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Scott Adams's Political Survey of Economists
Buffaloaf writes "Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, wanted to have unbiased information about which presidential candidate would be better for the economy, so he financed his own survey of 500 economists. He gives a bit more detail about the results in a CNN editorial, along with disclosure of his own biases and guesses as to the biases of the economists who responded."
Now we actually turn to Scott Adams for actual unbiased information about economics? Or, at least an attempt to explain the biases up-front? That just hurts my head!! :-P
Where's the punch line?
But, seriously, good on Scott Adams for actually doing this on his own. I think had anyone else tried to do this, we'd all be screaming loudly that they were inherently biased and had an agenda.
No matter how it goes, Adams will get more material for the strips. ;-)
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That's a surprise. Maybe enomomists make less money than I thought.
Are there any other stat sites like this out there? When my wife was in High School her poly-sci teacher handed out papers describing the different platforms and the candidates. Then took the students down to get registered. Does anyone do this anymore?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
It's not exactly inconclusive either. Obama was granted higher marks on everything except international trade which is not surprising, but still dramatically skews the results due to that issue's importance to the economy overall. One could argue that international trade has the lion's share of effect on the gdp, but I'm not convinced the economists were taking into account exports.
Obama's platform for international trade is to import less and export more. I would say that's effectively going to bolster our economy by boosting our gdp in the long run. But can he actually pull it off? The desired effect could take a few years to reach our gdp.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The plain fact is that the economists surveyed think Obama would be better for the economy, by almost two-to-one. It's kind of sad how Adams had to dress the fact up by noting how many were Democrats vs. Republicans, essentially declaring it a tie:
Despite his own strong evidence that the economists were being objective -- their own income levels did not correlate to whether they thought the rich should be taxed -- he doesn't even tell us the plain fact until after he dresses it up.
His CNN writeup was an excuse to repeat three times that he would have his taxes raised by Obama. Well yeah, he makes zillions of dollars. No mention of Obama's plan to cut taxes, for almost everyone, by more than McCain's plan.
I look forward to his next survey of economists, in which he asks which is better economically, capitalism or communism, and then weights the results before revealing them. ("Not surprisingly, 88% of market-favoring economists think capitalism would be best, while 80% of socialist economists pick communism. Our economists favor capitalism on 11 of the top 13 issues, but keep in mind that" etc.)
From time to time, Scott will do something interesting and write it up on his blog. I subscribed to his blog for a while, but I ended up unsubscribing because of the over-the-top sarcasm and overall negative tone. It just didn't feel healthy to *read* it.
The fact that Adams has attached himself to a medium through which he distributes mockery as social commentary is really not surprising to me at all. I know smart people who are trying to make the world a better place by making positive things happen, so it frustrates me that Adams won't just drop all the grudges and stop acting so defensively. We need more smart people on the offense, starting awesome new projects and using their creativity to lift people up.
From the CNN article:
Moneywise, I can't support a candidate who promises to tax the bejeezus out of my bracket, ...
Then maybe you are in the wrong tax bracket. Try being in mine for a while. I think most people would prefer to be in a tax bracket that gets taxed like that and keep the rest, rather than where they are now.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Take some time and learn about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and who ran the "corporation" since 2000. Add to that, researching the 2005 bill that forced FM/FM to give out loans based on racial profiles instead of financial stability, and you'll have a good idea who to blame.
Who was in charge of Fannie Mae when they "misreported" $10.8 billion in 2006? Washington Times
For those too lazy to find out, consider that Obama, despite being in the Senate for only 2 years, is the #1 recipient of donations from FM/FM at $112,000. (McCain has also taken $16,000, Joe Biden also got $500.)
"Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines last week called for continued efforts by Fannie Mae and mortgage lenders to reach out to those 'at the margins' of home ownership. Blacks, Hispanics and immigrants trying to buy homes would be a major focus of outreach, Raines said." Raines made no mention of assistance for the millions of white families who have difficulty purchasing homes.
And who is Franklin Raines? Why, Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton. (He was the chairman of the same department under Jimmy Carter.) He's currently under investigation by several different groups, including the SEC, the OFHEO, and others.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
I know it's encouraging that someone is trying to get 'unbiased' information about expert opinion on the candidates, and, as an Obama supporter, I would like to put some faith in this survey.
That said, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in this survey.
Unfortunately, the terrible response rate (about 8%) means that there is huge probability of non-response bias. In other words, we're probably not getting a representative group of economists. It may very well be that mostly pro-Obama supporters felt like responding (perhaps out of a sense of a need to defend his economic policies).
Additionally, there is no testing for statistical inference. For example, in the PowerPoint, there's a question of who has provided more advice to candidates (Democrats or Republicans). The authors make it sound as if the Republicans did, but the difference is almost certainly within the margin of error.
Finally, there's this common misconception that things are either "good for the economy" or "bad for the economy." In reality, there's more than one way of thinking about the economy as a whole. For example, some think of it merely in terms of GDP, while others consider the distribution of wealth as well. It's not clear from the survey what was meant, exactly, by "the economy."
It appears that the Bush administration did see a train wreck coming:
New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
So see why the free market couldn't correct earlier check this commentary out:
Financial Markets Are in a Mess
It doesn't matter who is in the White House, since all that person can do is propose a budget.
I'm not sure which country you live in, but in the U.S. the President gets to either sign, or veto the budget. That's a considerable amount of power, and I'd say it DOES matter who's in the White House.
(Oh, and you may have noticed that George Bush did in fact veto or threaten to veto budgets which decreased Iraq spending, so this power is more than a little theoretical)
AccountKiller
Woah, what? How is this subjectivity so surprising? Let Uncy DanOrc451 tell you a story here from the frontlines of objective academic science from the perspective of a bemused non-scientist observer.
I was at MIT a few months ago picking up my brother to go play tennis, and I witnessed a practical fistfight break out between two teams of scientists. Apparently, a physics experiment of some kind was being run by two academic teams across some departmental boundary, one focusing on theory and the other focusing on actually conducting the experiment for the theory guys.
Bypassing the technical gobbledygook they were (literally) screaming at each other and focusing on the English bits, it became apparent that the situation was this: the experiment failed to confirm the theory. The theory folks were furious at the experimental folks since they clearly must have been incompetent and done the experiment wrong; their theory was perfect and beautiful. The experimental folks were furious at the ivory tower theory folks for refusing to accept the results of their clearly valid experiment, since that was what the scientific method was all about in the end.
What was striking about it was the fury and the absolute certainty that their work and worldview on either side was right, and that each thought the other half didn't really "get what science was all about."
I really thought we were going to have some broken glasses on our hands. It was quite a scene, and "objective" would be about the last conceivable word you'd apply to the situation.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Add to that, researching the 2005 bill that forced FM/FM to give out loans based on racial profiles instead of financial stability, and you'll have a good idea who to blame.
I'm gonna call bullshit unless you can back this up with a link or two including one pointing to the actual legislation.
Loans favoring people of a certain income class and demographic with interest rates that might not otherwise be available to them under conventional market proceedures, aren't particularly controversial, but *requiring* them to loan to a candidate who wouldn't qualify under normal market conditions would be.
However, anyone familiar knows that "normal market conditions" in 2005 included No Income, No Job, No Asset loans, which should make one *highly* skeptical about the assertion that congress twisted lender's arms.
Who was in charge of Fannie Mae when they "misreported" $10.8 billion in 2006?
The connection of Fannie Mae to Walter Mondale's campaign manager is supposed to be evidence of Democratic malfeasance here? It's been 20 years since Mondale ran. Focusing on Enron and its spectacular collapse that took down a colluding Big 5 accounting firm instead of FM's *understating* their earnings? I guess that's evidence of a massive media conspiracy... especially since the media DID report on problems with FM.
For those too lazy to find out, consider that Obama, despite being in the Senate for only 2 years is the #1 recipient of donations from FM/FM at $112,000.
A bit of further research reveals that this is out a total of a recent $390 million in lobbying dollars. So, Obama's the largest recipient... at .02% of FM donation dollars. I guess that means he's tight with FM, although he's also raised more money than anybody else from just about everybody.
"Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines last week
That "last week" has got to be pre-2004, then, since that's when he was pushed out over the accounting issues.
called for continued efforts by Fannie Mae and mortgage lenders to reach out to those 'at the margins' of home ownership. Blacks, Hispanics and immigrants trying to buy homes would be a major focus of outreach, Raines said." Raines made no mention of assistance for the millions of white families who have difficulty purchasing home
Raines also made no mention of his support for the troops, ending Islamic Terrorism, and the state of Israel, which means he is against these things.
And yet
Tweet, tweet.
Scott Adams is an idiot. He had a funny take on the other idiots who surrounded him in his PacTel cubicle in the 1990s, but that's just the idiot leading the idiots. Read his "Dogbert management books" for business insights that aren't even funny, in ways that show he actually knows as little about business management as the idiots he mocks.
Here's Adams' latest demonstration of his idiocy, in this stupid (and not funny) editorial:
The surge escalation has failed. Of course throwing tens of thousands of new US troops at a civil war will succeed in beating back the enemies, making them less likely to try attacks than when the US military was spread too thin to intimidate. No one questions whether our military is good at killing and intimidating enemies, when Washington (run by Bush and McCain's Republican Party) isn't keeping them too weak to do the job.
But the surge's job wasn't just to drop the killing. That was a means to an end, to create a political opportunity that was totally squandered. The Iraqi government is a farce that hasn't governed anything, even when we give it a break in the action during which it can concentrate on governing. It has failed. And since the purpose of the surge escalation has failed, the surge has failed. Anyone saying any different just thinks that the purpose of war is to kill. It's not, and those people have lost the Iraq War since they started it.
But hey, if the surge worked, then we won. Let's get the hell out of there already. Not stay the "100 years, maybe forever" that McCain thinks equals victory. If we've got to keep troops there, we're losing. Only getting out of there is any real measure of victory.
Yeah, and then he totally ignored that most economists are Democrats. Because people who understand the economy vote for Democrats. Even among Republican economists, more Republicans support Obama than Democrat economists for McCain. That speaks much more than what Adams' single datapoint survey says.
Of course, that is what every single American (who isn't crazy) says about their political bias.
And there we have the basic evidence of Scott Adams idiocy. Or rather, his lying. Obama might be raising Adams' taxes, if he makes over $250,000 a year. He's almost certainly not going to raise yours. You can see for yourself with the Obama Tax Cut Web Calculator, which takes 15 seconds and 3 status facts about you to show you the dollar amount of your Obama tax cut.
Adams is a rich guy who makes his money satirizing incompetents running big orgs. His pocketbook is threatened by Obama because he's made so much more money than most people, benefited so much more than most people, from the exact kinds of idiots he needs in power for him to sell more books and cartoons. He's as scared of McCain as he is of Obama, because though he believes McCain won't tax him (but the country would fall apart, an expensive proposition even for a cartoonist who has to live in it), because McCain is boring. Which means he won't be a good c
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make install -not war
In Scott Adams's survey of members of the American Economic Association, he found 48% Democrats, 17% Republicans, 27% Independents, 3% Libertarian, and 5% Other or not registered. However, in this working paper by Gross and Simmons (at Harvard and GMU, respectively), surveying economists working in academia, they find 34.3% Democrats, 37.1% Independents, and 28.6% Republicans.
Anyone have ideas on what's up with the disparities in the statistics? The only explanation I can think of is that the AEA includes economists in the public sector, where (as one might expect) folks tend to favor government intervention in the economy.
(By the way, for anyone curious, the stats for academia as a whole are 45.2% Democrats, 38.9% Independents, and 15.9% Republicans. In English it's 51.0/47.1/2.0, in computer science it's 32.3/58.1/9.7, and in electrical engineering it's 13.2/55.3/31.6)
Let's play the monopoly game. You have a market monopoly, and I'll name a monopoly propped up by government. Last person to name a monopoly wins. I'll go first, so the game will be over sooner. Your local water company is a monopoly. Now you go. You'll name Microsoft sooner or later. In spite of its being propped up by copyright law, I'll give you that one out of pity. Now I'll go. Your local sewer company is also a monopoly. Now it's your turn again.
I'm waiting....
Nothing? I thought not.
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Oh, and did you know that the government FORCED banks to make CRA loans? "CRAP" loans are more like it. Countrywide was very proud of how well they complied with the law -- how many CRA loans they made .... and where are they now?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I will never forget a conversation I had with a Dutch friend while visiting Holland.
The Dutch, in general, are a fairly conservative people overall. (yes, I know - generalization....)
So we got to talking about the conservative people vs the liberal laws they have regarding social issues. I asked him about this apparent contradiction and I will never forget his reply: "Holland is a very very diverse country. The alternative to social liberalism is chaos. There are so many different groups with different beliefs that we have to have liberal laws".
Which is exactly opposite of what we seem to do here in America. There's a lesson in there somewhere.....
This policy resulted in a greater flow of money throughout the economy - because when people who aren't rich get money, they are much more likely to spend it.
Clinton then invested the money received into infrastructure and programs for the poor and middle class - further empowering them to lift themselves up, and the economy with them.
THEN the Gingrich GOP started demanding tax cuts, and Clinton steadfastly refused - going as far as shutting down the actual government because Clinton kept vetoing them. They wanted trickle-down fantasy tax cuts - Clinton wanted to pay down the debt. Thus we got the surplus.
Every President that's tried trickle-down: massive debt. The one president so far that's tried tax cuts for the poor and middle-class: one of the greatest economic upturns of the last 100 years.
Thats' how it is. Reality actually may have a liberal bias.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.