election 2020!

I’m going to try not to get too carried away with election 2020 posts. For one thing, a lot of people know a lot more than me about election 2020. Nate Silver for example. In 2012 I made a little spreadsheet electoral college model that helped me understand the election that year. By 2016, that sort of thing was so easy to find on the internet and so much more sophisticated than anything I could hope to come up with that it wasn’t really worth the trouble. For another thing, it can be fun to forecast the outcomes of certain events, sports for instance, and come back later to see how you did. Sports are fun because you pretend to care about them, but you know deep down that they don’t matter. Politics is not like that – they matter and I care, so it is just not that fun to be wrong.

Okay, with that rambling preamble, and before the first voting starts in the Iowa caucus (I’m writing on Sunday, January 26), I’m going to give my predictions. But before I give my predictions, let me be open and honest about what I want to happen. I want Bernie Sanders to be elected President, and I want him to serve alongside a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. This would give the United States a chance to tackle the systemic corruption problem that is dragging our nation down, and put us on a path to future success. Elizabeth Warren would have a chance of doing this too, and I actually prefer her policy positions overall, but I think Bernie Sanders is the stronger leader and the leader we need right now.

I don’t think that is what is going to happen. Of the three (President Bernie Sanders, Democratic House, Democratic Senate), the Democratic Senate is particularly unlikely. Let’s look at PredictIt – gamblers there are giving about a 70/30 chance of the Senate remaining in Republican hands. Those are not awful odds for Democrats, but in a straight-up betting situation you would not take those odds. And keep in mind, a super-majority of 60 in the Senate is required to pass major legislation, not just a majority of 51. So even if Sanders or Warren gets in as President, and assuming the House stays Democratic as seems likely, it will be close to impossible to get major progressive legislation through on issues like campaign finance, health care, childcare or education. A Republican Senate will also block any efforts to reengage with the United Nations or ratify treaties on things such as climate change or human rights. A Democratic President will be stuck trying to fine-tune rules and regulations across the executive branch, rebuild the State Department and shape foreign policy to the extent possible through the executive branch.

Let’s start with general election polls out as of right now. People say these don’t mean anything. But I recall looking at Clinton vs. Trump in these polls, before we knew that either of them would be the nominee in 2016, and being surprised that people thought Trump would beat her. The same polls showed Bernie Sanders beating Trump. So let’s look at these wildly inaccurate, not very useful polls on RealClearPolitics as of Sunday, January 26.

  • Biden vs. Trump: Biden leads by 4.3% nationally, an average of 6 polls taken between December 4 and January 23. Of these 6, 1 shows Trump leading and 1 shows a tie, while the others show Biden leading by 2-9%.
  • Sanders vs. Trump: Sanders leads by 3.2% nationally, an average of 6 polls taken between December 4 and January 23. Of these 6, 1 shows Trump leading , while the others show Sanders leading by 1-8%.
  • Warren vs. Trump: Warren leads by 1.4% nationally, an average of 6 polls taken between December 4 and January 23. Of these 6, 2 show Trump leading and 1 shows a tie, while the others show Warren leading by 5-7%.
  • Incidentally, today PredictIt gives the eventual Republican nominee a 52% chance of beating the eventual Democratic nominee, which doesn’t exactly gel with the numbers above.

The first thing that occurs to me is that these polls (not counting PredictIt) show any of the three most likely Democratic nominees winning the popular vote, whereas they showed Hillary losing it at a similar point in 2016 (based on my memory, I don’t know how to get the historical poll data). Democrats have reasons to be confident, but they are under-confident for obvious reasons. They are probably about as under-confident right now as they were over-confident as of Hillary Clinton’s victory party-like last rally in Philadelphia on election-eve 2016.

The second thing that occurs to me is that the Warren thing is just too close for comfort. I like Warren, but she seems like a risky nominee when Bernie Sanders is so similar in his policy views, and is the stronger potential leader in my view. Similar to Obama, people have this weird reaction to her as an elitist egghead. I personally am comforted when I feel like the people leading the country have a better grasp of subjects like economics and history than I do, but it does not seem as most of my fellow humans share these feelings.

Which leaves us with Sanders and Biden. Let’s go back to Nate Silver and his Monte Carlo models which are so much better than anything I could come up with. His model suggests a 58% chance that no Democratic candidate wins a majority of delegates. Biden has a 42% chance, Sanders a 22% chance, and there is a 15% chance that nobody gets a majority. Nate points out that in the event nobody gets a majority, but somebody gets a clear plurality, one thing that could happen is that the delegates cast votes for their pledged candidate in the first round of voting, but the candidates and delegates arrange in advance for the plurality candidate to get the majority of votes in the second round. I think you have to say that the two most likely outcomes as of today are that Biden gets a majority of delegates on the first vote, or Biden gets a clear plurality of delegates and gets a majority vote on a second ballot as a pre-determined outcome. Put those two together and this is the likely outcome – the Biden vs. Sanders showdown goes to Biden, the Biden vs. Trump showdown goes to Biden, and we have President Biden.

Now let me tell you why my purely subjective, purely anecdotal experience suggests that a President Sanders is a real possibility. It could be that I am rationalizing what I want to happen, of course, which would make me a human being, but nonetheless here it is. I am originally from Martinsville, Virginia, a former Appalachian manufacturing powerhouse that has fallen on very hard times, and this is an understatement. My grandparents’ generation moved from rural subsistence lifestyles to urban factory worker lifestyles. My parents generation worked in those factories when they were young, then got laid off when the factories moved to Mexico and eventually China. I remember friends and relatives railing against Bill Clinton and NAFTA because they thought this took their jobs and the quality of life of their families away. Now, in my personal view, NAFTA was just the final nail in the coffin created by decades of policies meant initially to prop up Cold War allies, which then proved a convenient narrative for multinational corporations, and turned out to be straightforward to represent in abstract mathematical models by academic economists.

Barrack Obama made Martinsville, Virginia one of his early campaign stops, and I know for a fact that some of my hillbilly friends and relatives you would never expect to vote for him bought into his “hopey changey” vision and voted for him in 2008 and 2012. When 8 years of Obama didn’t noticeably improve their lives, and the Democrat running in 2016 had the last name “Clinton”, these same friends and relatives voted for Trump in 2016. I think people who self-identify as America’s lost industrial base in Pennsylvania (where I now live), Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin did the same. To state the obvious, 2020 is not 2016, there is no candidate named Clinton, and Bernie Sanders won the 2016 primaries in some of these states. At least some of these “working class” Trump voters are going to love Bernie Sanders. Combine this with the coin toss in Florida which went Trump’s way in 2016, an outside chance of Texas flipping Democratic in 2020, and uncertainty about the economy, and Bernie has a good chance. Like I said, Democrats are under-confident.

So let’s be clear: I think the odds favor Biden, a Democratic House, and a Republican Senate. I think Sanders, a Democratic House, and a Republican Senate is the second most likely outcome. Trump, a Democratic House, and a Republic Senate is probably the third most likely outcome. Nobody knows what is going to happen with the economy or geopolitical events, but in the next 11 months something is probably going to happen. Sanders, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate is not a high probability, but as Nate Silver might point out, a sports metaphor might help us realize that the odds are not that different from perhaps an underdog like the Philadelphia Eagles winning the 2018 Superbowl (which they did). It’s likely enough to be worth fighting for.

Soros at WEF

George Soros summarized the disastrous state of the world in a speech to the World Economic Forum, then tried to end on a high note. The high note didn’t succeed, at least for me. He got me too depressed with his list of problems: climate change first and foremost; authoritarian trends in many countries including the United States, China, Russia, and India; Brexit; and specter of nuclear war rising. His solution to all this is better education focused on system thinking and critical thinking. I can certainly support that – if we start now, it is a long term investment that may pay off in 40 years as babies born today start to move into positions of power. We may always want to consider some shorter-term measures to deal with the risks of war and climate change if we would like those babies to have a civilization to grow up in for the next 40 years.

neonicotinoids

The problem with neoniconitoid pesticides, according to this Intercept article, is not that they kill bees directly, but that they weaken their immune systems so that they succumb to fungal infections. Sick bees have an instinct to fly away from the hive and die quietly somewhere to protect the hive. And the concentrations that cause this are so low they are not even detectable in monitoring data.

Delta-v

I recently read Delta V, a near-future space exploration saga by Daniel Suarez. I recommend it as a really entertaining and thought-provoking book. The story is about an expedition to mine an asteroid for water, metals, and other minerals in the early 2030s. There are no technologies in the book that seem implausible – in fact, I would say if anything that the author was conservative and assumed only technology that would be available today. (I’m writing this in 2020, just in case you are an anthropologist reading this in the impossibly distant future.) The story doesn’t have a villain per se other than “investors”, but there is a character that seems to be some combination of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, a sort of semi-villain with redeeming features. The author obviously did a lot of research on the physics, biology, and even chemistry of life in space, so be warned that while being entertained you might learn something by accident.

a “decade of liberal failure”?

According to Alex Pareene at The New Republic, the 2010s were a “decade of liberal failure”. He cites the escalation of the Afghanistan war, so carefully considered by Nobel prize-winning Obama, devolving into an quagmire with no obvious point and no obvious way out. He believes that the stimulus package and Affordable Care Act basically worked, but the Obama administration purposely designed them to work behind the scenes. They actually benefited people, but people don’t give the administration any credit for those benefits, and Republicans are able to successfully play on this misconception.

undeclared U.S.-Russia war?

I’m not familiar with this blog yasha.substack.com, but it makes a somewhat convincing argument that the U.S. and Russia are fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, and that is a theme running throughout the impeachment proceedings.

If you read the impeachment literature, including the articles of impeachment, you’ll find the notion that we are at war with Russia underlies a major part of the case against Trump. Aside from the charges of self-dealing and corruption and attempts to influence an election, Trump’s other overarching crime is he “compromised American national security” and “injured national security” by slightly delaying the nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine that had been approved by Congress. The argument is that he will “remain a threat to national security” if he remains president and so must be removed. This line of thinking is expressed even more clearly in the House Judiciary Committee report on impeachment.

yasha.substack.com

science trends to watch in 2020

Wired has a story on science trends to watch in 2020.

  • Stem cells are being used to grow mini-versions of all sorts of human organs, including hearts, kidneys and brains.
  • advances in trying to detect dark matter
  • the end of a key U.S tax credit for solar panels
  • gene editing going mainstream in medical treatments, and newer, safer techniques evolving (pun intended, ha ha!)
  • obvious bond villain Elon Musk launching satellites by the thousands. Also, private flights to the International Space Station.
  • use of massive data sets in “personalized medicine”

Meanwhile, here’s a rundown from LiveScience.com on the weird, wacky world of quantum physics. In a nutshell, these are recent, real-world experiments where matter, energy, and even time do things you wouldn’t think they are supposed to do.

the “best” health advice from 2019

The Week has cherry picked a few studies from 2019 as best. Although they did pick ones with large sample sizes, what would be “best” to me would be some kind of meta-analysis of all studies published and what they said on balance, with some kind of grading for quality and communication of the uncertainty involved. That would be awesome journalism, but I imagine it would be expensive. The great news is that if you add up all the percentages that doing this and that can reduce your chances of death, you can live forever! Anyway, here is my quick summary:

  • Exercise, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains just never go out of style. More whole foods (the thing, not the chain) and less processed foods in general seem to be a very good idea. Seriously, just orient your life style around these things and it is very unlikely the scientific consensus will change some day and tell you it was a bad idea.
  • Napping is good for you – this particular study says “five minutes to an hour once or twice a week”. I’m not surprised that rest is good for the heart, but I thought there was an emerging consensus that maintaining a consistent schedule on all days was good, and this seems to contradict that a bit.
  • Parents are stressed out while kids are young, then ultimately glad they had the kids later in life. This doesn’t surprise me since I am living through the stressed out part, but I do find it helpful to put myself in my future self’s shoes and ask if I would regret having children. In fact, my wife and I did that when we made the decision to have children, and the answer was and is no, we have no regrets. The distinction between happiness in the moment and overall life satisfaction also comes to mind.
  • Aspirin and ibuprofen seem to help your heart, but also raise your risk of internal bleeding. It’s probably best not to self-medicate.
  • Smoking and getting hit on the head, even gently, are not good for you.

Philadelphia in the twenteens

Inga Saffron, the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tries to use the cell phone to tie together trends in Philadelphia in the 2010s. I don’t know if I buy her argument 100%, and I don’t know how serious she is about it, but the list of trends is interesting, and it’s interesting to compare her assessment to my own experience living and working in the city for most of the decade.

  • young adults moving back to the city – this was a huge trend and hard to miss. Apps made it easier to get food and stuff to their homes without driving, and ride sharing made it easier to get around. Inga argues a lot of people “ditched their cars” – this may be true, I haven’t seen the data, but one thing I observed is that a lot of new homes featured garages, and larger developments featured big garages and even surface parking in some cases. This changed the walking experience in some neighborhoods quite a bit, and not for the better. Overall though, it is great for the city to have the people.
  • Tech jobs are one reason the young professionals came back. Tax policy and zoning code changes also had an effect. Inga doesn’t mention “councilmanic prerogative”, but in my neighborhood this means that the 2011 zoning code, considered a national model, still has not gone into effect at the end of the decade. The council person and developers he favors benefit from this by being able to negotiate every new development in their favor. This means that what should be the main street in a densely populated neighborhood underserved by shops and restaurants is mostly still a bunch of building supply warehouses. This also plays to anti-gentrification voters, which has an ugly racial element to it that is hard to talk about. In my view, Inga correctly diagnoses the problem of lower-income residents being pushed to more affordable housing farther from jobs in the city center, without corresponding improvements in public transportation.
  • People are giving up their cars, according to Inga, but traffic is worse and buses can’t run on time due to all the ride sharing and deliveries. Parking garages are disappearing because they are under-subscribed. I would like to examine the numbers on all these issues. Traffic does seem worse, but my instinct is that it is due to poor street design and maintenance, traffic and parking management/pricing, and an almost complete lack of law enforcement effort. Solutions to these problems exist, and all these things in the public realm need to be brought into the 21st century in concert with the new technologies coming from the private sector.