We're the Worst

A brief rant, consequent to the Senate's vote on the gun bill:

Drawing on their abiding ignorance of the rest of the world, Americans are always ready to believe that we're tops in everything. Now, I'm an American, so I think America is the greatest country in the world. The question is, could I convince someone who is not an American? That's not so easy.

Health? We're number 36 in life expectancy, even though we spend more than any other country (and have reduced disposable income as a result). Infrastructure? Number 23. Education? Number 17.

But what is more disturbing, it has occurred to me recently, is that among the industrialized democracies (a group in which I would not include Russia), the U.S. is probably the least democratic.

Just some questions, to which my answer is "not as far as I know":

• Is there any other country (among the industrialized democracies) where legislators spend more time raising money than legislating?

• Is there any other country where redistricting is done solely by partisan politicians?

• Is there any other country where elections are supervised by partisan politicians?

• Is there any other country where in one house of the legislature some citizens' votes count sixty times much as others?

• Is there any other country where lobbyists play as prominent a role as they do here?

• Is there any other country where some people have to stand in line for five or six hours to vote?

• Is there any other country whose legislature is as paralyzed as ours, as obsessed with trivia, as lacking in actual debate?

We invented the idea of sovereignty of the people. Now we think we're still ahead of everyone else on democracy. We're not. We're behind. Maybe that's why we're behind in so many other things.

Hip Fractures: How to Be a Social Scientist, Sort Of

I recently was reading a health column by Jane Brody in The New York Times about people taking calcium supplements to prevent osteoporosis. As seems to be invariably true in her columns, Brody here took an anti-supplement position. She has some evidence: supplements don't seem to do any good in healthy women, and may do some harm, though not all the studies agree.

Brody's conclusion: Eat more dairy products.

The one indisputable fact is that the safest and probably the most effective source of calcium for strong bones and overall health is diet, not supplements. But few American adults, and a decreasing proportion of children and teenagers, consume enough dairy foods to get the recommended intakes of this essential mineral.

But I had some doubts. I had, for some reason, recently read this article from a medical journal, arguing that hip fractures (taken as an index of osteoporosis) were more common in countries that consumed more animal protein and less vegetable protein. (There was a theory behind this, something about "endogenous acid production consequent to the metabolism of animal proteins.")

This article hadn't specifically looked at dairy consumption, but had included a list of the 33 countries studied, ordered by incidence of hip fractures. Among the countries with the highest incidence were some that I thought probably had high dairy consumption, such as the Scandinavian countries. (Little-known fact: the Vikings were big dairy farmers.) Also, some countries with a strong cultural aversion to dairy products, such as China, had very low rates of hip fracture.

So I decided to investigate further. I found a source on dairy consumption worldwide. If I were doing this for a journal article, I wouldn't cite  a source that cited the FAO, I would just cite the FAO.  Using data on the country level rather than the individual level is not ideal, but no individual-level data was available. (I've decided to grit my teeth and treat "data" as a singular noun.) There were a few countries for which I couldn't find dairy consumption data, so I ended up with 28.

I then created an Excel spreadsheet and made a scatterplot of the data. (For complicated reasons,* I eventually used the natural logs of all the data, which is easy to do in Excel. That's what the "ln" on the axes means. The results are similar without doing that.) If dairy consumption reduced hip fractures, you'd expect to see the points form a rough line that sloped downward from left to right. Instead, the line slopes upward, meaning that higher dairy consumption is associated with more hip fractures. The correlation between (log of) dairy consumption and hip fractures is a strong +.91. (The chart will get bigger if you click on it.)

This certainly casts doubt on the claim that drinking milk reduces osteoporosis. But we're not done yet. Here's the hard part about doing social science: correlation just shows that two things tend occur together. The actual relation between those two things may be masked by other things. 

In this case, when we look at the countries that have low incidence of hip fractures, we see places like Nigeria, China, and Thailand. Countries at the high end include Sweden, Norway, and Germany. Perhaps it's higher income that leads to osteoporosis, and since people in higher-income countries drink more milk, we see milk consumption and osteoporosis together.

Is there a plausible theory that would explain why higher income could result in more osteoporosis? Yes: it's well-known that weight-bearing exercise reduces the risk of osteoporosis, and it's probable that people in poorer countries do more physical labor than people in rich countries.

So let's get some data on per capita GDP in these countries. We'll go to the CIA to get the information. Sure enough, the correlation between between (log of) income and hip fractures is strongly positive at +0.87,  and the correlation between income and dairy consumption is also strong at at +0.84. So it is possible that what we're seeing as an effect of dairy consumption is just the effect of higher income.

To go further, we must cross the line that separates bad social science from normal social science, and measure the effect of each variable holding the other constant. To do that, we'll use multiple regression, which is available on Excel by activating the Data Analysis pack. Here are the results


Look at the column "Coefficients". (Ignore the row labeled "Intercept.") This measures the effect of that variable on hip fractures. Roughly, the coefficients indicate the percentage increase in hip fractures for a one percent increase in dairy consumption or GDP per capita (hip fractures increase by 0.84% and 0.73%,respectively). But the important point is that both effects are positive, meaning that an increase in either is associated with an increase in hip fractures holding the other constant.

Now go to the column "P-value". Here we are asking the question, "How likely is it that the effect of each variable is real and not just a random fluctuation in the numbers we happened to collect?" The effect is probably real if these numbers are small; conventionally we want them to be .05 or smaller, and if so we say they are "statistically significant." As you can see, when we take account of GDP per capita, dairy consumption is statistically very significant (that second  number in the "P-value" column is .000098, which is really small), even though GDP is also significant.

But is this plausible? Do we have an explanation for why drinking milk should be bad for you?

There's only one explanation I can think of: the claim, in the paper I linked to above, that animal protein causes osteoporosis. Dairy is chock-full of animal protein. Let's see if dairy has an effect when we take account of the consumption of animal and vegetable protein, using the figures from the paper.

As you can see, consumption of animal protein (AP g/day) has a statistically significant effect on incidence of hip fractures, as does per capita GDP. But when we take account of those things, dairy has no statistically discernible effect. We have to be careful in interpreting this, though. It doesn't necessarily mean that consumption of dairy has no effect on incidence of hip fractures, just that it has no independent effect. It probably means that consumption of dairy has an effect through its effect on the level of animal protein consumed. And the effect is a bad one.

So it doesn't seem that Brody is on strong ground in recommending consumption of dairy products to ward off osteoporosis.

One last point: You may ask, what does all this have to do with social science? This is epidemiology. That's not a social science, is it?

Whether it is or not, the problems are the same: dealing with non-identical humans, and having to reach conclusions based, usually, on non-experimental data. Of course, there are a lot of natural sciences where you usually can't do experiments, but that's a subject for another time.

*Heteroscedasticity. 

I Don't Get It, Israel

OK, Israel, let's go through this whole peace thing logically.

First of all, the only possibilities are a one-state solution and a two-state solution, right? (We can assume that a no-state solution and a more-than-two-state solution are not possibilities.) Start with a one-state solution.

The version that Arabs, including Israeli Arabs, mostly favor is a "state of all its citizens," i.e., not a Jewish state. An overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis will be against this, so let's skip it.

The alternative is one Jewish state. Advocates presumably don't envision granting Israeli citizenship to the two million Arabs on the West Bank, so... I'm not sure what they envision. Possibly somehow expelling all the Arabs from the West Bank. That would be such a bloody process that it's not worth rational consideration.You think Israel's a pariah state now? You think even most American Jews will stand up for you?

Or you could continue the status quo forever, with two million people lacking basic freedom who hate you, and the army obliged to keep a lid on the whole thing. But why on earth would you want to? How many people in Israel really care deeply about who's in charge of Hebron?

If Israelis want to be, at some point in the future, a normal country, there has to be a two-state solution, meaning one Jewish state and one Arab state. Now, you may say that's not possible right now, because Israel has no "partner." Fine. But a two-state solution has to be the endpoint, whether it's next year or in five years or in fifty years.

What does that imply? It implies that at some point, next year or in five years or in fifty years, the Palestinians are going to get more or less all of the West Bank for a state. Can we imagine that this state will contain within it Israeli settlements, an archipelago of little islands of Israeli extraterritoriality? No, we cannot imagine that. How would they be defended? Is Israel going to set up checkpoints in another country?

Conclusion: If you're for a two-state solution, then you have to admit that at some point in the (possibly distant) future, the isolated settlements will have to go. But if they have to go eventually (say in ten years), what possible sense can it make to be building them now? It's just throwing good money after bad.

Conclusion: If you're building settlements, you're not serious about a two-state solution. You're not a "partner" for the Palestinians.

So the Palestinian Authority's refusal to enter negotiations without a freeze on settlement construction  seems completely reasonable. What would be the point? It would be like Israel negotiating over whether it has a right to exist. (Whether the PA's refusal to negotiate is wise is another question.)

Logically, then, it seems that there is no way to be for both a two-state solution and settlement construction. Note that this has nothing to do with Israel's security needs. One could make a security argument (though not a very good one) for Israel holding on to the West Bank. But that has nothing to do with settlements. The settlements add nothing to security; if anything they reduce it. Note also that it has nothing to do with whether the Palestinians are ready for peace negotiations, as long as you think that they will be at some point in the future.

To sum up, here are the logical possibilities as I see them:

• One state that is not a Jewish state
• One state that is a Jewish state, with expulsion of two million Arabs
• One state that is Jewish state, with two million people under military occupation forever
• Two states

It seems to me that settlement construction is consistent with any of the first three of these outcomes, but not with the fourth, two states.

So what gives, Israel? Are you for a two-state solution or not? I'm well aware, actually, that Israel is not a person and so cannot be held to the same standards of rationality as an individual. But when you say you accept a two-state solution and yet have coalition members who advocate, or rather demand, more settlement construction, you're behaving either illogically or in bad faith. I'm looking at you, Bibi Netanyahu.

You Saw It Here First

The two-month Claritas edge:

http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/the-gun-report-march-25-2013/?hp

http://howardfrant.blogspot.com/2013/01/meme-busters-on-hammers-and-guns.html

If you're Slate reader, the Claritas edge is only two weeks.

Magazine Article of the Decade

Here.

We know that America has much higher health care costs than any other country. But why? Where is the money going?  The author tries to track it. I was surprised by his answers.

Read it. You won't be sorry.

Federalize Federal Elections

Election rules have been in the news a lot lately. In the State of the Union, Obama announced the creation of a bipartisan commission to find ways to reduce waiting times at polling places. The implicit assumption behind this commission is that waiting times are a problem of bad management rather than politics (for instance, they will survey customer service specialists), despite the fact that waiting times for whites in 2012 were almost 40% shorter than for blacks and Hispanics, and that in some places this appears to have affected turnout.

There was also considerable and heated controversy over changes in early voting hours and photo ID requirements, which some people claimed disadvantaged blacks, students, and other Democratic-leaning groups. Finally, a few days ago we had the Supreme Court oral arguments on a section of the Voting Rights Act, highlighted by Justice Scalia referring to it as a "perpetuation of racial entitlements" which are known  ("It's been written about.") to be very difficult to get rid of.

Rather than fighting over each effort to change election laws, it's time to cut the Gordian knot. We should simply have one Federal law that applies to all Federal elections around the country. One rule for voter ID and hours, one type of voting machine, even one non-partisan commission to redistrict. Why do we think it is normal to have partisan (often highly partisan) elected officials overseeing elections? Why do we think the gerrymander is normal? Why shouldn't honest democracy be the norm?

The usual objection is that this would impinge upon the Constitutional responsibilities of the states. Here is avatar of the conventional wisdom David Brooks, Friday on the PBS Newshour:

"These are states' obligations. This is a state matter. And so it becomes a little hard to nationalize it."

Well, hang on just a minute. Here's the Constitution, Article I, Section 4, first paragraph, as originally ratified and never amended:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

That seems pretty clear. Federalizing Federal elections is not only Constitutional, but is an eventuality foreseen by the Framers. The problem is not legal but political. In the current environment in Washington it's hard to get Republicans to vote even for things they favor (e.g., the individual mandate), let alone things that would reduce their current electoral advantage.

Still, it's time to start moving the Overton Window on this issue. What's impossible this year may be law in five years.

The Antinomy of the Pope

There is a logical paradox that you have probably encountered (though probably not by name) known as "the antinomy of the liar" (no, not antimony). One simple form is when a man says, "Now I am lying." You know the rest: If he's lying when he says "I am lying," then he's telling the truth. But if he's telling the truth about his lying, then he must be lying. And so on. Some of you may have seen an episode from the original Star Trek series where a version of this paradox caused the beautiful female robots to say, "Norman... analyze..." as smoke started to come out of their heads.

So all the recent news from the Vatican has got me wondering. Papal infallibility has been official Church dogma only since 1870. What if the new pope issues an encyclical saying he's not infallible? Should Catholics believe him?

Polling: Name This Fallacy

Sorry, I don't know whether this fallacy has a name (it's not the ecological fallacy, by the way) but it seems to be quite common among political pundits. I'd call it the fallacy of homogeneity if that weren't such a snooze.

The mistake is in thinking that all members of a sample are alike. For example, exit polls after the 2004 election revealed that "moral values" was one of the most important issues to voters, and 79 percent of those voters voted for Bush over Kerry. "Oh, no!" said many Democratic talking heads. "Better not talk about gay rights, or abortion, or drug legalization, or..."

The problem is that all voters are not alike. So in fact, we don't know if a single vote was changed because of Bush's and Kerry's positions on moral values. In particular, evangelical Christians are (I imagine) inclined to say that moral values are important to them. But they are not swing voters; they were going to vote overwhelmingly for Bush anyway. Were there any undecided voters who were swayed by a candidate's position on moral values? We don't know.

More recently, I heard Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC announce that the myth of NRA influence was dead, because a new poll showed that while 26 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who had an NRA endorsement, 39 percent say they would be less likely. That's a striking result, but hang on a minute. If you were Heidi Heitkamp, the newly elected senator from North Dakota (Democrat, pro-gun) would this make you change your position?

Probably not by much. Most likely, most of that anti-NRA 39 percent is people who were pro-gun-control to begin with. The question that interests Senator Heitkamp is, what do the percentages look like in North Dakota? And we can't tell.

Burdens on the Producing Class--Movie-Producing, That Is

A rather breathless story in today's New York Times talks about how millionaires are considering moving out of California. The state's new top income tax rate is 13.3 percent, and that combined with the new top federal rate of 39.6 means that the rich face a top tax rate of 51.9 percent! (Actually, if you add those two numbers you get 52.9, but never mind).

One small problem with this calculation, which all these rich people's accountants surely know: state taxes are deductible on your federal tax return. That means rich people face an effective state tax of (1-.396)*13.3, or 8.0 percent, for a combined rate of 47.6 percent. In fact, once you take account of deductibility all the differences between states shrink. I don't expect to see Hollywood moving en masse to Texas anytime soon.

The Four Hours and the Two Hours

Now that the Super PAC threat has failed to materialize, Congress seems to have lost interest in doing anything about campaign finance reform. Yet the problem hasn't gone away. A 2012 poll finds that three-quarters of Americans think there is too much money in politics, and a similar number think that this has given the rich more influence than other Americans.

Think this might contribute much to Americans' sense of alienation from their government? You'd be right.

But that's not all. The Huffington Post recently published what it said was a slide from a Power Point presentation given to new Democratic representatives, showing a reasonable allocation of time in a representative's day. The slide calls for four hours per day to be spent on the phone raising money. This is much as they should spend on all official duties. Of the time spent on official duties, two hours is spent on the floor or in committee meetings, that is, doing what we  ordinarily think of as legislating.

This is truly shocking. Our legislators spend only two hours a day legislating (and often less than five days a week), not because they're lazy but because they feel they have no choice. No  wonder they often seem to be talking past each other-- they barely see each other. It's no secret that the floor is often empty, but I always assumed it was because legislators were at committee meetings or otherwise working behind the scenes. Turns out they're on the phones, trying to make sure they have enough money to spend another two years on the phone.

That's the paradox. Apparently, members of Congress don't even like it. Imagine how you would feel spending four hours per day begging for money over the phone; now imagine how it must feel to someone who is way above average in ego and self-centeredness. If you're a Congressman, almost half your day is spent doing stuff you hate--in order to be able to continue doing the same thing.

Why don't politicians do something about it, by enacting public financing of campaigns? I can only offer guesses. One would be that the existing system probably does favor incumbents. Another is that it favors Republicans, who have been the staunchest opponents of public financing.

But another problem has also been the Constitutional difficulties, since recent Supreme Court decisions, of keeping big money out. Nancy Pelosi has even been reduced to calling for a Constitutional amendment to permit regulation of corporate speech, which is both inadequate and unachievable.

Fortunately, I have already proposed a solution to this problem: instead of trying to keep big money out, we should be trying to get small money in. It turns out that small contributions by enough people completely swamp $100 million donations by a few billionaires. Instead of leveling the playing field with a bulldozer, you might say, we level it with a dump truck. I go through the arithmetic here.  I suggest one possible way of doing this: a $100 refundable tax credit for political contributions. Lawrence Lessig and Bruce Ackerman have both made another, nearly equivalent, suggestion: give all citizens a $50 voucher that they can spend on political contributions.

If the facts were known about the four hours and the two hours, I think there would be outrage. Two hours a day? But this outrage would just curdle into more cynicism unless people were presented with a viable alternative. Increasing small contributions would only not only liberate members of Congress to do their jobs and virtually eliminate the influence of big money on politics. It would make ordinary voters feel, rightly, that they had an influence on government.

I don't know who will pick up this ball. But some entrepreneurial politician could really run with it.