If you decide you’re only going to cover the one percent of those events that feature outlier events, then you present the public with a very distorted view of things. And to take a bit of a self-critical look at things, this dynamic wasn’t helped by the rise of a left-wing mass media (blogs, Rachel Maddow, etc.) that was more interested in poking fun at the nuttiest voices on the right than in trying to amplify the concerns of pro-reform voters.

Democracy in America has a some interesting thoughts on the issue. According to DiA it basically comes down to three issues: time (the zero-sum nature of news is such that if extremely ideological protesters are getting coverage, the calm, reasoned town hall meetings likely are not), tone (no one likes to feel like they are being mocked by an effete urban liberal), and market dynamics that prioritize extreme viewpoints rather than moderate issues based policy discussions.

I think those are all legitimate points as to why the sensationalism took root so quickly and strongly. The point that’s missing, that Yglesias doesn’t really touch on, is what would a better response have been. It seems to me that the two most common responses to distortions or one’s views, or out and out lies, are to either mock it (“look how unhinged Sarah Palin is…”) or ignore it (“of course there are no death panels in health care reform, no one would believe that…”), and ultimately neither are particularly constructive of effective.

Ignoring misinformation is an obvious loser. No matter how outlandish the distortions coming from the other side are, they need to be addressed. One simply cannot assume that people will read a bill, call their congressman, educate themselves online, etc. Assuming civic engagement is how people lose elections and get their agenda marginalized. You have to go out into the field and educate people and convince them to care and pay attention.

Snark is a more tempting response, but ultimately a more harmful and counterproductive one. Perhaps on some level it’s instictive to write off the lunatic fringe of the other side (to be clear, both sides have them). But a snarky, poke fun, look at how silly republicans are, response is one that’s inherently aimed at people that already agree with you. The fundamental flaw with satire as a response is that it doesn’t do anything to combat the actual misinformation. It takes as a given that people already know that what was said was a lie and that we can all just have a laugh about it and move on. But we can’t, if we could then we wouldn’t still be talking about death panels and no matter what happens with healthcare reform we’ll talk about how Sarah Palin almost de-railed it 5 and 10 years from now.

The point I’m trying to make is one that I’ve been kicking around in my head for a little bit lately. It does no good to mock the other side and attempt to undermine their arguments with humor. All it does is betray a weakness in your own arguments or a lack of conviction necessary to defend them. It’s all well and good to crack a joke at the oppositions expense from time to time, but if that’s all you do, which seems to be the case for plenty of liberals and conservatives, then you deserve to lose.

-Robert F. Kennedy, Day of Affirmation Address at Cape Town University, 6 June 1966

This is very silly. Look, just on a basic level, the Secret Service’s capacities aren’t infinite: protecting the president is hard enough in normal circumstances; throw in the job of making sure gun-toting protestors don’t have a sight line on the president, and the agents’ jobs become that much more difficult.

This is a deeply dangerous idea. I strongly disagree with the logic of the 2nd amendment and I would like to see it overturned (obviously not a possibility) or failing that, severely curtailed (still not much of a possibility). But arguing that a constitutional right should be suspended if it causes inconvenience is self-evidently stupid, and I imagine Zengerle realized this pretty shortly after writing the post. Will Wilkinson makes the same point and adds in some speculation as to whether politicians are overprotected to begin with, linking to this paper and noting:

The challenge that Frey poses to Zengerle is this: Even if it could be shown that citizens legally open-carrying firearms significantly increase the probability of an assassination attempt (I am skeptical), it might not be worth the cost to add resources to increase presidential protection. Indeed, Frey finds that politicians are already overprotected. So the presence of citizens with guns may do nothing more than slightly reduce the extent of overprotection.

The main point of the paper is that the costs of assassination differ based on whether they’re assess from a private or public perspective. It seems to me that this point toes the line of so-trivial-as-to-be-taken-as-given. However, I wonder if the costs to the public are as low as Frey claims. He says:

The social cost of political assassination is much lower as politicians are replaceable. If one is killed, there are normally many others who can substitute for him or her.

True enough. This is exactly why we have a political line of succession, and failing that, there are always ambitious people waiting in the wings for their opportunity to take power. Still, I wonder if Frey hasn’t underestimated the actual costs of this “substitution” of one politician for another. The chaos and uncertainty that accompanies political assassination almost certainly has greater costs than simply finding a replacement politician. Besides the obvious lost productivity that would result nation-wide from people stopping work to try and find out exactly what had been going on, government activity is severely curtailed and the normal act of governing is pushed to the back burner (although I imagine Wilkinson would fine that less objectionable given his libertarian inclinations).

Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview.

On growing Craigslist to new cities and eating away at newspaper revenues:

Sometimes a new site grows very slowly for a long time. But eventually listings hit a certain volume, after which the site becomes so familiar and essential that it is more or less taken for granted by everybody except the distressed publishers of local newspapers. Revenue from newspaper classified ads is off nearly 50 percent in the past decade, a drop that comes to almost $10 billion. Only a fraction of this loss is because of Newmark’s company, but as the largest online classified site, craigslist is easy to blame.

One wonders what Milton Friedman would have to say about all this, although not for long once you read things like this:

What kind of company declares itself uninterested in maximizing profit? “Companies looking to maximize revenue need to throw as many revenue-generating opportunities at users as they will tolerate,” Buckmaster says. “We have absolutely no interest in doing that, which I think has been instrumental to the success of craigslist.”

I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this. The whole enterprise and organizational structure and mission of Craigslist remains extremely opaque to me. But having read this article I’m reminded of a point that Matt Yglesias has brought up from time to time. It’s been a while since he posted on it and I don’t remember it well enough to go back and find it, otherwise I’d include a link. The thrust of his point though was that the internet age has seen hugely valuable enterprises being created. It’s just that these enterprises aren’t realizing value in a way that shows up in the GDP. Yglesias made the point in relation to blogging, an activity that creates a good that should be of substantial value except that it’s being given away. The same issue is discussed in Free. I wonder just what the implications for economic growth of all this are.

It seems like Craigslist is simultaneously performing a service of incredible value, it’s market share and near total monopoly of certain areas of classified ads is remarkable, yet it isn’t generating much value in an economic sense of a corporation. It’s revenues are high as the article notes, but I think it’s pretty obvious that they could be substantially higher. As a marketplace for co-ordinating real-estate, employment, bartering, etc. it’s plays an enormous role in reducing costs of co-ordination. I wonder if those benefits outweigh the potential benefit of just monetizing the entire enterprise.

Matt Yglesias has a fairly reasonable response, noting that:

Corporate executives have a lot of social and political power in the United States, in a way that goes above and beyond the social and political power that stems directly from their wealth. . . One could easily imagine a world in which CEOs were reluctant to play the role of freelance political pundit out of fear of alienating their customer base. And it seems to me that that might very well be a nice world to live in.

Generally speaking, I am indifferent to what John Mackey thinks of healthcare reform, but I care very much how John Mackey behaves when it comes to providing healthcare reform to his employees. A great number of CEOs have asinine political opionions, that they have the means to express them is an unfortunate state of affairs, but poorly thought out opinions are a great deal less effective at riling me up as poorly thought out actions. As it happens, Whole Foods has an admirably democratic stance towards employee healthcare plans.

Matt Steinglass weighs in strongly in favor of CEOs respecting the political inclinations of their customers. He cites Rockefeller and the unions in the early 1990s, Henry Ford’s support of anti-semitism in the 1930s, and one could certainly include Coca-Cola’s involvement in Latin America, and a myriad of corporation’s who did business in South Africa during apartheid. The important theme running through all these examples is that they deal with actions taken not opinions voiced. Rockefeller’s opposition to unions was coupled with gross mistreatment of his workers. Corporate involvement in South Africa helped perpetuate an unjust regime based on outright racism.

The real test of whether a company is worth boycotting is far less in the opinions of it’s CEO as in the actions that that corporation takes. Radley Balko makes this point forcefully:

The reason the boycott is moronic is that you’re punishing a company that does everything the left thinks a company should do in just about every other area (save for a few, noted below) solely because its CEO expressed opinions about health care that you don’t like.

This strikes me as a classic example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. Being embroiled in a healthcare debate at the moment, that phrase has been beaten into the ground, but it holds here. Whole Foods is by all accounts an exceedingly responsible corporation that provides employee benefits far above the industry standard. On top of that it provides organic, responsibly produced food products at a price that, while expensive, is less than it would be without a company like Whole Foods creating economies of scale. Do people supporting a boycott really think that the world would be a better place if we were to take the megaphone away from John Mackey if it means punishing a corporation that seems to do quite a bit more good than harm?

Having become economically aware during this most recent financial crisis, I didn’t realize the people have been questioning the rational market hypothesis for quite so long. The discussion of the stock market crash in 1987 was fascinating in that so much of Fox’s description of the circumstances and theoretical questions behind it rang so true for the current round of economic unease. The biggest difference is that we seem to have learned no lessons from that crash and simultaneously gotten much better at tying disparate parts of financial markets together and thus creating a wider web of systemic risk.

It speaks to the power of the rational markets hypothesis and I think that that power comes primarily from it’s simplicity and elegance. The rational market hypothesis is so easily explained and understood that it’s no wonder that it became as widely accepted as it did. And every time it, or any other theory, get’s explained to someone new, a level of nuance is inevitably lost. Instead of learning that markets incorporate all available information and describe the best possible approximation of price, except for the exceptional cases when they don’t, say in the case of a housing market bubble. We learn that markets incorporate all available information and that their price estimates are as perfect as possible.

It’s no wonder that the rational market hypothesis went unchallenged for so long. There’s no similarly simple and powerful alternative waiting to fill the gap. Behavioral economics, like that done by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, doesn’t provide a general theoretical framework, it pokes holes and points out inconsistencies. That’s not the stuff of grand theory, it’s the stuff of inconvenient reality that so often brings theory back to earth.

Herbert has one of the most powerful megaphones in the world with which to move elite opinion—that of policymakers, journalists, entertainers, businesspeople, and the millions of middle-class readers of the New York Times—and yet he doesn’t move it. Twice a week, Herbert yells at them for their indifference. Twice a week, they slam the door and run out for a joyride with badboy David Brooks.

It’s a good point, you don’t hear people talking about Herbert editorials vey often, or at least I don’t in the blogs I read and the people I tend to hang around with. It’s even more surprising since I think that I have a fairly liberal social circle and tend to read blogs that are sympathetic to Herbert’s views. Frank references some interesting research about why this might be the case:

In the 1960s, the economist Thomas Schelling performed research demonstrating that people are more likely to be moved by single victims than by statistics. In 2005, the psychologists Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic found the limits of human compassion to be even more irrational and constrained. In their study, students at a university in Pennsylvania were paid five dollars to complete questionnaires on technology. Enclosed with the questionnaire was a seemingly unrelated letter soliciting donations to a hunger relief organization in Africa.

The study’s first conclusion was what the researchers had expected: people are more compassionate when they are told about a specific victim. When respondents were asked to donate money to help feed a seven-year-old African girl named Rokia, they contributed more than twice what they did when just confronted with general statistics on hunger.

This is depressing to read. One of the things that frustrates me most is the way that people don’t seem to humanize statistics, whether they don’t want to or they’re not able to (and Frank suggests that we just may not be very good at it). It’s fundamentally difficult, and probably impossible for the human mind to wrap itself around a number like 24 million which is the number of people that died in the USSR during World War Two. At a certain point large numbers simply stop having any meaning, it’s the reason that the difference between 1 billion and 1 trillion in stimulus dollars doesn’t seem to matter that much. Eventually our minds stop being able to percieve just how different those two numbers are.

This Gallup map (via Andrew Sullivan) shows that, despite frequent claims to the contrary, America is a predominantly blue and democratic nation. One wonders then when the media will begin to treat the national sentiment as such. This strikes me as one of the flaws with the mainstream media doctrine of equal air time for differing opinions. I strongly support airing controversial and conflicting view points, but they need to be put into context and I think that this is one thing that the media does a particularly poor job of doing. Allowing Republicans to come on air and state their case against healthcare reform is an essential element of a functioning debate on public issues, but it’s important to remember that their case runs contrary to the general sentiment of the country.

I would really like to see this kind of policy implemented in other states (perhaps ones that aren’t imbued with the strong Mormon work ethic) to see if it would work and what the effects might be. I’m a big fan of using states as breeding grounds for creative public policy, it’s something that I’d like to see a lot more of.

Has a historical figure as radical as Jesus Christ ever existed? Did a political revolution ever remake the world as thoroughly as America’s did?

He brings in Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution and approval of the American Revolution and wonders if current conservatives have the ability to make similar distinctions. This strikes me as an excellent and essential point to understanding conservatism. Conservatism, in it’s ideal form, is not a knee jerk opposition to change, it is a deep skepticism of change. The difference is the difference between Burke’s reasoned and cautious conservatism, skeptical of change but recognizing that incremental changes are vastly preferable to social upheaval, and the current conservative movement that has defined itself not through doubt but opposition. The ideal conservative isn’t a child who says “No” over and over and over again until his parents give in and he gets his way, it’s the child who asks “Why?” and doesn’t stop asking why until he’s satisfied. That child holds his parents accountable, although in a thoroughly unintentional manner, and makes them realize how little they might actually now.