The Outdated Logic of Federalism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.