Exhibit A

In the course of doing some projections about what it would take for Phil Mickelson to pass Tiger Woods in the World Rankings this week (answer: not a whole lot), I happened to have the following idea: what tournament contributes the most absolute points to a player's World Ranking? It's not necessarily an obvious question, because tournaments won a long time ago get weighted very lightly. So, just for fun, here are the answers for the current top 10. Assuming we like the OWGR formulas, these are the tournaments which most make us think these ten people are good golfers:

1. Martin Kaymer: 2010 PGA Championship, Win, 100 Rank Points, .7826 Weighting, 78.26 Adjusted Points
2. Lee Westwood: 2010 Open Championship, 2nd, 60 Rank Points, .7391 Weighting, 44.35 Adjusted Points
3. Luke Donald: 2011 WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship, Win, 76 Rank Points, 1.000 Weighting, 76.00 Adjusted Points
4. Graeme McDowell: 2010 US Open Championship, Win, 100 Rank Points, .6957 Weighting, 69.57 Adjusted Points
5. Tiger Woods: 2010 Chevron World Challenge, 2nd, 30 Rank Points, .9565 Weighting, 28.70 Adjusted Points
6. Phil Mickelson: 2010 Masters Tournament, Win, 100 Rank Points, .5870 Weighting, 58.70 Adjusted Points
7. Paul Casey: 2011 Volvo Golf Champions, Win, 38 Rank Points, 1.000 Weighting, 38.00 Adjusted Points
8. Rory McIlroy: 2010 Quail Hollow Championship, Win, 64 Rank Points, .6196 Weighting, 39.65 Adjusted Points
9. Matt Kuchar: 2010 The Barclays, Win, 70 Rank Points, .8043 Weighting, 56.30 Adjusted Points
10. Steve Stricker: 2010 Northern Trust Open, Win, 58 Rank Points, .4891 Weighting, 28.37 Adjusted Points

The first thing I notice is that I think all of these are correct. These are the single biggest reasons for thinking these guys are good. This, in turn, makes me have a little more confidence in the way the people at the OWGR do things. It's interesting to me that Tiger and Stricker are the two with the least compelling single reason to think they're good. In Tiger's case he's really just coasting on the handful of wins from the 2009 season, none of which are as big a deal at this point as the Chevron runner-up but of which there are several. If those drop out and nothing replaces them, then uh-oh, it'll just be his 2nd-place at a 16-man formerly unofficial invitational in December. This is, also, accurate, I think: the first thing I'd mention if you ask me why I think Tiger deserves to be considered a good golfer now is the Chevron, but next I'd probably talk about the fact that just two years ago he won six tournaments. You also see each of the last four majors represented here, but not all four winners: Louis Oosthiuzen isn't in the top 10, but the man who finished right behind him (though a fair way back) is.

Anyway, not an earth-shattering analysis or anything, but I think it's interesting.

Systemically Underestimating Uncertainty

One of Nate Silver's big things as far as the science of modeling is concerned is that he thinks people have a tremendous tendency to underestimate uncertainty. People will say, you know, "The Republicans are guaranteed to hold the House," but the truth is that at this point the margin of error on a forecast for the 2012 House results has to be ±50 seats. Heading into last year's election day he said that his model predicted that there was no way to call the result within 5 seats either way and have a better than even chance of being right. Well, I think I'm certainly seeing this phenomenon in how people discuss the Mets' chances in 2011. The consensus seems to be that, if the Mets are lucky, they'll win 80-85 games. That implies that people think they'll win 75-80 in a more realistic scenario. First of all I'd maintain pretty emphatically that I don't think these Mets are worse than last year's Mets, so I think people are being overly pessimistic.

But say I'm wrong. Say I'm being my usual optimistic self there, and we really can't count on Reyes or Beltran or Bay to be healthy, Pagan, Thole, Davis, Pelfrey, Niese, or Dickey to reprise their great 2010 performances, or Emaus, Young, or Capuano to be useful additions. Say the 50th-percentile result for the Mets heading into 2011 is really something like 78-84. I still think that to say that the best-case-scenario 90th-percentile result is 85 games is just plain wrong, along the lines suggested above. Maybe we can't count on any of those things. But isn't it possible that the team will stay healthy? And that we'll get a combination of career years and somewhat disappointing years that averages out to a little bit above everyone's career averages? Because if we do, this team will win 90 games. Maybe that won't happen, but I don't think it's a possibility you can dismiss this early in the season. You just can't know.

They Don't Realize They're The Same

Republicans say a lot of very silly things; that's nothing new. But apparently Newt Gingrich, who somehow gets to pose as the wise elder statesman of his party despite having always been, as my dad (who remembers Gingrich's first trip to the halls of power) tells me, an unimpressive Republican hack, has just made the following dire prediction: within 60 years, America may have become a "secular atheist country." But that's not all! Because it won't just be any secular atheist country, it will, quite possibly, be a secular atheist country dominated by "radical Islamists."

Ahem.

To me what this demonstrates is not just that Republicans in general, and in this particular instance Newt Gingrich, are not the sharpest tools in the shed. It's that they really refuse to see one basic truth about the Islamic conservatives in the Middle East: they're the same as each other. Republicans in this country favor, relative to the overall political culture here, state support of religion, restrictive laws and customs regarding sexuality, censorship of the press and of literature, militaristic nationalism, the death penalty, etc. They also both tend to be, relative to their culture, scornful of democracy and willing to use violence or the threat thereof to avoid being judged by democracy. Liberals tend to oppose the Republican Party or the Tea Party or Pat Robertson for the same reason for the same reasons that we oppose Hamas, the Taliban, or the Muslim Brotherhood. No, Republicans are not as bad as these groups, not in absolute terms. But they want to move our society in the direction of what the Islamists want their societies to look like. And we don't like that.

Why do Republicans oppose the Islamists? The simplest explanation is competition. After all, while the faction that opposes state support of religion is going to oppose all groups that favor state support of a given religion, the faction backing state support of a given religion ought also oppose all the groups favoring state support of other religions. If we're establishing right-wing Islam, we can't exactly be establishing right-wing Christianity at the same time, even if many of the public policies formed as a result would be similar. Alternately there's just the plain old racist/intolerant explanation, i.e. that most conservative Christians in this country just don't like Arabs. But the point is, they don't seem to get that they are in the same role in the American political culture that the Islamists play in the Mideast's political culture. And so you have Gingrich being scared of those secular, atheist, radical Islamists. Which, last time I checked, don't exist.

 

The Proper Structure of the Judicial Branch

The current election for a spot to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which (not shockingly!) has become intensely politicized, reminds me of some of my thinking about how to structure a judicial branch. One's first inclination is to say, "judges shouldn't be elected!" and indeed I don't think you go very wrong by adopting that approach. But I think my actual main feeling about how to set up a court system is a little different: no one one the top policy-setting court should have any opportunity to be concerned with having to keep themselves on that court. There are two ways to accomplish that: one is life tenure, and the other is some sort of fixed term with an absolute lifetime 1-term limit. The point is that you don't want justices on your court system's Supreme Court to be looking over their shoulders. I don't think you can avoid some political ambition influencing judges on lower court systems, because they will always be aspiring to appointment to higher courts, so I suppose I can't really object all that forcefully to re-appointment to lower courts. I'm not sure I see any reason for it, though, and I probably think that for a sitting judge to focus on re-election is a mistake. So, all in all, I guess I would say:

• Judges on the Top Court should either have life tenure or a strict term limit. There should never be any opportunity to be re-appointed or re-elected to the highest court.
• Requiring re-appointment of lower-court judges seems permissible, though probably not particular desirable as far as I can see.
• Re-election of lower-court judges strikes me as deeply questionable.
• I'm not that fussed how judges get onto a court. If you can be elected once but then never have to worry about facing the voters again, that strikes me as fine. However, I imagine there are various practical problems here; would there be elections only for open seats? So a judge would get elected to fill a vacancy and then serve for as long as they wanted with periodic re-appointment? It seems like an odd system, and I would probably prefer to keep elections out of it altogether.

Retaking the House, Historical Data

1916: +19/196 (+9.7%)
1924: -24/207 (-11.6%)
1940: -7/169 (-4.1%)
1948: -75/246 (-30.5%)
1996: -9/237 (-3.8%)

These are the numbers from the five cases in the last hundred years when the President's party lost more than 20% of its Congressional delegation in a midterm election and the President's party won the next Presidential election. Specifically these are the changes in the Congressional delegation of the opposition party that had made large gains in the midterm in the Congressional elections that coincided with the Presidential election. To me this is the kind of case to look at to see if the Democrats have a shot at retaking the House next year. There are 242 Republicans in the House; that means the Democrats need to reduce the Republican delegation by 10.3% or more in 2012 to retake the House. Obviously, that happened in two of the five cases I've highlighted. To my mind, that suggests that it's eminently possible, based on scant historical evidence. The Truman performance of 1948 would be serious overkill, and indeed was serious overkill in its own time.

Interestingly, in every single one of these cases the electoral margin of victory for the President or his party was narrower than in the previous election, or only just barely bigger. Clinton went from 370 EVs to 379, but Wilson '16, Coolidge '24, Roosevelt '40, and Truman '48 underperformed Wilson '12, Harding '20, Roosevelt '36, and Roosevelt '44, respectively. So one thing about this data set is that it strongly suggests that Presidents don't take this kind of shellacking in a midterm election and then expand their electoral majority significantly two years later. And Obama probably won't either, unless the Republicans nominate a lousy candidate. But it does make me think that if he does expand his majority significantly in 2012, which seems like a definite possibility (see the part about "Republicans nominating a lousy candidate"), then retaking the House would be just that much more of a possibility.

Yes, It's (At Least Partially) About Repressive Sexual Mores

I'm reading a book about Justice Brennan, and a chapter I read last night discussed the very important case Griswold v. Connecticut. It mentions how, around the time of Griswold, the Catholic Church was beginning to debate itself about whether or not it ought to think birth control was unacceptable. And it quotes some Pope from shortly before that era, probably Pius XII, saying that birth control was not okay because it was "mutual masturbation...gaining pleasure by an unnatural act." Which brings me to my point: yes, this is about an anti-fun ideology. By "this" I mean, very broadly speaking, every aspect of the modern Christian conservative political movement's desire to regulate all and sundry forms of sexual behavior. Birth control, gayness, abortion, premarital sex, all of it. It's about being anti-pleasure. Having too much fun in the wrong ways is considered a Sin. Why? Unclear. Who does it hurt? Why does god mind, if he does? Is it that, if we like this life too much and have too much fun here, we won't be sufficiently attendant to some sort of supposed future life? Or is it just that a bunch of old men think that young people having fun is disturbing to them, personally? Probably a heavy component of this last one. But in any event, we do know that the old line about how Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having fun applies more broadly than Puritans per se.

Side note: I do admit that there are legitimate reasons to be opposed to abortion that do not involve being anti-fun. I myself don't think that a pro-fun position is sufficient to make abortion good (in fact, I don't think anything makes abortion good, I think certain circumstances make abortion least-bad and that the government shouldn't criminalize it), just as I don't think a pro-sexual privacy position is sufficient to make it constitutionally protected (though I do think it is constitutionally protected). But I think as an empirical fact the anti-fun movement is a considerable part of the anti-abortion movement.

My Theory of Tiger

Tiger Woods, as of this very moment, sucks. It's a shame, but there's really no debating it. He's shot his first round over par at Bay Hill since 1999 this week, and then also his second. He's had his worst finish ever at Torrey Pines, by far. He hasn't won anything in well over a year. He's hitting shots you've just never seen from him. He's not the same Tiger Woods. What's different? I think I know the answer: fear.

Tiger says that he's hitting the ball great on the range, and just can't bring it to the course. Various announcers confirm that he looks really good on the practice tee. To me, this is very similar to the thing I and people I know sometimes get of taking really good practice swings and then messing up on the real shot, and I have the same basic belief about it. It's got to be psychological. We know Tiger can make a dozen perfect iron shots in a row, physically speaking, because he does it, over and over again, on the range. So it must be the case that something about the difference in the psychological setting between the range and tournament competition is messing him up. And that's got to be psychological. I also think that the main mental factor that destroys one's ability to hit good golf shots is fear. On the range there is nothing to fear. But in competition, fear ought to be everywhere. Except I think Tiger's never really felt fear before. He's always known, not just believed but known, that he was the best golfer of all time and that he was just going to go out there and win. But now his personal life has all gone to hell, and he's lost a good measure of his public support, and he knows now that whenever he does badly people will interpret it as a sign that his career is finished. So he's scared. And you can't hit good golf shots while in the grip of fear.

This theory has two main consequences, one a prediction and the other advice. The prediction is that, if he wins again relatively soon, he'll be back, more or less at full strength, and will go back to his dominating, winning ways. The advice is that he really needs to notice that it's fear he's dealing with, at least if I'm right. The trick with fear is to notice that you're scared, and then tell yourself not to be (as long as it's a fear that you shouldn't just actually go along with, like the fear of jumping off of cliffs with no bungee cord). If you have fear but you don't know you do, there's no way you can conquer it.

Alternatively, he could just head over to Augusta where he knows every inch of the course and knows exactly how well it suits his game, and start feeling pure confidence just based on that. Either way, really.

More on Transcending the Numbers

Because hits aren't the only thing that matters, what I've done today is calculate the differential in each player's team winning percentage between games in which the player records at least one hit, walk, or hit-by-pitch, and games where they don't, since the player's Major League debut. Note that the second category includes games they didn't play in. Here are the numbers: Derek Jeter, +.117; David Wright, +.095; Jose Reyes, +.156; Albert Pujols, .188 (for comparison). None of this is to say that, perhaps, Jeter's numbers are better than Reyes. But excluding any utterly intangible things like clubhouse leadership qualities, it looks like Reyes contributes more to his team when he is successful than Jeter does. (Though less than Pujols does; the Cardinals are utterly dependent on him and they should consider that when thinking about signing him or not signing him. The Mets should think about this when considering whether to sign Reyes, too.) My instinct that Reyes transcends his numbers better than Jeter does is definitely born out by the evidence.

Transcending the Numbers

In my family we often like to laugh at the idea people sometimes express that Derek Jeter "transcends the numbers." In others words, these people claim, Jeter isn't just a sure-fire Hall of Famer who plays great in the postseason and has been an integral part of a wildly successful team for a decade and a half. No, he transcends that, and is, in fact, The Best Player Ever. Or something like that. I don't know. And we tend to laugh at it. At the same time, I have often expressed the view that Jose Reyes contributes something to the Mets beyond what his front-line stats show, even though those are pretty good anyway. Which, when you think about it, is kind of a claim that Jose transcends the numbers. So maybe, just maybe, I should think twice before laughing so easily at the same claim made of Jeter.

Or maybe not.

The "Oh Yeah, He's Crazy" Syndrome

PPP has a post out about how much more unpopular all of the Republican leading candidates for President have gotten during the campaign. Not shocking, really: campaigns don't make anyone look good. But here's an interesting pattern I noticed. Palin's 15-net-point drop was, apparently, made up of 18 or 19 point drops with Democrats, Republicans, and independents, which doesn't add up but does suggest a very uniform movement against her. Gingrich lost support most dramatically from independents, with Republicans in second place, which suggests that Democrats remembered all along how much we hate him. Romney's worst decline was among Republicans, which spells doom for him. But Mike Huckabee lost barely any ground among Republicans (which is why I think he wins the primary if he runs) but 25 net points from Democrats. That's the thing about Huckabee. He looks very genial. He's charming, he's charasmatic, he goes on the Daily Show and has reasonable enough arguments with Jon about something or other. But then you listen to what he's saying. And he's crazy. And not just in a "well yes, he's a hard-right Christian conservative, but he's got the compassion thing going on economics." No. Huckabee's original thing was the flat tax. He's just crazy. He's crazy in sheep's clothing. And it's easy to forget that when he's not running for anything. But now that we Democrats are starting to realize that, hey, not only would he probably win the nomination but he'd also probably be the only Republican who could make it a race against Obama, we're remembering. And so we stop giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Your 2011 New York Mets

A switch-hitting shortstop who bats lead-off, shows lots of power for both spots, fields the ball well, hits well, has a pretty good on-base percentage for a lead-off hitter, and, oh yeah, still has speed enough to spare to lead the majors in steals and triples. (And runs scored? If so, MVP.)
A switch-hitting, Gold Glove-caliber center-fielder who's a good hitter with decent power and tons of speed.
A Gold Glove third baseman who, if his career continues at its current pace for another decade or so, would be tied in Bill James' Hall of Fame Standards metric with, uh, Stan Musial, Rogers Hornsby, and Willie Mays.
A first baseman who looks to have Gold Glove potential, who has this penchant for flipping over railings to make highlight-reel catches and launching 450-foot bombs into the Shea Bridge, and whose adjusted OPS in his first full season was distinctly on par with the numbers put up by Adrian Gonzalez, Mark Teixeira, and Prince Fielder.
A catcher who, two years ago, hit over .320 in both AA-ball and the major leagues and who, despite the main knock against him's having always been his lack of power, cranked a ball over the grassy slope in right field out to the alligators in today's game.
A pair of corner outfielders who, as recently as 2008, hit 142 extra-base hits between the two of them and drove in 213 runs, one of whom is a switch-hitting Gold Glover. Granted, they're both coming off of injuries and suffer from being older than they used to be, but there's still lots of potential here.
One late reliever with a 100-mph fastball and what looks to be a wicked slider this year, one with one of the nastiest curveballs I've ever seen, and one with a great curveball and a great changeup who's been virtually untouched this spring.
Five actual starting pitchers, more than some teams can say. None of whom, let's be honest, exactly projects to be All-Star level, but each of whom you'd expect to give you a solid year's worth of starting pitching work.

Would somebody please remind me why this team is going to suck?

The Common Tongue

Ever notice how every single piece of fantasy that describes a world inhabited by lots and lots of races of "intelligent" creatures features a common tongue? For instance, in the Lord of the Rings, there is a Hobbit language, and there's Elvish (two varieties, at least), and there's Orkish and Entish and Dwarvish and various other languages. But every hobbit, elf, orc, ent and dwarf also speaks this at-large hegemonic language, which I think is that of humans, and so they can all communicate with one another. Many other fictional worlds that are set in something very much resembling our world but with all and sundry demons or spirits or what have you inhabiting it in addition to we normal humans do something similar: all of the random demons and spirits happen to speak English. I suppose that in French television they speak French. The end result is the same: everyone can communicate with everyone else.

This thought occurs to me just because I'm reading a bunch of constitutional cases about language rights and it's making me think about how much we don't have a common tongue in this human world. A whole lot of countries can't even really manage to have a common tongue within their own borders. And it tends to tie them in knots; see: Quebec. This is the weird thing about language: from a "rational," by which I mean to connote the kind of hard-nosed pragmatism associated with economics, perspective, there should only be one language. Having so bloody many different languages is quite distinctly problematic for the actual process of interaction and cooperation; there's a reason that the whole Tower of Babel story is cast as a punishment. But of course if you suggested that we abolish all languages but one (and note that I am not suggesting that!) you'd be met with howling from all corners, and not just because it's close to inevitable that you'd be suggesting English and no one who doesn't speak English natively themselves really loves our linguistic hegemony anyway. We have this weird thing where we have lots of different languages purely by accident, because for thousands of years after we developed the capacity of language humankind lived scattered across the globe with only the most viscous cultural diffusion. That's a recipe for divergence. But given that we do have all of those accidentally different languages, they are each bound up in a specific culture that really, really likes its own language and really, really doesn't want to give it up.

Fiction writers tend to gloss over these issues. It's understandable, I guess: if the Orks actually couldn't speak Dwarvish and the Elvs didn't understand the Hobbits it would be very difficult to write the Lord of the Rings. You'd be spending all of your time working through the language problems. And that detracts from the story. But I think it's just interesting to note how much we really don't have that kind of universal communicability in the real world.

Also, I think Harry Potter deserves props for this, as for so many things, because there are lots of non-human creatures in that world who don't speak English. The merfolk in the lake at Hogwarts actually can't speak English, at least above ground. And at events like the World Cup they actually mention that the Hungarian Minister for Magic doesn't speak English, either. But there you have these people like Albus Dumbledore or Barty Crouch who speak hundreds of languages and can function as interpreters at need. And, of course, the story takes place almost entirely within Britain, where most of the endemic magical creatures who speak at all will be speaking English.

I also think it would probably be fairly easy, if one lived in a world with fairly abundant "magic," to craft a spell that would make the things you said intelligible to anyone who was listening, regardless of the language they spoke. In fact my guess is that the merfolk at Hogwarts have something like that working when they're under water, though of course it's never made explicit.

Justice Rehnquist Gets One Wrong

Apparently in 1977 the Court, 5-4, declared unconstitutional an Illinois law preventing illegitimate children from inheriting, on equal protection grounds. In his dissent, then-Justice Rehnquist states that

"The Equal Protection Clause is itself a classic paradox, and makes sense only in the context of a recently fought Civil War. It creates a requirement of equal treatment to be applied to the process of legislation--legislation whose very purpose is to draw lines in such a way that different people are treated differently. The problem presented is one of sorting the legislative distinctions which are acceptable from those which involve invidiously unequal treatment." (emphasis mine)

Note that he's very, very wrong about this. And ironically, I think, he's wrong in a way that conservatives like to accuse liberals of being wrong. There is no Equal Treatment Clause! There is no Equality Clause, either. There is an equal protection clause, a difference which makes the clause both somewhat more circumspect and also, in some ways, stronger. Of course the law will treat people differently. But a person is not to receive inferior protection of the laws. This means, on the one hand, that yeah, there are plenty of instances where you will treat people differently. It's what laws are. There might even be some situations where people in Group A get a genuinely worse deal than people in Group B that are acceptable. But on the other hand, using the word protection instead of the word treatment changes the thing from a negative to an at least partially positive right. It's one of only two positive rights in the Constitution, I think (aside from procedural rights), the other being the guarantee of a republican form of government in each state. And the fact that we are guaranteed equal protection of the laws, that this is something the state owes us, has real consequences. If there's anything in the Constitution that requires public education, this is it. If there's anything in the Constitution that could prohibit the decriminalization of murder, this is it. Those are both the reasonably trivial examples, but it goes further than that, I think. In the case at hand, this might be a case where, on the "treat similarly situated persons similarly" bases, you would have to allow the discrimination (value-neutral) made by this law, but it's still true that denying illegitimate children, who themselves never did anything wrong, the right of inheritance is denying them the equal protection of the laws.

So I think that maybe conservatives should be careful what they wish for when they scold liberals about how it's just equal protection, not equal treatment. And they should also remember it themselves.

Going 1-for-4

So, as of writing Jose Reyes is 1-4 on today's spring training game. I was just thinking about whether going 1-4 tells you anything, and my intuitive conclusion is that it doesn't. After all, while it's true that you hit to a .250 average that day, which isn't great but isn't atrocious, it's also true that if you get four at-bats you're most likely to get 1 hit if your "true" batting average is anywhere from .125 to .375. So I think it tells you very little. But I decided to check and see if there's a statistical basis for that: how does the chance of going 1-4 change as your batting average goes from, say, .200 to .300? The answer: very little.

There are, obviously, five options for a day in which you have four at-bats: zero, one, two, three, or four hits. Note that the main trend as "true" batting average rises from .200 to .350, basically from the worst in the league to the best in the league, is that the odds of going 0-4 fall drastically, from about 41% at the Mendoza line to around 18% for an Ichiro type. The vast majority of that drop goes to your chances of going 2-4, which rise from 15% to 31%. The likelihood of 3-4 goes up rather considerably, too, from about 3% to more like 12%. Your odds of have a 4-4 day, though, rise only marginally, from "negligible" to, maybe, 2%. But look at what happens to your odds of going 1-4. Almost nothing. From .200 to .300, the odds of getting exactly one hit go from 41.0% to 41.2%. Big whoop. Admittedly it rises, imperceptibly, to 42.2% right around a .250 average itself, and falls a wee bit to 39% up around .350. But what we're seeing here is that a 1-4 day at the plate really does tell you almost nothing about how good a hitter you are (except that you're major-league caliber).

For What It's Worth...

If, in my attempted extrapolations of how many games each baseball team will win this year, I replace Chase Utley of the Phillies with Luis Castillo, then I get the Phillies dropping down to approximately 89 wins, with the Mets at 87. Remind me why we're utterly out of contention from the moment we throw our first pitch, again?

The Horns of a Constitutional Dilemma

In Gregg v. Georgia (1976), the Supreme Court lifted its moratorium on capital punishment that had prevailed since Furman v. Georgia (1972), and at the same time defined a standard that death penalty schemes would need to meet. First the scheme would have to provide objective criteria by which to judge death penalty cases, and those criteria would need to be enforced by appellate courts. Second, though, the scheme also had to allow the sentencer to take into consideration the "character and record" of the individual defendant. This is meant as a limiting factor as well, i.e., only cases that a) meet the objective criteria and b) do not have mitigating "character and record" circumstances are viable death-penalty cases. I'm sympathetic to this second part, both out of general "the fewer executions the better" bias and because I think it makes a certain amount of sense. But I also think that if you're going to insist upon that standard then you hit rather sharply against the Equal Protection Clause. Because, remember, this second standard (especially when combined with later rulings requiring a jury verdict in favor of death) requires as a necessary precondition to the state's killing a defendant is for the jury to declare that it doesn't really like the guy. If the jury did like the guy, it would be bound to not kill him. So in a very real sense one of the criteria for whether the state can execute you is, "will twelve random citizens find you sufficiently unappealing that they are fine with killing you?" That strikes me as a standard that just doesn't even claim to respect the notion of equal protection of the laws. Less appealing people, which as a matter of absolute fact will tend to include non-white people and relatively tough-looking men, are made much more likely to have the state kill them. So I think that by insisting on this very sensible restriction on capital punishment the Court has actually banned any and all forms of the death penalty that can come close to meeting the Equal Protection Clause's standards. In other words, the death penalty ought to be unconstitutional, even if you agree with Gregg.

For What It's Worth...

If you look at the top marginal tax rate in the United States since 1948 and also at the rate of real GDP growth in that same period, there's a +0.212 correlation. That is to say, a higher top marginal income tax rate has been slightly associated with a higher rate of economic growth. I know this really isn't good data, but doesn't that maybe suggest that we should be a little skeptical of the claims that cutting taxes for the rich is essential to a strong economy? Just a thought.

Remind Me Why The Mets Suck, Again?

Seriously. Why do people talk about the Mets as a team whose upside is .500? They were only two wins shy of breaking even last year, and since last year they have dispatched with Jeff Francoeur, Alex Cora, John Maine, Gary Mathews Jr., and probably at least Oliver Perez as well if not Luis Castillo. What are the problems with this team? Oh, second base is a bit of a mess. Yeah, no kidding. But the thing is, that's one position. Out of eight. And the thing is, we have some pretty good people playing the other seven. Okay, Beltran's unlikely to be contributing his usual All-Star/MVP-caliber play. Maybe he won't be playing every day, maybe he won't be there on Opening Day. But it's not like we're starved for outfield depth, and there's nothing magical about Opening Day (indeed, since the Mets seem to be charmed on Opening Days, one could say there's no need to worry!). Beltran is quite likely to play well if not great. And as for the pitching, honestly, we have five starters lined up whom I would expect to give basically solid seasons, and a bullpen that I don't think can be worse than average. So what's our problem again? I just don't get it. Hell, I don't see why, given that the Phillies do seem to be a wee bit injury-prone so far, we couldn't contend to win the division, with a little bit of luck. I just don't get all the pessimism.

On Nuclear Power

Here's my thing about nuclear power: I don't get why we're bothering to discuss it. Like fossil fuels, there's a limited supply of it. Like fossil fuels, there's a certain amount of run-of-the-mill pollution and contamination that seems to come with it. Like fossil fuels, only more so, there's the possibility of, I don't know, a giant catastrophe right next door to the biggest metropolis in the world that could kill millions of people. Unlike, for example, wind energy, it's not actually really, really easy to add capacity to our nuclear power portfolio right now. To add new nuclear power, it takes a hell of a lot of money, time, effort, etc. Nobody wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard, and you can't blame them, because the best we can say is that we're not sure it causes cancer. But it probably does; hell, it would be weird if it didn't. And what with all the nuclear disasters we're all completely justified in wanting to regulate these plants to within an inch of their lives, if not further. The result of which is that it's all barely economically viable, if at all. How do you add more wind power? You stick an extra windmill in the middle of Kansas. It's quite simple, actually. As far as I know there really just isn't anything we don't know about how to get lots more wind power, right here, right now, and it wouldn't cost very much to do. The cost to scale our solar program up is probably not very high either, and from what I've heard they think there are some exciting breakthroughs in the field of solar technology coming rather soon. So what exactly is the point of nuclear power in this country right now? What does it give us that we can't get just as easily if not more easily using cleaner, safer, perpetual sources of energy? Isn't nuclear sort of a dominated strategy, even aside from the catastrophic-disaster factor?

The Median Voter Theorem, Revisited

The median voter theorem states that if you assume the ideologies of the electorate can be represented as a one-dimensional space and there are only two parties/candidates in the election, each candidate will maximize their expected votes by adopting the policy preferences of the median voter. In that world the two candidates are indistinguishable and will each receive half of the votes of the electorate, at random. The prediction is that politicians will all gravitate toward the center and elections will be very close contests between two exceedingly similar options. I have always thought and continue to think that this theorem is at best useless and at worst a load of bull.

There are a lot of conditions that go into the Median Voter Theorem that don't hold in the real world. For starters you assume that we are restricted to a two-party system; new parties placing themselves at the 49th and 51st percentiles of the electorate would instantly obliterate the two median-voter parties, though you can argue that they, then, would become the two parties in turn and would move toward the center. It is also not clear that policy preferences can be meaningfully restricted to a single dimension without losing information crucial to vote-predicting; this gives rise to the probabilistic voting models, which can make similar unique-equilibrium predictions in multiple dimensions. But I think there's a deeper flaw here, and we can see it when we look at the two supposed "examples" of the MVT in action: the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections.

The Case for Mandatory Voting

My tendency is very much to think that mandatory voting is the kind of thing that you just shouldn't do. It is, rather directly, an interference with an individual's decision-making as to how they want to participate in the democratic process, and I tend to find such things sketchy. That said, there are a whole lot of elections that would have turned out very, very differently last year if we had mandatory voting in this country. When I was taking a course in modern political theory we discussed the notion of negative versus positive liberty, where (roughly speaking) negative liberty is freedom from interference but positive liberty is freedom of self-determination. Though nearly equivalent in definition, the two freedoms have historically developed along very different lines, with the particular quirk of positive liberty being the idea that true positive liberty consists in doing what your true self wants. The idea is that people have a higher self, more rational or whatever, and a lower, base self, and what we really want is to do what our higher self wants but our pesky lower self is oppressing us. External restrictions, therefore, that force you to follow your superego rather than your id, so to speak, are actually increases in liberty. It's an argument I'm generally very skeptical of, again, in no small part because people have a tendency to think they know what other people's higher selves want.

But I think you can make a fairly strong positive-liberty case for mandatory voting, actually. Suppose I'm a citizen of Wisconsin who, if you had put a ballot in front of me last November and told me I wasn't getting out of the room until I voted for someone, or even if you just asked me in a casual telephone poll, would have voted against Republican Scott Walker in the governor's race. More or less by definition, I currently wish Scott Walker hadn't won. Maybe I don't care very much, but I would have preferred a world in which Scott Walker weren't governor. And it's predictable that I would prefer that world. If you simultaneously made voting mandatory and quite easy indeed, then I would have voted and Scott Walker would have lost. And there would be a lot fewer people saying, damn, why didn't I bother voting last year? Obviously there are systemic biases in who votes and who doesn't vote, with disempowered groups tending very much not to vote, which means that the lack of mandatory voting shifts a whole lot of power away from those who already lack power. It strikes me that there's something kind of non-oppressive about saying to someone, here, look, you have this power, now use it.

That said, I don't think I actually support mandatory voting. But I do think it's indefensible to have a system that doesn't try to get as close as possible to 100% turnout without actually requiring it. The practice of requiring prior registration for voting, which is as far as I know unique to this country, is simply absurd. So is conducting elections for one day only and having that day be Tuesday. So is requiring in-person voting; Oregon does its elections entirely by mail now, and they have higher turnout and fewer problems. I've never actually been able to see any reason why you couldn't get an internet-voting scheme to be just as safe as paper-ballot voting, which, mind you, has never been exactly a paragon of tamper-proof reliability. It's possible that an internet voting scheme would require some kind of comprehensive internet identification system more rigorous than what we currently have, but I can imagine that there could be ways to do that which would be a price worth paying to make our democracy so much easier.

Instead we're disenfranchising college students. What does it say about a party when keeping people from voting is one of its main electoral strategies? It says that it knows it is losing the battle of democracy and it doesn't give a damn.

The Republican Party As A Faction

I have often argued that people tend to misinterpret the phrase "tyranny of the majority," and the related concept of factionalism. Tyranny of the majority, I insist, is not simply the practice of letting the party that wins an election implement its preferred policy agenda as thoroughly as it sees fit. Rather, it is when the majority enacts policies whose purpose is to benefit the group holding majority-based political power and disadvantage the group currently losing the game of democracy. The most extreme example, of course, would be when a certain Germany government decided to, uh, kill millions of those who weren't in its faction. But you also saw tyranny of the majority in the century between the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, when black voters were enfranchised but a tiny majority and the white majority routinely elected representatives who favored active segregation and discrimination by the government. Other examples would be if, say, a country had a majority of its population who were farmers, and the ruling Farmer's Party enacted a tax on all people who weren't farmers (or something that worked out to the same thing).

I contend that the 2011 Republican Party is acting in a largely factional manner, and making every attempt at various kinds of tyranny of the majority. Here's what I mean by that. I think the Republicans are going after a lot of groups now simply because those groups vote Democratic. The student-disenfranchisement thing is because college students vote Democratic. The anti-union thing is because the unions vote Democratic, and even more importantly spend Democratic. The anti-immigrant thing is because Hispanics vote Democratic. With every ounce of power it has left, the conservative section of our society is doing its damnedest to crush the political influence of Democratic-leaning groups. And it's not just generational snobbery, or anti-labor sentiment, or xenophobia, though to be sure there's a lot of that in the voting bloc that makes it possible and those feelings are exploited like hell by the politicians who are making this play. If you listened to the Wisconsin debate closely enough you heard Republicans admitting that it wasn't about the budget. Hell, it wasn't even about the decades-old battle of labor versus management, one of the most active fronts of the class wars. No, it was about the fact that unions help get Democrats elected. Likewise the New Hampshire anti-student-voting bill is being pushed not because of anything about how it's kind of silly to let college students vote somewhere they don't ever really live, but because they vote Democratic.

These aren't real acts of public policy. These are the acts of a particular faction of America, the non-young, white, Christian, conservative faction, to take the political power it won last year and use it to fend off demographic changes it fears will push it out of power before too long. These are the acts of a political movement that is so terrified of ever losing at democracy again that it wants to just scrap the whole thing, and rule, itself, by virtue of being the "real" Americans. This is tyranny of the majority (or at least attempted tyranny of the majority).

Shouldn't This Be a Gaffe?

The right to vote is, justly, seen as more or less the single most important political right in a free society. Mainly this is because the vote is the simplest weapon to use in protecting all of your other rights. Accordingly, almost everyone in most nations not currently adhering to either the Islamic or the Communist philosophies agree (at least in public) that all adult citizens should have the right to vote. Disenfranchisement based on wealth, race, gender, religion, all of these have come to be seen as deeply illegitimate. But of course there's that pesky word "adult" in the formula. Everyone also agrees that it's basically meaningless to talk about giving a one-month-old infant the right to vote; the closest you could come would be to let their parents vote for them, which violates other rules like not having some people voting twice. So we need to have some way to figure out who, like the infant, can be legitimately disenfranchised and who must be given their vote. I, as someone who would probably have ranked upwards of 90th percentile in the whole country for pure political informedness when I was fourteen, have been known to wish there were some kind of test that teenagers could take to qualify to vote early, but that approach is typically rejected rather thoroughly. Instead we just draw a bright line at some particular age. It used to be twenty-one in this country, then we moved it to eighteen when the whole "old enough to fight" thing got pointed out. In fact the voting age is 18 in the vast majority of the world, though it's 16 in Brazil and 20 in Japan (where that's the traditional age of adulthood). I think you can make a reasonable argument that 18 is too high, and I think you can also make a reasonable argument that it's too low, though I wouldn't be inclined to make that argument myself.

You can also make a reasonable argument, I think, that the current way American elections law treats college students is a little bit silly. I spent the first eighteen years of my life living primarily in New Jersey, and will have spent the next four spending most of my time in Rhode Island, but still considering New Jersey my home. So naturally in 2009 I voted in New Jersey while a college student at Brown, in 2010 I voted in Rhode Island, and in 2011 and 2012 I expect to vote in New Jersey again. I get to jurisdiction-hop. Will I spend any time living in Rhode Island after I graduate? Who knows? Likewise New Jersey. That this way of doing things is the best possible solution is not, I think, immediately self-evident, though I myself (being a rather emphatic small-d democrat) wouldn't like to make it more stringent. But I think you can argue that it should be more strict and not be a horrible person.

But here's what you can't do. You can't say what the Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives said to a Tea Party meeting recently in support of a bill against college student voting rights. He said that college kids are "foolish" when they vote, lack "life experience," and "just vote their feelings." But that's not all he said. The unforgivable offense that college kids commit when voting? "Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do." This, see, is what it's not okay to say. This is not a respectable argument. This is the "you disagree with me, so you're doing it wrong" argument. I myself happen to be of the opinion that there are a lot of relatively more aged white persons in this country who have an instinctive, emotional reaction against the idea of a multicultural, culturally liberated society, and "just vote their feelings" in favor of oppression. There are a whole lot of other people who I think are damn foolish for, to use an example that isn't picking on the right wing, having voted for Ralph effing Nader in 2000. I'd even call any of those people who lived in a swing state downright stupid, at least with respect to their decisions on voting that year.

But you don't get to disenfranchise those people. It's possible that if we made voting a privilege that you had to demonstrate some degree of political literacy to qualify for, and could potentially lose, the quality of governance would increase. I don't think it's likely, but I have to admit it's possible. But the legitimacy of government would go to zero, instantly and immediately. And this proposal is even worse. It's not enough that this guy is arguing in favor of a policy that you can make a pretty good argument for if you've a mind. He said, explicitly, that he wants to disenfranchise college students because they vote Democratic. There's no way that allowing the party in power to disenfranchise those who will vote against them can make government better. It's just a pure power grab. It's nothing but oppressing and persecuting your political enemies. We aren't supposed to do that in this country.
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Defining Liberty

In a post by Brown University professor Jason Brennan on the (new, I think) liberal libertarian blog Bleeding-Heart Libertarians, he discusses whether liberty is an inherently social concept or whether, as Brennan argues, liberty is simply the absence of wrongful interference. It strikes me, though, that both he and the right-wing libertarian he's arguing with have things wrong. Liberty isn't specifically about interference, a word which implies agency. It's just about restrictions. The purest form of authoritarianism, we are told, is that everything not forbidden is compulsory. The real point of that definition is that in that sort of world, the individual has zero actual discretion about how they live their lives. Note that this does not necessarily imply that life is unremittingly horrible; one might live in a fairly benign authoritarian regime where you were required to do lots of things that you happened to enjoy. But freedom, or liberty, is certainly not a component of this system. Now, since I'm calling this a regime I've sort of implied an agent, but I don't see that I have any more liberty if some sort of impersonal, abstract forces have deprived me of all ability to choose how I live my life. So I would tend to define liberty as the lack of restrictions on one's ability to choose how to life one's life. There's no logical maximum of liberty of this kind, of course, but it's clear to me that a very poor person has less of it than a very rich person, in the same way you have less liberty if you get stuck in a tiny little cave.

But then again, there's no particular reason to talk about everything in terms of liberty.

Legislative Game Theory

We were studying game theory in econ this week, but it was all stuff I already knew, so I spent that time concocting game theoretic representations of various events from the recent past and near future in American politics. Let's start with the Bush tax cuts debate of last December, and also of next winter as well. Let's imagine that there are two players, both with absolute veto power, called Obama and Boehner (McConnell was the veto player last year, but Boehner will be next year and is more prominent anyway). Obama proposes an extension of the tax cuts for those making under $250,000 per year. Let's say that Boehner proposes an extension of tax cuts for those making over $250,000 per year; really he would be proposing tax cuts for all, but it's a lot easier to see the game this way.

There are four possibilities for outcomes here. If both players agree to the others' proposals, then everyone gets a tax cuts. If only Obama vetoes, then poor people (relatively speaking) get a tax cut. If only Boehner vetoes, then rich people get a tax cut. If both players veto, no one gets a tax cut. So what are the two players' preferences? Boehner, I think, is like this: cuts for the rich > cuts for all > cuts for the poor > cuts for none. Obama, in late 2010, was like this: cuts for the poor > cuts for all > cuts for none > cuts for the rich. (Strictly speaking Boehner's irrational, since he prefers adding cuts for the poor only if there aren't also cuts for the rich, but whatever.) So we can construct the following little Punnett Square of possibilities:

If we assume that the decisions are both made without knowledge of the other's decisions, and that no communication is allowed, then obviously Obama should veto, since he gets a better result in either case that way, and Boehner should therefore cooperate since he prefers cutting taxes for somebody, even if it's poor or working-class people, to cutting no one's taxes. But those assumptions are obviously wrong. Instead let's assume that Obama has to go first, in a sense, by both proposing certain pieces of legislation (since the Democrats control both Houses, he gets to do this) and by signalling what he will or won't veto. Then, once Obama sets those parameters, Boehner makes his decision, and then Obama is bound to obey the rules he set for himself in his original move. Both are allowed to communicate with each other before the decision. Now, Boehner clearly can't get his optimal position, because it's Obama's least favorite position and Obama will do anything to avoid it. But suppose Boehner says before the game starts, "look, I'll agree to your tax cuts only if you make it clear that you'll agree to my tax cuts, too." Then for Obama to try and veto Boehner's cuts would get him no cuts, which he doesn't want. So he will propose a full tax cuts package, but make clear that he'll veto a tax cuts for the rich only bill if it gets to him. Then Boehner agrees to this, and we get tax cuts for all. That's approximately what happened, except that the concept of extending the cuts for just the rich were never on the table.

He's Not The Messiah

Last year, sometime during the spring, I remember seeing a headline on Huffington Post: "The British Obama?" Underneath it was a picture of someone I had never seen before, but I soon became rather well-informed about him. It was Nick Clegg, the charasmatic Liberal Democrat leader who, it was supposed, would take advantage of the weakness of Gordon Brown's Labour Party to turn the Lib-Dems into a viable force for the first time in quite a few generations. After decades playing a centrist role in British politics, the liberals to Labour's actual socialists, the Lib-Dems had finally done what the rise of "New Labour" suggested for them all along, and simply become the left-wing party. Clegg seemed to do well in the debates, certainly looking like the more viable left-wing candidate than Brown. Heading into the elections, some polls showed the Lib-Dems competitive to beat Labour for second or even challenge the Conservatives for the national lead.

Then the election happened. While the Liberals did gain about 1% in the popular vote over 2005, they also lost five seats. Labour had a similarly disappointing night, while David Cameron's Tories notched 97 gains and came oh-so-close to an absolute majority.

A majority which Nick Clegg, he who ran his party distinctly left of Labour, handed him.

The Liberal Democrats are currently polling around 10% for a prospective U.K. general election. That's abysmal. That's less than half what they got in the election. It's worse than they've ever done in the handful of decades they've been around. According to UK Polling Report's swingometer, a performance that bad would have them getting a whopping, uhhh, 18 seats. That's about a third what they've got now. The Lib-Dem-sponsored AV referendum is polling right about 50/50, but with a bad trend. The only reason they went into coalition with the Conservatives was to get that referendum. Can you imagine if it fails? How much damage Nick Clegg, who was really supposed to be the savior of the Liberal Democrats, would end up having done to his party? With Ed Miliband leading Labour back to the left, I can envision a future in which the Lib-Dems kind of stop existing. It was always a sort of weird arrangement: the left-wing majority in Britain decided, for no good reason, to have two parties rather than one, despite the winner-take-all nature of their electoral system. It makes no sense; there's a reason you tend to see two-party systems in countries that use first-past-the-post.

This coalition has killed the Liberal Democrats. I don't see how they recover. All their liberal supporters have decided that, well, voting for the Lib-Dems gives them Tories. What's left? Trying to be that centrist party again? Centrist parties have a problem, which is that they are bloody boring. I can't imagine that the conservative voters will become a base for the LibDems. Nick Clegg has destroyed the party.

Japan

1. It sucks.

2. Natural disasters are definitely a big, big part of Japan's self-identity. It looks to me like Japan has gotten off comparatively light given that we're talking about one of the biggest earthquakes on record, though I could be objectively wrong about that, and I also think I've heard that that isn't entirely an accident.

3. If there is any justice in the world this will be a Bobby Jindal moment for the Republicans. Jindal famously proposed cutting volcano monitoring in his 2009 response to Obama's not-really-SotU address, and a day later a certain volcano in Alaska spoke up, saying "Are you sure about that?". Congressional Republicans are proposing to slash, among other things, the budget of the people who monitor tsunamis.

Oh wait, there is very little justice in the world. Shame.

Par Combinatorics

How many possible golf courses are there?

Well, it's a stupid question, of course. There are an infinite number of golf courses. Everything's a continuous variable on a golf course, from the length of the holes to the width of the fairway in the landing area to the depths of the bunkers, and there are an infinite number of potential factors in any event. But there is one factor that has a certain primacy (see the previous post for that) and that is distinctly discrete: par. So let me say that for the purposes of this article, I am defining an equivalence relation on the set of 18-hole golf courses where two courses are equivalent if each of their holes of a certain number has the same par. And now let me rephrase my question: under standard assumptions about the par composition of golf courses, how many different "equivalence classes" of golf courses are there? This is a question we can answer (though why we'd want to is a different story; predominantly if we are bored...). The basic answer is, a lot.

Length and Difficulty

I'm in a graphical statistical analytical mood today, so it's time to turn my attention to golf. A few years back I compiled a list of some 829 golf holes used on the PGA Tour or in major championships. Specifically I gathered data on the lengths and stroke averages of those 829 holes in the most recent tournament that had been played on them. Just now I noticed that, though it's early going yet, the par-5 1st hole at Doral, 530 yards, is playing to a 4.2 average while the par-4 3rd, 440 yards, is playing around 4.33. So naturally I got the idea into my head to check the statistical relationship between length and difficulty, using my handy data set.

A Modest Proposal

So called not so much because it's as offensive to the moral sensibilities as the original modest proposal, but just because it's not remotely modest in any way whatsoever. Anyway, here goes. In comparative con-law class this week, we've been talking about federalism (ad nauseum, one might say). One of Professor Calabresi's pet theories is that the number of sub-federal units in a federation is a very important factor in the strength of the federal structure. Too few states, he hypothesizes, and there is no cohesion: you get lots of secessionist movements and a weak central government. Too many, and the states disappear and the central government becomes a powerful behemoth. The U.S., Professor Calabresi thinks, has too many states, and this is a primary reason why we have lost our old, balanced "dual federalism." Canada, on the other hand, has too few, reflected in its damn-near-successful secessionist movement in Quebec. His typical counterexample is to wonder what would happen if the U.S. had four mega-states instead of the real fifty: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. Calabresi thinks that such a union would be quite likely to split up, and I think he might have a point.

But in considering that collection of mega-states, one of my first thoughts is, well, it's natural to make a New England state, but that's a slightly smaller level. So just for fun, since I've been playing with maps today anyway, I decided to try to clump the 48 American continental states into a natural-seeming smaller number of states. Here are my results:

Political Demographics

Nate Silver had a really beautiful analysis over the past few days of the demographic tendencies of American voters. In his first piece he noted that the vast majority of voters looked like swing voters, i.e. between a 25% and a 75% chance of voting Democratic, if you just look at non-political demographic factors, like age, race, sex, income, education, religion, location, etc. The second piece, however, took a look at what happens if you include political demographics, that is to say, party and ideology. The answer is, not shockingly, that there are a lot fewer swing voters: indeed, just 26% nationally. And in that piece he included a chart of the percent of each state's 2008 electorate estimated to be Democratic base voters (>75% chance of voting for Obama), Republican base voters (<25% chance of voting for Obama), and swing voters (those in the middle). [Note: Hawaii and Alaska excluded] I, given my predilection for this sort of thing, made a bunch of maps.

"Contract Year"

In the final season of a three-year, $37 million deal he inked with the Mets on December 10, 2008, Rodríguez is likely to put up some great numbers in order to garner a new contract from either the Mets or another suitor.

So reads some analysis of the "top 10 relief pitchers for 2011." It's a common opinion you hear voiced: this is so-and-so's "contract year," so you know they'll put up great numbers. Now, there may certainly be players who do appear to demonstrate this phenomenon. Adrian Beltre, from what I hear, might be one of them. And if someone wants to show me evidence, statistical evidence, that players do better on average in their contract years than in other years, across the whole of Major League Baseball, I'd be willing to entertain the notion that this is, in fact, a real thing that occurs generally speaking.

But consider what it means. Players cannot, obviously, simply decide to perform well. If it were that easy, etc. The most a player can do, I think, is decide to try harder. So we're stipulating that K-Rod, or Reyes, or whoever, weren't really trying their best in the years in the middle of their contracts. Do we really believe this? I don't. Not in general. I play a sport, and let me tell you, it sucks to do badly. It really, really does not feel good. And in baseball you have the added element that when you do badly, you get to have the extra fun feeling of losing that much more often. So I don't honestly believe that players are really just sort of sleepwalking through their careers, through their professions, except when they think the spotlight is on them to perform well and sign a big contract this offseason. I don't believe it, as a matter of human psychology. I think most players conceive of themselves as baseball players, and they are doing this because they want to be really, really good baseball players. And they also want to get paid lots of money, but I have a feeling they don't really think, well, if I have a great year this year people will have forgotten it already by the time I'm next a free agent, so I'll slack off this week. I don't buy it.

Whither Olympia Snowe?

Only 28% of Maine Republicans think that Olympia Snowe should really be a Republican. Accordingly, while her two named primary opponents so far have a combined 30% name recognition, she only gets 43% against their combined 28%, prior to any sort of campaign. All of this makes you think that it would be tricky for Senator Snowe to win the Republican nomination. Maybe she could do it, especially if the Tea Party opposition fails to coalesce around one candidate. But it's unlikely. However, if she runs as an independent, she wouldn't just lead, she'd be getting a majority against a Democrat and a Tea Party Republican. So it looks like if she bolts from the Republican Party and runs as an independent, she'd have a very good chance indeed of winning re-election.

But what would she do? That's what I wonder. If 2013 dawns with Sen. Olympia Snowe (I-ME) sitting in the middle of the Senate, how will she vote? Suppose she were actually the marginal vote determining control of the chamber: would she support the party that kicked her out of a primary? Or the party that's been running candidates against her every six years since she got elected? I think you have the potential for one hell of an interesting dynamic here.

You Call That Federalism?

Canada, so we are told, has a federal structure, as the United States does and as France does not. There are ten provinces and they each have their own legislatures and they get to make laws for themselves, etc. But here's what an article comparing Canadian and American federalism had to say about the details of Canada's system: 1) National courts review, and interpret, provincial laws; 2) the central government participates in appointment of most provincial judges; 3) provincial governors are appointed by the national executive and can be removed (for cause) by him or her; 4) the national government may "disallow," that is to say repeal or overturn, any piece of provincial legislation within a year of its passage. That strikes me as basically adding up to a situation in which the provinces have actually zero independent power that they can exercise wholly on their own initiative. You call that federalism? To me, that sounds more like a bunch of administrative units that the fundamentally-unitary government suffers to exercise certain powers. Now, hey, I like the idea of that kind of delegated federalism (in fact I think I might write a paper about it shortly), but I still think it's weird that we consider Canada federal at all given all of this.

The Problem With Rand Paul

I just watched Rand Paul on the Daily Show, and he said a lot of very reasonable things. Things like "we ought to cut defense spending as well," or "you don't have the right to pollute your neighbor's property," or "we're a lot better off now than we were thirty or eighty years ago, in part because of an activist government." But the problem is that the lesson he draws from all of this is... being a radical conservative. Why?, one wonders.

The United States Is Smaller Today Than It Was In 1787

According to Google Maps, it takes 20 hours to walk across Rhode Island on the longest diagonal that's entirely over land, and about 5 hours to bike that same distance. It takes about 10 hours to fly from Maine to Hawaii. When this nation was founded the fastest mode of transportation available was probably the horse, which I don't imagine was much faster than bicycles are nowadays. Now we have planes. The result is that you can get all the way across the country today in only about twice the time it would have taken to traverse Rhode Island, the smallest state in the Union, back at the time of the founding.

And, of course, the time it takes to send a piece of information from Maine to Hawaii is, well, zero seconds. It still would have taken five hours to get information across Rhode Island in 1787, because communication was only as fast as transportation in those days.

Conclusion? This nation has actually shrunk a whole lot since 1787.

If I Were Terry Collins...

Based on what I've seen to this point in Spring Training, here are the players I would like to see on the Mets' Opening Day roster:

Starting Position Players:

Josh Thole (C), Ike Davis (1B), Daniel Murphy (2B), Jose Reyes (SS), David Wright (3B), Jason Bay (LF), Angel Pagan (CF), Carlos Beltran (RF)

Not a whole lot of suspense here except at second base. I think it's pretty clear that Murphy has the best bat of the four competing for the job, which includes him along with Castillo, Emaus, and Turner. In his appearances at second base so far, he's looked perfectly competent. Until or unless I saw something seriously problematic in his defense, I'd consider it his spot.

Starting Pitchers:

Mike Pelfrey (RHP), Jon Niese (LHP), R.A. Dickey (RHP), Chris Young (RHP), Chris Capuano (LHP)

Again, no surprises. The idea of kicking, say, Capuano off for Oliver Perez is laughable, I'm sorry. When/if Santana returns, I'd say Capuano should be either traded or moved to the bullpen if that seems appropriate.

My Problem With Federalism

Whenever I hear people talk about federalism, or something like the paper we're reading this week for ConLaw about what number of sub-national units are optimal for promoting a dual-federalism balance between local and federal power, is: why do I care? When we talk of America's being "dangerously close to an omnipotent federal government," what is the danger? Specifically, given that it is ultimately elected representatives making the decisions at the federal level to exercise more and more power, why should we insist that the decisions about what sorts of powers will be exercised at the national level as opposed to the local level be made in a binding fashion up-front, rather than decided by the people as they go along? I see the categorical reason for wanting to limit the sum total of government power, but I'm not entirely sure I see a categorical reason for wanting to enforce certain rules about the vertical distribution of that power even if people don't like those rules.

Relatedly, I'm intrigued by the idea of what I call delegated federalism, which I suppose isn't really federalism at all but is really just when the central government grants non-negligible discretionary power to local administrative units. It strikes me that this sort of arrangement can simultaneously tap into a lot of the benefits of locally-customizable laws and avoid a lot of the problems with the "categorical federalism" approach we take in the U.S.. Basically the key point is that the decisions about distribution of power between localities and the nationality are made at the national level as a part of the normal political process. That way, if people actually want local authority, they get it, but you won't get the same kinds of lowest-common-denominator problems or civil rights problems we get in this country.

Austerity

Apparently there's a rumor that a lot of Major League Baseball executives feel that the best chance the Wilpon family would have of retaining control of the Mets, given their financial difficulties, would be to conduct a fire sale. Get rid of Reyes, Beltran, K-Rod, Bay, even maybe David Wright, and gut the payroll down to $70 million, about half what it is currently. That way the team would be raking in net money, and they might inspire the confidence of banks that are currently uninterested in loaning the team any more money.

Reading this logic, there's only one word running through my head: austerity. That train of thought is identical to the agenda being pushed by right-wing parties in just about every industrialized nation right now. We're in financial trouble, so we must cut spending dramatically. There are, of course, two problems with the logic of austerity, however. The first is that pursuing austerity means you end up doing a really sucky job of the thing you're supposed to be doing; in the case of a baseball team that means winning baseball games, and in the case of a government it means all that stuff about providing for the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty. The second is that it's counterproductive. If you cut government spending and balance the budget during the recovery from a recession, you just might end up choking that recovery and losing lots of tax dollars, canceling out the original austerity. If you cut payroll from your big-market baseball team, hoping to pocket the resulting surplus, you are likely instead to find that nobody shows up to watch your baseball games. I'm about as die-hard a Mets fan as there is, but if the Wilpons get rid of everyone who's on the team right now it would distinctly lower my interest in going to games, or in watching games. A large part of the reason I watch Mets games right now is Jose Reyes. I will watch fewer Mets games if he's not in them. I would probably go to fewer Mets games if Reyes isn't on the team. And fewer fans in the stadium means, well, less money. So, good-bye surplus. And you just cost yourself a whole bunch of All-Star caliber players, for nothing.

Don't'cha just love conservative thinking?

Politics As Power, Part III

One interesting tie-in to this view of partisan politics as an organized struggle between the powerful and the powerless is that I think this struggle would play out very differently in a direct democracy. Suppose every political issue was settled by a plebiscite, so the people could settle different issues differently. The median voter's preferences would prevail issue by issue rather than just at-large. Think what would happen to this power struggle. In every given instance the electorate is divided into the roughly-speaking powerful and the roughly-speaking powerless. And the median voter will belong to one of these two camps. And which camp the median voter will belong to will vary considerably issue-to-issue. 4% of the electorate identified as non-straight in 2008. For the pro-gay position to win a referendum would require a lot of charity by the straight "faction" (although speaking as a straight person myself I don't really see what we're giving up by being charitable in this instance, other than the right to oppress). Women, however, are a majority, albeit a narrow one, so in theory if mobilization, organization, and solidarity were equal across the sexes then women's-rights issues would tend to win. Most people in America don't own guns. The gun-owners' position would lose, then, unless lots of non-owners voted against their interests.

What I think would happen by separating these issues is that people would behave a lot more like members of a whole bunch of factions. Nate Silver recently had a great post the key point of which, I think, was that "the truth is that none of us is just one thing." And in our political system, this means that each person is a member of a bunch of dispossessed groups (I'm an atheist and a vegetarian) and a bunch of powerful groups (I'm a straight white man), and since we only get to cast one vote these competing factional interests end up resolving one way or the other, in the aggregate. But if we had the opportunity to vote on each issue line-by-line, then (if I were voting out of solidarity with my various identities) I would vote anti-religion and pro-animal rights but also against civil rights or women's rights or LGBT rights. (Of course, I wouldn't want to vote against any of those things, but never mind that for now.) Instead I have to decide whether I identify more with my straight white male self or with my atheist vegetarian self. Then I vote, either for a Democrat or a Republican, and a bunch of other people do the same thing and we get a Congress that's either holistically pro-powerful or pro-powerless.

This relates, I think, to one of the points I made about James Madison's thinking in Federalist #10 about the problem of faction. Our political system more or less forces on us two broad-based national coalition groups, and I think this is a feature that strongly, strongly undercuts the tendency toward faction. But I also think that the simple act of having to vote once for a representative government, rather than getting to vote on each issue separately, goes a long way toward this end itself, even in a system of proportional representation. After all, even in a wild PR world, you still only get to choose one faction to completely belong to, at most. When combined with what I believe to be the nearly-inevitable tendency of political systems to equilibrate in a state of competitive balance, I think representative democracy ultimately ends up being a system for organizing a gradual power transfer away from those in whose hands it has historically been concentrated. I have a feeling that's an outcome that a lot of the people who dreamed up representative democracy a few centuries ago would be very pleased with.

Politics As Power, Continued

The other thing I have to say about my analysis that partisan politics in most liberal democracies is basically about power, and one party represents the powerful while the other party represents the powerless, is that I think it's obvious which side ought to win that struggle. Is there any principled reason for favoring power imbalances among society? There is some reason to think that achieving full economic equality would be ultimately counterproductive in terms of aggregate human happiness, since it would severely reduce material prosperity. But at most that means we should try to find the closest we can come to full economic equality without triggering too much of a reduction in GDP. And aside from this, is there a good reason why some people should have more power in society than others?

I can't really think of one, unless we want to dredge up various ancient doctrines of divine favor. Accordingly, I think it's fair to say that the "liberal" side of this fight, the side of the powerless, actually does have a relatively cohesive philosophy, and that philosophy is egalitarianism. The other side, I contend, is basically just the powerful looking at these egalitarians, who are clearly right on the abstract merits of the question, and saying, "No! Don't take my power! I like my power! You can't have it!" Then all the different Lords of Society come together and form a party to mutually defend themselves against those pesky egalitarians. So I guess there is a coherent philosophy behind the right-wing side of the battle, but the problem is that I think it's just plain greed.

Politics As Power

In conventional analysis, one of our political parties is in favor of a very strong military and in favor of government imposition of particular standards of comprehensive morality but opposed to government regulation of the economy and the other party favors a (somewhat) weaker military and more vigorous civil liberties, but greater economic intervention. Libertarians like to make fun of this. Neither party makes any sense!, they say. One party supports economic but not social liberty, while the other supports social but not economic liberty. Neither party has genuine internal philosophical cohesion, they say.

I say, that is only true if, like most libertarians, you insist upon framing every single issue in terms of the word "liberty." It's a perfectly good word. In general, more liberty is a good thing. But the thing is, there are other ways to see the world. And there's one alternative way to view politics that makes the standard partisan division in most every liberal democracy look a lot more sensible: power.

The Strange Obsession With Federalism

The Seventeenth Amendment, which made Senators elected by direct popular vote rather than selected by state legislatures, was a bad, bad thing, we are told. By drastically weakening the influence of the state governments upon the national government, the 17th Amendment threw American federalism all out of whack. Ever since then, there has been no effective power in the national government favoring the preservation of the power of state governments, and so the federal government has been appropriating more and more power onto itself. And this is bad, we are told.

Why is it bad? The Senators elected directly by the people are willing to vote for an overall federal policy that has the federal government exercising more power than a Senate chosen by state governments would. Okay. To me, as someone who believes both in democracy in general and in making democracy relatively non-convoluted, it strikes me that the problem is obviously on the side of the pre-17th Amendment-style Senate. Roughly speaking, "the Senate elected by the people" is the will of the people. So saying that the post-17th Amendment Senate has acquiesced to large expansions of federal power is saying that the people have made that acquiescence. Is there a problem here? If the American people tire of the old balance of power between the states and Washington, is there a principled reason why they shouldn't be allowed to change it? Should we bake in an institutional bias into the system that always over-accounts for the interests of state governments?

As an aside, it's not entirely true, necessarily, to say that federal power has expanded. Usage of federal power has expanded, there's no doubt about that. Say the federal government started exercising a lot more power beginning in 1937, the year the Supreme Court ratified the Second New Deal as Constitutional, and let's also say that the Court would not have upheld similar usages of federal power pre-1937. There are three possibilities. The first is that the Court would have been wrong in striking down the New Deal pre-'37. The second is that the Court has been wrong in allowing the New Deal and its progeny post-'37. The third is that something about the true, underlying constitutional order changed in 1937. There are a lot of people who believe that Door #2 is in fact the correct answer, and at least one of them is on the Supreme Court. Most, though, tend to think that the Court was mainly wrong in striking down parts of the New Deal before 1937, and that in truth most of the modern federal government is constitutional. But if you think that, then those things have been Constitutional forever, it's just that the federal government chose as a matter of policy not to do them. (Forever, or until as far back as you need to go to find a Constitutional Amendment that makes a difference.)

If you assume that the underlying true constitutional order does not actually change when the Constitution is not amended, then I would actually assert that the 17th Amendment, while it definitely changed the structure of American federalism in and of itself, did not create a climate that further eroded federalism. The net changes to the Constitution since 1913 have been either expansions of the franchise (which is admittedly a restriction on state power, but I think it's one most people would consider good) or relatively federalism-neutral things like fixing Presidential succession and establishing term limits for the President. Yes, the directly-elected Senate has probably been more willing to use the power the federal government is now generally admitted to possess. And it's possible that an indirect Senate like that of the old regime would have had a bias against confirming Justices who would interpret the Constitution in the way we typically consider correct nowadays. But that's a bug, not a feature.

The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong, Part N

Jose Reyes has often seemed like one of the best lead-off hitters in the game. For several years he blew away the rest of the league in terms of stolen bases, and on top of that he routinely racked up double-digit triples and a similar number of home runs. And he played shortstop. A great, great player, right? Well, there was just one problem: his on-base percentage. For his career it's just .335, which is not very high when you come right down to it. Even in his best years, 2006-08, he only put up a .355 OBP. And people say that OBP is really the most important thing for a leadoff hitter: you're supposed to get on base and let the big bats behind you drive you in. Steals are nice, but they're ultimately just the frills; on-base percentage is really what makes a great leadoff hitter. And .355, the thinking is, just isn't that good an OBP for a supposedly-great leadoff hitter.

But is that last bit even remotely correct? Well, consider the following: suppose that the Mets had had nothing but the '06-'08 Reyes leading off for them last year, with a .355 OBP. Among the 30 Major League teams, that would have ranked them 5th in terms of the OBP of their leadoff position, and just fractionally behind the other four. A Derek Jeter/Brett Gardner combo for the Yankees posted .358, with Gardner significantly boosting Jeter's performance. Ichiro Suzuki had .360 for the Mariners, aided by a .315 average. Rickie Weeks led the Brewers to .361. Finally, an amalgam of Stephen Drew, Chris Young, and Kelly Johnson in Phoeniz put up .368, which I think might have a little something to do with the ballpark they play in. That's it.

So why, again, do we think that .355 OBP for a guy with genuine power and the ability to steal 50 bases routinely is not good enough? Oh, Reyes, you're only in the top-5 in the league among leadoff hitters in this one thing, while being far and away the best at this other thing that's also kind of important. That's just not good enough. Like, seriously? That's ridiculous. Now, if Reyes can't recover his peak form and toodles along as his career .335-type guy, well, that would make him 10th in the league, still distinctly top half but not really much better than average. And that would be unfortunate. Likewise, it would be amazing if he could improve on it; if Reyes plays every day with a .380 OBP, I can tell you right now he would deserve to be league MVP.

The point is, I think, that people compare him to the .401 OBP career from Rickey Henderson. But here's the thing: there's a reason Rickey is the best lead-off hitter of all time by a large margin. He had something, some magic. Reyes is not as good a hitter as Rickey Henderson was. It's a shame. If he were, I think he might be looking at making a run for Rickey's steals record. But he's not. That doesn't mean, however, that he can't be the best lead-off hitter in the game today with his .355 on-base percentage. He absolutely can.

Does No One Remember the Southern Strategy?

Jon Chait has a piece arguing that, while the Tea Party genuinely does not pursue a racist political agenda, Tea Party members do hold a distinctive and deeply regressive set of opinions about racial issues. They think, for example, that anti-white racism is as big a problem as anti-black racism much more than other people, or that too much has been made of the problems facing black Americans. But, Chait says (and as far as I know he's right about this), they don't push the racial part of their ideology very much at all as a part of their public agenda.

Uh, obviously.

That's the whole point of the Southern Strategy. When Nixon decided to make an explicit play for white Southern racist voters in '68, and especially in '72, the point was not to talk about race. Rather, it was to talk about other things like welfare or crime or whatever. To the untrained ear, this sounded like it was just Nixon pursuing his conservative, law-&-order agenda. But to the racist, it sounded like what it was meant as: "let's go get those welfare-dependent, law-breaking ******s!" Dog-whistle politics. The way to do racist politics is to not talk about race, but subtly hint, in a way that those who are racists themselves will recognize, that you will pursue anti-black policies, or just that you sympathize with the racists, or something.

So consider the Tea Party. Its members hold anti-black views much more than the general populace does. Their leaders like to spend a lot of time talking about how our President, who was born in Hawaii and spent most of his life in places like Chicago, is actually a foreigner and there's been a massive conspiracy to pretend he's an American. Or that our President, who both describes himself as Christian and appears to be much more comfortable than other recent Democrats when discussing his own faith, is in reality a secret Muslim. Both are claims that would never ever in a billion years be made against a white President. Sure, people made crazy accusations against Clinton, like the whole "murder" thing, but you can tell by the fact that the specific tone of Obama's crazy accusations that they're racially derived.

Finally we have the Tea Party's agenda. The thing about the Tea Party's agenda is that it's incoherent. The only constant that I've ever seen is that anything at all that President Obama supports is evil wicked socialism that will destroy the world, and must be opposed to the utmost. Giving states increased flexibility to implement health-care laws three years earlier than would otherwise happen, a proposal that there is literally no coherent argument against? Nope. Oppose it. Never mind that it literally is a Republican proposal, right now, let alone in 1994 or even two years ago. It's all a part of the creeping tyranny. To my mind, that kind of agenda suggests strongly a personal animus against Obama himself, and a very strong one. Hmmm, what might that animus be?

And, of course, to the extent that the Tea Party does actually have an agenda or an ideology, it's a carbon copy, if not a distillation, of the same old dog-whistle issues. To the brain of a racist, "let's cut government spending" means "let's cut government handouts to black people."

The birtherism stuff is racist. The "party members" themselves are relatively speaking racist. The agenda is designed to appeal to racial animus. In what way is this not a racist movement?

(Standard disclaimer: many who identify with the Tea Party are not racist at all; it's a large movement (in absolute terms) and therefore contains a large amount of variety and, well, okay, not much diversity, but you get the point. I'm talking in the aggregate here.)

And So It Begins

First Newt Gingrich and now Trent Franks (R-AZ) have stated in public that they think Barack Obama's decision to stop defending the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court is an impeachable offense. Never mind that this is perhaps the single most absurd claim anyone has ever made. If Obama were planning on ceasing to enforce the law before it was even struck down, then you could construct an argument that this was a breach of the responsibility to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Even in that case, though, there have been lots of people through history who argued that the President may stop enforcing a law he thinks is unconstitutional. These people tend to be advocates of executive power, which is something that has by and large been a right-wing thing of late (although it does vary by who the executive is at any given time). The Eisenhower Justice Department filed an amicus brief in Brown expressing support for the plaintiffs (a.k.a. the good side). It's routine for the current Administration to argue in court that a law is unconstitutional. Hell, Bush routinely just refused to implement a law he didn't like, and Republicans loved it. The idea that this is an impeachable offense is just ridiculous.

But, as I said, that is not the point. The point is that I have been saying for a while now that Obama would be impeached by this Congress. And not because anyone in the party hierarchy wants to impeach him, or thinks it would be a good strategic move. No. He would be impeached because something would happen, some sort of mini-scandal or whatever, and some Republicans would decide it was impeachable. And then, given the fact that no Republican is ever allowed to say anything that's any more reasonable than anything any other Republican has said, even more Republicans will get on the bandwagon. And suddenly it will become the single most pressing demand of the Republican base. After all, it makes perfect sense: if Obama's an evil socialist Muslim Kenyan whose entire Presidency is unconstitutional, then, hey, why haven't you impeached him for that already? And then John Boehner will have very little choice but to accede to the tide of popular sentiment.

So here we have our first little mini-scandal, except that it's not even a scandal at all, and we see both a leading Presidential candidate (who knows a little something about frivolous impeachments) and a member of the House Judiciary committee calling for Obama's impeachment over it. If this goes all the way to the Senate (where the trial would really just be for show, because there's no chance in hell they'd convict), you heard it here first.

A Little Respect, Please?

Ruben Tejada led the Mets in hits in Spring Training last year, at the age of twenty. He's one off the pace so far in Spring Training this year, with his four hits (through eight at-bats for both) trailing only Fernando Martinez's five. Three of his four singles have driven in runs, so together with Russ Adams he leads the Mets in RBI at this stage. On his Minor League career, his basic hitting stats are .273/.343/.353, and the results in AA and AAA the last two years have been comparable to that pace at worst. (Note that another young, exciting Mets middle-infield prospect put up minor league numbers of .284/.337/.422, which are a total of .010 away from Jose Reyes' major-league .286/.335/.434 line.) Last September and October Tejada hit .284/.364/.433 in 79 PA, a very Reyes-like performance minus the blinding speed. So I ask you, whence the general sense that he is not someone who will be able to handle Major League pitching, now or ever?

I guess it must be from the fact that in his other 176 PA last year, which you'll note is not a much larger sample, Tejada hit just .181/.279/.215. But why would we believe that small sample, as opposed to the small samples that say he actually can handle himself decently and the slightly-bigger sample that suggests that he'll be able to handle himself decently once he matures? No, Ruben Tejada will never be Albert Pujols, but a brilliant defensive middle infielder who can put up decent 8-hitter-style numbers at the plate? Isn't that the kind of player who could be distinctly useful for a team? I hear he's even bulked up a little bit and is showing a bit more power right now. The Mets are what ought to be a fairly heavy-hitting team; the Reyes/Pagan/Wright/Beltran/Bay/Davis lineup is really quite intimidating if they're all there and playing remotely like themselves. If Tejada were our second baseman, we'd be one of the elite defensive teams in the league, I think. Are we really so sure that Daniel Murphy is a categorically better hitter, anyway? In his only full year of play, which was also his only year playing from CitiField, Murphy hit .266/.313/.427. I think it's obvious that Luis Castillo would be worse than Tejada both offensively and defensively. So if Tejada continues to play well this spring, I hope Terry Collins has the sense to realize that there's no reason to think he can't hold his own in the big leagues.