My DSM code is 301.81. What's yours?

Slate is on the cutting edge of psychological assessment, Diagnosis by Unnamed Quote. Here's more:

A line from a New York Times profile of [Rod Blagojevich] is as trenchant a description of narcissism as is found in most psychology textbooks: "[He] is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush." There it all is: the sense that other people don't matter, the belief others are instruments for the narcissist's use, the self-admiration.

All kidding aside, this kind of pop-psychology must be pretty popular because Emily Yoffe (previously) has done it before. But popular isn't always good. And Yoffe is firing off labels without respecting how difficult it is to define and determine a disorder/disability as a part of someone's thoughts/behaviors/feelings. Of course, this culminates in a smallish statement about our culture in general, "If the observers who say that part of our economic troubles result from a mass case of narcissism, from consumers who thought they should have the house of their dreams financed on bad debt to bankers who thought they deserved eight-figure bonuses for packaging that bad debt, then perhaps we are about to be cured". Interestingly, there's no mention of wage stagnation regarding consumer debt. Very naughty, Slate. thoughts/behaviors/feelings.

Friday Fun: How progressive are you?

I saw this quiz on Ezra Klein's blog and I agree that without any reliability or validity data, it isn't exactly a sound assessment instrument (that scale is problematic, why didn't they go with a Likert?) . Still, it's interesting to play around with. See it here and have a great weekend!

Superpost: Thoughts on inequality

The GINI Coefficient is a measure of inequality of income distribution. The more unequal a society distributes its wealth, the higher the GINI figure will be. Let me decribe this further.

Let's say that countries X and Y each produce an income worth 100 dollars a year. Let's also say that both countries are 10 people big. Country X distributes all 100 dollars to 1 person. Country X would have a high GINI figure. Country Y, on the other hand, equally distributes its money (all 10 people receive 10 dollars). Country Y would have a low GINI fingure.

The NY Times blog, Economix, has a post about the implications of having a high GINI index. On the one hand, long-standing conventional wisdom was that "efforts to reduce income inequality would be punished by lower economic growth". On the other hand, "Richard Wilkinson’s new book, 'The Impact of Inequality,' summarizes evidence from comparative studies that violence is greater — and trust and cooperation lower — in more unequal societies."

What does this have to do with the efficiency argument noted above? The post author notes that higher violence rates may lead to a higher need for private gaurds and private gaurds are an inefficency. They then post the graph on the right (I circled Miami).






There are a few pieces of important information provided here. One, Miami has an oddly high GINI index (over 63%, which is similar to the indices of countries in the developing world), which is to say, Miami has a highly unequal distribution of wealth.

Two, Miami also has a large number of private gaurds as a percent of total employment. Again, according to the post authors this represents an ineficiency (and this makes sense since guards don't "produce" much, and they definitely don't "produce" anything beyond what law enforcement does).

Three, the dispersion of the points on the graph show a pattern of points being lower on the left and higher on the right. Typically, this indicates that there is a relationship between the two variables. Here, it shows that, for US cities, a higher GINI index correlates with more security.

If you have read this far congratulations. But, there's more. One, doing an analysis with only two variables present is never the best design. Two, the notes on the statistics say that the effect of one of the variables explains 64% of the variation in the other. That means that 36% of the variation is being caused by other things (and this is quite possibly lower than reality since only two variables are included in the model).

The point I am trying to make is that understanding this information is difficult. It is, however, important to understand statistics. The media ignoring complicated models (or uncomplicated one like this one) does not serve anyone.

I am also saying that Miami is scarily unequal.

Bai on political science

Reporter Matt Bai wrote a review (reg. req.) of a book called "The Myth of Digital Democracy", by Matthew Hindman. Bai writes that thesis of the book is that, "[a]ccording to Hindman, American politics and media, far from being democratized in any way, are still controlled by a relative handful of activists and gatekeepers." Now, I haven't read this book so I can't speak how accurately Bai describes the main topic within the book. I would like to take a second to note some statements about differences between political journalists and political scientists.

Bai says:

Academics who study politics often consider those of us who write about the field to be superficial, simple-minded and–the greatest indictment of all– unscientific. We interview three people in an Iowa diner and act as if we have penetrated the very soul of America. (Such allegations are, sadly, true enough.) Hindman’s book is permeated by just this kind of mild contempt for political journalists, who, in his view, have mindlessly extolled the democratizing virtues of the Internet while not possessing the basic intellectual skills necessary to quantify their assertions.

On the other hand:

[P]olitical writers don’t think so much of political scientists, either, mostly because anyone who has ever actually worked in or covered politics can tell you that, whatever else it may be, a science isn’t one of them. Politics is, after all, the business of humans attempting to triumph over their own disorder, insecurity, competitiveness, arrogance, and infidelity; make all the equations you want, but a lot of politics is simply tactile and visual, rather than empirical. My dinnertime conversation with three Iowans may not add up to a reliable portrait of the national consensus, but it’s often more illuminating than the dissertations of academics whose idea of seeing America is a trip to the local Bed, Bath & Beyond.

I emphasized the two sections about because I think that they point out a key issue. A democracy is not a sporting event. We need to treat it as an important sociological reality as opposed to a narrative that reads well. Furthermore, even in sports, the turn towards quantitative analysis leads to an increase in successful outcomes. I am not sure what the benefits are of denying the value of statistics in political endeavors. I am sure that David Plouffe could enlighten you on the benefits of accepting the value of statistics, though.

Look, math is hard. Statistical analysis is hard. Doing these things well can result in complicated, nuanced understandings that may be difficult to adequately describe in a newspaper. Demonizing the math, though, only leads Americans down a roads in which we understand the dynamics less and we rely on the media elite more. If the internet democratized anything, it was the political media landscape. Today, we don't have to rely on editors dictating what we need to know on the basis of what they think will sell more newspapers. Any additions to that small group of, potentially conflicted, information providers, be they minimal additions or not, is a good thing.

Friday Fun: How conservative are they?

Brendan Nyhan points us to National Journal's interactive ideology rankings. The app is interesting - it told me that Jeff Miller from Florida's 1st district (which covers the western portion of the Panhandle) ranks as the 6th most conservative member of the last Congress.

On the other hand, the soon-to-be Dr. Nyhan is quick to note that the information given is compiled with less than the best methodology. Either way, it's a cool time killer.