Brendan Nyhan

The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber writes the Freakonomics takedown that needed to be written (TNR registration required). It’s a longer and better developed version of the rant I’ve been on for a year or so privately. Steve Levitt is a genius of clever research design, and it’s great in principle to expand the scope of economics. But the discipline runs the risk of putting cleverness before substance and cumulative progress — the academic equivalent of what the counter-intuitive fetish did to liberal opinion journalism:

In retrospect, I have come to see this as the moment I realized economics had a cleverness problem. How was it that these students, who had arrived at the country’s premier economics department intending to solve the world’s most intractable problems–poverty, inequality, unemployment–had ended up facing off in what sometimes felt like an academic parlor game?

With the 2005 publication of Freakonomics, the breezy exposition of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt’s oeuvre, the rest of the world has come to see that economists are capable of spectacular feats of cleverness–and to a degree I couldn’t imagine back in my poseur days. In the search for what’s known as “clean identification”–a situation in which it’s easy to discern the causal forces in play–Levitt has turned to such offbeat contexts as Japanese sumo-wrestling and the seedy world of Chicago real estate. He has studied racial discrimination on “Weakest Link,” a once-popular game show, and reflected on the scourge of white-collar bagel-filching. This has, in turn, inspired a flurry of imitators, including papers on such topics as point-shaving in college basketball, underused gym memberships, and the parking tickets of U.N. diplomats.

Within the frequently tedious body of economics scholarship, these papers stand out as fantastically entertaining. Judging from the dizzying sales of Freakonomics and the thousands of lecture halls across the country now bursting with econ majors, they’ve also been wildly successful at ginning up interest in the discipline. But it does make you worry: What if, somewhere along the road from Angrist to Levitt to Levitt’s growing list of imitators, all the cleverness has crowded out some of the truly deep questions we rely on economists to answer?

Back in October, I highlighted my favorite fundraising thermometer ever — a GOP graphic that colored Ted Kennedy’s head pink:

Now, New Mexico governor and presidential candidate Bill Richardson is trading on his Hispanic ethnicity to raise cash with a chili pepper graphic:

As a friend asked, isn’t there something vaguely offensive about using a cultural stereotype to raise cash? It’s not far from a sombrero. And you can imagine the analogies for other ethnic groups provoking a far greater reaction.

Update 3/28 8:50 PM: Commenters and the Albuquerque Tribune’s Richardson blog respond that the chili pepper is actually a symbol of New Mexico — here’s what the Tribune blog wrote:

Actually, Brendan, it’s more a symbol of New Mexico than Hispanicness. Apparently you’re unaware that we not only have an official state question, but an official state answer.

Q: Red or green?
A: Christmas!

Fair enough…

The political scientists Jeff Lewis (UCLA) and Keith Poole (UCSD) have estimated the spatial locations (essentially, the ideological positions) of members of the House in the 109th and 110th Congress in order to analyze the vote on Iraq withdrawal in the House on Friday. As it turns out, supporters and opponents separated almost perfectly along party lines, with only a handful of leftist Democrats and conservative Democrats breaking ranks (plus two Republicans). Here’s how they summarize it:

[P]lacing a cutting point between Cramer D-AL and Boren D-OK correctly classifies all but 15 members for a correct classification of 96.5 percent [(430-15)/430] with a proportional reduction in error (PRE) of .929 [(212-15)/212]. The vote was highly ideological. All newly elected Democrats voted YES and all newly elected Republicans voted NO. In addition, note the cluster of voting “errors” at the furthest left rank positions. These were Democrats who voted NO because the Bill did not go far enough to end the Iraq War. This is a rare example of “two-ends-against-the-middle” voting (technically, the roll call had three outcomes!).

What does ABC News consider important enough “breaking news” to send me an email? Apparently, this:

Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com:

CORONER: ANNA NICOLE HAD NINE PERSCRIPTION DRUGS IN HER SYSTEM AND AN INFECTION IN HER BUTTOCKS CONTRIBUTED TO HER DEATH

Thanks ABC! That’s news I can use.

In a post on Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall demonstrates a common pathology of scandal debate:

It is not too much to say that everything that has come out of Alberto Gonzales’ mouth on this issue has been a lie…

And the president is fine with all of this. Fine with the fact that the Attorney General has not only repeatedly lied to the public but has also been exposed as repeatedly lying to the public. He’s fine with at least two US Attorneys being fired for not giving in to pressure to file bogus charges to help Republican candidates.

Of course he’s fine with it. Because it comes from him. None of this is about Alberto Gonzales. This is about the president and the White House, which is where this entire plan was hatched. Gonzales was just following orders, executing the president’s plans. This is about this president and this White House, which … let’s be honest, everyone on both sides of the aisle already knows.

What evidence is there that “the entire plan” was “hatched” by the President and the White House or that Gonzales was following the President’s “orders” and “plans”? This speculation may turn out to be true, but it’s irresponsible to state it as fact at this point. (Am I missing some key piece of evidence here?)

There’s reason to worry. During the Clinton years, we repeatedly saw scandal investigations in which the administration’s dissembling or lack of full disclosure was taken as proof that there was an underlying bad act. Similarly, Republicans frequently asserted without proof that all administrative problems or corruption were the result of centrally directed conspiracies.

Marshall — and Congressional Democrats — would be wise to avoid falling into these traps.

Jon Chait flags some classic inside-the-Beltway nonsense from the Washington Post editorial page:

The Washington Post editorializes today on the prosecutor scandal. It turns out, as with most issues, that the blame here can be apportioned between the two parties in precisely equal measures. Funny how that keeps happening.

The key part of the Post‘s Solomonic compromise is explained in this passage:

If questions remain, Mr. Rove and Ms. Miers should be interviewed. They don’t have to testify under oath, since lying to Congress is a crime.

I don’t don’t which is funnier: the Post‘s casual, unstated assumption that Miers and Rove will lie, or its casual, unstated assumption that this is perfectly OK. I look forward to the Post applying this logic to other areas of our legal system. (“Mr. Escobar’s runners should not be searched for drugs at the airport, since importing cocaine into the United States is a crime.”)

Are there two Jacob Weisbergs? The Slate editor seems to have trouble making up his mind about the myth that Al Gore said he invented the Internet. Consider the twists and turns in Weisberg’s writing on the matter
documented by Jamison Foser of Media Matters:

Slate.com's Jacob Weisberg, for example, took
a familiar shot at Gore, writing this week
that “Al Gore claimed he invented the
Internet.” Weisberg has apparently forgotten that Gore never claimed to
have invented the Internet. Either that, or he's lying, because it
certainly isn't the case that Weisberg never knew the truth. After all,
Weisberg himself wrote on September 30, 2004:

A big element of
the GOP's superior skill is the technique it has refined for depicting Democratic
candidates in terms of a simple, troubling vice — and then reinforcing that portrayal
relentlessly and pervasively. In 2000, the Bush team did Al Gore in with the
charge that Gore was prone to boastful exaggeration. At first, this seemed a pretty
weird and marginal critique. Who cares if a politician exaggerates his
accomplishments — don't
they all do that? What's more, many of the
specific attacks were baseless. Gore never really took credit for inventing the
Internet. He didn't really claim to have been raised on a union
lullaby that hadn't yet been written when he was a baby. A number of Gore's
other infamous howlers were equally dubious.

Interestingly, Weisberg's
memory seems to fade in and out. During the 1999-2000 presidential campaign,
when Al Gore was a candidate, Weisberg accused him of “brag[ging]
about pioneering the Internet” and reported that Bush mocked Gore for “claiming to
have invented” the Internet — without bothering to point out that the
charge was false.

In 2004, with Gore out of the
spotlight, Weisberg told the truth: “Gore never really took credit for
inventing the Internet.”

Now, in 2007, with Gore receiving
widespread attention and credit for his work on global warming — and with more
than a few people urging him to run for president — the inconvenient truth
that “Gore never really took credit for inventing the Internet” has
apparently faded from Weisberg's memory. Now, Weisberg flatly states: “Al Gore
claimed he invented the Internet.” He must just have forgotten. Either
that, or he's lying.

It’s fascinating how the conventional wisdom reestablishes itself in people’s minds. How could Weisberg forget that the Gore myth had been debunked?

Phil Klinkner of Polysigh points out a classic case of false equivalence from George Will in the Washington Post:

There are the tantrums — sometimes both theatrical and perfunctory — of talking heads on television or commentators writing in vitriol (Paul Krugman’s incessant contempt, Ann Coulter’s equally constant loathing).

Is Paul Krugman contemptuous of Republicans? Yes. Is there any comparison between his work and the name-calling, vitriol, and disinformation of Ann Coulter? No.

One of the most frustrating things about the Bush administration is the way that the White House and its supporters fall back on the defense that all administrations do X — a claim that obscures differences in degree that amount to differences in kind.

For instance, when we wrote about the administration’s dishonesty about policy in All the President’s Spin, one response we heard from a number of people — including at least one “counter-intuitive” liberal journalist — was the banality that all politicians lie and dissemble. That is true, of course. But the frequency and sophistication of the administration’s deception about policy was a difference in degree that amounted to a difference in kind.

Similarly, the Bush administration and its supporters are now essentially admitting that eight US attorneys were removed from office from political reasons. Their claim is that presidents always change US attorneys to meet their governing priorities, pointing to the Clinton administration’s replacement of incumbent US attorneys when it took office. For instance, the Wall Street Journal editorial board writes the following:

U.S. attorneys are “political appointees,” and so by definition can be replaced for political reasons. If San Diego’s Carol Lam was out of step with the Administration’s priorities on immigration enforcement, or New Mexico’s David Iglesias was judged insufficiently aggressive on voter fraud, then it was entirely appropriate for the President to replace them with officials more in line with his views. What’s the alternative? Presumably, Mr. Bush’s Congressional critics would have him–and his successors, Republican and Democratic–preside over political appointees who are unaccountable to anyone except Congress.

But again, this is a difference in degree that amounts to a difference in kind. As Matthew Yglesias pointed out (among others), there’s an important distinction between a blanket removal of US attorneys when a president assumes office and removing specific appointees during through a term for failing to prosecute Democrats. Even David Brooks gets the distinction:

The founders made prosecutors political appointees.

But the word “political” in this context has two meanings, one philosophic, one partisan. The prosecutors are properly political when their choices are influenced by the policy priorities of elected officeholders. If the president thinks prosecutors should spend more time going after terrorists, prosecutors should follow his lead.

But prosecutors are improperly political if they bow to pressure to protect members of the president’s party or team. Most would agree that Harry Truman was being improperly political when he tried to block the reappointment of Maurice Milligan, a U.S. attorney investigating the Pendergast political machine in Missouri.

The problem is that there is a gray area between these two political roles. People of good faith disagree about whether the Clinton administration behaved improperly in firing almost all of the 93 prosecutors it inherited, in the midst of some high-profile and politically troublesome cases.

Prosecutors, like other professionals, develop a code of honor to help them steer through the gray areas. This code of honor consists of a series of habits and understandings to help individual prosecutors know how to behave when loyalty to the law is in tension with loyalty to the president.

…When you look at the prosecutors who were fired by the Bush administration, you see some who were fired for proper political reasons and some who were fired for improper ones. Carol Lam seems to have been properly let go because she did not share the president’s priorities on illegal immigration cases. David Iglesias seems to have been improperly let go because he offended some members of the president’s party.

But what’s striking in reading through the Justice Department e-mail messages is that senior people in that agency seem never to have thought about the proper role of politics in their decision-making. They reacted like chickens with their heads cut off when this scandal broke because they could not articulate the differences between a proper political firing and an improper one.

Moreover, they had no coherent sense of honor. Alberto Gonzales apparently never communicated a code of conduct to guide them as they wrestled with various political pressures. That’s a grievous failure of leadership.

It’s also important to note the creeping relativism behind these arguments. All politicians mislead sometimes, so it’s ok to do so systematically. US attorneys are political appointees, so it’s ok to replace them for partisan reasons. When does that “responsibility era” begin again?

Along with Maureen Dowd, the Washington Post Style section helped popularize the sneering, snarky, personality-driven approach to political reporting that now dominates national press coverage. It’s become so influential that a number of its “best” writers have been poached by other publications. As Post culture critic Phil Kennicott told the Washingtonian, “Style has won the war. Narrative journalism is now on the front page and Metro.”

Sadly, one of Style’s exports is Mark Leibovich, who is now doing awful work for the New York Times, including a recent piece that analyzed Hillary Clinton’s handwriting and referred to her current campaign as “Version 08, Nurturing Warrior, Presidential Candidate Model.”

Today, Leibovich offers us another pathological profile. In this one, he and co-author Patrick Healy compare Al Gore to a recovering alcoholic:

The last time Al Gore appeared publicly inside the United States Capitol, he was certifying the Electoral College victory of George W. Bush. He returns on Wednesday, a heartbreak loser turned Oscar boasting Nobel hopeful globe trotting multimillionaire pop culture eminence.

For Mr. Gore, who calls himself a “recovering politician,” returning to Capitol Hill is akin to a recovering alcoholic returning to a neighborhood bar. He will, in all likelihood, deliver his favorite refrain about how “political will is a renewable resource” and how combating global warming is the “greatest challenge in the history of mankind.” He will confront one of his fervent detractors, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who derides Mr. Gore as an alarmist.

He will also embrace old friends, pose (or not) for cellphone photos and greet the legion of climate change disciples who swear by the “Goracle” as a contemporary sage.

Leibovich and Healy also make sure to mention that Gore has gained weight, writing that “His hair is slicked back in a way that accentuates the new fullness of his face.”

Healy, it’s worth noting, wrote a long and prurient examination of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage for the Times last May that tracked the number of days per month they were together over a seventeen month period.