[Note: this is the article that I wish Nate Silver would write. He’d be so much better at the number crunching. Of course, he’s also paid a lot more.]
I’m tired of hearing pundits spew their opinions about this, that, or the other. Let’s face it, most people don’t know anything.
Of course, that includes me, but hey: this is my blog.
I’m using hyperbole; it’s true. And yet in a country where 9% of people think that space aliens may have caused the disappearance of Malaysia Air flight 370; in a country where 55.56% of Supreme Court justices are completely ignorant about the First Amendment; in a country where sizable numbers of people believe in a 10,000 year-old Earth, and where numerous people doubt facts like global warming, evolution by natural selection, and the supremacy of Matt Damon…in such a country, how can you really take anyone seriously?
OK; I take Neil deGrasse Tyson seriously. But he’s earned it.
People (of every political ideology) spew forth talking points without any facts to back them up. Hell, they spew forth talking points without any justification at all. I have liberal friends who are against GMO foods…even though there is no reason to think they could ever be harmful, and in fact have already saved millions of lives. (Trivia question: how did Norman Borlaug save a billion people from starvation and subsequently win the Nobel Peace prize? Answer: genetically modified wheat.)
On the other side, all kinds of nifty-sounding talking points spew from the conservative font, again without even a shred of justification other than “well, that sounds right”. For example, people claim that less government is good. Shrinking government is a goal of Tea Baggers. “Democrats want more government, Republicans want less government…everyone knows that.” It’s become a cliche, and people don’t even question it any more.
But this is the information age. We don’t have to rely on our gut feelings, or even our supposed “knowledge”, to evaluate claims like “less government is good”. We have data. Why don’t people look at the data and then make up their minds?
I’ll tell you why: because looking at data is hard work. Let’s face it; most people just can’t do it. Most people want to be told what to believe. But I just got tenure, so I have some time. Let’s try to get to the bottom of this.
It didn’t take me long to find this website, which has nifty (exportable) data on all kinds of economic indicators. Hey, look, the USA is ranked 12th in economic freedom out of more than 165 countries. Yay! We’re doing OK.
What about the size of government? This is harder to quantify, since it means different things to different people (for example, many Republicans want to “reduce” the size of the US government without touching our defense budget, which is a little like trying to lower world sea levels by draining the Mediterranean Sea). However, the indicator “Gov’t Expenditure % of GDP” seems pretty good to me.
How does the USA do here? Do we have a “bloated, huge, nanny state?” Our spending is 41.6% of GDP. This makes us rank 47th in this indicator, so about the 72-percentile. We have a “bigger” government than about 72% of the countries on the list.
Who’s ahead of us? The supposed “socialist” states are (Norway, Sweden, Findland, Denmark) of course. Everyone “knows” they are entirely nanny states. Also: France, the UK, Germany. The usual suspects. Liberal, bloated, big government monstrosities.
But also: Cuba!? Libya!? Bosnia!? Iraq!? Malta!?
Maybe Cuba fits well into the narrative. Cuba is a Communist country, so of course the commies have huge governments. (I personally think Cuba is an outlier, since its GDP is pitifully small). But what about other Communist states?
Hmm. The narrative is starting to break down. China’s government spending is about 23.9% of its GDP, almost half the size of the US. The commies in red China are spending half of what we spend. Vietnam spends about 30.9% of its GDP.
The talking point that the USA has become a “bloated nanny state” doesn’t hold water. We’re in the top one-third of spenders, it’s true; but our defense budget is Brobdingnagian to say the least; if you plotted “non-defense government spending as % of GDP” our rank would be much lower. (Note: I lack the skills to do this…feel free to do so yourself.)
But all this is distraction. Ultimately, I don’t even know if big government is inherently bad or good, and more importantly, you don’t either. Admit it. You’re just guessing.
But we don’t have to guess. We can try to understand the data a little bit more.
It didn’t take long for me to stumble on the cute Where-to-be-born index, a kind of “happiness index” which takes multiple factors into account like quality of life, health, economics, and so on, in order to rank countries based on where you’d prefer to be born. (Admit it: you’d rather be born in Australia than Bangladesh.) So hey, I know how to use Excel: let’s plot Size of Government vs. Where-to-be-born and see if there’s a correlation!
Firstly: there’s not much of a correlation (the R^2 value is only around 0.17). This is not surprising; the size of government has little to do with anything. (It certainly shouldn’t be the entire frakking basis for a political movement.) But what correlation there is, is positive, meaning that as governments get bigger, people tend to get happier. All the Viking countries are in the upper right. And those Scandanavians are doing well, dammit!
Some countries stand out. Russia and China are lower and to the left of the USA, meaning they have smaller governments (is that surprising?) but are also more miserable. Cuba, though, is a huge government spender…why is that? Also, what’s the deal with Singapore? They’re happy and (apparently) almost an anarchist state. Tea Baggers take note: emulate Singapore.
The main idea I want you to get out of the graph is this: there’s a lot of noise there. You can’t really draw any conclusions. If you want to say that “Big Government Bad!” in the same way that Tarzan says “Fire Bad!” you’d better have some data to back up your claim. And finding such data is, well, hard work. Good luck.
And now I’d better get back to studying something I know about: physics.
Many Worlds Theory 
I don’t know, I doubt Nate could have done a better job… And congratulations on your tenure! Slippers and 3pm cocktails from here on 🙂
Hmm.
I’ll stick with what I know. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.” Let’s looks at the Supreme Court decision you criticize. Say you are not a lawyer and only have the actual wording to go on. Does a prayer at a local meeting constitute “making a law”? No. Does it establish a religion? Maybe this is a little closer, but just going on the language it seems unlikely. If we broaden the research to account for the intent of the framers based on contemporaneous writings, “establishment” reflects the fear of a government sponsored religion, such as the Church of England. In that context, prayer in a town hall meeting is not establishing a government religion. If you further broaden the scope to what was actually practiced at the time that the amendment was written, prayers were regularly given before meetings, including before sessions of Congress. Thus, based on the actual wording of the First Amendment and the practices at the time the amendment passed, the idea that a prayer before a local meeting would violate the first amendment seems far-fetched. However, beginning in the mid 1900s, the court broadened the interpretation of “establishment” which led to a series of precedents that makes the case you cite a much closer call today. Anyway, the good thing about the Supreme Court is that you can see exactly what they decided and why they decided it. You can study each of the dozens of cases that are cited by both sides, map out the justices reasoning, and conclude for yourself which point of view is the most reasonable. I doubt that you’ve actually done that, so I am going to assume your statement that the justices are ignorant is hyperbole. The Supreme Court functions far better than the other two branches of government even though we all disagree with its decisions from time to time.
As for the political parties, the Rs generally focus too much on defense and the Ds generally focus too much on entitlements (though there are numerous counter-examples), but neither distinguishes itself when they are in power. Do you honestly believe that, if the Ds had full control, there would be any meaningful reform of defense spending? Or if the Rs were in control that entitlements would be meaningfully reformed?
Since you bashed the right a few times, I’ll throw in one about the left: I respect the science of climate change, but, as a policy matter, it’s bizarre to me that the same people who evangelize about 100 year flood levels based on computer models that change daily refuse to do anything about Medicare, which will bankrupt the country in the same amount of time if it goes unchecked. Yes, it’s a bad idea to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, but who is to say we should spend trillions of dollars today on climate change rather than fix Medicare? And neither of these political issues even address the real issue — that the human population has increased from 1.5B to 7B since the industrial revolution. Don’t we have to decide what can be done to accommodate an ever-expanding population before we can legitimately deal with either climate change or medicare? I’m not sure that even Nate Silver has an answer to that.
Looking back, I’m trying to see what “Right bashing” I’ve done. (1) As for the Supreme court, right or not, the decision is chilling. If the court says that specifically Christian prayers are OK but other religions are not OK, then they have established a religion. And on the other hand, if any religion can lead a prayer before a city council meeting, then I hope Satanists and Zeus-worshippers start praying at such meetings since the justices so lazily opened the door. (Does anyone really think Scalia would have voted the same way if the prayer had been an Islamic prayer?) (2) I then bashed the left re: GMO’s. (3) I then bashed the right on a single topic: the claim that “big government is bad”. I don’t even explicitly disagree with this statement; I try to support this “bashing” with a plea for more data. Am I missing something? Was there other (implicit) bashing somewhere? As for global warming, it’s not a symmetrical issue since most scientists I know (a) agree that global warming is bad and (b) have no idea what to do about it. I literally have no opinion about this, other than “it’s bad”. I have vague notions that we should wean ourselves off fossil fuels, promote green energies, but frankly so much of the rest of the world is even worse (i.e. China) that I am fatalistic and don’t really think we can do much. So there’s my radical left position.
The bashing comment was directed mainly at the tea bagger references (rather than tea party), which I interpret as being more than just a critique of a point of view As for the SCOTUS, I do not think they have taken the next step, which you are inferring. Kagan’s main concern seemed to be more about insuring a variety of faiths were represented over time rather than the fact that a prayer was being recited. Anyway, we need a test case. If someone in Dearborn, for example, opens a town meeting by reading a passage from the Koran, that will test your point. It would be inconsistent for Scalia and especially Thomas to oppose that. I would be surprised if they did, actually. Hopefully it will happen. I do agree with you in theory that permitting prayer from one point of view and not another would run afoul of the 1st Amendment. I have way more “faith” in the SCOTUS on that than I do the executive and legislative branches on climate change, global warming or anything else.
Reblogged this on oogenhand.
Your post reminds me of another widely held fallacy; the majority of Americans (~65%) believe the myth that we use only 10% of our brains when in fact we use virtually every part of the brain over a 24-hour period. Evolutionarily, the myth doesn’t hold water seeing as though the brain is a glutton for resources. Furthermore, as brain researcher Barry J. Beyerstein noted in a 2004 Scientific American article, destroying far less than 90 percent of the brain can have a catastrophic effect, and there doesn’t seem to be any portion of the brain that a person can lose without experiencing some sort of loss of function.