Stasis fallacy 3

The stasis fallacy is the assumption that if the rules are changed, the actors will play the game in the same way they did before.

Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight (Jan. 25, 2013) contains the very interesting article Electoral College Changes Would Pose Danger for Democrats by Micah Cohen in which there is discussed a variation of how the Electoral College votes.  Mr. Cohen ends his article with an example of the stasis fallacy by making the logically invalid assertion that with one alternative method Mr. Romney would have won the last election.

When voting in the Electoral College almost all states use the winner take all system: the candidate who gets the MOST popular (people) votes in the state gets ALL of that state’s electoral votes.  Exceptions are Nebraska and Maine which use the “congressional district” method which allows 1 electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district and two for the state at large.  (There was a variation in Virginia which would given the two statewide electors to the candidate who received the most district electors.  For our purposes, this is no different from the congressional district method.)

Mr. Cohen includes a complete compilation of how the votes that were cast in the 2012 election would have determined the electors if they had been selected by an alternative method:  a modified "congressional district" method.

"If the Virginia proposal had been adopted in 2012 and the other 47 states had adopted a system like Maine’s and Nebraska’s (where one electoral vote goes to the winner of each Congressional district and two votes go to the statewide winner), then 103 of Mr. Obama’s blue state electoral votes would have gone to Mr. Romney. Mr. Obama, by contrast, would have gained only 32 electoral votes in red states."

Mr. Cohen then moves from arithmetic to the area of logic as follows:

"And, by an Electoral College count of 277 to 261, Mr. Romney would be president."

This is not a valid conclusion, unless Mr. Cohen means that, after the election was conducted according to law, God came down and declared that the votes would be counted differently. However, the drift of the article is that a CHANGE to this new system would give the Republicans an advantage, which indicates that he means to be assuming that the new system would have been the law BEFORE the election.

Notice that I am not saying that Mr. Romney would not have won.  I am saying that the information at hand does not assure us that he would have won.

The flaw in the thinking in the article is the assumption that is implicit in counting the votes that were cast using method A and assuming that they would be cast in exactly the same way if the election were held by method B.  That in turn implies that the candidates would have campaigned (in election method B) in exactly the same way that they had campaigned in election method A.

This is the error.  Consider Texas.  In method A, Obama ignores Texas because it is hopeless.  In method B, Obama would likely campaign in Houston, Austin, Ft. Worth and perhaps Dallas.

For another example, consider Pennsylvania, 2012.  In method A, Obama, by the way he campaigned, piled up huge majorities in Philly and Pittsburg to overcome the Romney vote in the rural areas.  In this way he carried the whole state of PA.  In method B, those extra votes in the large cities will not be of nearly as much value (although they can still help win the 2 statewide electors).  Therefore, if we used method B, Obama would be moved to revise his campaign plan to be more consistent with the reality of that different method of counting.  

Once you recognize that the method of campaigning would change, then surely it becomes clear that the votes could change.

 Consider a simpler example from a different election. Al Gore obtained more popular votes for president than George Bush did in the presidential election of 2000. But Bush won the electoral vote and the presidency. We heard over and over again: “If the election of 2000 had been decided by popular vote, then Gore would have won.” The response was always some variation of: “But the election was not by popular vote”. For some purposes, that is a sufficient answer. But I think that this is worth a bit more reflection. Put aside your own political perspective and consider the logic of the statement: “If the election of 2000 had been decided by popular vote, then Gore would have won.” Again, suppose one is talking about God coming down after the election is over and decreeing that the voting system has been changed to popular vote. If that is what was meant by the statement, then the statement is obviously true, but also silly. For the statement to be meaningful it has to be about what would have happened if the rules had been changed (to popular vote election) before the election took place. To claim that the vote as actually cast would have been duplicated with those other rules, then one has to assume (among other things) that the candidates would have campaigned in exactly the same way. That is nonsense. In fact, if the rules had been changed, then the candidates would have campaigned very differently. With the existing system, it was totally irrelevant whether Gore won California (or Bush won Texas) by 1 million votes or 3 million votes. Either way he still got all of the electoral votes of that state and nothing else. There was no reason for either candidate to try to win the national popular vote. And they didn’t. If the rules had been changed to national popular vote, then Gore would have spent more time on the coasts and Bush on flyover country getting out their base voters. It is very possible - perhaps even likely - that Gore would have won.  But it is not certain. Also, even if one could know that Gore would have won a hypothetical national popular vote election it would have been because of how the votes had been cast in that completely different kind of election.  It would not have been because of how the votes were actually cast in 2000.

The Electoral College

The time has come to speak of cabbages and kings and the EC (Electoral College.)

Whenever we have an election that looks close the TV babblers start talking about the EC and what happens if the EC vote differs from the popular vote.  During the coverage of the close 2000 election, Tim Russert of NBC said that if they differed then the election “goes to the House of Representatives”.  That is not correct.  (If no one gets a majority in the EC, then the president is chosen by the House of Representatives from among the top three finishers.  Note:  Each state gets one vote in that election.)  

If you don't like the Electoral College you might try to revive the Bayh Celler Amendment (see the Wiki article above) which is a legal way to change it.  A group called National Popular Vote has proposed a back door attempt to change it. That method would be a snake pit of bad possibilities. 

 So what does happen if the EC vote differs from the popular vote?

Nothing, except the TV babblers get a talking point and legions of people commit the stasis fallacy.  The stasis fallacy is the following logical error:  Change the rules of an activity and then expect that the behavior of the participants in that activity will remain the same as it was before the rule change.  So if Romney wins the popular vote and Obama wins the electoral vote, you will hear people saying: If we used popular vote then Romney would have won (or Gore would have won in 2000).  This is of course absurd because IF we were using the popular vote as the determining vote, THEN there wouldn’t be any such thing as a battleground state and the candidates would campaign a whole lot differently and thereby change the popular vote.

Question: What do you call a man who loses the popular vote and wins the electoral college vote?

Answer:  Mr. President

Reckless Endangerment 2

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The housing bubble mentioned yesterday has provided us with another example of the stasis fallacy. Again, we assumed that changing the rules (home mortgage regulations) would not have an impact on the individuals who were involved in the process.

My first encounter with the stasis fallacy was the flawed welfare system as described recently by Barack Obama : "Well, you know, here's what I would say. I think we should acknowledge that some welfare programs in the past were not well designed and in some cases did encourage dependency. As somebody who worked in low income neighborhoods, I've seen it, where people weren't encouraged to work, weren't encouraged to upgrade their skills, were just getting a check, and, over time, their motivation started to diminish. And I think even if you're progressive you've got to acknowledge that some of these things have not been well designed."

I am impressed by that straight forward acknowledgement.
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Reckless Endangerment

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"Put on asbestos mittens and pick up “Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist, and Joshua Rosner, a housing finance expert."

From a review by George Will of a book on the current unpleasantness that one might say "resonates with reality".

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National popular vote 3

I do not think that the NPV proposal (see 8-6-10) is a reasonable method. There are two major problems that I see with it and both involve assuming that, even though you have changed the rules, the whole process will continue along just like it has before (see Stasis Fallacy 5-27-10). They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. It is also pretty crazy to think that if you change what you are doing, then you are going to get the same result.
The first problem is that this is a pure plurality system election. There is no runoff, no matter how few votes he gets the candidate with the largest vote wins. If both parties nominate centrist candidates you could have the wingnuts on each side throw in two more candidates and then the election can be won by someone whose vote is in the high twenties. This could easily draw in a couple more candidates and suddenly you could have a vote tally of: 23%, 21%, 20%, 18%, 14%, 4%. A president who only got 23 % of the vote! The electoral college has never produced that kind of minority president. Contemplate the idea of how a president could govern if 77% of the voters had voted against him.
Why didn’t they provide for a runoff? Because they can’t. There is no way to include a runoff in their program because you’re options are limited when you are trying to amend the constitution through a back door maneuver. Their response is that the scenario above won’t happen. It has never happened before. They don’t mention that in all of the “befores” we were using that other system … .

Stasis fallacy 2

It was suggested to me that the stasis fallacy (May 27, 2010) was simply the law of unintended consequences (= LUC). I agree that they are related. But one may have an unintended consequence that could not have been predicted and therefore does not involve fallacious reasoning. Consider Columbus’s discovery of America.
On the other hand if one makes a change without properly thinking it through and obtains an unexpected consequence, then the issue of fallacious thinking is independent of one’s intentions. (I am assuming a good faith effort. Treachery is another matter.) Consider the example that led me to consider this in the first place. Al Gore obtained more popular votes for president than George Bush did in the presidential election of 2000. But Bush won the electoral vote and the presidency. We heard over and over again: “If the election of 2000 had been decided by popular vote, then Gore would have won.” The response was always some variation of: “But the election was not by popular vote”. For some purposes that is a sufficient answer. But I think that this is worth a bit more reflection. Put aside your own political perspective and consider the logic of the statement: “If the election of 2000 had been decided by popular vote, then Gore would have won.” This is certainly true if one is talking about God coming down after the election is over and decreeing that the voting system has been changed to popular vote. If that is what was meant by the statement, then the statement is obviously true but also silly. For the statement to be meaningful it has to be about what would have happened if the rules had been changed (to popular vote election) before the election took place. To claim that the vote as actually cast would have been duplicated with those other rules, then one has to assume (among other things) that the candidates would have campaigned in exactly the same way. That is nonsense. In fact, if the rules had been changed, then the candidates would have campaigned very differently. With the existing system it was totally irrelevant whether Gore won California (or Bush won Texas) by 1 million votes or 3 million votes. Either way he still got all of the electoral votes of that state. There was no reason for either candidate to try to win the national popular vote. And they didn’t. If the rules had been changed to national popular vote, then Gore would have spent more time on the coasts and Bush on flyover country getting out their base voters. It is very possible - perhaps even likely - that Gore would have won. But if so it would not have been because of how the votes were actually cast in 2000 but because of how they would have been cast in a completely different kind of election.

I believe that most people’s thinking about this topic involved a straight forward error in analysis. However, one has to note that many of the folks who made this argument would have preferred a different outcome to the election. It is hard to believe that, for them, their error led them to unintended consequences.

The stasis fallacy

If you change the rules of an activity and do NOT consider the possibility that this will cause a change in the behavior of the players, then you have made a logical error. I am going to call this the stasis fallacy. For example: Bankers were long known for being hard-nosed and careful about lending money. The reason was simple: they were responsible for the outcomes. Suppose you change the rules and allow them to make loans and arrange a buyer so that they can immediately sell those loans. Suppose I then assume that that same banker will, in this new environment, operate with the same vigilance about those loans that he did previously. Then I am making the stasis fallacy.