The Poverty Trap's Assumed Explotation

Paul Krugman has a very nice series of blog posts attacking Paul Ryan's latest discussion of poverty, which continues in his usual theme of how anti-poverty programs are actually terrible for the poor. The series culminates in this post, pointing out that not only does Ryan's attempt to invoke scholarship fail miserably, but the logical argument he's trying to make with that scholarship is equally a failure. Ryan loves to focus on the issue of "social mobility," but he simply assumes that reducing the incentives of the poor to work hard will reduce their social mobility. There is in fact no evidence for this assumption: internationally, we observe that the American poor, having a less-generous welfare state upon which to depend than their European brethren, indeed work harder, as Ryan thinks they should, and also have worse social mobility. Oops.

What Paul Krugman did not say is what's behind this assumption of Ryan's. And what I think it is is the idea that people, or poor people in any case, should only and will only be permitted to live a non-destitute life if they work really hard. It's kind of the old "deserving poor" idea, that poor people deserve their poverty and do not deserve charity (private or public in nature) unless they have a good Protestant work ethic (and, particularly in the olden days, various other good moral qualities). So then for somebody like Paul Ryan, it becomes definitionally true that getting a poor person to work less hard will disadvantage them, because we're assuming that only working hard can permit a poor person to stop being destitute. And so public policies which in fact weaken or destroy the empirical connection between hard work and being allowed to live a marginally-comfortable life must be disadvantaging the poor, even if in fact they make them less poor. Because after all, the only way to get ahead is by working hard, even if that isn't true.

Now, obviously, that's ridiculous. So what's going on? One possibility is that Paul Ryan and his ilk believe their own hype somehow. Could be. More likely, though, is one of the following two options, or some admixture of the two. One would be an essentially theological belief: it doesn't matter how comfortable a life poor people are allowed to live here on earth. Living a life of dependency on the government will be bad for their souls, and will therefore condemn them to an eternity of torment in hell upon their deaths. We shouldn't be tempting people into laziness by making it possible for them to live somewhat more lazy lives without material punishment within the temporal realm. This is of course a somewhat-logically-consistent position (although Republican doctrine doesn't exactly avoid providing similar temptations for the rich and powerful, and there's probably nothing whatsoever in the Bible to support this view anyway, perhaps unique among all possible theological or moral views), but it rather blatantly violates the principle that public policy ought not be used as a tool to save others' souls according to one's own theology.

On a more crass level, Paul Ryan doesn't care about poor people at all. What he cares about is extracting work from them, because he is the representative of the capitalist classes. And it is of course perfectly true that if our social goal is extracting the most work from the poor, well yeah, things that reduce the incentive of the poor to work hard and which thereby have the effect of reducing working hours among the working poor are bad. But this is not exactly a social goal that Paul Ryan can be upfront about. So he needs to disguise his nakedly exploitative desire to extract the maximum work-hours from the peasantry by pretending to have a background assumption that working harder is unavoidably the only way for a poor person to move up in the world and to have a better life. That gives him an excuse to pursue policies dedicated precisely to making that the true state of the world, while pretending that he cares about poor people.

Now, I don't know which of these is actually motivating Paul Ryan. I suspect it's about 70%, maybe closer to 80% the class warfare reason, more like 20% to 30% the theological one. But I do know that underlying the faulty assumption deconstructed by Paul Krugman is a belief that hard work and ceasing to live in poverty are definitionally identified, that you cannot have the latter without the former. But since this is obviously false, either Paul Ryan is an idiot who believes his own hype or he has some ulterior motive he's trying to conceal, probably one of the two I describe. He is, in other words, laundering his own assumption that the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the capitalist class is an intrinsic good thing, or that exploitation of the poor is ultimately good for poor people because it's good for their souls. So whenever he says he cares about poor people, just flatly don't believe him. He doesn't, at least not in the ordinary way that public policy is supposed to.

Nope, Sorry, That's Not What That Is

Here's a headline from Huffington Post. I choose them not because I think they're worse than any other more-or-less conventional media types, but because I read them a lot. Anyway the headline is "Paul Ryan Proposes Solution to Debt Ceiling 'Stalemate'." Curious whether that was actually true, I clicked on it and read the first, I dunno, sentence or so of the article. It's not true. His proposed 'solution' is "for the president to come to the table." That's not a solution. It's not a solution in part because the Republicans have spent literally the entire past calendar year refusing, as a matter of principle more than of strategy, to hold budget negotiations with the Democrats. It's not a solution in part because it so reeks of the highwayman in Lincoln's great anecdote, who tells the person he's robbing at gunpoint, "stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer." But it's mostly not a solution because it doesn't acknowledge the fundamental long-term game theory of this situation. If Obama comes to the table and negotiates, and the negotiations are successful, on their own terms at least, he has all but ensured that the debt limit breach will eventually occur, whatever exactly it will entail. Once debt limit hostage-brinksmanship becomes the normal way that divided governments do their budget negotiations, it becomes a matter of statistical certainty that eventually one of those showdowns will lead to the fuse running out and the bomb going off. Negotiating is not a way to end the problem. There could've been things Paul Ryan could have said, without making us suspicious about supernatural possession or something, that would have been proposed solutions to the problem. I'm thinking of some kind of budget deal that included a provision repealing the existence of the statutory debt limit, i.e. giving Treasury unlimited borrowing authority as needed to full the budget deficit. Making a deal under those circumstances would genuinely be better than hitting the limit now, because though it would be capitulation to threat it would be capitulation in exchange for melting down the weapon, thereby ensuring no analogous future threats.

But let's consider it proven that what Paul Ryan is "proposing" here is not a solution to the crisis. Not even a potential solution. This makes the Huffington Post headline wrong. Factually, objectively wrong. A correct headline would've been something like "Paul Ryan Proposes Something He Claims Would Solve the Debt Ceiling Stalemate." Okay, that's overly wordy, but someone more experienced writing news headlines than I could probably improve it. The point is that the only sense in which "the President should come to the table" is a solution is the sense in which Paul Ryan claims it to be one. That it is entirely his assertion that this would work is integral to conveying what he was saying. Or to put it another way, if the headline as written were true it would be huge news. What actually happened is the epitome of non-news. That's not even a matter of, like, subjective ideological/partisan interpretation, it's just true, and the Huffington Post is acknowledging it to be true by placing this story way below their monster mega-story at the top about the debt ceiling. "Paul Ryan Reiterates Silly GOP Talking Point" is barely worth telling anyone. "Paul Ryan Proposes Solution to Debt Ceiling Stalemate" could be the story that heralds the end of the constitutional crisis of 2013, as well as signal the bizarre transformation of the most problematic member of the House of Representatives. That the headline as written also implies a certain level of reasonableness on Ryan's part is also a problem, no doubt, but if Ryan were actually being as reasonable as the headline suggests that wouldn't be problematic. But he isn't, and it's just plain factually true that he isn't, and it's irresponsible to write headlines that say, not just imply or suggest but say otherwise

The Continuingly Narrow Focus of the Debates

So, that debate was a lot better than the previous one. The moderator, more or less, knew what she was doing, both candidates actually said things (okay, granted, one of them didn't say very many true things, but still...) and, most importantly, the Democrat is widely perceived to have won. You know this because the Republicans are saying, well, the moderator was biased and Biden was smiling too much, but Democrats are just saying, hey, we won big. As David Roberts put it, "the GOP complaint...is that Joe Biden smiled & laughed too much while kicking their candidate's ass."

But, but, but... I'm not completely happy. You see, we're now two debates in, and this one had no particular area of focus, it was just the two Vice Presidential candidates discussing the election at-large. And yet, we've basically only had questions on the "to warmonger, or not to warmonger?" part of foreign policy, taxes, health care, the budget, and "the economy" in the sense of whether or not the labor market has been good under President Obama. That's, um, a narrow set of issues. Okay, last night had one late question about abortion, by far the worst framed question of the debate (in that it didn't just ask the candidates about abortion policy or whatever, but framed it around some nonsense about the candidates' personal religious beliefs). But, here's some stuff we haven't yet had a debate question on:

• Immigration
• Climate Change
• Gay Rights
• Women's Issues
• Criminal Justice
• Poverty
• Medicaid (and, you know, Medicaid is a health-care entitlement, we spent a lot of time hearing about other health-care stuff and entitlements, but nothing on Medicaid)
• Affirmative Action, which is in the news these days
• Labor Issues
• Campaign Finance Reform

This stuff is important! It was important when the first Presidential debate, allegedly on domestic policy, didn't talk about any of it. It was still important when the Vice-Presidential debate, allegedly without limitations on subject matter, didn't talk about any of it. It will still be important next week, when Obama and Romney meet for a town-hall debate. I dearly hope we get something about some of this stuff, but I'm not remotely optimistic it will be more than a small percentage of the whole time. Probably we'll just keep rehashing the same old budget-y economics stuff. And then, this stuff will still be important the week after that, when the "foreign policy" debate won't really provide an opportunity to talk about any of this stuff.

And then it will still be important two weeks thereafter, on election night.

Risk is Risky

As Nate Silver explained shortly after the pick was announced, there's a pretty good reason why Mitt Romney's pick of Paul Ryan makes at least a certain kind of sense: Romney is currently losing. He's been losing very steadily for months, and there's no particular reason to think that will change. That, therefore, makes it more sensible than it would otherwise be for him to do something risky, and picking Ryan is definitely risky. So, in a sense, good for Romney in recognizing that he needed not to just go with the boring ol' Senator from a swing state, hoping to gain some modest advantage in Ohio or Florida or wherever. (Although another way for Romney to take a risk would've been to pick a moderate(ish) Republican like Nevada's Brian Sandoval, which arguably would have been a better risk.)

But while one can recognize the need for Romney to do something risky and shake up the current "Obama narrowly but very clearly and very steadily in front" dynamic, that doesn't mean that the risk will pay off. And if it doesn't pay off, it's quite likely that it will not pay off in a big way. Specifically, I'm thinking that the odds of an Obama landslide, by at least as big a margin as last time around, is much bigger now than it was last Friday. I suppose it's possible that the new plan will work for Romney, although it doesn't look like it to me and the private despair of many Republican strategists has me feeling pretty confident about that. But it's at least as likely that the plan will go horribly wrong, that the decision to switch the election over to a grand ideological struggle in which you're clearly on the unpopular side will go about as well as it sounds like it should, and that Obama will rack up close to a double-digit margin of victory. Maybe win all his 2008 states, perhaps minus Indiana, and plus, say, Missouri and Arizona? Something satisfying, anyway.

A while ago I noticed that being re-elected with a smaller Electoral College margin of victory that your initial election is really rare. Madison did it in 1812, but that was before the popular-vote era. Woodrow Wilson did it in 1916, but his first election was a wacky three-way contest with Taft and Roosevelt that allowed him to rack up an electoral landslide despite getting 42% of the popular vote. So it's rare. Obviously, Presidents lose re-election all the time, but when they win they tend to extend their margins. For the past many months it's looked like Obama was going to win re-election but with a narrower margin than 2008. I'd say the Ryan pick has made the alternative much more likely.

Romney's Advisors Knew Ryan Was a Bad Choice

So, the initial reaction to the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI01) as Mitt Romney's running-mate has been kind of curious. Republicans are elated. So are Democrats. Electoral politics is a zero-sum game, so this is weird. Now, to be fair, there's arguably a tactical advantage in appearing publicly to think that things are going great for your side, so maybe this isn't so weird. But the fact remains that at most one side can be right in their elation over the Ryan pick. Which one?

Well, obviously, being a Democrat I tend to think that the Democrats are right, and that Ryan will turn out to have been a giant mistake. But here's a piece of evidence that makes me much more confident in that thought, and much less scared of the idea that there's some secret plan that will make Ryan a genius pick. Specifically, I've seen a few stories recently saying that all of Romney's advisers were dead-set against picking Ryan. The impetus to choose him came entirely from the candidate. The great thing about this is that there's no particular reason to think that Mitt Romney, himself, has a perfect grasp of all the relevant evidence about whether Ryan would be strategically advantageous for the ticket. There is a reason to think his various advisers have such a grasp, however, namely that it's their job. It's not the candidate's job. So the fact that all of the people in the campaign whose job it is to know what decisions will make strategic sense for the campaign didn't want to pick Paul Ryan is tremendous news. It suggests that they agree, in their heart of hearts, with the Democratic reaction to the Ryan pick.

Now, these stories could be wrong. But if they're not, they make me feel a lot better about feeling good about Paul Ryan as the Vice Presidential nominee.

Oh Wait, They Did

So, apparently it is going to be Paul Ryan after all. Sweet. There is nothing about this choice that scares me; for my analysis of why not, see my previous post. It looks to me like Obama is going to win this election, barring something changing rather dramatically, for two very good reasons: nobody can stand Mitt Romney, and nobody agrees with Paul Ryan's policies. It'll be nice, assuming it does play out the way it looks like right now, to see those two very sensible, substantive reasons triumphing over the "let's hope voters are stupid and just vote against the incumbent in a bad economy" thing.

Of course, if Romney does win now, it'll be just that little extra bit super depressing. Don't screw this up, okay Barack? I really don't want these guys in power any time soon.

Oh Yes, Please, Nominate Paul Ryan for VP, Please

Apparently there's an increasing pressure building from the right wing of the Republican Party for Mitt Romney to choose Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District as his Vice Presidential nominee. The thought of this makes me kind of giddy. Here's why.

First of all, Ryan offers essentially no geographic advantage for Romney. Nate Silver's calculus showed that, while a Rob Portmann or Bob McDonnell or Brian Sandoval pick could boost Romney's odds of winning the Electoral College by close to 2% by providing a home-state bonus, Ryan would only add 0.1% to Romney's victory odds. That is to say, more or less nothing. That's because Ryan is not that popular in Wisconsin as a whole, since after all he only represents one of its eight Districts; his statewide net positive rating is just +4.9%. That translates, according to the FiveThirtyEight model, into an additional +0.7% in the Wisconsin popular vote tally, which translates into an extra 2.5% chance of winning Wisconsin, which translates into an extra 0.25 expected electoral votes. Which translates into an extra 0.1% chance of winning the electoral college. So in terms of geographical math, a Paul Ryan pick accomplishes nothing. So far, so good.