An Awe

Among the traits characteristic of the historical line of research begun during the 1930s by the Annales school, reference to statistical objectifications has been significant. From this point of view quantitative history has inherited, via Simiand, Halbwachs, and Labrousse, elements of the Durkheimian school and, even closer to the source, of the mode of thinking centered on averages engendered by Quetelet, who opposed macrosocial regularities to the random, unpredictable, and always different accidents of particular events. It sought, by this technique, to overcome individual or factual contingencies in order to construct more general things, characterizing social groups or the long run, depending on the case. This attempt to give form to the chaos of countless singular observations involves having recourse to previous sources or to specific encodings, of which historians ask two questions: Are they available? Are they reliable? In this perspective, the question of the reality and consistency of objects is assimilated to the question of the reliability of their measurements. The cognitive tools of generalization are presumed to have been acquired and firmly constituted. All that matters is the controlled collection and the technical treatment--eventually automated--of the data.

--The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, Alain Desrosieres, trans. Camille Naish, Harvard UP, 1998, p. 323.

Number One for 12 August 2011

The FCC won't let me be me:

• The kids are alright ... at hacking iPhones [Forbes]
  
• Deep reading is deviant behavior. Best line: "American universities are largely populated by people who don't fit either of these categories—often really smart people for whom the prospect of several hours attending to words on pages (pages of a single text) is not attractive." Yes, absolutely. I like reading a lot less now that I read a lot more. [Chronicle of Higher Ed]
  
• A reminder: It doesn't help the president to be bipartisan. [The Monkey Cage]
  
• A reminder: Wall Street was pretty stupid about the debt crisis. [Even The Liberal New Republic]
  
• How I met your mother discovers advertising newspeak. (Or, rather, the memory hole.) [Entertainment Weekly]
  

Mark Rom has a new Web site

Check out Mark Rom's new blog.

I miss "Rom wasn't built in a day", though. Great title.

Debt and blockbusters

Summer is a time for blockbuster movies--sprawling, spectacular, and
illogical monuments to excess. This summer, the most successful disaster
film hasn't been a Hollywood creation has been the Countdown to the
Default.

The imaginary apocalypses now playing the multiplex pale next to the
consequences of America's impending defaults, downgrades, or some
combination of the two. (Sure, evil transforming robots might wreck
Chicago, but a default would have wrecked my retirement portfolio.)

Ironically, the national debt played a supporting role in one of the
summer's biggest movies, Captain America. The movie shows the journey of
Steve Rogers, a good-hearted Boy Scout type who wants to defend the world
against the bad guys, from 98-pound weakling to world-saving superhero.

But Captain America's first assignment isn't punching Hitler in the jaw.
It's traveling across the country selling war bonds. In other words, in
today's debate over the national debt, Captain America would be foursquare
for spending more money than the government earns.

What's more, he would be part of a proud pro-debt tradition. Contrary to
Tea Party slogans, the debt has been a central tool for uniting Americans
for most of U.S. history. Buying debt has even been seen as a patriotic
duty.

Forget the wonk-centered debate over the extent to which American
policymakers have abandoned--or ever adopted--Keynesian ideas. The national
debt has been an essential part of the American experience ever since 1790,
when Alexander Hamilton made a deal with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
to swap the location of the national capital for the federal government's
assumption of state debts (what we would today call a "bailout").

The resulting bargain ensured both that the capital would be located in the
South instead of the commercial, cosmopolitan, and (the South feared)
abolitionist North and that the federal government would play a major role
in the nation's financial markets.

The creation of the debt thus insured the future of the Union by binding
both Southerners and Northerners to the federal government. Subsequent uses
have been just as calculated: the Civil War was paid for by a mix of
taxation, inflation, and debt sales, as was American involvement in both
World Wars and the defense buildup that helped the United States win the
Cold War.

In every case, policymakers calculated that taking on massive amounts of
debt was in the national interest--and voters agreed. Voters not only
returned the politicians who voted for that spending to office, they turned
out in droves to buy bonds in order to support deficit spending.

Captain America's bond salesmanship was fictional, but real-life bond sales
drives featured Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth. Irving Berlin even wrote a
theme song for bond sales performed by Bugs Bunny ("Here comes the freedom
man/Asking you to buy a share of freedom today").

For most of their history, in other words, Americans have managed to stop
worrying and love the debt. That's not a part of the nation's history that
John Boehner, Eric Cantor, or the Tea Party's members care to remember.
They instead claim that the debt is the result of out-of-control Washington
spending.

And they're right. Unlike earlier generations' deficit spending, the
contemporary national debt wasn't incurred to beat the Nazis or save the
Union. It's the result of decisions taken in President George W. Bush's
first term to slash taxes on the wealthy without cutting spending
elsewhere--and then to embark on costly nation-building projects without
raising taxes to pay for them.

For all their righteous anger about the debt, then, the pro-default crowd
misses the point. The problem isn't the size of the national debt. Instead,
it's the purposes for which it was spent and the ability of the government
to raise the revenue to pay for the money that it has already spent.

A default on the debt would signal the end of an unbroken American
tradition of faithful repayment. Doing the right thing now requires a
steadfat mix of spending cuts and tax increases. That would be a dull
ending to the high-stakes negotiations, but real life isn't a  movie, and
sometimes boring endings are the best kind.

Everyone hates adultery

John Sides and Matt Yglesias delve into the General Social Survey to see why people's attitudes toward adultery have changed.

Hester Prynne by Flickr user Billhd

The GSS is great; it may be my favorite dataset of all time. And I remember the first time I sat down and started playing with it I immediately gravitated to the variables about social behavior--extramarital sex, premarital sex, pornography, gay sex, and so on. Political scientists hardly ever get to play with these sorts of variables, and guys who do International Relations absolutely never have time to wonder what causes adultery. And Sides, like Douthat and Yglesias, is right to be shocked at the levels of support for extramarital sex--it is striking the first time you plop these into Stata to see that your parents' or grandparents' generation enjoyed a bit on the side.

Sides observes that more-educated Americans have gotten less accepting of adultery, and speculates that the availability of divorce has something to do with it. Yglesias notes that an alternative theory is that female empowerment has made women less reliant on breadwinners, and so the "marriage market" may have allowed them to find more suitable mates and enforce better behavior by holding out an exit option.

I think these are both plausible theories worth investigating. But I want to add some data and some thoughts to this debate. What follows uses only descriptive statistics (for now), so no interpretation is needed, just some careful thought. But I want to drive down one main point: Adultery used to be at least somewhat popular, but everyone hates adultery more than they used to, and this shift has affected practically all subgroups over the past forty years.

First, let's take a look at some additional data. The two charts below show shifts in opposition to adultery by sex and by race over the period 1972 to 2010.

First, a couple of notes. I follow Sides in defining opposition to adultery (and, yes,  I am using the shorter and judgmental term) by using the GSS question XMARSEX. (By the way, this is how we refer to GSS variables at my department--"XMARSEX," "PORNLAW", "HOMOSEX", etc. Way cooler than standard variable names like "V16".) In this case, I am conservative: Opposition to adultery includes only those who say adultery is always wrong.

Second, we should be aware that the GSS responses constrain our ability to answer these questions. What we want to know is under which circumstances people believe adultery is acceptable, but we merely know if they think it is "almost always" or "sometimes" wrong, or "not wrong at all." It is possible that the categories we're measuring have changed--that the person who thought in 1975 that extramarital sex was almost always wrong would believe that given today's divorce laws that it is now simply wrong to engage in affairs. There are strategies to cope with challenges such as these, but I'm not going to get into them now.

Third, we should always be aware that America has changed a lot in the past 40 years. In 1972, only 11 percent of respondents had a college degree; in 2010, 29 percent of respondents did. Similarly, in 1972, about 84 percent of respondents were white; in 2010, only about 76 percent of respondents were. (That's one reason why I just use "White" and "Black" as categories in the race chart--there aren't enough observations to support finer-grained categories across such a long time period.)

Getting back to the charts with these caveats in mind, though, we can see that the same picture that John held out is broadly true: even groups (like men) that used to be favorable to adultery are no longer supporters. The same pattern can be seen by looking at religious affiliation, which I present in two ways. The first looks at Protestant versus Catholic attitudes and the second at all respondents who view themselves as religious versus those who have no religious preference (e.g., atheists and agnostics). (Again, data limitations prevent me from displaying anything more fine-grained.)

Here we begin to see an interesting pattern. The shift in societal mores has affected even atheists and agnostics, contrary to what we might expect if we get all of our news from Glenn Beck. Secondly, although nonreligious respondents are more tolerant of deviations from marital fidelity, the gap is narrowing quickly; nonreligious respondents are now almost as willing to condemn adultery as Catholic respondents were in 1972.

Just for fun, I also looked at a partisan breakdown.

Although there is a widening split between the parties on this issue (and others), nevertheless Democrats and Republicans alike have grown less tolerant of adultery, at least at a mass level.

Given the relationship of adultery to marriage (long recognized by playwrights among others), we might want to investigate whether those who are married have different ideas than the population as a whole. A plot of opposition to adultery by marital status reveals a surprising pattern. In this case, we see that although married respondents have always been intolerant of adultery, divorced/separated respondents and never-married respondents have quickly caught up.

Note that fewer than half of single respondents in 1972 thought extramarital sex was "always wrong," which explains Mad Men. Very interestingly, in the early 1970s divorced respondents were fairly accepting of extramarital sex, but over the past few years their attitudes have converged on those of married respondents a generation ago. (One wonders if there isn't a natural ceiling to how strongly divorced respondents will condemn adultery, since some of them, at least, are presumably divorced because of an affair.)

Finally, I looked at whether levels of workforce participation by women have tracked with changes in perceptions on adultery. The first chart takes women who are working either full or part-time and compares their attitudes with women who are not (e.g., laid off, never working, retired, and so forth).

Here, we can see that there is support for a modified version of the Yglesias hypothesis. If the effect of women getting jobs is to make them more likely to demand marriage equality and fidelity, than that effect is recent. In the 1970s and 1980s, women who worked approved of adultery at nearly the same rate as men.

 However, there does seem to be some support for the idea that male attitudes have changed. The chart immediately above compares the attitudes of men whose wives work full- or part-time with those of men who are unmarried or whose wives do not work. Whereas there was practically no difference between those two groups throughout the 1970s or even the George H.W. Bush administration, a wide gap opened up during the Clinton-Bush administrations. (It remains to be seen whether the steep decline in 2010 is a blip.) This is consistent with Yglesias' (girlfriend's) hypothesis: male attitudes have shifted faster and more consistently than women's.

Finally, I want to point out that the GSS is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. This is what federal support of social science underwrites. It's critical to have these data in uninterrupted time-series, and it's essential that guys like Tom Coburn not be allowed to take away funding for such projects.

Number One for 13 July 2011

There's only millions that lose their jobs and homes and sometimes accents / There's only millions that die in their bloody wars, it's all right

• I like reading Roger Ebert anyhow, even though I normally disagree with him, but this was a blast from the past--both the references to Royko, the titan of columnists in the Midwest, and to James Hoge, who was also once my boss. [Roger Ebert]
  
• The CIA's using vaccination drives as a front for finding bin Laden has led me to revisit my rejection of the Marglins' view of vaccinations as a tool of imperialism, both epidemological and epistemological. [Kevin Drum]
  
• If Michele Bachmann, then this is the attitude that her Secretary of Education will bring to the post. [Penny Arcade]
  
• The world needs Bayesians to interpret frequentist correlations: "the distribution of systematic errors has much longer tails than the distribution of random errors, so the larger the estimated effect, the more likely it is to be a mistake" [Gelman blog]
  
• Regular readers of Perspectives on Politics are wildly overrepresented on this blog, but if you aren't among those four or five hundred people, you should definitely read how Americans don't believe government programs help them even though government programs essentially protect, nurture, and shelter them from cradle to grave. [Thought News]
  

"Ping Pong," Stereolab

What do professors do?

The question, from the Hon. Mr. (Matthew) Cameron [Yglesias blog understudy]: How can we raise the teaching productivity of the university?

The answer: The quickest route is to sacrifice research.

I think that there's a widespread misunderstanding of what professors actually do and what universities are actually for. Teaching is secondary. This is not true by biomass--the bulk of tertiary education institution are, indeed, devoted by teaching--but in terms of societal value research is the primary goal and justification of the academic enterprise.

Let's unpack the fallacy. Cameron argues a point that a lot of people find intuitively appealing: Universities are soooooo inefficient, because they use large in-person lecture courses to teach! We should just put those online and use the savings to drive down tuition costs to help the Struggling Middle Class and make college more accessible for the Honest Working Classes. (I think all of this is important, so I'm not mocking the SMC and the HWC themselves, but rather pundits'--often Ivy alumni who frankly don't know many authentic SMC and HWC members--invocation of these mythical creatures.)

Consider how Cameron phrases the difficulties:

Universities have little reason to cut costs because their reputations directly benefit from higher per student academic spending. So even if a school achieves cost savings without sacrificing quality – say, by replacing large, intro-level lectures with online courses – it will be regarded as less prestigious by many ranking methodologies. ... inally, university faculty view online technology as a threat to their role at the heart of the higher education system. This was evident during an exchange between George Mason University Prof. Tyler Cowen and Stanford University Prof. Tim Bresnahan at yesterday’s conference. When Cowen raised the possibility of universities employing fewer professors once online courses are widespread, Bresnahan responded defensively by asserting that he does more than just teach.

Cameron then lays out what he sees faculty as doing:

Obviously, Bresnahan has a point – the specialized expertise and personalized guidance that professors can convey to students in higher-level college courses truly is indispensible. For entry-level lectures with hundreds of students, however, faculty members often don’t do much more than teach. They don’t grade papers, they don’t meet their students and they aren’t able to delve into the finer details of the subjects they teach. These classes aren’t just a waste of students’ money, however; they’re also a drain on professors’ time. If they were freed from their obligation to teach such classes, professors would be able to devote more effort toward their niche in the higher education system – stimulating students’ intellectual curiosity through personal interactions and engaging learning experiences.

Here we see the thinking behind the critique of the large lecture course from the point of view of those whose only engagement with academia has been as a student:

• Professors are primarily teachers;
  
• teaching is best carried out in face-to-face interactions;
  
• large lecture courses make it hard for professors to have face time with students;
  
• ergo, large lecture courses are a waste of time.
  

There is a corollary argument for replacing these courses with online courses:

• The Internet is cheap, and allows for on-demand scheduling;
  
• Students from the HWCs and SMCs are motivated and disciplined;
  
• Online courses suffer from all of the disadvantages of large lecture courses (no face time, no instructor engagement, etc) but at least they are cheaper to provide;
  
• Universities will pass on all cost savings from eliminating large lecture courses to students;
  
• Universities will be unharmed by losing those tuition dollars;
  
• ergo, let's move large lecture courses online.
  

These arguments collapse at several points because their assumptions are valid. The argument for online courses is staggeringly weak. In the first place, the success of the University of Phoenix belies pundit optimism about distance education. Students in online courses have higher drop-out rates than their in-person equivalents, and universities have no reason to pass on cost savings to students. Indeed, if universities did have a reason to do so, then the adjunctification of higher ed would have been accompanied by plummeting tuition costs. But I am less interested in those reasons than in the wildly naive view about what it is professors do and how that conditions this debate. When my non-grad school friends and my family ask what I plan to do after finishing my doctorate, they invariably ask if I plan to teach. I invariably respond that I would, in fact, very much like to be a professor. But I never use the verb "teach" in describing that position.

I love teaching. I think I am good at it. I work very hard at doing well at it. But given a choice between being a mediocre teacher and a great researcher, or a great teacher and a mediocre researcher, I would take the former every time. Every time. Because if I just wanted to teach, there are many more lucrative and less demanding ways to do so--most of them involving majoring in education as an undergraduate and getting a better-paying job in a nice suburban school system or a good private school. (Yes, the BLS shows that political science "teachers" earn more than secondary school teachers, but that does not account for wages foregone--which can be substantial if you take five or six years to finish your degree--nor the survivor bias for university salaries: all of the washouts have already washed out of that pool, because for university instructors tenure is a privilege, not an entitlement.)

I don't think that the choice is that stark. And I think that, frankly, teaching is not really as hard as it seems. Yes, being the bestest teacher in the whole wide world is very tough, but that is to say that giving Steve Jobs-level presentations is incredibly more demanding than giving a very good presentation. Acquiring a relatively high level of competence seems to be more a matter of discipline and minimal training than of massive investment (certainly less than, say, learning game theory). (Veteran professors are welcome to disabuse me of my naivete.)

Yet that is almost irrelevant. Granted that universities--all of them, even Harvard--need some faculty to work hard at teaching, the real value-added from universities does not come from teaching. It can't, by definition. Both the best and the worst pedagogue in the world alike are limited by how good their subject matter is. There can be no calculus teachers without calculus, no physics teachers without physics, no political science teachers without political science research. Who cares how well we are teaching if what we are teaching is wrong?

And, by definition, only research can be progressive and expand our capabilities and understanding. But the value of humanity's understanding of a subject is bounded by the most perceptive, not the mean. When the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington was asked how many people understood his theory of the expanding universe, he thought for a moment before replying, "Perhaps seven." Professors are often criticized or mocked because their research is so obscure, but it is precisely that obscurity which often leads to breakthroughs with startlingly practical applications.

This is at the heart of Professor Bresnahan's response to Cowen that he does more than just teach, and it is why Cameron has so badly misunderstood what the professoriate does. It is not a question of "the specialized expertise and personalized guidance that professors can convey to students in higher-level college courses." It is the fact that that expertise did not spring forth fully-formed from Zeus' head. Rather, it was hard-won, mostly by professors who were probably notoriously bad teachers.

And that is why weakening the edifice of the university by forcing its scholars to become pedagogues first and researchers second, if at all, is so frightening. Research will continue, with or without the university. But research outside of academia is proprietary and narrow, and whole disciplines--especially the social sciences--will vanish or become so transformed as to be unrecognizable. (Think of the niche field of "retail anthropology.") Universities exist to provide public goods, and piecemeal "reforms" such as blindly sacrificing large lecture courses and the cross-subsidization they provide both to research and to those much-ballyhooed higher level courses will profoundly alter the production and transmission of knowledge.

Number One for 11 July 2011

The less I say the more my work gets done:

• Big changes in little Chinatown [Washington Post]
  
• Barkin and King et al are good beach reading for political scientists, but let me also suggest The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations for its critical standpoint toward mixed-method work and The Diffusion of Military Power. [The Quantitative Peace]
  
• New advances in monetizing reruns: How I Met Your Mother eps tout new flicks [Entertainment Weekly]
  
• The brothers are generous to Blue Moon, stingy to Three Philosophers [Beer Advocate]
  

Elton John, "Philadelphia Freedom," a song for which I have a totally inexplicable fondness:

What is an academic poseur?

The question, from a backbencher: You've laid out the case for bringing back the insult poseur. Are there poseurs in academia?

The answer: Are there poseurs in academia? Are there animals in the zoo?

A poseur wants you to think that he's genuine when he's a fake, and knows it. Consequently, an academic poseur wants you to think he's a genuine scholar when he's just faking it.

Paul Ryan is a policy wonk poseur.

I think that it should be self-evident that this is a common type, not only among graduate students but faculty -- even quite senior faculty.

The distinction between knowingly faking something and just not being good at something is critical. It's the personality version of plagiarism: wanting the benefits of expertise without the hard work of developing it. Empirically, however, the poseur is even worse at his job than the plagiarist is at his. The plagiarist copies expertise, but the poseur may not quite know whose expertise to copy.

How can you tell the difference? The biggest difference is that the poseur wants you to think he understands, say, deconstructionism or maximum likelihood estimation. And he'll even know many of the keywords, and he'll do a lot of the low-cost things that you'd do if you were a serious student of the subject. (In the quant methods version, this would be signing up for the Gary King twitter feed; I don't know what it would be for the po-mo stuff, but let's say that it's wearing only black.) And he may even ask questions--"How are you handling endogeneity?", "Did you try robust standard errors?"--that are very similar to the ones that someone who really knows his stuff would ask.

But on close interrogation, you'll note that the questions are always the same, and that his discussions of the subject always hinge on lore, not logic. (All academic fields have rich traditions of lore, which is the oral culture of the discipline. Lore reflects the actual practice of the bulk of researchers working in a field. Typically, lore is to the discipline's formal methodology as the religion of the faithful is to the theology of the clergy.) And that lore itself may be outdated: anyone who claims to like methods but has a preoccupation with R-squared, for instance, probably doesn't understand what R-squared actually means, and certainly hasn't done the very basic reading on the subject of interpreting linear regression.

There will be other signs: interpreting logit regression results without understanding that MLE coefficients don't represent a constant marginal result is a trivial matter, but a common one. Another will be recommending the newest gee-whiz method in a case where it's not really appropriate--but it will impress the senior faculty around the table, who themselves have never heard of the new method and are sure to think that anyone who has is a frood who really knows where his towel is.

By now, you may be wondering if you are a poseur. It's possible. I have been a poseur; I have denied my poseurness; I have overcome it. And the secret to overcoming it is the essence of Socratic wisdom--admitting that you know nothing--leavened with a bit of Buddhist humility (that is, letting go of your attachments to impressing others). But if you believe that there is a royal road to understanding, then you should know that you are a poseur.

Number One for 8 July 2011

• The best paragraph I read yesterday:

  This is why I got into the newspaper business, to be able to write like this and get paid for it. This is what newspapers used to do — some of them, anyway. We would publish pieces like this on a Sunday, and no one would ask, as they would in later years, “But what’s the utility here? Can we include a sidebar on the sperm bank’s hours and rates? This seems awfully long. Are we being self-indulgent here? I mean, really, who cares?”

  [Nancy Nall]
  
• Courtesy of the Hon. ZW: Eric Mazur on how to teach without lecturing
  
• How to respond to criticism [Duck of Minerva]
  
• Is partisan polarization a consequence of U.S. relative economic decline? [Matthew Yglesias]
  

"Crepuscolo Sul Mare", Piero Umiliani