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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (5152)	11/22/2006 2:36:47 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 10087

The way it's framed, "should be allowed to" doesn't seem to mean "should" do it seriously but rather should do it as an object lesson. Yes, but its still "should do it". If I thought the object lesson would make a difference I'd say go for it. But I have a feeling nothing positive will come of it. OTOH it probably will not be a great negative either. Its the type of thing that some people get really worked up about, but that probably won't have a large practical or political effect.

To: Lane3 who wrote (5152)	11/22/2006 2:41:04 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

Your answer isn't ever on any multiple choice list. <gg> Maybe I'm the type of guy that made Harry Truman ask for a one handed economist.

To: Lane3 who wrote (5152)	12/29/2006 5:05:39 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 10087

Is Federalism Tainted? volokh.com Some selected replies - volokh.com "As to the original post, let's separate two meanings of "tainted": (i) on the merits, the theory is flawed, as the history of Jim Crow shows; and (ii) federalists have a political problem independent of the merits of the idea..." volokh.com volokh.com My Take - Obviously the consequences of an idea have to be considered, but federalism is a rather large idea that has lots of consequences. Even if you only consider the problems of slavery and legal discrimination in American history, there are times (as Ilya Somin points out) when federalism worked in a positive direction, and if you look at other areas there are many more times when things were positive. Also federalism is written in to our constitution. Ignoring that weakens the rule of law IMO. And generally federalism makes it easier to avoid unjust laws. (With the provision, again pointed out by Somin, that people must be allowed to move between states for federalism to have this advantage) So I'd say federalism is not tainted by slavery and Jim Crow in sense number one on JosephSlater's list - "on the merits, the theory is flawed, as the history of Jim Crow shows". But it is at least to an extent tainted in sense number 2, in that "federalists have a political problem independent of the merits of the idea" because of Jim Crow, and perhaps because of slavery. One side point - "Federalism" is used in this post and on Volokh's to mean something like "state's rights", or "decentralization of power". In the context of the current political and legal situation a more federalist solution would mean more power for the states, however in the context of a very lose confederation, that was more of an alliance of states then a fully unified country federalism would mean less state power and independence and more power to the central government. Federalism implies a balance between the two, not an almost powerless central government.

To: Lane3 who wrote (5152)	1/29/2007 6:48:08 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

More Than 50 Percent Can Be Above Average posted 12:52 PM by Glen Whitman In this article on why policymakers are irrationally biased toward hawkish foreign policy, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon offer a familiar example of alleged cognitive bias: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. I used to think this was a clear example of cognitive bias. Now I’m not so sure. The idea is that only 50 percent of us can really be better-than-average drivers, so at least 30 percent of people are wrong. The buried assumption here is that driving skill is symmetrically distributed, so that the mean and median are the same. That’s not necessarily true; the distribution might be skewed by the existence of small numbers of very bad drivers. To take a very simple case, suppose that 80% of drivers have no accidents at all, while the other 20% have 5 accidents per year. Then the average (mean) is 1 accident per year, and fully 80% of drivers are better than average! Obviously this example is unrealistic because it includes only two driver types, but it’s illustrative of what I think might be going on. I couldn’t find any figures online stating the distribution of drivers by accident frequency, so I really don’t know if the distribution is sufficiently skewed to justify 80% of us thinking we’re better than average drivers. (If anyone knows of such statistics, please point me to them.) But it’s certainly not unknown for distributions to be that skewed. To take one example I’m fond of presenting to my students, the average (mean) time to conception for women trying to get pregnant is about 7 months. But 50% of such women will be pregnant within 4 months, and 75% will be pregnant within 6 months. That means at least 75% of women are doing “better than average” in the conception race. The result is driven, of course, by the fact that some couples have fertility problems that delay conception for many months or even years. These couples are analogous to the bad drivers who might be skewing overall accident rates. agoraphilia.blogspot.com -- One response - I think there's a better explanation. I think that when different people claim that they're better than the average driver, they're not necessarily saying the same thing. They have different definitions of what it means to be a better driver. Good driving is a bundle of skills and practices and many people weight each of the factors differently. So, most people can truthfully say that they are a better than average driver because when they say it, they're using their own formula to measure it, and they probably focus on their own more heavily-weighted factors more than the average driver; so they are better at them. This reminds me of Will Wilkinson's arguments about happiness from status races being positive-sum, because different people have different dimensions where they seek status. We can all be happy with our relative position if we have different areas of life where status matters to us. # posted by Gil : January 06, 2007 6:17 PM agoraphilia.blogspot.com