The Dread Hand of Nate Silver

(Sorry it's been a while; I've been in a kind of law school admissions purgatory for the past couple of weeks.)

I happened to follow some links today and wind up on the Baseball Prospectus page that gives expected 2013 performances for each Major League Baseball team. They've got projected wins and losses, estimated odds of winning the division, of winning a wild card, of getting to the post-season (i.e. the previous two added together), even of getting to the not-the-silly-wild-card-game part of the post-season, and, of course, estimated odds of winning the world series. And as I cast my eye over this page, what I couldn't help noticing was the obvious influence of Nate Silver (and/or the influence of BP on Nate). Here's one example: the projections for each team's wins and losses are given to one decimal point. The Mets, for instance, are forecast to win 80.6 games this year. The odds of the Mets winning 80.6 games is precisely zero, because you can't win six-tenths of a game. I recall a point during the last election cycle where Nate publicly defended presenting his electoral vote projections to the tenth of a vote, despite the impossibility of receiving tenths of votes. (I'll save telling you what his reason was for later in this piece, for dramatic effect.)

The similarities, however, don't end after the decimal point.

I Hate "Big Government"

No, not big government. "Big government." The phrase, not the thing. I don't like how people use those words. I may have written this post before, but since Republicans have kept saying, post-State of the Union, that Obama thinks "big government is the answer to everything," it's on my mind again. Basically, the definition of the "size" of government these days is the numerical size of its budget, possibly as a proportion of GDP. This is insane. Here's an example that's pretty minimal in how much it challenges the notion that overall levels of taxing and spending define the bigness or government: tax expenditures. According to a forthcoming Harper's Index, the state of Texas has budget expenditures in tax breaks for corporations equal to 50% of its actual budget. That doesn't show up as either taxing or spending, but it's a use of the tax code to create policy, i.e. to influence people's choices. As Matt Yglesias has been saying occasionally of late, one can also identify places where the alternative to a tax-and-spend program is a kludgy regulatory mandate. For example, single-payer health insurance would add a lot to the government's books, and it would require an increase in tax revenues, but in certain very obvious ways it's a much less invasive policy than the awkward framework of the Affordable Care Act, which involves some government subsidies but also various requirements that private actors either get or provide insurance. That's inefficient policy, and in my opinion, though it's not a particularly severe infringement of people's liberties, it's much worse along that dimension than proper national health insurance, which just doesn't involve liberty interests at all.

The government has the power to tax, and it can spend the dollars it acquires through taxation (or borrowing) in whatever way it pleases. Even the modern progressive income tax only amounts to a rather modest drag on how quickly one can accumulate wealth, unlike the confiscatory 91% taxes of yesteryear (specifically, the 50s, when Republicans were in charge). A government might use that power quantitatively more or less, but that's a pretty trivial shift in how "big" the government is, at least in the sense in which "big government" is supposed to sound kind of spooky and 1984-esque. Warrantless wiretapping, now that's big government, in the "big brother is watching you" sense, literally. Slightly higher Medicare spending? That might be "large government," or something, but it isn't meaningfully big government.

Citizen Obama

So, that was a pretty good speech. Not one of his entries in the annals of great American rhetoric, but a very solid group of policy proposals with some very nice philosophical defense of liberalism sprinkled in. Of course, none of the stuff will happen, but it's nice to see him advocating good stuff nonetheless.

The thing I noticed in particular, though, was the continuation of Obama's "citizen" theme. I don't remember whether it was in the Inaugural or some slightly previous speech, but there was a nice long passage about citizenship at some point over the past couple of months. (Possibly his election victory speech, actually.) I like this because it's more than a mere ideological philosophy (though those are good too), it's an actual political philosophy. And it's an important one. I don't have a lot of original stuff to say on the subject, but I've been thinking over the course of the past couple of days about how categorically different democratic government and non-democratic government are. In fact, I think that describing them that way is misleading. It makes it sound like they're two somewhat different ways of doing the same thing, "government." That's wrong. Democratic governance is, ultimately, the process by which the peoples of a nation come together to make decisions about the direction of their society. Non-democratic "governance" is when some completely random person, or group of persons, who happens to have a lot of dudes with guns loyal to and/or paid by him (it's usually, but not always, a him), sets up in the middle of some country and tells everyone in said country that, if they don't do exactly what this "sovereign" says, they'll be killed. Those aren't the same thing at all.

The Greatness of Ryan Howard

This is sort of random, but I was reading a baseball-related comment thread the other day wherein some people were debating whether or not the Phillies would be any good this upcoming season. Basically, one person said that, look, they haven't been much good of late, but they do have six players with great resumes: Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Ryan Howard. The other person responded with skepticism about the idea that Howard can be considered "great." The substance behind that claim is that Howard is a poor defensive first baseman who can't run, so in order to be a great player he doesn't just need to be a great hitter, he needs to be a great hitter, and this he is not. Sure, he puts up gaudy home run totals, with 300 in the first 9 years of his career. And sure, his batting line of .271/.364/.551 looks nice. But since he plays in Philadelphia, a very good hitter's park, it's not as impressive as you might think. And as for his most notable stat, his gaudy RBI numbers (149 in 2006, 136 in 2007, 146 in 2008, 141 in 2009, a total of 920 over 1098 games), well, the RBI stat is pretty much a joke in these circles these days. After all, RBI is mostly a function of how many people happen to have been on base for you. Scoring runs is a team effort, but we dish out individual statistical credit for it in somewhat arbitrary ways.

This last point has always slightly bothered me. Is there really no value to the RBI as a measure of individual performance? I don't think so. As with pitchers' wins, it's a stat that has a lot of noise against fairly little signal, but that doesn't mean there's no signal or that you can't tease it out from the noise. Consider the difference between Ryan Howard and Adam Dunn. They're rather similar players; Dunn has a career line of .240/.370/.499, and has also played in a lot of pitcher's parks. Dunn is, perhaps, a slightly worse hitter than Howard (and much worse overall), averaging 38 home runs and 96 runs driven in per 162 games, to Howard's 44 HRs and 136 RBIs. But the difference in home runs, a little less than 16%, is a lot less than the nearly 42% gap in RBI rates. Is that just about their teams, or do the players themselves have something to do with it? Well, we can disaggregate team contribution from player contribution by looking at performance in different bases-occupied situations. This isn't perfect, since the speed of baserunners can vary in ways that affect the ease of driving in runs, but it does most of the work for us. So, how do Howard and Dunn stack up in those different situations?

Rocco for the Hall of Fame!

Okay, it's a little early to be advocating that explicitly. But we can always hope! The occasion for the hope is the fact that, in Rocco Mediate's Senior (er, um, Champions) Tour debut, he just shot an eleven-under 61 to take a three-shot lead heading into the last round. He's a decent bet to win. Now, people always win their Senior Tour debut, or at least it's kind of a thing that happens a lot, because the youngest players on that tour have a noticeable advantage and one typically debuts immediately after turning 50. Still, Rocco could be one of those people who goes out and has himself a great Senior Tour career after only a decent PGA Tour career.

And the thing is, according to the rules, you're eligible for the Hall of Fame if you have 20 wins between the regular and Senior PGA Tours. Rocco only won 6 times on the regular tour, so he'd need 14 Senior Tour wins to qualify; that would place him T17 on the current list of players with the most Senior victories. Now, most of the people who are qualified for the Hall of Fame ballot through the combined regular/senior wins criterion and most of whose wins have come from the Senior Tour are not in the Hall of Fame. Hale Irwin has the most Senior wins all-time, with 45 and 7 majors, and is in the Hall of Fame, but on the strength of his 20 PGA Tour wins and 3 US Open Championships. Lee Trevino's second with 29 wins and 4 majors, and is also in the Hall of Fame, but on the strength of his 2 US Opens, 2 British Opens, and 2 PGA Championships. Then we get Gil Morgan and Miller Barber, with senior careers totalling 25 wins, 3 majors and 24 wins, 5 majors, respectively. But neither of them won a regular major, or won more than 11 PGA Tour events, and neither is in the Hall of Fame. Rocco would be very much in their category, even if he has a great senior-tour career. So, why do I think he might sneak his way into the Hall of Fame when other players with similar resumes to his potential have not?

Because of Torrey Pines. Because of Tiger Woods. Because of the 2008 U.S. Open, and the playoff, and the agony. Because he was the foil for one of the greatest moments in golf history, and because if one shot had gone differently over those first 90 holes he would've been the protagonist of an at-least-as-great moment. Because he's Rocco, and he is genuinely famous. Yeah, he's famous for one moment, not for a long glorious career. Roger Maris, who spent a very long time holding the single-season home run record, is not in the baseball Hall of Fame, and never came that close to it. But if Rocco really does have a renaissance on the Senior Tour, and racks up well over a dozen wins with some majors thrown in, then you could add to his single shining moment a genuinely great senior career, and given that there exists a Senior Tour ballot-qualification pathway, that ought to count for something. Neither the shining moment nor the senior resurgence would on its own justify his enshrinement, but if Rocco can combine them, I think he would deserve it.

The Passionate Society

My current reading material for my Classics of Political Economy course is The Passions and the Interests by Albert Hirschman. The part I've been reading consists mainly of a survey or summary of the treatment of passions in mainstream philosophy from the very early says of Saint Augustine through (with a bit of a skimming over the Dark Ages) the eighteenth century. At least, that's as far as I've gone so far. And the thing I find really striking is that it is the almost unanimous opinion of the thinkers Hirschman has quoted that passions are bad. Augustine, for instance, defined three kinds of lust, namely sexual lust, lust for money/possessions, and lust for power, and, obviously, thought they were all sinful and bad. That continued to be the position of the more-or-less religious segments of the philosophical community until, well, the present day, really. Opposition to that view, that all passions are bad and people should abstain from indulging them because they're bad and people should want to be good, came from people who said, wait a minute, that's not realistic. Instead of just telling people their passions are bad, which won't work (even though it's true), let's try to discover which passions are less bad, and use them to control the others. For instance, David Hume is said by this author to have advocated restraining the "love of pleasure" through the "love of gain."

Now, when I read that sentence, my immediate thought was that it was simply insane. What's wrong with the love of pleasure? Pleasure is great! Almost by definition! It doesn't get much better than pleasure. If people were on the whole more devoted to pursuing pleasure, and less to pursuing gain, everyone's lives would probably be better. Sure, it would pose problems for our particular economic structures, but as the world gets more and more prosperous that becomes less and less of a problem, as seen in the general trend toward more leisure time. That's a straight-up gain-for-pleasure trade, and I think it a most sensible one. After all, what's the point of gaining stuff if not enjoying it? And if the point of gaining stuff is to enjoy it, why try to gain stuff if you could be doing other stuff that was more enjoyable than having the stuff would be? Now, stuff is nice, and can lead to lots of pleasure, so a pure love-of-pleasure agenda wouldn't exterminate the acquisitive interest, but on a very basic level it seems to me that Hume had it backwards.

But I think that's just emblematic of my broader point in this post, which is that the view that passions are bad has lost. Though I'm sure a lot of lingering religious institutions don't like this fact, it is unquestionably true that in modern Western society, people accept as a matter of fact that passions are basically good. We don't deny that they can have problematic consequences, and that one should avoid acting on one's passions if doing so will have problematic consequences, but fundamentally we just don't view the suppression of passions as an end in itself. Rather, we view the expression of passions as an end in itself, possibly the main point of life and at least one of the main ones. We live in the passionate society. The reading I'm currently doing is largely devoted to examining how the passion for material acquisition made the switch from being Bad to Good. Of, I think, at least equal importance and magnitude is the transformation in attitudes toward sexual and romantic passion. The passion for power is a somewhat different animal in the modern world than it was in the time periods I've just been reading about; for one thing, it's a lot less possible for one random person to gain meaningful political power except by holding office in the government of a nation-state, and for another, economic power becomes ever more important leading this passion to dovetail with the material-acquisition passion to ever-greater degrees. But even in the life of the American republic there has been a shift in attitudes toward political ambition. In the olden days, it was taboo to actively campaign for President. Yeah. 'Nuff said.

What I think is behind all of this is the basic hegemony of more-or-less utilitarian ethics. That's a very loaded word that means an awful lot of things, most of which I don't mean in this context, but what I do mean is that teleological and deontological ethics have become massively less influential over the past couple of centuries. Perhaps the best term for their competitor is consequentialist, but what really separates these kinds of ethics isn't their form. After all, one can express achieving one's telos as a consequence, and perform a pseudo-consequentialist calculus that will effect a teleological ethics, or express a pseudo-deontological ethical rule saying "don't harm other people" that would effect a consequentialist ethics. The difference is almost entirely that in consequentialist ethics, "good" is treated as almost synonymous with "advancing the interests of beings" for some class of beings and some class of interests. And the interests are typically things like pleasure or utility or happiness. Again, you can bend that structure back toward one of the old-fashioned kinds of ethics, but in practice people don't. Something is good if it makes people happy. Something is bad if it makes people sad. In that world, passions are the basic thing we're trying to satisfy. If two people meet up in a bar and go off to a hotel and have sex, and both enjoy the experience a lot, and then go their separate ways by mutual consent, that's great! They've both just satisfied their passions, and good for them. We only really discover "bad" when one person's passion interferes with another's.

Obviously I think this was a change for the better. But then I would: I'm a proud citizen of the passionate society. Good or bad, however, I do think that this wholesale shift in our society's philosophy of ethics and desire and pleasure is really interesting. I'll close this philosophical musing with a few lines from that great thinker, Angelus:

Passion. It lies in all of us, sleeping, waiting, and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir, open its jaws, and howl. It speaks to all of us, guides us. Passion rules us all, and we obey. What choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love, the clarity of hatred... and the ecstacy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dark. Without passion, we'd be truly dead.

Phil's Dominant Week

Okay, the week isn't officially over yet, but the bookmakers at Ladbrokes are giving Phil Mickelson 1/14 odds, i.e. predicting that he'd win the Waste Management Phoenix Open 14 out of 15 times from this position. It's about as close to being over before it's over as a golf tournament can be. That, not surprisingly, is a bit of a testament to how good Phil Mickelson has been playing this week. He's at -24, and holds a six-shot lead over Brandt Snedeker. He's led the tournament wire-to-wire thus far, opening with a 60 that could've easily been a 59, following it up with a 65 that could've been a whole lot better had he not driven the ball into the water on 18, and adding a 64 today to effectively put this thing away. In fact, it's felt like every single day Phil's had one of the best rounds of the entire field. And he has! In fact, it's kind of impressive how well he's been doing compared to the best round anyone else has had.