Reporting on Polls

It is TC's view that the reporting of public opinion polls by media outlets has deteriorated recently, athough it has long been flawed.

Two cases in point.

Take, for example, this headline in the Toronto Star, a newspaper that has increasingly been displaying the worst habits of the tabloid NY Post/Toronto Sun variety:  Majority of Canadians support return of death penalty, poll finds.

What is striking is that the headline that appears on the website of the polling firm in question, Angus Reid, actually reads: Canadians Hold Conflicting Views on Death Penalty

While the lead paragraph in the Star speaks of Canadians "warming to the idea of a return of capital punishment", it never outlines the details of the second question asked in the Reid survey: "All things considered, which of these two approaches would you prefer as punishment for convicted murderers in Canada?" The options are "life imprisonment without parole" or "the death penalty".  By a margin of 50% to 38% life imprisonment is preferred.  The question that returned a majority for the death penalty was: "As you may know, Canada eliminated the death penalty for murder in July 1976. All things considered, would you support or oppose reinstating the death penalty for murder in Canada?"

It is important to recognize that capturing real public opinion is elusive. Question wording has a significant impact on the numbers that a given query will produce, but it seems clear that, given a choice, Canadians prefer life imprisonment as a punishment for murder.

The Reid headline is more accurate. The Star acknowledges the point about respondents preferring life imprisonment, but the words are deep in the story and oblique: "Given the choice of supporting the death penalty or life imprisonment, 50 per cent chose the latter, the survey found." The impression is clearly left that Canadians are more enthusiastic about the death penalty than life imprisonment. But it ain't so.

A quick Google search also reveals a 2010 Ekos poll that contradicts the Reid question that did produce a majority favouring return of the death penalty (a plurality of 46% to 40% disagreed with the idea of restoring the death penalty).  Information about other surveys with results on the same topic should also have been included if the Star was doing its job.

A more traditional flaw one sees oft repeated is the media outlet/pollster that reports a new result without reference to the work of any other polling firms. Thus we have the following National Post headline about a Forum Research poll: Liberals reach post-election high, but Tories rule the polls 

Just one problem, they are referring only to Forum Research polls. The last Nanos poll, taken before the Forum Poll, had the Liberals at 27.6%, slightly higher than Forum's 26%. Unfortunately, one sees this kind of comparison frequently.  The real problem is the careless journalism.

Larry Desjardins

Larry Desjardins, a former Manitoba cabinet minister, died this week.  However, published obituaries (here and here) missed two moments of his political life of historic importance. 

The key moment came following the June 25, 1969 election when Ed Schreyer`s NDP won 28 of the 57 seats in the Manitoba legislature.  Efforts in the days after the election to construct a coalition between the 22 Progressive Conservatives led by Premier Walter Weir and the remaining 5 Liberals plus a Social Credit member and an independent were brought to an abrupt halt by the announcement by Desjardins, elected as a Liberal that year, that he would sit in the legislature as a Liberal-Democrat and support an Ed Schreyer led government.

This gave Manitoba its first NDP government.  Since 1969 the NDP has ruled Manitoba for almost 28 years (compared to 15 years for the PCs).

In 1970 Desjardins wavered in deciding whether to support the government`s legislation to create public auto insurance.  However, Ed Schreyer kept his support. This sustained the government during a critical period early in its life. It also ensured that a key election promise, which would prove to be very popular over time, was kept intact. This second decision by Larry Desjardins was also of considerable historic importance and deserves to be remembered.

Cooked Grits

The Liberals emerged from their weekend convention in a self-satisfied frame of mind. There was a large turnout and enthusiastic participation. Many Liberals are happy with the performance of Bob Rae as leader, and think he will compare well with whatever leader is selected by the NDP on March 24, and likely he ought to become the permanent replacement for Michael Ignatieff. 

What was missing was critical self-reflection. The weekend was symbolized by the Globe and Mail op-ed page on Friday, January 13. An insightful column by Jeffrey Simpson (misleadingly headlined "Don't Write Off the Liberals Quite Yet") summed up the Liberals problem well:

Think of the chunks that have fallen away from the once-formidable Liberal coalition: francophones outside Quebec, many multicultural Canadians, blue-collar workers in the industrial cities of Ontario, federalist francophones in Quebec, Jews, Atlantic Canadians in cities such as St. John’s, Halifax, Moncton and Saint John, the “business” Liberals from Toronto. It was an impressive coalition, malleable when necessary, mobilized around the broad ideas for which Liberals stood.

When key parts of the electorate that once supported you depart is it not reasonable to stand up and ask the essential questions: "Why did those voters leave?", "How can we get them back?", and most importantly "What do we need to do to get past the NDP?". Instead there was a focus on issues of organization, reforming the leadership process and fund-raising.  Those issues matter but politics is also about the fundamentals of who should vote for you and why, and what do you need to do to do better than both your key competitors. The convention had the flavour of an event where the party had to overcome but one adversary. 

In a column placed just to the right of Simpson's in the January 13 Globe was an opinion piece from outgoing Liberal Party President Alf Apps headlined "How the Liberal Party will rise again".  He offered the following:

Canadians have sent Liberals to the political woodshed on three previous occasions – 1930, 1958 and 1984. Each time, the party was seen as arrogant, out of touch and out of date. Liberals bounced back from defeat by doing two things: reaching out to new people with new ideas, and modernizing their organization.

He seems not to have noticed that on each of those occasions the party was in second place. It is this narcissistic complacency that is at the heart of the Liberals dilemma. In fact, they did emerge from the last election not that far behind the NDP in Canada outside Quebec, just six points behind - 26.3% for the NDP to 20.5% for the Liberals. But their current circumstance is more catastrophic than in those other three years. Recovery will not come from spouting bromides such as those of Mr. Apps.

The Liberals are strong enough that they should not be written off (just yet), and the NDP has been weakened by the loss of Jack Layton, but one can't help but notice that it is not the Liberals that have eight reasonably decent leadership candidates with a significant measure of French language skill.

The Liberals need to take note of their problems: loss of francophone Quebec a quarter of a century ago, loss of their monopoly on the votes of immigrant Canadians, the losses to the NDP in Atlantic Canada, their death spiral in the west - one could go on - before they can realistically contemplate re-establishing themselves as a major party.

The only way to solve problems is to confront them head-on. The Liberal tasks extend well beyond rewriting their constitution and raising more money. But one does not detect recognition of this on the part of Canada's "natural governing party".  It may tell us much about their fate.

Inequality, the movies and Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Arrow's Wikipedia page describes him this way:

Kenneth Joseph Arrow (born August 23, 1921) is an American economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972. To date, he is the youngest person to have received this award, at 51.

In economics, he is considered an important figure in post-World War II neo-classical economic theory. Many of his former graduate students have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize themselves. Arrow's impact on the economics profession has been tremendous. For more than fifty years he has been one of the most influential of all practicing economists.

The economics profession of course has contributed mightily to the arrival of the current crisis, particularly the proponents of neo-classical theory whose ideas have been at the root of demands for deregulation and lower taxes on corporations and the well-off. So it is worth noting when Kenneth Arrow focuses in on the problem of inequality.  He said the following recently (courtesy of Mark Thoma at Economist's View):

The specific problems of the current U.S. economy—the drastic increase in unemployment and sluggish increase in output—overlay a tendency of much longer duration, a drastic and rapid increase in the inequality of income. Every economy of complexity produces an unequal distribution of the good things in life. But the period immediately following World War II showed a considerably increased equality of income compared with either the Great Depression or the previous period of relative prosperity.

Of course that period was dominated by Keynesian economics.  Arrow argues that while the U.S. has had productivity gains in the past few decades, they have not been widely shared.

Clearly, the bulk of the gains from increased productivity went to a small group of upper-income recipients. Indeed, closer study has shown that the bulk of the increase went to the top 1 percent of income recipients and much of that to those in the top .1 percent.... Profits from the finance sector, which historically have been about 10 percent of all profits, have risen to an extraordinary 40 percent....

This casts light on the claim that the problem is one of personal ethics, of greed....

A proper sense of responsibility has to be enforced by legislation, as it was in the 1930s. There has been some erosion in the law, for example under the Clinton administration, and in enforcement. The Dodd-Frank law is a step in the right direction, but the influence of the financial industry watered it down and created unnecessary complications.

It is not superfluous to argue that steepening the income tax progression, removing a number of blatant loopholes, such as the special treatment of capital gains, and reducing the exemption level for estates would add considerably to post-tax equality.

Clearly the zeitgeist has changed and Arrow's commentary reflects that. The Occupy movement has altered the whole political atmosphere in the United States and Canada and elsewhere. In fact, Arrow's commentary appeared as part of a special series in the Boston Review dedicated to the Occupy movement.

Social change such as we are experiencing is often reflected well in the arts, such as film making.  If you get a chance, don't miss the new movie Margin Call. It is not playing in many cinemas in Toronto at the moment, but is clearly getting good word of mouth (the packed theatre we were in last night has recently added screenings).

Check out the trailer, which, unlike most such promotional spots, summarizes the film well.

Why Obama can't be compared to FDR

Another great post from Ezra Klein:

In “Reaching for a New Deal,” Theda Skocpol and Lawrence Jacobs recall with bemusement the sepia-tinged excitement that greeted Obama’s victory in 2008. What the FDR-obsessed pundits missed, the two political scientists say, was that “the timing, nature, and severity” of the economic crises the two presidents faced were very different.

Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932, three years into the Great Depression. The unemployment rate that year was 23.6 percent. Obama won the presidency in 2008, mere months into the financial crisis; unemployment was at 6.8 percent. Consequently, the two presidents faced political systems prepared to do very different things.

In his new book, “The New Deal: A Modern History,” Michael Hiltzik makes clear that though FDR was an unusually energetic and ambitious president, he was paired with an unusually energetic and ambitious Congress.

Take the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which ended traditional bank runs by insuring commercial bank deposits. FDR opposed it. He believed that “the weak banks will pull down the strong.” But senators from rural states represented those small, weak banks. Deposit insurance was part of the price they exacted to pass the Glass-Steagall banking law. “You will have to come to a deposit guarantee eventually, Cap’n,” Roosevelt’s vice president, John Nance Garner, told him. He did — but only because Congress forced him into it.

This happened again and again throughout the New Deal. FDR wanted to go far. But Congress often wanted to go further — occasionally over the president’s objections.

Read the whole thing.

The Problem is Political

Ezra Klein, to whom tcnorris has provided a link for a long time, has written an excellent summary of why a bad economy has plagued Barack Obama in the form of a disparaging book review about Ron Suskind's Confidence Men.

Suskind did not get the story right at all, but this summary by Klein does:

It is easy to tell the story of what the White House did wrong in its response to the financial crisis: it underestimated it. It had good reason to underestimate it, of course. Almost everyone was underestimating it. In the fourth quarter of 2008, when Obama’s economic team was meeting in Chicago to map out their policies, the Bureau of Economic Accounts thought the economy was contracting at a rate of 3.8 percent per year. It wouldn’t be until this year that we learned the economy was really contracting at a rate of 9 percent. And it wasn’t just the BEA. The Federal Reserve has been continuously overoptimistic. So have the leading private forecasting firms, like Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Analytics. And so have Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.

The observers who got it right were the ones who could tell a story that didn’t rely on the early data. Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, who would publish This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, their epic history of financial crises, in late 2009, saw that the recovery would be slow and tough. Economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, who were more knowledgeable about the struggles over recession in Japan and had their own Keynesian understanding of financial panics, were also suitably pessimistic.

But early mistakes can be corrected. If the initial stimulus is too small, you make it bigger. If your housing policies are too modest, you toughen them up. If the private sector sheds jobs and long-term unemployment becomes a problem, you begin hiring workers directly.

Or so goes the theory. The reality is more troubling. The initial stimulus was too small, but there’s no plausible case that Congress would have been willing to make it much bigger just because the Obama administration had a theory that the financial crisis would lead to a worse recession than most forecasters expected. The trouble was that attacking a financial crisis with a too-small stimulus was a bit like attacking pneumonia with too-few antibiotics: you feel better for awhile, and then it comes back. And this time, it’s harder to kill.

The problem is political. Having very publicly passed a very big policy that you promised would revive the economy, the country blames you when the economy does not, in fact, revive. Your policies are discredited and your opponents are emboldened. You lose seats in the next election and your leverage over lawmakers. So you can’t, with any prospect of success, go back to the well and ask for a bigger stimulus or more money to buy up bad mortgages. And then, when the economy gets worse, you’re simultaneously in charge and out of options. You came to Washington promising change and now you’re begging for patience. It’s a crummy situation, and there’s no combination of policy proposals or speeches that can get you out of it. But this is the vise that has tightened around Barack Obama’s presidency.

It seems to me that even those who got it right such as Krugman probably underestimated how much stimulus was actually needed (although he foresaw the political consequences). The Obama stimulus was $700 billion and Krugman and others spoke of 1.3 billion over two years.  As Klein notes revisions to the data made only this year tell us the downturn was much worse than suspected at the time.

We still need lots of stimulus, but the blame for not doing anything now squarely and unequivocally belongs with the Republicans and the austerity class, something that the media in particular, has had trouble figuring out.

More needs to be done by government in the form of public spending in the U.S., Europe and Canada. The mania for deficit cutting and balanced budgets is insane. It cannot be said often enough or loudly enough: we must not worry about deficits while the problem is deflation and unemployment.

Persistent Unemployment & the Austerity Class

Over the longer run I remain an economic optimist, but the North American economy is being dragged down by an "Austerity Class" that dominates political and media discourse preventing the adoption of the Keynsian policies needed to break out of our current economic malaise. Ari Berman has written an excellent summary of its influence in the Nation, that I discovered courtesy of Economist's View:

...a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis—when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them—did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?

An explanation can be found in the prominence of an influential and aggressive austerity class—an allegedly centrist coalition of politicians, wonks and pundits who are considered indisputably wise custodians of US economic policy. These “very serious people,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wryly dubs them, have achieved what University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong calls “intellectual hegemony over the course of the debate in Washington, from 2009 until today.”

Its members include Wall Street titans like Pete Peterson and Robert Rubin; deficit-hawk groups like the CRFB, the Concord Coalition, the Hamilton Project, the Committee for Economic Development, Third Way and the Bipartisan Policy Center; budget wonks like Peter Orszag, Alice Rivlin, David Walker and Douglas Holtz-Eakin; red state Democrats in Congress like Mark Warner and Kent Conrad, the bipartisan “Gang of Six” and what’s left of the Blue Dog Coalition; influential pundits like Tom Friedman and David Brooks of the New York Times, Niall Ferguson and the Washington Post editorial page; and a parade of blue ribbon commissions, most notably Bowles-Simpson, whose members formed the all-star team of the austerity class.

The austerity class testifies frequently before Congress, is quoted constantly in the media by sympathetic journalists and influences policy-makers and elites at the highest levels of power. They manufacture a center-right consensus by determining the parameters of acceptable debate and policy priorities, deciding who is and is not considered a respectable voice on fiscal matters. The “balanced” solutions they advocate are often wildly out of step with public opinion and reputable economic policy, yet their influence endures, thanks to an abundance of money, the ear of the media, the anti-Keynesian bias of supply-side economics and a political system consistently skewed to favor Wall Street over Main Street.

Taken together, the various strands of the austerity class form a reinforcing web that is difficult to break. Its think tanks and wonks produce a relentless stream of disturbing statistics warning of skyrocketing debt and looming bankruptcy, which in turn is trumpeted by politicians and the press and internalized by the public. Thus forms what Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent calls a Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop, wherein the hypothetical possibility of a US debt crisis somewhere in the future takes precedence over the very real jobs crisis now.

See the rest of the article here.

Part of what permits this oppressive admosphere to flourish is a journalism that refuses to acknowledge the most obvious of facts.  This phenomenon was recently tackled by James Fallows, a blogger with the Atlantic and former Jimmy Carter speech writer, who took on the dishonest practices of Washington journalism that have facilitated the Republicans' deliberate obstruction of the Democratic majority Senate, using the example of Obama's jobs bill, an initiative at odds with the views of the austerity class.

The link above was to his original post but he followed it up here, here, here, here, and here.