Musings of a Failed Political Scientist

A while back Bhaskar Sunkara posted a rather incoherent rant against Ezra Klein in particular and left-leaning (as if there are other kinds) wonk bloggers in general. I say incoherent mostly because Sunkara drifts from explaining why a policy focus is a terrible thing  to slamming the New York Times for focusing on personality during the Chicago teacher’s strike. Apparently, how non-wonk pundits’ obsessions with personality reflect on Ezra Klein is left as an exercise for the reader. Sunkara criticizes Klein for his limited praise of Paul Ryan in 2010 and then praises Paul Ryan himself.

Conor Williams cuts through Sunkara’s hyperbole and weird robot metaphors and sums up the post as such:

Sunkara argues that the new technocrats mistake their obsession with facts for a knowledge of value judgments. By mistaking policy for politics, they set themselves (and their fellow liberals/progressives/et al) up for political defeats.

In making this argument, Sunkara is kind of right, kind of wrong, but in general misses the entire point. As Williams writes, “better chart blogging isn’t about to secure Florida’s electoral votes.” That’s probably true. However, Sunkara is being intentionally obtuse when he writes,

The wonks couldn’t understand. “Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation,” Klein whined. Republicans weren’t playing fair. They were playing at politics, while he was trying to construct sound policy.

Sunkara and I both reside firmly on the left, but I think we are vastly different partisans. I’ve read little of him, so I apologize if I do him a disservice, but I get the impression he supports the left for their goals and values – full stop. There’s nothing wrong with that. I support most of the left’s goals and values as well. But I also believe that, values aside, the Democratic Party does a better job of governing. Sunkara may find it offensive that Ezra ends up making a case for the left without such value judgments. I’m guessing, however, that showing that the Republican party circa 2012 either has no idea how to run a country, or are actively lying about their plans, might be a persuasive argument to many voters. There are whole swaths of the country that still think that Democrats might be nice fellows with their hearts in the right place, but that if you want the trains to run on time you should vote for those sensible Republican businessmen. If that were ever true, it certainly ended in 2000. Political attitudes are sticky, and it’s a political boon to the left to be able to point out that the Democrats can now do a better job of keeping the country going.

But mostly, as I said, Sunkara misses the point. He’s writing as if political speech is a zero-sum game, and that Klein is taking up valuable airtime that would be better allocated to some ideologue that would make value-based arguments for the political left. But again, returning to Conor Williams,

The wonks aren’t really the problem. After all, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with fact-based policies. They beat the hell out of the alternative. Sophisticated policy analysis is fine, even necessary, once we’ve (politically) hashed out the relevant value-laden objectives that we’re after. Snazzy charts alone can’t settle whether or not the United States should pursue educational equity or stratification. That’s a moral and political question. Wonky analysis can help us get a better sense of which policies might encourage one or the other.

There’s a place for technocrats, and there’s a place for firebrands, and in general the left needs both. Whatever “I’m not a liberal” stuff may come out of Ezra’s mouth, it’s obvious he operates with liberal assumptions. Read a few of his columns and try to imagine any of it coming from somebody with an R next to their name. It’s hard to imagine Klein and his team spending so much time and effort detailing how government interventions can be done efficiently if they didn’t think such interventions were a worthy use of government in the first place.

Really, Ezra’s whole project depends on liberal assumptions, and that’s where I think he and technocracy are so important. There aren’t conservative versions of Klein.¹ There are conservatives who pretend to do what Ezra does, but they’re like Ryan: they don’t want government to work effectively. They don’t want government at all, and in fact the less effectively it works the better for them, because it’s easier to get rid of a poorly run institution than a well-run institution (For the life of me I can’t find the link, but as I understand it there is no technical reason the IRS couldn’t simplify tax returns for 90% of the population by mailing out pre-filled forms based on the standard deduction and an individual’s W-2’s, and people could just sign the form and return it. Basically there are two groups that block such a reform: tax preparation firms, and the anti-tax lobby who wants to keep tax payment as ostentatiously difficult as possible in order to affect public opinion).

I think for why technocrats are important today, we should at least listen to their (if oblique) justifications for their project. As Matt Yglesias – another dreaded wonkblogger, but at the time writing for safely liberal ThinkProgress – wrote,

For the past 65-70 years—and especially for the past 30 years since the end of the civil rights argument—American politics has been dominated by controversy over the size and scope of the welfare state. Today, that argument is largely over with liberals having largely won… There are big items still on the progressive agenda. But they don’t really involve substantial new expenditures. Instead, you’re looking at carbon pricing, financial regulatory reform, and immigration reform as the medium-term agenda. Most broadly, questions about how to boost growth, how to deliver public services effectively, and about the appropriate balance of social investment between children and the elderly will take center stage.

This is (as is Yglesias’s wont) rather glib, and I and any other liberal could come up with a hundred things we’d like the federal government to spend money on to improve society. But we’ve had republicans running on protecting Medicare for two cycles now. Sure, they’ll try to kill if it nobody’s looking, or if they can pin it on anybody else, but the social safety net has become such an accepted, if not cherished, part of American life that they can’t come out and say “we want to kill Medicare, we want to kill Social Security.” They can just hand-wave about reform – and it takes wonks to point out that handwaving for what it is. Arguments about values and goals don’t help when Republicans ape liberal values and goals of supporting seniors financially and medically and then try to push privatizing Social Security and switching to Medicare vouchers. You need to argue that the Republican proposals won’t work, and that they’ll make things worse, and these are empirical arguments that need to be grounded in the data. Moreover, there needs to be a liberal voice calling for these programs to be well-run, not only so that they do more good with less, but so they’re harder to kill.

And I think that this is what Klein, consciously or not, sees as his raison d’être. Ezra, quoting Yglesias three years later, wrote,

The progressive project of building a decent welfare state is giving way to the more technocratic work of financing and managing it. How government is run, more than what exactly it does, seems set to be the main battleground of American politics in coming years.

This sentiment may offend Sunkara. But rather than seeing it as an abdication of values, I see it as a project that of necessity grows out of the values that Sunkara himself presumably holds. Moreover, I see it as an extension of the Progressive Movement of the early 20^th Century – only rather than trying to put technocrats in charge of everything, Klein and the wonkblog movement are trying to make technocrats out of voters, building democratic support for technocratic policies. What separates the wonkbloggers from their fellow wonks is that instead of making their cases in whitepapers meant for elite audiences, they seek to educate readers on topics that were formerly locked away in unreadable OMB reports.

One of conservatives’ biggest victories in the last thirty years has been to discredit the very notion of governmental intervention. Think of Ronald Reagan’s famous quote: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'” I don’t believe that conservatives successfully sold their values to the majority of the American people, but I think they did a good job of arguing that liberal values were unworkable. To the degree Klein et al can restore faith in the possibility of efficient and successful liberal programs, I think he does the left a favor.

Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California pushes back on the gerrymandering explanation over at The Monkey Cage. Basically, he estimates what would have happened this year had the 2008 districts remained in force, and concludes:

Democrats do gain more seats under this simulation—seven more total—but fall far short of matching their predicted vote share.  The point should be clear:  even under the most generous assumptions, redistricting explains less than half the gap between vote share and seat share this election cycle. [emphasis his]

This may well be true; the 2010 redistricting compared to the 2000 redistricting did not, on net, explain the disparity between the Democrats’ vote share and their number of seats in the House.  McGhee also points to Matt Green’s chart showing that not only is a vote-share/seat-share disparity not unusual, but that for a long time predominately favored the Dems. Part of that may be unavoidable; small differences in vote-share may correspond with larger differences in seat-share, similar to how the popular vote for president is always closer than the electoral college vote.

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Redistricting is one of my pet peeves. I’m a fan of proportional representation in the first place, which would remove the problem of redistricting completely, but if we’re going to do it this way let’s do it right. But we’re not: as people on twitter were noticing,

Pennsylvania: 2.71 million votes for D house candidates. 2.64 million votes for R house candidates. House members elected: 13 GOP, 5 Dems.

— sethdmichaels (@sethdmichaels) November 7, 2012

The way this works is pretty simple. Imagine a state with 100 voters, 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. It has 10 congressional districts with ten people each. The GOP in our hypothetical state controls the state house, and wants to maximize the congressional seats won by Republicans. So what they’d do is create three districts that, combined, have 23 Democrats and only 7 Republicans. The Democrats easily win those three districts, but the other seven districts have, combined, 43 Republicans and only 27 Democrats. Boom: three Democratic seats, seven Republican seats.

This is exactly what the GOP in Pennsylvania did – they put a whole lot of Democrats in those five districts. I did some quick and dirty math based on the AP figures published by the Chicago Tribune. The average winning Democrat in PA took 76.2% of the vote; the average  winning Republican took only 58.7%. The strongest-performing winning Republican had a lower winning percentage than all but one of the winning Democrats. Since every vote past 50% is (in effect) “wasted,” the GOP forced the Dems to waste a whole lot of votes in a small number of districts to ensure themselves victory in the rest of the state.

This is actually contrary to the way redistricting has worked in the past. Usually the party in power tries to create a bunch of safe seats for its incumbents, and forces the opponents incumbents to fight in evenly matched districts in the hopes that they could be knocked off. This works well for the individual politicians, but is less effective for the party at large. The PA GOP put party ahead of individual interests, and it paid off. Meanwhile, the Illinois Democratic Party stuck to the old formula; they protected a bunch of incumbents, and though the state voted 53.8%-44% Democratic, they “only” won 12 of 18 seats.

This problem is bigger than the Pennsylvania GOP’s tactical brilliance and the Illinois Democrats’ relative lack thereof. My quick and dirty calculations nationally (not all precincts have reported, and AP doesn’t report uncontested races): 53,627,450 people voted for Democratic candidates for the House, or 50.6% of the two-party vote; 52,162,619 people voted for Republican candidates for the House, or 49.3% of the two-party vote. That’s pretty darn close to the presidential vote. But the GOP controls 27 state houses outright, compared to only 15 state houses controlled by Democrats (the rest are split or nonpartisan). That’s a lot of redistricting done by Republicans. The Republicans control the House not because more people voted for Republicans, but because either through GOP redistricting or chance, the Democrats had more “wasted” votes.

Only the losers complain about the refs, and lord knows the Dems won a whole lot last night. Until we change the way house districts are drawn, the rules of the game are what they are and the GOP played the game better than the Democrats. But I’m already hearing Boehner talk about how the House results are a “mandate” for Republicans. It’s important to keep in mind that the GOP House majority is structural, not democratic, and more people voted for a blue House than a red House.

[ Update: Dave Weigel at Slate notices the phenomenon in a couple posts; Ian Millhiser at Think Progress ran the same numbers I did for the national House vote; and Dylan Matthews at Wonkblog looks at the seat share/presidential vote disparity in the states where Republicans ran redistricting. Matthews’ final sentence:

This suggests that it’s going to be tough for Democrats to make big gains in the House until 2022, when the districts are drawn again following the Census. And for that to happen, they’d have to do quite well in the 2020 state legislature elections.

That’s right on. But the problems that keep the Dems from making gains in the House until 2022 will also make it really hard for them to do well in the 2020 state legislature elections.]

Tim Wu’s The Master Switch‘s greatest flaw is by no means unique. “Practically every” book about social or political ills,” David Greenberg tells us, “finishes with an obligatory prescription that is utopian, banal, unhelpful or out of tune with the rest of the book.” Wu’s final chapter manages to be all four, and I deeply identified with the the strained, almost frantic way he tried to MacGyver a half-dozen incongruous and sometimes contradicting themes into a coherent conclusion. I’ve been there myself, as I think most writers have, and since nobody else can figure out final chapters either, let’s put his final chapter on hold for a moment and consider the rest of the book.

The book discusses the history of the American film, radio, television, telephone and internet industries – and, more specifically, the similarities Wu sees between the arc of each industry. Wu calls this the Cycle, and it plays out roughly thus:

1. A disruptive invention, which unsettles established players and often leads to a brief utopianism as idealists and hobbyists popularize the new invention
2. Consolidation, as powerful forces gobble up control over the new technology and shut out further applicants.
3. Breakup, as (usually) the federal government eventually decides to fulfill its role as trust-buster, and we return to Step 1.

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I’m really excited to see stuff like this:

The Rap Genius guys are still sleeping on mattresses, but are also the recipients of a $15 million vote of confidence from one of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture capital firms. On Wednesday, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it was investing in the site, with ambitious plans to move beyond hip-hop lyrics and annotate just about everything on the web. Marc Andreessen said in a statement on the site (annotated, of course) that Rap Genius has the potential to “be knowledge about the knowledge” and to “create the Internet Talmud.”

It’s pretty natural that an effort to annotate everything would begin with music lyrics. I don’t think any other cultural product is

1. is textually opaque enough to make annotation really valuable to the reader/listener and
2. popular enough to generate mass interest in annotation and to make annotation worthwhile from a economies of scale perspective. Continue reading →

I’m coming up rather rapidly on my 30th birthday. Oh, for the age of eight, when the rise and fall of the Roman Empire could be comfortable sandwiched in that last week before one’s birthday. A much younger friend of mine recently asked me what it was like, and I responded with the standard litany: body parts breaking down, everybody I know getting married and having babies, an inability to understand pop culture – kids these days with their doo-wop and baggy pants. But another incident came to mind – I recently found myself defending status quo bias in a way I would have found inconceivable not too long ago. I fear my life is turning into a bad Billy Joel song.

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One of my friends wrote me the other day complaining about the tendency this cycle for both sides in the presidential race to take their opponents statements blatantly, almost obscenely, out of context. Obama’s recent “You didn’t build that” gaffe was exhibit one. Despite behind behind Obama, and hating the way the gaffe has been weaponized, I felt compelled to defend the media’s focus on gaffes – at least, some of them.

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A few weeks back, NPR’s Planet Money podcast talked about recent changes to the way the organ transplant system for lungs and livers function. As is their wont, they looked at the system as a market, albeit an unusual one in that it is illegal to buy or sell organs. However, I think the system is better viewed as a political one – instead of doctors as market actors, they’re representatives trying to balance personal self-interest with their responsibilities to both their broad and narrow constituencies.

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Hi, my name is Nic and I’ll be your cruise director on the maiden voyage of the S.S. Failed Political Scientist.

So what’s this all about then? Long story short: after getting a B.A. in political science from a “New Ivy”, spending five years in D.C. getting my hands and soul dirty, and then returning to academia to get an MA from a top-tier political philosophy program, I applied to a dozen PhD programs and… got in nowhere.

Well, aren’t you going to try again? No thanks. My year in the world of big-time academia has pretty well demonstrated to me that I am not cut out for it. Oh, I think I’d be a pretty good teacher if I could land a gig in a small, liberal arts school that prized instruction over publishing, and I think I’d even do a decent job of publishing if it came to that. But that’s not all of what it means to be a political science professor, and from what I can tell (having not reached that level) it’s not a very large part of what it means to be successful in a PhD program. Shmoozing with professors, seeking grants, networking at conferences, self-promotion… for a student of politics, I’m pretty lousy at politicking. And to teach at a place like my alma mater, I’d need to get a degree from a top-ten program, and politicking aside I don’t have the GPA or CV to get into a Yale or U of Chicago.

More than that, the PhD labor market isn’t exactly plagued by a dearth of willing labor. At the honors dinner my senior year of undergrad – at a cookout designed to honor the three students in the department (myself included) who had completed the honors program by writing a lengthy thesis and then defending it – one of the professors whom I knew very little came over and tried his best to crush my dreams.

Professor: “So I hear you want to get a PhD.”
Naïve 22 Year Old Nic: “Yep.”
Professor: “You know you’re going to be one of 50 kids competing for each spot in a program, right?”
Naïve 22 Year Old Nic: “Uh, Yup,” wondering how he was going to twist this around to congratulating me for surviving a grueling year of thesis-writing.
Professor: “And you realize that once you have your degree you’ll be one of fifty PhDs competing for each open teaching position, right?”
Naïve 22 Year Old Nic: “Er, Yeah,” having abandoned all hope that this would be a pleasant exchange
Professor: “What the hell are you thinking?

In retrospect, I should have heeded his words, but at the time it just made me dig in my heels.

So why a blog then? Why not just go out and get a real job? I have a real job, thank you. I started this blog for three reasons:

1. To stop bugging my friends and family. I’m sure my girlfriend is tired of hearing about how last week’s procedural vote in the Senate totally proves that Machiavelli is right about everything, and a few days ago I caught myself going into a long aside about French policy in 18^th Century North America as a way of explaining my concern about a tax proposal in an email to my parents.
2. To find a style of my own. Depending on the day and the subject, I find myself sounding a lot like Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias, or occasionally Chez or Andrew Sullivan. None of these are my voice. I have my own voice in my academic writing, but that’s not really fit for normal human consumption. I’d like to teach myself to write in a consistent, approachable style that doesn’t make the lay reader’s eyes glaze over and doesn’t parrot my betters – particularly because I’ve noticed that when I find myself adopting another’s style, too often I adopt their logic as well.
3. To learn how to write efficiently and under normal human conditions. In undergrad and grad school, I’d spend an entire semester gathering notes and jotting down ideas. Then at the end, I’d spend twelve hours outlining, grab a bite to eat, and then sit down and write 30 pages in one 24-hour long session. And then I’d collapse. When I had to write shorter pieces mid-semester – or, for that matter, blog posts while working in the private sector – I’d really struggle without my routine of over-preparation and sleep deprivation.

So is this all going to be dry stuff about whether Machiavelli was a republican or not? No, though I hope to draw on political philosophy more than your run of the mill blog. I’ll predict that most of the posts will be about contemporary American politics, and if I can bring Machiavelli or Plato or Rawls into the conversation, well, that’s just gravy.

It’s also going to be a lot less serious and a lot more vulgar than academic writings. Be prepared for words like ‘fellationics’ and phrases like “masturbatory nostalgia”.

Now wait a second! You like Machiavelli, and you call yourself Nic. That’s not your real name, is it? Nice catch. No, this blog is pseudo-anonymous. I freelance, and I’d like my professional persona to be more than a Google search from both my internet Id and my ill-considered fumblings at becoming a better writer and more mature thinker.

Ha! I can figure you out, you’re leaving clues to your identity all over the place! You’re _____! Please don’t. I’m nowhere near important enough for it to be a big deal if my identity became public; the pseudo-anonymity is essentially to keep this blog more than a Google search away from current and potential clients.

My experience and my beliefs are why I’m writing this blog, and I don’t want to have to couch things in ambiguities that make those experiences less relevant and more difficult to apply to my writing.