Is Freedom of Association Fascism?

The New York Yankees in recent years have upset very many people with their policy of enforcing “patriotism” during the Seventh Inning Stretch. Security forces every patron in the ballpark to remain still while “God Bless America” is sung. The blogosphere has generally condemned such draconian measures, as this requirement apparently struck a nerve. For example,

Yankee Stadium security deserves no benefit of the doubt here, nor in this instance does the Steinbrenner family if they’re the ones who have ordered the policy be implemented. Forcing paying customers to stand at rapt attention during a song isn’t some cute little attempt at patriotism to bolster the legacy of Mr. Born on the Fourth of July Steinbrenner, it’s FASCISM. Roughing them up over their failure to stand still during a canned recording of a song that’s been drained of all meaning by its endless repetition is in diametric opposition to what the song and the country it so proudly celebrates stand for; this is about as un-American as you can get.

The author (Jaffe) complains in very strong words about the rights of those that dissent from the requirement to pay respect. Essentially, he argues that the requirements curtail his Freedom of Speech. Freedom of Speech, Jaffe implies, is not simply about government censorship, but an entitlement to express one’s personal opinions, whatever the circumstances.

This broad interpretation of Freedom of Speech erases the power of its close cousin, Freedom of Association. Yankee Stadium is not the public square; it is private property. If the owner of that private property requires that you perform some legal action (e.g. paying respect during a patriotic song) in order to stay therer, you must do it, if we are to say that the owner is really “free”. As the oft-quoted 19th century judge said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” During a decade where ostentatious displays of patriotism are in the vogue, Freedom of Association may annoy liberals in circumstances such as these, but there is little grounding for referring to it as Fascism. Whether Jaffe likes it or not, Steinbrenner has just as much right to throw people out of the stadium for appearing unpatriotic as Jaffe does to throw someone out of his house for voicing, for example, Neo-Nazi propaganda. Freedom of Association is Fascism only in a world where all humans have an indelible right to take a shit in their neighbor’s yards. There really isn’t another way to spin it.

There are complicating factors to the specific issue; the circumstance that set off Jaffe above involved an anecdote where security allegedly manhandled a fan out of the stadium without a refund. To my understanding, the ticket gave the fan a license to be in the stadium and a refund would have been necessary to legally kick him off the property. Obviously, the actions taken by the security officer were also over-the-top, as Freedom of Association is not Freedom to Assault. Yet, these issues were not the crux of any argument I’ve seen on the blogosphere; instead Jaffe and his ilk have used them almost solely as an embellishment to the outrage they feel for needing to pay respect during the song. Nonetheless, the anecdote is just that, an anecdote, and one that was voiced by a fan who was likely drunk at the time and who had every reason to punch up his story a little bit. It’s not fair to form generalities on that type of thing.

The more theoretical criticism I can see of this policy is whether Yankee Stadium should be considered purely “private property”. Major League Baseball teams have long been run almost as public trusts rather than a classic, profit-seeking enterprise. New York City has substantially subsidized a new stadium for the franchise, which is set to open next year. If one considers the new stadium public property, the question changes drastically, although it is still not cut-and-dry. Public property still does not immediately imbue one with the right to voice any opinion whatsoever, and I do not mean that in the banal, “yelling fire in a crowded room” sense. There is no reason why a town hall cannot throw someone out for yelling obnoxiously, and of course, liberals themselves harshly denounce religious statements on public property. This is not to say that this circumstance neatly falls into any of those categories, but the door is open for discussion. My standpoint, although it is not a very firm one, is that the Yankees can continue this practice until the city uses the funds as a gateway to instruct them otherwise.

Freedom of Speech, and more generally, Freedom of Expression, are negative rights, not a positive ones. Censorship occurs when the government explicitly stops you from doing something you could do with your own means. Referring to two private parties (you stand during the song and pay me $80 in exchange for being here) as censorship is both dishonest and a complete non-sequitur. Analogously spurious and deceitful are claims that stem-cell research is banned in the United States (it’s legal, but “failing to fund” is construed as “banning”) or that failing to increase funding for public broadcasting is censorship. All of these arguments make the preposterous assumption that Freedom of Expression is somehow an entitlement rather than a protection from government coercion. To put it another way, these views reprehensibly argue that freedom to choose gives those who invoke it the inalienable right to express their values or beliefs through the property of others, whether literal or through taxation. From that perspective, equating a failure to provide a positive Freedom of Expression to Fascism is nonsensical. No society can function that way without becoming duplicitous or lawless.

The Residual Fallacy

For hardcore baseball fans, the “Pythagorean” record, called such for its ostensible appearance to the Pythagorean formula, represents how many games a given team “should” have won over the course of a season. The formula uses nothing but a team’s runs scored and runs allowed and spits out out a winning percentage that very closely correlates with the actual win total of a team. Even more surprisingly, this Pythagorean record correlates closer to the following year’s win-loss record than the previous year’s record does. This strongly suggests, although hardly definitively, that runs scored and runs allowed are a better indicator of team quality than win-loss percentage itself.

Amateur analysts have taken this as a very happy research opportunity. Some looked at how many games a team has won over its Pythagorean record as proof of a team’s strength in ways not measured using runs scored or runs allowed alone. The differential has been used to put numbers to statistical bugaboos like team chemistry, the effectiveness of the coaches, and the usefulness of the running game. However, these methods have fallen out of practice as those variables have failed to exhibit any year-to-year statistical significance in explaining the differential. The only objective factor that has been shown to explain any of the differential is the strength of a team’s bullpen, and that effect is not strong.

We’re lucky that in baseball, unlike real life, we have an amazing degree of data capture and an embarrassment of historical riches, with nearly complete yearly records going back more than 125 years. Retrosheet even has made available full play-by-play data for every season for more than forty years. Every play, every action, of all 162 games, (now) all 30 teams… it is a bewildering accomplishment. This treasure chest of data, an ostentatious auric ensemble of empirics, allows analysts to respond to numerical questions with genuine answers.

Yet, that’s not all. In baseball, every action is discrete. A hitter smashes a home run. A second baseman fields a ball and throws out the runner. Each event is distinct and countable for all to see. Furthermore, the data encapsulates what is important, which is why the pythagorean records work as well as they do. If the subjective, uncountable variables were what really drove a record instead of runs scored and runs allowed, the pythagorean record would not have its predictive power.

The subjective, uncountable variables like team chemistry likely have some effect to a team’s final record, but we have no idea what the effect is. It is now widely accepted to be a fool’s errand to try to tease anymore meaning from the differential. Yet, outside of baseball analysis, the problem of identifying the cause of residuals appears in far more important matters. However, since real-life data rarely possesses the ideal characteristics found in baseball statistics (gratuitous amount of data, countability of actions, importance of objective factors over subjective ones), we cannot take the same logical positivist approach to analysis; that is to say, we cannot ever rely on data to confirm any hypothesis definitively. We may be able to identify correlations for objective causes with some certainty, but we would only be lying to ourselves to think we had captured everything important.

Thomas Sowell has pointed out such presumption in what he calls The Residual Fallacy. The fallacy states that if we control for every objective variable we can find, that persistent statistical significance of a “soft” variable proves that the “soft” variable was directly responsible. But, as stated above, in real life, we don’t have a full picture of everything important. Imagine if in baseball, we only had the number of home runs hit and the average height of the players and were asked to use it to estimate the team’s win-loss record with such information. Without information about the other things that matter, we might pick up on some statistically significant relationship between win-loss record and, for example, average attendance. Would it then be fair to conclude that we have taken everything important into account, and that large crowds cause teams to win more often by cheering?

Yet this is what we do, routinely, including academics and scholars. Courts accept it as evidence. The example that Sowell points to is “proving” racism empirically. It is a fact that, in most industries, if you adjust for age, years of education, marital status, and everything else for which data is easy to collect, Asians make more than Caucasians and Caucasians make more than Hispanics and Blacks. Does this prove racism and put a dollar number on it? Of course not. It is likely that there are additional subjective differences between the groups. This does not mean it’s an INNATE difference or that the groups are somehow better than one another; it means that there probably exist other explanatory variables that analysts cannot capture. At the same time, this does not disprove racism, either. It could well be true that if we could somehow control for literally everything important, race would still be a persistent factor. The point is that we do not know and can’t know in any meaningful sense by throwing everything objective in a regression and seeing what sticks. It just isn’t evidence.

Baseball is a weird case, a rare human event where we can boil down most of what’s important to a few numbers. Still, this doesn’t turn the minds of baseball traditionalists -especially reporters- who spend years with the team and believe team chemistry to be an essential part of a winning organization. They could be well be right; if we could measure chemistry meaningfully, it may explain both some of the differential between the actual and pythagorean records and a reason why the team scored those runs in the first place. Yet, it is strange that some hold standards higher for baseball, where there is evidence that we have captured everything important, than in sociological questions with enormous political ramifications, where believing we no everything is nonsense.

Market Accuracy

In major league baseball, statistics can literally control the game. Managers have been known to wait to use their closers in situations that will credit them with a save, instead of the situation that will maximize the likelihood of winning games. Analogously, managers do their best to allow the starting pitcher to go at least five innings if the team has an early lead so that pitcher may pick up the win. Empirically, analysts such as Bill James, Derek Zumsteg, and myriad others have decried the outward tunnelvision of the former and the arbitrary accounting methods in face of statistics that measure value more effectively.

Managers, players, announcers, and the fourth estate have frequently defended continuing this behavior. Perfectly plausible and perfectly nonscientific explanations of the importance of a closer-centric bullpen include the notion that relief pitchers are better able to prepare mentally for a game when they know which events will bring them in. While no evidence has ever really been offered to support this conjecture beyond the anecdotal, that does not mean it is not true or important. These groups have similarly felt vindicated since seemingly no playoff team in recent decades has used a “closer by committee”. Despite the lack of evidence and the conclusions of sabermetric, theoretical models, the “preparedness” factor for pitchers cannot be unreservedly dismissed simply because a non-psychological model does not readily present circumstances for said importance to become apparent.

An inescapable exception to psychological excuses is the strikeout record for batters. In 2002, Milwaukee Brewers third baseman Jose Hernandez, at the end of an allstar season, approached the all-time single-season record for strikeouts. With five games remaining in the season, management benched him to save Hernandez the ignominy of tying or breaking the record. There exists no possible justification for playing an alternative ahead of Hernandez if management’s goals were to win that season or win in coming years. Keith Ginter, a 26-year-old whom one could only charitably describe as a prospect, took the playing time from then on out. This was not an isolated occurrence, as the record had been approached before and after until Ryan Howard finally broke it and put it to rest.

The Brewers focused on a number, and not a particularly meaningful one given that Hernandez was the team’s only allstar, as a reason for benching him. Everyone accepted that it had nothing to do with winning games, but so Hernandez wouldn’t feel stigmatized. The very people -the managers, players, announcers, and the fourth estate- who at that time frequently condemned the use of baseball statistics, acted in the interests of nothing more than, as Joe Sheehan put it, an accountant’s spreadsheet.

Within the markets, the legislature, financial commentators, public officials, and the masses make the identical error. All anyone can think about is pushing the market up. If Bloomberg and MSNBC tell us that the number of abacus beads has gone in our favor, we feel good. People made money. If it goes down, investors curse the heavens and push for the market to be stabilized. Stabilization only becomes important if it keeps you from losing money.

To keep the market climbing, social and political factors inhibit market participants from keeping it in check when irrational exuberance arrives for dinner. The purest example is the disgust felt by many of the notion of selling short. This derivative has a downward effect on prices, meaning the investor shorting the commodity “wins” when everyone else is “losing”. “Why should we allow someone to profit on the failure of our economy?”, proffers those of such persuasion.

The answer is that the stock market is not the economy. Its function, or at least what its function should be, is to provide a medium for interested parties to develop a portfolio of risk that best fits their goals. When someone invests, he does not, or at least should not if the market is working properly, invest to push the price up. The goal is to acquire a return, through dividends, interest, capital gains, or otherwise, above and beyond that which would be acquired through the nearly riskless t-bills or money market accounts. An experienced, skilled investor may even shrewdly choose securities that provide a return over the expected return given the risk profile. Yet, these choices do not necessarily push the market up. They make it more accurate, or efficient.

The “goal” of the market is not as some causal factor that may increase productivity and keep the economy near full employment. If it has any goal at all, it is to keep securities as close to their “true” underlying value, where that value is normally defined as the expected amortized profits over the next twenty years. The next time the stock market inevitably drops in value by a third, it is not a cause for mourning and depression unless you were overexposed in a market to begin with. If the market was either correcting itself or responding to a change in the real economy, this is a good thing. The relative price levels of all securities in the market, weighted by their respective risk profiles, should strive to match reality. The reason why we have these prices at all is to communicate value, not to remain high so investors can feel rich.

I’m not arguing that the government should intervene to curtail such behavior, or that any intervention is even possible without further disruption to the truths communicated by price level. The focus on increasing the level of the stock market, whether caused by public policy or psychology and culture, causes situations wherein the market is irrationally high. Just as traditional baseball people confuse pitcher wins, saves, and batters’ strikeouts for actual wins, commentators conflate the level of the markets with the real economy. The final statistics in a season are incidental to the goal of winning as is the level of the market is to the economy.

Espousers of rational expectations, in accordance with the efficient market hypothesis, or as Soros dismissively puts it, market fundamentalism, say that I don’t have a lot to worry about. By the invisible hand, the market will push prices towards a rational equilibrium. If this is true, great. My concern is completely unwarranted. However, the preponderance of conjectured biases the market may possess go in a single direction- up. Whether it is the cultural factors scorning selling short I alluded to or the Post-Keynesian’s view of the market as a Ponzi Scheme, there aren’t very many systemic factors that can push a security or the market down without a wise investor grabbing it.

“Market Efficiency” is a loaded term. Edgy and all the rage of the early 80s, that very notion, much like the supposed failures of supply-side economics, the Laffer Curve, and monetarism, has become little more than a blunt object used to assault any conservative economics. Hence, I do not carry a flag for “market efficiency”, but the unstated goal of that concept, market accuracy. Whether through the Keynesian means of effective fiscal and monetary policy or through lifting the cultural and institutional biases against it, the key to helping the economy is to make the market accurate.

The truth to our economic condition is not the price level of securities or even our crude notion of gross domestic product. The real indicators to consider are our level of technology, our average, individual ability to command resources, the stability of money, and the minimization of externalities. Do not lose sight of that.

The Hypocritical Vision of Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed

Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy argues that the “anointed”, or left-liberals, choose unfounded arguments that make them appear to be the saviors of humanity. They scorn anyone who disagrees with their urgency in fighting their perceived evils, leaving no room for dissent. According to Sowell, empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that the policy initiatives championed by the “anointed” in the 1960s have unequivocally failed.

While his conclusions regarding the outcomes are ones I tend to endorse, the method by which he presents them in the scope of the book I find ironically academically lacking and wholly hypocritical. He cites a plethora of examples of left-liberal policies, such as sex education, Keynesian economics, and affirmative action, to qualify how the “anointed” fail to form a conversation with the other side of the argument. Although Sowell’s dismissal of sentimental, non-evidentiary forms of argument is commendable, he focuses far too much in ascribing these attitudes to left-liberal points of view in place of demonstrating the fallacy of “self-congratulation as a basis for social policy”. Sowell is far too overzealous in using the argument to smear liberals rather than providing a balanced view of the issue.

Using case studies to make a point may sometimes be informative. Sowell very effectively argues the existence of “The Residual Fallacy” in an early chapter.

The common procedure in trying to prove discrimination with statistics is to (1) establish that there are statistical disparities between two or more groups, (2) demonstrate that the odds that these particular disparities are a result of random chance are very small, and (3) show that, even holding constant various nondiscriminatory factors which might influence the outcomes, that still leaves a substantial residual difference between the groups, which must be presumed to be due to discrimination. Since essentially the same intellectual procedure has been used to “prove” genetic inferiority, the choice of what to attribute the residual to is inherently arbitrary. But there is yet another major objection to this procedure. Not uncommonly, as the gross statistics are broken down by holding various characteristics constant, it turns out that the groups involved differ in these characteristics on every level of aggregation – and differ in different proportions from one level to another.

This is an excellent point, even if it is little more than an application of the statistical aphorism, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. However, instead of fully developing this point, Sowell is quick to bash liberals over the head with it. Seeing how all politicians use the “residual fallacy” is used universally is far more instructive in understanding it than to focus on how American left-liberals do by themselves.

Another frequent theme in the book is the contrast between the “Vision of the Anointed” and the “tragic” view of human nature. To Sowell, the tragic view is the economic understanding that the world is one of tradeoffs while the view of the anointed is one of solutions. He portrays Keynesian economics as being of the latter (while never citing a single example demonstrating this), even though some very smart people at least partially accept this view while arguing in the language of the “tragic”. To Sowell, the anointed present a self-congratulatory conjecture while, to paraphrase the author, no evidence is presented and none is asked for those conjectures. While anecdotal evidence is cited, there is no line of argument suggesting such thinking is endemic to the thinking of the left.

It took a while reading the book for my distaste in its style to truly coalesce. All the while I attempt to form an educated opinion on any issue I reasonably can, I only consider myself an expert in one: baseball. Sowell self-evidentially uses the sport to provide an analogy for the “merit versus performance” issue.

Even at a more mundane level, nothing seems to be more of a purely individual feat than a baseball player hitting a home run, and yet the number of home runs depends on factors that reach beyond the individual player. Ted Williams, for example, hit home runs with greater frequency, in proportion to his times at bat, than either Roger Maris or Hank Aaron – and yet Williams never came close to Babe Ruth’s home-run records that Maris and Aaron broke. The difference is that Williams was walked far more often than either Maris or Aaron – in fact, about as often as the two of them put together – and that in turn was due to who was batting after each of these players.

To walk Ted Williams was to drastically reduce the danger of the home run, but to walk Maris or Aaron was only to bat Mickey Mantle or Eddie Matthews [sic], each of them top-rank home-run hitters in his own right, leading the league in that department four years each. Individual batters must of course hit their own home runs, but the man on deck has a lot to do with how the man in the batter’s box will be pitched to – or whether he will be pitched at all.

Now, while The Vision of the Anointed was written in 1995, well before the “statistical revolution” in baseball began, the presumption of such an effect is exactly the type of the type of non-evidentiary Sowell spoke out about. No evidence is presented and none was asked for. Well, in 2007, J. C. Bradbury looked into the question, known in baseball as “protection”, in The Baseball Economist. This question was even examined elsewhere earlier, but not quite as popularly.

For data from 1984 to 1992, we measured the influence of on-deck hitter quality (measured by OPS) on the likelihood that a batter would walk, get a bit, get an extra base hit, or hit a home run. [Colleague] Doug and I were a bit shocked by what we found. Thought the conventional baseball wisdom – a better on-deck hitter does protect a batter from being walked – is partially correct, the batter also lowers his ability to hit for average and power. Therefore, a good hitter imposes a negative externality on the batter who precedes him in the batting order. This is completely counter to the conventional baseball wisdom.

For the one issue I feel I have a firm grasp on, baseball, I can skim and immediately know Sowell has made a strong error of logical presumption. This does not prove that the conclusions to similar arguments he made are incorrect, but that the questions of discrimination or the role of government in society are ones requiring more “empirical” argument than a few dismissive paragraphs.

If Sowell really wanted to argue against the “vision of the anointed”, he should have chosen applicable examples from both Republicans and Democrats. It’s not like non-evidentiary arguments from free-market conservatives didn’t already exist in when he wrote his book. By selectively citing only examples of the “anointed” from the left, the label stops becoming anything meaningful and becomes a smear. Moreover, the book has become far less relevant in this decade as neoconservatives have been far more receptive to non-evidentiary arguments than Reagan-era conservatives ever were. Speaking as someone who is ultimately a conservative Christian, nothing sounds more similar in tone to the anointed than the indifference and evasiveness to truth found within the schools of intelligent design.

“The Vision of the Anointed” ceased to become a meaningful criticism of left-liberals when it ceased to apply the criticism to anyone but left-liberals. The reaction by pseudo-intellectual conservatives to each example of the supposed ignorance of liberals is ironically analogous to the “a-ha! statistics” (confirmation bias in the perusal of statistics) criticized elsewhere by Sowell. As Sowell himself points out, it’s easier to trash the other side of the argument than to rationally converse with it. By providing a guilty-by-association outlet to do exactly that, he supplies an ostensibly scholastic cop-out of what liberals say while ignoring what they actually have to say.

Educated moderate and liberal Americans are going to see straight through the purported “empirics” Sowell presents. I find each of his statements -the failure of sex education, the insignificance of racism in today’s society, etc.- by themselves to be more likely to be true than not, but he is not so compositionally concise that he can give justice to liberals’ arguments in two-and-a-half pages. These are questions that require books by themselves to argue in one direction or another, not something that can be hand waved in a couple hundred words. The structure of the book, by locking in on broad conservative viewpoints, bites off more than it can chew. In doing so, it disregards counterarguments that any academic liberal could rattle off in his sleep with a nearly-fatal dose of opium.

The examples Sowell provides are nothing but fractious, derisive conjectures that further splinter conservatives and liberals apart. If humans individually are psychologically prone to believing themselves to be an omniscient, judgmental savior, Sowell should argue that alone. If a given left-liberal policy is fallacious, that deserves its own book or paper of similar scope. Making the former argument by cherry picking examples of the latter does not do much of anything.