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Silver Linings

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, News Media. No Comments on Silver Linings

Every newspaper publishes articles online that are bad. Or Silly. Or both. The reason, I think,  is that online newspapers have no serious space constraints, and they can get ‘guest columnists’ to write pieces – particularly opinion pieces – for free. This is sadly true even at my primary source for US and International news, the Wall Street Journal.

Recently the WSJ featured an op-ed with this title:

Trump Tariffs Are a Victory Against Climate Change

By making consumption more expensive, they may do more for the planet than 1,000 ESG plans.

The author is one Amy Chan, who advertises herself as chief sustainability officer at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. This puts her in the class of ‘university bureaucrat’, a group whose disconnect from reality is only exceeded by that of the faculty in their institutions.

Now, Ms Chan does not claim that the reason for Trump’s tariffs is saving the planet from Climate Change, only that this will be one of their happy, albeit unintended, consequences.

Here’s a quote explaining the first of her three reasons for this claim:

“Many supply-chain leaders are outlining an emerging strategy called “manufacturing in region for region.” This means producing goods in North America for North American consumers, in Europe for Europeans, and so on. That’s good for stability and even better for the planet. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, transportation accounts for roughly 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Fewer transoceanic journeys mean less emissions.”

This is classic bureaucratic ‘only one thing matters’ thinking. This noble strategy of locating plants in each region in which a company sells does mean less transportation of goods, but it also means more manufacturing plants. And, of course, the inputs used by those plants still have to come from somewhere. So if the one plant you had in China producing for the whole world also got most of its inputs from China, the company must either find input sources in the other countries in which it locates plants, or trade shipping outputs for shipping inputs instead. So, it’s not even obvious less total shipping is the result.

In addition, if transport costs account for 15% of emissions, then something else must account for the other 85%. Perhaps manufacturing is in there somewhere? Will a lot of (presumably smaller) manufacturing plants produce less emissions than fewer large plants? I have no idea, but Ms Chan does not consider the possibility. Simply, there is no way to know if this bold new strategy by manufacturers will have a net negative effect on emissions. It’s complicated, as they say – unless you’re a university bureaucrat.

As to her second reason, she actually makes two separate points, so I will call them 2A and 2B. Here is 2A:

“Mr. Trump’s recent move to end the de minimis tax exemption for low-value imports from China could curb America’s addiction to fast fashion and disposable goods supplied by retailers like Shein and Temu. This would result in fewer impulse buys and less landfill waste.”

Note that this exemption only applied to low value items ordered from Chinese producers by individuals. It is separate from the tariffs imposed on goods imported to the US by importers for eventual resale in the US. In the very same edition of the WSJ is an article about this, which describes how a company named Kuru that used to import athletic shoes to Canada, then let US consumers directly order them online, shipping them across the US-Canada border under the de minimis exemption. Kuru’s response to Trump’s move is to ship the shoes from China directly to a warehouse in the US, and fulfill the orders from there. They will still be subject to Trump’s tariffs on imported Chinese goods, but it will be calculated on the wholesale rather than retail price of the goods, lowering the impact some. How does this change in Kuru’s approach to selling in the US reduce impulse buys and landfill use?

The tariffs on Chinese goods, plus the elimination of the de minimis exemption will make it more expensive for US residents to buy a dress or book or food supplement or toy directly from China, whether they do so from a US reseller or directly online. Thus, one may expect that they will do so less. But – fewer impulse buys, whatever those are, or less landfill waste – why? If US consumers instead buy from US-based companies – and at this point there is no way to know, but that is presumably Trump’s hope – all that happens is landfills have more US made goods in them down the road, and fewer made in China.

Again, that the removal of the de minimis exemption will result in fewer small individual purchases by Americans from Chinese sellers is not to be argued with, indeed that is precisely the point. Why that should result in fewer impulse buys or less being thrown into landfills is not at all obvious, and Ms Chan does not elaborate beyond what I quoted above.

Her 2B is as follows:

“Manufacturers may also respond by producing higher-quality, longer-lasting products. The effect won’t be limited to cheap goods. Higher prices on electronics, appliances and vehicles will encourage consumers to extend the life of what they already own. The greenest car isn’t a new electric vehicle; it’s the one you don’t replace.”

This quote directly follows the previous one so Ms Chan clearly is arguing that this 2B is a consequence of manufacturers reacting to the removal of the de minimis exemption. Why foreign producers who see their individual orders from Americans drop would respond by producing higher-quality longer lasting products I cannot imagine. I don’t even see why that would necessarily be a response of foreign manufacturers to the tariffs that DJT has imposed on what they export commercially to the US for other firms to re-sell. Again, Ms Chan does not provide any reasoning for this claim.

The claim in the third sentence is just….bewildering, at least with regard to electronics and appliances. How does Ms Chan propose that Americans will extend the lives of their laptops and smartphones? Does she see a sudden renaissance in the electronics repair and refurbishment business? Certainly most Americans are not in a position to DIY their electronics into a longer life. As to appliances like refrigerators and washing machines, she may have a point. If the purchase price of those goes up, it seems reasonable that people will be more likely to pay the guy from Maytag (does Maytag still exist?) to repair the old one when it breaks down, rather than buy a new one. But what about a coffee-maker? Or that electric moustache trimmer? Will people get those repaired? Or just go back to using a sharpened rock? I guess we’ll see.

In any case, it is the last sentence in that quote that is the least supportable.  No, the greenest car is not the one you don’t replace. If you replace even a four-year old gasoline powered car with another similar but new gasoline powered car, you can be very sure your emissions from driving will go down, as will your fuel consumption. This is why various jurisdictions have instituted ‘cash for clunkers’ programs. Of course, it is rather more complicated even than that, as it matters for the whole calculation what happens to the old car. If someone else ends up driving it, then you have to figure in how that person would have gotten around if they had not acquired your old car. Would they be driving an even more emitting, gas-guzzling clunker? Taking public transit? Again, it’s complicated.

On to reason three. The article points out that China produces more than two-thirds of global rare earths – I will take her word on that – and then says that making those more expensive to import from China – presumably via tariffs –  will induce US firms to do more recovery and reuse of those substances. That makes a certain amount of economic sense, but it also seems likely to induce more exploration for rare earths in places outside China. Even if more re-use occurs, it does not follow that this will reduce emissions. What are the relative emissions footprints of recycling rare earths vs mining them? I don’t know, and Ms Chan doesn’t tell us, so it is not even clear that her ‘re-use and re-cycle’ regime will reduce emissions if it happens. There are some key facts missing from the argument.

It is not inconceivable that an unintended consequence of Trump’s tariffs might be a net reduction in emissions, but the many possible reactions of millions of firms and consumers to those tariffs makes it a very difficult claim to support. My point here is that, university bureaucrats, particularly ‘sustainability’ bureaucrats, are very bad at considering a wide range of possibilities. They want to keep you focused on the one part of the issue that supports what they want you to conclude. A silver lining to Trump’s tariff cloud would be a nice thing to find, I suppose, but this article provides little evidence that Ms Chan has found one.

I was going to have a second section in this post to show that university faculty can be clueless too, but this is already long enough, so I will write that up separately.

Coda: Then there’s this

The day I posted this, the WSJ outdid itself for silliness, featuring an article titled:

Six Friends Tried to Plan a Girls’ Trip in a Group Chat. Things Went Sideways

Talk about your breaking news, eh?

It included the following graphic, to help the reader follow this complex and utterly fascinating story….

The article ended with a request to readers –

“What’s the worst communication breakdown you’ve ever had in a group text? Join the conversation below.”

For this I pay no small sum every month.

 

Oh For Crap’s Sake, G&M

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Health Care, Language, News Media, Standards. No Comments on Oh For Crap’s Sake, G&M

I was at a gathering of mostly family (not my family, I was a guest) over the weekend at which someone said to me ‘I blame the media for much of what is wrong with the world today’.

An extreme statement, but one with which I find it hard to disagree. It is bad enough that little contemporary journalism provides us with facts, but what is really infuriating to me is that absolutely misleading horseshit shows up so often in mainstream (as well as much not-mainstream) media.

I offer you exhibit A, a Globe and Mail article titled ‘Are Canadians getting their money’s worth from their health system?’ authored by one Frederick Vettese, and marked as both ‘Opinion’ and ‘Special to the Globe and Mail’.

Special, indeed. The piece is centred on the graphic below –

I hardly know where to begin, but let me start by saying that many of the comments that were submitted on this article by Globe readers exhibit a lot more wisdom about the topic than that shown by the author.

Let’s start with something mildly technical: what data on what countries was used to draw that downward-sloping line? If it was just the 11 countries actually labeled in the graph, then this is cherry-picking data of the highest order. As a commenter pointed out, if that is the case, and you take the US out of the data, the line almost certainly slopes upward. On the other hand, if you leave the US in and take out Albania, it will have a much more negative slope.

The author does not think it important to say anything much about just what data is in there.

Let us give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume the line was drawn using data from every country on planet earth. This brings us to the caption on the diagram.

‘Translates into’??

What is that supposed to mean? Many of the commenters (as well as myself) took the caption to be suggesting that higher health care expenditure causes lower life expectancy. But god forbid a journalist use clear language. That one cannot infer such causality from this diagram, whatever data was actually used to draw it, is again clear to most of the commenters, and I hope to you, gentle reader. One very basic and relevant reason is that both health care expenditures and life expectancy are surely driven by other factors. Imagine a country in which disease rates are high, for any reason. This is going to decrease life expectancy as well as induce higher health care spending by both governments and individuals. Bingo, downward-sloping curve.

As they say – duh.

Also, I doubt anyone with a lick of sense thinks that increasing life expectancy is the only goal of health care. However, if one wanted to actually begin to understand what influences life expectancy, there are about a million other things that one ought to include in any statistical assessment, starting with per capita income, moving on to incidence of chronic disease, urbanization (hello, Albania), educational attainment, poverty rates….I could go on.

Thus, the author’s sentences:

“It is reasonable to expect that spending more on health care should lead to better overall health and hence longer life expectancy. If this is true, the trend line in the chart should be a straight line sloping upward from left to right.”

are baloney. Or, bologna. There is no reason to think it should be upward-sloping when all those other things are ignored.

The author also writes

“More spending certainly seems to be counterproductive. But more likely, the additional spending is not being put to good use.”

So, he truly does appear to be clueless. No, your graph does not ‘certainly’ imply that more spending is counterproductive, Mr. Vettese, nor does it provide any evidence about how well health care spending is being used in Canada or anywhere else. The efficacy of money spent in health care is a devilishly hard to measure thing, and your simple-minded graph tells us nothing about it. Nothing.

Indeed, nothing in this sad little article tells us anything about the answer to the question in its own headline.

Another F- in informativeness for the Globe and Mail.

Canada’s Next PM

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. 1 Comment on Canada’s Next PM

We don’t know when it will happen, because us ordinary citizens have to sit around and wait until at least Feb 24 to get any clues from the Important People as to when we may have an election and thus, almost certainly, a new government and PM, but it seems impossible to bet that it won’t happen by the middle of the year.

Today’s poll on the website 338canada.com/federal has the federal Conservatives’ support at 44%, the Liberals at 22% and the NDP at 18%. The election is not being held today, and the Liberals are in the process of selecting a new party leader, and shit surely can happen over two to four months but it would be very brave – or foolhardy – to bet against Pierre Poilievre being the next Canadian PM, leading a Conservative-majority government.

Is that a good or bad thing? I am asking this in a purely selfish way. A federal election is surely going to happen (although it seems Dougie is going to send Ontarians to the polls first, I will write about that down the road) and I will need to decide for whom to vote. Unlike the custom in the Canadian press and throughout society these days, I do not see myself voting for Poilievre or Carney or Singh. I am voting for who I want to represent me in Parliament, and in that vote, the party to which a candidate belongs is only one factor, albeit an important one.

Unfortunately, there is really no evidence that Canadian federal MPs of any party are allowed by their party leadership to truly represent their ridings, and I am not oblivious to this. Hence, a critical factor in how I vote in my riding is going to be what I think of the leaders of the various parties. I have nothing good to say about Singh or Trudeau after observing them govern Canada over the last many years. I see Freeland as having been very much a Trudeau acolyte until she suddenly got religion last month, although I give her kudos for changing her stripes, however late in the game.  Mark Carney so far seems to me to be a classic Ottawa mandarin. We don’t need any more of those in my view, but he is also new to politics so I plan to listen carefully to what he has to say throughout the Liberal leadership race; assuming, of course, he has things to say.

That leaves Mr. Poilievre, who has been covered assiduously (and almost universally negatively) in the Canadian press as the Leader of the Official Opposition. In that role he has been very much in Attack Dog mode, and while I get that can be seen as pretty much his job description up to now, it has not made me favorably inclined toward him as an improvement over Trudeau as PM. Or over Carney (who at this point I would bet on winning the Liberal leadership race). Poilievre would certainly be preferable to Singh, but almost anyone would be in my view. The NDP does not believe in arithmetic, and that is disqualifying, in my opinion.

A couple of people I respect have pointed out to me that Poilievre sat down to be interviewed by Jordan Peterson on Peterson’s podcast last Dec 21. This was before Trudeau announced his intention to resign, but PP was riding high in the polls, and the episode is titled ‘Canada’s Next Prime Minister’.

So, I took the time (it’s an hour and 40 minutes long) to sit and watch the interview, in hopes of learning more about Mr. Poilievre than is possible from reading mostly hostile press reports.

However, getting information from podcasts is not my usual thing, so I will lay all my biases and misgivings about this out before turning to what I think I may have learned about Mr. Poilievre.

I don’t watch or listen to podcasts. Many people I know do, but I am very much a fan of the written word. This makes me a dinosaur, I know, but so be it. Had a transcript of this podcast been available (I could not find one) I would surely have read that instead of listening to the podcast.

I am not entirely a fan of Jordan Peterson, although I have a great deal of respect for him, and I thought his original 12 Rules for Life book, which I read, added something valuable to the culture. A psychologist of my age characterized that book to me as a bunch of wisdom you might get from a good 6th grade teacher. I think that’s actually fair, but what the psychologist failed to appreciate is that there are few such wise teachers anymore. Much that is written and published is not blindingly new, but if it fills a need felt by many (as Peterson’s book clearly did, particularly for young men), it is valuable. Peterson’s book was valuable.

Peterson is a rarity in that he has a wide-ranging mind, and, having heard him speak more than once, I appreciate that. I also think that his years in the spotlight have turned him into a media creature, and that this has not served him well. He is almost always in combat mode, and that has to be a very hard place to be. While I think I understand how that can happen to someone who has been attacked as much as he has, it still gets in the way of some of the good things I think he is trying to say.

Finally, and this is not unique to Peterson, I think that on this podcast, in which he was supposed to be playing the role of interviewer, there was too much Peterson. Another reason to see a transcript, because if one could, I bet the word count for Peterson would be higher than for Poilievre. As it is, I bet in the video there are more minutes of Peterson’s voice than of Poilievre’s, but I know of no way to check that. This has been my typical experience when I have listened to interviews done by podcasters. They are used to declaiming, they are used to being the focus, and the role of a good interviewer is to ask good, concise questions and then shut up and listen. Peterson did much too little of that in this interview, in my opinion.

As a result of this, I don’t feel like I learned all that much about Mr. Poilievre from this interview. None the less, here are some things I think I did learn.

The revelatory part of the interview to me occurs at about the 1:14 point in the podcast. Peterson notes that he doesn’t envy the task Poilievre will face as PM in taking over after 10 years of Liberal governance. I think that’s a fair comment, and keep in mind that this was said before Trump started blathering on about tariffs on Canadian imports into the US.

He then asks PP a pretty direct question and in my mind, a good one. This is not an exact quote but he asks Poilievre ‘Why should Canadians have confidence in you, what is your plan when you take office?’

Poilevre replies, again not an exact quote:

Cut bureaucracy, cut foreign aid, cut out the consultants, cut corporate welfare and use the savings to bring down the deficit and lower taxes. Unleash the free enterprise system, repeal C-69, which he calls ‘the anti-energy law’ to start a ‘massive’ energy boom in our country. Incentivize the municipalities to get building.

Then, an even better question: Can you highlight who are the key members of your coming administration and lay out what their roles will be once you form a government, and what their strengths are.

I will write out PP’s response to this in the form of a list:

Andrew Scheer, former party leader and Speaker of the House, he knows the rules of the game in Parliament, and that’s important for getting legislation passed.

Dr Leslie Lewis, current shadow minister of infrastructure, she’s doing a great job of talking about how we can improve infrastructure in this country.

Gamil Giovanni (spelling?, I’m working off an audio tape here) recently elected in an overwhelming mandate in Durham.

Melissa Lantzman, deputy leader, extremely well-liked in Toronto, terrific communicator, very smart.

We’re recruiting new candidates in ridings we don’t currently hold, to help me win the election and govern.

Asked by JBP in a follow-up – who PP has on the ‘energy side’, PP responds by saying ‘we’re very lucky as we have a lot of MPs from Alberta and Saskatchewan, and very few of them don’t understand energy’.

PP then shifts to talking about the good conversations he’s had with Premiers Danielle Smith and Scott Moe.

The conversation then moves off onto other topics.

So as to JBP’s first question about what is PP’s plan, what he says is not awful, there is nothing in it that I have any real disagreement with. However, beyond the repeal of C-69, there is nothing at all specific in it, either. What bureaucracies will you eliminate, what is an example of the corporate welfare you will eliminate, and how exactly do you plan to incentivize the municipalities to get more building done? Municipalities are creations of provinces, what on earth can the federal government even do in this realm?

To be sure, had any other party leader been asked that question, or Freeland or Carney, I would not expect any more detailed answers.

Even less inspiring was PP’s answer to the question about his team. It was all politics, a good house leader (ok, fair enough, that matters) MPs who won big mandates or are well-liked and smart. And, I’m sorry, but being from Alberta, particularly being a politician from Alberta, doesn’t imply you know doodly about energy.

Even more than the first, PP’s answer to that second question sets him out in my mind as a career politician. To be sure, that is who party leaders always are in the 21st century, although Carney may end up being an exception. And, there is no better example of the fact that not being a career politician does not necessarily make one a good leader than Donald J Trump.

Locally, London currently has a couple of city councillors who are well-known to be the candidates for various parties in the looming federal and/or provincial elections. People get into municipal politics not to contribute to their city – at least rarely so – but as a stepping-stone into a ‘real’ career as a higher level politician. The pension is very good, I hear.

So, we end up ruled by career politicians.

Returning to my selfish motivations, listening to this interview did not turn me away from the idea of voting for the Conservative candidate in my federal riding when that decision comes, it just showed me that if I do, I will be voting for a candidate whose party is led by a career politician. Not disqualifying, but not really a plus, either. So, I guess I gotta keep listening.

Dumb Epilogue

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. No Comments on Dumb Epilogue

In this post just last week I took the Canadian Press to task for not asking questions about the possibility that Doug Ford might cut off electricity to three US States in response to Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canadian imports to the US.

The questions were not revolutionary: Can Ford do this? Are there legal contracts in place?

Well, an organization called The Globe and Mail thought those were good questions, and put someone on the job of finding answers to them. You can read the resulting article here if you’re a subscriber. If you’re not, why not? I don’t work for them, but the G&M seems to be the only org in Canada that still tries to do some reporting.

The gist of this ‘Explainer’ article is that there are no actual contracts under which Ontario supplies power to the US. Rather, the electric grid in the Northeast and Northern Midwest of the US is highly intertwined with that of Ontario.

Here are three key paragraphs from the piece.

“Before 2005, Ontario had a relatively balanced electricity swapping arrangement with its American neighbours. It subsequently became a substantial net exporter, but its international transfers peaked around 2015 and have been on a gradual downward trend since then.

The Ford government places little value in those exports. Ontario’s nuclear power plants and hydro dams often produce more power than the province needs, typically overnight during the spring and fall. This forces the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) to export some of that surplus power, typically at low or even negative prices.

“The former government set up a process where we do a lot of exporting at a loss,” Mr. Lecce said last week.”

Well, now. It turns out Ontario is selling that power to the US at a loss, sometimes even paying the US to take the electricity (that’s what is meant by a negative price) because Ontario is producing more than it can use.

What to make then of Ford’s threat to ‘stop selling electricity to the US’??

More ‘I’ll shoot my puppy’ threats from Ford, it would seem. No, Ontario does not make a profit on these sales generally, in fact they seem to often sell at a loss, which might seem to indicate that Ontario is not hurting itself if it cuts this electricity to the US off.

But, but, but – it’s not that simple. One cannot forget that Ontario is doing this as the currently easiest way to deal with its own over-production during certain times. So, what’s it gonna do if it does not send this unneeded-in-Ontario power to the US at bargain rates? Light up Queens Park? Send it to Mexico instead?

The electricity exports from Ontario to the US are the easiest way for Ontario’s hydro producers to get rid of excess production, which happens because they cannot shut nuclear and hydro-electric generation facilities down quickly. Or, rather, it is highly costly to do so, so they send the extra power to the US. Even if they have to pay the US users to take it, this is less expensive than the alternative of shutting down production.

More puppy-shooting threats by Ford, then, but a tip of my hat to the Globe for digging into this. Nice to see journalists being journalists rather than click-baiters.

I admit that I do wonder, though: why do those US states want Ontario’s excess electricity if it is available overnight in Spring and Fall? What’s their story?

Well, not our problem, and one cannot answer every question in a single post.

Dumb and Dumber

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. 1 Comment on Dumb and Dumber

It’s impossible to live in North America and not read about President-elect Trump’s various blusters about the US’s relations with Canada and Mexico. Living in the former naturally causes me to focus on it, but my impression so far is that the government in Mexico is doing a much better job of dealing with said bluster. Mexico’s president hasn’t said much, and what she did say was pretty clear.

A major kerfuffle up here in the Great White North is Trump’s threat to impose a 25% tariff on all goods imported into the US from either country. His ‘reason’ to do this is to get Canada to stop the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants into the US.

Let’s start there. If one knows anything about international relations, one knows that it is the duty of each country to police its own borders. Specifically, if the US or Uganda or Sweden wants to keep something from coming into the country – whether animal, vegetable, mineral or people – then it is responsible for doing that. This is why, when Canadians travel to the US, they do not find themselves talking to a Canadian Border Agent about where they’re going, how long they plan to stay, and what they might be bringing with them. They get to talk to a very nice US border guard about all those things. If there are Canadian border guards patrolling the Great Lakes in boats, they are there to stop things and people from entering Canada, not from entering the US.

There are and have been countries in which citizens leaving the country have to talk to a border guard working for their own government. Citizens of good ol’ East Germany and the Soviet Union had to do that, back  in the day, and they could be sure they would be turned around and sent back home – if not arrested – if they did not have documented high-level permission to leave. We don’t live in countries like that. Thankfully.

I had to answer an hour’s worth  of questions from Israeli border security agents when I left their country after my one visit there in the 90s. We don’t live in a country in Israel’s precarious position of constant war, either. Thankfully, again.

For a while in the aftermath of 9-11, US border officials (in combat fatigues, no less) would lurk on the US roads that run from the US onto the Ambassador Bridge, randomly stopping cars that were heading to Canada. I don’t know what they would have asked me had I been stopped, I was always waved on, but I viewed it as one more step toward Big Brother when I saw it. Maybe they’re still doing it, I don’t know, I have not crossed that bridge in a long time.

So, if Mr Trump is proposing we start doing that to people leaving Canada for the US, the appropriate Canadian governmental response would be – ‘We’re not that kind of country. What enters your country is your responsibility.’

This has not been the response of Canadian government(s). They have instead looked like the proverbial chickens running around with their heads cut off, because not only the PM and his ministers have responded to this tariff threat, but so have a number of provincial premiers.

I will consider these responses in a bit, but first we have to be clear about the nature of Trump’s threat. The President-elect has said he will punish Canada for ‘letting bad things and people into the US’ by imposing a 25% tariff on all goods the US imports from Canada.

So, he is proposing to raise the prices of a large set of goods purchased by Americans and US -based companies, as a way to punish Canada, presumably until it stops those bad things from going to the US. To be sure, these tariffs, if enacted, will not be good for Canadian companies that export to the US, or their workers. The rise in prices in the US that the tariff will surely cause will reduce US demand for those products and that will mean lower sales and presumably lower profits for those Canadian companies. It is not impossible that some companies in Canada will be driven out of business by this.

So, definitely bad for (some) Canadians for sure. But also bad for most American consumers, and many American companies. Higher prices are not good if you are a buyer.

In other words, Trump is saying  ‘Do what I want or I will kill this puppy.  Yea, I know it’s my puppy, but dammit, I’ll shoot it, and you’ll be sorry.’

He is proposing to get what he wants by punishing his own citizens and companies. Waytago, Donald.

Not to be outdone, various Canadian officials in various governments have proposed to retaliate in much the same spirit. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has suggested his government will stop selling hydro-electricity to three US states in which, according to this Canadian Press story Ontario sells enough electricity to power 1.5 million homes. The three states involved are apparently New York, Michigan and Minnesota.

What will this cost Ontario and its taxpayers? Anyone? The answer hinges on what will happen if Ontario does stop exporting that electricity to the US. If it just means Ontario produces less electricity, then the question becomes whether Ontario was making a profit on those exports. If so, then we are foregoing those profits, and once again a government is punishing its own citizens to retaliate against a government leader who is punishing his citizens. If, on the other hand, the Ontario suppliers were not making a profit on that electricity then….well, why not?

Ford’s other idea is to stop the LCBO from importing US-produced alcoholic beverages, so….Bourbon, wine, and – one can hope – their crappy beer.

Bad for Jim Beam, Jack Daniels and California wine producers, I guess, as the LCBO does buy a lot of booze, but once again, it’s gonna be us Canadian consumers who also pay, through less choices in booze.

The province apparently (the CP story gives no source for this) is also considering restricting exports of minerals to the US that are used in battery production. It’s not clear to me that a province has any ability under the Canadian constitution to restrict what Canadian companies export, but once again, if they can, this is punishing the companies in Ontario that would otherwise be making a profit and employing Canadians by selling these minerals. I mean, c’mon, folks. Trumps says he will tax something we sell to the US and Ontario’s response is well, then we won’t sell it at all? That’s all you got? We’ll shoot our own puppy?

Now, not every Canadian premier is clueless. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is quoted in the article as saying “Under no circumstances will Alberta agree to cut off oil and gas exports,” she said. “Our approach is one of diplomacy, not threats.”

And, we are not going to cut our own throats, she might have added.

Another quote from the CP article:

Michael Sabia, president and CEO of Hydro-Québec, said “it’s not our current intention” to cut off Quebec’s exports to Massachusetts or New York state, but he conceded it might be possible.

“Our intention is to respect those contracts, both because they’re legally binding, but also because it’s part of, in our view, a sound relationship with the United States,” he said. “It’s a questionable instrument to use in a trade conflict.”

Okay, then if these contracts are legally binding, what about the contracts Ontario has with US states for providing electricity? Are they not legally binding? Did any journalist think to ask Ontario’s officials about that? And, given what Sabia says in that last paragraph, did the writer of the article mean to write that Sabia ‘….conceded that it might be impossible’ (to cut off electricity to the US). Y’know, beecause they have legally binding contracts. (Sorry, I have zero faith that journalists get things right any more….)

Another quote from the Ontario Premier in the CP article.

“We’re sending a message to the U.S. (that if) you come and attack Ontario, you attack livelihoods of people in Ontario and Canadians, we are going to use every tool in our tool box to defend Ontarians and Canadians. Let’s hope it never comes to that.”

Give a 21st century politician any excuse to use combat metaphors and they can’t stop themselves. Trump is attacking Ontarians and Canadians. I imagine that’s how Trump sees it, too, but what in fact he is doing, if we’re going to stick with the combat rhetoric, is attacking us in a way that guarantees his own people get hit with friendly fire. And, of course, our own ‘generals’ are threatening to ‘defend’ us by responding in kind.

I say keep your head down for awhile, none of these leaders can shoot – or think – straight.

Oh, yea, and just to make sure there is something completely ridiculous in this post, there’s the ‘Canada as 51st state with Governor Trudeau’ jab from Trump. It says a lot about 21st century journalism that journalists write intentionally serious stories about Canada becoming a US state, and their employers print/post them. There remain few grownups in the room anymore. Any room.

Endnotes

1, I was talking to someone the morning before I wrote this article and she told me she’d heard that Trump was going to stop selling US booze to Canada. I just said ‘That sounds implausible’ and of course it isn’t true, but it shows that people watching all this happen often have no idea about how things work. Who can do what, who is actually doing what, what are its impacts; none of this is obvious to most people. This makes it all more of a shame that the media is so bloody bad at explaining anything.

2. More beating up on CP. They deserve it. This note appears at the bottom of the CP article I quote above:

“Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version stated that Ontario exported enough energy to power 1.5 million homes in three states in 2013.”

Um….that’s still what the story says, and in addition, it names three specific states, but doesn’t give the year. So……just what was wrong about that original story? Is it that you are now saying you don’t know what bloody year those numbers apply to? Or…..you know the year but you’re not going to tell us? But, you’re sticking to the 1.5 million homes number?

You know things are bad when you can’t tell what mistake a correction is correcting.

 

Dammit, This is Important!

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Language, News Media, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Dammit, This is Important!

This is going to be a rant – unusual for me, I know – but a short one. I am working on a much longer rant for the coming days, so you’ve been warned.

I refer you to The London Free Press, November 21, Letters to the Editor. One letter is headed Timing Offensive.

The author is offended that the Freeps published an article headlined ‘We don’t want to know about abused men’ on Nov 9. I quote from the outraged letter:

“You have 11 other months of the year to publish that article, and yet you chose to run it in the one month dedicated to the Shine The Light on Women Abuse campaign.

Are the editor and editor-in-chief that insensitive, or worse, misogynistic?”

Misogynistic, clearly. I mean, it’s obvious, right?

I surmise that it was the publishing of an article about abuse of males during a month when someone decreed that we should focus on abuse of females that drew the writer’s ire. Would an article about the Movember prostate cancer thing have been equally offensive? I surmise not, as I suspect there were articles in the Freeps about Movember that did not outrage the letter-writer. No, I haven’t looked…..

More fundamentally, what is the actual nature of the offense, here? As far as one can tell from the letter, most of which I have reproduced above, as it was not long, the offense is thinking about, writing about, and publishing an article about, other types of abuse. So, our attention must not stray from the abuse of women during November, not even for the length of time it takes to read that offensive article.  And apparently, if the Freeps had published the article on Dec 1 the author would not have been upset, December presumably falling under the ’11 other months’ designation.

However, it is also true that someone somewhere, I know not who or how, did designate November as a month to support/discuss/sympathize with (I really don’t know what we’re supposed to do beyond growing a moustache) men who have prostate cancer. Should I then be offended if the Freeps publishes an article on breast cancer this month? What about skin cancer? I won’t be, but is that lack of outrage a moral failing on my part?

Sadly, this is pretty much how many people see things. They have a cause. The war in Gaza, misogyny, racism, cruelty to animals. This then becomes the most important thing there is to think and talk about, not just for oneself, but for everyone.  One then patrols their chosen territory assiduously, outraged by any and all perceived actions by anyone anywhere that might suggest that one’s favourite issue is not supremely important. (There are also people for whom this is a job description. They’re called ‘advocates’, they get tons of media attention, and are a topic for another post someday.)

Students camp out on the concrete beach (ok, how many were actually UWO students is not clear) and harass passersby and graduates because nothing is more important than their stand on the war in Gaza. Not your fellow students, not the ability of other people to live their lives without being shouted at, and never mind that your silly encampment and juvenile harassment has zero chance of having any impact on what happens in Gaza. This issue is important to me, to the exclusion of all else – including going to class or earning a living – and so it must be equally important to all right-thinking people. Any person who does not see the paramount importance of my issue, well – they must be a, a, a….misogynist.

So it is with this offended letter writer. It does not occur to her that if the appearance of that story in the Freeps (of all places) actually had any detrimental impact on the Shine the Light campaign, maybe said campaign is doomed.

 

Elections for Sale? Campaign Ad Spending in the USA and Arms Races

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. No Comments on Elections for Sale? Campaign Ad Spending in the USA and Arms Races

I. Some numbers

I read a series of letters to the Editor of The Globe and Mail this morning, all on the results of the US election, which continues to feature prominently in Canadian media, and certainly in the G&M. One letter-writer fumed that democracy had not triumphed in the recent US election, and went on to cite a number of reasons for believing that, including that ‘….the US Supreme Court has flooded US elections with corporate and special interest money.’

It seems to be a common belief among Canadians that because US elections involve the spending of so much more money than what is spent here in Canada on a federal election campaign, that winning elections in the US is all about outspending your opponent. That was certainly the attitude among the Canadians in the US Election discussion group I joined recently. A consequence of that need to outspend your opponent is the need to raise a lot of money, hence the belief that it is money, and those who have it, that matters to the outcome.

This prompted me to try to find out just how much was spent in this last US election, and by whom. The obvious place to go for such data is to the FEC, the US’s Federal Election Commission, as all spending by candidates, parties and political action committees (PACs) is supposed to be reported to this body. The FEC says that between Jan 1 of 2023 and Oct 31 of 2024, candidates for President and Congress spent $3.1B, the Party Committees together spent another $1.5B while PACs spent $7.3B, which adds up to just under $12B in total spending by all groups for US federal positions. That’s a lot of clams, and of course the good ol’ rule of 10 says that if Canadian spending is anything like in the same league, total spending in the next Canadian federal election (some time in 2025) will come to $US1.19B. Anyone care to bet it will be that high?

So far as I can tell, the FEC site doesn’t provide a breakdown of spending by party or candidate for the entire campaign. I found some tables that compiled spending up to June 30, 2024, but that ends well before the big spending spree just before Election Day. Which is not to say there isn’t a lot of info on the site. You can go in and find out that Nikki Haley for President, Inc, spent $49.58 on an Uber, date of the ‘disbursement’ being 12/31/2024, which is more than a month into the future, so…..I dunno what that means. Anyway, the site claims to have over 130 million records in its ‘disbursements’ database, all of which you can see, but I didn’t think I had the time to go through and add them up, and as a retiree I no longer have research assistants so I looked for another source.

A report from NBC news, dated Nov 8, reports on spending on advertising by the various parties and candidates, saying it is using data gathered by AdImpact. NBC reports that AdImpact reports as follows on the Presidential election:

“Overall, the Democratic campaign and pro-Democratic outside groups spent almost $1.8 billion, while the Trump campaign and pro-Republican outside groups spent $1.4 billion.”

So, the Dems outspent the Reps on this Presidential campaign by some $400million, and Harris lost. The story is similar in Congress, quoting again from the NBC story –

“The campaign for the Senate, which will be controlled by Republicans at the start of next year, drew about $2.6 billion in spending — $1.4 billion from Democratic candidates and outside groups and $1.2 billion from Republican candidates and pro-Republican groups.”

And……

“House races drew $1.7 billion in ad spending — $940 million from Democrats and $760 million from Republicans…”

It now appears the Republicans will have a slim majority in the House, also.

It leads me to wonder how evil all that money really is if it is not actually effective in winning elections. The Dems outspent the Reps on ads in all three cases, and lost. Of course, campaigns also spend on other things; the so-called ‘ground game’ of getting supporters to the polls, one way or the other. But I don’t think folks who worry about US elections being ‘bought’ worry about that. Helping folks get in their ballot is seen as virtuous spending, it’s all that ‘misinformation’ on TV and social media, financed by the evil rich, that is evil.

There is a substantial body of research showing that political contributions to Senators and Congressmen do not correlate with how they vote on legislation. That is, there seems to be no evidence that contributions from, say, the AFL-CIO or UAW to a legislator results in their voting more favourably on labour legislation, etc. One response to this is to note quite correctly that ‘no evidence’ does not mean that there is no effect. Finding good evidence that x has an effect on y, which is what most social science research tries to do, is difficult, and ‘no evidence found’ is a very common result of such research. (Research that finds ‘no evidence’ doesn’t often get published, which is why all you read about in the media are stories that include a sentence that starts ‘ a new study shows that….’. What those studies ‘show’ is very often baloney, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Another response to this particular ‘no evidence’ finding is that this is because what political contributions actually do is determine who ends up being elected to be a legislator in the first place. The 2024 election says maybe not so much, or at minimum, not always. The Dems outspent the Reps at every turn and ended up with a Republican president and Republican-controlled Congress. Their majorities in the latter are both very slim, and could be reversed in the 2026 mid-term elections, of course.

It will be interesting to see what happens in 2026. Who ends up controlling the House and Senate after those elections will be of interest, but also how the campaign fundraising and spending go. Will the Dems be able to again outspend the Reps, and will it get them control of Congress if they do?

Just for fun, I went back and checked on the last Canadian federal election in 2021, and discovered that the limits set by Elections Canada on spending by the various federal parties were set at $30Cmillion or less, depending on how many candidates each party ran, so that came to an overall ceiling of just under $150Cmillion in spending by all the federal parties combined. Canada doesn’t have PACs, but third parties do spend money in Canadian election campaigns. I could not find any figures for spending by such groups, but Canadian legislation prevents them from spending more than $150,000 in any one election, so their spending cannot add up to much, it would seem. In short, there is no way total campaign spending in the next Canadian federal election is going to get anywhere near $US1.19B, as that would translate into about $C1.6B.

Does that lower spending mean we get better electoral outcomes in Canada? What do you think? Electoral campaigns are certainly much shorter in Canada, a fact for which I know I am very grateful. But – would it be better or worse for all if parties and candidates were allowed to spend more? I’m betting no one reading this thinks it would be better….

II. A Hypothesis

One way to understand this high level of US campaign spending is to view it as an arms race, much like the one that Pepsi and Coke are involved in. That is, no one in North America can possibly be ignorant of the existence of, or the taste of, either Pepsi or Coke. Yet in 2019 Coca Cola spent $154million advertising just its Classic and Lite brands in the US, while PepsiCo spent $118million advertising just its Pepsi brand in the same year. Why so much for a product everyone already knows about? Answer: it’s an example of an arms race, like what happened in Europe before WWI.

The key characteristic for a strategic situation to be an arms race is that each party believes that it’s chance of winning is greater the greater is their own spending and the less is their opponents’ spending. Winning a war in 1914 was more likely the more a country spent on arms and the less its potential opponents spent. Check. The more Pepsi spends on advertising Pepsi the greater will be Pepsi’s sales, the more Coke spends on advertising, the less will be Pepsi’s sales, and conversely. Check. The more Trump spent on political ads, the more likely he was to win the election, but the more Harris spent the less likely he was to win, and conversely. Check. This all leads to each side in an arms race trying to outspend their opponent, and means that the more your opponent raises/spends, the more you feel you must raise and spend. Hence, ever-increasing fundraising and spending.

The logic of this all leads to the conclusion that both parties would be better off if a third party could come in and impose an outside limit on their spending. In the political case, that would mean a law limiting contributions or spending or both, such as Canada has. It is also the impetus, at least partially, for arms control agreements and treaties in the warfare example – although Hitler in the 30s showed that there is an enforcement problem with those. In the case of Coke and Pepsi, there is no third party, and if those companies sat down together and agreed to mutually limit their own ad spending, they would almost certainly get in trouble with US anti-trust authorities. That is illegal collusion, man.

A case in commerce where a third party did more or less impose an ad spending limit was in the early 70s, when cigarette ads were banned from TV by the US government.

This was done for health reasons, not to help out the tobacco companies, but I have heard that tobacco company stock prices rose after that ban, which would be outstanding evidence that they were in an arms race up until then. I haven’t been able to find any credible evidence of that rise – it happened back in 1970 – although it does seem to be true that overall industry spending on advertising dropped after the ban on TV ads. If anyone out there can point me at evidence about those tobacco stock prices, please do. I won’t hold my breath…..

Anyway, the analogy with political campaign advertising is pretty clear. There was no possibility that anyone in the US who might possibly vote was ignorant of the looming election or of either of the two candidates. The media provides unending streams of information about it all independently of any advertising by the two candidates and parties. Do all those campaign ads induce people to vote who otherwise would not, or is each campaign just worried about losing vote share to the other side if they don’t advertise? If so, then maybe Canada’s campaign spending limits regime is superior – at least for the political parties, and maybe for the voters. On the other hand, no one claims that the media were made better off by that 1970s TV advertising ban on cigarettes.

An attempt to limit campaign spending in the US would likely not get past the first amendment, but I’m betting the media would be at the front lines of trying to stop any such effort in any case. To them, after all, that $7.5B in ad spending was revenue.

Not Political  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. No Comments on Not Political  

Hey, Kids!

This is going to be an article about the recent US election that is not about politics. I’m sure you’re all relieved – I know I am.

One staple of any US (or Canadian) election is pre-election polling. Media organizations do it, the parties and candidates do it if they can afford it, and movements in those polls are written about endlessly in the months leading up to the election. It might even be true that they matter for the outcome, because they affect people’s beliefs about the eventual likely outcome, and there is credible evidence that the expected closeness of an election affects people’s decisions to vote. Why bother if you expect a landslide?

This last US election was predicted by almost all polls to be close at every moment, but there were differences, and one notable difference was in the predictions made by traditional polls relative to those made by prediction markets. These market platforms, like Polymarket, allow people to make real-money bets on who will win the election. The price of betting on a Trump win is set on this market platform, based on what bets are being made, and varies between .01$ and 1$. Paying the going price at any moment gives you one ‘share’ in a Trump victory, which means that if he wins, as he did, you collect $1 for each share you bought. Similarly for shares in Harris, which trades on its own separate market (although prices on the two markets are obviously linked). Thus, if a share in Trump costs 40cents, that suggests that in this market the general belief is that Trump is more likely to lose than win, while if his shares are going for 65cents, as they were at various times a week or so before the election on Polymarket, that suggests the general view is that he is more likely to win. Those who bought Trump shares when the price hit $0.65 (see below) made $0.35 for each share they bought.

Polls, on the other hand, do not directly predict the winner, but rather try to predict the share of votes each candidate will get, both nationally and in each state, based on surveys of likely voters. Those state vote predictions then have implications for the Electoral College vote count, which can of course be used to generate a prediction about who will win.

Below is the plaform Fivethirtyeight‘s final poll from Election Day.

Well, here are some facts (so far as I can tell) about all these predictions and polls in this election.

1, All the polls I know about got the national popular vote wrong. Not by a lot, maybe, but the ones that I know about predicted that however the Electoral College turned out, Harris would win the popular vote. They’re still counting votes in California for some reason, but it looks like Trump’s national vote total will exceed Harris’s by maybe 3 or 4 million.

2. None of the polls I saw at any point predicted that Trump would sweep the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.

3. If this makes you want to thumb your nose at polls generally, you should probably pick on the one that appears in – wait for it – The Economist. On Election Day – yes, you read that right – it posted an update to its prediction about the winner, giving Harris a 56 percent probability of victory.

Gonna be hard to live that one down……

4, There is plenty of chatter out there in the mainstream media now that the polls, like those in The Economist, are done for, having had their collective asses kicked by the political betting markets. That’s unwarranted, for sure. If you want to go full geek you can read a blog post here by statistician Andrew Gelman as to why that is an unwarranted conclusion, but know that Gelman was involved in putting together the prediction model used by The Economist. (I don’t believe he is involved in its day-to-day operation, so is likely innocent of any involvement in that big Harris jump on Election Day.)

However, I think I will back Gelman on this. First of all, it is worth noting that the betting markets back in 2016 were predicting a Clinton victory right up to election night, by which I mean a Clinton share cost more than $0.50 and a Trump share cost less than that. Beyond that, it is important to note that all US presidential elections in this century have been quite close, some of them really really close. It has become a 50/50 country at the national level politically, so predicting election outcomes is always going to be done with a great deal of uncertainty. That’s what makes sporting contests between equally capable teams fun, right? Whether that fun translates into politics you can judge for yourself.

All of which brings me to one particular prediction market in which something a bit unusual happened this year. I think it’s an interesting story in its own right. A couple of weeks before the election, the prediction market Polymarket, which had been selling Trump and Harris shares for prices not far from $0.50 for some time, suddenly saw the price of a Trump share vault into the middle 0.60s.

It turned out, and Polymarket was pretty up front about this, that the price had increased so markedly because a large buyer – later know as ‘The Trump Whale’ – had jumped in and bought a lot, as in millions of dollars worth, of Trump shares. It’s called a market because that’s what it is, that’s how it’s designed, so his big buy pushed the price of a Trump share up markedly.

It is still not known who this is, and Polymarket sure isn’t going to say, but The Wall Street Journal has featured a couple of stories on him, in which he has said he has no political agenda, but rather that he had a ‘hunch’ that Trump was going to win, that the polls were missing something. [It appears now to be common knowledge that he is a wealthy Frenchman who goes by the alias ‘Theo’. The WSJ claims he is set to rake in some $50 million from his election bets.] He bet not only that Trump would win the presidency, but also that he would win the national popular vote, something no poll got right.

The latest version of his story is that he believed that the polls were once again missing a ‘shy-Trump-voter’ effect, as they did in 2016 and 2020. That is, people who are going to vote for Trump, but won’t tell a pollster that, or just don’t respond to polls.  The WSJ story continues as follows –

To solve this problem, Théo argued that pollsters should use what are known as neighbor polls that ask respondents which candidates they expect their neighbors to support. The idea is that people might not want to reveal their own preferences, but will indirectly reveal them when asked to guess who their neighbors plan to vote for.

Théo cited a handful of publicly released polls conducted in September using the neighbor method alongside the traditional method. These polls showed Harris’s support was several percentage points lower when respondents were asked who their neighbors would vote for, compared with the result that came from directly asking which candidate they supported.

Well, now – that’s an interesting idea. If you think so, too, Gelman has an entire post devoted to it, not completely geeky, but very long, which you can read here. Bottom line: he also thinks ‘ask about your neighbors’ polling is an interesting (although not entirely new) idea, but needs more research. Of course he does, Gelman’s an academic, remember.

It is by now well-recognized by pollsters themselves that getting truly representative samples of people to survey has become more difficult with the demise of the universal use of landline telephones. What that all means for the polling business going forward remains to be seen, for sure, but it seems at least true that after three Trump-involved elections, US pollsters have still not figured out how to stop underestimating his support.

 

I Can’t Stop Myself

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. No Comments on I Can’t Stop Myself

…..writing about the US election. There’s just so much silliness.

Sometimes the best thing I can do in this blog is point my readers to other sources at which they can find things really really worth reading. One such is The Free Press https://www.thefp.com/  a website founded by former NYTimes staffer Bari Weiss. I subscribe, but you can read much of its content for free, and it consistently features commentary that I find both educational and stimulating. And, best of all, at least from my perspective, it is not just a mindless conservative/right-wing/Republican mouthpiece. In the long article that I quote below the author spends two paragraphs explaining how the Republicans’ likely control of both the executive and legislative branches of the US Federal government is not going to be a good thing and then explains what a fool is Tucker Carlson.

I quote below from a weekly Free Press column titled TGIF, written by Nellie Bowles . You should go here to read the entire thing, it is quite long but almost uniformly awesome. I am repeating here just what she writes about how the leftish US media intelligentsia is writing about Harris’s loss to Trump.

→ Our campaign was perfect: In the wake of their staggering defeat, Democrats have figured out what went wrong. It’s simple: The voters are bad. Americans are bigots. Case closed.

“I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign,” said MSNBC’s Joy Reid. “She had—Queen Latifah never endorses anyone. She came out and endorsed her. You know, I mean, she had every prominent celebrity voice. She had the Taylor Swift—she had the Swifties, she had the Beyhive. You could not have run a better campaign in that short period of time.”

You’re telling me Queen Latifah didn’t move the needle for Kamala? I need to sit down.

Or there’s Emma Vigeland, a host of the influential progressive radio show Majority Report, who said: “Can’t believe I actually had faith in other white women to choose our collective reproductive rights over their own whiteness. Naive and dumb.”

B-b-b-but, the Swifties are white!

Here’s Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart on PBS: “I can’t help but wonder if the American people have given up on democracy.” USA Today columnist Michael Stern slammed a piece that dared ask the question of where Harris went wrong: “Nope, I won’t read it. Harris ran a great campaign. The story should be titled ‘where the American people went wrong.’ ”

Frankly, the American people should have had to earn Kamala’s vote.

How, one might ask, could voters fail such a simple test? As Reid summed it up: “One side stands for freedom while the other meets the textbook definition of fascism: namely, a far-right dictatorial regime like Hitler’s Germany or Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy. But also, white-ruled South Africa before Mandela and the black majority took control. Or Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela today.”

All of those places in one, that’s America today. They took Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, and apartheid South Africa and rolled them all up into a dictator burrito and ate it for breakfast. They saw Putin’s Russia and said I’ll take three, thanks. Americans drained the swamp and then reconstituted it with Orbán’s Hungary. That’s what voters did.

You might take all of these shifts and think: Wow, American voters rejected Democrats in this cycle. Or you could have The New York Times’ take on it, which is that we have been conquered.

Never before seen in our 248-year history? He was president four years ago.

As I often write: you can’t make this shit up. There’s plenty more in the article worth reading, including where Bowles notes that Instagram took down a post by Piers Morgan (remember him?) in which he congratulates Trump for his win, the Instagram nannies having determined the post constituted ‘hate speech’.  https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/1854273724327059936

A parting shot. The exit poll info below was also in the article, but is in fact originally from The Financial Times. It shows, subject to the usual caveats about exit polling, how all-encompassing was the vote shift away from the Democrats relative to 2020.

Can’t make that up either, Dems.

Post-Apocalypse Post

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. 2 Comments on Post-Apocalypse Post

I may or may not post more on the just-completed US federal election in the future, but here on the day after I want to write a few things that occurred to me today or in the course of the campaign.

1. Mainstream Media. A couple of months ago, just after Harris magically became the Democratic nominee, I was sitting in my living room writing a blog post, as I do. I was also listening to the CBC’s Tempo program, in which CBC plays classical music from 9am to noon. Tempo also features a four-minute newscast at the top of each hour. CBC thought a good use of some of that four minutes was to inform me every hour that Taylor Swift had endorsed Kamala Harris for president. My tax dollars at work.

2. Charlatans. Every US Presidential election season, shallow media outlets like the New York Times and NPR drag out historian Alan Lichtman, proclaiming him as ‘The Prophet of Presidential Elections’. If you want to know why this moniker is balderdash, you can read statistician Andrew Gelman’s blog articles about it here and here. One can hope that Lichtman won’t get the usual media coverage in four years, given he predicted a Harris win this time – but I would not bet on it.

3. Snowflakes. In the run-up to said election, it appears that the School of Public Policy at Georgetown University felt that their students were so stressed by this looming election that special services had to be set up for them. You can read about it all here, but to give you the idea, here’s a brief quote from the article, written by Free Press (No, not the London one) columnist Frannie Block:

Here’s the agenda (and no, you can’t make this up):

10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Tea, Cocoa, and Self-Care

11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.: Legos Station

12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.: Healthy Treats and Healthy Habits

1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.: Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises

2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.: Milk and Cookies

4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.: Legos and Coloring

5:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.: Snacks and Self-Guided Meditation

I wanted to ask Clevenger [the school’s director of student engagement’] why college and graduate students needed milk and cookies to recover from their stress—and how being coddled in college might someday affect American diplomacy—but she didn’t respond to my calls or emails.

I am very much looking forward to reading about what Georgetown are doing for their students now to help them deal with an election win by The Anti-Christ. Stay tuned for updates.

4. Apocalypse. To finish up, I quote here a paragraph from the article by Andrew Coyne that appeared in today’s Globe and Mail. I plan to save the entire article for future reference, but I am posting this much here so we can all revisit Andrew’s predictions in a few months.

“There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.”

Yikes. Gotta find my Lego set.

 

Bought and Paid For – and Scared

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. No Comments on Bought and Paid For – and Scared

I open with a tip of my hat to Andrew Coyne, whose op-ed piece in the Oct 4 Globe, titled ‘Nice little news network you got there. Pity if anything should happen to it’ inspired this post. [I will add – that’s a good headline for the article, not something I say often.]

A word about Coyne. I have been reading him since he was The National Post’s token liberal commentator, and continue to do so now that he is the Globe’s token conservative. I also watch him on CBC’s At Issue panel on Thursdays, but in truth I watch that mostly to hear what the redoubtable Chantal Hebert has to say about Canadian politics. Chantal is awesome.

Andrew has a few things that he write about regularly, from which I infer they matter to him a lot. Here are three of them, which I’m bothering to list here because they matter to me, also.

  1. First-past-the-post (otherwise known as plurality rule) electoral systems, as are used in Canada, England and in US congressional elections, are bad, and should be replaced by proportional representation systems.
  2. Much of what is wrong with current Canadian politics and governments arises because it is now necessary to have the approval of the Party leader to be nominated to run in any riding as the candidate for that Party.
  3. It was wrong and will lead to a diminishment of Canadian democracy for the federal government to set up a system for subsidizing (selected) news media outlets.

Full disclosure – I disagree completely with Mr Coyne about issue 1, but agree with him almost entirely with regard to issues 2 and 3. I am going to say nothing here about 1, it is a complex subject, one I spent a good bit of my professional career thinking and teaching about. Someday I may write a long post or three about it, but not now.

I agree with Coyne about 2, and I will at this point say only this about it. If you wonder why MPs from the Liberal Party of Canada did not long ago force their highly unpopular PM and party leader to step down, you have only to note issue 2. Those MPs rely on the leader of the party to sign off on their nomination if they are to have even the chance to run for office in their riding in the next election. They are not about to piss JT off. I say no more at this point, even though there is much more to be said.

On to 3, the topic of this post. To his credit, from the moment the idea of having ‘approved’ news media organizations receive financial subsidies from the federal government was suggested, Coyne has written piece after piece saying ‘this is a terrible idea’. The press cannot, must not, be seen to be in the debt of the federal government if they are to play their role of holding government ministers and bureaucrats accountable for their decisions. Full Stop.

That argument is unassailably correct, as far as I am concerned, but of course those subsidies are now in place anyway. The first big problem with this system is  – which orgs get such a subsidy and how much does each get? That the CBC gets a subsidy in the current regime, on top of the more than $1Billion they get directly from taxpayers, should tell you immediately that the subsidy-receivers are going to be tilted toward BIG establishment news outlets. According to CTV news (a CBC competitor, to be sure), CBC got $1.4B in the most recent federal budget, an increase of about $90million from the year before. How much of this is the ongoing subsidy they receive every year and how much is from this new, broader subsidy regime, is not clear.

Coyne’s Oct 10 piece above simply points out two more emerging consequences of the existence of this subsidy regime. One is Pierre Poilevre’s recent attack on CTV News, which included forbidding Conservative MPs from speaking to reporters from that org. He did this in response to two CTV employees splicing together some video of Poilevre so as to make him seem to say something he did not actually say.

I agree with Coyne that what those CTV employees did was flat out wrong, but Coyne’s point is that CTV was over-the-top apologetic about it, issuing two separate apologies, firing the two employees, and that CTV did that – in Coyne’s view – because they know they have pissed off a likely future PM, who is going to soon be in a position to influence their subsidy.

The larger point is: how can news org’s claim to be ‘independent watchdogs’ of the government  of the day – you know, the vaunted ‘fourth estate’ – while receiving a subsidy from that government? Coyne goes on to say that political abuse of the system is already a bi-partisan matter, citing a tweet on X in which a Liberal MP says to a National Post reporter “Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place – the same subsidies your Trump – adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary.”

In other words – ‘what are you doing criticizing my party, you ungrateful cur. You would not have a job without the subsidies my Liberal-party-led government pays your employer’.

This is a terrible situation news orgs have put themselves in, and it’s only going to get worse. The Conservatives have for decades been unhappy with what they see as a CBC that is Liberal-sympathetic and antagonistic to them. I think the Conservatives are not wrong about that bias, but the point is that they will find a way to reduce its subsidy if they form a majority government. I will not be terribly unhappy if they do, but that is not the point – one must ask, will every change in government now result in a list of previous subsidy recipients being taken off the news media gravy train and replaced by others? Is that the kind of ‘free press’ Canadians want?

Coyne is right, government subsidized journalism is a terrible idea. That implies that the CBC was a terrible idea before this added subsidy regime was born, but widening the subsidies to take in more organizations makes a bad idea worse. A press that relies on government subsidies to stay in business is not, in any relevant sense, a free press.

I understand that the claimed reason for this is the inarguable fact that the news business is in bad financial shape. Few media orgs are able to make any profit in our brave new internet world, and almost no local news orgs can do so. Local radio stations and newspapers and even TV stations are closing their doors on a regular basis. However, Coyne’s concern – which I share – is that this subsidy regime represents a cure that is worse than the disease that spawned it. A better way to support local news media needs to be found.

Union Postures, CBC Reports It – Updated

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, LBOs, News Media, Safety. No Comments on Union Postures, CBC Reports It – Updated

[Note: I posted this first on Sept 26, after which another article (read it here) about this appeared on the CBC website. This caused me to update/amend various bits of the post on Sept 28, which you will see below. ]

A union, any union, is just another LBO, and so those in charge do what those in charge of any LBO do – stop behaving like sensible human beings. They become organization people, whose primary mission is the maintenance of the LBO and hence, of course, their own positions.

The faculty at The University of Western Ontario are ‘represented’ by UWOFA, a local union not directly affiliated with the Teamsters or CUPE or any other national labour organization, as are some unions at Western. I think it is affiliated with CAUT, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and I think some of one’s union dues to UWOFA get shoveled up to CAUT. This faculty unionization at Western happened in the oughts, I voted against it back then, but having seen it happen anyway, was sure that it meant the end of good working conditions at Western. In fact, it took awhile for that expected deterioration in things to happen, in large part because there were enough reasonable faculty (including a couple of my Econ Dept colleagues) who were willing to serve in important union positions (like negotiating and salary committees) to keep things from going entirely off the rails immediately.

All those reasonable folks eventually got old and retired, like me, so the Union was becoming more and more unreasonable by the time I retired. A story on the Sept 26 CBC-London website (read it here) makes it clear that UWOFA has moved into full LBO posturing mode.

If you didn’t already know, CUPE local 2361, which includes caretakers, groundskeepers and many other folks tasked with keeping UWO running, walked off the job on Aug. 30 after contract negotiations with the university broke down.  They remain on strike as I write this.

The Sept 26 story headline and sub-headline from CBC was as follows:

Western faculty flag ‘critical safety violations’ amid strike, launches complaint to province

Infractions include: Eyewash stations, safety equipment not being tested and asbestos found in old buildings

If you had read this CBC story early enough, the first thing you would have seen was the photograph below, with the caption below that:

“Some students at Western University say they have seen full garbage and recycling bins on campus since facilities employees walked off the job on Aug. 30. It’s prompted the university’s faculty association to launch a complaint with the province. (Kendra Seguin/CBC)”

So, ‘some students’ have said they have seen full trash bins, but apparently the intrepid CBC reporting team, including photographer Seguin, couldn’t find a trash bin that was actually full, so they took and published the photo above. That doesn’t look staged at all, does it?

A picture is worth a thousand words – just maybe not the words intended.

If you wondered ever if the CBC thinks we’re all fools, their publishing that photo and caption perhaps provides some evidence. However, eventually someone must have pointed out to someone at the CBC that this photo and caption was rather  embarrassing, journalistically speaking, and it is no longer part of the story if you go read it now.

There are other photos, which I will get to in a minute.

The article’s sub-title raised some questions for me, as follows –

1.How do UWOFA people know that things have not been inspected or tested? Are they going around and checking? Interesting work for faculty to be doing, if so, but even if they are, how does a professor of Sociology know if a fire extinguisher or eyewash station has been inspected or tested?

2. Who ‘found’ this asbestos in old buildings? Are UWO faculty also going around buildings removing drywall and checking for asbestos? I mean, if there is asbestos in old buildings (and there certainly is in some, including the building in which I used to work) it has been there since the building was constructed. It all was certainly there before the CUPE strike, so just what does it have to do with said strike?

Well, as to 1, there are new photos in the story, taken apparently by UWOFA members, so yes, faculty really are spending their time on this – or UWOFA is paying someone else to take them, I suppose. Here’s one below, showing a station behind a glass case that holds a fire hose and fire extinguisher.

The point being that there are initials on the red sticker dated up to July, but not August or September. So what we can infer is that no one has come by and put their initials there. What does that certify? Well, that no one has come by to check that the equipment hasn’t disappeared. You don’t ‘test’ a fire extinguisher or fire hose, right? In the case of the extinguisher, that renders it useless, and in the case of the fire hose, it makes one hell of a mess.

Here’s another photo from the new and improved CBC story:

Well, someone wearing jeans and sneakers is apparently putting a new plastic liner in a plastic garbage can. I don’t know how UWO faculty can possibly concentrate on their work knowing such things are going on, possibly in the same building in which they are working.

But wait, there’s more –

So, there is indeed an eye wash and safety shower which may have not been tested since the 16th of August. That doesn’t mean the station doesn’t work, of course, but no one has put an initial on that card since then.

[Amendment: The more recent CBC story includes the following statement from the UWO administration:

A spokesperson for the university said weekly checks of eyewash stations inside labs are the responsibility of lab staff, not CUPE 2361 employees. 

Thus, if indeed these stations are not being checked and tested, it has nothing to do with the CUPE strike. I wonder who UWOFA may have gotten into hot water over this photo?]

But wait, there’s still more. Another quote from the story:

The faculty union also said HVAC systems in student residences are malfunctioning and replacement workers aren’t wearing adequate personal protective equipment.

How does the faculty union know what is happening in student residences, and who among these dedicated faculty guardians of safety is aware of what ppe is required by workers in any particular situation?

Here are two clarifying quotes from UWOFA’s stalwart president:

“For a replacement worker, the difference between a sneaker and a safety shoe is very significant when a heavy or sharp object falls on their foot,” said UWOFA president Johanna Weststar.

Ah, of course, this is about UWOFA’s concern for the replacement workers.

She is further quoted –

“A malfunctioning eye wash station could mean blindness for faculty, staff or students who work with hazardous substances. Western works because CUPE workers do. We need them back now.”

It could, indeed. Here’s a crazy idea, but stay with me on this. Suppose UWOFA members who go into a room or lab in which there is an eye wash station or shower check to see if it is working before they begin their class or lab work. You know, turn it on, and see what happens. Now, I know that would be doing the work of a member of another union, a definite Solidarity No-No, but….it would prevent, you know, blindness from happening.

That crazy idea aside, this last quote does kinda indicate what is really going on – UWOFA is trying to put pressure on the Administration to settle with the striking CUPE members. More precisely, they are trying to get a provincial minstry to put pressure on UWO to settle. I have no doubt having CUPE on strike is a pain in the ass for faculty, but it is of course never going to happen that UWOFA tries to put pressure on the strikers themselves, or good ol’ CUPE, to settle. Solidarity, right?

So, this is posturing by UWOFA to try to get something they want – the Admin to settle with the CUPE workers. I am no friend of the UWO Admin, I think the place was and continues to be incredibly badly run, but I think UWOFA is just as badly run, and does not in any sense operate in the interests of most faculty members. It was a tossup in my last years working whether it was the Admin or UWOFA that did the most to make my working life unpleasant.

I will close with one last bit of the CBC story. Another quote attributed to UWOFA:

The faculty union said it’s “alarmed by the potential for asbestos exposure in older buildings, where water and steam leaks occur frequently and require special precautions that may not have been properly communicated to replacement contractors.”

Ah, so those ‘special precautions’ that are required ‘may not have been properly communicated to replacement contractors’. Indeed, they may not have been. Or, maybe they were, it doesn’t sound as though UWOFA actually knows, does it?

But, being fair to UWOFA, it is unlikely anyone within UWOFA actually claimed to have ‘found’ asbestos in old buildings. That wording at the beginning of the story is almost surely pure CBC, devoted as ever to accurate reporting.

[Amendment: The later CBC story includes this quote from the UWO Admin:

“There is no reason to suggest that asbestos-related hazards have increased during the current strike – and the University is not aware of any contracted employees exposed to any hazardous conditions,” said Ledgley.

As I wrote, asbestos has been known to be in some UWO buildings for years – this has nothing to do with the present CUPE strike.

Again from the UWO Admin, quoted by CBC:

“In the unusual circumstance that asbestos abatement work was necessary, it would be conducted by individuals properly trained in asbestos work with proper personal protective equipment and the worker would be monitored by Workplace Health.”]

I suspect none of this posturing by UWOFA’s leaders is going to have an impact on the Provincial Ministry of Labour, and thus on the duration of the strike, but I suppose one shouldn’t blame an LBO for trying.

[Amendment: I was just wrong on this. The more recent CBC story includes this:

The ministry told CBC News on Thursday that it received two health and safety complaints from the university on Sept. 24, and has assigned an inspector to investigate.

“The ministry prioritizes worker health and safety, enforcing the Occupational Health and Safety Act to ensure compliance. While the investigation is in progress, we cannot provide further details,” a spokesperson told CBC News in an email.

The ministry is indeed investigating. I look forward to what happens next, and whether this has any impact on the duration of the strike. I suppose I should say ‘Well played, UWOFA’, but I’ll wait to see what actually comes of all this.]

 

 

 

No, a Canadian Federal Election is Not Imminent

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. No Comments on No, a Canadian Federal Election is Not Imminent

I was going to title this post ‘Arithmetic Matters’.

Canadian politics has actually become somewhat interesting of late, which is saying something, given that Canadians – and Canadian media – generally pay more attention to US politics than to the domestic variety. However, Jagmeet Singh’s recent decision to renege on the NDP’s Supply and Confidence agreement with Trudeau’s Liberals, plus the occurrence of two by-elections on Monday, September 16 has given the chattering classes in Canada something domestic to write about.

In that vein, John Ibbitson has an op-ed in the Sept 17 Globe (read it here) with the headline With the Liberals Losing Once Safe Seats, an Election Can’t be Far Off and that title pretty much says what is the point of the column. The Liberals have indeed now lost safe seats in both Toronto and Montreal in recent months, and the NDP yesterday hung on – barely – to a once-safe seat in Winnipeg. Ibbitson thus predicts an imminent dissolution of the House of Commons and election.

Ibbitson is just wrong about this. Two facts say that is so. One, the Liberals need only one of the Bloc, The Conservatives or the NDP to support any legislation in Parliament that is a matter of confidence, to prevent the dissolution of the House. Just one.

Two, if you look at the website 338 Canada and take into account all you like the fickleness and inexactitude of polling in the 21st century, you are still left with the following numbers.

Current stated support for the major parties is as follows:

Liberals 24%

Conservatives 43%

NDP 16%

Bloc 8%

Because of the way support for these parties is distributed around the country (a key matter for the Bloc in particular), 338Canada projects that if an election were called today, the parties would win seats in the following ranges (current seats held are in () )–

Liberals 49-95 (154)

Conservatives 189-240 (119)

NDP 9-25 (25)

Bloc 31-44 (33)

Thus, even in the best possible scenario, the NDP will find itself in third place in number of seats held in a Conservative majority government, and very possibly a distant fourth, after an election held right now.

I’m sorry, Mr. Ibbitson, but while the Bloc and Conservatives might happily bring down the government tomorrow if given the chance, the Liberals need only the NDP to keep that from happening, and the NDP can read the 338Canada website, too, and so has no reason to want an immediate election, their close win in Winnipeg notwithstanding.

Happy to bet Mr. Ibbitson – or anyone else – a cold beer on this: No Canadian federal election in 2024. You read it here first, folks. Ok, maybe not first……

Two Harris-Trump Debate Related Posts

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. 2 Comments on Two Harris-Trump Debate Related Posts

These two articles both arose from that damnable US Presidential debate, which, against my better judgement, I did watch for the first half-hour.  I have nothing useful to add to the gazillion words that have been written about the debate itself, other than to say that I switched back to watching a baseball game after 30 minutes because I was getting depressed.

Other than arising from that one event, these posts have nothing in common.

I. The BBC and the Election

The BBC website for the US and Canada is one I check regularly, despite my belief that the BBC, once among the most reliable and fact-oriented of all news-reporting institutions, is now no better than any other, and worse than some.

On Sept 12, I found the following story posted on the US and Canada BBC News website.

What the world thought of US debate

The first showdown between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was closely watched not only in the US but around the world.

The debate in Philadelphia featured some tense exchanges on foreign policy between the two presidential candidates.

From Beijing to Budapest, here’s how the debate went down, according to BBC foreign correspondents.

…..

What then follows are brief segments from BBC reporters stationed around the world, purporting to reveal reactions to the debate from people in the countries/regions where they are stationed. In fact, there is almost nothing, beyond one cryptic quote from Ukrainian president Zelensky and two sentences from two media outlets in Hungary, that tells you what anyone around the world, be they leader, media organization or citizen, thought of the debate. It is all what the BBC correspondents think such people thought of the debate, which makes it not reporting but yet another opportunity for said correspondents to write what they wish. Not a fact to be seen anywhere. Gathering facts, going out and interviewing foreign individuals or leaders, that takes effort, and resources, and that clearly didn’t happen. So, the piece offers the reader no reporting or news-gathering, just more reporters saying things.

More sadly, one part of the piece is much worse than that, as one correspondent takes a dip into conspiracy theory. Here is one entire section of this report, nominally about the Middle East.

White House race keenly watched in Middle East

By Paul Adams, international correspondent, Jerusalem

The two candidates did not stray much from their previously stated positions last night, even if Trump did add, with characteristic hyperbole, that Israel wouldn’t exist in two years if his opponent becomes president.

Here in the Middle East, the race for the White House is being keenly watched.

With the war in Gaza raging and a ceasefire deal still elusive, some of Benjamin Netanyahu’s critics suspect that Israel’s prime minister is deliberately stalling until after the election, in the hope that Trump will be more sympathetic to Israel than Harris.

There’s a whiff of history perhaps being about to repeat itself.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s campaign team was suspected of urging Iran not to release American hostages held in Tehran until after he had beaten President Jimmy Carter, saying Reagan would give Iran a better deal.

Could something similar be afoot now? Certainly Netanyahu’s opponents believe he is now the chief obstacle to a ceasefire deal.

That’s Mr. Adams entire contribution, and all I can say is – Oh, my god. As I wrote, he talked to no one, quotes no one who live in the Middle East, but then – A whiff of history? The BBC’s intrepid correspondent in Jerusalem tells readers nothing about what anyone in the Middle East actually said about the debate, and then does not mention that this suspicion (he does at least use that word) about the Reagan campaign’s interactions with the Iranian government in 1980 was investigated by two separate US Congressional committees, who found no credible evidence of its truth. Indeed, the Chairman of the House task force, a bloody Democrat, went to the trouble of publishing an editorial in the NYTimes in 1993, shortly after his investigative committee published its findings, saying there was no credible evidence to support the claims of Reagan campaign efforts to delay the hostage release, and most of the people who testified that it had occurred could not be believed. No mention of any of that in the BBC story. You can actually read the report of the Congressional Task Force here – all 998 pages of it. Yea, I know, not likely – I’m betting Mr. Adams hasn’t read it, either, but there’s no need to if your only intent is to find another bad thing to attach to Netanyahu, if only by implication.

As I said, how the mighty have fallen. A BBC correspondent reviving what can only be seen as a (rather old) conspiracy theory, in the guise of reporting on an ongoing US presidential campaign.

II. The Debate’s Impact on Two Prediction Markets

I got this idea from a blog I follow by Rajiv Sethi, called Imperfect Information. He is very interested in prediction markets, and this post is about how two such markets reacted after the debate. If you want to read his (more techy and detailed) take on this, it’s freely available here.

For those who don’t know, a prediction market refers to a platform on which you can buy a ‘share’ in the outcome of some future event. In this case, you can either buy a share that Kamala Harris will be elected president, or buy a share that Donald Trump will be elected president. This is really placing a bet, because what buying a share in, say, Kamala Harris gets you is a payment of a dollar if Harris wins, and nothing if she loses. The terms of that bet then depend on what you paid for that share. In the graph below, which I reproduced from Sethi’s blog post, the prices at which one could buy a Harris share on two different prediction markets is displayed, during the hours just before and just after the debate.

Note that on PredictIt a Harris share was priced at 50cents four hours

before the debate. That means that betting on Harris by buying a share was an even bet; you pay 50cents and get a dollar back if she wins and lose your 50cents if she loses. Someone who thinks she has better than an even chance at winning might therefore buy a share, and someone who thinks she is more likely to lose would not. On the Polymarket site, a Harris share cost only 47cents four hours before, so that would be a good bet perhaps even for someone who thought she had only a 49% chance of winning. [It’s actually a bit more complicated than this, as Sethi explains in his long post, because Harris and Trump contracts are traded separately. What I write above is close enough for a basic understanding of these markets.]

As you can easily see, the price of a Harris contract jumped on both markets right after the debate, even though they continued to be different.

Sethi’s post delves into how these two sites can offer different prices on a Harris contract at the same moment in time, and the possibilities of making money by betting on both markets when this is true. I am writing about it here just to note that both markets saw the price of a Harris share (contract) jump immediately after the debate, reflecting the fact that people trading on those markets in general thought her chances of winning went up, and this was reflected immediately in the price of a Harris share. It would also be reflected in a drop in the price of Trump shares, which are not depicted here.

This contrasts with the fact that so far, none of the opinion polls that have updated since the debate, so far as I know, have seen any change in the ‘intend to vote for’ numbers for the two candidates. This is a big difference in how prediction markets and polls, both of which can be said to ‘predict’ the electoral outcome, operate. Markets are always open, so right after the debate, or even while it was ongoing, people can go and buy and sell shares if they think what is happening has changed the probability of a Harris win. Polls have to wait until a new survey is done and compiled before they can reflect the effect of an event like the debate.

However, along with the fact that markets react more quickly to events than do polls, there is the fact that they can offer different predictions. As I say, no poll of which I am aware thinks the debate changed either candidate’s support, whereas the two markets above reflect considerable movement. I admit I don’t know what has happened since the time frame depicted on the graph, prices can change constantly on these markets.

Now, whether polls do a better job than markets in predicting outcomes is – so far as I can see – undecidable. With an event like this election, one candidate wins, and all either a poll or market tells us any time prior to that is a probability. If the market says the probability of a Harris win is 0.55 at some point in time, and Harris eventually loses, there is no verifiable sense in which the market was ‘wrong’. There was, after all, a probability of 0.45 that Harris would lose at that same point in time. Unless a poll or market states a probability is either 0 or 1, it cannot be wrong. One can of course just declare that if the prediction of something happening is greater than 0.5 and that something does not happen, then the prediction is ‘wrong’, but I think that is based on a misunderstanding of the concept of probability. Similarly, if a poll says Harris has a 50% chance of winning and at the same time a market says it is 55%, and she wins, does that mean the market prediction was ‘better’? One can declare that to be so, but again, it’s not clear to me what that really means, since both allowed that her losing was a legitimate possibility.

None the less, one can easily find people who will argue for the superiority of one over the other. Folks do like to argue.

Interestingly, it is very difficult to operate a prediction market devoted to the US Presidential election in the US itself. The SEC and other US regulators have come down hard on the ones that did exist (one of the first was built by economist George Neumann at the University of Iowa) as being unregulated trading platforms, which forced them to shut down or leave the US. PredictIt is based at The Victoria University of Wellington in Australia, and Polymarket operates on crypto currency only, and although it now seems to be operating legally in the US, it was fined $1.2million in 2022 by The Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Wikipedia (not my favourite source for credible info) claims over $700million has been wagered on the presidential election on Polymarket.

What the Google Just Happened?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, LBOs, News Media. 1 Comment on What the Google Just Happened?

Much of the material I write about in this blog is taken from the news media, obviously, but sometimes I write about the story or issue that the media piece is covering, while other times I am writing about the media piece itself. This article is going to be of the second type.

You have likely read or heard that the US Department of Justice brought an antitrust case against Google (four years ago, actually), and that the judge presiding over this case has just recently found against Google. Most headlines say something like ‘Google found guilty of being a monopolist’. This is an oversimplification. The DoJ accused Google of violating a rather specific US antitrust statute, and the judge found that it did. In this case (you can read the judge’s decision here) it was Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and here is what the judge himself had to say about that statute in his decision:

“Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a firm to ‘monopolize.’ ….The offense of monopolization requires proof of two elements: (1) the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market and (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident.”

Thus, it is indeed true that the DoJ had to show that Google has ‘monopoly power’ in the search engine market (arguing that aspect of the case is where a bunch of economists made big consulting fees, you can bet). However, it also has to show that Google did something willful to acquire or maintain that monopoly power. Being a monopoly due to, say, selling a superior product, implies no harm, no litigation.

From what I have read, it is Google’s agreements with other companies – like Apple – to make Google the default search engine on the devices they sell in return for a payment from Google that were found to violate part (2) above. For example, Google paid Apple $20B (yea, that’s a B) for making Google the default search engine on every iPhone’s Safari browser.

A lot has been written about the consequences of this decision for average Joes and Jills like you and I. How, if at all, will it change what happens on the internet, particularly in searching the web?

I haven’t read everything written about this, and there has been a lot, but I did come across an article on the National Post website, posted on August 9, written by one Matt Stoller, with the title:

Landmark decision means Google’s control of the web is ending

Wow. I am aware that Mr. Stoller almost certainly did not write that headline for his article, but a note to whoever did – this case was about Google’s search engine only, and if you know anything about Google, you know they have plenty of other operations on ‘the web’ (the parent company, Alphabet, owns Youtube, just to name one). In any case, it is a bit much to talk about Google’s ‘control of the web’. (If any firm could be said to ‘control the web’ my money would be on Microsoft, but that’s a blog for another day).

However, the rest of the article I have to credit to Mr Stoller, and he has some remarkable things to say about this just-issued decision. For example, he writes: ‘So there we go, Google’s control of the web is ending.’

Ah. So, maybe he did write that headline.

Then there’s this –

‘The implications of this decision will have ripple effects across the internet, the law, and big business for generations.’

Generations. One senses a taste for hyperbole in Mr. Stoller’s writing, no?

Here are two facts about this case that seem relevant to understanding how important it will turn out to be for average internet users.

  1. Google has already said it will appeal the judge’s ruling.
  2. The judge’s decision is the final step in what is only the first stage of this trial, which is called the ‘liability’ phase. What now follows is the ‘remedy’ phase.

Regarding point 1, some of you may recall that in the early 2000s the US brought a case based on the same Section 2 of the Sherman Act against good ol’ Microsoft, accusing it of monopolizing the market for personal computer operating systems. The government won that case too, but it was then overturned by the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. So, it’s a bit too soon to be counting any chickens, and the judicial appeal process could drag on for some time.

Stoller ignores my point 1 in his article, but not point 2, since he writes the following:

“This part of the trial was what is called the liability phase, which is to determine whether Google broke the law. Judge Mehta found that it did. The next stage is called the remedy phase, during which the court will hear arguments about what to do to address the bad conduct.”

What to do, indeed. A company the size of Google, even just its search engine division, is an incredibly complex organization. It is fair to say that no one working in Google’s search engine division – including the person at the top – is aware of everything that happens within it. It’s just too big and complicated. So, what do you suppose are the chances that the DoJ and the judge, who agree that Google has behaved badly, but know approximately nothing about running a tech company, can figure out what remedy is needed to force Google to behave better in the future?

They can, presumably, do the obvious thing of declaring illegal Google’s contracts with Apple and others regarding the Google search engine’s status as the default search engine on their installed browsers. But it will still be true that Apple et al are going to choose some search engine to be available on the devices they sell. Do we really believe that Google can find no other way to persuade those companies that Google’s search engine is the one they should have as the default on their installed browsers? Given that (according to the Financial Times) Google currently handles more than 90 per cent of online queries  and that ‘google’ has become a synonym for ‘search for’, why indeed would all the companies with whom Google currently has agreements not leave it as their default search engine? It’s already the one most people use. What can the learned judge and assorted lawyers and economists working for the DoJ possibly come up with to change that simple fact?

Finally, a comment on the Stoller article’s most hyperbolic paragraph:

“What about the rest of business? Well, this decision means monopolization law is back. Exclusive contracts and arrangements are pervasive in American commerce, and until recently, executives could reliably exploit such deals without fearing that they might face any legal liability. But that era is over. This case is in the headlines, which means every single competent executive in America in any firm with market power is going to get a memo from their antitrust or general counsel on what they can and can’t do going forward. And they will likely begin changing their behaviour to avoid being brought to court for monopolization.”

So Stoller thinks the case will trigger memos from counsel all across the corporate universe. Well, maybe not. Even if this Google decision is not reversed on appeal, and even if the DoJ and judge come up with some way to actually reduce Google’s ongoing share of the search market, it is simply not true that any Google executives are going to face ‘legal liability’. Google might have to pay a fine, and it might be a whopper. However, for any person within Google to face a legal sanction, the DoJ would have had to bring a criminal case against Google (and its executives) under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The DoJ can do this, but they did not in the Google case, and in fact they almost never do. What they did was sue Google, a very different matter. The reason for this is simple; the DoJ can only win a criminal case against Google or any of its executives if it proves its allegations beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s a much higher standard than the standard of proving one’s case by a preponderance of the evidence, which is what is required in a civil lawsuit. The DoJ wanted to win this case and change Google’s business practices, so they filed a lawsuit, not a criminal case. Google executives might get fired by their company, but legal liability is not on the table.

The only antitrust violations that are typically prosecuted as criminal cases in the US (Canadian law and practice are similar in this regard)  are those of price-fixing or bid-rigging, which violate  Section 1 of the Sherman Act. In such criminal cases executives can indeed be fined or even imprisoned if the government wins the case, but again, this is not what happened in the US vs Google case.

Going forward, there is perhaps some reason to think executives of other companies need to worry about ‘legal liability’ for entering into exclusive contracts that violate Section 2, but only because in 2022 the DoJ announced that they would start pursuing more criminal cases under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The Department has in fact filed two Sherman section 2 criminal cases in the last 50 years, one in 2022 and the most recent in 2024. However, they didn’t pursue a criminal case against Google, and the two recent cases in which criminal charges were brought were against executives of relatively small companies.  So, if other executives have reason to be worried about legal liability, it does not arise from the judge’s decision in phase one of this case against Google.

If executives in other companies got memos about what to do or not do from their legal counsel, it would have happened after the DoJ’s 2022 announcement, not after judge Mehta’s recent decision in this case. And….did those memos cause executives in other companies to change their behavior? No way to know, really, until and unless more criminal Section 2 cases actually are brought – and maybe not then.

So maybe ‘….monopolization law is back’ is a bit premature. However, it is not fair to be too hard on the enthusiastic Mr. Stoller. If you go to the Financial Times article on this case, available here, you will find other worthies waxing equally hyperbolic about the meaning and significance of this still-incomplete case.

Peeps are gonna believe what peeps wanna believe.

 

 

An Ex-Mayor and an Editor Walk into a Bar

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. No Comments on An Ex-Mayor and an Editor Walk into a Bar

A tip of the hat to The Wall Street Journal for putting this in their Notable and Quotable column. The Journal’s Editors don’t comment on whatever appears in this column, they just publish it for their readers to see. Having seen it, I have a comment or two.

As background, Keisha Lance Bottoms is a former mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, a city with a population of about 500,000, which is the centre of a metropolitan area of some 6 million. Not a small job.

Ms. Bottoms has a different job now, something in the commentariat business. After the Biden-Trump debate, she was interviewed on MSNBC, and here is the WSJ’s report of part of that conversation –

Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms speaks with MSNBC host Chris Jansing, July 1:

Ms. Jansing: Your hometown paper the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is among those saying it’s time for President Biden to pass the torch. The editorial board wrote, “This wasn’t a bad night. It was confirmation of the worst fears of some of Biden’s most ardent supporters.” . . .

Ms. Bottoms: Let me just say I was very disappointed with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We have talked about making sure we’re protecting elections and making sure there’s no undue influence. This was undue influence by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or an attempt to influence. I think voters should be able to make decisions the same way they did in the primaries.

Ms. Jansing: But isn’t that what editorial boards are supposed to do?

Ms. Bottoms: Editorial boards are supposed to honor fair elections. I don’t think it’s fair when an editorial board with 10 people sitting in a room are trying to influence an election.

– There you have Ms. Bottoms’ take on the role of newspapers in the 21st century.

I’ll first just say that this is a good example of the tendency for supposedly knowledgeable people to say things that would have – even 20 years ago – been considered laughable.

Note the use by Ms. Bottoms of the terms ‘undue influence’, ‘protecting elections’, and ‘honor fair elections’. This is typical cant for most members of what passes for an intelligentsia in the 21st century. There is a list of unquestionable and unpardonable sins, like colonialism and oppression, ready and waiting to be attached to anything one is against. ‘Election influencing’ is another such sin – although I suspect only when practiced by the wrong people to influence elections in the wrong way.

Beyond that – what is it about the ‘10 people sitting in a room’ that is unfair? Would 5 people be fair, or would a thousand be more fair? Is it the fact they are sitting in a room at all that makes it unfair? Would it be fair if they were standing, or – kneeling?

And the sentence ‘I think voters should be able to make decisions the same way they did in the primaries.’ is beyond the pale. Does Ms. Bottoms believe that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editorial Board did not publish any commentary on the candidates in the primaries when those were being held? Or, perhaps they did not write those when sitting in a room.

It has become the sole job of virtually all political operatives, be they candidates, office-holders, advocates, activists or spin doctors, to quote talking points. Never mind a reasoned analysis, god forbid you should explain why you disagree with the Editorial Board’s position. Just get in your words – ‘honor fair elections’ – and retreat from the field claiming a score.

As I say, someone 20 years ago who said what Ms. Bottoms said above would have been laughed at. Today, I’m sure she has been favourably quoted by other, similar, political operatives.

Smiling – and Paying – for the Camera

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, London, News Media, Safety. No Comments on Smiling – and Paying – for the Camera

A short article by Scott Kitching appeared on the June 11 London News Today website letting us know that London City Council has authorized adding another 15 redlight cameras to the 10 that are already operating around the city. Our illustrious Mayor was quoted:

“More Red Light Cameras help limit dangerous driving behaviours at more locations in our City, and address a widespread community concern,” Mayor Josh Morgan said in a statement released by the city.

This statement can of course be used to justify putting a red light camera at every intersection in London, so stay tuned, folks.

Kitching also included some ‘statistics’ – reportedly provided by ‘the city’. That’s all the detail regarding the source of said stats we get. Quoting from the article:

“Since the red light camera program began in 2017, the number of collisions at intersections with signals has fallen by between eight and 11 per cent, according to the city. The number of collisions involving injury or death is down by 40 per cent over the same time period.”

Ok, the first stat seems like it is perhaps relevant to understanding the impact, if any, of the 10 existing redlight camera set-ups. Nothing is said about controlling that 8 to 11 percent drop for changes in the volume of traffic through intersections with signals, but there is a more important issue with it. That is an 8 to 11 percent drop ‘at intersections with signals’. Not  at intersections with red-light cameras, but rather all signaled intersections.

So; does this mean there has been a general trend down in collisions at signaled intersections? If so, that cannot possibly be attributed to the 10 (out of hundreds) of intersections that have the cameras. What we need to know here is what has been the trend in collisions at the camera intersections compared to the trend over the same time frame at all the other (non-camera) signaled intersections. The stat as quoted tells us precisely nothing about the impact of the cameras on collisions at signaled intersections.

As to the second sentence in the quote, I have no idea what that tells us. The number of collisions involving injury and death is down 40% – is that throughout the city overall? At signaled intersections generally? At signaled intersections with cameras only?

That second stat as stated tells us nothing about anything related to the impact of existing or planned red light cameras on traffic injuries or fatalities in London.

Ah, but who needs evidence, really? According to a CBC.ca London article on this City initiative, these cameras make money (for the city, not you fine folks). CBC London quoted London’s Director of Transportation and Mobility, Doug MacRae, thusly:

The cost of operating the new red light cameras for one year is approximately $1 million, MacRae said, but notes that they pay for themselves through the fines issued.

Per Inspector Brackenreid: Follow the money, Murdoch.

Immigrant Discrimination and the Freeps

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in London, News Media, Research. No Comments on Immigrant Discrimination and the Freeps

The media these days like to publish stories about academic research but as a rule, they do a bad job of it, and that is particularly true of my hometown paper, The Freeps.

An article published in the Freeps on July 31, 2023, headlined:

‘Alarming’: Study reveals hostility toward immigrants in London, region’

illustrates well what I mean.

The line under that headline read: “The study, funded by the London and Middlesex Local Immigration Partnership, surveyed the experiences of 30 London and Middlesex County immigrant and racialized people.”

Now, hold on. What can one possibly conclude about anything that might be happening in London-Middlesex after talking to 30 people? The immigrant population in the areas is, according to Stats Can figures reported in the actual study (more on it below) was around 90,000 in 2016, no doubt higher than that now. 30 is a laughably small sample of that population. However, reading on, the article goes on to say that this was ‘….a followup to a survey conducted by the same team that found about 60 per cent of those who identified as immigrants in Southwestern Ontario said they experienced some level of discrimination or racism in the last three years.’

Ok, so this suggests that at least two studies were done, a survey plus interviews of 30 local immigrants. The writer for the Freeps claims that 60% of immigrants reported discrimination in that survey. I determined to go find the actual studies to sort all this out, partly due to my reading this sentence further down in the article:

“A group of Western University researchers led by Esses heard newcomers say they were overlooked for promotion and their work was underappreciated.”

Ok, how many of your peers report being overlooked for promotion,  or underappreciated at their job? Maybe everyone? What makes that discrimination?

My curiosity fully aroused, I found the two studies on the website of the sponsoring organization mentioned above. You can, too, at this link

The first study, which surveyed 829 L-M residents in March of 2021, is written up in the paper dated August 2021. The second is indeed a report on interviews with 30 immigrants from the L-M region, and is dated March, 2023. This is the study mentioned in the tag line, and it is worth noting that all of the 30 people interviewed for that study reported being immigrants  and reported experiencing discrimination. Anyone who did not report those two things when first contacted to be interviewed, was not in fact interviewed. So the rate of reported discrimination among the interviewed group was 100%, by design.  That’s not what the article’s tag line would have you think but…ah, details.

As to the first, much larger survey, that’s where the Freeps reporting gets worse and the research gets, well, interesting. The 829 respondents to the survey were contacted by a hired polling company that used random-telephone-number dialing to collect its sample of respondents. Those who were actually given the survey to respond to were put into three groups, which the researchers titled Immigrants and Visible Minorities, Indigenous Peoples, and White Non-Immigrants.

Now, if one is trying to understand discrimination experienced by immigrants living in London-Middlesex, it seems very odd to include Indigenous Peoples in the survey. If anyone is 180 degrees different from being an immigrant, that would be indigenous folks.

On the other hand, including a set of White Non-immigrants in the survey makes sense. Whatever you learn about discrimination among immigrants is pretty meaningless without a point of comparison: the White Non-Immigrants can be considered the analog to a Control Group in a drug study. It’s like if someone tells you that The Bismarck displaced 41,000 tons when it was built, that doesn’t tell you it was one huge battleship unless you also know how big were other ships of the era.

Below are the self-reported rates of discrimination of these three groups – that is, the percentage of survey-takers in each group who reported being discriminated against – you can find these numbers on p.20 of the 2021 report:

Immigrants and Visible Minorities: 36.7%

Indigenous Peoples: 61.6%

White Non-immigrants: 44.4%

Which brings us back to the Freeps writing that “…60 per cent of those who identified as immigrants in Southwestern Ontario said they experienced some level of discrimination or racism in the last three years.”

Clearly that’s just wrong. Inaccurate. (See why I love the Freeps?) Indigenous peoples most certainly do not identify as immigrants. Count on it. The self-reported rate of discrimination among the immigrant group was 36.7%, which is way less than 60 in anyone’s arithmetic.

So the Freeps got the facts wrong, and they erred in the direction in which the Freeps always errs, in my experience. The Freeps has become The London Alarmist, always making things seem as bad as possible, so here they report the biggest, baddest number, even if it’s the wrong number.

However, I cannot let the researchers off free on this one, either. The word ‘Alarming’ in the headline is accurate, in that researcher Vicki Esses did use that adjective in describing the stories they heard in the interview study. But, of course, in the 2023 interview study the interviewees were pre-selected for saying they had been discriminated against. The earlier 2021 survey study could then be viewed as an attempt to understand how representative those stories are of the general experience of immigrants in the area.

But here’s the thing, which you alert readers likely have already noticed. White non-immigrants reported being discriminated against at a higher rate than the immigrants. As my foul-tongued friend Hugo might say – WTF?

The Freeps reporter did not question Esses about this finding from the survey, and I would bet a buck said reporter did not read either report. I mean, who has time to learn about the things one writes about? I would bet a lot more than a buck that had Ms. Rivers turned in a story to her editor headlined ‘Immigrants less discriminated against locally than white non-immigrants’ she would not have gotten her byline into The Alarmist.

A final note on the research, specifically the survey report. As the researchers write on p. 51 of the 2021 report – “Nonetheless, because participation was voluntary, it is likely that interest in the topic had some influence on whether or not eligible individuals participated, leading to some inevitable potential biasing of the samples.”

Yea. Likely, indeed. They note that the use of random-phone-dialing to get initial respondents helps work against bias, and that is only partly true. The researchers don’t tell us much about that respondent recruiting process, and were this study being presented in a seminar, here are just a few of the questions I would ask:

Did the phone-calling include cell phone numbers or just land-lines?

Was there a set text the callers used to screen potential survey-takers, and if so, what did it say?

Given that the survey involves unconfirmed self-reporting (the results from which should always be taken with a grain of salt) what reason is there for confidence that the reports of discrimination correspond to actual discrimination?

The reasoning behind the first two questions is simple: if only land-lines were called, as used to be the case, a whole swath of Canadians, mostly younger, who have no landlines anymore, is left out of the pool of potential survey-takers. How that might bias the results I cannot say, but it seems it must to some extent, so this is important for understanding the survey results.

And, if the callers doing the recruiting let out the fact- or even the possibility – that they were asking people to participate in a survey on discrimination, then my Spidey sense goes into full vibration mode. This will attract people who feel discriminated against disproportionately, and renders the ‘% experiencing discrimination’ statistic unrepresentative of what happens in the general L-M population. It is not reassuring that the researchers say so little about the respondent recruiting process.

The third question is prompted by the fact that White non-immigrants reported more discrimination than Immigrants. This makes it very difficult for me to believe that these responses tell us much about discrimination against immigrants.

To go back to the Random-Controlled Drug Trial analogy above, if the group you gave the drug to (the white non-immigrants) is more likely to get the disease the drug is supposed to cure than the group that did not get it (the immigrants), your drug does not work; indeed, it’s bloody dangerous.

That finding should have the researchers questioning just what the survey responses actually tell them, if anything. Do they believe that white non-immigrants are actually more likely to experience discrimination than immigrants? If so, are they seeking research funding to look into discrimination against white non-immigrants? I rather doubt the answer to either question is yes, but that’s the implication of their survey results if they want to insist that the survey responses tell us something about actual discrimination.  And that ‘Alarming’ thing kinda suggests they do.

 

 

Ask Yourself: Do I Feel Lucky? Well, do you…..?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in News Media, Research. No Comments on Ask Yourself: Do I Feel Lucky? Well, do you…..?

 

Bad luck and trouble, two of my best friends – Sam (Lightnin’) Hopkins/Mack McCormick

You can spend a lot of time reading about things that seem social sciencey, but are in fact pure politics. One example of what I’m talking about is the following non-question: what matters more in life, luck or talent?

It’s not a scientific question because 1) luck is impossible to measure, 2) talent is only measured approximately, at best, and 3) there is no scale on which one can put a life to decide the ‘more’ part of the question.

However, political types, by which I mean politicians, advocates, activists and ‘experts’ are happy to go on and on about which matters more, and they are all quite sure they know the answer.

An Opinion piece showed up in the Feb 21 Report on Business section of the Globe on this non-question, titled Rich and successful? It’s likely you’re just lucky. Written by Mark Rank, said to be a Professor of Social Welfare at Washington University in St Louis, the piece is labelled as being ‘Special to the Globe and Mail’, which I think just means that Rank is not on the staff of the Globe.

It was a very annoying article.

Let me explain.

In his piece Rank weighs in on the side of luck in this debate, and I’m not writing to argue against that position; as I wrote, it’s a pointless argument. I’m writing because Rank badly mis-characterizes a piece of academic research in supporting his position. He writes:

“Take the case of who becomes wealthy and who experiences poverty. It turns out that the random factor is very much in play. In a fascinating research article titled Talent Versus Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure, mathematical physicist Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues were able to empirically quantify the relative importance of talent versus luck in terms of acquiring great wealth over a 40-year working-age lifespan. What they found was that the most talented people almost never reached the peaks of economic success – rather, the ones most likely to achieve the pinnacle of wealth were those with more average talents but who happened to catch a couple of lucky breaks.”

Before I explain what is wrong here, I doff my hat to Professor Rank for apparently citing some actual research, and for including in his article a link to the paper he is citing. That happens all too rarely.

The above paragraph makes the research of Pluchino and colleagues seem like it is about real people, living ’40-year working-age lifespan(s)’, right? And, it seems that for these ‘people’ it turned out that the ‘most talented people’ were not generally the ones to achieve ‘the pinnacle of wealth’. Rather it was those people with good luck who did well.

That could hardly be further from the truth of what the Puchino article does.

To start with, his statement that Pluchino and colleagues “…were able to empirically quantify the relative importance of talent versus luck…” is flat out wrong. The adjective ‘empirically’ says that they observed people and recorded what they observed to support their ‘luck matters more than talent’ claim. [Merriam Webster – empiric: capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment; originating in or based on observation or experience.] They observed no one, they gathered no data about anybody.

In fact, what the Pluchino et al paper does is report on the construction of a mathematical model, in which the authors interpret their purely mathematical result as demonstrating that luck matters more than talent.

However, none of this ‘talent’ they write about is embodied or observed in actual people, nor do they observe the amount of good or bad luck that any real people experience.

Puchino and friends build a model in which the ‘people’ are theoretical entities who do nothing. In the model they are assigned varying levels of theoretical talent by the researchers, and then they are bombarded with theoretical good or bad luck. They do not respond to what happens to them in any way. In fact, in the model, they are not allowed to make any decisions or take any actions – they are automatons. The researchers give these automatons varying levels of ‘talent’, but the same ‘wealth’ (also theoretical) to start out with, then run them through forty fictitious instances of good or bad luck. Having performed those mathematical operations, they observe how much wealth each automaton ends up with. (These forty hits of theoretical good or bad luck is what Rank refers to as a ’40-year working life span’. No one works in the model, either – good or bad things just happen to them. 40 times.)

In addition to this, there is no interaction between the various fictitious automatons. What happens to automaton no. 12 has no influence on, nor is it influenced by, what happens to any other automaton. You know, just like in the real world, where people go through their lives in perfect isolation.

I repeat, there is no actual data about anything collected or observed by these researchers. Thus, there is nothing whatsoever ‘empirical’ about this research, and I leave it to you to consider what this fictitious world of automatons might tell us about luck vs talent out in the real (empirical) world. (Note that because the automatons don’t do anything, the role of diligence, effort, or good decision-making doesn’t have even a theoretical place in this research.)

Puchino and company do discuss other research papers they say provide evidence that luck matters more than other things. These other papers are duly referenced, and the interested reader can go read them and judge for themselves how convincing any of them are. I have not done so, and there is no indication Rank has, either.

The point here is that Puchino and his colleagues provide no empirical evidence that luck matters more than talent, only that it does in their theoretical model, and Rank is wrong to say they do. Professor Rank has mis-used their research in trying to support his own view on this matter in his op-ed column. As a Professor of Social Welfare, I am not surprised that Rank believes luck matters more than talent, but there is no evidence in his article or the Puchino paper to support that view.

Sadly, academics tend to believe that any press is good press, so I doubt Puchino and friends are upset by Rank’s complete misrepresentation of their research in his article.

I was.

 

Who needs experts – and who needs Al?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in News Media, Research. No Comments on Who needs experts – and who needs Al?

I had planned to follow up my post on the Freeps printing a ‘news’ article in which the only news was a set of comments by one person (link), with one on the use of ‘experts’ in media more generally. Before I could, a regular reader pointed me at a piece in a site called The Hub that covered the same ground. Having read Howard Anglin’s piece carefully, and enjoyed it much, I’ve decided the best thing for me to do is just provide my own readers with a link to it (link).

I can’t see me writing anything better than he did….at least not yet.

Op-Eds in News Clothing

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in London, News Media. 1 Comment on Op-Eds in News Clothing

In the mainstream news media, it has long been common practice to distinguish between articles that are reporting news and opinion pieces. However, something that I see turning up with increasing frequency in news outlets are articles that are not labelled as Opinion, but are in fact mostly that. An example of this came up last year in the local London Free Press (aka The Freeps).

The article is titled “Western accused of trying to push aside women’s hockey concerns”, which appeared on page A2 of the Nov 11, 2023 paper edition of the Freeps that landed on my porch that morning. The byline is Jane Sims, a regular reporter for the Freeps.

The story out there in the world that this article refers to is the fact that the UWO women’s hockey team went through a kerfuffle involving the University’s strength-training coach (who worked with all the university’s athletes, apparently) and the team’s own coach. There was an investigation which resulted in the strength coach being dismissed but the coach of the hockey team staying on. Reports in previous editions of the Freeps indicated that not all of the hockey team players were happy with this outcome. This article of Nov 11 occupies 24 column-inches in this edition of the Freeps, making it the longest article in the paper’s Section A not covering some aspect of Remembrance Day. There is some re-stating of what had happened previously in the matter, some other material (e.g., that about 20 players were on the ice for the last practice) that may be new to readers, but what is undoubtedly new in the article is a series of quotes from Garrett Holmes, who is said to be the founder of The Canadian Student-Athlete Association. The website for this organization states the following:

The Canadian Student-Athlete Association is a non profit unincorporated association founded by Western University student-athlete Garrett Holmes on July 20, 2020.   

It serves as the only independent voice for Canadian university and college athletes. 

The article notes that Holmes had written two letters to the UWO president criticizing the university’s handling of this matter, and quotes him repeatedly.

I am citing this article not because I find what Holmes has to say about all this objectionable, but because the article is presented as news, when in fact it is to all intents and purposes an opinion piece that presents the opinions of one person regarding this matter – Garrett Holmes. There is nothing in the article to suggest that Holmes has any more information about what happened than would anyone else who had been reading about it in the Freeps. He has not interviewed anyone at Western so far as we know, nor has he any inside information not available to others. He has an opinion about what happened, as might you, but you didn’t get quoted in the Freeps. The Freeps simply inserts his opinions – and no one else’s – into what is supposed to be a news article. Indeed, the article headline – not typically written by the reporter – suggests that Mr. Holmes’ views about what happened are the entire point of the story.

So I ask, why Mr Holmes’ views, and his views only? Did Ms Sims contact anyone else to get their, possibly differing, views? Did she contact the UWO Prez, or John Doerksen, or the coach herself, or any players? Is there something about Mr. Holmes that makes him uniquely qualified to have his views aired in London’s only newspaper?  He is indeed the founder of the CSAA, and you can visit that org’s website here (link). It lists Mr Holmes as founder, has some info about him, and you can also read there its two-page constitution, and note that it’s Board of Directors is ‘coming soon’ – just as it has been since the Freeps article appeared last year. The constitution’s last line is “This constitution may only be amended by a unanimous vote of the Board.”

There is a larger point here, that ‘news’ articles in many outlets include a lot of what is said or written by ‘advocates’, ‘activists’ and ‘experts’ . If Mr Holmes is an ‘expert’, the standards for that designation by the Freeps seem kinda low to me.

Moreover, if a media outlet is going to quote such people, the outlet has to choose which of the many available ‘experts’ to quote, and doing so necessarily inserts what are most typically no more than opinions into a news article.

By the usual conventions, this article is news rather than opinion because it does not include the opinions of Ms Sims, or anyone else who works for the Freeps, such as the Editorial Board. But quoting one and only one other person’s opinions moves the article into opinion none the less, in my view. Consider that if she wanted, Ms Sims could insert her opinions into any article just by finding an ‘expert’ or ‘advocate’ whose opinions she shares and quoting only them. I’m not saying this is what happened here, but still, this news story is really mostly opinion, because it mostly ‘reports’ the comments of one person.

One response to this might be – ‘Really, all you’re complaining about is the Freeps being a bit hazy about the line between news and opinion? People can tell the difference between the facts reported in the article and Holmes’ opinions. No big deal, get over it.’

I think it’s a deal. Why did the Freep do this? Why did they not just report on the latest developments in the matter, and leave any comments from Mr Holmes or others to the Op-Ed page? There are always many motives that can be dreamt up to explain any behavior you might observe, but I will hypothesize a particular one in this case.

News media outlets, and the Freeps in particular, want controversy in their news stories, they want to report that people are upset, outraged, deeply concerned, that they are ‘calling out’ other people. Mr Holmes’ comments got in the article, on my hypothesis, because he accuses the university of treating the athletes badly. He is quoted ‘I think it’s clear that some players, if not all, don’t feel it’s a safe environment….’(ellipsis in the original)*.  Mr Holmes cites safety concerns, and that is the great contemporary trigger – there is nothing worse you can accuse a person of in the 21st century than being unconcerned about safety. However Ms Sims came to know about Mr. Holmes and his views, I’m betting that he would have found himself ignored and un-quoted had he commended the UWO admin for its actions in this matter.

*(pseudo-footnote): I would never let my students back in the day get away with a sentence that starts with ‘I think it’s clear that….’ – a topic for another post.

 

Surge Pricing Burgers and the Importance of Reading the Whole Post

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, News Media. No Comments on Surge Pricing Burgers and the Importance of Reading the Whole Post

Wendy, Wendy what went wrong? – Brian Wilson and Mike Love

Some weeks back a news story made the rounds that Wendy’s CEO had announced in a call with investors that the company was planning to institute ‘surge pricing’ in its restaurants. You can read a somewhat outraged story about it in the NY Post here, if you missed it. Surge pricing in this case would mean that what you pay for items on their menu would vary with the time of day, as does the amount of business at Wendy’s – busy times would see higher prices. The technology to do this is the installation of menu boards at the drive-thrus on which prices could be changed electronically whenever desired. Presumably the same would be true for the in-store menu boards, also.

Anyway, this generated a mostly predictable amount of outrage from mostly predictable quarters, but I am writing about this not because of the pricing itself, or the outrage, but rather about what happened next. On February 28 the Globe ran an Associated Press article with the headline “Wendy’s says it has no plans to raise prices at busiest times at its restaurants”. Similarly, CNN’s website (a place I rarely go) ran an article on Feb 28 titled “Wendy’s says it won’t use surge pricing’.

To its credit, CNN also provided a link to the blog post in which Wendy’s supposedly backtracked from its CEO’s original statement to investors about this. You can read that post here also, if you like.

However, what convinced me this was worth writing about myself, was an Opinion article that appeared in my print edition of The Globe and was headed up thusly:

Surge pricing for burgers? Wendy’s was wise to reject it

Woonghee Tim Huh and Steven Shechter

Special to The Globe and Mail – Feb 29, 2024

Woonghee Tim Huh is professor and chair of the operations and logistics division at the UBC Sauder School of Business and the Canada Research Chair in operations excellence and business analytics.

Steven Shechter is a professor in the operations and logistics division at the UBC Sauder School of Business and the WJ VanDusen Professor of business administration.

****

You can read the online version of this Globe article here. In it, the UBC guys explain, sort-of, why it was wise of Wendy’s to back off from their original surge pricing plan.

No doubt Bus School profs have superior insight into firm pricing than do I, but it seems to me that it behooves all of us to read what the firm in question has to say about what they are doing before analysing what they are doing. Professors Huh and Shechter do quote from Wendy’s ‘backtracking’ blog post, in the paragraph below, quoted directly from the Profs’ G&M article:

So, on Wednesday, Wendy’s said its dynamic pricing plan would not raise prices during busy times. The plan, the company said, would only “allow us to change the menu offerings at different times of day and offer discounts and value offers.”

Point one: learn to use ellipsis if you only quote part of a sentence. Here is the full sentence from the actual Wendy’s blog from which the good Professors’ partial quote is taken:

“Digital menuboards could allow us to change the menu offerings at different times of day and offer discounts and value offers to our customers more easily, particularly in the slower times of day.”

Point two: everything that is important about the actual sentence posted by Wendy’s is the underlined part of it at the end which the Professors left out of their own quote. Had they included it, they might have felt compelled to explain how ‘raising prices during peak times’ differs from ‘offering discounts during slower times of day’, and that would be a truly difficult task, because there is no difference.

Back when I taught price discrimination strategies in my Managerial Econ class, I would start with something familiar to everyone – Seniors pricing. You know, you walk into the movie theatre and find something that looks like this:

Admission: $15.00

Seniors (55+): $12.00

(Sidebar: I would ask my students why so many businesses offer lower prices to seniors, and get lots of responses about corporate altruism and Seniors being on fixed incomes. It was fun then to show them that this pricing increased profits for the firms, no altruism needed.)

But I digress.

My point is that one does not see this sign in a theatre:

Admission: $12.00

Under 55: $15.00

There is no bloody difference in the price anyone pays for a theatre ticket with the two different signs, but the second one just seems so mean, while the first one seems nice.

Well, it’s the same with Wendy’s pricing: offering discounts at slow times seems nice, adding a premium when it’s busy, well that’s just mean, and Wendy’s would never do that. They said so, after all.

Minor point: If Wendy’s actually had, in some alternate universe, backtracked from surge pricing, I can’t say there is anything in the Sauder School authored Globe article that convinced me that backtracking would have been wise, the headline notwithstanding. However, since Wendy’s did not backtrack, that point seems not worth pursuing.

Not so minor point: Since it is clear from their own blog post that Wendy’s is going to install these quick-price-change menu boards, the following scenario becomes possible. The drive-thrus already have cameras focused on the cars in the queue, so it would be easy to build a data base of licence plate numbers at each store, or even across stores, so the store could determine, for example, how regular a customer they were serving. If Wendy’s corporate strategists have kept up with what goes on at insurance companies, they could then program their menu boards to show higher prices to frequent drive-thru-diners.

I used to teach students about that sort of ‘disloyalty pricing’, too, because insurance companies do employ it – they call it ‘price optimization’, and last I read, some US States were trying to ban it.

Shattering illusions, that was always my mission.

Coda: Before this post went to press, the WSJ published another article on surge pricing and other restaurant strategies. A quote from that article:

While some consumers tend to resent surge pricing, as Wendy’s discovered last month, they like happy-hour discounts and other deals at slow times, industry consultants said.

Whatever would the world do without industry consultants?

 

Attitudes on Peace, Order and Citizens’ Rights

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Attitudes on Peace, Order and Citizens’ Rights

At this point I have lived 63% of my life in Canada (nearly 81% of my adult life), but I was born in the US of A. It is common among my friends – wherever they were born – to argue about the differences, or lack thereof, between Americans and Canadians. Like all general comparisons, they are at best approximations, and not very precise ones, at that. Still, it’s a generally amusing exercise, and it gives us all something to argue about over beer.

However, sometimes things pop up on my radar that seem like they might reveal something useful about such differences. One example appeared in a letter to the Editor of the Globe and Mail just after the Federal court ruling that the Liberal Government of the time was not justified in invoking the Emergencies Act during the trucker convoy protest in Ottawa. It’s hardly surprising that this decision prompted a lot of folks to write to the G&M, but the letter below caught my attention –

Letter to the Editor, G&M print edition, Jan 25, 2024

Re: “Invoking Emergencies Act wasn’t justified and infringed on Charter rights, Federal Court rules” (Jan 24).

Really? What is wrong with this country?

We watched as a collection of bullies occupied Ottawa, breaking parking and noise bylaws and generally being inconsiderate to the local inhabitants. The federal government is now being censured for its decision, which solved the problem with no blood spilled.

We as polite Canadians seem to be at the mercy of individuals who claim that their right to cause mayhem trumps our right to peace, order and good government.

Signed, etc.

—

I immediately wrote a (sarcastic, I admit) reply to this letter and sent it to the G&M Editors, which of course they did not print. I mean, really – the three sins of the protesters you can name are breaking parking and noise by-laws and being inconsiderate, and that to you is sufficient grounds for the government to invoke the Emergencies Act and start demanding banks turn over account information? Really?

I suspect if you asked 100 Canadians and 100 Americans whether they agreed with the letter-writer’s position, you would get a higher percentage agreeing among the Canadians than among Americans, but I’m not confident that the difference would be all that large. My suspicion is that 21st-century citizens of all the advanced democracies are on average more concerned with peace and order than with any threat to their rights as citizens. That is, to be sure, no more than a hunch, based on being on the planet a long time. If anyone knows of good research on Can-Am differences in attitudes about such matters, I would love to get references.

Uses and Abuses of Statistics – MLB Edition

Written by Editorial Team on . Posted in Culture, News Media. No Comments on Uses and Abuses of Statistics – MLB Edition

If you watch a lot of sports as I do, you cannot fail to be aware of the so-called ‘Analytics Revolution’, a phenomenon that has wormed its way into sports broadcasting. Whatever professional teams may be doing with the reams of game and performance data they now collect, one cannot miss how much sportscasters talk about it, before, during and after each broadcast. 

As someone whose happiness would greatly increase if said sportscasters would just shut up, I cannot say all this statistic-centric chattering is welcome, but sometimes it is interesting. A frequent use of stats in a broadcast is when one of the commentators cites a statistic that they think is directly relevant to what is happening in the game. For example –  

Hockey team x scores the first goal of the game, and the commentator says ‘The team that scores first wins the game z% of the time.’

Baseball team y goes into the 6th inning trailing by 2 runs and the commentator says ‘Teams that trail by 2 or more runs in the second half of a game have only a Z% chance of winning.’

Now, there is no mystery as to where these statements come from. For the first one, you just look at the last 10 years (say) of all NHL games and see which team scored first and which team won. The percentage of the games in which it is the same team gives you z in the statement. 

A particular example of this occurred during the second round of last season’s MLB playoffs, when two teams were playing the third game of a best-of-five series, tied at one win each. The commentator said ‘The team that wins the third game in this situation goes on to win the series 70% of the time.’

Once again, it’s clear this statement comes from looking back at previous MLB best-of-five series in which the teams split the first two games, but in this case I had an immediate reaction to this stat: that seems too low. 

My immediate no-pencil-and-paper reaction was not that he was quoting a mistaken actual statistic, but rather that I thought the 3rd-game-winning-team would win the series more  often than that. I got out my pad and pen, and here is what I came up with. 

What would simple probability calculations predict for the probability in question? Imagine team A has won the third game against team B, so it is leading the series 2 to 1 with two possible games to go. Assume also, just as a starting point, that because this is the playoffs, these are two evenly matched teams. Thus, absent any specific information about each team in each game (who is pitching, injuries, weather, etc) one would expect the probability that either team wins is ½. 

Given that, you can calculate the probability of team A going on to win the series (having won game three) by noting that the series after game three can go only one of three ways:

  1. A wins game four and the series
  2. A loses game four but wins game five and the series
  3. A loses both games four and five and loses the series. 

This is the whole universe of possibilities, and it is easy to calculate the probability of each one.

  1. The probability is ½ under our assumption that 1/2 is the probability A wins any single game
  2. The probability A loses game four is ½ and the probability A wins game five is also ½, so the probability of those two events happening is ½ times ½ which is ¼. (The probability-aware out there will note that I have assumed that the probability of winning in each game is independent of what happens in the other game. I will come back to that below.)
  3. The probability A loses each game is again ½, so again the probability it loses both is ¼. 

Note that these three probabilities do add up to 1, so we have covered everything, but we have also found that the probability that either i or ii happens – the two cases in which A wins the series – add up to ¾, or 75%. 

So, on this account, my instincts were right, 70% is lower than 75%. 

However, when a calculation comes out differently than an actual number from the world, it is the calculation that must be re-thought. My first thought along those lines was the following: if A wins game three, then it has won two of three games against B, and although that is a small sample, it does point to the possibility that maybe team A is somewhat better than B, and that should be taken into account. 

For example, maybe in this scenario the probability A wins either of games four or five should be 0.55 and the probability B wins only 0.45. 

This is not helpful in reconciling the data with the calculations, however, as if one re-does the calculations for the probability of each of the three outcomes above, one now gets:

  1. 0.55
  2. 0.45 x 0.55 = 0.2475
  3. 0.45 x 0.45 = 0.2025

and the predicted probability of A winning the series is now up to 79.75%, even further away from the empirical 70%. 

Huh. 

So, one has to look at something else, and my preferred culprit would be the assumption built into all these calculations that the outcome of each game is independent of what happened in previous games. In particular, I suspect that a team that has won two of the three first games takes it a little easy in the fourth game. Not just that Team A’s players might ‘relax’ a bit, but also that team A’s manager might save his best pitcher for game five if he is needed, hoping that if they win game four his ace will be available for game one of the next round. In that scenario, the probability team A wins game four is less than 0.5, not more. You all can probably think of other explanations. 

In any case, it was clear that what the sportscaster who said this last autumn wanted us fans to think is ‘whoa, winning game three is really important’, when in fact there is something more interesting to be said: why don’t winners of game three do better than they do in a five-game series?