ILP is the one who brought up Sandusky
That gives you license to make light-hearted remarks about him?
Political Scientists Are Lousy Forecasters
(643 posts) (4 voices)-
Posted 10 months ago #
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I didn't write anything. But I don't think anyone needs license to talk about anything. I mean, you trivialized the holocaust ny comparing NOLA to the **** regime. I guess you had license to do that.
Posted 10 months ago # -
Yes. Why not?
I didn't make jokes about the N.a.z.i.s. Unlike the person that joked about Sandusky.
Posted 10 months ago # -
I don't see that Sandusky comment as a joke. Pointless, perhaps, but I don't see why it is suddenly the focus of discussion. ILP is just getting hammered in yet another discussion and is now trying to change the subject.
Posted 10 months ago # -
So 15 pages of defensive critique (and some trolling) follow a core question - can quant political science actually offer predictive tools? I respect quant work, but little of it has utility for policy. Ditto a lot of the (weak) empirical qualitative work. This is a tremendous shame for pol sci.
This is one reason why government doesn't leap to hire quant pol sci PhDs. Ditto political risk companies (only a few do quant work).
This is not to attack pol sci or quants. But it does point out why this debate matters. The pol sci community needs to be more realistic about what the discipline can and cannot do - and perhaps more open to criticism as well.
Posted 10 months ago # -
Why is saying that sanduskys book was qualitative any worse/better than bringing him up gratuitously in the context of university administrators turning a blind eye on academic fraud.
Posted 10 months ago # -
This is not to attack pol sci or quants. But it does point out why this debate matters. The pol sci community needs to be more realistic about what the discipline can and cannot do - and perhaps more open to criticism as well.
^ This (although I'd throw that at economists too, especially the last bit).
I also don't buy the Friedman and Shepsle "as if" gambit that yoyoyo nicely summarized a few pages back ...
The point is we can use quant methods to approximate and model human behavior even if individuals do not literally think in terms of equations and statistics.
It's fine to take that approach if all you really want to do is reliably predict outcomes and you don't much care about whether you really understand the actual mechanisms at work. The trouble is we suck at prediction, so this move certainly doesn't help us.
It also doesn't make us look much like scientists: if people don't literally think in terms of the equations we use to model their behaviour, nor the statistics we use to test our models, then the natural question is "what, precisely, are these equations modeling, and what, exactly, are those statistics measuring?"
We're never going to have predictions better than, say, meteorology, but if we want to be taken seriously as an explanatory (rather than wholly descriptive) enterprise, then we'd better start finding good answers to the questions of what, exactly, our mathematical constructs represent, and whether they really are good representations of the mechanisms at work generating the outcomes we study.
Simply passing on the question ("who cares? we can act as if agents really do find Nash solutions by solving fixed point theorems, or define their expected intertemporal issue-specific ideal points as nonlinear mappings in a Banach space" ... I'm making that last one up ... I hope) doesn't make us look very scientific.
Posted 10 months ago # -
^I think GAG does a good job at predicting U.S. behavior on the issue of climate change, and his work is decidedly qual.
Posted 10 months ago # -
GAG! GAG! GAG! GAG! GAG!
ILP! ILP! ILP! ILP! ILP!
Posted 10 months ago # -
^^ is not GAG.
I admire GAG's work. What's wrong with that? You admire Gary King and the like.
Posted 10 months ago # -
Why is saying that sanduskys book was qualitative any worse/better than bringing him up gratuitously in the context of university administrators turning a blind eye on academic fraud.
There is absolutely nothing gratuitous about using the Sandusky case to argue that U.S. university administrators are more focused on covering up embarrassing episodes than exposing the truth (e.g., rampant fraud among quant social scientists).
Posted 10 months ago # -
And it's not wrong to point out that sandusky is a qually.
Posted 10 months ago # -
"I admire GAG's work. What's wrong with that?"
What do you admire about it? You make it sound like this is merely a difference of tastes.
Posted 10 months ago # -
"then we'd better start finding good answers to the questions of what, exactly, our mathematical constructs represent, and whether they really are good representations of the mechanisms at work generating the outcomes we study."
But I do think that we are getting better at doing exactly this, even if progress is slow and irregular.
Posted 10 months ago # -
it's not wrong to point out that sandusky is a qually.
Sandusky is a qual social scientist?!!! You're an idiot and disgusting. Please go away!
Posted 10 months ago # -
I do think that we are getting better at doing exactly this, even if progress is slow and irregular.
This mantra has been muttered by quants for decades, and yet there is not one quant regularity in social/political behavior that has ever been found.
Posted 10 months ago # -
What do you admire about it?
The strength of GAG's book, Urban Sprawl, Global Warming, and the Empire of Capital, is his ability to identify/analyze why the U.S. government refuses to do anything about its massive climate change emissions. This is much more than any social science quant does with his/her research.
Posted 10 months ago # -
"The strength of GAG's book, Urban Sprawl, Global Warming, and the Empire of Capital, is his ability to identify/analyze why the U.S. government refuses to do anything about its massive climate change emissions."
We've been through this before.
I. The book's central claims:
1. the US leads the globe in per capita (but not absolute) emissions associated with anthropogenic climate change.
2a. the US has a lot of suburbs, and
2b. there are a lot of people with vested interests in keeping things that way.
3. sprawl has significant energy demands compared to other possible spatial configurations of economic activity and everyday living.
4. states matter in the global economy.
5. capitalists use the state to keep control of the means of production.
6. urban sprawl depends on state intervention, and supports (5) by getting some people (the numbers are never quite clear) to buy and drive cars a lot, live in expensive-to-heat suburban mcmansions in low density single-use residential developments, and buy all manner of stuff associated with a suburban lifestyle.
7a. for a bunch of idiosyncratic historical reasons (mostly centering on trolleycars, land markets and property values, and the politics surrounding domestic energy reserves), that crazy sprawl stuff never happened nearly so much in Europe, and
7b. the US is basically the worst place for sprawl (for some reason never explained, big sprawling megacity regions in developing countries don't count, even though they have all the same problems, compounded by extraordinary human misery and concentrated pollution).
8. the US capitalist-controlled state finds clever ways to defuse criticism and shut down more energy-efficient alternative modes of industrial production, commercial and private transportation, and residental development.
Therefore, US urban sprawl is the most important cause of global warming, it's the fault of the capitalists and their political stooges, and we really ought to do something about it.
II. The book's central problems:
Even if you agree with the motivations and the generic conclusion (that global warming is in large measure caused by us, it's in all likelihood going to be a very bad thing in the uncomforatably near future, and we ought to do something about it), the book has serious problems:
1. The rather sweeping conclusions about the connection between sprawl and climate change aren't supported by the various (largely descriptive) themes developed in the chapters. More precisely, the connection drawn between the political incentives behind sprawl in the US and global warming are at best tenuous, relying as it does on a simplistic conflation of varieties of industrial pollution around the planet with the purported imperatives of state-centered capitalist elites, of which the only real example suggested in the book is US commercial interests (oil, autos, realty), and even here the claim is impressionistic: no rigorous model is constructed and tested, either quantitatively or qualitatively.
2. The literatures and data cited on urban growth and political incentives in industrialized economies is selective and impressionistic; the author shows no signs of seriously engaging with work in urban and regional economics that deals with the spatial structures of urban industrial location and production, nor work in urban politics that provide alternative theoretical frameworks for explaining the same patterns of political incentives and elite alliances that the author takes to be so central to his account.
3. The story told about European city regions versus the United States is at best impressionistic, at worst simply mistaken (especially when communist-era cities are factored into the analysis).
4. The sanguine treatment (which is to say, no treatment at all) of massively problematic sprawling urban regions in Africa and Asia is frankly insulting to people who study that stuff.
5. The methodological approach employed largely involved surfing websites and getting a single phone interview with a lobbyist (a methodological admission from the endnotes).
Posted 10 months ago # -
The story told about European city regions versus the United States is at best impressionistic
GAG provides data showing how automobile ownership and average automobile use is much, much higher in major U.S. cities than in Europe. How is that impressionistic?
Your claims about the global South (particularly Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America [with the possible exception of Brazil) are way, way off. These regions of the world have very, very low per capita emissions of CO2, which is also true of China and India. This is in sharp contrast to the huge per capita emissions in the U.S. -- a country with over 300 million people.
Posted 10 months ago # -
In the Oxford Literary Review (vol. 32, no. 1), Timothy Clarke (2010, 148) asserts: "For detailed analysis of the decisive interrelationships in the United States between urban sprawl, the interests of oil companies, urban planning, the culture of induced automobile use, and capitalist imperialism, see George A. Gonzalez Urban Sprawl, Global Warming, and the Empire of Capital (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009)."
Thad Williamson (2010), in Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship (Oxford University Press), writes the following of Urban Sprawl, Global Warming, and the Empire: "In a provocative recent book, George Gonzalez argues that there is a causal connection between the dependence of the American economy on sprawl and related industries and the United States' slow response to global warming" (371).
Posted 10 months ago # -
"GAG provides data showing how automobile ownership and average automobile use is much, much higher in major U.S. cities than in Europe. How is that impressionistic?"
That impresses you, does it? Where is the data in his book? What's the source? And what claims does he support with it? While you're at it, ask yourself whether the claims he makes about growth coalitions in US cities are dramatically different than in major European cities, and whether industrial emissions in and around East European cities over the latter half of the 20th century are dramatically different than US cities (and whether extant optimistic data from those regimes ought to be trusted). Then you'll have started thinking like an actual social scientist.
"Your claims about the global South (particularly Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America [with the possible exception of Brazil) are way, way off. These regions of the world have very, very low per capita emissions of CO2, which is also true of China and India."
Are you insane? Why are you obsessing over per capita rather than absolute emissions? China and India are global ecological disasters and both are getting worse, and throughout the global south, sprawling megacity regions have all the problems of industrialized cities, and the promise of much, much worse pollution and yes, carbon emissions, as increasingly affluent middle classes expect their own cars, private homes, secure and plentiful electricity, and extensive regional infrastructure. GAG, get your head out of your a.s.s. long enough to realize you cannot blame the federal government for you driving an SUV and flying to Paris with your students each year, and changing the US system isn't going to suddenly make climate change manageable. It's a massive, complex global problem and US urban sprawl simply isn't as important as you think.
The thing is, if you'd just published your book with a popular or activist press, I'd be totally fine with it - good stuff, well referenced, passionate and plausible advocacy on an important issue. What bugs me, and provokes me to kick your butt here, is that you pretend that this is good scholarship and, methodologically, a good example for political science research. It's neither. It is good political advocacy that is well-grounded in secondary scholarly and some not-so-scholarly but still decent literature (your use of DeCicco and Fung, 2006, for example is a good example).
Posted 10 months ago # -
"Thad Williamson (2010), in Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship (Oxford University Press), writes the following of Urban Sprawl, Global Warming, and the Empire: "In a provocative recent book, George Gonzalez argues that there is a causal connection between the dependence of the American economy on sprawl and related industries and the United States' slow response to global warming" (371)."
GAG does indeed argue that. In fact, that more modest argument is pretty plausible (which is probably why Williamson cites it). It's what GAG wants to hang on that argument that doesn't easily fly, at least not on the evidentiary grounds that GAG has on offer. GAG thinks that US urban sprawl is a key factor in global warming. It's certainly a part of the story, but GAG wants to say more than that: it isn't just that sprawl is bound up with incentives that keep the US as a reluctant participant in global efforts to reign in emissions. He thinks US urban sprawl itself is a key factor in anthropogenic climate change. That sort of giddy advocacy masquerading as evidence-based analysis may fly in some of the squishy corners of human geography and environmental studies, but it ain't an exemplary piece of social science research by serious political science standards.
Posted 10 months ago # -
changing the US system isn't going to suddenly make climate change manageable
Nevertheless, it is the low hanging fruit in confronting climate change and a required piece of the puzzle (i.e., the likes of China and India aren't going to decisively deal with their global warming emissions until/unless does so).
Posted 10 months ago # -
What bugs me, and provokes me to kick your butt here, is that you pretend that this is good scholarship and, methodologically, a good example for political science research.
Other than factors related to mental/emotional instability, it is unclear what is agitating here.
Posted 10 months ago # -
^ lame.
Posted 10 months ago # -
"Sandusky is a qual social scientist?!!! You're an idiot and disgusting. Please go away!"
Memoirs, even those written by unsavory people, are qualitative. Sandusky is obviously not a qual social scientist, but neither are the quals that are named in the NYT article that the ILP kept pushing. Those clowns don't even have college degrees.
Posted 10 months ago # -
"There is absolutely nothing gratuitous about using the Sandusky case to argue that U.S. university administrators are more focused on covering up embarrassing episodes than exposing the truth (e.g., rampant fraud among quant social scientists)."
But you only have evidence of fraud in European universities, and as a previous poster has pointed out, administrators initially dragged their feet in those universities (e.g., in the Stapel case). It would actually make more sense to conclude European university admins are more focused on covering up embarrassing episodes.
Posted 10 months ago # -
Riddle me this, ILP...I few questions have popped up after looking at some of your examples.
You assume a lack of evidence of quant fraud in US universities is proof that fraud exists but it is simply being concealed. Why do you not similarly argue that a lack of Sandusky-type scandals in Europe is proof that such scandals are simply swept under the rug? To the contrary, you take a lack of evidence in the European case to mean that there is no wrongdoing. The logic seems inconsistent.
Posted 10 months ago # -
You assume a lack of evidence of quant fraud in US universities is proof that fraud exists but it is simply being concealed.
No, what I assume is that even after Stapel and other Dutch social science quants were exposed of massive fraud U.S. university administrators have not done any digging among their social science quants. U.S. administrators do not want to embarrass their institutions.
Posted 10 months ago # -
Sandusky is obviously not a qual social scientist
Then your joke in very poor taste is even more idiotic.
Posted 10 months ago #