Month: November 2010

Sam Wang makes his predictions:

[A] Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-controlled Senate are essentially certain. Here’s why.

Based on the easily inspected database at Pollster.com, it is possible to assign a binary outcome in each of 30 swing districts based on who’s ahead. This gives a split of 18R-12D. Added to the noncompetitive races which give 212R-193D, the total is House 230R-205D.

For the Senate, the number of races is small enough that it’s necessary to be probabilistic, at least in part. Democrats will control at least 49 seats (47 Dems + Lieberman-CT + Sanders-VT). Of the five borderline races (WA, NV, CO, IL, and WV), Democrats lead in two (WA, WV), a Republican leads in one (NV), and two are within 1 percentage point (CO, IL). Splitting the last two gives Senate 52D-48D. Note that I am not making specific predictions on these five races – my meta-analytic goal is to estimate the total number of seats, not individual outcomes.

Nate Silver gives five reasons why the GOP might outperform expectations:

I’ve tried to stress that there is a great deal of uncertainty in the outcome. Not necessarily uncertainty in individual races: people probably overestimate that. But uncertainty, rather, in where the House and the Senate will finish over all. People probably underestimate how strongly polling and forecasting errors are correlated from district to district. If Republicans tend to overperform expectations in some races, they will probably also overperform in many, most, or maybe even almost all races. The same holds true for Democrats. (The most recent time something like this occurred was 1998, when polls underestimated the standing of Democrats by 4-5 points nationwide and in almost all individual races.)

Evan Osnos encapsulates the Chinese reaction to the election and the tea party:

Take “The Chinese Professor,” the political ad produced for the Citizens Against Government Waste, that depicts a Chinese lecturer, twenty years in the future, cackling over the red-white-and-blue and crowing, “now they work for us.” This might seem like prime red meat for China’s “angry youth,”—and, indeed, it has attracted its share of predictable comments in that spirit—“This sounds great! It’s going to be the reality,” as one Chinese commentator put it, on the video site Tudou. But after six days, in which the video has attracted 548,271 hits and four pages of comments, most Chinese viewers seem not to have the remotest idea that this ad is related to the election. (They have a point.) They are interpreting it as either 1) anti-Chinese propaganda put out by the U.S. government; 2) evidence that Americans are really scared of China’s rising power; 3) a nationalist video made by people who believe in the future of China.

Douthat is puzzled by Democratic plans for immigration reform:

In the long term, certainly, the slow-but-steady growth of the Latino vote offers a big opportunity for the Democrats. (And in the long term, the Republican Party’s growing reputation as the party of, well, advertisements like these bodes ill for its ability to offer a demographically-inclusive conservatism.) But the Obama White House needs to play for 2012, not 2028, and in 2012 there’s little reason to think that the gains from mobilizing Hispanics around an (almost certainly futile) immigration reform push will count for all that much.

The evidence that Hispanic Americans are single-issue voters obsessed with the border debate has never been all that strong (look at the poll accompanying this Times story, and you’ll see that immigration ranks below jobs, education, health care and the deficit on the list of Hispanic priorities), and the evidence that they’re the country’s crucial swing constituency is likewise relatively weak: In 2008, amid intense Democratic enthusiasm, the Latino share of the electorate was still only 9 percent, and as Andrew Gelman noted afterward it’s very difficult to argue that they were a particularly crucial component in Obama’s sweeping victory. Which suggests that if the White House wants to repeat that triumph in 2012, wooing back disaffected whites is going to be much more important than re-consolidating the Hispanic vote  — and it’s hard to see how a big effort on immigration reform helps them on this front, and very, very easy to see how it might hurt.

Ad from Alex Pareene's list of race-baiting campaign ads.

 

A list of world statistics updated in real-time. 

Social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn's new study (doc) explains the right ways to buy happiness. Big Questions online has highlights. One tip is to "buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones":

If we inevitably adapt to the greatest delights that money can buy, than it may be better to indulge in a variety of frequent, small pleasures—double lattes, uptown pedicures, and high thread-count socks—rather than pouring money into large purchases, such as sports cars, dream vacations, and front-row concert tickets. 

Fallows agrees with Krugman that it is going to be a nightmare: 

When a party is willing to hamstring the country's overall prospects, as "collateral damage" in its effort to weaken the other party, the results are bad for everybody. To choose one example, about which I have more to say in an upcoming magazine article: Everybody knows that "green tech" / "clean tech" businesses of many descriptions are going to be a future source of jobs, wealth, influence, and growth. The Chinese government, as we've read so often, is putting a lot of money behind them — and will keep doing so over the next decade. The U.S. government has started making such investments in the past couple of years — but these will surely become hostage to "divided government," since stopping them will be a way of "stopping Obama." And what will really be stopped is America's future share of such jobs, wealth, influence, and growth, since you can't develop these projects through short-term, stop-start spending. Sigh. Rather, Grrrrrr.

Virginia Postrel asks whether a flourishing economy depends on delusion. To answer it, she quotes  economic historian John V.C. Nye, who argued that "countries become economically stagnant when their business people become too mature and rational":

That’s what happened to Victorian Britain, [Nye] suggests, when it was surpassed by the United States and Germany. Britain had capable businessmen and good financial markets to support them. There’s no evidence that Victorian businessmen failed to invest wisely. The problem, argues Nye, is that they didn’t invest unwisely.

The odds of any given venture succeeding are, of course, low. But it’s rational to invest $1 million in a business that will fail nine out of ten times, as long as the tenth time will earn least $10 million. Nye is talking about irrational bets: investing $1 million on a one in 50 shot of $10 million. An entrepreneurial culture encourages those crazy bets as well, and a few startups get lucky. We should, Nye suggests, think of “the entrepreneur as the valiant, but overoptimistic investor rather than the heroic seer.”

Dayo Olopade reports on Google's attempt to capture the large internet market in Africa, and some of the many problems they face:

Take Gmail, for example. Globally, the service has trailed those provided by Yahoo! and Microsoft. Magdalinski suspects it's just too complicated for African modems. "Gmail is always loading with flashy chat and all this JavaScript," he says.* By contrast, "Yahoo! loads fast — it works on a shit modem in an Internet cafe."