Slightly Less Cowardice
ESPN has their big prediction page for the NFL season. Easterbrook documents how many picks were wrong post-facto. Last year, I documented how spineless the picks were in the first place. Less than half of NFL playoff teams repeat the next year. But the typical ESPNer predicts eight to nine teams to repeat and usually picks six or seven division winners to repeat.
This year, they aren’t nearly as spineless. The picks are:
AFC East — Everyone picks New England, which seemed reasonable until Brady got hurt
AFC North – Twelve pick Pittsburgh to repeat, Four pick Cleveland
AFC South – Ten pick Indy to repeat; six take Jacksonville (but those six all have Indy as the Wild Card)
AFC West – All pick San Diego to repeat, which seems reasonable given how crappy the AFC West is.
AFC Wildcard – Cleveland, Jacksonville, Tennessee, Jets, Indy, Pittsburgh, Houston, Denver and Buffalo all get picks. Only the Dolphins, Bengals, Ravens, Raiders and Chiefs get no votes (although Denver and Buffalo only get one each).
The AFC has a lot of repeat picks, with two commentators spinelessly picking the entire slate of 2007 playoffs teams to repeat exactly. I’m guessing most people would currently believe the AFC is the superior conference. But it’s not. The NFC outperformed them by two games last year. Moreover, the AFC is incredibly unbalanced, with several great teams and a lot of horrible teams. The NFC is much more competitive, which is reflected in the picks
NFC East – 14 pick Dallas, one each pick Philly and the Giants
NFC North – Evenly split between Green Bay and Minnesota
NFC South – New Orleans gets all but one vote, that one going to Carolina
NFC West – Seattle gets 14 votes, with two extremely deluded people picking Arizona.
NFC Wild Card – Minnesota Giants, Carolina, Philly, Green Bay, Washington, Tampa, Dallas and St. Louis all get votes.
San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago and Detroit are the only teams not picked to make the playoffs by anyone.
Going analyst by analyst, while Chadiha and Clayton pick seven division repeats, no one picks more than nine overall repeats and Wickersham takes over Tafoya’s spot as the only analyst with real balls, picking only five division winners and six teams overall to repeat.
So my non-spineless somewhat randomized picks?
AFC East – Pats, even if Brady is hurt.
AFC North – Pittsburgh
AFC South – Jacksonville
AFC West – Denver
Wild Cards – Indy and Cleveland
NFC East – Philadelphia
NFC North – Green Bay
NFC South – Carolina
NFC West – Seattle
NFC WC – Dallas and New Orleans
That’s four division repeats and seven overall repeats. I deliberately picked to not have as many repeats — which was tough in the very unbalanced AFC. I suspect that one of Indy and Pitt will not make the playoffs, but since I like both teams I unfairly bounced San Diego. I’m still not happy having seven repeat teams, but it’s the best I can do.
What the Heck?
I just saw the strangest commercial with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. I backed the DVR up and watched it a second time. I still don’t know what the heck that was about.
Ratings
For some reason, I love information like this on how TV ratings don’t predict elections.
Esoteric Post of the Day
Turns out that the neocons are indeed full of crap:
In a recent paper, co-author Andrea Dean and I investigate whether democratic dominoes like the ones American foreign policy posits actually exist and, if they do, how “hard” they fall.
Does democracy really spread between countries? If so, how much? We find that democratic dominoes do in fact exist, but they fall significantly “lighter” than foreign policy applications of this principle pretend.
Countries only “catch” about 11 percent of their geographic neighbors’ average changes in democracy; the modesty of this spread rate is consistent over time. Our analysis extends back to 1850, but 150-plus years ago, like today, changes in countries’ democracies were only mildly contagious.
Our study isn’t focused on the impact of U.S. intervention on democracy abroad. But if our estimates are in the ballpark, they have potentially sobering implications for attempts to democratize the world through intervention. Even if U.S. intervention succeeds in improving democracy in a key country it occupies, the democracy-enhancing “spillovers” of the intervention are likely to be minimal.
Democratic dominoes don’t have the “oomph” to democratize entire regions. Most of an intervention’s benefits for democracy, where there are any at all, are likely to remain local.
Bill Easterly and two of his colleagues have a provocative working paper that looks specifically at foreign intervention’s influence on democracy abroad. What they find is even more damning for domino-inspired interventions.
According to their work, which examines interventions in the cold war period, U.S. interventions decreased democracy by 33 percent in countries where America intervened (so did Soviet interventions). Christopher Coyne’s important book examines the reasons for this failure and provides evidence that foreign intervention’s democracy-reducing outcome isn’t limited to the cold war context.
I’ve always thought that spreading democracy should take a distant third place to defending and improving our own. I would point out, however, that the entire point of Soviet interventions was to stop democracy.
Friday Night Linkorama
Quote of the Day
Dave Barry:
“Nobody here is bitter or angry. As far as I can tell, nobody in Minnesota ever gets riled up about anything. Minnesotans really are, as the expression goes, ”Minnesota nice.” They are beyond nice. They make Mister Rogers look like Hitler. If you drove your car at 85 mph into a Minnesota family’s house, their reaction, once they pulled you out of the wreckage and gave you some hot cocoa, would be to apologize for building their house in a location that you would eventually want to drive through.
Which may be why no Minnesotan has ever been elected president.”
It’s funny because it’s true.
Overkill
I hope I’m not the only one bothered by this. Any Presidential candidate who cracks down on the sale of military weapons to local law enforcement would get my vote.
Crapstrong
Lance Amstrong is embracing the anti-vaccine garbage. How disappointing.
Theft by Taking
People who run subscription services that automatically renew need to be taken out and shot. Yes, I’m looking at you MacAfee.
Rating
A nice explanation of how Obama came to be the “most liberal” member of Congress.
Tuesday Night Linkorama
The number and percentage of Americans without health insurance actually declined slightly in 2007 compared to 2006. The share without insurance in 2007, 15.3 percent, is actually lower than it was a decade ago.
Median household income is not falling: “Between 2006 and 2007, real median household income rose 1.3 percent, from $49,568 to $50,233—a level not statistically different from the 1999 prerecession income peak.”
The share of households earning a middle-class income of between $35,000 and $100,000 in real 2007 dollars has indeed shrunk slightly compared to a decade ago, but so too has the share earning less than $35,000 a year, while the share earning more than $100,000 continues to rise. The middle class is not shrinking; it is moving up.
The 12.5 percent of Americans living below the poverty line in 2007 was statistically unchanged from 2006, and remains below the 13.3 poverty rate in 1997. The poverty rate has been trending downward since the early 1990s during a time of growing trade and immigration flows.
The Gini coefficient, a statistical measure of income inequality, was .463 in 2007, down slightly from earlier in the decade and virtually the same as it was a decade ago.
Warnering on Empty
I couldn’t help myself. I had to fisk Mark Warner’s horrid speech:
China China Chain
Only Frank Rich could use the Olympics to argue for an Obama presidency:
[Phelps win] was a rare feel-good moment for a depressed country. But the unsettling subtext of the Olympics has been as resonant for Americans as the Phelps triumph. You couldn’t watch NBC’s weeks of coverage without feeling bombarded by an ascendant China whose superior cache of gold medals and dazzling management of the Games became a proxy for its spectacular commercial and cultural prowess in the new century. Even before the Olympics began, a July CNN poll found that 70 percent of Americans fear China’s economic might — about as many as find America on the wrong track. Americans watching the Olympics could not escape the reality that China in particular and Asia in general will continue to outpace our country in growth while we remain mired in stagnancy and debt (much of it held by China).
How we dig out of this quagmire is the American story that Obama must tell. It is not a story of endless conflicts abroad but a potentially inspiring tale of serious economic, educational, energy and health-care mobilization at home. We don’t have the time or resources to go off on more quixotic military missions or to indulge in culture wars. (In China, they’re too busy exploiting scientific advances for competitive advantage to reopen settled debates about Darwin.) Americans must band together for change before the new century leaves us completely behind. The Obama campaign actually has plans, however imperfect or provisional, to set us on that path; the McCain campaign offers only disposable Band-Aids typified by the “drill now” mantra that even McCain says will only have a “psychological” effect on gas prices.
During the Cold War, nitwit Commie sympathizers would often talk about how amazing it was that the Soviet Union did so well in the Olympics. They would also wax poetic about how wonderful their massive parades were and how impressive their engineered programs (particularly their space program) were. They would then use this supposed success to argue that America needed to move in a more collectivist direction. They would, of course, completely ignore the millions of Soviet citizens who were living in desperate poverty (or in gulags) or the oppression that enabled these dubious triumphs. The flash of Olympic gold, apparently, was more revealing than the grim struggle of the Soviet citizens.
As Russell Roberts points out, history is repeating itself. Rich is using a dubious success and ignoring huge problems to argue for … something.
Yes, China is growing quickly. Yes, they have mobilized a lot of resources to win gold medals in gymnastics and diving.
But they are a desperately poor country that represses their people too often, has filthy air, and has a massive problem dealing with an exploding urban population. Their mobilization of resources to win medals in gymnastics and diving is a scandal for such a poor country, not a triumph. Meanwhile, in the United States, we are suffering through a mild something, maybe a recession with unemployment at 5.7%. Our debt problem is minor. The fact that a lot of US debt has been purchased by the Chinese government that will be repaid in dollars that buy a lot less than they used to is tough on the Chinese not us.
The idea that Obama will have a plan to reverse matters and set us on the right track is simply a fantasy. We will continue to run trade deficits whether Obama or McCain is elected. We will almost certainly run Federal budget deficits under either man as well.
Finally, Chinese growth is good for the United States. The economic race is not like the Olympic race. It is not zero-sum. In the Olympics, if you win the gold medal, I can’t. In economics, both countries can grow together.
I enjoyed the hell out of the games but I also know that China’s success was partially based on being able to build facilities wherever they wanted and pulling kids from families for relentless Olympic training. There is a massive difference between that and America’s success, which is built on a free people pursuing athletic excellence on their own accord.
China’s success at the Olympics only proves what can be done when you have control of 1.3 billion people. It is the much large commercial success which their top-down capitalist reforms have enabled, that are the larger geopolitical story.