Nov 2012 links

Some Red-State Residents Say They Want to Secede -- But Their States Wouldn't Be Able to Sustain Themselves // If CA were to secede, the state would have a nearly balanced budget. If AL were to secede, it wouldn't be able to pay for stop signs.


The Public Apparently Isn't Interested In Sound Economics

Polarization of US Government

• NOMINATE (Wikipeda) (an acronym for Nominal Three-Step Estimation) is a multidimensional scaling method developed by political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal in the early 1980s to analyze preferential and choice data, such as legislative roll-call voting behavior.
• Left-right ideology of voters, congress members, and senators by Andrew Gelman on July 20, 2008
•  Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (VoteView.com) (June 2006, MIT Press)
• XKCD's massive map of Congress's political leanings since the start (Poster Order $15.00)

Election Prediction sites, predictions, and discussions:

•  FiveThirtyEight.blogs.nytimes.com by Nate Silver’s, has undoubtedly drawn positive attention to quantitative political science. (Is Nate Silver’s popularity good or bad for quantitative political science? , The Monkey Cage)
  
• VOTAMATIC.com (How it Works) Forecasts and Polling Analysis for the 2012 Presidential Election  
• Pollster Predictive Performance, 51 out of 51, by Simon Jackman's research {Final projections} -- If Florida stays in the Obama column, we will have called each state correctly: ...  Drew Linzer at Votomatic, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, Sam Wang... it looks like we've all hit it.  
• Real: 50.4%, 48.1% {Votomatic Proj: 50.1%, 48.4%, 1.5%}
• The most accurate polls of 2012 {reporting on} Poll Accuracy in the 2012 Presidential Election —Initial Report, November 7, 2012—, Fordham University

Data and visualization blogs worth following -- April 27, 2012 by Nathan Yau

Robert Reich (Romneyism)

1. Corporations are the basic units of society.
2. Workers are a means to the goal of maximizing corporate profits.
3. All factors of production – capital, physical plant and equipment, workers – are fungible and should be treated the same. 
4. Pollution, unsafe products, unsafe working conditions, financial fraud, and other negative side effects of the pursuit of profits are the price society pays for profit-driven growth.
5. Individual worth depends on net worth 
6.  People who fail in the economy should not be coddled.
7. Taxes are inherently bad because they constrain profit-making.
8. Politics is a game whose only purpose is to win.
9. Democracy is dangerous because it is forever vulnerable to the votes of a majority intent on capturing the wealth of the successful minority, on whom the economy depends. 
10. The three most important aspects of life are family, religion, and money. 
11. Patriotism is a matter of guarding our economy from unfair traders and undocumented immigrants, rather than joining together for the common good.

Soup Kitchens Caused the Great Depression (Krugman), i.e. increased use of the social safety net is a cause rather than a result of the depressed economy.

Charts: FlowingData

• The History of Film, Visualized, buy a print of it for $34,
• 512 Paths to the White House (NYT) see all the paths to victory available for either candidate.