cross-posted from Dagblog
The Eastern Seaboard is getting clobbered by a combined late-season
hurricane and blizzard, flooding large areas and knocking out
electricity in even larger areas. As I write this, the New York City
subways are flooded, there has been an explosion at a Con Edison power
station, and a large parts of Rockaway are burning while firefighters,
trapped by the floodwaters, are helpless to stop it.
Once-in-a-lifetime storms like this one have always existed. But the increasing frequency
of massive storms, coming much much faster than only once a lifetime, is
one of the results predicted by the standard model for catastrophic
global warning. That doesn't mean that Hurricane Sandy (aka the
Frankenstorm) is necessarily a result of climate change, the way the
shrinking polar ice obviously is. But climate change models do predict
that there would be many more storms like this, and the last ten years
have certainly had a hell of a lot of fierce weather events. Of course,
many people in the media denounce the very idea of climate change as
"junk science"
The storm is knock out millions of people's electricity a week before a
presidential election. This is largely because we have allowed our
infrastructure to age and weaken, until our bridges and roads and power
grids are too creaky and brittle for an emergency. The problems with
this have been predicted for many years, but those who advocated public
rebuilding of our national infrastructure were denounced as
spendthrifts, wasting the public's money and "holding back" the
entrepreneurial economy.
The election itself is on a knife's edge, largely because the economy
is in the doldrums, despite the half-sized stimulus package President
Obama passed at the beginning of his term. Some economists, most
famously Paul Krugman, predicted at the time that such an undersized
stimulus (less than half the size of the demand that the American
economy had lost in the downturn) would fail to spur sufficient growth,
make future stimulus packages politically impossible (because the first
would "prove" that stimulus spending "doesn't work"), and lead the
President into an uphill slog of an election campaign in a depressed
economy. All of those things have happened. But for saying so in
advance, Krugman was widely called unreasonable, partisan, and shrill.
He continues to be called those things.
This week, as the election remains close and different approaches to
reading polls yield different indications about which candidate is more
likely to win, a wide range of media voices ranging from professional
conservatives at the National Review to self-described centrists like David Brooks and Politico
launched on attack on the poll analyst Nate Silver of 538.com for the
high crime and misdemeanor of favoring state-by-state polling data over
the headline numbers from national tracking polls. What apparently
provoked this pack-mentality assault was that Silver did not endorse the
idea that Mitt Romeny was continuing to surge in the polls after, well,
after Romney ceased gaining in the polls. Eventually, some of Silver's
attackers (some of whom had gotten very personal indeed) realized that
nearly every poll-averaging outfit was producing results much like
Silver's; this led some of them (such as noted statistical genius
Jennifer Rubin) to denounce poll averaging itself.
There's some grim humor in the attack on Silver, such as his critics'
displays of colossal mathematical illiteracy (some of his attackers
cannot distinguish between predicting that Barack Obama has 70% chance
of winning the election and predicting that Obama will win the election
in a 70-30 blowout), and their even more colossal displays of hypocrisy
(various pundits who have been horribly mistaken over and over, without
an ounce of chagrin, have pompously declared that if Silver is wrong
about the upcoming election he will be permanently disgraced. Disgraced,
I say! Just like Joe Scarborough was that time that he was wrong about
every single thing that happened in the Bush Administration.) But
there's something simply grim here, too, because the sudden outburst of
rage suggests how our media actually works and how they treat the
business of prediction.
If Nate Silver's approach to handicapping the election is wrong (and of
course it could be), we'll know in a week. And Silver's critics, if
they only believed he was wrong, could just wait for him to be proved
wrong, the way I wait out loudmouths in sports bars. But simply not predicting that Romney would win
after the media storyline had changed to Romney's Irresistible Momentum
was enough to provoke a wide-spread attack. To predict something that
the establishment finds politically inconvenient is considered an
outrage. And to base that prediction in rational analysis of data only
makes it more unacceptable. When people like the pundits who attacked
Silver this week talk about "facts," they don't mean facts. They mean
socially-produced ideas of reality, established by influential insiders
and handed down to the rest of us. Anyone who publicly contradicts that
socially approved "reality" is disrupting business and inconveniencing
the powerful, and that cannot be allowed. Carefully-constructed
reality-based models only make the crime worse.
The global-warming hypothesis, based on careful analysis of enormous
quantities of data, is not acceptable to the powers that be, because
accepting that reality would force them to change the way they arrange
things, the way they conduct their business and make their political
decisions. Those arrangements outweigh any facts. The reality of our
crumbling infrastructure is likewise inconvenient, because it would
require sensible taxation and a rational approach to public finance.
Paul Krugman's model for the how large the stimulus needed to be was
likewise inconvenient, because it did not fit in with existing political
agendas. How dare he make predictions without taking into account what K
Street considered reasonable?
Our country has allowed the perspective of insiders and elites, a
perspective that treats ongoing power games as the most fundamental
reality, to crowd out actual reality. When science, mathematics, or
simple common sense threatens to interfere with the results of those
games, or render them moot, then science, math, and common sense are
ruled out of order. But there's a price to be paid for running the world
as if Beltway games were more real than physics, and that price is
extremely high. The price is that our country fails to deal with easily
foreseeable problems, and instead makes them vastly worse than they
needed to be. After a while, it means our system runs a danger of
failing completely. And that failure is all too predictable.
Kamala's mom
5 days ago