The Quantitative Peace

Projectors and Pollsters

The methodologists and closeted Americanists among us (everyone is during the election season, it seems--don't worry, we won't tell) may be interested to know that WashingtonPost.com is hosting a live chat tomorrow at noon with Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight.com and Charles Franklin of Pollster.com.  If you are unfamiliar with these websites then first, you should be warned that they are addictive.  Second, you may want to check out their FAQs and methodology statements:

• FiveThirtyEight.com FAQs and Statement of Methodology
• FAQs about Pollster.com Maps

Go here to submit questions and for more information.

The European Treasury

Philip Coggan gave an interesting interview this morning to NPR in which he discussed the effect of the of the United States' bailout failure on the European markets.  The primary purpose of the short interview was to describe the European perspective on the global impact of the U.S.'s financial crisis and the speculation on Congress's activity surrounding it, though one incidental point caught my attention. 

Coggan mentions that a concern in Europe at the moment is that a large Swiss bank might fail.  This would be quite problematic because, while these types of firms are probably considered "too big to fail" for the European economy, the Swiss government could not afford to bail them out.  Europe has a strong interest in the survival and growth of European financial markets--whether they are located within an EU constituent state or not.  However, the EU does not have a treasury of its own, so it doesn't have the power to spend taxpayers' money on economic bailouts--it doesn't even really taxpayers in the strictest sense.

How urgent is “Urgent”? The Bailout Package Defeated

I watched in awe today as members in the US House of Representatives failed to pass the 700 billion dollar bailout package. How could this possibly be? All the signals from President Bush, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke indicated that if something was not done soon, we would all be doomed. McCain even “suspended” his campaign because this impending crisis was so urgent. Yet, 95 Democrats and 133 Republicans voted against this bill. To make matters worse, it seemed as though the impending doom was correctly predicted. As the votes were tallied on the floor, Wall Street watched and the Dow Jones dropped 788 points, its lowest point drop in history.

After taking a moment to calm down (and contemplating whether I should convert my dollars to pesos- Mike’s suggestion), I realized this all this drama may not be as dire as some would want the American public to believe. The Republican Party may be making this crisis seem worse for strategic purposes, which I will explain more about below. However, I want to talk about why this crisis may not be as bad as it seems.

More after the jump...

Note to self: the world loves 2x2 tables.

It appears that one cannot go wrong with something as simple as a two-by-two table (produced in Excel) in a blog post.  The three biggest traffic generating posts that I have personally done involve the Prisoner's Dilemma (it is about a 2x2 game!) that received link love from Freakonomics, the Dark Knight Ferry game which generated over two dozen different links and occupied the number one Google search for Game Theory Dark Knight (until recently that is), and the latest Bayesian-Rumsfeld table which was picked up by Drew at ZIA and Andrew Gelman at the Monkey Cage (who we have linked before on his other blog). 

As always, I appreciate any linkage the blog receives.  So, thank you, and greetings incoming, first time Monkey Cage readers.

Bayesian Statistics engages in Pre-9/11 Thinking....

Going through Jeff Gill's Bayesian text book when I came across the line:

From the Bayesian perspective, there are two types of quantities: known and unknown. (43)

This seems to be from the pre-9/11 school of thought as Rumsfeld* has us living in a more complicated world:

I guess technically I should exclude unknown knowns - that is, those things we did not know that we already knew.  I also have written the words "know" and "known" far too many times that it no longer appears to be a real word anymore.

*"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." ~ Donald Rumsfeld, quote recently appropriated from one of Aparna Kher's dissertation chapters.

Einstein's 23 Biggest Mistakes

Einstein is probably the first image conjured in popular culture when asked to think of famous scientists, especially those that transformed the way in which we understand the world.  It has been popularly acknowledged that he failed math as a child, though this is not true:

In 1935, a rabbi in Princeton showed him a clipping of the Ripley’s column with the headline “Greatest living mathematician failed in mathematics.” Einstein laughed. “I never failed in mathematics,” he replied, correctly. “Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.”

However, given the lack of the early perceived irony off one of the greatest scientists having failures, we now have a list of Einstein's greatest mistakes to comfort our own intellectual shortcomings.  This includes several mistakes in his proof of the famous mathematical relationship. 

Perhaps conferences and peer-review journals will keep our public list of academic mistakes much shorter.

Edit: Julie and I were going over an old article on Socialism by Einstein in the first issue of the Monthly Review, and she pointed out that Einstein makes an astute observation about the similarities and differences between physical sciences and the social sciences.  Not that it is a necessarily unique assertion in modern studies, but one worth shoring up from 1949:

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately.

Who would an economist vote for?

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has commissioned and released the results of a survey of economists on a range of issues and candidates choice for the 2008 election.  This was partly prompted by earlier statements by Clinton and McCain that neither candidate would not throw their lot in with economists and Adams decided to see what economists really thought:

We asked the economists which candidate for president would be best for the economy in the long run. Not surprisingly, 88 percent of Democratic economists think Democratic Sen. Barack Obama would be best, while 80 percent of Republican economists pick Republican Sen. John McCain.

Given that the survey is looking at experts in an academic field to gauge some sort of consensus, it is worthy posting.  Just as if someone commissioned a survey on the Bush Doctrine with International Relations scholars.  The results above are not overly surprising.

Conference Double Dipping: How Germ Free is Your Paper?

Since it had become suggested reading for our first year graduate students in their introduction to methods course, I finally compelled myself to read over the April edition of PS: Political Science and its symposium on duplicate paper presentations at conferences.  That is, whether it is acceptable for an identical paper to be presented at different conferences.  My exposure to conferences is limited compared to the  more lengthy CVs and experiences of the senior members of the profession.  Despite this limitation, my exposure to repeat submissions and presentations has occurred on more than one occasion.  When asking graduate students at his institution, Dometrius reports in his introductory note:

When raising the same topic with graduate students, however, the modal reply was a blank stare—a lack of comprehension that presenting the same paper as many times as you wished would be viewed by anyone as an unusual or questionable practice.

This observation seems to be a shocking predisposition (to me at least) as presenting identical work, demanding the attention of people (with a high probability of seeing the same panelists, discussants, or audience members in the subsequent presentation) to hear the same research without substantial changes puts strains on the time and resources of individuals and, at more selective conferences where presentation space is rare, constrains other researchers from presenting (Sigelman (2008) argues that the marginal utility of round one reviews is greater than what is gained in the same slot by a second round of reviewers, decreasing the overall gain from that conference slot). 

Additionally, graduate students may have encountered academic norms and official policies against submission of the same paper twice in undergraduate or graduate course work.  This norm against double submissions, from all that I have heard and read, exists for political science journals as well where duplicate journal submissions can lead to automatic rejection and subsequent, identical journal submissions (without revisions suggested in the first roun) does not fare well with a small pool of potential reviewers who are unlikely to take kind to the lack of revisions suggested in their first rejection letter.  Consequently, based on other practices and demands in the discipline, I would venture that the innate bias would be against such practices, not a default in favor of it. 

This is not to be construed as my own personal bias as the Cooper (2008) piece provides some rational, persuasive arguments of why mutliple presentations of the same article may be of use.  Additionally, other authors suggest that departmental constraints and incentives are more likely to shape the behavior of submissions as teaching loads and tenure requirements are very real inducements when considering what to submit.  More so, the above paragraph is attempting to suggest why there would be pre-existing inertia against such a practice and fresh members of community (read: incoming graduate students) would interpret such disciplinary norm as a warrant against double submission/presentation of identical papers as opposed to favoring such a practice. 

Regardless, there are  several pieces in the discussion that create a cohesive exchange of ideas.

Where's OUR Particle Accelerator?

Yesterday, the first particle beam was guided through the $8 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva.  In mid-October, the first particle beam collisions will be made, thus inaugurating the biggest, most expensive playground for particle physicists ever imagined.  I've been trying to figure out what political science equivalent would match the LHC in scale. 

The most obvious example might be the commissioning of our very own laboratory-state in which political scientists schedule time to come in and basically mess with a state's government to see what happens when we enact small institutional or social changes.  Of course, without comparison, that might not be the most interesting political science sandbox we can imagine.  Perhaps we can expand into a whole international system of laboratory-states, then, where not only do the Comparativists have a shot at the fun, but the International Relations folks can conduct experiments and see what prods their lab-states into war.  The most obvious problem with this type of political science playground, though, is ethical, of course.  Physicists don't really have to worry about their experiments violating anyone's human rights when it plays around with subatomic particles, but political scientists can't commission a lab-state to starve its citizens so we can see what happens.  There is also an undeniable question of scale here, as $8 billion doesn't seem to stretch too far when we talk about polities and war.

Likewise, I probably wouldn't get the funding or approval to do any real-life experiments that too closely approximate the substance of my dissertation--the use of violence by extremist factions.  However, abstract experimental methods are arguably gaining more ground in political science, and are more established in economics.

Though I haven't seen this documentary, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? tells the story of Jeff Smith, a political science Ph.D., from Washington University in St. Louis, and his run for the Democratic nomination for Dick Gephardt's former House seat in 2004.  His primary run certainly wasn't worth $8 billion, but it is potentially an interesting experiment that might give us some interesting insight into the role of money in American political campaigns.

So, if we had a shot at building some kind of dream laboratory in our academic discipline, what would it be?

Legislating While Grumbling: PM Must Resign Over Cooking Show

The Prime Minister of Thailand, Samak Sundaravej, has had a severe legitimacy problem for some time now. Not only is he facing charges of corruption, his party has also been accused of electoral fraud in the last election. There have been many protests as well, some violent. However, none of these things have been sufficient enough to get Sundaravej out of power. It was his appearance on a cooking show, Tasting While Grumbling, that was sufficient enough. The Thai constitution prohibits Ministers from being employed in the private sector, and Sundaravej's paid appearances on that show apparently violated that rule. The Constitutional Court asked him to resign today.