen, though, Bush-Cheney might do something about the fact that Americans don't know how badly Kosova's been doing in the last year or two under U.N. "control".
- Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee. A young, moderate, southern Democrat who is a rising star in the House — gave Pelosi a run for minority leader — and is black, which can't but cause excitement.
- Arlen Spector. (We're getting a bit more speculative here — I could just about as well list Janet Reno or Walter Mondale — but the media were infatuated with McCain, which was less plausible.) A natural for the attack-dog role, and apparently invincible in a large swing state.
- I can't really make a good case for Ed Rendell, but Pennsylvania is the largest swing state with a Democratic governor, so I suppose I'll at least mention him. He's corrupt, so adds heft in dealings with the United Nations.
- Jacques Chirac. Apparently Constitutionally ineligible, but I'm sure the Supreme Court can find something in the fourteenth amendment to handle that.
I seem to be out of ideas, don't I.Incidentally, I've only mentioned people I haven't heard mentioned anywhere else. The faint rumblings about Sam Nunn and Bill Cohen merit mention.
::: posted by dWj at 6:57 PM
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From the 9/11 committee hearings, Patrick Fitzgerald on cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. Much of the media seems to have reported that "there was no connection between Iraq and [9/11 or al-Qaeda], contrary to what the President has claimed"; the President has maintained his belief that there was a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, but not between Iraq and 9/11, and this seems to be holding up. (There is not, however, clear evidence that Iraq was not connected to 9/11; Czech intelligence still maintains that it was.) It seems the President's subtlety and nuance may be too much for the media to handle.Update: More, and yet more.
::: posted by dWj at 6:57 PM
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Wednesday, June 16, 2004 :::
It's time to reboot my computer, which means I'm going to blog some things that I had intended to comment on but probably won't:- Last week, NRO suggested that if Kerry was going to be respectful of Reagan, he should rescind any positions in disagreement with Reagan. I think that's stupid. The worst thing I can say about Kerry's response to Reagan's death is that it surprised me.
- Also at NRO, Denis Boyles brings up the new notion from Old Europe that the Germans as a whole were victims of Hitler.
- Joanne Jacobs has tales of high school teachers getting in trouble for teaching. Incidentally, a friend native to Massachusetts told me she'd never heard of tenure for high school teachers -- I had never heard the concept until I came to Massachusetts. It's not clear to me whether we're both ignorant, or whether it's a school district by school district thing, or what.
- Instapundit has more tales of abuse by U.N. "peacekeepers" in Africa.
- A piece at the New Criterion posits:
Unlike the U.S., Spain failed to grasp the civilizational importance of its first national tragedy of the twenty-first century. Because of this failure, there will surely be more such tragedies visited upon Spain. At the moment when Spain most needed vigorous national discussion, her intellectual class failed her, and the students allowed themselves to be used as the proxies of demagogues. A frightened electorate had no power to resist the loudest solution on offer. All of this suggests that the terrorists did not err in selecting the weakest wildebeest of the herd. In decrying the attacks, not a few commentators have argued that the Spanish electorate allowed terrorists to become actors in Spain's political life. This is to miss the forest for the trees: the terrorists saw in Spanish society the volatility and fractiousness that is the precondition for terror's effectiveness, and they took advantage of it with the foreseeable political consequences.
::: posted by Steven at 6:28 PM
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Tuesday, June 15, 2004 :::
Of those chronically uninsured, the vast majority are poor, but over 60 percent are under the age of 35. Thus, the uninsured may be a largely healthy population that could afford to purchase health-care in a more consumer-driven system. Indeed, many of those currently purchasing insurance with health-savings accounts were previously uninsured. At NRO.
::: posted by dWj at 7:03 PM
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How different is Bush's foreign policy from Reagan's?
Questions.
Answers.
::: posted by dWj at 12:33 AM
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Monday, June 14, 2004 :::
"The latest poll shows that if the election were held today, most people wouldn't vote, because they think the election is in November."
- Dennis Miller Zogby has been doing some state-by-state polls for the Wall Street Journal, on days leading up to May 24 and on June 7. It would be a mistake to make anything of these polls, taken five months before the election, by a fellow who got the 2002 elections right and nothing much since. Allow me to make a mistake.
The polls both show John Kerry winning, but a very simple adjustment projects a Bush win. My idea is to suppose that since the overall margin of error in each poll is small, but the state-by-state margin is larger, most of the difference in the total two-party vote between May 24 and June 7 is due to changes in public opinion, while a lot of the change in individual states is due to polling error.
Paying no attention to the actual margins of error, and pulling coefficients out of thin air, I figured out the results based on the aggregate results of the June 7 survey (in which John Kerry leads in the 16 states polled by 1.8%), assuming that the actual differential between each state and the aggregate was two-thirds of the June 7 result plus one-third of the May 24 result. For example, in the May poll, Iowa supported Bush by 5.2%, while the 16-state aggregate backed Kerry by 4.4%, for a differential of 9.6%. In the June poll, Iowa backed Kerry by 1.3%, while the aggregate went for Kerry by 1.8%, for a .5% differential. I then added (2*9.6 + .5)/3 to the June aggregate for a 3.5% Bush victory.
Based on Zogby's results, Bush was winning 218 electoral votes in May, and 242 in June. My fudging gives Bush every state he won in June, plus Florida, Iowa, and West Virginia, for 281 votes. Bush lost Florida in both polls, but my exercise paints it red because it was less pro-Kerry than the aggregate in May -- the assumption, in other words, is that Bush's gain overall in June was real, but his decline in Florida from -1.4% to -1.6% was based on an unfortunate sample selection.
If there's anything valid one can take from this exercise, it's that these polls are volatile. Like all volatile substances, they should not be consumed haphazardly.
I'd like to re-emphasize that even if my methodology were valid (which it isn't) and the polls were reliable (they aren't), the election isn't until November. The only reason for this little exercise is that it's more fun than what I ought to be doing. Really, ignore me.
::: posted by Steven at 11:01 PM
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I'd just like to quote a paragraph from the George Will piece Eric just linked to:MIT's Adelman notes that even before 1800 -- before the coal-fired industrial revolution -- Europeans worried about exhausting coal supplies. ``European production actually did peak in 1913 and is nearly negligible today.'' Billions of tons remain beneath European soil but are uneconomical to remove. So far. I believe the current price of "alternative" (i.e., non-hydrocarbon, non-wind, non-nuclear) energy is a few times the price of oil, and falling.
::: posted by Steven at 8:30 PM
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Sunday, June 13, 2004 :::
Weekend commentary roundup:
George Will comments on the economics of the energy market. He notes, inter alia, that gasoline today is (inflation-adjusted) half the price it was in 1920 and three-fifths the price it was in 1981. Will also demonstrates (more importantly) that we need not artificially increase the price of oil through taxation in order to stimulate the growth of alternative energy supplies because oil prices will rise automatically as it becomes more difficult to find.
Charles Krauthammer (column from Friday) notes that as people are praising Ronald Reagan for his optimism, they are missing the point of what he did.
Optimism? Every other person on the No. 6 bus is an optimist. What distinguished Reagan was what he did and said.
Mark Steyn compares the funeral of Ronald Reagan to that of the Queen Mother two years ago. I noticed that Lady Thatcher's curtsy in the Capitol Rotunda, but the meaning was lost on me. Steyn explains:
When Thatcher stood before President Reagan's coffin, by the way, she curtsied -- which you're supposed to do only for kings and queens.
He also comments on the perception, contrary to the facts and prevalent in the popular press that Reagan was not intelligent:
If anything is laid to rest with him at the end of this remarkable week, it ought to be the lazy condescension of the elites. That's all but indestructible, alas. Last Monday, the Washington Post and many other papers carried an Associated Press story by Adam Geller on Reagan's economic legacy which began, ''He had almost no schooling in economics...'' Actually, that's one of the few things he did have schooling in: In 1932, he earned a bachelor's degree in social science and economics from Eureka College. I guess a certificate from Eureka just doesn't impress these reporters the way Bush's Yale Business School diploma [sic] impresses them.
He also observes:
On CNN the other night, there was a featurette on all the changes in Ronald Reagan's long life: He was born in 1911, when Buffalo Bill was still alive, etc., etc.. Big deal. If you were born in 1980, that world has vanished, too. The arrogance of every age is the assumption of permanence. It's unusual to find a leader who thinks beyond that: ''smart'' in media politics means someone who can recite by heart every sub-clause of his plan on prescription-drug re-importation from Canada, not someone who looks a decade or two down the road and figures out the lie of the land.
Indeed, when Speaker Hastert eulogized President Reagan in the Rotunda, he said "Ronald Reagan helped make our country and this world a better place to live. But he always believed that our best days were ahead of us, not behind us." The preposition "But" is wrong. Surely, it is at least partially due to Reagan's efforts that better days followed his efforts and that better days yet lie ahead.
Robert Cringely (column from Thursday) comments on the future of blogging. Lest this become a meta-blog-entry, I will merely comment that I hope my blog entries never function the way he talks about.
And, in case you missed it, Robert Novak had a nice column on Monday in which he described Reagan as perhaps the nation's most ideological president and also one of the most intellectual. It's worth reading because it also notes Reagan's support for the restoration of the gold standard.
::: posted by Eric at 10:22 AM
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