Anyone else excited for this?

Although I have to ask, what’s that part where Harry grabs Voldemort and jumps off some ledge into some pit? Clearly that’s not in the book. Though if I had to guess, I’d say it’s at the final Hogwarts fight, after Harry is supposedly dead and right after he takes the invisibility cloak off and reveals himself to Voldemort.

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The economic crisis only ended for the rich

As I’ve noted before, this economic crisis is worst for the poor and not too terrible for the rich.

Jon Chait properly notes that this may be much of the reason for the shift from job-creation to deficit reduction. For Washington, for Wall Street, for educated elites, for political donors — the economic crisis has ended. For millions on unemployment benefits, the economic crisis won’t get better.

This is part of why the rise in gas prices has been so captivating; the people for whom ends have just started to meet are suddenly pinched at the pump.

The following graph shows unemployment with respect to education level:

Unemployment vs Education through Sept 2010 (via Calculated Risk)

The twisted lens of our politicians means that they see the blue line, when they should be seeing the red line. Our nation now runs a serious risk of a long-term underclass — no diploma, no job, no job training or prospects, and an ever-smaller government safety net. It’s easy for us to sit back and admonish those people for not going to school, not getting a job, etc. But that smugness will not be able to stop the problems that an enormous underclass will create for America. Too bad no one in Washington can hear over the tinkling of champagne glasses from the Correspondents’ Dinner.

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Releasing the long-form will, in fact, serve a possible purpose

Stendhal thinks releasing the long-form birth certificate was a mistake. Clearly, it is offensive and bad precedent and there never should have been a need for it.

That being said, I was thinking about this news this morning. Was there a political advantage to doing it now? I’m assuming that the White House must have thought so, or else they wouldn’t have done it. After all, it’s been three years since birtherism began. Why now? Here are a few ideas:

(1) The White House had some internal polling information and didn’t like how well Trump and/or birtherism were playing right now.

(2) The White House honestly doesn’t want birtherism playing a big issue during the GOP primaries and the general election. They might think it will highlight too strongly his “otherness.”

But my favorite one is…

(3) Like Anna, Zane, and Stendhal all hint in the comments to Stendhal’s post, the White House suspects that birtherism won’t die with this, which will make it ALL THE MORE RIDICULOUS, ABSURD, AND OFFENSIVE to such voting groups as independents and non-racist assholes when the GOP candidates spend entire debates dragging Romney and Pawlentey and such down into the muck of birtherism.

It’s a gamble of course. Birtherism might mostly die down now. But if it still roars strong, and we still see majorities or pluralities of GOP voters clinging to it, and we still get candidates running for President who believe in it, then it will be so much worse for them now that the White House released it than it would have been if they could have held onto this canard.

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What possible purpose will this serve?

President Obama has released his long-form birth certificate.

Number of birthers this will appease: 0

News cycles that this will consume: A TON

Problems fixed by this: 0

Unfortunate precedents this sets: 1

President Obama, I hate to say it, but you’re doing it wrong. Appeasing the irrational person doesn’t make him or her more rational.

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Existentialist Star Wars

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Why was Amazon selling a textbook for $23,698,655.93?

Mike Eisen is a professor in my department, and he had a great catch the other day. He wanted to procure an out-of-print book on flies, and noticed that while there were many used copies available via Amazon, there were two vendors selling new copies for absurdly high prices. Read his whole post, as it is a great example of observation and deductive scientific reasoning. He noticed that one vendor would price their book at 98% the cost of the competitor, which is a strategy we can all understand. The curious part is that the other vendor would respond to the pricing by increasing theirs to 1.27x that of the first. Because 0.98*1.27 > 1, the prices were converging towards infinity.

But why would the second vendor do this? Eisen offers two hypotheses. One, the second vendor has a lot more reviews, and thus might be charging more because consumers might be willing to pay more to obtain a book through a vendor they consider more reliable. He finds a second possibility more likely: that the second vendor doesn’t actually possess the book. If someone were actually to purchase it from them, they would need to get it from another source, such as the first one, and thus the need to charge 127% their price, with that extra 27% being the profit they’d make. I can think of a third hypothesis. It’s possible that both vendors are owned by the same entity. If you only see one new book price, it can be tough to know if you’re getting a good deal or not, and you might be tempted to get a used copy instead. However, if a dummy second higher price were also listed (i.e. there is still only one new copy of the book in existence), you might now think that the first price is a deal after all. Like Stendhal says in his previous post, our concept or “saving” money now basically means “spending marginally less for a discretionary purchase.”

Also, this story underscores the weird possibilities that can arise from using automated algorithm-based pricing on large websites like Amazon. This is surely not the only time this has happened. On Reddit, someone saw a CD selling for $2.9 billion, and he actually bought it! Amazon responded by canceling the order, and following up with emails and phone calls to verify the matter. While these two examples might seem strange or even funny, it’s more alarming to think that similar automated pricing is probably largely contributing to our entire stock market and thus to the world economy.

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“Extreme Couponing” and the consumer pathology of “saving”

If you haven’t seen TLC’s “Extreme Couponing,” well, there’s not much to see — just families using multiple coupons and paying next-to-nothing for giant piles of groceries they will never use. Still, the show is doing quite well.

Yet, some TV commentators have noted the similarity between these couponers and “hoarders” (subject of their own terrible TLC reality show), who compulsively store items they don’t even need. The similarities are there: most couponers and hoarders begin their compulsive behaviors after some trauma (lost job in couponers’ case; death of loved one in hoarders’); couponers have giant neatly stacked piles of diapers for kids they don’t have, while hoarders have their useless crap in giant piles around their houses.

But more troubling to me is the idea that this show and others of its ilk are “shows for this economic time.” After all, the shows seem to emphasize frugality and thrift, and the featured families tend to be middle-class families caught in hard times. How much, though, are these families really “saving”? “Saving” used to mean actually taking money you have and not spending it. Somehow, American consumer culture has translated “savings” to mean “spending marginally less on a (usually discretionary) purchase.” The success of Groupon, Living Social, and similar online couponing companies have capitalized on this mentality. But if you weren’t going to buy 100 packs of diapers (or dinner at said restaurant on a Groupon) already, are you saving anything? “Saving” is just a synonym for “spending.”

With all the time that these couponers spend planning their attacks and poring through newspaper clippings (similar to Black Friday shoppers), they could be doing something else. Anything else. And all the other things they could be doing might bring them more marginal utility than 1000 toothpaste tubes for ten cents.

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“Reason cannot save us”

According to a new CBS/NYT poll, a plurality of Republican voters (47 percent) now believe that President Obama was not born in this country. That’s more than believed Obama was not born in this country during all the campaign rhetoric of 2008. This is absolutely nuts, and yet makes complete sense.

Robert McNamara noted that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, everyone was behaving rationally, and yet, two countries that didn’t want to go to war almost did anyways. Why can’t rationality be our salvation? Perhaps, rationality as we understand it is simply impossible to attain.

We thrive on the idea of rational debate as a prerequisite of functional democracy. Bruce Ackerman, among others, has pitched the idea of a Deliberation Day, in which people gather before Election Day to discuss issues in a rational sphere of community dialogue. The more fact-based, less hysterical, less animalistic platform always needs more rationality, but surveys such as the NYT poll seem to indicate that people are simply not in a rational frame of mind. With all the various stresses and problems in our lives, we don’t allocate the mental resources for political decisions or what country the President is born in, and instead, we go with whatever our available sources tell us (PDF).

It’s easy for Democrats to point at Republicans and marvel at the crazy, but we’re all flawed in similar ways. None of us behaves as rationally as we would like to believe. Even in a world with all the information at our fingertips, our tribal and heuristic biases will always point us in the direction of beliefs we already have. Our base instincts — tribal association, loss aversion, fear — may simply always dominate our rational ones.

This sounds pessimistic, and it is, but the wealth of cognitive research suggests that Obama and Democrats hoping to deal with the Republican Party on a rational level are looking for the wrong fight in the wrong place.

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Reminder: there are no racist people in America

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote the definitive article on how there are no racist people back during the 2008 presidential election (and occasionally blogs updates about the same thing.)

The latest entry into this never-ending saga is Marilyn Davenport, a member of the central committee for the Orange County Republican Party, who sent an email with the following image attached:

You can imagine where this is going…

“Reached by telephone and asked if she thought the email was appropriate, Davenport said, “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people–mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”

Not only does she say it is obvious she cannot be a racist… she also has friends who are black! Or as John Cole says, she’s not a racist, she just sends racist emails.

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Derrick Rose, statistics, and confirmation bias

I know, I know. We said fewer sports posts.

But with the Bulls actually playing well enough to score the 1-seed in the East and a shot at the NBA’s best record, everyone is talking Derrick Rose for MVP.

And they’re probably wrong.

Let’s be clear from the top. I like the Bulls. I like Derrick Rose. I think Rose is a superior basketball player to most. I am glad the Bulls drafted Rose over Beasley. I love watching Rose make a drive to the rim or toss a no-look kick-out pass to an open Korver in the corner.

Yet, Rose is not the most valuable player in the league. But how can we measure value?

Well, let’s take a few advanced player metrics from the NBA, not all of which I believe are accurate, but all of which have various merits.

If we believe Adjusted +/- (a wildly inconsistent and not altogether useful stat), we see that Rose is in the low-20s in league-wide ranking for the 10-11 season.

If we believe PER (a stat that overvalues shot attempts and usage), we see that Rose is ranked about 8th in the league.

If we believe Wins Produced (a stat that overvalues rebounds), we see that Rose is ranked about in the high-40s in the league.

Derrick Rose is a very good player in the NBA, but he is not among the best of the best. Here, generally, the numbers agree, and here, generally, the “heart”/”grit” club takes over.

Here’s a sample from Michael Wilbon of ESPN:

Numbers can’t tell you how hard a guy practices and whether his infectious work habits affect the work habits of teammates. Numbers can’t tell you whether a guy grabbed somebody by the collar in the locker room and said, “You’re playing tonight or I’m going to put my fist through your chest” which, trust me, happens. […]

The truth of the matter this season is that NO player in the NBA has meant as much to his team, has played as well, has led as effectively, has been as accountable and as responsible as D. Rose of the Chicago Bulls. Fortunately, I think the vast majority of the voters know this. I know Doc Rivers pulled me aside in January and said, “Rose is going to the MVP of the league THIS year.” Doc said that. I’ll take his informed judgment over all the numbers Hollinger and anybody else can produce.

Our tendency is to confirm what we already assume to be true. Confirmation bias leads us to use even anecdotal evidence to outweigh strong, data-driven evidence, so long as it confirms something we already believe to be true. If Wilbon had already decided in January that the MVP would be Rose, all the information he saw after the fact confirmed that to him. Wilbon’s idea is that the numbers don’t tell us everything, which is true. But numbers do what our eyes cannot: watch every game, shot (made and missed), and play that we didn’t see.

If, as Wilbon claims, the reason for the Bulls’ success is Derrick Rose, then why didn’t this success exist last year? What’s different? The Bulls added several new, productive players (Boozer, Brewer, Asik, Korver), without giving up any productive players. The Bulls added a new coach with a defensive mindset. Rose plays more minutes and takes more shots, but he tends to be less efficient when taking them. But Rose himself did not change substantially in his style of play; he only changed in his usage — the percent of the time the ball was in his hands. The only person in the league with the ball in his hands more was the similarly-lauded Kobe Bryant.

When Miami went from a 47-win team last season to a probable 58-win team this season, everyone (rightly) attributed their new success to their new players: Lebron James and Chris Bosh. When Cleveland went from a 61-win team last season to a 18-win team this season, everyone similarly attributed their failure to the departure of key players.

Numbers don’t tell the whole story. All the human drama of sports drives sportswriting and drives fandom. But, when talking about most valuable players, the numbers matter, and the human drama leads us to make assertions not based in fact.

P.S. My MVP pick would be Kevin Love, but since no one takes that choice seriously, I’ll say Dwight Howard.

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