In Defense of Cautious Football Coaches.

FiveThirtyEight is on a crusade. Well, I guess they're just one of many people on this particular crusade, but since I'm not a football fan they're most of where I encounter it. Specifically it's the crusade to get football coaches to be less conservative in their decision-making about things like punting or going for it on 4th down. Or about two-point conversations. They've got another piece today, arguing that a couple of NFL coaches who made ill-fated decisions in this weekend's playoff games had committed "crimes against middle-school math." This is basically because, in certain situations, you can show using simple math that going for two-point conversations after touchdowns is the correct call by win expectancy, even when failing to convert would mean falling one point short. Roughly speaking that's because you often lose in overtime; to a first approximation it's a 50/50 shot, and if you're on the road it's a lot worse than that. So if you're a road team with something approaching a 50% chance of making your two-point conversion when it would win you the game outright, it's better to go for it.

But I feel like this is missing something: maybe the goal isn't always to maximize win expectancy. This is perhaps the most radical idea in all of sports. Maybe it's even more radical than the whole "maybe we shouldn't really be playing football at all, guys" thing. It's close, anyway. Well, there's a category of things called "sportsmanship," I guess, where it's routine not to maximize win expectancy. But I'm talking more broadly than that. Maybe we care about things other than just the end-of-the-day result. My hypothesized other value in this context is that losing now and losing later are different things. The 538 calculations implicitly treat them as the same, and indeed, one week later they have awfully similar consequences. But it's possible, isn't it, that they're not really the same. And if losing later is better than losing now, then you get something out of the cautious, "wrong" decisions the 538 people inveigh against in exchange for those points of Win Expectancy. You get to keep playing. You get hope, at least a few more minutes of it. Maybe, sometimes, that's worth it.

Now, I don't know anything about football, really, but I do know baseball, and I know that I always breathe an immense sigh of relief whenever the Mets tie up a game. The difference between one run down and a tie is, to me, the most emotionally significant one there is late in games, because it means you're not losing. It means something has to go wrong in order for the game to end with a bad result. Of course, something might go wrong, and if you're not leading then you need something to go right before something goes wrong. (Against the Royals in the World Series, for instance, that felt juts about impossible.) But, phew, not losing is a wonderful feeling. It's the feeling of, okay, we were down 8-1, maybe, but we've just put up a six-run inning--but that seventh run, that's what makes it mean something. That's a multitude of sins washed away; that's a fresh start to the ballgame. The go-ahead run can seem almost unimportant in comparison, even though it's not, really.

Now, baseball isn't football. There's rarely a situation that calls for a genuine strategic choice here, although for what it's worth, in the late innings, if I'm down a run and have a chance to sacrifice-bunt a runner over to third base with one out, I'm gonna do that more often than not, even though it's at best a neutral move from a win probability standpoint, because I'd rather attain that wonderful status of not losing now and worry about the actual winning part later than go for broke now and fail. But maybe similar concerns aren't really felt by football fans. And maybe the immense awesomeness of winning now by going for that two-point conversion with seconds left in the fourth quarter would outweigh them, if ever anyone would try to do it. But the point, really, is just that it's a little too simple to do the win probability analysis and call it a day. There might be things besides just who wins and who loses at the end of the day that matters.

The Mets lost the World Series. They lost it despite having led in the late innings of four of five games; they could almost as easily have won the series in five games. And in Game 5, Matt Harvey was pitching the game of his life. For eight innings. Eight glorious, shut-out, five-hit innings. With nine strikeouts. But then came the ninth inning. The team was up 2-0, Harvey had thrown 102 pitches, and the Mets had Jeurys Familia, ace closer, waiting in the bullpen. Terry Collins brought Harvey back out to start the ninth. He walked Lorenzo Cain, I believe after a few close calls that he maybe should've had. Then Cain stole second and Eric Hosmer doubled. Familia came in and got three ground-ball outs, and indeed, had Lucas Duda made a routine throw home on the second of them, the game would've ended. But he missed, and Hosmer scored, and the Royals went on to beat up Addison Reed and Bartolo Colon in the 12th to claim the Series.

It's easy to criticize Terry Collins there for making the wrong move. And maybe, in a pure win-maximization sense, he did. But Mike Francesa did a segment about it the next day, plus or minus a weekend or two, and said, look. Collins chose to trust his player. He put his faith in Matt Harvey, who had pitched lights-out with all his heart that day. And it backfired. But isn't that what sports is all about? We're here to see great players do incredible things, are we not? Matt Harvey completing that game would have been legendary. (To my mind, the first eight innings still deserve to be legendary; they sure were amazing to watch.) Isn't it a better world where managers will put their faith in their greatest players and give them the chance to do incredible things, even when that doesn't make the most sense, then where they meticulously hew to what some probability chart tells them about optimal strategy?

I found that segment incredibly moving, and it helped me find a real sense of peace about the fact that the Mets lost the Series. Now, I still don't think I agree with Collins' managing: I would absolutely have brought Harvey back out for the ninth, but the leash would have been precisely one baserunner. After that first walk I would absolutely have brought Familia in, no questions asked. That, to me, would have struck the right balance between putting your faith in your player and still also doing what's necessary to win. But Francesa helped me remember that it isn't, it shouldn't be, all about winning. That way lies becoming the Yankees. Sports, ultimately, is entertainment, and we should play the game in a way that's fun, even if that sometimes means losing when we could have won. There are worse fates.

I don't know if this is what's going on in these football contexts, but I wish the public discourse on the issue would at least consider the possibility.

On the Hyde Amendment, Single-Payer, Bernie Sanders, and Socialism

Hillary Clinton recently called for repealing the Hyde Amendment, the federal law which prohibits federal funds from being spent on abortion. That is, among other things, surprisingly radical for a candidate most known for her cautious, calculating, pragmatic manner. It's also interesting because Bernie Sanders, the generally more radical candidate opposing her, has not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, come out in favor of repealing the Hyde Amendment. Which is funny, when you think about it, because Sanders is thoroughly pro-choice, and of course is most notorious these days for his proposed single-payer health care system. In which the federal government would pay for all the health care.

But if the Hyde Amendment is still around, then that won't include abortion.

At best this would lead to a market for supplemental abortion insurance, or just to women paying for abortion out of pocket. That's the at-best scenario, and it's pretty much a nightmare from a reproductive rights perspective. The worst-case scenario would be if private insurance, and maybe even private out-of-pocket purchase of medical treatment, were actually outlawed, which would effectively outlaw abortion itself. (That would almost certainly be unconstitutional under current doctrine, certainly as to abortion and maybe more generally.)

So, the first thing to say about all this is that someone needs to ask Bernie Sanders about the Hyde Amendment. Like, yesterday. But that's not really the crux of the issue: he'll almost certainly say he supports repealing it. He assuredly does support it on the merits, and there's no great political loss to admitting it.

The deeper issue, I think, is what it says about him that he didn't think of this when he was drafting his proposal. Because, it's a big issue. In a single-payer system, every aspect of medical treatment is subject to intense politicization, and this is a country where that could get seriously problematic, very fast. This is actually one of the virtues of the liberal-capitalist order: it's very good at letting people decide what they want for themselves, and having there be people willing to give it to them (so long as they can afford it--aye, there's the rub), even if other people aren't too happy about that. Single-payer, even if it allowed private insurance around the margins, would complicate that happy "live and let live (if you're not poor)" picture a lot. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth doing; that "if you're not poor" part is a really big problem. But it's not just a fantasy issue. It's a genuine cost to achieving an awful lot of good, and Sanders shows no sign of recognizing that it must be paid. This is for me the big issue with the fact that, at certain points in the past, he wanted to let the states administer the new single-payer system. Really, Bernie Sanders? An awful lot of states would make decisions about what should and should not be covered that you would really not like. He's backed off that position for now, but the lack of attention to the analogous issues at the federal level, e.g. the Hyde Amendment, doesn't give me a ton of confidence that he understands the real problem here, or has good ideas for what to do about it.

And then of course there's just the fact that the politicization of medicine would add an entirely different dimension to the fight. Paul Krugman has been talking a bunch lately about how it's tough to get a single-payer system from where we are because it really would impose losses on a bunch of important stakeholders. Well, once you remember that the Hyde Amendment exists we've got a whole other fight on our hands. There's been controversy in recent years about requiring employers to provide insurance that covers contraceptives. Imagine the explosion that would ensue if we proposed to have the federal government cover the full cost of abortions for everyone. Which is not to say that we shouldn't do it! We should, in an ideal world. This is a fight that deserves to be won. That's slightly different, though, from saying that it would be won, or even that the victory would be worth the fight.* 

More to the point, perhaps, is that Sanders does not seem to anticipate that fight, or the others like it that would surely come. And this has me thinking about a recent Ta-Nehesi Coates article and its discussion of the view that Sanders and his ideological comrades have toward racial justice issues:

"[Sanders sees] black people not so much as a class specifically injured by white supremacy, but rather, as a group which magically suffers from disproportionate poverty.

This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible."

My feeling about this is that it's almost the other way around. It's not that adopting socialism would make racism and its effects disappear. It's that racism itself, as a separate and distinct ideology, is a big part of what's stopping us from being more socialistic. There was some research, which I could probably dig up if I wanted to spend a bit of time on it, trying to figure out why, descriptively, causally, why the United States has such a meager welfare system. Ultimately the study concluded that it's all about race, or more specifically racism: American whites don't have solidarity with black people, and therefore resent having their wealth redistributed to black people in a way that middle-class Germans don't resent having their wealth given to poorer Germans. (Interestingly we can see a related phenomenon playing out in the European Union right now; it turns out the Germans and the French don't have that much solidarity with the Greeks after all, and therefore experience a similar resentment and a reluctance to support the much-poorer people of Greece.)

And similarly with issues of sex and gender. There's a lot about the social democratic agenda that is deeply threatening to the patriarchy, there really is. Just as there is with white supremacy. Someone like Sanders is right about that. But he seems to assume that this means we should focus our energy on attacking Capital (capitalized for sinister emphasis, of course), and that when we defeat it, all those identity-politics fights will take care of themselves. But I feel like if you don't appreciate the independent power of the patriarchy, of white supremacy, in American political life, then you won't appreciate the true nature of the struggle to make America better. And you'll lose. Because you'll rush headlong at the one enemy you're focused on and let yourself be surrounded by the other armies in their coalition. Better to attack each of those allies--whose support Capital needs but to whose defense Capital cannot necessarily come--in turn, and then leave the main enemy weakened and alone. But defeating white supremacy, defeating the patriarchy, that's a massive undertaking. It'll take years, decades really. Maybe generations. And it's not a fight that Bernie Sanders seems to see himself as fighting. Hillary Clinton does, if in an incremental way (though her opposition to the Hyde Amendment is impressively bold).

And that, I guess, is the socialist case for voting Hillary.



*Perhaps my favorite part of that fight would be the inevitable court case arguing that covering abortion in the single-payer system violated religious freedom. Because the logic there is damn near identical to the similar claims being made about mandated private insurance in a case like Hobby Lobby, but if we move it to the context of a government program then it becomes obviously absurd. There's no right to have the government not spend its money on things you disapprove of for religious reasons; that's absurd. We can tax you, and once we tax you it's not your money anymore. (The one exception is that we can't spend it actually supporting religious institutions you don't support, per the Establishment Clause.)

The Historical Argument for Ted Cruz's Eligibility

Rafael Edward Cruz, a.k.a. Ted Cruz, the current leading actual-politician in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, was born in Canada. It is contended by some that this makes him ineligible to be President. Well, okay, the issue has been thrust into the spotlight by troll extraordinaire Donald Trump, who's managed not to actually make the argument himself, rather alluding to its existence as a potential complication should the Republicans nominate Cruz. (His subsequent argument that Cruz should seek a declaratory judgment settling the issue once and for all is (a) a truly masterful piece of trolling, and (b) the most attention the law of remedies has had since the Kim Davis saga, teehee.) Anyway the thrust of the argument is that the Constitution limits the Presidency to "natural born Citizen[s]." What does this mean? Who knows. But perhaps it means only people who were born on American soil. And Cruz wasn't.

Under this reading, the fact that his mother was from Delaware, and hence an American citizen by the Fourteenth Amendment, and that Cruz was therefore* an American citizen from birth, is immaterial. Under any other reading it probably isn't. So the question becomes, is this reading the correct one? (Spoiler alert: no, it is not.) This legal question has a funny and oft-overlooked relationship to the whole Obama birther debate, because even if Obama really was born in Kenya, so long as we don't dispute his mother's identity then he would be in the same position Cruz is in now. Birtherism, that is to say, relies not only on a flatly-wrong view of the facts, but also on a rather extreme view of the law. Nobody really brought this up back when birtherism was a thing.

And so, you see, this puts liberals in a funny situation. We all think it's hilarious that Trump is trolling Cruz this way. But it's a little awkward for us to, like, join in the fun. Because, y'know, we think this kind of thinking is repugnant. What's a poor liberal to do? Ah, the good ol' hypocrisy gambit, by which things that aren't fair game become fair game against people who think they should be fair game (e.g. homophobic Republicans who just happen to be gay). In this context it works by asserting that the narrow reading of "natural-born citizen" I described above would be correct under an originalist theory, that Cruz favors originalism, and that therefore, in Ted Cruz's own opinion, Ted Cruz is ineligible to be President. This also serves, for those among us who enjoy this sort of thing (e.g. Fordham Law professor Thomas Lee), as a convenient way to get in a few pot-shots against originalism. It's reminiscent, in that way, of Erwin Chemerinsky's argument from a few weeks ago that, under an originalist theory, women can't be President. I don't like that sort of thing. I didn't like it when Chemerinsky did it, and I don't like it now.

Because, you see, it turns out that the correct historical approach to this problem reaches the same damn result as every other kind of argument: yes, Ted Cruz can be President. I'm not gonna do exactly what I did last time, running through the modalities in turn, because the issue doesn't seem to have that kind of shape to me. Rather, I'm going to discuss two arguments, each of which weaves together several modalities. They reach the same conclusion, but one of them is pointedly anti-originalist and the other, y'know, isn't.

Two Points on Affirmative Action

Yesterday was the big affirmative action argument at the Supreme Court, with Fisher v. University of Texas being argued for the second time. It's long been suspected that the case could bring about the end of race-based affirmative action in America, anywhere within the ambit of the Fourteenth Amendment's "state action doctrine" at least. Not surprisingly, the oral arguments were rather high-profile, and some remarks by Justice Scalia have become especially controversial. I just have a couple of points I'd like to make, both about Scalia's comments and about those of one of his colleagues.

First, concerning Scalia, a discussion of whose remarks and the theory behind them you can find here. He was, in a rather clumsy way, invoking so-called "mismatch" theory, the idea that affirmative action ends up putting black students in schools that are too advanced for them. A sophisticated version of this analysis might focus on the fact that, as a result of unequal policies at various lower levels of the American education system, black people are in general not prepared as well for the rigors of elite universities. Scalia, of course, did not make the sophisticated version; his remarks seemed rather to suggest that black people are actually just not as smart as white people, and will therefore be overwhelmed by going to white people schools. 

One thing to say about this is that it's not true, as the Vox explainer makes clear. Anothre thing to say about it is that it's racist. But I'd like to go a little further on that last point: in a lot of ways, Scalia's remarks, and to a certain extent the broader "mismatch theory" on which they're based, were channeling the basic logic of educational segregation. Of course, the actual logic of segregation was that it was bad for black people and that this was good because white people should be kept in a position of social supremacy over black people. But the avowed logic, the "it's good for everyone" logic, would have been a lot like this. Black people, for whatever reason, whether their innate talents or a legacy of admittedly unfortunate discrimination, just aren't prepared to compete with white people on an equal basis. It wouldn't be fair to them to push everyone into integrated schools. They need separate but equal.

This isn't to say that Scalia favors segregation (though honestly, who among us really doubts that if Scalia had been around in 1954 he would've been condemning Brown v. Board of Education as a lawless judicial usurpation?). It's just to say that some of the logic and rhetoric behind the anti-affirmative action movement can very plausibly be seen as a slightly watered-down version of the arguments against racial integration in the first place.

My other comment concerns an offhanded remark from the Chief Justice. The supposed benefit of affirmative action, since just improving the status of the African-American community is apparently not good enough, is diversity, and specifically the idea that diversity on campus will be good for everyone. (Obviously, affirmative action is only okay if it benefits white people.) One of the ways in which the state of Texas was arguing that the diversity fostered by affirmative action was good for everyone was about the dynamic within individual classrooms. John Roberts was skeptical of this idea, and at one point asked the lawyer for the state, "What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?"

Mr. Chief Justice, may I humbly submit that a minority student brings to a physics class the perspective that black and Hispanic people are also, y'know, people, and might actually be smart, or have something to say about physics? A "perspective" that is too often lacking? Along with its close cousin, the "perspective" that women are also people and might actually be smart or have something to say about physics; lord knows that one's been all too absent from the classroom for ages. I've never had the opportunity to experience it directly, but my sister has, and my impression is that that feeling of being not welcome does an awful lot to discourage everyone other than white men from even trying to participate, or pursue a career in these fields. That probably has an awful lot to do with why the historically black colleges are so much better at producing black scientists. They are, to use the cliched term, a "safe space" for black people to pursue science. And unfortunately, an awful lot of science classrooms just aren't safe, in that way, because there are just so goddamn few black people or Hispanics or women or whatever already there.

You might think that, in something like math or physics, there would be no such thing as the "black perspective" or the "female perspective." You might especially think that if you really didn't have much sense of how to empathize with the plight of the oppressed. And in a way, you would be right. But it's a funny thing about science: insight can come from anyone. Even if there's no "black perspective" or "female perspective," an individual black person or woman might turn out to have an insight that could change the world, or at least be kind of interesting. And if the world is set up in such a way that they're all strongly discouraged from even bothering to try to contribute, that insight might be buried forever. Sort of like how there isn't a black way to hit a baseball, but Jackie Robinson was still damn good at it. And so was Josh Gibson, it's just that he never got the benefit of someone willing to say, hey, maybe we should give these guys a chance.

Another Inevitable Result of the Great Inversion

So one thing that's making the rounds today is a poll showing an ever-increasing number of people saying they wouldn't like it if their child married someone of the opposite political party. This of course shows how terrible Americans are, how acrimonious our partisan divides, how tribal our politics, etc. Because you see, in 1960, 4% of Democrats and 5% of Republicans said this. In 2008 it was 20% of Democrats and 27% of Republicans. Now it's 33% of Democrats and a whopping 49% of Republicans. People are becoming that much more ideologically intolerant, I guess.

Or not. We don't know how ideologically intolerant people were in 1960. Not from this survey data at least. Because, as I detailed in my previous post, back in 1960 party identification correlated only weakly with ideology. More to the point, there was a considerable amount of ideological overlap between the two parties. A Democrat and a Republican from Massachusetts had an awful lot more in common with each other than that Democrat would have with a Democrat from South Carolina. Indeed, it's quite likely that, at least if you go back a little further, the Massachusetts Democrat would have had more in common with the South Carolina Republican than with his southern co-partisan.

So if you had the strong feeling that you didn't want your son or daughter marrying someone whose ideology you found hateful, it just wouldn't make a lot of sense therefore to decide you didn't want them marrying someone of the opposite party. You would presumably want to be discriminating among cross-partisans, just as you would need to be discriminating among co-partisans. These days, though, if someone puts an R after their name it gives me a pretty good idea of what they're all about, or at least what they're willing to tolerate. So whether you like the practice or not, it just plain makes a lot more sense to disfavor members of the opposite party, for your children or for yourself.

Donald Trump is the Inevitable Result of the Great Inversion's Completion

The latest CNN poll shows Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz as the three medalists (right now) in the Republican nomination. That's two not-actual-politicians who've spent years cultivating support among the right-wing fringes of society, plus one actual Senator practically every member of whose own party hates his guts. The three of them together are getting 66% of the primary vote right now. That's two-thirds of Republican voters, planning right now to vote for one of the three craziest candidates in the race. If Marco Rubio were to consolidate the Christie, Bush, Fiorina, Kasich, and Paul supporters, he'd be at a whopping 25%. There's a real inmates-running-the-asylum feeling here. And I know why.

The big story of American political history, well, since the Civil War at least, is what I like to call the Great Inversion. In 1890, there were two political parties, each consisting of a sharply-drawn and entirely coherent faction. One party represented the northeast and the Pacific coast; the other was for the most part based in the South. You'll note that every word of those two sentences would be the same if I replaced the year with 2015. The only difference, of course, is which was the Democrats and which the Republicans. During the interim the two parties switched places, Democrats shifting from the party of John C. Calhoun to that of Barack Obama, while the Republicans went from the party of Lincoln to the party of, well... evidently Donald Trump. And all through the middle of that time period, things were messy.

Giving Constitutional Argument a Bad Name

So apparently Erwin Chemerinsky goes around maintaining that the text and history of the Constitution don't suggest that a woman can be President. This is called giving constitutional argument a bad name. This outrages me so that I thought I'd just give a quick run-down of different ways to approach this problem from various modal angles.