The Outdated Logic of Federalism

When, in the 1770s and 1780s, the Founding Fathers set out to create a government for the colonies that were declaring their independence from the British empire, they faced what they thought was a big problem: the new nation was too big. They were committed to representative, republican government, see, and it was received wisdom that democratic forms of government just didn't work except in very small settings. A city-state like Athens? Fine. But a country sprawling over hundreds of thousands of square miles, most of them rural? It had never been done, and they assumed it couldn't be done. The logistics of governing so much territory, and of trying to have engagement and feedback by the citizenry on a regular basis, would just be too difficult. Thus, federalism, which maintains the smaller state governments as the primary--and independent--bases of day-to-day governing. Because the states were closer to the people, literally, they would be more responsive to those people, and everything would be great.

World Series Upset Odds

Just for fun I decided to make some rough calculations about the odds of each team's winning the World Series based on assumptions about how likely they are to win each game. To simplify matters I'm ignoring the whole "clinching" thing, and just treating the Series as a seven-game series, 4 games to win. So seven-game shutouts are a possibility in my calculations. I imagine that this doesn't actually affect the odds; the entire premise of clinching is that it shouldn't. The first thing I tried was a 3-1 ratio, i.e. one team having a 75% chance of winning each game. This struck me as a decent approximation for the odds if you pitted the best team against the worst team from a given year of Major League Baseball, though it's obviously just a wild guess. The better team has a 93% chance of winning at least four of seven games. An 80% favorite game-by-game is a 96.7% favorite overall. 70%-30% gives you an 87.4% chance of a non-upset; 2-1 odds in each game give roughly 5-1 odds for the series as a whole. 60%-40% favorites have 71% chances of winning; 55%-45% gives 61%; 51%-49% gives 52%. Overall there's a genuine tendency to exaggerate the tendencies of a single game, as well there should be for a larger sample size, but for modest advantages game-by-game that effect is quite modest as well. A 19-game season series magnifies just a 51%-49% advantage in each game to a roughly 5-3 advantage overall, at 62.5%. You only need a 62% chance of winning each game of that season series to have a 90% chance of winning the series itself. Seven games really isn't enough to get away from the small-sample-size effects. Or, in other words, every World Series is pretty much a toss-up, assuming both teams were above-average MLB teams from that year.

A General Theory of Offensiveness

Apparently Mitt Romney recently acquired a new Head PR Guy, who promptly tweeted various offensive things, including that Rachel Maddow looks like a man and needs to put on a necklace. Like I said, offensive. But this actually puts me in mind of my recently-formulated general theory of offensiveness: things are directly offensive to a person insofar as they deny the reality or legitimacy of their existence or their experiences. I say "directly offensive" because, if people have a general level of empathy and kindness/decency, something that's directly offensive to one person/group will also be offensive to other people not in that group, but not because their existence has been denied etc. So in that quote from the Romney guy, the offensive part is that he's denying that Rachel Maddow has a legitimate right to exist independent of how well she satisfies this guy's notion of what women should be like.

This theory helps explain why I find a certain kind of anti-internet thinking distinctly offensive. Specifically I mean the strain of thought that says interactions on the internet don't count, or aren't really real, or don't involve genuine connections between people. As someone who's pretty sure he routinely uses the internet in ways that are distinctly real, and do involve actual human connection, I tend to feel like these claims are simply denying that experiences like mine could exist. And that's offensive.

I'm not certain, obviously, but I have a hunch that one would find that nearly every instance of something's being offensive could be rather neatly explained under this framework.

You Can Always Count on Goodwin Liu

More affirmative action. I'm only a very little bit into the reading from Goodwin Liu, published in 2002 i.e. while the Michigan cases were matriculating through the federal courts, and he's already made a great point. The plaintiff (well, okay, defendant by the time it got to the Supreme Court, but still, he was the plaintiff) in the Bakke case alleged that he was better-qualified, in terms of MCAT scores and science-courses GPA, than students admitted under the racial quota program. This is true; indeed, it is dramatically true. But he was also better "qualified," along these axes, than most of the people granted "normal" admission, i.e. who were given one of the non-quota slots. Despite being so extremely well "qualified," in terms of test scores and grades, he went 0-11 in applying to medical schools. As Liu puts it:

"Whatever Bakke's weaknesses were, there were several reasons, apart from affirmative action, that might have led the medical school to reject his application. Grades and test scores do not tell us the whole story."

In this particular case, apparently someone who gave Bakke an admissions interview thought him "rather limited in his approach" to medical problems. Liu then goes on to note that removing even the rigid quota of the California system, where 16 of 100 spots were reserved for minorities, would only increase the odds of acceptance extremely modestly for an applicant not benefiting from the quota: from 2.7% to 3.2% among all applicants, and from 16% to 19% among applicants who advanced to the interview stage. It's an extremely important statistical point, that because minorities are, you know, minorities, the boost in admissions-likelihood given to each beneficiary of racial affirmative action is significantly larger than the damage done to the admissions-likelihood of each non-beneficiary. And that sends us back to the point that college admissions is finicky, there are always lots of really good applicants, and you are almost certainly getting rejected (or wait-listed, in Ms. Gratz' case) for some reason idiosyncratic to you, or because they just can't take everyone, or whatever. You probably wouldn't have gotten one of the spots that went to an affirmative-action beneficiary. So get over it.

Thoughts on Affirmative Action

I have the occasion today to do some reading about affirmative action, including selections from Charles Ogletree, Goodwin Liu, Glenn Loury, Carol Moseley-Braun, and, uh, Clarence Thomas. (The last of which is just an excerpt from his dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger.) These selections tend to focus on the 2003 University of Michigan cases, Grutter and Gratz v. Bollinger. I may have more thoughts later, but right now I have what I think basically forms one overarching one: the arguments against affirmative action rely on a deep sense of entitlement. No, not racial entitlement, not the entitlement of white people to own the world, although that is probably a component for many opponents of affirmative action.

It's a more complex form of entitlement than that, and it's well-illustrated by the details given in one of these readings that's basically a biography of Jennifer Gratz, the successful plaintiff in the suit against Michigan's undergraduate admissions system. The University of Michigan had always been her dream school (as she was born and raised in Michigan), and she devoted all her energies toward getting into it. She had a 3.8 GPA, good test scores, loads of extracurricular activities, etc. And apparently, she was "so confident that she'd make the cut at Michigan that she applied to no other colleges." Now, from my own experience of applying to college a few years back, I recall being told over and over by my high school's college prep people that nothing was ever a guarantee. 1600 SAT's and a 4+ GPA (we had GPA's that went above 4.0) weren't a guarantee, anywhere really but especially at the most selective schools. Anywhere you apply, you might be rejected, so be prepared for this both practically (by applying to lots of places) and emotionally. Jennifer Gratz was apparently not emotionally prepared, and sued.*

This is the attitude, the sense of entitlement. It's the idea that, if you have GPA X and Test Scores Y, and you don't get admitted to a school where most people with those numbers did get in, you've been mistreated. Seriously, who the hell sues because they don't get in to college? College admissions are far more subtle capricious than that. Ogletree's contribution to this reading mentions this point, that everyone on the right talks like a "meritocracy" is a) desirable, and b) a simple matter of making admission dependent upon nothing but test scores and grades. That isn't how it works, that's never been how it works, get over it.

Define "Learning"

I am not going to respond in-depth to today's David Brooks column about college, for various reasons. But I was struck by this early paragraph:

Colleges are supposed to produce learning. But, in their landmark study, “Academically Adrift,” Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that, on average, students experienced a pathetic seven percentile point gain in skills during their first two years in college and a marginal gain in the two years after that. The exact numbers are disputed, but the study suggests that nearly half the students showed no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years in college.

There's a bit of conflation here, isn't there, between "leaning" and "skills"? Okay, learning skills is often an important part of learning, but learning stuff is also a big, important part. Not to brag or anything, but I think my critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills were all pretty damn good when I got to college. I'm not really sure they've improved all that much. But, have I learned anything? Hell yes! I've learned a whole big bunch of stuff, knowledge, facts, and also, by the way, some more specialized skills and techniques like abstract algebra and complex analysis. I've learned about scores of legal cases, I've read thousands of pages of political philosophy, I learned a bit of astronomy and a bit of economics and bits of history. I've learned plenty. Other people have learned plenty, too. And I bet that in most career-preparation graduate schools, like medical schools or law schools, almost everything you learn is either facts or specialized skills, not broad-based skills like the ones Brooks mentions. Arguably the idea behind the educational system is that the pre-college levels help you learn how to do the basic thinking stuff he's describing, and then once you get to college you use those basic skills for higher learning. If people don't improve in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing while at college, maybe that's because they've been getting better at those things before they walk in the door.

Now, I don't know that that's the correct explanation for what's going on. And I certainly don't dispute the basic idea that judging education institutions on the quality of their inputs is silly. But it doesn't make sense to expect colleges, in an ideal system at least, to be the place where people learn the basics of how to think. That should have already happened, and in college you should get to learn stuff.

One Political Rule to Rule Them All

Harry Enten had a column in the Guardian recently about political "rules." You know, like "incumbents never win re-election with approval ratings below 50%." Until, of course, they do. The basic conclusion of the article is the very sensible one, namely that, since in each election one can find scores of rules saying that both candidates simply must win, the rules are basically bunk. Like I said, this is basically sensible, but there's one rule of which I'm rather fond: no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio. I like this because it makes sense, and it illustrates the one long-term constant of American partisan politics. Ohio is the state which, perhaps more than any other, embodies the business interest. Other industrial Northern states tend to contain bigger, denser cities, leading to more sympathy for the workers and liberalism in general; Southern and Western states typically have non-industrial concerns. But in Ohio, businessmen, business owners, and capitalists generally tend to be the dominant political group. And the only thing that's been a fixed point in the American political scene is that the Republican Party is pro-business. They were pro-business under Lincoln, pro-business under McKinley, pro-business under Coolidge and Hoover and Nixon and Reagan and Bush. It makes sense that if they couldn't even convince Ohio, the natural dwelling-place of their basic historical constituency, to vote for them, they wouldn't have much luck convincing the nation as a whole.

Adventures in Weird: Romney Handicap Edition

Regular readers, if there are any, may recall my notion of the "Romney handicap," a figure calculated by subtracting President Obama's net job approval from his margin over Mitt Romney in a general election trial heat in any given poll. Well, here's an oddity. A recent CNN/ORC poll showed Obama with 48/47 approval numbers, for a +1 margin. They also show general election results of Obama 53%, Romney 41%. That's a +12 margin, for an 11-point Romney Handicap. But the weird thing is, that same poll showed Mitt Romney with 44/43 favorability numbers, an identical margin to Obama's approval rating. Weird, right? Why, if he's equally popular, is Mitt Romney giving Obama so much of a handicap?

Well, it's because this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, favorability versus approval. Obama's favorability numbers in this same poll are 56% favorable, 42% unfavorable. So he's got a +14 margin on favorability, Romney's got a +1 margin, and when you run them against each other Obama's got a +12 margin. Sounds about right. This makes me wonder whether the focus on approval rating might not be misplaced. Perhaps we should be looking at favorability ratings; after all, you can't have an approval rating for a challenger. Maybe the true rule isn't that Presidents need 50% approval to win re-election, but rather 50% favorability. Or maybe I'm just taking one slightly kooky poll result and drawing way too many conclusions from it. But it's a phenomenon to keep an eye on, if you like keeping an eye on esoteric polling phenomena.

Sorting Hat: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Recently I decided to re-read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, the Harry Potter-inspired fanfic by Eliezer Yudkowsky a.k.a. Less Wrong. There's a lot of discussion in HPMoR about the Hogwarts Houses, what they truly stand for and how all of that gets corrupted by the polarization of the Muggleborn issue, and therefore the whole Death Eater/anti-Death Eater axis, around the time of the story. This has inspired in me the impulse to Sort characters from various other fictional universes into the four Hogwarts Houses. See this previous post, in which I Sorted figures from American political history, for some guidelines, although my Rules of Sorting won't be exactly the same since politics has its own particular pathologies, specifically the ubiquity of ambition. Anyway, for my first foray into Sorting other fictional universes, let's try the Buffyverse! (Obviously, if you're not familiar with Buffy the Vampire Slayer or its spin-off show Angel, don't read this. In fact, let's say don't read this if you haven't watched both of those shows in their entirety, unless you don't mind spoilers.)

Everything's an Imposition!

Literally, everything. On everyone. Everything is an imposition on everyone. At least, that's the logical conclusion of the logic by which religious conservatives like to claim that various liberal secular policies, like gay marriage or widespread contraceptive use, constitute an imposition on them which is contrary to their religious liberty. As I understand it, this argument makes heavy use of the notion that by, say, performing gay marriages, the government imposes on these people the burden of living in a society featuring married gay people. (Okay, sometimes they also like to hyperventilate about the idea that their churches might be forced to gay-marry people, but since they're never placated when it's pointed out that this is just not true...) But that construction quite literally has no limits whatsoever. Once we accept the idea that living in a society where X happens is an imposition or an infringement, those concepts explode across all of existence.

Because any time I do something, anything at all, I impose on you the fact that you're living in a world where I just did the thing I did. And there's nothing you can do about it! I don't ask your permission, and unless you're one of the very few people within a short radius of my current location you don't have the power to stop me. I simply act, and in acting force you to inhabit a reality in which my action occurred. So any time I do anything, or any time anyone else does anything, it's an imposition on everyone. And not just on everyone in the country. Not even just on everyone on the planet! Though I don't know it, I am forced to live in a reality that includes all the actions of any other life forms there may be scattered throughout the universe. And I am forced to live in a reality that includes all the actions of any life forms that may have existed, anywhere in the universe, prior to the present. That means that anytime I act, I impose the fact of my action on everyone everywhere in the universe, from now to eternity. That's a lot of people!

It goes farther than that, I think. Because notice that I'm not constrained by the flow of information here: I live in a reality which contains actions I don't know about. And because information isn't particularly important here, there's no reason to obey things like relativity. I wouldn't say, for instance, that I haven't imposed my action on the Sun People (if they existed, which I assume they don't) until 8 minutes after I act, that being the minimum time required for them to receive information of my action. But if I don't have to wait for the information to arrive before I can start imposing on people, why should I not get to impose on people in the past? They were, after all, living in a reality that contained my action; they were just at a different, and earlier, point in time. That does mean they can't know they inhabit the same reality as my action, but it doesn't mean they don't so inhabit. And while knowledge of the imposition is presumably prerequisite for complaining about the imposition, it would seem not to be necessary for the imposition itself.

So there you go. If we accept the idea that allowing other people who happen to be gay to get married constitutes an imposition on religious conservatives who wish that didn't happen, then we must accept that everything anyone ever does is an imposition on everyone everywhere in the universe who ever lived or ever will. Every action is then an infringement of the rights of everyone throughout all of time and space who wishes that action hadn't happened, or would so wish if they knew about it.

Actually, when you put it that way, maybe this is a pretty good argument, if just for the timey-wimeyness!

A Liberal Man's View of the Gender Gap

It sucks! Why should women get to have all the fun of being responsible for re-electing President Obama? Don't get me wrong, it's great that women are clever enough to figure out that voting for a Republican would be very very bad for them, and are hence planning to support Obama by landslide margins over the now-officially-inevitable Republican nominee Mitt Romney. But it's not like a Romney Presidency wouldn't also suck for those human beings in this country who happen to have a Y chromosome. We should be giving Obama a landslide, too! Guys, what's wrong with us? Shape up!

(This, of course, being just one facet of the generally-frustrating experience of being a member of quite a few oppressor groups, but being utterly opposed to those groups continuing to have their oppressor status.)

An Observation on the Fundamental Asymmetry of Platoon Splits

For his career, David Wright, a right-handed batter, has feasted on left-handed pitching. While he's hit for a .288/.364/.483 line against righties, he owns a .341/.434/.591 mark against lefties. Unfortunately for him, though not surprisingly, he's got 3623 plate appearances against right-handers, and just 1177 against left-handers. That leads to an overall performance of .301/.381/.509. If he had faced left-handed pitching as often as he's faced right-handed pitching, and vice-versa, those numbers would jump to .328/.416/.564. He would have, in the same number of plate appearances, 83 more hits, 42 more doubles, 16 more home runs, 2 more triples, giving him 178 more extra bases, 85 more walks against 168 fewer strikeouts. 58 of those extra walks would be intentional ones. He'd ground into 7 fewer double plays, while notching 2 more sacrifice flies, reaching on six more errors, and being hit by three more pitches. Okay, most of those last ones might be random statistical anomaly, as might be his five fewer runs driven in. The basic point is, though, that if lefties were as plentiful as righties and righties as scarce as lefties, David Wright would look a lot like Albert Pujols.

That's not really surprising: a righty, who naturally does so much better against lefties, would prefer for there to be more lefties and fewer righties. But the real point is that we react to David Wright as being dramatically better against lefties, but to Darryl Strawberry, say, as having been dramatically worse against lefties, rather than saying he was better against righties. Straw's OPS was .914 against right-handers, and just .763 against lefties; Wright's are .846 and 1.025 respectively. Those are very similarly-sized gaps. But because left-handers are so much scarcer than right-handers, David's numbers look overall closer to his (worse) performance vs. righties, and Darryl's numbers look overall closer to his (better) performance against righties. The imbalance of pitching creates a natural dynamic whereby a good right-hander will be nearly as good against right-handed pitching as a good left-hander, but the good left-hander will be awful against lefties compared to that right-hander.

So in a platoon dynamic, if you have two players of equal overall ability, i.e. whom you'd expect to put up similar numbers over a full season as an everyday starter, you'll basically never want to let the lefty face left-handed pitching. But letting the righty face right-handers won't be such a big deal. You'll still expect to prefer using your left-handed hitter in those situations, but having 100% rigidity on that rule won't be such a big deal. That's useful, in a sense, because otherwise you would expect all left-handed players to dominate platoon situations, getting ~70% of the playing time as ~70% of the opposing starting pitchers will be right-handed. Or perhaps it's actually a source of some good ol' market inefficiency, with managers tending to let left-handed players dominate platoon situations more than they should. My tendency would be to assume that the overall mix should align pretty well with how much you like the two players relative to each other: if they're really just as good, then give them each 50% of the time; if not, favor the better player somewhat; and if you start wanting to give the lefty starts against left-handed starters, then it's probably not really a platoon situation.

Phil Mickelson is Very Good at US Opens

Phil Mickelson has, famously, never won a US Open. Instead, he's finished second five times. But consider, for a moment, what this means: he's really, really good at playing the US Open in few strokes! Five top-2 finishes is more than nearly everyone in the history of the universe can claim. In fact, I've devised a metric that suggests Phil is a better US Open player than several players who won it twice.

It's tough to try and add up cumulative performance in a golf tournament. If you just add together finishes, then a score of 10 could be five second-place finishes, or one 10th-place finish, and there's no good way to handle missed cuts or simply missed tournaments. One could use the career money list, but that gets into tricky inflation problems. Or one could try and create a time-neutral points system similar to a money list, and that's basically the premise of my system. The basic idea is this: if your finish in a tournament can be described with a positive integer n (ignoring ties), you get 1/n points; otherwise, you get 0 points. So Jack Nicklaus, for instance, has a career performance number of 11.048 at the Masters: 1 point each for his 6 wins, half a point each for his 4 runner-up finishes, etc. This is not, of course, a perfect system, but I think it works pretty well. (Incidentally, the next-best finisher at the Masters is Arnold Palmer, in the 6.75 region. Jack was good!)

So Phil Mickelson's US Open Career Performance Number is, by this reckoning, 3.536. And that's without any wins! So far I've computed these numbers for several two-time champions of the tournament, and have found that Billy Casper (3.235), Cary Middlecoff (2.982), Ralph Guldahl (3.334), and, perhaps most surprisingly, Lee Trevino (3.520) do worse than Mickelson. If Phil were to win and finish second (again!) in the next two US Opens, and Tiger Woods miss the cut (which had bloody well better not happen), he'd overtake Tiger, who's at 5.063. It's really amazing, when you think about it, that he hasn't won this thing yet.

If Clean Elections Create Polarization, Maybe Polarization is Good!

Matt Yglesias has a new post out today discussing the apparent fact that Arizona's clean elections law has resulted in more extreme candidates winning elections. He's skeptical that this is really a general phenomenon. I'm skeptical that the explanation the political scientists he quotes give, which makes it seem like the whole fundraising process is good because it protects us from "extreme" candidates, is accurate. It seems more likely to me that there's a fairly consistent Money Agenda, and that if you require candidates to do private fundraising they will overwhelmingly need to cater to that Money Agenda. Take that impetus away, and more of the actual disagreements in society can surface. That's a good thing, isn't it? At the very least it's a democratic thing.

Polling: My Ideal Angle on the Trayvon Case

I don't think I've written anything about the hideous, disgusting, tragic Trayvon Martin case, because it's the kind of thing I try to avoid and I haven't really felt like I have anything to say. But today there's a poll out about it! That's more like it! The poll asks three substantive questions: whether the respondents think George Zimmerman is guilty of a crime, how much of a factor racial bias played in the shooting, and whether Zimmerman would've been arrested had his victim been white. The interesting thing, of course, is the racial breakdown. For all three questions, there's an enormous split between black and white respondents, in the obvious direction. 36% of whites think Zimmerman is guilty, 15% of them feeling so "definitely," while 7% think he is not and 52% are uncertain. Among African-Americans, 72% think he's guilty, 51% definite about it. Just 1% think he's not guilty of a crime, and only 26% are unclear. 30% of whites think racial bias was a major factor, with 26% saying it was a minor factor and 27% saying it wasn't a factor at all. Among blacks, the breakdown is 72%-13%-8%. 52% of whites think the race of the victim isn't making the decisive different in Zimmerman's non-arrest, to 33% who think it is. Among blacks, well, 73% say it is making a difference, and just 20% say otherwise.

Evolution is Not a Morality Play

This is not about the Masters, but it actually sort of made me a bit angry so I thought I should comment on it. The background is that President Obama used the term "social Darwinist" to refer to the currently prevalent Republican philosophy in an economic speech a few days ago, and some Republicans objected. Jonathan Chait then wrote a blog post defending the use of this term. Aside from the point I'm about to mention, which is not a political one, it's a good post making sound points that deserve making. But at one point he says that the "social Darwinist" label is supposed to suggest that certain kinds of right-wing laissez-faire economics "treated the market the way Darwinists treat natural selection — as the sole natural and correct mechanism for distributing rewards." Later, he says that conservatives might object to the label because "because it can be understood to imply a more literal application of Darwinism — that the poor should be killed off so they cannot reproduce."

There's a gigantic problem with these descriptions: they act like Darwinian evolution by natural selection is supposed to be a morality play! This is simply false. Evolution is not right any more than it is wrong, in the moral sense: it simply is. It's also not about "distributing rewards" in any meaningful sense; the point is just that the genes of those who accrue the rewards of survival and reproduction will tend to dominate the gene pool of future generations. That it! The "social Darwinist" label describes someone who thinks it morally correct to set up human civilization on a slightly misunderstood version of the principles of natural selection, i.e. a Hobbesian war of all against all in which the strongest prosper, for a time anyway, and for the rest of us life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (And yes, that's a misunderstanding of actual natural selection: life is often like that, but not necessarily and not always.) One could level a similar charge against one who believed it was good that lions go around slaughtering gazelles.

Incidentally, I think this whole confusion has to do with a kind of projection on the part of the early opponents of Darwinian theory. As they tended to be people who freely conflated how they thought the world should be with how the world is, they assumed that Darwin and company were doing likewise. But the Darwinians, or most of them anyway, had a proper scientific mindset.

(As an aside, most serious Darwinians, starting with Darwin himself, don't think that natural selection is the exclusive mechanism of evolution; sexual selection can also play a substantial role. But I don't think that part makes a particularly good analogy to Republican policies!)

Who You Calling Hype?

Over the three preliminary days of Masters week, I've seen at least two articles on pgatour.com surface with exactly the same theme: the hype around Tiger Woods at this 76th Masters Tournament is excessive, there are nearly a hundred other players in the field with eyes on a victory of their own, this won't just be some coronation. Maybe Rory McIlroy is included in the hyped category, as in a hyped Woods vs. McIlroy confrontation. Of course the articles themselves are sportswriter-y in the extreme, but that's not even my main problem with them. They're posted on the most prominent website in American championship golf! What are they if not hype? In general I've noticed a tremendous amount of spinning from the golf establishment this year against Tiger Woods, his resurgence, and the idea that he might just start winning tournaments and majors again like he always used to. It's a little funny, then, to see that same golf establishment complaining about how much everyone thinks Tiger's the only person in the field!

Another Year, Another Masters

Today, Wednesday April 4th, is the day before the start of the 76th Masters Tournament, so I just thought I'd take this opportunity for a little bit of statistical analysis. People often say that experience at Augusta National is key at the Masters, and in particular that former champions have a huge advantage. And they're right! Compared to the other two U.S.-based majors, the Masters is vastly more favorable to repeat champions. The numbers are as follows: the 20 multiple winners of the U.S. Open have won just 50 of its 110 playings, or 45%; at the PGA Championship, the 18 multiple winners have 46 of 93 wins to their credit, for 49%; but at the Masters, the 16 multiple-time champions have 45 wins out of just 75 tournaments. That's 60%! At both the Open and the PGA, your average multiple champion has around 2.5 wins. At the Masters, that figure is more like 2.8.

In fact, we can restrict our gaze to just those players with at least three wins, and the pattern remains just as stark. Only 5 players have achieved this level of excellence at the PGA, and just 6 for the US Open. At the PGA, they combine for 20 wins, or 21.5% of the total; at the Open, they have 22 wins, exactly one-fifth of the total. But at the Masters, the eight dominant figures (Nicklaus, Palmer, Woods, Player, Snead, Faldo, Mickelson, and Demaret) have 29 wins. Not only is this more than the figures for the (older) Open and PGA, but it represents nearly 39% of all Masters. So if you're someone who likes Augusta, you probably really like it.

But you'll note I've been talking just about the American majors, and there's an obvious reason for that. At the British Open, the 26 repeat champions of the past 150 years combine for 87 wins out of 140 tournaments. That's 62%, higher than the figure for Augusta. But there are 19 three-time Champion Golfers of the Year, who have a total of 73 Open Championships to their credit. That's more than half. So while it's definitely true that the Masters selects for a certain Augusta-friendly type of player year after year, that's nothing compared to how thoroughly the British Open rewards the same group of links-loving golfers.

Perhaps some more analysis coming later. For now I'll just note that the weather seems to be favoring Tiger: the course will be playing easy, as it has each time he's won it (well, okay, in 1997 he was the only one who thought it was easy, but he's been double-digits under par all four times), and the skies should be nice and clear tomorrow morning while he's playing, and then get nasty for McIlroy and Mickelson's afternoon rounds. Let's hope he can take advantage!

Thoughts on the Affordable Care Act Litigation

I suppose that, since I haven't posted in a few weeks and since it was the big news over the past several days and since legal/constitutional issues are sort of my specialty, I ought to comment on the recent Supreme Court litigation about the Affordable Care Act and its individual mandate. This could get long-winded; be warned! Okay, here goes: