Heads I win, tails you lose

It seems that John McCain took credit for the successful passage of the bailout earlier today, while speaking in Columbus, OH. He was a true leader who brought all parties together.
From Politico:

"I've never been afraid of stepping in to solve problems for the American people, and I'm not going to stop now...”

Obama, on the other hand, was supposedly too afraid to put country first:

“Sen. Obama took a very different approach to the crisis our country faced. At first he didn't want to get involved. Then he was monitoring the situation.” McCain, grinning, flashed a sarcastic thumbs up. “That's not leadership. That's watching from the sidelines,” he added to cheers and applause.

After the bill failed to pass in the House, McCain's campaign blamed Obama and the Democrats, even though two thirds of the Republicans voted "no":

“This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country.” — McCain-Palin senior policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin

So if the bill had passed, it would have been because John McCain is a terrific leader who put country first and brought everyone together. But since the bill failed it must be because Obama and Democrats were too partisan to put country first-- even though most Democrats voted for it, and most Republicans voted against it.

Hmm. In the words of David Letterman, "This doesn't smell right."

Our Happiest Age

Today I stumbled on to an interesting website displaying a graph that relates survey answers of believed or expected happiest age to age of the responder. The data were made available and above is a scatter plot with a best fit line and 95% prediction bounds.

While the R-square is low (0.1354) the positive relationship is very highly significant, as the 95% confidence interval for the slope of the fitted line is (0.3688, 0.5481), which obviously does not include 0.

This means that as people get older, their stated belief regarding the best year of their life increases. While this initially struck me as reflecting optimism, the fact that the slope is less than 1 means that at a certain point people begin to believe that their best year is behind them. This happens at age 27-28 on average. Earlier than that people think their best year is ahead of them.

I'm 28 years old now, so I guess I'm supposed to believe that this is the best year of my life. In truth, the data are so variable that 95% of the time I would believe that the best year of my life is somewhere between 2 and 53, which is a huge range.

While it's sad that we become less and less optimistic with age, the good news is that according to this fit line and prediction bounds, the time when one's current age creeps outside the 95% confidence intervals for their believed happiest age is 74. After that at least 95% of the time people think their best year is behind them.

This figure simply shows the mean and standard error of those responding. The overall average expected "best year" was age 31 (sem 0.55). The average age of those responding was 35 (sem 0.44).

As a final note, these data are not quite normally distributed (both in terms of age of responder, and in perceived best age), but are pretty close.

Government Bailouts

If the proposed $700 billion Wall Street bailout passes, we will have spent about 7% of our 2008 GDP on bailouts. Everyone is talking about this new bailout proposal, but with those already done the government will have spent over a $1 trillion on bailouts this year. This site has an interesting graph showing the various bailouts since 1970 (in 2008 dollars). It sounds like both Democrats and Republicans believe that some sort of intervention is necessary, although it is not yet clear to me whether the government's purchase of nearly worthless pieces of paper to "restore confidence" will prevent major economic collapse. It is also not yet clear to me how much time we have before a collapse is imminent, and for that matter, what the realistic effects of such a major recession will be. Many are comparing what is going on now to the Great Depression. Could we really see unemployment hit 25%? How difficult will it be for people to borrow money if there is no intervention?
I would really love to hear quantified predictions rather than simply that the economy is at serious risk (and that we need to do this as soon as possible), as Bush told us last night. I would also like to see what the cost of spending $700 billion (as well as the total $1.01 trillion) on bailouts will have on the value of our currency and other economic indicators.

So right now I think I have to be agnostic on the of issue bailouts. Even after reading newspaper articles and watching the news, it is still not clear to me what the relevant cost-benefit analysis looks like. I should also mention that in addition to impact estimates, I would like to see some sort of measure of the accuracy of these estimates based on either previous forecasts or a model of the uncertainty of these effects. After all, what suckers we will all be if we spend an additional $700 billion on bailouts and STILL have economic collapse along the added mess created by spending huge sums of tax dollars on it.

Minimum Wage

The U.S. federal minimum wage was raised for the first time in a while in 2007 to $5.85 and then in July, 2008 to $6.55. In 2009, it is scheduled to increase to $7.25. I recently downloaded minimum wage data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and graphed changes in the minimum wage over time. I also converted each year's value to Consumer Price Index-adjusted 2008 dollars. From this we see that the minimum wage was actually greatest (in purchasing power) in 1968 (over $10/hr in 2008 dollars), when the actual wage was raised to $1.60/hr. This goes to show the impact of inflation: approximately an order of magnitude reduction in dollar value since 1950.

Fun with maps

I've always loved this map, demonstrating the population density of the US. I downloaded this from the US Census website, which has a lot of interesting demographic maps.

This map really shows just how sparse much of the western US is (one dot = 7500 people). Playing with Photoshop's distort tool, I overlaid the next map onto this one.

This is Tornado Alley and "Dixie Alley" from NCDC
Many states have 25-30% obesity (BMI > 30) rates, with those in Tornado Alley and Dixie Alley leading the way.


And finally, an interesting US map showing the distribution of religious affiliation.

Not that there is any causal relationship between these data sets. It is fun to look through this stuff though.

Problems with Democracy

Chruchill famously said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried." One of the supposed benefits of democracy is the idea that by allowing all citizens to have their say, policies will better reflect the people's interests. This is intuitively true when we compare modern democratic republics to the autocracies of Europe in past centuries.
Nevertheless, when we examine the political process in modern America, several practical problems emerge related to the psychology of the people.

Voter Turnout
While in theory every individual has the right to vote overall turnout since 1964 has never been above 65% of the voting age population. Midterm congressional elections usually draw only about 35%. Therefore, election results do not necessarily reflect the people's interests as a whole.

Some would argue that individuals who choose not to vote had the opportunity to have their say, and therefore it is not the fault of democracy as a system. Others may suggest that refusing to vote is, in itself, making a political statement. While I concede both of these points to some degree, we currently do not know to what extent they are true. For example, the fact that election day is held on Tuesdays means that some individuals probably do not vote because of work or other obligations.

A friend of mine has been following the 2008 presidential election with great interest. He has a clear preference for one of the candidates, but when I asked him about it he told me that he is not going to vote. To him, and I think many people, voting is a hassle. "What's the value of a single vote?" one may ask. In the 2004 election one vote constituted 0.0000008% of the popular vote. To go to a polling place during a work day and potentially wait in line for hours to cast a single vote, seems like a waste of time. The problem is, millions of people may think this way. The 2000 final tally giving Bush a win in FL (and therefore, overall) was 537 votes (larger than the margin of counting error). In 2004, the election was decided by a difference of 118,000 votes in OH. I should mention that in OH, individuals in particular precincts had to wait in line for 4-10 hours (in the rain) to cast a single vote. While people are willing to wait in such lines for concerts and next-generation iPhones, I wonder how many people thought it was not worth their time for a single vote. My point is that while one person's vote has a miniscule impact, the fact that millions will use this fact to justify not voting could have an enormous impact. It is of relevance to both 2000 and 2004 that registered Democrats seem to have somewhat lower turnout than Republicans.

Incumbency
High congressional incumbency rates suggest a couple of points. One potential issue is name recognition and comfort with the familiar. This, in itself, is not necessarily bad. However, if elections are about voters getting their say to represent their interests, it is curious that they believe the best person for the job is already in office 80-95% of the time. An alternative interpretation is that most areas simply are lopsided in voter affiliation. Perhaps a district that is 60% republican will seldom vote for a democrat. Even if we took this to be true, it says something about the influence of voter party identification on the ability for incumbents to hold on to power. Thus, it would seem that identity rather than job performance could determine the outcome of many congressional elections. This might be a plausible explanation for why the congressional job approval rating is just over 20%, as most districts will undoubtedly reelect these individuals in November.

Manipulation of Public Perceptions
The most damning and perhaps obvious practical problem with a democratic system as it exists today in the US, is the role of propaganda. I'm using Webster's 3rd definition:
Propaganda: "ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause."

Setting aside the negative connotations of the term, propaganda is obviously the purpose of political campaigns. The content of propaganda can be true and useful for voters to make informed decisions. Propaganda can obviously also mislead. Think of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political advertisements this year. What is the content of those 30 second ads? Do we really learn more about candidates' policies? In the last week, McCain has put out ads stating that Obama is in favor of "comprehensive sex education for kindergarteners." Is this true? Well, no. But that does not matter to the McCain campaign as long as the ad is effective in raising Obama's negatives. The tactics do not need to be so direct either. Beginning with Tony Schwartz's "Daisy" cartoon, designed to play on the fears that Goldwater would have been trigger-happy with nuclear weapons, all presidential campaigns market their candidates to some degree as heros or champions and their opponents as incompetent or untrustworthy. In the 2008 campaign, such imagery has been perhaps more blatant and direct, but thematically no different.

Selling candidates as consumer goods (but with greater passion) degrades candidates, showing what is both necessary to be elected in the age of visual media, and the depths to which these candidates will sink for a win. In the past 50-60 years advertisers have learned a great deal about what works. Simply stated, billions of dollars are spent on ads because they affect behavior. Period.

Many of us are annoyed to sit through commercials, but are not really angered by them. After all, it is up to us consumers to choose to purchase products in the end. We have free will, right? Well, if effective techniques are used to bend our perceptions, attitudes, and desires so that as a group we probabilistically behave in a particular way, our will is constrained.

Thus, autocratic rulers of the past controlled their subjects directly. It ultimately did not matter what the people wanted. Today, with elections, the power is given to the people to choose their leaders. Only, now, with effective campaigning, and "issue ads" the views and desires of the people are molded. I know this sounds quite dark. I would not go so far as to say we are entirely controlled by the ads on television. But if they were not a determining factor in election outcomes, why else would it be essential for candidates to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising?

Summary
So maybe Churchill was right. I can't think of a just system in which the governed have no say. However, the idiosyncrasies inherent in the psychology of the people, and the manipulation thereof, seems to hinder our ability to realize some of democracy's noble ideals.

Model results in pictures

Because the last post only gave the end results, I thought it might be a little more informative to see what percent of the time McCain or Obama won each state in the simulation. The picture here shows the percent of the time Obama won from 0-10% (Full Red) to 90-100% (Full blue).
This was based on the data from pollster.com. Ultimately, Obama won almost 90% of the time with these polling data.

2008 Presidential Election Predictions

There are a number of sites out there that run simulations based on polling data to predict the result of the presidential election if it were held right now. I think the best one is at www.fivethirtyeight.com. Before I knew about this, I started playing with the polling data myself. I found a curve presented by Charles Franklin, relating polling margin to win probability. For example, a candidate ahead in a pre-election poll 55% to 45% will win around 90% of the time. Based on his curve, which I approximate with a normal cdf, I ran a simulation of 10,000 "elections" based each on the polling data on realclearpolitics.com and pollster.com. I did this a few weeks ago and Obama had an overwhelming lead (90-97% win probability). Given the recent shifts in polling trends, I decided to run the analysis again.

Although the national data is trending slightly toward McCain since the republican convention, my model still predicts Obama wins 71% of the time (realclearpolitics.com) or 90% of the time (pollster.com).

This model is incredibly basic. It does not take into account national trends, and many of the state polls lag behind McCain's recent bounce. For these and other reasons, I think these simulations over-estimate Obama's probability if the election were held today. Fivethirtyeight uses a much more sophisticated model, and has each candidate winning about 50% of the time. It will be interesting to redo this analysis over the next 55 days.

As a caveat, this analysis is likely to only be accurate immediately prior to the election. I did run this simulation using the polling data of battleground states immediately prior to the 2004 election. This simulation gave Kerry a 22% probability of winning with an average number of electoral votes of 250. He actually received 251. So although this model is about as simple as it could be, it may be a decent predictor immediately prior to the election.

Inaugural Post

Welcome to dopamachine. My name is David Sturman, and I'm a medical student and neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. While I really love to think and talk about science, I thought that I would use this blog to post about a range of topics. I hope you enjoy.