The Enlightened Despot

Marc Ambinder comments on the latest turnout data:

The doubters were right: according to the Current Population Survery, overall turnout levels stayed roughly the same, relative to population increases, but the composition of the American electorate changed enough to give the appearance of a Democratic landslide, and that, as GWU’s Michael McDonald puts it, ” disparities in turnout rates among various demographic categories decreased between 2004 and 2008.”  As Mark Blumenthal points out, turnout among black voters increased by nearly 5% — bringing them to within a percentage point — relative to size — of white turnout. Young voter turnout increased by 2.1%.

Ambinder is just dead wrong here - these numbers suggest that the doubters were wrong. Or, rather, that they were right about the gross turnout numbers, but wrong about everything else. The people the doubters were doubting were not, after all, predicting a huge turnout surge amongst old, white Republicans. This data supports the theory, which already seemed likely in the immediate aftermath of election day, that Obama and his campaign had in fact mobilized a huge number of new or unreliable voters, but that this had been offset in the raw numbers by despondent Republicans staying home. High turnout is generally thought of as a good thing for Democrats because the young, the black, and the poor are the voters most likely to take a pass - high turnout is good news for Democrats only insofar as it is an indicator that these demographics will make up a greater percentage of the overall pool of voters. Stay-at-home Republicans made turnout a less useful indicator, but that doesn’t change the fact that the doubters were dead wrong about the phenomenon people were actually interested in.

Count me out of the consensus about how wonderful he is. My feeling has always been that he is very good at picking interesting things to write about, and then does a fairly poor job writing about them. Here’s an excerpt from the very beginning of the preface to Moneyball:

For more than a decade the people who run professional baseball have argued that the game was ceasing to be an athletic competition and becoming a financial one. The gap between rich and poor in baseball was far greater than in any other professional sport, and widening rapidly. At the opening of the 2002 season, the richest team, the New York Yankees, had a payroll of $126 million while the two poorest teams, the Oakland A’s and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had payrolls of less than a third of that, about $40 million. A decade before, the highest payroll team, the New York Mets, had spent about $44 million on baseball players and the lowest payroll team, the Cleveland Indians, a bit more than $8 million.

Now, I’m no statistician, but I’m pretty sure that 44 is more than five times 8, and that 5 is a larger number than 3. He asserts that “the gap between rich and poor in baseball was … widening rapidly”, then quotes a statistic that shows exactly the opposite. Now, his point may well be a good one, and I’m sure there are plenty of metrics that would have supported his case. But this is essentially a book about numbers, and in the first two pages he has already made a very primitive mathematical error.

And this is pretty much what I see in his writing on economics. I often suspect he is right, and he is always making interesting claims, but the details are always fuzzy, there to create the illusion he is proving something, when in fact he is just making dogmatic assertions and asking us to take it on faith.

People are making far too much of this from Jeremy Teigen:

On the Monday before Election Day, Timothy Noah at Slate asked “Why don’t war heroes win?” He looked at the past fifty years of head-to-head presidential match-ups and noted that John McCain’s then-likely loss put him in the company of George McGovern, Bob Dole, and John Kerry. Noah quotes David Greenberg, who attributes these losses to the “tinny ring” of “military values like duty and sacrifice” in contemporary society.

…

In general, veteran status has small effects that are not statistically distinguishable from 0. Democratic vets did better than their nonveteran peers in 2002, but did no better in 2006.

I’ve seen the same point made anecdotally recently: the last five presidential elections have been won by the candidate with the weaker military record. Fair enough, but the much more significant datum is that of the eight candidates involved in those five elections, six of them have military records. Veterans do not, of course, make up 75% of the general population, so they’re doing pretty well forthemselves there.

Teigen makes a similar observation himself:

Nevertheless, this does not seem to deter veterans from running for office and promoting their service during their campaign. Despite the allegedly “tinny ring” of military values, some candidates make their military service the key element of their campaign narrative (e.g., Craig Williams). To me, this behavior and the continued emergence of veteran candidacies says that our candidate selection mechanisms still value military service even if the general election yield is inconstant and small.

The implication is that the two parties are irrationally running tons of veterans. That is nonsense. If the parties are being rational about the value of a given candidate quality in their selection process, you should expect candidates with that quality to do roughly as well as the party’s candidates overall. If veterans were winning far more than non-veterans, one would ask “Why the hell aren’t you running more veterans? Slap a tie on any joker with a service record and get him out there!” Similarly, if they were doing much worse than average, it would be clear that parties were attaching too much value to military service. That they do just about as well as everyone else suggests that the parties are right about how much veteran status and worth. And based on how many veterans they run, the answer is that it is worth a lot.

Remember when John McCain wouldn’t shut-up about corporate tax rates in Ireland? Wasn’t that really bizarre? Well, guess who’s back, courtesy of Matt Yglesias and his buddies at ThinkProgress:

John McCain expended a lot of time on the trail slamming America’s corporate income tax and lauding Ireland as a superior model. And guess what? McCain was right — Ireland is a better model. Unfortunately, McCain’s actual plan wasn’t to make our corporate income tax more like Ireland’s. Instead, he wanted to leave the loophole-ridden mess as it stands and then cut rates.

…

Ireland raises more not less income from their corporate taxes. That’s because their lower rate is levied on a broader tax base, with many fewer loopholes.

I’m entirely with Matt on the underlying point: for any given amount of tax revenue you want to raise, it’s better to raise it via a lower rate that gets applied to all of the relevant income, rather than a higher one that lets a lot slip through various loopholes. But the comparison with Ireland is drivel. There are many ways in which ThinkProgress’s analysis oversimplifies the issue, but none of that matters as far as Yglesias’s point is concerned, because his own numbers don’t even come close to backing him up.

To begin with, it is an odd sort of gotcha to point out that Ireland raises more (’more‘, even) tax revenue than the US. McCain’s complaint was never that we were collecting too much money, but rather that taxes were too high. And it is flat out untrue that this is “because their lower rate is levied on a broader tax base, with many fewer loopholes”. According to the ThinkProgress article he is referencing, exemptions reduce the effective corporate tax rate in the US from 35% to 25.3%, still over twice as high as Ireland’s rate. How does Ireland end up raising more money from corporate taxes, as a percentage of GDP, than we do, despite having lower taxes? By having much higher corporate earnings as a percentage of GDP. And they do that, in part, by having absurdly low corporate taxes, attracting corporations from around Europe to use them as a tax haven. Which, after all, was exactly McCain’s point.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that he was right. There are more than two or three variables at work in an economy, and we shouldn’t be looking to Ireland as a model. Slashing taxes to attract Canadian and Mexican corporations is probably not the way to maximize tax revenue, though it might be fun to try, just to see if Krikorian and Steyn’s heads exploded. Still, either Matt doesn’t really understand the chart he’s looking at, or he’s indulging in a little intellectual dishonesty to take another shot at McCain.

Ah, Yglesias. Ah, humanity.