Underestimating Sarah Palin

Based on what I've read in a number of venues, I venture to say that if you support Barack Obama, you may well be underestimating Sarah Palin's potential benefits to John McCain's candidacy. Here are four reasons why:

1. Many people see this choice as a pander to Hillary voters and think it won't work. I agree that the pick won't work especially well in that way. But half of the electorate doesn't like Hillary Clinton, and a solid majority of independents don't like her. A lot of people who like the idea of seeing a prominent female politician will be very happy to see someone other than Hillary Clinton play the role.

2. Attacking Palin is going to be very dangerous. A great many people will see her primarily as an amazing woman: a dedicated mother who stands by her principles and has launched an impressive career while raising a bunch of kids. This is all accurate: I think Palin's policy positions are terrifying, but I hope the Obama people are thinking very carefully about how to respect Palin's personal accomplishments as they attack her policies. Getting the tone of this wrong will seriously rile up the right-wing base.

3. A point related to #1: I see a lot of commentary assessing potential reactions to Palin based on the opinions of college-educated women. But at least initially, men like the Palin pick better than women, and to the extent that choosing Palin involves targeting ex-Hillaryites, I'll wager the swing group is the less educated, more socially conservative, more Appalachian core. I can easily imagine people from my Appalachian hometown (where my mother has long been amazed at the resistance of Democratic women to Hillary Clinton) connecting with Palin, especially if, say, Biden says something that sounds condescending and eggheaded and dismissive about her.

4. Palin's background is in journalism, specifically broadcast journalism and more specifically sports journalism. I've only seen a couple of her TV clips, but she seems to handle that environment very well, and (unlike McCain) she should be very good at reading a teleprompter, which will be important next week.

All that said, I think such a cynical, pandering, precipitous choice should ultimately hurt McCain's chances. But if Democrats think it will be easy to dismiss Palin's appeal, they could pay dearly for the mistake.

Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style

Bruce Schneier on getting cybersecurity right in the next Presidency

Top 10 conversation hacks

A striking little piece on the competitive advantage of Costco

Malcolm Gladwell on big ideas

Jean-Michel Rabaté perceives a singularly American form of political lying

Book review: Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

I started reading Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion after Tyler Cowen called it "one of [his] favorite social science books." I can see why: although some of Cialdini's points have become relatively commonplace since the book's initial publication in 1984, Influence still provides an engaging blend of social scientific scholarship, anecdotes of Cialdini's undercover ventures as a "compliance professional," and something like the self-help genre in Cialdini's advice on resisting each of the compliance techniques he describes under the headings reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.

I'll supplement this main review post with some snapshot reactions to a few of Cialdini's points that prompted me to think of specific tangential issues. For now, two overarching thoughts:

First, this book provides a valuable counterpoint to works of behavioral psychology and economics that emphasize the internal biases that affect individual decision-making. Although those works sometimes address social factors and Cialdini sometimes touches on the classic behavioralist issues (loss aversion, endowment effects, etc.), Cialdini's focus on influence and compliance is still refreshing.

Second, the more practical side of Influence, especially the information that flows out of Cialdini's undercover work, raises issues akin to those of publicizing methods of picking door locks. Cialdini is handing out the keys to human consent. Cialdini's direct advice is almost entirely defensive--he tells the reader how to ward off the tools of compliance, not how to deploy them--but it is easy enough to imagine ways to gain influence. For one example, I am highly confident that the techniques Cialdini describes, carefully applied, could help professors positively influence students' evaluations of their courses--an extremely valuable skill. I leave the reader to consider the implications of that possibility.

Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style

Back from a vacation week, and published on Saturday, but that lacks the alliteration I require:

I know I shouldn't link to Nate Silver every week, but I blame him for writing something irresistible every time. This time around it's the best strategic analysis I've seen of the Biden choice.

Merlin Mann on kicking ass with outcome-based thinking. I especially like the Foo for Bar formulation.

Via Very Short List, a great little accent identification game, with creepy patriarchal and colonialist undertones brought to you by Rudyard Kipling.

A good piece on humiliation, China, and the Olympics: "In 2001, the National People's Congress even passed a law proclaiming an official 'National Humiliation Day.'"

And following an impeccable pass of the baton, Errol Morris runs the anchor leg analyzing photography as a weapon.

What if classical music were popular?

In this lovely little TED lecture, Benjamin Zander aims to sell his audience on the idea that every one of them--and indeed, everyone else--secretly loves classical music and needs only a little guidance to discover that love.

Near the end of the talk, Zander says that people in the classical music business always think along these lines: two percent of people already take an active interest in this music. What can we do to raise that to three or four? Zander says that the approach should instead be to assume that everyone does love or will love classical music and to take the actions that flow from that assumption.

Zander thus evokes one of my favorite thought experiments: what if classical music (broadly defined, but of the "serious" rather than "pops" variety) became truly popular? Specifically, how would the 2% of, say, Americans who currently identify themselves with classical music react? Some, I presume, would revel in the spread of their preferences to a larger number of fellows. Many, I guess, would feel dismay at the loss of the cultural capital that we confer on exclusive forms of high culture. I would predict that this group would find ways to create new mechanisms of exclusivity: we might, for instance, see a certain kind of chamber music gain new clout, with its patrons building extremely specialized concert halls whose performances would not only be costly to attend but also impose daunting conventions of dress and behavior. If this happened, I would further predict that the devotees of this music would lament that it commanded such a small audience and suspect that, in their hearts of hearts, everyone truly has a taste for it.

Do you, reader, have a different and perhaps happier vision?

Bonus question: what has the evolution of jazz, which has frequently seen its more popular branches defined out of the category of "jazz," told us about this imagined scenario?

Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style

Beyond overconfidence: Tyler Cowen reports on new views of ability bias

Find out why last week's ruling on executive privilege is such a big deal. This is worth understanding.

Zombies reciting haiku

Nate Silver strikes again: a lovely little contextualization of Evan Bayh's politics

San Diego Padres General Manager Paul DePodesta, on his blog of unprecedented GM transparency, runs down how trading after the deadline works in baseball

Conclusions, part II: so what?

Can we do better than "so what"?

Last week, I posted some thoughts about teaching the art of the conclusion--that is, about explaining the elusive something more that teachers often ask their students to provide. Here I continue my search for the language and examples that will help my students write conclusions. The next and probably final installment of this series will address the journalistic kicker, a subject Michael raised in the comments last week.

Today, however, I ponder the question, "so what?" When I was a student, I saw many teachers tell students that papers should convey answers to that question. When my undergraduate thesis adviser, Patricia Meyer Spacks, received a set of term paper drafts that disappointed her, she gently explained what she was looking for and wrote on the chalkboard in dramatically ungentle four-foot letters, "SO WHAT?"

When essays do find ways to answer the question, the effects can be wonderful. Take, for example, this striking little essay by Phillip Davis about the neurological effects of reading Shakespeare. Having set up a series of problems at the beginning of the piece, Davis shares a few data points in the middle, and about two-thirds of the way in, he writes--as its own paragraph--"so what?"

Davis answers the question powerfully, with a series of insights that expand in scope until they culminate in this final paragraph:

It is early days. But I am getting a greater sense of how and why Shakespeare really does something to our inner reality, making me feel more alive in more unpredictable mental ways when I read or see his work. I am also getting a sense of an underlying shape to experience, as though the syntax in front of my eyes were keying into mental pathways behind them, and shifting and reconfiguring them dramatically in the theatre of the brain.

Yes, that will do nicely as the something more.

All this said in favor of the "so what" approach, however, I must come to an anticlimax: in my own teaching, I have not found that asking "so what?"--or suggesting that students ask it of themselves--does much good. The question may be too vague, or it may be too hard to unburden it of its commonly dismissive inflection: "Yeah, well, so what if it is?"

My current idea is to revise the "so what" approach in two ways: first by switching the language to "and what does that mean?"--with the suggestion that the best essays will find ways to answer the question multiple times. And what does that mean? And second, I want to make the function of the conclusion more concrete by saying that it releases the pain the introduction has inflicted--an approach I'll explore when I come to ponder introductions within the next week or two.

A cliffhanger!

Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style

The NINES project is at the cutting edge of literary studies; here is a taste of the work it's doing to enhance digital scholarship and teaching.

Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com develops a fascinating little metric for evaluating Vice Presidential candidates' political strength

Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson discuss uncertainty and humility

Some of the young folk don't know about Laurie Anderson: Here's an interview to introduce them to her.

Kevin Kelly, always good for a striking insight, projects the second 5000 days of the web. I especially like the idea that we will start linking ideas rather than pages.

On conclusions and addictive thoughts

I'm working on a series of posts in which I seek new ways to talk to college writers about the nature of introductions and conclusions. Today, a first musing on conclusions.

David Carr recently published in the New York Times this astonishing bit of his new book The Night of the Gun. Carr's piece has from the beginning the advantage of ready-made biographical drama, as it recounts his recovery from addiction to become a successful journalist and father. It surpasses other, superficially similar narratives, however, by adding moments such as this one:

When a woman, any woman, has issues with substances, has kids out of wedlock and ends up struggling as a single parent, she is identified by many names: slut, loser, welfare mom, burden on society. Take those same circumstances and array them over a man, and he becomes a crown prince. See him doing that dad thing and, with a flick of the wrist, the mom thing too! Why is it that the same series of overt acts committed by a male becomes somehow ennobled?

Carr's ability to relate his own story but also step outside it and theorize it--and for all its engaging concreteness of word and image, this is a bit of unabashed theory--gives the reader a quick prompt to consider questions of gender, genre, and narrative structure that reach well beyond the essay's interesting but relatively ordinary musings on the uncertainty of memory. The passage strikes me as an example of what we teachers of writing have in mind when we tell students that an essay's conclusion should add something more, something that teases out the implications of an argument without simply changing the subject.

I feel the difficulty of describing the goals of critical essays using the example of a bit of memoir. If you would like to ponder the translation of similar subject matter into academic prose, have a gander at this review essay covering a number of new books on brain science. Let's ride this post out on a quotation:

Instead of recalling the experiences of both pleasure-filled high and painful withdrawal, the addict's memories may be overwhelmed by the powerful neural connections previously created by the drug. Only if memory is a matter of reconstruction of latent physical traces, not direct recall of past events, Changeux argues, could these kind of drug-induced long-term compulsions occur.

Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style

I'm trying out a potential weekly feature: a set of five links gleaned from my internet readings. Here's installment 1 of X.

Beat box cook (ht Carolyn)

A fantastic probability quiz from the Wall Street Journal, and the answers

Steve Levitt on the economics of sounding black in the New York Times

50 commercial parodies

Name trends (ht Kottke)

Bundling on Amazon: better together?

On his fun and varied economics blog, Grinnell grad Seth Gitter writes an interesting post on the economics of the combo meal, from the starting point of a bundle that Amazon offers.

Gitter's explanation is right on, but regarding the Amazon promotions, I'd like to add one point that I find interesting. Those Amazon discounts are not actually discounts. Hence the brilliance of the Amazon scheme: the bundles convey the feeling of discounts without costing the seller any money.

I can't find the bundle Gitter references anymore, but I'll stick with his example of The Perfect Storm. Here is the bundling language from this DVD:

Better Together
Buy this DVD with U-571 (Collector's Edition) DVD ~ Bill Paxton today!

Total List Price: $24.97
Buy Together Today: $17.48

The cost of The Perfect Storm is $9.99, so the offer is to get the second item, U-571, for an additional $7.49. The Amazon price for U-571? Yup: $7.49. I've checked dozens of these bundles, and none of them has ever offered a genuine discount; they just let you buy two Amazon items instead of one.

Of course, the language never quite claims otherwise. The key to the promotion is that it a) presumably relies on Amazon's database to choose pairing that will attract the viewer, and b) it uses the language of the discount combo to reinforce the benchmark of the list price and to activate all our associations with other companies' bundled offers--these offers feel like McDonald's combo meals, even if they don't behave like them.

I do hope, reader, that you are now pondering the behavior of the combo meal in the most striking and graphic ways.

Zoo economics (bestseller codename: Zookonomics!)

How do you take the fun out of a zoo?

Yesterday, Pete and I went to the Niabi Zoo, just outside of the Quad Cities on the Illinois side. Niabi is a fairly small zoo and clearly geared to attracting families with small children; in many ways, it is a version of the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines on a slightly smaller scale. In fact, our Blank Park membership got us into Niabi for free.

(Incidentally, I didn't have a good time at Niabi, but I imagine a Niobe zoo would have been much more depressing. So there's that.)

The similarities to Blank Park made the differences in our emotional experience all the more striking. Nearly everything about the layout of Niabi seemed calculated to make a three-year-old child ask for something that required payment beyond the admission price. The entrance and exit routes required passing oodles of animal toys. Upon entering, we were hit with the boarding station for the train and the snack bar. Crossing the train tracks took us through the lorikeet cage (a dollar for a cup of nectar to feed them?) and on to the petting zoo, where you could pay to feed the fish or pay for a pony ride, or exit and confront the carousel.

Many of these things are routine components of zoos. I understand the business model: get families to come by offering cheap memberships and fairly cheap admission, then see whether they will spend a little more on high-margin products one they've arrived. I knew roughly what I was getting into.

In this zoo, however, it became clear that by cranking up the intensity of the hawking two or three notches, the zoo fundamentally changed our experience. We seemed to have passed a tipping point at which incremental increases in available stuff caused a dramatic behavioral shift. Our Niabi visit became an unrelenting bargaining session. Every new situation required me to make a call: no to the train (let's see the place first), no to nectar, yes to fish food, no to donkey food, maybe to pony ride, no to carousel--but OK, yes to the pony ride, no to the toys next to the ticket booth for the pony ride. The details didn't matter; the spurs to negotiation turned a zoo trip--usually the very easiest way to spend a couple of outdoor hours with Pete--into a high-stress headache. This time, my animal-loving boy didn't even see most of the regular exhibits; after his pony ride, both of us needed a nap.

Book review: Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, The Millionaire Next Door

The Millionaire Next Door is one of the most interesting books about money you'll ever read, partly for the reasons the authors intend and partly for reasons they unwittingly reveal.

The book's primary insight involves the separation of income and wealth ("wealth" meaning net worth over a million dollars, a standard that may now be out of date). When people speak of the wealthy, they almost always define that category in terms of annual income, which we often infer from the visible signs of wealth, but Stanley and Danko reveal the limitations of that approach. Most millionaires, it turns out, are people who don't have the cars or houses or clothes we associate with rich people. Instead, they tend to be people with medium-high to high incomes whose habitual frugality lets them accumulate a lot of money. The book presents a series of case studies comparing people of similar ages and incomes who have different net worths: on one side are PAWs (prodigious accumulators of wealth), and on the other are UAWs (under-accumulators of wealth). Often, these differences come down to professional lifestyles: lawyers and doctors tend to be in communities where financial showiness is valued, for instance, while owners of blue-collar businesses actively avoid that showiness.

I had heard the broad outlines of this argument from a friend, so it was fascinating but not surprising to read the details. What really got my attention, however, was one of the case studies that compares two doctors, one saver and one spender, who have similar (very high, in this case) incomes. In a departure from the usual concerns of the book, the authors suddenly mention that the spender is very concerned about federal income tax rates, whereas the saver is not. The reasoning: the saver has a great deal of wealth separate from his annual income, and he lives well within his mean. The spender, on the other hand, regards extreme consumption as the sign of wealth, and he has so much debt from houses and cars that he needs almost every dollar of his huge income to keep pace with his consumption.

The book is written by anti-tax conservatives, as is sometimes explicit and routinely implicit in their framing of issues, so they don't dwell on this point. The implications, however, are clear. When people on the left talk about tax rates for "the wealthy," they equate wealth with income. That equation leads to the assumption that "the wealthy" aren't affected by an increase of a percentage point or two in the top marginal tax rate. What the book makes clear is that the wealthy in terms of net worth are almost entirely unaffected by small changes in the marginal tax rate, but there are a lot of wealthy people in terms of income who perceive themselves, at least, as facing fairly dramatic lifestyle changes based on those changes. And that's why--in addition to principled arguments--so many people who appear to be above economic worry are so passionately and personally opposed to even small marginal increases in tax rates.

The valuable thing about the book for liberals is that it's an analysis only conservatives would think to undertake: it examines only medium-high to high income earners to see how income does or does not become wealth. The results are sometimes mind-blowing, no matter your initial perspective.

Margins of error

Almost exactly four years ago--not coincidentally, during the last Presidential campaign--Kevin Drum wrote this piece about margins of error in polling and how to read them. It's well worth revisiting now and often.

This is a case where the obvious, common-sense reading of the data (a 2% lead in a poll must be a little better than a 1% lead, right?) is more accurate than the common journalistic presentation that purports to correct the obvious reading (a lead only becomes meaningful when it's bigger than the margin of error, and then it is magically superdupermeaningful).

Looking back at Drum's post, I am reminded again how Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has created a new level of statistical political analysis. Whenever I find myself at a public computer with a few minutes to kill, I go to Nate first.

A new name for waterboarding: framing the torture debate

I've heard a number of people comment that the public might be more upset about waterboarding if it didn't have a name that made it sound like an X-Games event combining the skills of snowboarding and tubing. Christopher Hitchens's unequivocal declaration that his waterbording experience was one of torture called this issue to mind again.

I propose that we call the practice partial drowning. This name has the advantages of vividness and, even better, accuracy. Who's with me?

Boy writes name, receives feedback

A few months ago, my son (who turned three in January) wrote his name for the first time. As a teacher of writing, I thought it appropriate to give him some comments. Here follow the image and my response.



Assignment: Writing Your Name
Peter Simpson
Introduction to Reading and Writing
April 2008


Dear Pete,


Congratulations on writing your name for the first time! You have done an excellent job learning the three letters necessary for completing this assignment, and you wrote them in sequence with only minimal supervision and guidance from Mama. She and I are both proud of you, and we hope you look back on this as one of the highlights of your three-year-old year.

I also have some suggestions you might consider as you continue writing your name in the future—as I would encourage you to do, given this promising beginning. The first point involves spacing. As you know, you ran out of room on this sheet of paper after the first three letters, so you had to make the final “e” next to the initial “p.” It would be better to plan out the spacing of your words in advance to avoid confusing the reader. Also, most readers and editors will expect any capital “e” to have exactly three horizontal lines. Drawing many more horizontal lines on each “e” is fine if you are writing for Mama and me, but when composing for a wider audience, try to stick to three. Along the same lines, you seem at this point to be capitalizing the letters “p” and “e” but not “t”; I would suggest either capitalizing all your letters or only the initial “p,” to make either “PETE” or “Pete.” If you want to know which of those two forms is preferable for a given piece, consult your teacher or editor. Finally, though I certainly understand your desire to reduce your spending on school supplies, especially since you will not even get an allowance for some years yet, I do think you’ll find that readers prefer letterhead or plain white writing paper to hotel stationery. Mama or I can show you where to find such paper at home.

Do not let these details overwhelm my main point, Pete: you have done very well with this assignment, and I sincerely look forward to seeing what other words you will write soon. Nice work!


Best,


Professor Simpson (Papa)

Listening to college

Over at The Quick and the Ed, an exceptionally interesting policy blog, Education Sector policy manager Kevin Carey has posted his thoughts about a presumed competition between audio courses such as those produced by The Teaching Company and free videos of Yale courses. (One could use other examples to make the point: Barnes and Noble has started its own line of audio courses, for example, and Berkeley and MIT have also made courses available online.) I always enjoy Carey's posts and generally find them convincing, but I think he misses the key issues when he assumes that the university courses can displace the commercial versions. (I feel the difference between these formats acutely today, as it happens, because I gave the first of three lectures I will give in this summer's Adult Community Exploration Series at Grinnell; in format, ACES is roughly a shortened, free, live version of a Teaching Company course. I have spent a lot of the past week adapting materials from my college courses to the ACES format and therefore pondering the transformations that process involves.)

I have listened to some of those Teaching Company tapes and have also listened to some of the online college courses, especially a Berkeley course in economics. I enjoy both formats but find them fundamentally different. Aside from the quality of academic content (which is generally strong in both modes), the appeal of The Teaching Company's courses lies in their ability to make the listener feel included in the world of the course. The lecturer speaks directly to the customer who buys the Teaching Company course, carefully contextualizing the materials for an intelligent but nonspecialist audience. The lectures are self-contained; the listener may feel inspired to read some primary materials, but such reading is not expected or required. The Teaching Company sells the feeling of full membership in an excellent lecturer's audience for the price of about a hundred dollars, depending on the course.

A university course, however, offers that sense of inclusion only to students who have done preparatory work for each class, and even for online observers who do that work, the experience of the free university courses is fundamentally alienating. The professor addresses the students in the room, takes care of the normal housekeeping that a college class requires, refers to events and people and gestures that are inaccessible to the online observer. I come to these classes having spent all but one year of my adult life in college classrooms, and even I find the format prohibitively unsociable. Such courses provide valuable guidance to exceptionally determined and disciplined students--a goal I support enthusiastically--but for better and for worse, they will not replace the more broadly welcoming format of The Teaching Company.

But whom does it resemble kissing?

Slate.com's political gabfest has solicited sports metaphors for the current state of the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination. I propose that it's like the old college football bowl system and that the analogy has a lot to tell us about how we perceive close contests.

As a method of ranking teams, the old college football bowl system worked well. It worked for exactly the reason everybody else the world says it didn't work: it was messy and indecisive--and therefore accurate. At the end of a season, sometimes you had two or even three or four teams who could make credible claims to be the best in the country. Perhaps one team finished the strongest but lost a game early, another went undefeated against a weaker schedule, another lost two games while its best player was hurt. If these teams did not play one another in bowl games, analysts and fans could build different narratives supporting the claims of different teams to be the true national champions; the official rankings never settled the arguments. Leaving those arguments unsettles was the great strength of the bowl system as an evaluative tool. It was also the great weakness of the system as a mechanism of producing drama. The NCAA basketball tournaments, by contrast, create situations where, say, one referee's decision at the end of a game creates a durable consensus about the relative merits of the two teams playing the game. Tournament play takes contests that are essentially tied and forces them to a decisive result; tournaments produce wonderful drama by denying the messiness of rankings.

The race for the Democratic Presidential nomination will ultimately be a tournament: either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will become the nominee, and the narrative of both candidates success or failure will be shaped dramatically by the result. But for now, we have a process, like the old bowl system, that is driving analysts crazy by failing to impose false decisiveness on the contest. Obama does better in caucuses, Clinton in primaries. Obama does better with some demographics and Clinton with others, but most of these differences are relatively small and shift in magnitude from state to state. By awarding delegates proportionally and gradually, the system has done an admirable job of reflecting these uncertainties.

Of course, the nomination process is unlike the college football season in that the Democratic party, for all sorts of structural reasons, really does have to settle on a winner. But the drive for creating narratives of decisive wins--the narratives that produce drama at the expense of accurately messy judgment--has controlled media coverage of the race throughout. Consider the weight placed on Clinton winning the popular vote in New Hampshire, or Obama in Missouri, or Clinton in Texas. But come on: they basically tied. And the gloriously messy, generally proportional methods of delegate allocation have admirably reflected those ties, creating a calm and quiet story of ties and narrow victories while the campaigns and the media shout about decisiveness.

A Presidential nominating process, like the NCAA basketball tournaments, must eventually produce one winner, and the name of that winner will forever distort the narrative of the contest. Our memories will select the facts that make the result seem inevitable.

For the moment, however, let us give thanks for delegate allocations that muck things up, that let similar performances accrue similar benefits without forcing one referee's whistle, or one butterfly ballot design, to take on the force of destiny.

Clinton or Obama: Which Democratic Presidential candidate do the markets like in the general election?

Supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both argue that their candidate is better equipped to beat the Republican nominee for President in a general election. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution first alerted me to the fact that when the Intrade political market contracts for Clinton and Obama to win the nomination were swinging wildly in response to Iowa and New Hampshire results, the contract price for the Democratic party nominee winning the Presidency remained calmly in the low 60s.

(For non-Intrade junkies: the price of the contract is for a share that will pay $100 if the contracted event comes true. That is, if you buy a share of the Democratic nominee for President at $65 and the Dem wins, you get $100, but if the Dem loses, you get nothing. Therefore, the price functions as the market's estimate of probability: a $65 price implies a collective judgment of a 65% probability of the Dem nominee winning the Presidency.)

Since Tabarrok made his post, the probability of the generic Democrat winning the general election has climbed above 65, but many factors could explain the move: Obama's shift to frontrunner status, McCain's emergence as the Republican nominee, increased worries about the economy relative to national security, and so forth. Therefore, I did a snapshot analysis earlier today that derives the answer to this question: according to the markets, would Obama or Clinton give the Democrats a better chance to win the Presidency?

To answer the question, we need the market's estimate that each candidate will win the party nomination and, separately, the estimate that each candidate will win the Presidency. At an arbitrary moment earlier today, the market gave Obama a 71.0% chance to win the nomination and a 47.2% chance to win the Presidency; for Clinton, the numbers were 29.0% and 18.3%, respectively.

The ratio of the second number to the first is the probability of winning given the nomination. Obama's number is 66.5%, Clinton's, 63.1%. Obama gets an edge at that moment, but I've seen moments over the last couple of days that give Clinton an even tinier edge. I would guess that overall, the market is signaling that it considers Obama the stronger nominee by a tiny margin. What's certain is that the market doesn't care much about the identity of the nominee.

Therefore, the supporters of either candidate who have made the case that their candidate has a clear advantage as a general election contender might want to step back and consider that the arguments put forth by the other side are equally persuasive to the bettors on Intrade. I have made such arguments in support of one candidate (Obama), so I include myself among those who might benefit from reflecting on this data.

Super Tuesday Post: A Brokered Convention?

As I write, during the afternoon of the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries, the identity of the Democratic nominee for the Presidency is breathtakingly uncertain: Josh Marshall points out that two of the most influential polling services have come to incompatible conclusions about voters' opinions, and the Intrade futures for the two candidates are currently trading between 49 and 51, with Clinton just above the 50% line and Obama just below.

The closeness of the race has prompted Chris Bowers, in a widely noted blog post, to say that "the most likely scenario" in the Democratic race is a brokered convention decided by superdelegates rather than primary and caucus results. Bowers presents a brokered convention as nearly inevitable barring a whopping Clinton victory in today's elections.

Given the attention the Bowers argument has received, I think it worth noting that Intrade also has a market in the probability of a brokered convention: shares on the Democratic side last traded at $11.10, implying an underlying probability of only 11.1%, with no eye-catching volatility or trends in the price.

Reader, you choose the moral of the story, as it must be one or both of the following:

1. Something in Bowers's account dramatically understates or underweights the ways in which the party can avoid a brokered convention.

2. Bowers is more or less correct, and there are heaps of money available for the taking on Intrade.

On this blog, I try not to make points that are relevant only in a given news cycle. My intent here is to illustrate the tension between the blog narrative and the market and thereby to wonder, in the new age of prediction markets for increasingly contingent and sophisticated contracts, how frequently some of us will be checking market prices to weigh the importance of a wide range of stories.