Archive for Random
Can Ron Paul extend beyond his libertarian base? He did in New Hampshire
The media story for Ron Paul is high floor, low ceiling–that he can’t reach beyond his loyal libertarian base. Karl Rove made this case in his post-Iowa column in the Wall Street Journal:
Because he has a high floor of support but also a very low ceiling, Texas Congressman Ron Paul is likely to have seen his high-water mark Tuesday. The results provided him little that helps him broaden his support in New Hampshire and subsequent primaries.
Now we have exit polls in New Hampshire to test Rove’s claim.
First, Ron Paul doubled his 2008 vote total in Iowa, but tripled his New Hampshire total, gaining over his previous high-water mark. And relative to the fiscally conservative, socially liberal/moderate voters we identified in our studies on the “Libertarian Vote,” Ron Paul seems to have over-performed in New Hampshire among several demographics:
- Moderates/liberals on fiscal issues: Ron Paul took 28% compared to Romney’s 34%;
- Conservatives on social issues: Paul got 16% compared to Santorum’s 22%;
- Evangelical/born-again: Paul took 21% compared to Santorum’s 23%;
- “Is true conservative” most important: Paul won 41%, compared to Iowa, where he only won 37%;
- High school or less education: Paul won 26% compared to 23% with more than high school (data show libertarians have higher education than average); and
- Decided within last week: Paul won 19% compared to only 11% in Iowa.
Late deciders are particularly telling. If it were true that Ron Paul draws from only an ultra-loyal base, logically, these voters should have made up their mind long ago. Instead, Paul gained over his Iowa totals among late deciders. Nearly one in five voters who decided within the last week picked Ron Paul. Many of these may well be fiscal moderates or liberals.
New Hampshire seems to be evidence that Paul is gaining beyond his libertarian base.
Is Support for the Tea Party Declining? No.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times and other media outlets reported on a new Pew study purportedly showing declining support for the Tea Party. But according to Washington Post/ABC News polling, support for the Tea Party has ranged between 42 and 47 percent from April through December 2011–statistically about the same. If you go back further, Washington Post polls found 27 percent support in May 2010 and 38 percent support in October 2010, when many people didn’t know about the Tea Party. If anything, support has increased or leveled off. See Question 25:
Q25. On another subject, what is your view of the Tea Party political movement – would you say you support it strongly, support it somewhat, oppose it somewhat or oppose it strongly?
-------- Support -------- --------- Oppose -------- No
NET Strongly Somewhat NET Somewhat Strongly opinion
12/18/11 42 13 28 45 20 26 13
11/3/11 43 14 29 44 20 24 13
10/2/11 42 12 30 47 20 27 11
9/1/11 47 13 35 45 18 27 8
7/17/11 44 13 31 46 23 24 10
6/5/11 46 13 33 44 21 24 10
4/17/11 42 16 26 49 21 27 10
10/3/10 38 13 25 36 28 18 26
5/5/10 27 17 10 24 11 13 44
*Note slightly different question wording 10/3/10 and 5/5/10
So who’s right, Pew or WashingtonPost?
Depends on which question framing you like better. Pew’s question asks respondents whether they agree/disagree with the Tea Party, and Washington Post asks respondents whether they support/oppose, strongly/somewhat. That’s a subtle but important difference. The agree/disagree framing is more binary and forces a choice as if the Tea Party stands for one thing. Washington Post’s question allows for a respondent who, say, supports the Tea Party on spending cuts, but doesn’t agree with the Tea Party on some other issue. Such a respondent could “somewhat support.” That allows for a wider range of opinions. And notice that respondents who say “no opinion” is higher with the Pew questions, usually a sign that respondents reject the question frame or that it doesn’t accurately capture how people think about it.
Is there a BitCoin bubble?
Tim Lee writes about the BitCoin bubble, where he argues that demand for BitCoin represents a bubble that will, like most bubbles, pop.
While I’m still skeptical that BitCoin will ever be a serious currency, I don’t think it’s likely that there’s a bubble, at least not yet. Currently, BitCoins are trading at around $1.15 each on the exchanges that convert BTC and USD. And since there are just under six million BitCoins currently in existence (the number of coins “mined” in BitCoin parlance), that means the BitCoin economy is somewhere in the $7 million range. By 2140, the last BitCoins will be mined and the total number of BitCoins in existence will level out at about 21 million. Based on the current exchange rate, that’s somewhere around a $25 million economy.
I don’t see how this represents a bubble. Given current American macroeconomic policy, you’ll be lucky if you can buy a haircut for $25 million in 2140. And $7 million in 2011 is still pretty insignificant; it’s less than the budget deficit of Las Vegas. If a bubble existed, we’d be talking about the world of BitCoin being valued in the billion or tens of billions of dollars.
Plus, unlike dot-com shares or houses or tulips, the supply of BitCoins is fixed (though I look forward to seeing Tim’s thoughts on this tomorrow). About 30% of the total BitCoins ever to be mined already exist, and we know pretty much what the trajectory looks like over the next 130 years. This is as stable a supply as can exist, which makes it easier for markets to equilibriate. And to the extent a bubble does develop, it will likely be more a reaction of holders of US dollars to the fear of future inflation.
Finally, even if BitCoin remains a tiny, niche currency — so what? The costs of converting USD and BTC are negligible. As long as some sites and people take BitCoins, the currency can thrive. Think of PayPal. Now, certainly, PayPal accounts are denominated in dollars and Euros and sterling and other real-world currency. But I can’t send PayPal money to just anyone. Restaurants and meatspace retailers generally don’t take it. Many if not most people won’t take it. I can’t pay my doctor or my mechanic with PayPal money. But because I can make many transactions with it — and freely convert my PayPal dollars with dollars in my bank account — it’s still useful to me. BitCoins can play the same role with the feature not bug of having no central bank inflating their value and being exchangeable with traditional currencies.
So in short, while I doubt we’ll still know the name BitCoin in a decade, I’m not convinced that there’s any irrational exuberance inflating the value of BitCoins to unsupportable levels.
Quick thoughts on the NYT paywall
Quick thoughts on the New York Times paywall that’s generating so much ennui in the Twitterverse:
- Most of the complaints seem to be motivated by status quo bias. People paid for newspaper subscriptions for decades; then in the last few years we started getting the same deal for free over the Internet. Now we’re being asked to pay again. The last few years are an aberration, kind of a free trial period. The question has always been how to monetize news in the Internet era, not whether to do so. Whether it was distribution costs of paper or otherwise should be irrelevant from the perspective of the consumer. The relevant question is: do I value paying X dollars per month for a subscription? As paperboys were replaced with more efficient forms of delivery (guys in cars), we didn’t expect rates to fall, nor should we have. It’s not a perfectly competitive market. The relevant question is whether you value the Times‘ content by their asking price, not how the Sulzbergers make their bones.
- There’s no reason to expect newspapers at marginal cost. Indeed, it would be great to make news collection and analysis profitable again. Profit incentives drive investment, competition, and improvement. If the Times (and WSJ and FT and others) can charge for their services and make money, more power to them. The effect may well be to encourage innovation and competition in the news industry. Imagine if America had a dozen world-class daily newspapers and well-compensated professional journalists doing in-depth reporting from across the globe. We’re only likely to get this from vigorous, profit-driven competition.
- Relatedly, saying “advertising” in response to the previous point strikes me as a bit of hand-waving, like libertarians glibly saying, “oh, the market will fix it!” in response to any and all complaints about anything. If advertising were a silver bullet, presumably someone would have figured out how to really make it work by now. Similarly for micropayments, foundation support, etc. This isn’t to say that subscription-based payments are the be all and end all, but they may work for now. Other forms of financial support may come out in the future. But it’s amazing how conservative people who usually have a deep-seated belief in innovation can become when faced with having to pay the piper.
- I wish Kindle content was part of the package. I still prefer to Kindle reading experience to other experiences (though I’ve not yet broken down and bought an iPad). But nothing I read on the Kindle has tied my Kindle subscription to online content. Hence my weekly paper delivery of The Economist, which pretty much goes straight into a recycling bin.
Freeze our borders, hostile and incompetent agency!
Yesterday, after an eight hour flight from Amsterdam, I landed in Washington at Dulles airport, where I proceeded to spend an hour in line to clear immigration. The reason was that, despite six international flights arriving within about an hour (according to the arrivals board that I had plenty of time to stare at), Immigrations and Customs Enforcement only had about 9 on-duty officers to process all US citizens and permanent resident.
It’s not like they didn’t have the physical capacity for more officers; about half the lanes were closed. It’s not like they didn’t know these flights were coming; Lufthansa doesn’t just say, “Hey, let’s fly an unscheduled A340 from Frankfurt to Washington this afternoon!” Afternoons are a busy time on the east coast for arrivals from Europe. This happens every day. And Dulles processed just under 3 million arriving international passengers in the last 12 months; it’s not like this is something unusual.
It’s just that ICE didn’t schedule enough people to process all these flights in a timely fashion. Whether this is due to the fact that they are incompetent or just don’t care is immaterial: the experience was terrible for everyone involved.
Which brings me to my point: I have a feeling that there is an inverse correlation between people demanding that the US “secure our borders” (meaning locking down about 7500 land miles, plus tens of thousands of sea miles) and frequency of international travel. People who have experience dealing frequently with the guardians of our sovereign borders realize the incompetence at basic issues like agent scheduling that plague the agency. It’s said that a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested; perhaps a border realist is someone who’s spent a lot of time queuing to get into his country of residence.
It’s no secret that, even as a native-born American with a blue passport, getting into the US can be a pain in the backside. I’ve waited as long as two hours to clear immigration in the US — though in the many crossings I’ve done into other countries from the Schengen Zone states to China to Ethiopia to Ecuador, I’ve never waited more than perhaps 15 minutes (excepting once when I was detained, for the whole of 20 minutes, by the UK border guards over a visa misunderstanding.)
Moreover, other countries’ immigration agents tend to be courteous and welcoming. ICE agents are hostile and intimidating. Yesterday the agent asked me how much I got paid. (I refused to answer.) Last month an ICE agent in Toronto asked me how I was getting to DC — while he was holding my boarding pass. He also demanded to see my drivers licence to let me in to US territory. Where, may I remind you, I am a citizen. This after a delayed 14 hour flight from Asia that left me 45 minutes to catch my connection. Messing with the minds of citizens just off long-haul international flights seems to be sport.
Expecting ICE to be able to lock down our borders is fatuous. They don’t seem capable of basic things like, you know, scheduling enough agents to process a known quantity of incoming planes. Their routine hostility towards Americans (and I can’t imagine with foreigners must put up with) is annoying, and their horrendous track record on everything from operating detention centers meeting basic standards of decency to actually looking at the photographs on passports, does not suggest an agency that has the willingness or capacity to lock down tens of thousands of miles of border.
I think Americans who routinely cross our border and come back are likely to understand that this is the case. And I suspect those who call for impenetrable borders have spent very little time thinking about the realities of implementing such a policy.
