Author: Joy Buchanan

Complacency and American Girl Dolls

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Two recent books warn Americans that our society stagnated after the moon landing: The Decadent Society and The Complacent Class. Both imply that the 2000’s are running on fumes and have no equivalent of the Saturn V rocket. We have barely altered our physical world in decades, improvements in cell phones notwithstanding.

This has launched an interesting debate (you could even call it a game) where people look for counterexamples. Here’s the most recent one I’ve seen

This week I saw a reinforcing example of stagnation.

In the 1990’s I used to read the American Girl doll catalogue from cover to cover every year. Everything is terribly expensive but also delightful to look at. I had the Molly doll and I read a few AG books about how she was inconvenienced on the homefront during World War II. She complained about having to eat turnips from a Victory garden, but she was encouraged to be patriotic and support a cause greater than herself. Her father is away with the U.S. Army Medical Corps.

I was a little dismayed when I saw that you can now buy a mini Molly doll for your 80’s doll. My life is now “historical”, so I am officially old. Great.

It’s not lost on me that American Girl is playing on nostalgia to sell more product. Millennials like myself might buy this mini Molly doll so we can re-live memories of childhood vicariously. However, I’m going to use this to illustrate “the great stagnation”.

You can be inwardly focused or outwardly focused. The WWII war effort was a time when America was dynamic and focused on achieving great things.

“Courtney” the 80’s doll is pictured next to a Pac-Man arcade machine. Her goal is to keep herself sufficiently entertained. She can listen to her Walkman if Pac-Man gets boring.

Today, 40 years later, people are still starting at screens just like Courtney the 80’s doll. The reason we are buying a mini 1940’s doll to gift to a 1980’s doll is because so little has happened since 1980.

You can make jokes about an infinite recursion of American Girl dolls. It’s funny because it won’t happen. You can be inwardly focused or outwardly focused. Molly’s America is outwardly focused, and that makes her exciting.

I don’t think anyone is going to give a 2050 doll a mini Courtney 80’s doll. I’m even more certain that no 2050 doll is going to get a mini 2010 doll complete with tiny 2010 iPhone.

Maybe by 2040, there will be something new to ignite the imagination.

Incidentally, LEGO seems to think humans will be on Mars soon.

Twitter flags versus censorship

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Throughout this semester, I have asked some students in my data analytics class to think about how data is relevant to current events. Undergraduate Jack Brittle wrote this article about data and election news.

Sometimes public attention moves on quickly after an election is over. Today, on November 15th, voting and messaging is still being debated. It was a month ago on October 14th that Twitter locked up the digital platform of the New York Post, a right-leaning newspaper.

This was an important development in the debate about whether tech companies have the authority to censor posts written by users.

Twitter initially said that linking to the Post stories violated the social-media company’s policies against posting material that contains personal information and is obtained via hacking. As the story broke, Twitter began preventing users from tweeting the stories. Twitter locked the Post’s account, saying it would be unlocked only after it deleted earlier tweets that linked to the stories.” (Wall Street Journal). Twitter suspended a major American newspaper. This move is viewed by some as a direct threat to the freedom of the press. Twitter and other major tech companies came under fire for their ability to manipulate and control media. After major pressure and backlash, Twitter released the account back to the New York Post. “Twitter on Friday unlocked the New York Post’s Twitter account, ending a stalemate between the social-media company and the newspaper stemming from the latter’s publication of stories it said were based on documents obtained from the laptop of Hunter Biden. “We’re baaaaaaack,” the Post’s Twitter account tweeted on a Friday afternoon, just minutes after Twitter said that it was reversing its policies in a way that would allow the Post to be reinstated.” (Wall Street Journal).

It seems that Twitter backed down in that instance. The fundamental question has not been resolved. Should Big Tech censor material on their platforms?

First, there is a school of thought that believes Twitter has the right to control the flow of information on its platforms. Companies like Twitter are not breaking any laws by doing this. Do they not have the right to support and defend certain social causes? By only allowing users to see certain opinions and facts, Twitter can choose to support different policies. It’s not laws but our expectation of media that leads to controversy. Twitter should allow a free flow of information in order to create an open marketplace of ideas.

However, a new difficulty arises because of “fake news”. Now more than ever, media can be manipulated to create certain storylines by nefarious users. According to studies, “fake news” spreads nearly six times faster across digital platforms that real news stories. This leaves Twitter between a rock and a hard place. Do they control information spreading on their site and risk censoring the wrong material, like some consider to be the case of the New York Post article? Or do they take a hands-off approach, allowing all stories to have a place in the arena?

These giant tech firms have unprecedented power. Not only are they gaining massive amounts of data about people and firms, they also have the unique ability to shape their users’ outlook on a variety of ideas and events. These data giants are struggling with how to manage these capabilities and will no doubt continue to update and reform policy.

A example of evolving policies is the treatment of President Trump since November 3rd. Since election day, Donald Trump, has tweeted challenges to official vote counts. Trump has not only claimed voter fraud but also claimed he has won states where vote counts favor Joe Biden. Twitter has since developed a flagging system that adds a note on any tweet that Twitter deems misleading. Instead of censoring the president by locking the entire account, there are flags warning about disinformation. This system seems to be an improvement over previous ways Twitter has handled misleading information. It allows users to see all information but also be warned about potentially questionable information. I expect these policies to continue to evolve as tech companies grapple with the difficult task of managing the flow of information.

The Joad Family in 2020

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The following is by Hannah Florence.

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath details the impoverished circumstances of the fictional Joad family during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Initially, the Joads are tenant farmers in Oklahoma, but due to the consolidation and mechanization of agriculture during the 1920s, they are displaced from their farm and without many options. After receiving a leaflet that promises abundant jobs and housing, the family follows in the path of many of their neighbors that have already left for California in search of more opportunity. Yet the hardships continue for the Joads. The grandfather dies on the arduous trip and find that they have been misled about the availability of jobs and the conditions of the squalid camps.  

According to Steinbeck, the introduction of the tractor and the power of the bank are responsible for their initial misfortunes. The tractor makes farming easier and more efficient, but leaves families without work including the Joads. In an encounter with a tractor driver, a tenant farmer without work asks, “what you doing this kind of work for—against your own people?” (pg. 25). The tractor driver is seen as treasonous because he improves his own standing while a hundred other people—his people— are left without a means to provide for their own families. But the tractor driver doesn’t revel in his improved circumstances, instead he is blunt about all of their predicaments, “crop land isn’t for little guys like us anymore” (pg.25). This assessment indicates that despite their divergent trajectories, neither the tractor driver nor the tenant farmers have any influence, but they are both pawns of a larger power. Steinbeck insinuates that both individuals—the tenant farmer and the tractor driver– is largely expendable. If the driver leaves another tractor driver would gladly accept the job; if that one left, still another one would come along. The greater enemy is the big-wigs in ‘the East’ who give orders to ‘the bank,’ who are ultimately responsible for displacing the farmers.

The increasing efficiency of agriculture and its effect on the fictional Joad family illustrates what many families have faced due to the increasing efficiency of manufacturing. For the Joads, there is a strong sense of alienation. Their family home is damaged by a tractor, the neighbors are leaving, and there is no work available. Similarly, as factories and plants that were economic drivers have shuttered in rust belt towns, other main street staples such as the barber shop, the diner, and the hardware store can’t afford to stay open. As a result, formerly vibrant communities are emptied. Individuals are faced with the reality that the relatively straight-forward path to the middle class afforded to their parents will not be the same for them as options diminish for blue-collar work. The next steps for people, specifically without a college education, may not seem clear or within reach.

The monsters outlined in the first section of The Grapes of Wrath— the bank and the tractor—could be subbed in for the current monsters in our current political and economic discourse—automation and trade. The novel picks up on some of our current anti-establishment rhetoric as individuals in ‘the East’ that run the bank profit handsomely while families such as the Joads have their lives uprooted. The bank and the people in the East create a new class of winners and losers as well. The winners in this case are the tractor drivers who can now afford to give their kids shoes for the first time; the losers are the tenant farmers who have no income for food. The income inequality between the tractor driver and the tenant farmers is a microcosm of increasing income inequality in the U.S. as a result of rapidly increasing productively for a small sector of the labor force. In Average is Over, Tyler Cowen illustrates how low-skilled laborers face a similar scenario to the tenant farmer of the 1920s: individuals who are a complement to innovative technology are richly rewarded, but unskilled labor that can be replaced by it will struggle to find work in the knowledge economy.

The Grapes of Wrath demonstrates how creative destruction brought about by innovation and technology is an enduring phenomenon. Yet the characterization of this trend in The Grapes of Wrath seems prescient given the sentiments of many Americans that computers, automation, and globalization are richly benefitting a small portion of Americans that can harness these technologies at the drastic expense of many Americans that have been automated or outsourced out of their jobs.

  • Hannah Florence is a student at Samford University, where she studies economics, political science, and data analytics. She is currently a Young Scholar for the American Enterprise Institute’s Initiative on Faith and Public Life. After graduation, she hopes to continue her public policy research as she begins a career in Washington, D.C.

When will computers accurately predict elections?

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Why can computers beat humans at chess but not predict election outcomes with great precision? Experts in 2020 mostly forecasted that Biden would win by a large enough margin to avoid the kind of quibbling and recounts we are now seeing. I don’t write this as a criticism of the high-profile clever Nate Silver, or any other forecaster. I’m thinking through it as a data scientist.

First, consider a successful application of modern data mining. How did AlphaZero “learn” to play chess? It generated millions of hypothetical games and decided to use the strategies that looked successful ex-post. AlphaZero has excellent data and lots of it.

If we think about actual election outcomes, there aren’t enough observations to expect accurate forecasts. If each presidential election is one observation, then there have only been about 50 since the founding hundreds of years ago. No data scientist would want to work with 50 data points.

You can’t say “in the years when ‘defund the police!’ was associated with Democrats, the GOP presidential candidate gained among married women”. There has only ever been one presidential election when that occurred. Judging by what I have been observing of the DNC post-mortem on Twitter in the past week, that might not happen again. See this tweet for example:

I know very little about political analysis. Only from what I know about data science, I would imagine that computers will get better at predicting the outcomes of races for the House of Representatives.

House representatives serve 2-year terms. There are over 400 House elections every 2 years.

Think about this over one decade of American history. There are actually more than 400 representatives in the house, but let’s imagine a “Shelter” of Reps with 400 members for ease of calculation.

In one decade, there are usually two presidential elections. That means we get 2 observations to learn from. In the same decade, there would be 400×5 “Shelter” elections. That yields 2,000 observations, which is considered respectable for the application of data mining methods.

One application of such a forecasting machine would be to determine which slogans are the most likely to lead to success.

Introducing Students to Text Mining

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I’m going to teach text mining in the upcoming week. Most of my students have never heard of it. We have spent the semester talking about what do to with structured data, which includes some of the basic concepts from traditional statistics.

I often ask them to think about what computers can do. We talk about why “data analytics” classes are happening in 2020 and did not happen in 1990. Hardware and software innovations have expanded the boundaries of what computers can do for us.

The gritty details of how text mining works can make for a boring lecture, so I’m going to use the following narrative to get intellectually curious students on board. It always helps to start with fighting Nazis. Alan Turing helps defeat the Nazis by using a proto-computer to crack codes. The same brilliant Turing was smart enough to realize that computer could play chess someday (acknowledgement for me knowing that trivia: Average is Over). Turing didn’t live to see computers beat humans in chess but, in a sense, it didn’t take very long. Only about 50 years later, computers beat humans at chess.

Maybe chess is exactly the kind of thing that is hard for humans and easy for computers. When we discuss basic data mining, I tell students to think about how computers can do simple calculations much faster than humans can. It’s their comparative advantage.

Could Turing ever have imagined that a human seeking customer service from a bank could chat with a bot? Maybe text mining is a big advance over chess, but it only took about one decade longer for a computer (developed by IBM) to beat a human in Jeopardy. Winning Jeopardy requires the computer to get meaning from a sentence of words. Computers have already moved way beyond playing a game show to natural language processing.

How computers make sense of words starts with following simple rules, just as computer do to perform data mining on a spreadsheet of numbers. As I explain those rules to my students this week, I’m hoping that starting off the lecture with fighting Nazis will help them persevere through the algorithms.

Strange overnight switch in 2020 election betting markets

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https://twitter.com/MattBruenig/status/1324005469560705026

I share this tweet because it provides a good visual of a strange event last night. As results were coming in at night in the US, there was a sudden huge reversal. For months the markets had predicted a Biden win. Throughout the night there was some wild speculation in which some buyers were willing to bet Trump would win. Around the time respectable people start waking up in the US, the market flipped again. I hear some people saying on Twitter that they regret no buying during the night. Near 5am Eastern Time that Trumps chance of winning went back down under 50%. That is also when new information came in showing that Biden would likely win Wisconsin.

At the time I write this, votes are still being counted. It is expected that the ballots still to be counted will mostly give votes to Biden. The “blue wave” did not materialize in 2020. If Joe Biden wins the presidential election, it will not be with the overwhelming mandate that some expected.

Economists often promote using betting markets to get predictions of the future. There are lots of applications beyond politics. These high profile elections bring attention to betting markets. Maybe people will begin relying more on them in other fields. I think betting on temperature increases and rising sea levels would be interesting and useful.

The New Social Media Influence in the 2020 Presidential Election

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Joy: I’m not an expert in elections or social media (unless having a Twitter habit counts). I asked Kate Zickel who manages political online accounts professionally to write about the current election:

It’s no secret that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have had a tremendous influence on political elections in America since their infancy in the mid 2000’s. While the exact impression of these platforms can be difficult to measure, it’s clear that their impact in 2020 is greater by far than in previous election cycles.

Data from SocialBankers reports that “While President Donald Trump’s use of Twitter has been widely acknowledged, and certainly had a tremendous impact on the outcome of the 2016 elections, former Vice President Joe Biden has actually surpassed the President in many key engagement metrics.” This includes the nearly 30 million American voters that comprise the largest percentage of Twitter’s user base at nearly 20%.

The New York Times’ Ben Smith recently explained how media and tech companies have evolved back into their roles as information gatekeepers leading up from the 2016 election. Twitter, for one, recently began pinning notices to the top of all U.S. Twitter users’ timelines warning about misinformation on mail-in voting while Google said it’s been pushing to make its core search products including YouTube into hubs for authoritative information about electoral processes and results.

Pre-bunking is yet another new election influencing tactic used by many news and information sources to prevent the spread of false information before it starts… at least that’s the idea.

There is, however, a direct inverse relationship between broadcast ad spends and digital ad spend since the 2018 midterms. For the first time ever, spending on digital political advertising has slightly surpassed cable. Still, advertising spent on broadcast television — mostly at the local level — reigns supreme.

And while the influence of social media at the polls isn’t exactly new, the 2020 presidential election has set a new precedent in this era of information gatekeeping.

Eli Dourado on the election today

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Eli believes that it is likely (not guaranteed) we will know who won the US Presidential election tonight.

Esports Projected Growth

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There is a YUGE election happening tomorrow. I don’t know if there will be an apparent winner before bedtime tomorrow night. In 2016, I stayed up watching the news until (to everyone’s great surprise) Trump gave an acceptance speech at 3am.

I don’t play video games. Whether you do or not, you’ll want to keep an eye on this important cultural and financial trend. Regardless of who wins the 2020 US election, people around the world will be playing a lot of video games. The following report is the work of Samford undergraduate student Erica Eades.  

Esports is a competitive level of gaming that involves players winning money. Professional esports players are typically sponsored by companies affiliated with video games. Students are becoming more and more involved in esports. League of Legends World Championship was 2019’s biggest tournament by live viewership hours on Twitch and YouTube, with 105.5 million hours.

When the pandemic reached the U.S. the sports industry shifted their focus. Many leagues were able to quickly restart their competitions in a different format as esports, which quickly transitioned its in-person events to online-only games. For many months following the pandemic esports was the only option if you wanted to watch a live competitive event.

I had an interview with Noah Hankinson, a professional eSports gamer and consultant that has conducted extensive work with the NCAA, Learfield Sports, and multiple eSports properties. Noah shared perspectives on the state of eSports and demographics.

According to Noah, the most popular game is constantly changing. Although a game may be incredibly popular one week, it could be obsolete the next. To learn what game is most popular during a given time frame, simply observe the games famous Twitch players are using. Many Twitch streamers focus on only one game, but others will focus on what is most popular at the time so that they can maximize revenue from viewership. Noah informed me that the ‘traditional’ games such as Call of Duty, League of Legends, or Rocket League are growing. These games are the most popular and have the widest reach across all eSports demographics.

Depending on the game being played, there are different rules and formats each team (or individual) must adhere to. Popular games include football and soccer, where player roles or team game plans are more well known. Many eSports are based on individual talent, much like wrestling or track-and-field. Over the years, as eSports has become more of an emerging community, college organizations have started to help push the next generation of eSports competitors.

From a social standpoint, esports are more inclusive than other sports. Men and women are able to play on the same teams and teams are made up of individuals from various demographics and ages. Esports is not just a young demographic, eSports gamers ages in America range from 12 to 60 with the average age being 33 years old.  

Many predictions have been made about the growth of the industry. As teams of eSports members populate across the country, the unprecedented growth of the competitive gaming industry continues to rise. Newzoo is the leading provider of market intelligence covering the global games, esports, and mobile markets. The data from newzoo allows them to project the esports industry esports revenue stream worldwide based on sponsorship. In 2018, the global market esports revenue was $776.4 million. The global esports revenue will probably hit $973.9 million in 2020, and $1.194 billion in 2021. 

This projected growth has made it important to maintain positive relationships with current and future partners in the industry. With increased interest in esports there is a momentum for new partners to enter the industry and increase revenue. Using the data that projected the revenue and growth can be beneficial for many esports executives and the industry as whole. It will be interesting to follow and see how the industry continues once live sports are able to resume normally. After the “at home” year that brought so much to esports, observers agree that the industry’s upward trajectory is continuing.

EWED Recommends Gifts for 2020 Holidays

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For the past two weeks, several of us have been describing books and items we enjoy. I’ll summarize all of these potential gifts for both adults and children here. We’ve got everything from what goes in a perfect cocktail to gifts under $20 for toddlers. Hopefully this helps you cross someone off your holiday shopping list.

Things for Adults

Lined pants for cold weather (Joy’s review)

The gift blog that has the most reader traffic to date is Jeremy’s blog on cocktail ice. The True Ice mold is going to transform your home bar.

Along the same theme, Doug suggests ingredients for an Old Fashioned.

More light will make you happier. For example the Day-Light Sky Lamp (Scott’s review)

Scott reviews camping tents. The Ozark Trails 9-Person Instant Cabin is fun and huge and easy to set up.

Books for Adults

Jeremy says Werner Troesken’s book The Pox of Liberty is a great book for understanding the current pandemic. Interestingly, it was published in 2016! We have been vulnerable to a disease outbreak for a long time.

Doug recommends The Sabbath. Doug made a great point in his review that people in quarantine might not be getting any rest even though their schedule might look empty. A quote from Doug’s review: “genuine rest — not diversion — seems necessary in the tensions of our present moment.”

Review of How the Scots Invented the Modern World. I’ll borrow from the book’s own tagline “How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World”

Doug reviews The Ancient Christian Commentaries on Scripture (a set of books).

Undergraduate students review Tyler Cowen’s excellent The Complacent Class. Review #1 and #2.

for Kids

Joy suggests several different toys for kids. See the blog for a bike and a tablet game. A fail-safe mid-budget present for a 4-8 year-old is this remote control car ($25). For the even younger crowd (I suppose geared toward girls) is  Minnie Wooden Magnetic Dress-Up ($10).

Joy reviews several books for kids. Most recently, I have been reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with my elementary-aged son and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s important to read fiction together. We are having great talks about these vignettes on the sea voyage.