Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Actually, 1 for 20, got to give him credit for scuttling kyoto.

What a load of $#@!-up's. Thanks for the good summary. Will pass it on.

Actually, what he did, Ugh, was say that he would offer an alternative to Kyoto and never mentioned it again.

Meanwhile, though, poor analogy, prof (my guess is that you should stay away from baseball). The typical major league hitter has an average around .260. If he's 0 - 20, the odds are pretty good that he will get a hit the next time up; otherwise, he wouldn't be a .260 hitter.

I'd say that a better baseball analogy would be, if someone hasn't gotten a hit in 3.5 seasons, the odds are that he can't hit....

And should be sent to the low minors or not offered another contract at all.

Don't hold back.. How do you really feel? At least you didn't tell him to go $#@! himself.

What this country needs is George Wallace to tell these Bush neo-cons that they're a bunch of pointy headed intellectuals who can't park their bicycles straight (present company excluded, of course!)

P.S. For a good time, see the Poor Man's story board of the latest Bush ad. There's a link at Atrios.

Yes, but there is no evidence that Bush is a
0.260 hitter. so we are still stuck with the evidence that he is a 0.000 hitter.

Actually, taking the baseball analogy to its logical conclusion:

A sabermetric examination of his minor league translation numbers (from the low minor Oil League to the high minor Texas League) indicates a player who has never learned to control the strike zone, hit for average or even hit for power barring the occasional wind-aided home run in a small ballpark; and who only still has a job because he has friends in the front office and is the son of a former major leaguer. Thus, the 0-for-20 start to his career should surprise no one.

In short, George W. Bush is Pete Rose Jr.

Yeah, that was about the stupidest thing I'd ever read from Kleiman. Although as he doesn't specify anywhere just what that set of one was referring to it doesn't necessarily mean that the set was the set of succesful Bush enterprises. And given his closing paragraph I wonder if he didn't mean the set of invasions of Iraq in the 21st century. I should also clarify that I was another one of the idiots that believed in an invasion for humanitarian reasons, how was I to know that humanitarian reasons in Bush-land meant "sado-masochistic republican sex games for everyone".

Read Michael Mann's Incoherent Empire. You will see that it's easy to conquer countries and hard to hold on to them. There was much reason to be wary about invading Iraq, aside from all moral reasons for wariness. The triumphalism of the two-month period when the invasion seemed to be going well should be remembered. Triumphalism is easy--at the beginning. Remember the Soviets in Afghanistan. Michael Mann reminds us that it's the long haul that's hard. People who are planning invasions should know this.

Whoa! Ouch. It must be great when grouchy agressiveness, a disciplined mind, and talking points, line up JUST right. As my young friends say, "D#@n! You opened a can of whoop-@ss that time!"

Given that this point was well-made (no way to have supported BUSH doing this), however, there does need to be a very focused, politics-free, policy-full way of thinking about what to do about non state terrorists actors, how they mesh with state terrorists actors, how the "lifeblood" of the economy is in the ground of regimes who, in many, many ways, create more "stateless" terrorists.

It's a difficult, important, and dangerous question. As much as anything, this misadventure into Iraq, the arrogance of the current administration has delayed really taking on this challenge in a coherent rational, important way. It is so important that the "grown-ups" get this right - economically, politically, and otherwise. But this conversation can't occur in such a rabid partisan atmosphere.

If he's 0 - 20, the odds are pretty good that he will get a hit the next time up; otherwise, he wouldn't be a .260 hitter.

This is completely wrong. If with a fair coin you have tossed "heads" five times consecutively, your probability of tossing tails on the sixth is still .5: no more, no less.

The situation is more complex with the batter, but the basic point is the same: given a fixed probability, a string of failures does not make a string of successes more likely.

Say the batter had a terrible slump, no hits in 100 at-bats. He wouldn't have to go 52-100 in the next series to still be a .260 hitter. In fact, if he only got 26 hits per 100 at bats, his average would approach .260 as his at-bats approached infinity.

well, son volt, i thought about that before making the comment about the hitter going 0-20, but actually, hitting a baseball is not the same as flipping a coin, so i don't think the analogy holds (although, admittedly, i'm no expert on statistics).

But i am a pretty well-versed expert on baseball. Most hitters go through 0-20 stretches during the season at some point, but in the non-infinity of a season, they still end up more or less at their career norms. Once in a great while, someone hits 50 points above or below his norm (which is so say over the course of 500 at-bats, he gets 25 more or less hits than his career norms would suggest), but by and large, once a hitter established his norm (which may take a year or two to learn the league, etc.), his variation from the norm is pretty modest (and often can be explained by factors like ballpark effects).

Now, the statistical basis for this i can't spell out for you, but yes, in baseball, the fact is, that when a guy goes 0-20, the odds are that he's going to "overcome" that variation from the norm sooner and not later. (For a living example this season, see Derek Jeter, who 6 weeks ago or so was still hitting way below his career norm at about .180, and who, since then, has hit about .400, which has lifted him to .270, and i expect him to continue to raise his average over the course of the year to something very close to his career norm, which is on the order of .314).

I think the big reasons that hitting isn't like coin-flipping is that much more luck is involved in hitting: as jeter said during his awful stretch, he felt that he was hitting the ball hard, just right at people....

$#@! means Cheney up ?

I hope you feel better after using that word.

To paraphrase Amit Kulkarni, what we have here is a whole *&^%load of $#@!ups. And if anyone cares to add to the list the rest of you guys will have to do your calculations all over again, unless, of course, there is a consensus that *&^%load is a constant.

Ya know, when W was Gov of TX, all of the Dems thought he was just plain stupid, stupid, stupid. They sneered, and sneered, and sneered. And they lost, and lost, and lost. And the same thing's about to happen to you smart fellers. See ya in hell, guys.

Son Voit, your statistical theory is a little off, but hey you may be onto something:

I think we'd be better off with a nickel than with Bush.

If Bush is 0 for 20 currently, then one can state with 90% confidence that his long-term average is less than 0.14. Back to the minors, Shrub.

Frankly, I think one could make a stronger statement. Just like when you see answers to a multiple-choice exam that gets every single answer wrong, when with random guessing one would expect to see a few right answers. The conclusion is that it wasn't random guesses, but systematically stupid choices.

So Bush is batting 1.000 on his "stupidity average".

A slight demurrer. This:

We have the Medicare drug benefit: a $#@!-up.

is only half a $#@!-up. It was supposed to be a boondoggle for W's friends and to placate seniors. The first half of that appears headed for success.

Howard: Son Volt is correct. Before you make strong statements on this you need to read up on the theory of runs. Without details, everything you say in your second post is consistent with Son Volt's comment.

No doubt about it, Bush has the stupid vote sewed up.

A batter isn't a fair coin though. I think that howard was right.

Of course, sometimes a .250 hitter permanently turns into a .000 hitter; some people lose it.

Kleinman infuriates me with his "responsible" version of liberalism which, in practice, is irresponsible, naive, gutless, and mostly concerned with "I'm not like those disreputable extremists". "Solidarity" is a good property and "stab-in-the-back" is not equivalent to "fair". The right is entrenching and expanding their Empire of Dread and fools like Kleinman are out there claiming that "moderation" requires sneering at the people who ring the alarm bell.

I've seen this joke put on the net somewhere - I can't remember where - but Kleinman does remind me of the old, bitter, East European Jewish joke about the two Jews dragged in front of the firing squad. One asks for a blindfold and the other whispers "Don't make trouble".

Trouble is here, Mark. Pretend to be one of the responsible center all you like. It won't make Tom Delay a statesman.

The more times you flip a "fair coin" without getting tails, the more likely it is you're not really playing with a fair coin.

"But I'm due, I tell ya! I'm DUE!!!"

Economists no longer remember how to do qualitative research. You don't have a sample size of one just b/c you have one country. You have a variety of different observations across time and space within Iraq. Are they highly correlated? Sure, so your real N isn't as high as every little event that occurs. But it wasn't just one decision that was made, there were many. And that allows us to infer certain things about the actors involved.

What I don't get is why neither Kleinman nor DeLong got this (perhaps Brad did but just didn't write it). At the least, many economists still understand time series, which is what we have in Iraq.

Sometimes I despair for the profession. There is a glaring difference between the amount of methodological sophistication economists claim to have and the amount of sound methodology they employ. Friends of mine who are statisticians regularly cluck over the lack of humility that economists have. But that's a side topic / hobbyhorse of mine.

By my count, half of the 20 points are debatable. Next, the list consisted only of things assumed to have gone wrong--otherwise you would lose the rhetorical effect of zero. So let's say that the number of all things that should have been mentioned was 40--and 20 of them obviously must have gone right, b/c they weren't mentioned. So we have an estimate of 0.75 average. Not bad.

I would put it differently: the MORE that Gregg Easterbrook tries to convince us that Bush's environmental policy is bad, because liberals attack Bush over it, the MORE certain we can be that the policy stinks. Easterbrook's writing on environmental issues - once you strip away the obfuscation - could be cut-and-pasted into the Mobil-Exxon space on the lower right corner of the NYT Op-Ed page. No one would notice, and it would, of course, still be the lower-right corner...

Brad is quite unfair to describe all these exercises as $#@!-ups. What about the !$@#-ups, the #@$!-ups, the @$!#-ups? They try every permutation of Murphy’s Law.

Brad, I think you are terribly up$@#!

Brad, I think you are terribly up$@#!

The rigour of walons post matches its generosity. walons assumes an equal number of 'things gone right' that is implicit in the (not as explicit a list as some of you smartie-pants think) list. Is that generous or what?
Patrick teaches us ( OK, not all) that this is a grave error: to give an inch, nay a molecule, let alone half.
There is hope.

I am taking lessons in methodological rigour from the esteemed professor who hosts this blog. I haven't yet reached his level of $#@!-up sophistication, but I promise I will try harder.

I'm sure if Bush farts, DeShort will find the fart fucked-up. DeShort need a shrink, badly.