Just How Stupid Are We?

Last fall I finished reading Just How Stupid Are We, a book about the American electorate by Rick Shenkman. The book claims that the American electorate is woefully uninformed on a variety of national and international issues and therefore can't be expected to make good decisions at the polls.

I had two major qualms with the book.

First, the book chooses a very ideological topic to focus on---the decision to invade Iraq. One of the central claims was that many Americans claimed that the war in Iraq was one of their top 2 issues when voting in the 2004 presidential election, but that many Americans were uninformed about Iraq. Specifically, many Americans believed there was an Iraq/9-11 connection, and that Iraq had WMDs (both of which have been shown to be false). There were some widely-discussed surveys about media bias showing that viewers of Fox News tended to believe in an Iraq/9-11 connection and in the WMDs at a higher proportion than the rest of the country. So there's certainly evidence that many Americans were uninformed.

This sort of presupposes that WMDs and 9/11 were the only reasons to invade Iraq. There were many who didn't want to invade Iraq even if they did have WMDs, and there were many others who wanted to invade anyway, even if they didn't have WMDs. It's also a complicated issue because the intelligence community seems to have failed as well, whether by failing to collecting the right information or by failing to steer clear or political pressure. I'm not an expert on the issue, but I think it's a little more complicated.

Then there are the claims that the administration deliberately tried to create a connection between Iraq and 9-11, even if only in people's minds by repeatedly putting them in the same sentence. This would certainly lead to misinformed voters, which is a little different than stupid voters. There's a difference between being misled and being stupid.

At any rate, while I don't necessarily disagree that many Americans are uninformed or under-informed, I wouldn't hold up the Iraq war as a great exemplar. The Iraq invasion might better illustrate how the American press is inherently pro-war due to the inevitable ratings boost, or that the modern executive branch is quite difficult to check by legislative branch, or maybe that enough Americans generally supported the war regardless of WMDs and 9-11. The author seems to assume that voting for Bush in 2004 was uninformed while voting another way was informed. You're crushing a lot of information down into a binary decision and the binary outcomes are going to be very heavily overloaded with meanings and contexts. I don't think Iraq explains it adequately.

My second concern with the book is that, well, duh, elections are always won and lost by uninformed voters anyway. Uninformed voters are probably easier to sway because they are uninformed and therefore can latch onto a variety of reasons to vote a certain way. Think about it... If you're running a campaign, the vote of an 18-year old high school dropout who only reads the sports page is worth the same as the vote of a 33-year old college professor who tries to stay informed on a variety of issues. If you can get the uninformed vote cheaply, either with slogans or rhetoric or empty promises or whatever, doesn't swaying uninformed voters have to be a plank in the winning strategy? You have limited funds to run the campaign and you need to maximize votes-per-dollar to win. How could maximizing your haul of uninformed voters not be a good idea?

To be fair, the book is careful to point out that voters both identified Iraq as a major issue in the 2004 election and showed that they were uninformed about Iraq. So he's making the point that many voters voted on the basis of bad information. Would they have voted differently if they had good information, or would have they have voted the same way for different reasons? Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that many voters want contradictions, like higher spending and lower taxes. This book doesn't shed enough new light on these inherent quandries in democracy.

I imagine that sometimes one candidate wins the informed vote, but loses the uninformed vote and therefore loses the election. But I don't know how to fix this. Well, I mean, clearly if you have a highly educated and well-informed population, then they can sort through all the information themselves. But that requires a lifelong commitment to information literacy on the part of the entire citizenry. It's a good long-term goal for society, but in the short-term it's always a better election strategy to find a way to reach as many uninformed voters as possible.

I don't see how elections can really be determined any other way until we end up with an information-literate citizenry. And even then, there may be points of disagreement that no amount of information can change.

In the meantime, I haven't read The Myth of the Rational Voter, though I plan to listen to an interview with Bryan Caplan (the author) on Russ Roberts' excellent EconTalk series. From what I've heard, this book covers a lot of the ways in which voters are rational and irrational. I will blog about it once I've listened to the interview.

Some of my Favorite Things

Let's see... Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens... What are some of my other favorite things? Good news sources! Specifically, that wonderful British paper, The Economist. I enjoy a non-American perspective on the world that isn't necessarily anti-America, and I like their droll use of humor. For example, a recent article about Russia sending warships to Venezuela to perform joint exercises notes that:

The public response from Washington has been a barely-stifled yawn. The State Department noted that if the Russians were indeed coming, then “they found a few ships that can make it that far.”

I love that they found a way to make me laugh at my fear that we're heading towards a new cold war!

Useful sources of information

I'm becoming a political junkie of sorts, and I've always been a knowledge junkie. But also being a nerd, I want good analysis from the best sources. My rule of thumb: If your analysis of the situation fits on a bumper sticker, you're probably an idiot.

Things I don't like:

• the so-called "echo chamber" of cable news programs
• liberal blogs laced with "let's impeach Bush" rhetoric
  
• conservative blogs full of "if you criticize Bush you're a terrorist" rhetoric
  
• local news (I'm not that interested in sensationalized coverage of hideous crime)
• right-wing talk radio (Rush Limbaugh)
  
• left-wing talk radio (Air America)

I don't really have a problem with opinions, I just don't like "spin", and I don't really like uninformed opinions on issues I'd like to know more about. Some things that I generally like:

• The Economist --- A view of the US from a non-American, but not necessarily anti-American, perspective. Plus, I read all the articles with my best "BBC World Report" accent inside my head. Another things I like about The Economist is that they use numbers and relevant statistics to back up things they say. I like statistics, it comes from my love of baseball in my childhood.
  
• Friday Morning News Roundup on the Diane Rehm Show --- Journalists talking about issues in the news. The journalists aren't necessarily experts on every subject, but they are extremely well-informed on how events are being covered, and can do a good job of explaining the sub-texts behind various issues in the news, such as the implications of a move made by a political campaign or politician, or the ramifications of a diplomatic visit or diplomatic statement. The guests on the show are also adept at anchoring issues in the news in their relevant historical context. The show is split into one hour for domestic news, and one hour for international news. The international hour is usually stronger, especially during campaign season.
  
• UChannel --- Recorded lectures and panel discussions by leading scholars. Many universities participate, though UChannel was started by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and their influence seems to have gained the project a lot of credibility. From UChannel's website:

"The UChannel presents ideas in a way commercial news or public affairs programming cannot. Because it is neither constrained by time nor dependent upon commercial feedback, the UChannel's video content can be broad and flexible enough to cover the full gamut of academic investigation."

I particularly like that, while certainly opinionated, the lectures aren't sound-bytes and are generally designed to clarify an issue, not deceive or confuse as many of the pundits on cable news.

• CSpan Booknotes --- No longer running, but their archives are online. I used to listen to this program in grad school on Saturday or Sunday nights while driving from my Dad's outside of Baltimore back to the University of Maryland near DC.
• The Teaching Company --- Check out any of their lectures. I'm not exaggerating, this company has changed my life. So long as I have my iPod, there is almost no wasted time in my life anymore. Driving, walking, doing dishes, shoveling snow, cleaning the bathtub---they are all opportunities for learning.
  

left/right outer join in Hibernate

Hibernate is great, but while HQL automates a lot of SQL, sometimes you run into things you can do in SQL that are hard in HQL...

For example, I wanted to do a left outer join between two tables, but I don't understand how to set one-to-one or one-to-many relationships in the XML config files for Hibernate, and as of August 2008, I believe that there's no syntax for simply doing an outer join without editing config files.

Suppose I've got two tables, A and B, both of which are properly mapped in Hibernate, and I want to do an outer join on A.x and B.y. I'd write this:

List list=
session.createSQLQuery(
" select {a.*}, {b.*} " +
" from A as a " +
" left outer join B as b " +
" on (a.x = b.y) " +
" where a.x = b.y "
).addEntity("a", A.class).
addEntity("b", B.class).list();

Note that if there is no corresponding entry in B for an entry in A, Hibernate correctly gives you back null (i.e. it doesn't give you an instance of class B with all the fields set to null or default, you legitimately get back null in row[1] of that entry in list).

The {a.*} syntax is a placeholder and the addEntity() calls fill in the fields based on the mappings in Hibernate. This syntax is kind of awesome because I can write SQL queries but take advantage of a lot of the automation and simplification that Hibernate provides. And I can do this without actually understanding a lot of the more complex aspects of Hibernate's config files (not great in the long-run, of course, but great today!)

The Gospel of Judas

Until age 10, I lived in Quincy, an Irish-Catholic neighborhood south of Boston. My family wasn't particularly religious, but still I dutifully went to Sunday school, completed my first communion, and sporadically attended church. My nominally Catholic upbringing (inadvertently, I'm sure) taught me that the bible was akin to a magical book---ancient, thick, and thoroughly inaccessible, at least to mortals like myself. My Dad, who had a similar Catholic upbringing, jokes that remembers the bible being spoken about with such awe and reverence that he feared to open it lest ghosts fling themselves from the pages.

Imagine my surprise my sophomore year of college when I realized that I could take Steve Finley's "The Bible as Literature" course, where we would read the bible as a literary text. Since then, and especially since I have very little patience with people who cite chapter and verse to justify their (usually intolerant) anti-science or social conservative agendas, I've become fascinated with the bible, especially the New Testament, and its intriguing history.

Back in August, on my way to and from Baltimore to visit my Dad, I listened to an audiobook version of Bart Ehrman's "The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot", as read by Dennis Boutsikaris and Lew Grenville.

First some backstory: The Gospel of Judas was discovered in 1978 in Egypt, but did not find its way to scholars until around 2001. In the interim, the document spent time in a safety deposit box in Jersey and was put into a freezer to "protect" the text (of course this damaged the text further). The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic text that tells the story of Judas as Jesus's closest disciple, and the only one who truly understood Jesus. In this document, Judas does Jesus a great service by betraying him to the authorities. It's such a radical re-telling of the story that it almost reminds me of Gregory MacGuire's alternate takes on well-known stories such as "Wicked".

I learned a number of fascinating things from the book:

• The Gnostics were (arguably) Christians who believed that there were many more Gods and divine beings than merely the God of the Old Testament. In fact they believed that the God of the Old Testament is not the most powerful being, but rather a blood-thirsty, reckless being, and also a fool. For the Gnostics, this secret knowledge (Gnostic comes from the Greek work for knowledge), along with a divine spark (which some humans ave and some do not), allows us to transcend this material world of suffering. There's quite a lot more to it than that, but the main take-home point for me is that the Gnostics believed the God of the old-testament to be a blood-thirsty fool.
• One way to look at the historical Jesus is that he was a first-century Jewish Apocalyptic prophet. What is an apocalyptic prophet? The apocalypticists believed they were living in dark times, with some dramatic event on the horizon coming to shake things up. Apocalypticism was in part a response to the observation that just, righteous, upstanding Jews suffered greatly, often in proportion to their righteousness. This contradicted the doctrine of the supremacy of the God of the Old Testament, who was not holding up his end of the bargain to protect his chosen people, and caused considerable re-interpretation and re-figuring of the Jewish tradition that eventually placed all of the suffering of the chosen people into a context: The end was near, and people would be judged. There is textual support for this view in Mark, the earliest gospel, especially Mark 9:1 where Jesus says: "Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power". There are some people there right now who "will not taste death" implies the to be very, very near. There is other textual evidence supporting this view as well, but that verse stuck out most in my mind. There were also other first-century apocalyptic prophets, including John the Baptist, Thudas, as and someone referred to in Acts only as The Egyptian.
  
• Ehrman sketches out a fascinating hypothetical scenario about what, exactly, Judas betrays to the authorities, since it's unlikely that the location of Jesus was that difficult to figure out. It goes something like this:
• Mark notes that Jesus was tried for proclaiming himself to be the king of the Jews, though Jesus never publicly proclaims anything like this in Mark.
• Considering that he raised a ruckus at the temple and that passover always had the potential for riots, it's possible that the established Jewish leaders wanted to get this charismatic upstart out of the way before riots or violence did break out, both to protect their own authority in the Jewish community and to keep the Roman authorities from swooping in to quash a perceived rebellion. But first they needed some plausible excuse to have Jesus arrested...
• The Romans always dealt harshly with anyone proclaiming themselves to be a "king" of any kind, but Jesus never says so publicly. Thus what Judas may have betrayed to the authorities was Jesus's private proclamation that he would be the king of the Jews. The fact that Jesus meant that this would happen in a strictly metaphorical sense after some kind of divine apocalypse was too fine of a distinction for anyone to bother parsing.
• If this scenario were true, it's possible that Judas meant to protect Jesus from harm during this tumultuous passover season. He figured they'd arrest him, quickly realize that he had no political aspirations, hold him until after things had calmed down, and then they could all get back to preaching in Galilee.
  
• It's also possible that Judas betrayed Jesus because he, like the other uneducated and illiterate disciples, had been promised leadership over one of the tribes of Israel in the coming kingdom. When would his happen? Soon. When? Soon. How about now? Not now, soon. Maybe he just got sick of all of this apocalyptic talk and betrayed Jesus out of frustration that the coming apocalypse... simply never came.
  
• You must treat each gospel as a separate work of art. Each Gospel has a very particular message; these are works of literature, each with its own agenda. They are not histories. For example, in Mark, none of the apostles understand who Jesus really is, they all abandon him in his time of greatest need, Jesus asks three times that he not have to endure crucifixion, speaks not a word during his crucifixion, and his last words on the cross are "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?". The women who find him after his resurrection are so terrified that they run out of the cave screaming, telling no one what they have seen. This is radically different from Luke, writing years later, who portrays Jesus as all-knowing, confident and in command of each situation, who carries on a series of conversations during his crucifixion, and who dies at peace, knowing that he will be resurrected. It doesn't make sense to conflate these two narratives into one big meta-narrative.

In conclusion, I highly recommend Bart Ehrman's book about the Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot for anyone interested in early Christianity, Gnosticism, or some brief insights into the historical Jesus. Ehrman has another book called "The Historical Jesus" which I will probably read next. I've already read "Misquoting Jesus", another Ehrman project that looks into the history of the texts that have come to be called the New Testament. I'll write about that sometime later.

There is no knowledge that is not power...

I'm an information junkie. I listen to lectures from The Teaching Company on my iPod on my weekly pilgrimage to Ithaca, I rarely miss a Friday News Roundup, and upon first moving to the splendid isolation of Hamilton, NY, tried for over a month to replace regular television with old episodes of CSpan Booknotes and the Sopranos on DVD. (The latter experiment, however noble, lasted from late August until a mid-October breakup, combined with the lack of anyplace within 25 miles where I could watch NFL games, finally drove me to Time Warner Cable.)

I should note that I also like to read, but I don't have all that much time these days, and listening to books or lectures on my iPod lets me combine educating myself with exercise, which is the ticket I hope to ride to a lean body and a fat brain. Check with me at age 40 and see if I'm still under 200 lbs...

Recently I've realized that apparently I come from a long line of information junkies.
My Nana was a total information junkie when I was little, only I didn't recognize it as such until recently. I have fond memories of riding around in the plush purple leather backseat of her Chrysler, slightly sick to my stomach from either the scent of Parliament cigarettes or her erratic use of the gas pedal, bombarded with the sounds of her favorite call-in talk show. I recall the jingle for re-financing services (USA Loans, 848 3006, 848 3006, home-owners, when you need a loooooooan!) more vividly than all of the programs... Well, all of the programs except the one about Roseanne Barr's crotch-grabbing rendition of the national anthem before a baseball game (yes, I'm ashamed that I remember that one)... But there was always some new something being discussed on the radio.

Looking back now, the call-in show host probably wasn't too insightful, the callers were probably not very sharp, and I probably wouldn't bother with the show these days. Heck, I can barely stand some of the callers to the Friday News Roundup on NPR... I'm seriously going to flip out if I hear one more person call to complain that "the media didn't pick up the story on [fill in a story about impeaching Bush]" or "why isn't Ron Paul getting more attention?" or my favorite, "why is the media always covering stupid things about the candidates, what about the issues" (which as often as not comes from someone who doesn't appear to understand "the issues" very well themselves). Don't get me wrong, I'm all for criticizing the media, for example for their frenzied excitement over wars and the corresponding war-induced ratings bump, and the major TV networks' willingness to trot out retired military personnel to provide an independent analysis of the Pentagon's handling of the war, even though some of those military analysts were looking for lucrative Pentagon contracts that could clearly jeopardize their independence. It's not that I'm against bashing the media, especially in the US... It's just that I'd like a more nuanced perspective than "I didn't see the issue I'm interested in covered on the nightly news tonight, so the media sucks".

Anyway, the point of this is that, although the talk show she listened to was not something I would listen to, Nana was an information junkie. She always had the radio going in the house as well as the car, and she was a pretty enthusiastic TV watcher, especially during baseball season (the poor woman lived from 1919 until 1998, one of a generation of Red Sox fans who never saw them win it all). She never listened to music in the car, except for Frank Snotrag (pronounced "Sa-not-rag" so as to cleverly pun, as only 8-year-olds can, on Sinatra). This seemed strange to me when I was little... Why didn't she listen to music? Even to bad music that I didn't like? What was soooooo interesting about people talking? (This reminds me of the time I switched her Frank Sinatra tape for Michael Jackson's Thriller, and then waited in vain for what seemed like months for her to finally play some of Old Blue Eyes.)

Now I too have followed in her footsteps and become an information junkie. Lectures from The Teaching Company and NPR podcasts aren't enough anymore; I've discovered UChannel, short for University Channel, on iTunes, which is a clearing-house of recorded lectures, so while I'm coding I can have something "light" playing in the background. I can't stop trying to soak up information!

I don't quite know why I'm so obsessed with information... I'd like to think of it as a life-long commitment to education, but I think there's something else going on as well. For example, I'm not an information whore by any means; in fact, I'm very picky about what I listen to. I like people who are extremely informed on whatever they're talking about. I like people who speak reasonably well. I gravitate towards science, economics, archeology, and history. I don't like generic "news" all that much because it never provides enough context. I'm definitely entertained by learning new things, and I especially love the "knowledge is power" aspect of this where I can know more about a subject and not be fooled into thinking that something (like negative campaigning) is much worse today than in the past (I don't think it's not worse, maybe less histrionic and more manipulative). I definitely don't like hearing horrible things, like the use of rape as a weapon of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, because I get depressed. I like reading the economist online, and I'd love to listen to the Economist, because then I'd get all the articles in a British accent, which is about as cool as you can get.

More thoughts on this later, I need to sleep.

The airline industry

The airline industry

Very interesting program on the Diane Rehm Show on the ill health of the American airline industry. Clearly record high prices for jet fuel are a major contributor to the problem, but there are other problems with the airline industry as well, some of which I don't fully understand. Some interesting tidbits from the program:

• The airline industry was de-regulated in 1978; wikipedia suggests that prices as well as routes and schedules were regulated by the government. One claim is that the de-regulation of the industry has allowed new carriers to spring up rather quickly and drive prices down throughout the industry. These new carriers can evidently buy or lease planes with little or no money down, charge low prices until their IPO, then declare bankruptcy later. Bob Crandell, former chairman and CEO of American Airlines and one of the guests on the program, points out that over 200 new airlines have come and gone since de-regulation in 1978. On one hand, the constant pressure of new carriers charging low prices drives down prices for consumers; on the other hand it doesn't allow the major airline companies to price flights high enough to cover their costs and leads to an industry that doesn't make any money as a whole, which is disconcerting given the relative importance of air travel to the overall health of the US economy.
• For background on regulation: Timothy Taylor devotes a lecture to regulation in Economics, 3rd Edition, a series of lectures recorded for The Teaching Company
• His observations about regulation of the airline industry are not unique and he cites a number of sources in the lecture's bibliography
  
• By the way, the lectures from The Teaching Company are of very high quality, and once you buy something they send you enough special deals and put enough material on sale that you can pretty much guarantee the $50 sale price to download 36 30-minute lectures on a topic of interest.
• The airline industry in the late 20th century resembles the railroad industry in the late 19th century in that there are very high fixed costs to build the network (expenses to lay track VS expenses to buy places, build airports, set up a massive air-traffic control system, and establish a system of flight connections), but very low marginal to operate the network. So once the network is set up, new companies keep forming, driving down prices, and preventing everyone from making any money.
• Other industries that are chained to an expensive fixed network, such as gas, electric and water utilities, also don't lend themselves nicely to competition and are typically regulated in some way, such as a regulated monopoly
• The telephone network used to be a regulated monopoly, but was eventually broken up into several smaller companies
• Notes on government price regulation:
• Cost-Plus Regulation: The company can charge a price that's high enough to recover their costs, plus a certain amount of profit. Terrible idea because there is absolutely no incentive to cut costs!
• Price-Cap Regulation: The company is allowed to charge a certain price for a period of time, and can make more profit but cutting their costs substantially below that price. Not as good as market competition, but much, much better than cost-plus regulation.
• Note that de-regulation in this context means that the prices were de-regulated; this does not mean that the FAA got rid of safety standards for the airlines! That's a different type of regulation.
• Also note that government regulation carries the risk of regulatory capture, the term for a revolving door for personnel between the regulatory agency and the industry under regulation that weakens the impact of regulation.
  
• Reading between the lines, I imagine there airlines were regulated by cost-plus or price-cap prior to 1978, and the price de-regulation in 1978 opened the door to competition from new start-up airlines that has decimated the industry.
  
• So it looks like there are structural problems to the airline industry such that unfettered competition drives down prices for consumers, but ultimately drives all the airlines out of business. One thing I'd like to know is how to measure the impact of air travel on the US economy, and what happens when an airline goes out of business. I've heard that the government routinely bails out bankrupt airlines, but I don't know what exactly this entails and what it costs if it indeed happens.
  
• The US has an outdated radar-based air traffic control system from the 1950s, which means that commercial air traffics needs to fly inside special lanes so that the radar can find the planes. Needless to say, these lanes are not always the most direct way between two cities, and the lanes are fairly congested. Research done by the FAA through the MITRE corporation suggests that a new satellite/GPS-based system for tracking (for which the technology already exists, though guests on the DRS suggest would cost $20-30 billion or more) would allow airports to increase their volume of flights by 15-20%.
• Bob Crandell points out that the US Dept. of Transportation doesn't really have a cohesive national transportation plan, and that if there existed the political will to craft such a plan and then spend the necessary capital to make it happen, then it's likely that we'd connect the northeast corridor from DC to Boston with really fast trains and not clog up the skies in that part of the country.