Ezra Klein continues his Health Care Reform for Beginners series this week with Health Care Reform for Beginners: The Many Flavors of the Public Plan and Health Reform for Beginners: The Difference Between Socialized Medicine, Single-Payer Health Care, and What We’ll Be Getting.
You’ll want to read them both, but here I want to focus on [...]
This nice quote from Milton Friedman (in the context of overhauling the Federal Reserve, as it happens) was recently quoted in the context of health care reform, specifically in support of considering single-payer systems. I’d add democratic reforms such as proportional representation to the list.
… it is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation [...]
OK, this can hardly be surprising. But still…
Matthew Yglesias: Public Deeply Ignorant About Cap and Trade
Via Dave Weigel, an unusually useful poll from Rasmussen Reports:
Via Mark Thoma. Lots more, mainly on spurious data mining.
Rats Outperform Humans in Interpreting Data
Laboratory experiments show that rats outperform humans in interpreting data… The amazing finding on rats is described in an equally amazing book by Leonard Mlodinow. The experiment consists of drawing green and red balls at random, with the probabilities rigged so [...]
A little more than two years ago, I published a review in Voting matters of the Second Report of the Irish Commission on Electronic Voting.
The government of Ireland chose an electronic voting system for use beginning with the local and European Parliamentary elections of 11 June 2004. Responding to public criticism, the government established the [...]
Self-described election junkie Nate Silver (FiveThirtyEight) has a piece in the NY TImes today bemoaning the failure of the US electoral system to produce competitive elections except as a rare exception.
Sadly, his solution is pretty lame:
The good news for fans of competitive elections is that some of these factors could conceivably be changed through acts [...]
This has been floating around for a while, and I’ve been meaning to mention it. So here goes.
Science Literacy — American Adults ‘Flunk’ Basic Science, Says Survey
Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not [...]
Another in a series of reasons we should think twice before entrusting our decisions to … people.
Abstract
Low processing fluency fosters the impression that a stimulus is unfamiliar, which in turn results in perceptions of higher risk, independent of whether the risk is desirable or undesirable. In Studies 1 and 2, ostensible food additives were rated [...]
Actually, this story has nothing to do with voting, at least not directly. But elections have been on our minds recently, and my first reaction was: these are the people who are electing our leaders.
A group of French researchers report the results of a survey. The premise is trivially simple:
In this paper, we analyze the [...]
Minnesota Public Radio has a few photos of disputed ballots in the Franken-Coleman recount, and asks voters to weigh in on how each voter’s intent should be decided.
Some are fairly obvious:
This one requires a little more interpretation, but again the voter intent is clear enough to me (though not to an automatic counting machine):
Here we [...]
Congratulations to Sam Wang and the Princeton Election Consortium.
The Electoral College
Outcome: Obama 365 EV, McCain 173. The map (NE 2 not shown):
FiveThirtyEight: 348.5 EV. Error: 18.5 EV.
Electoral-vote.com: 353 EV. Error: 12 EV.
The last-day Median EV Estimator for Obama: 352 EV. Error: 13 EV.
Our prediction: Obama 364 EV, McCain 174. Error:1 EV.
Closest: Princeton Election Consortium.
Individual state [...]
Most states allocate their Electoral College electors on a statewide winner-take-all basis. The exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which give an elector to the winner of each congressional district (the other two electors go to the state wide winner). It’s not quite (or even close to) proportional representation, as evidenced by the fact that neither [...]
That was the heading for this NY Times chart:
This map shows each state re-sized in proportion to the relative influence of the individual voters who live there. The numbers indicate the total delegates to the Electoral College from each state, and how many eligible voters a single delegate from each state represents.
The accompanying article describes [...]
Proposition 11: Redistricting. Constitutional Amendment and Statute.
Creates 14-member redistricting commission responsible for drawing new district lines for State Senate, Assembly, and Board of Equalization districts. Requires State Auditor to randomly select commission members from voter applicant pool to create a commission with five members from each of the two largest political parties, and four members [...]
I’ve had this post waiting in draft form for quite a while (the article in question appeared almost two years ago). It seems apropos to my last post, so no more procrastinating (on this post, anyway).
In a fascinating paper published at the end of 2006 in Science, Kathleen Vohs et al report on nine experiments [...]
Sam Wang again, moving from the effects of cell phones to the effect of race on polls.
The disappearing Bradley effect:
A hot topic among polling nerds is the “Bradley effect,” which occurs when a non-white (usually black) candidate falls short of opinion polls on Election Day when he/she runs against a white candidate. For this [...]
Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium estimates the cell phone effect at about 1%. What’s the cell phone effect? The general idea is that a) pollsters mostly don’t call cell phones, b) more and more people have only cellphones and are thus not included in polls, and c) those people may have systematically different [...]
So, this came up yesterday as we were drinking a little bubbly before (or was it after?) a performance of All’s Well That Ends Well at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. It’s an apparent paradox that shows up in some kinds of voting methods as well. I say “apparent” because we’re merely fooled by our assumption that [...]
Aidan Hartley in the NY TImes.
John Stuart Mill addresses this problem in Representative Government, sounding, to our ears, more than a little paternalistic. But surely it’s also true that elections are a necessary but not sufficient element of a democratic society.
Democracy by Other Means
Kenyan democracy has failed because ordinary people were encouraged to believe [...]
OpenSTV 1.1 has been released.
OpenSTV is a Python-based program with a reasonable GUI for counting elections using a variety of STV and selected other rules. I’ve been participating in the project in a small way as a developer; so far I’ve worked mainly o Mac OS X support. Standalone versions of the program are available [...]