Newsom defeats recall effort

The incumbent governor of California Gavin Newsom easily defeated the costly effort to recall him, with the Associated Press calling the race just 45 minutes after polls closed. It appears that about 65% voted against recalling him. The official vote count may not be known for another 30 days. It cost the state about $276 million to hold the recall election. That does not include the money raised and spent by the candidates. When you consider that Newsom will be up for re-election in just over a year, this recall effort seems particularly unnecessary.

Newsom painted this race as a Republican and Trumpian effort and that message seemed to work for him.

Speaking in Sacramento, Newsom said that in voting no on the Republican-led recall, Californians said “Yes to science, we said yes to vaccines.”

“I’m humbled and grateful to the millions and millions of Californians that exercise their fundamental right to vote,” Newsom said, “and express themselves so overwhelmingly by rejecting the division, by rejecting the cynicism.”

The leading Republican candidate Larry Elder has, like Trump, resorted even before election day to claiming election fraud without providing any evidence. But it appears that after the results were announced he conceded defeat.

Checks on the president’s ability to fire nuclear weapons

According to the US constitution, the president is the commander in chief of the military forces and thus has the power to order them to do anything without anybody being able to challenge that decision. That power extends to the use of nuclear weapons. A new book by two Washington Post reporters says that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley, the head of the US military, was so concerned that Trump had become unhinged by his election loss and the events of January 6th that he feared he might ‘go rogue’ and do something dangerously irrational such as start a war, perhaps with nuclear weapons. Milley reportedly convened a meeting of the officers who would be involved in the process to tell them that they had to promise to make sure that any order to start a war or use nuclear weapons also involved him. Milley also called his Chinese counterpart to reassure him.
[Read more…]

Calling a woman a ‘young lady’ is an obvious put down

Democratic senator Joe Manchin has been using the influence he has achieved as a result of a 50-50 tie in the US senate to advance the agenda of his corporate backers by thwarting efforts to pass the infrastructure bill in its present form and demanding huge cuts. When Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez pointed out his ties to lobbyists, he responded by referring to her as ‘young lady’ and she immediately called him out on it.
[Read more…]

Dan Ariely’s work called into question

In my teaching work and on this blog, I have often referred favorably to the work of behavioral economist Dan Ariely who devised ingenious experiments to tease out human behaviors and motivations. (See here for the posts where I have discussed his work.) I have recommended his book Predictably Irrational which, as the title succinctly suggests, argued that while people are often irrational, their irrationality is not random. He has also given very popular TED talks.

A lot of his research dealt with the issue of honesty: what corners people are willing to cut, by how much, and how they view themselves. So I was disappointed to read that he may the latest example of an academic who has been sloppy or worse in the way that he has conducted his research, throwing his work into doubt.
[Read more…]

What kind of marketing strategy is this?

I noticed that used copies of my latest book The Great Paradox of Science are available on eBay at about $10 higher than the list price set by the publisher and about $15 higher that the discounted price set by major retailers.

Since my book is readily available, why would anyone try to sell a used copy at a higher price than a new one?

I have never used eBay. Is there some weird marketing strategy that people use on that platform that I am unaware of?

The Costa Rican health care system

In the August 30, 2021 issue of the New Yorker, Atul Gawande takes a close look at the health care system in Costa Rica that, within a few decades, improved so rapidly that now its people have a higher life expectancy than the US and at a much lower cost. The numbers alone tell the story.

In 1950, around ten per cent of children died before their first birthday, most often from diarrheal illnesses, respiratory infections, and birth complications. Many youths and young adults died as well. The country’s average life expectancy was fifty-five years, thirteen years shorter than that in the United States at the time.

Life expectancy tends to track national income closely. Costa Rica has emerged as an exception… Across all age cohorts, the country’s increase in health has far outpaced its increase in wealth. Although Costa Rica’s per-capita income is a sixth that of the United States—and its per-capita health-care costs are a fraction of ours—life expectancy there is approaching eighty-one years. In the United States, life expectancy peaked at just under seventy-nine years, in 2014, and has declined since.

[Read more…]

Civil resistance versus revolution

Sometimes people who get frustrated by deep injustices in democratic societies seem to give up on their governments doing the right thing and start to consider the possibility of violent revolution as the only way to get any meaningful change. Andrew Marantz writes about an empirical study by Erica Chenoweth, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, to try and address empirically the question of which kind of effort, mass civil rights struggle or revolution, is more likely to produce the results sought.
[Read more…]