Careful With Those Odds

There's a story circulating today about a child born today, Leap Day, to a mother also born on Leap Day. This is presented as being a two-million-to-one event, and it's not hard to see where they get those numbers. Suppose you take a mother-child pair at random. What are the odds they'll both have been born on February 29th? Well, Leap Day occurs (roughly) once every four years, which adds up to once every 1461 days. So if one in 1461 is the odds of the mother's being born on Leap Day, and also the odds of the child's being born on Leap Day, then assuming the two are independent events the odds of the coincidence are 2,134,521-to-one.

But this isn't necessarily the right way to think about it. How surprised should I be that today, February 29th, 2012, featured a coincidence like this? Well, there are seven billion people in the world, and the global annual birth rate is roughly twenty births per thousand people. That's 140 million births in a year; in a leap year, that's 382,514 births per day on average, but let's be conservative. Let's be really conservative, actually, and say there will only be 200,000 births today. That's really conservative. Now, all of those children are born on February 29th. Now we can ask whether their mothers were also born on Leap Day, and we should expect that one in 1461 of them will have been, on average. So we should expect this two-million-to-one coincidence to occur around 130 times today. And remember, I made some quite conservative assumptions along the way. If on any given Leap Day it didn't happen that a child was born whose mother was also born on Leap Day, it would just be weird. In fact, once every eleven Leap Days or so we should expect a child born to parents both of whom were born on Leap Day.

There's another way to spot the unimpressiveness of this coincidence. For any given individual it's a two-million-to-one long shot that both they and their mother will have been born on Leap Day. But there are seven billion people in the world. So we would expect to find over 3000 such individuals alive at this moment. The world's a very big place, and something that's a two-million-to-one long shot can easily have enough opportunities to happen to be quite common overall.

State of the Senate Races

With Olympia Snowe's godsend of a retirement, and Bob Kerrey's apparent decision to jump back into the race, I think it's worth taking a fresh look at the upcoming batch of Senate elections. There are ten Republican-held seats. Of these, Maine is favored for a Democratic takeover, Massachusetts is no worse than a toss-up for the Democrats, Nevada is no worse than Leans Republican and is probably just a pure toss-up, and Arizona, though a stretch, is possible. It's unlikely that Indiana Republicans are sufficiently idiotic to ditch Richard Lugar, but if they do, that's also a potentially competitive race. In other words, on a good night it would be easy for the Democrats to win three (of ten!) Republican-held seats. If things go extremely well between now and November, we could conceivably win five.

As for Democratic-held seats, of which there are twenty-three, I think one can safely say that California, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia are pretty much safe holds. It looks very much like Bob Casey and Sherrod Brown will hold on in Pennsylvania and Ohio; likewise Debbie Stabenow in Michigan. I'd say Bill Nelson's a modest favorite to hold on to Florida. Meanwhile, I'd say we're noticeably favored to win open seats in Connecticut (which will be a net gain from the Connecticut for Lieberman Party), Hawaii, and New Mexico. Now, Virginia, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Montana are distinct toss-ups, and in North Dakota and Nebraska you'd have to say we're favored to lose. But if Kerrey is really running, then we've got strong candidates in both those states, Kerrey in Nebraska and Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota. There aren't, in other words, any Safe Republican pick-ups. A short while ago it seemed very much like there were. I'm not sure either NE or ND is more than Leans Republican.

One thing this means is that it's not inconceivable that the Democrats could actually hold on to all twenty-three of their seats. If they do, incidentally, those twenty-three Democratic Senate seats will get a lot more liberal, with Chris Murphy (probably) replacing Lieberman and Kerrey replacing Nelson. Now it would certainly be impressive if we manage to do this, and it would take quite a good night indeed, but recent elections have tended to be very good for one side or the other, and I honestly don't think 2012 is going to be a Very Good Night for the Republicans.

At the very least, it looks like the Republican effort to take back the Senate is a lot harder than it used to be. I'd estimate two seats where Democrats are favored to pick up a Republican seat, and also two where Republicans are favored to pick up a Democratic seat. That leaves five toss-ups, of which four are Democratic-held. A very rough estimate of expected results, then, might be Republicans +1.5 seats on the night, which would not be enough to make Mitch McConnell majority leader.

It's a pretty good week so far, in other words. And Santorum hasn't even won Michigan thereby throwing the Republican primary into even further chaos yet!

On Olympia Snowe's Retirement

First of all, this is the best news I've heard in a very long time.

Second of all, I entirely sympathize with her lack of interest in continuing to be a Senator. I particularly empathize with her lack of interest in continuing to be a Republican Senator; she is probably the person for whom living under Mitch McConnell's party discipline regime is the most onerous, and most requires her to support positions she doesn't actually believe in. That's got to be fairly little fun.

But as this little post on TalkingPointsMemo notes, her statement reads almost exactly like Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN)'s retirement statement. Washington's so damn partisan, and the Senate particularly so, so they're getting out to make a difference. But, uh, guys? You know how you make a difference? You stay and fight. Being a U.S. Senator means you have a whole lot of Power. Formally, you have one-hundredth of one-half of one-third of the power of the U.S. government, which is one-six-hundredth of the largest power in the world. Informally, people like Snowe and Bayh, by positioning themselves as marginal Senators on numerous issues, had much more real-life power than that. If centrist-y types like the two of them, Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, etc. would stick around instead of retiring and being replaced by generic partisans, there would be a substantial bloc of moderates in the Senate who could rule the chamber if they wanted to.

But if they just retire, and become lobbyists or whatever else they do (and, by the way, Senator Snowe: please, please, please run on the Americans Elect ticket this fall. Please!), then all they've done is give up the better part of their ability to change the world in ways they want.

Love: You're Doing it Wrong

The following are quotes from an antebellum Southerner, in 1854, in a book describing the ideal Southern society:

"A man loves his children because they are weak, helpless, and dependent; he loves his wife for similar reasons. ... He ceases to love his wife when she becomes masculine or rebellious."

"So long as she is nervous, fickle, capricious, delicate, diffident, and dependent, man will worship and adore her ... If she be obedient, she is in little danger of mal-treatment; if she stands upon her rights, is coarse and masculine, man loathes and despises her, and ends by abusing her. Law, however well-intended, can do little in her behalf."

There's a lot to say about that, or perhaps not so much a lot to say as a very little bit to say very emphatically, but my particular observation is that this guy clearly has a strange concept of love. Weakness, helplessness, and dependency are things which naturally inspire pity, and maybe perhaps a feeling of protectiveness. Love is not pity and protectiveness; it may include these things, if a loved one is, you know, weak, helpless, and dependent, although in its best forms it should also probably include a desire to help change those circumstances. I think what this guy really means is that, so long as his wife is properly submissive in the way described, a man will "love" the feeling he gets from his dominion over her. But, uh, "I love having dominion over you" is very different from "I love you." You're doing it wrong, antebellum Southerners.

The Tea Party Are Not Civil Libertarians, Okay?

Toward the end of a blog post about an apparently-dead-or-at-least-comatose NSA proposal to, I dunno, surveil the Internet more than the government already does, Kevin Drum tosses this line into an attempt to analyze the partisan breakdown of the issue:

Obviously the GOP base is inclined to think that anything Obama opposes must be good, and they certainly supported the increased surveillance powers that George Bush gave to NSA. On the other hand, tea partiers tend to be suspicious of this kind of Big Brotherish monitoring.

But the problem is, there's just no truth to this! At no point has the Tea Party in any noticeable way made any sign that it opposes the security state! They love the security state, as well they should, as they're just the very most conservative of conservative Republicans. Because if you're against surveillance, you must be for the people we want to surveil, which means you support the Islamofascists in their efforts to take over America and impose Sharia law here. Of all the many, many things to mind about the mainstream media over the past few years, perhaps the one I mind the most is the way absolutely no one challenges the assertion that the Tea Party is about libertarianism. It just is not. True, the movement is in some ways inspired by Ron Paul's quasi-libertarian campaign from 2008, but they've taken all of the least libertarian parts of his platform and ditched the parts that make one kind of almost admit that he's an actual civil libertarian. It's just one great big lie that the Tea Party opposes "Big Brother" government surveillance programs. It's just a lie.

On Posthumous Mormon Conversion

I should preface this by saying that the Mormon custom of posthumously baptizing various "heathen" types, like Jewish holocaust victims, is weird in the extreme and kind of sick. Moreover, it's patently offensive, in the strict sense; it sends a clear message of "y'all are inferior and need our help," and there's every reason to find that message kind of offensive. And the All Dead Mormons Are Now Gay thing is bloody brilliant; these sickos deserve every little bit of messing-with we can give them, both for the weird posthumous conversion thing and for their general homophobia.

But I personally, as a strong atheist, find that the whole thing is just not a big deal. The people in question are dead. It doesn't, and can't, matter to them, because they're dead! It's just a bunch of lunatics dancing around in funny patterns and chanting absurd phrases in dark rooms in Utah. It's a nothing. Absolutely nothing about the universe, or the well-being of the dead persons in question, changes because of these absurd/obscene little rituals. You can't posthumously convert someone to Mormonism, because religious adherence requires a living mind to do the adhering. The Mormon Church can write down Anne Frank's name in a list of Mormons somewhere, but so what? That doesn't actually matter one tiny little bit.

Like I said, that doesn't change the fact that they're what I can only justly refer to as sick fucks for doing this, or the fact that it is offensive and should be considered offensive. But aside from the offensiveness thing, this isn't some big terror they're inflicting upon the world. It's just their own little insanity in their own little world.

Bring Back 30-Day Sentences!

I'm sitting in my Law & Society class learning that, when people are considering the possibility of sanctions in considering whether to commit a crime, the certainty of a punishment matters a whole lot more than the severity. So, in other words, if Sanction A is a 50% chance of a 1-year jail sentence and Sanction B is a 25% chance of a 2-year jail sentence, both of which give an Expected Value punishment of six months, most people will be more scared of Sanction A than Sanction B. This is interesting for the death penalty debate, since trying to impose the death penalty makes it much harder to get the punishment imposed. But I think it's also interesting because over the past many decades we've moved away from giving people a 30-day sentence for run-of-the-mill offenses. This is probably a mistake, since it's probably easier to give people 30-day sentences than five-year ones. It's also vastly less destructive of social well-being. At the very least we wouldn't suffer much of a reduction in deterrence, and we'd move away from our 'throw everyone in jail forever' society.

Maybe Plane Crashes Are Scary

In this same paper on political psychology, in describing the quirks of human judgment, they mention how vastly many more people die from heart disease than in plane crashes, and yet people will avoid flying because they're scared but don't change their American lifestyles. But I wonder, is this irrational? Death of heart disease takes a mighty long time, and to avoid it you have to radically alter the way you eat and your general habits. A plane crash snuffs out the rest of your life in an instant, and can be avoided by the fairly modest practice of just not flying. After all, no one flew until pretty recently, and you can get from anywhere on earth to anywhere else on earth, more or less, without going in airplanes. So yeah, "plane crash" would be a much less common response from the Machine of Death than "heart disease," but that doesn't necessarily mean it's irrational to try to avoid one and not the other.

(Full disclosure: I've never flown, and I've always been a little scared of it.)

The Overton Window, Political Psychology, and Stare Decisis

I found this paragraph in my recent reading about political psychology very interesting:

"For example, Tversky demonstrated that most people possess a natural aversion to extreme options or situations. Thus, just by creating one more extreme option, a manipulative adviser can encourage a decision maker to choose the middle option that would have previously appeared unacceptable without the contrast effect of the even more extreme additional option."

This is, of course, exactly what the Republicans have been doing for the last few decades. You start out with a world with the Democratic option and the Republican option. Now the political consensus does not accept either option in its pure form. But the Republicans are smart, they get psychology. So they change their position, make it more extreme. Now their old position isn't extreme anymore, and thus becomes more acceptable.

I feel like there's a kind of political stare decisis. Political issues are raised, and debated, and then society comes up with an answer. Then we treat that answer as settled, and move on to the next issue, and by and large we don't reopen settled issues. In the 1930s, for instance, we had a big huge discussion about, basically, socialism. And we decided that government pensions and disability/unemployment insurance, some assistance for the poor, and public works programs, were okay. Later we also decided to annex medical care to those provisions for the elderly and poor. But anything beyond that, any kind of proper social democracy the way the European countries do it, is off-limits. Now, there are many of us who dislike that conclusion. Maybe it's a third of the populace; maybe a bit less. But we understand, at the organized political level anyway, that it's a settled question. We're not going to get that verdict overturned, so we stay quiet about the whole thing. Quieter than we'd like to.

The main thing Republicans have done over the past few years, I think, is stop respecting that consensus of stare decisis. They're advocating that we overturn essentially every political decision this country's made against them for the last hundred-and-thirty years. And so many people, scared at the extremity of the vision Republicans are currently advocating, try to appease them by offering what they used to want. Sure private retirement accounts, deregulation, and tax cuts seemed extreme ten short years ago, but if we can avoid banning contraception and abolishing the welfare state altogether it's a small price to pay, right? I don't know if it's cynically intentional, but one way or another the Republicans have been masters of advocating for more than their original position so they get their original position. Democrats are too nice to fight back. We won't say, en masse, "let's nationalize industry!" so that people will accept a simple public option for health care. We just accept the consensus, and refuse to exploit a quirk of human psychology. Asymmetrical politics.

You Can Make a Utility Function for Literally Anything

The idea behind the "rational choice" theory of decision-making, and its applications in numerous fields including both economics and international relations (the latter of which I'm currently taking a course on), is that individual people are rational actors who behave so as to maximize the attainment of their goals, to maximize their "utility." Now, since economists came up with this theory (and have been using it for centuries!), there's also a tendency within the field to assume that individual preferences are extremely standard. People want food, shelter, to continue living. They want money. They might want a few other things, too, like a decent romantic relationship (or, as my professor cynically boiled that notion down, they want sex), but for examining economics or international relations you don't need to worry about that stuff. And of course, people are all quite similar in their wanting of these basic things, so we can treat people as more-or-less interchangeable.

Now, of course, this leads to a picture of the world that's radically inaccurate. Human beings are wildly complex. Their desires are myriad and mysterious, often even to themselves. They behave in weird and unpredictable (or at least, damn hard to predict) ways. And they're all spectacularly different from each other, even when they're quite similar. The psychology of the individual, or in the words of Bertie Wooster, "what they're like," matters quite a lot. So of course the people who believe, rightly, in the psychology of the individual as an important sort of thing form various sorts of movements, like behavioral economics and political psychology, that rebel against the extreme modelling of rational-choice. And they're certainly right to do so, given how the phrase "rational-choice" has played out historically.

But consider the following passage from the article on political psychology I'm currently reading:

"Most rational choice approaches argue that people will seek to maximize their utility; they may not get the outcome they prefer for a whole host of external reasons, but they do not neglect actions designed to maximize their self-interest. From this perspective, it is difficult to explain why rational actors would engage in self-destructive behavior, such as drug addiction, without perverting the notion of self-interest."

That last sentence is only true if we assume that our rational choice theorist is also a paternalist, i.e. someone who assumes he knows what another human being's utility function is. In this particular case, our paternalist is insisting that the drug addict cannot possibly have a utility function which prefers addiction to sobriety. There's no particular reason, from a theoretical standpoint, to assume this. (When making public policy we might decide to be paternalistic in a case such as this, and decide that this person's utility function should prefer that they get clean, but that's a different story.) You can make a utility function for literally any set of preferences. Suicide can easily be explained within a rational-choice approach by simply asserting/assuming that, at the time of suicide, the person in question preferred to die. In my Law & Society class we're about to contrast rational-choice with "normative" theories of decision-making, in which people are motivated by an internal sense of morality. There's no conflict here! Just say that people, or some people anyway, derive utility from behaving consistently with their internal sense of morality. Now a rational-choice approach will show you a world in which people are motivated by their internal sense of morality. However in the entire world you want to explain people's decision-making processes, whatever preferences or desires or animal instincts you ascribe to people, you can just make a utility function incorporating those features. It's really that easy.*

I Don't Get It

PublicPolicyPolling recently asked voters nationwide whether they had a favorable or unfavorable impression of each of the 43 men who have been President of the United States (with the option, of course, of "don't know"). Now, it can be a little tricky to compare these ratings since name recognition, which I define as the percentage giving an answer either way, varies from a low of 16% for Franklin Pierce to a high of 95% for Barack Obama. Is a 12%/9% approval rating better or worse than a 42%/39% one? But looking at the numbers can show us some interesting, and at times perplexing, things:

Are We Sure the Draft's Constitutional?

During the Civil War, the Union government instituted a draft to supplement the ranks of the army as the war took its toll over the first couple of years. Many Northerners didn't much like this. In fact, much Northern rhetoric against the draft compared it to slavery, and you can see why: slavery and conscription are both, very literally speaking, forms of involuntary servitude. I think this fact, that many Northerners thought a draft akin to slavery, interesting in light of the World War One-era Supreme Court case rejecting a claim that the draft was unconstitutional. Only in one paragraph near the very end of the opinion does the Court even consider the Thirteenth Amendment claim, i.e. the claim that a draft is involuntary servitude, and hence proscribed by the same Amendment that abolished slavery. The Court basically just laughed this claim out of court, basically just saying that something so noble as fighting to defend your country could never be the same thing as the degradation of slavery. But people didn't necessarily agree with the Court when conscription was new in the North. Of course you can't really make the argument anymore, because slavery has a kind of Godwin's Law-esque status that you're not allowed to compare anything to it. But on the merits, I think it's hard to argue that a draft isn't involuntary servitude, and we know that it's not clearly true that in the language of 1865 no one would've thought that the words "involuntary servitude" could refer to the draft. Maybe the draft is unconstitutional after all.

Life Without the Confederacy

I've been reading a book about the motives of soldiers in the Civil War, and thinking more broadly about why the North fought that war. Obviously I'm glad they did, and I'm glad they won, both because slavery is one of the most wicked human institutions ever devised and the Confederacy was the last great bastion of official slavery in the "developed" world and because my grandfather was from Texas, and it might've been harder for him to come to the Northeast and become one of my ancestors if there were a national boundary running in between. But apparently late in the war many in the South were thinking that, if they could salvage their liberty and independence by jettisoning slavery, it was a sacrifice worth making. Suppose the war had resulted in an independent Confederacy in which slavery had been abolished. What would politics look like in 2012, at home here in the Union?

Well, if we just subtract the states of the former Confederacy, by which I mean Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee, we would find that the current Congress would feature 47 Democratic Senators and 29 Republican ones. That's a 61.8% Democratic chamber, instead of the current 53%. Nancy Pelosi would be Speaker of the House. And this would be a winning electoral map for President Obama this November:

In fact it would be the winning map of least resistance; in other words, that's the unique winning map for Obama where you give him the states he won by the biggest margins in 2008, in descending order, until he's got a majority, and then stop. Realistically one might add New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New Mexico to that map without being overly aggressive, which would give him a two-thirds electoral majority.

Now, of course, that's not what would actually happen. Instead, both parties would find themselves shifted a good deal to the left, because the median voter they both had to appeal to would be further left. In fact, we would have had two parties neither of which needed the support of racist Southern whites for the last 150 years. It's a bit depressing to think about how much better American public policy might be right now had that happened.

(Although to be fair, public policy in the territory of the former Confederate states would probably be a good deal worse.)

Not What I Meant

In my Law & Society class we were just asked to give an example of an archetypal "cultural conflict"-type law, and I responded by mentioning the issues of gay marriage and contraception, which have been in the news lately. My professor's interpretation of how the contraception issue fits into that framework was that the Catholic institutions were claiming that a majority ideology they don't endorse was being imposed on them. That's not what I meant. The anti-contraception types are trying to impose their (very, very minority) ideology on everyone else. I suppose you can see it either way, depending on whom you're sympathetic to, but given how few people actually have an objection to contraception I think it's hard to really endorse the Church's claims that it's being victimized here.

In Defense of James Buchanan

James Buchanan's December 1860 State of the Union speech is notable for his opinion that, on the one hand, secession from the Union (which was imminent in many states) was unconstitutional, and on the other hand, the federal government had no constitutional authority to coerce seceded states back into the Union. William Seward mocked this by summing it up as saying that no state has the right to secede, unless it wants to. And, of course, it's pretty hard to defend James Buchanan's conduct of the early secession crisis. But I think it's worth pointing out that there's a strong argument that Buchanan's model of secession is a valid one, philosophically speaking. After all, the United States, and particularly liberals within the United States, often do support secessionist movements around the world. We recently masterminded the brokering of the secession of South Sudan.

The crucial point here is that, pre-secession, a given state is still bound by the Constitution. And the Constitution, of course, does not permit secession! But if a state declares its independence from that Constitution, does it really care any more what its rights would have been under that Constitution? Nope. At this point that state views itself as independent, and as having its relations with its former sovereign governed only by the laws of international relations. And if that new state is genuinely independent, then does its former sovereign have the right to coerce it back into the fold? Of course not! That's just ordinary imperialist conquest, which we generally frown upon. So no constitutional right to secede, but once you've seceded you don't care about constitutional rights anymore and there's no constitutional authority for your former sovereign to coerce you back into the fold. That's exactly what Buchanan was saying, and it's perfectly sensible as a general rule.

So why don't we think, in retrospect, that Buchanan was right? I think it's mainly because the Confederacy was wrong on the merits, i.e. they were seceding to protect a singularly wicked institution, slavery. But this is not a question of the law, of the constitutional order. It's a question of a higher moral law. South Sudan's secession was justified, though I'm sure the Sudanese Constitution didn't permit it, because they were being oppressed and planned to create a better state. So no, of course the federal Constitution did not permit secession. This does not settle the question of whether that secession was justified, though, or whether a Northern war to bring them back would be justified. Only the fact that the Confederacy existed for the sake of moral wrongness can settle that issue.

And, of course, Buchanan was wrong on that score.

Yep, We Wanted to Destroy Your Way of Life

I just had the delightful experience of reading an essay about antebellum (white, male) Southern ideology. Specifically this article tried to link the inegalitarian pro-slavery ideology with the more broadly inegalitarian philosophy of Southern life as a whole, particularly as it related to women. In the course of the article you really get a sense of how repulsive this culture was. I particularly love the quotes from Southern politicians talking about how abolition of slavery would just be the thin end of the wedge, and once the North had managed that change they'd soon destroy all of the relationships upon which a proper Christian-republican society rested. The Northerners weren't just coming for slavery, they warned, they were coming for the entire Southern way of hierarchical life.

Yep! Or, if we weren't then, we certainly should've been and are now. The antebellum Southern social structure sucked! In many ways and on many levels! Millions upon millions of people were treated like dirt, and if not, it's because I'm being unfair to the way we treat dirt. The oppressive nature of marriage in the antebellum South needed abolishing every bit as much as slavery. So did the oppressive nature of parenting. It was just an oppressive sort of place. Southern society, at least insofar as it was defined by that oppression (and I think it was defined pretty far by that oppression), needed to be destroyed wholesale.