
Edward Tufte appointed by Obama to help track, and explain stimulus funds - voidfiles
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003e0&topic_id=1#
======
CoreDumpling
I sincerely hope Tufte can successfully counteract the Washington tradition of
applying the methods from _How to Lie with Statistics_. A good visualization
can just as well expose the fraud from a contrived one.

~~~
ewjordan
From what I've read of his work, Tufte has almost a compulsion to force data
to tell the truth, and do so in an effective manner.

Which makes me fear that his career in Washington will be politically
disastrous and end rather quickly...

I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that. We could use more people like him
keeping the government honest from the inside.

~~~
tokenadult
Yes. What if the data plainly presented show that the stimulus plan was
plainly a waste of money?

P.S. How many of you, when you hear announcements of how many jobs have been
saved by the stimulus plan, immediately do the mental arithmetic to figure out
how many dollars of taxpayer funds were spent to save each job? I think I
could do better in my family in keeping us all actively employed in work
helpful to society with the same number of dollars per employable person.

~~~
mos1
_How many of you, when you hear announcements of how many jobs have been saved
by the stimulus plan, immediately do the mental arithmetic to figure out how
many dollars of taxpayer funds were spent to save each job?_

I do not, because that is a fool's calculation.

The value created is not one year's salary, it's the difference in the present
value of an individual without a job and the present value of an individual
with a job, including all estimable secondary effects (both positive and
negative.) If you simply divide it and compare it to a year's salary, you'll
sit there and go 'HURRR THAT IS DUMB', but in reality, you're proving only
that you don't really understand policy analysis.

\----

I'm reminded of a situation that occurred many years ago in my career, when I
was still working in a corporate setting. My team hit a seemingly intractable
combinatorial explosion problem while trying to create a tool for the sales
force. It was incredibly difficult, and quickly blew through the allocated
budget (which we'd told them right from the gate, was inadequate).

The management just assumed we were lying... that we weren't up to this task,
or we were just lobbying for more money and man-power for our group (I was
trying to make a very specific high-end hire to help, and I had already
purchased some serious iron). In fact, they were so convinced that this
couldn't be this difficult to accurately analyze that they started shopping
consultancies, and most agreed with us, that this would be difficult and
expensive... but one did not. One said "yes, we can build it, no problem."

A year later, the consultancy had burned through a pile of money, and had
nothing to show for it.

Only then did management recognize that maybe this seemingly simple
configuration problem was not, in fact, as simple as they imagined. And
perhaps we weren't just lying or waving our hands when we said "this shit is
not as simple as you think it is." (and even then, they didn't admit it
outright. I had an all-day meeting which consisted solely of them asking me
stupid question after stupid question, as to why various simple approaches
wouldn't work... and me having to draw out specific examples on a whiteboard,
indicating the business and technical problems with these simple approaches.)

It's sad, but common, for people to assume that other people's jobs are easier
than they really are. Even very smart people fall into that trap... but
generally speaking if intelligent, hard-working people are advocating
something that seems stupid to you, it's probably because you don't understand
the problem or the solution.

~~~
anamax
> The value created is not one year's salary, it's the difference in the
> present value of an individual without a job and the present value of an
> individual with a job, including all estimable secondary effects (both
> positive and negative.) If you simply divide it and compare it to a year's
> salary, you'll sit there and go 'HURRR THAT IS DUMB', but in reality, you're
> proving only that you don't really understand policy analysis.

You're assuming that the job will last beyond the year and that we couldn't
simply send that person $X dollars and produce most of the same benefits.

~~~
jbooth
Your comment, particularly the part where you talk about "simply send that
person $X and produce most of the same benefits" underscores your complete and
utter lack of comprehension of his post.

Try reading it again.

~~~
pg
It would be better if you explained in a neutral way what you thought was the
source of the misunderstanding.

~~~
jbooth
Ok, although IANASS (not a social scientist) (edited to add: and sorry anamax
for the uncivil tone, long day):

Economic activity has benefits for society at large -- we get stuff out of it,
and there's a feedback loop where more people with money in their pocket means
more demand, which means more people employed, which means money in their
pocket, etc.

Recessions are when the economy gets out of balance (historically inventory
oversupply, more recently it tends to be financial meltdowns) and that
feedback loop goes negative -- less money in pocket, so less spending, so less
production.

Counter-cyclical spending is, according to economic theory, the one point in
the cycle where the government should be encouraged to spend money like
they're in vegas, up 50k and hanging at the strip club. Breaking this negative
feedback loop is priority #1 -- debt can be paid back later, and if you've
been breaking out your counter-cyclical toolkit, you've already lowered
interest rates to near-zero so this is really cheap debt, 1% interest or lower
-- if you produce any return at all, you've got a win in addition to the
counter-cyclical effects.

Once you've decided to spend, you've got to decide how. Giving money to people
in lump sums (which was in fact about 40% of the bill, the bill was 40% tax
cuts) is fast and simple, so it certainly has a place, but keeping people in a
job is far more effective because you create externalities. That job is
producing something of value to the economy, that person is gaining
skills/experience leading to future employability, and assuming that business
is ok, their labor might lead to additional job openings at the same company
later. These are all sustainable improvements that build on themselves and
contribute back towards that positive feedback loop. Just spewing money out to
people without any targeting whatsoever can only be a brake on recession -- it
doesn't really help lay the foundations for the bounceback.

~~~
byrneseyeview
This model seems flawed:

1\. The government can increase spending, but they can't create money. Either
they get it from taxes, or they get it from devaluing the currency (i.e.
taxing holders of currency, or currency-denominated assets). How would it help
to take $1 away from an employer building widgets, and use it to hire a
Diversity Coordinator at the DMV?

2\. What's the long-term effect on business decisions if the only two modes
the economy is in are a) growth, or b) near-zero interest rates? It looks like
this would lead to lots of leverage.

3\. You're assuming that it's always better for someone to have a job than to
lose it. So you'd end up subsidizing candlestick makers (probably by taxing
light bulb factory owners).

At best, this philosophy merely gives everyone a reason to misbehave. At
worst, it fines the productive, growing parts of the economy, in order to
reward the unproductive, shrinking parts of the economy. America in the
1930's. Japan in the 1990's. How many lost decades will it take to discredit
this stuff?

~~~
hga
WRT to #1, before you get to the "or" items, government borrowing crowds out
private, since a national government (or at least ours) is viewed as a much
safer creditor in the earlier periods of economic trouble.

In the longer term, sovereign debt defaults, explicit or implicit (your "or"
items, including the inflation tax), inevitably follow this type of counter-
cyclical spending (statistically, since this tends to be a regional or world-
wide thing).

~~~
jbooth
Government debt is an entirely different product than private debt. Different
interest rate and all of that.

Regarding the sovereign debt defaults, did we have one of those after the
great depression? Sovereign debt defaults are associated with financial
panics. Don't bind up intermediate (correct or incorrect) steps with the root
cause.

~~~
hga
It may be a different product but it's still in the same market for people who
want to lend out their money. The different interest rates are because of
different perceived levels of risk; normally a government can offer less
because they're viewed as more likely to return the money.

If they aren't in the market or to the degree they are less so, investors have
no choice but to put their money elsewhere.

As for your question, I don't think we can easily say. E.g. the BLS says the
dollar lost 28% of its (CPI) value from 1940 to 1946 ... but I'm not willing
to assign blame due to the discontinuity of WWII.

If Japan defaults in its 3rd Lost Decade, will that be the cause of the
initial '80s panic or decades of the wrong medicine to deal with it?

~~~
jbooth
IMO decades of the wrong medicine in Japan's case. In the case of an Argentina
where a ton of crap hits the fan and they default a year later, it's a lot
harder to blame the medicine.

(regarding Japan -- the consensus is that they didn't do enough stimulus, and
that in addition to their high savings rate is why they fell into a
deflationary spiral. the government printing money and handing it out with
coupons for blow and hookers would have been a better strategy than what they
did)

------
InclinedPlane
This should be an easy job. Just photoshop an image of a black hole with a
giant pile of nearly a trillion dollars falling into it.

~~~
hga
Very funny, but if Tufte wants to avoid destroying the brand he's built for
the 78% of the American population who don't self-identify as liberals, he'll
need to clearly present things like:

How much of the stimulus went to temporarily prop up state government budgets
and how it permanently increased the budgets of the states that accepted it.
Bonus points for explaining how Texas is so successful while refusing this
temporary windfall.

ADDED: The above effect on future state budgets could be illustrated as being
caused by synchrotron radiation coming from the dollar bills falling in at
relativistic speeds.

How "the most shovel ready" project of weatherizing houses became the slowest
because the Department of Labor has to make Davis-Bacon "prevailing wage"
calculations for 30,000 localities (still not finished...).

Etc.

I fear he'll either show us that he's a fool or what his price is.

~~~
jbooth
Answers:

How much went to temporarily prop up state govt budgets? Zero, even though
preventing a teacher layoff would've been about the most efficient use of
stimulus dollars possible. The twins from Maine held the bill hostage until no
money was given to state government. (If you're wondering how much went to tax
cuts, that figure is around 40%).

How was texas so successful while refusing this temporary windfall? I don't
know, but they definitely didn't refuse anything. Rick Perry made a bunch of
noise, got his headlines, convinced you that he's a true believer and then
took the money.

The weatherization project you got about right, although those studies
finished on schedule a month ago or so.. that was a stupid provision and they
should have eliminated it, they probably didn't realize it would lead to a
bureaucratic snafu.

Hopefully, what Mr. Tufte will show us, are some very compelling and
illustrative graphs that do a good job of explaining where the money went.
There seems to be some confusion abounding, especially on the tax cut part.

EDIT: A further hope I have is that people who normally respect things like
statistics, figures and Mr Tufte don't immediately do a 180 and disown the guy
if he doesn't produce a pie chart of the stimulus money that says "100% =
SOCIALISM"

~~~
hga
While the details of the $44.5 billion for local education aid were indeed
changed by "the twins from Maine" (although I'm not sure to the degree you
claim), you're not counting the $40 billion for unemployment benefits
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009#Aid_to_low_income_workers.2C_unemployed_and_retirees_.28including_job_training.29))
and the required changes in state law to get that money, or the $86.6 billion
for Medicaid
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009#Healthcare),
"More than 11% of the total bill is allocated to help states with Medicaid"; I
can't remember if there were eligibility changes required there).

For you to be right about no state aid and there being no strings attached,
you'd need to explain why there was all that furor about the governors of
Texas and one of the Carolinas (I think) refusing the aid, and the provision
in law to bypass a governor, and how the governor of Florida's figurative and
literal embrace of Obama is helping to destroy his campaign for Senator.

WRT to tax cuts, putting the annual relief ($70 billion this year) for the not
inflation indexed Alternative Minimum Tax into the stimulus was pure political
theater.

And I just can't see how Perry "took" the Texas share of the remaining $167
billion in individual tax cuts (perhaps he should have instituted a state
income tax to capture that "windfall" for the state???) or how he "took" the
Texas share of $51 billion in business tax cuts, but I don't know anything
about Texas business taxes.

Anyway, I don't need to see graphs to get a rough idea from the listed
breakdowns at Wikipedia or any of the other zillions of sites.

~~~
jbooth
Ok, you're right, there was a lump sum allocated to the Fed Dept of Ed which
will eventually make it's way to the states through various reform-based
programs -- programs, which, btw, are based on teacher accountability in a way
that the teachers' unions are hugely opposed to.

I thought conservatives would eat that up? Between that and the tax cuts, I
can see how the party-over-substance crowd would have a big problem with this
guy actually documenting where the money went. It's a lot easier to just shout
"socialism!" than to talk about the numbers.

Regarding aid "to states to shore up their budgets", there was precisely zero,
funding unemployment benefits and medicaid is not grant money going to states,
it passes straight through to the recipients. There was originally a big item
that involved the federal government contributing to state budgets in order to
forestall state layoffs for a year, which I thought would be a great example
of counter-cyclical spending. Unfortunately, it also made great hay for those
who wanted to attack the bill in general as "big spending", so it got
jettisoned. That's what I was referring to, not pass-through expenditures like
medicaid, unemployment, etc.

~~~
hga
"I thought conservatives would eat that up"

Again, watch for the attached strings, which I've read include a Federal
curriculum. And we've yet to see if these programs actually make it in the
face of union opposition. Last time I checked 1/5 of the members of any given
Democratic presidential nominating caucus are unionized teachers, and the
shutdown of the D.C. voucher program, the one that provides among other things
scholarships to the school Obama's children go to, does not inspire
confidence.

Conservatives don't think much of temporary tax cuts, you only get changes in
behavior with permanent changes in fiscal policy (and as for permanent 1-1.5
trillion dollar deficits...). People just pocket one time a few hundred dollar
things like the Bush stimulus or this.

And we have a tendency to ask, "Is this worth the price?" You have to look at
both sides of the ledger.

While unemployment and Medicaid _may_ be "pass-through" in terms of mechanism,
the fact remains that the states are on the hook for most of that money anyway
and would have had to pay it out if not for this temporary Federal windfall.

~~~
jbooth
Well, hang on, you're saying that rather than a temporary tax cut, you'd have
preferred the more substantive policy changes? Let's say Obama said "Hey, I
thought about doing a temporary tax cut, but I'd rather concentrate on policy
changes to help our bottom line" -- how do you think that would have gone over
with the right side of the aisle?

PS Regarding policy changes to help the bottom line... you've seen those
projected deficit numbers right? Two questions:

1) Do you think those projected deficits are the result of Obama
administration policy (about 3 months old at the time I first saw the chart),
or because of underlying fundamentals?

2) If you had to guess at the fastest rising cost in government spending,
would you guess healthcare?

3) Ok fine, one more but I can't resist, if Obama said "I'm not pursuing a tax
cut, I'm prioritizing healthcare reform because it will save the government a
ton of money", how do you think the conservative reaction would go? :)

~~~
hga
Yes, but not any substantive policy changes that Obama wants.

1\. Obama administration policy. There's no limit to how fast a politician can
spend money ^_^. (Well, to authorize the spending of money; as we've seen with
the stimulus bill there's no limit to the amount of red tape a bureaucrat can
then use to tie up a process.)

2\. Yes.

3\. Unfavorable, since we don't believe that the ends justify the means and we
don't believe him on costs. The CBO doesn't believe him, and that's not
counting the "savings" achieved by gutting Medicare, which will of course be
repealed in due course or "adjusted" every year as is already done for
Medicare payments to doctors.

~~~
jbooth
Well, sounds like the dude can't win with you -- I mean why waste the time
with justifications and arguments if it's just a big fat "NO!", even when he's
co-opting formerly republican ideas?

There's exactly one time when the government should make a point of counter-
cyclical deficit spending -- when in a recession. This is in pretty much every
economics textbook, including the one by Greg Mankiw (Bush's chief economics
adviser) that I read in college.

What we saw however, was that according to Dick Cheney, "Deficits don't matter
[as long as a republican is in office]", then as soon as a democrat is in
office, deficit spending during the worst financial meltdown in recent history
is against economic fundamentals all of a sudden.

On healthcare.. I don't even know where to start, whether it's with your total
refusal to acknowledge that we should focus on dollar-driven solutions ("I
don't believe the ends justify the means"), or your incoherent philosophy "I
don't believe in government financed healthcare in general EXCEPT for
medicare, in which case I'll accuse you of 'gutting' it."

At the end of the day, we have a huge budget hole as a result of skyrocketing
medical costs. I spent 3 years in local government laying off teachers and
feeling like shit about it because of those costs. Forgive me if I value those
teachers' paychecks and the kids' education over abstract ideals about what is
socialism, what isn't, and how something can only be a good idea if a
republican proposes it.

------
nkh
Obama scored some big points in my book for this one.

Edit:

When he did not follow up on his promise to have C-Span follow the health care
debates, left a bad taste in my mouth.

I have attended a Tufte conference, and he spent a lot of time discussing the
challenger disaster. While he was no where near the as good as Feynman (who
is?), he graphically presented the government information very well.

If anything it will draw attention to the problem as he is a big name in this
space.

------
jrockway
I never realized that Tufte was a political science professor. Anyway, I think
Obama made a great choice here. (I was going to write a long discussion of
why, but it will just lead to political debate, so I am censoring myself :))

------
pohl
Not since Feynman on the Challenger Commission have I been so excited about a
presidential appointment.

~~~
mcantor
Seconded. After a rocky first year, this decision alone makes me feel
vindicated for having voted Obama.

------
MartinCron
"Visualization Czar", anyone?

------
TobiasCassell
I am in Shock.. happy shock.. But, shock..

~~~
voidfiles
What is so shocking, I think Obama has been finding the best-of-the-best and
appointing them to the right places.

~~~
jamesbritt
Can you give some examples of this?

He's appointed several RIAA laywers to positions at the Department of Justice.

He picked Janet Napolitano to run Homeland Security. (I'm a 'Zonie of 10
years.)

While he may also be picking some good people, I'm not seeing "best of the
best" as any sort of theme.

~~~
Locke1689
Steven Chu as the secretary of energy — absolutely fantastic choice.

~~~
roboneal
Regardless of where you stand on the global warming debate...

"California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and
its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the
advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday."

<http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/04/local/me-warming4>

So were to believe within 90 years all the farms and vineyards will vanish
from California if we do nothing?

That's just headlining grabbing bunk, hardly befitting a "scientist".

------
blogimus
I predict less use of PowerPoint.

~~~
voidfiles
Hopefully, less slides, because slides aren't inherently bad

~~~
blogimus
Slides are a crutch (but I use them too) Much better if there are very brief
(3-5 page) documents with clean multivariate visualizations as appropriate.
Then discuss (This is what Tufte recommends). A nice multivariate
visualization method is RadViz. The real metric is "Does it add value to the
viewer?" If it is more of a presenter crutch, then get rid of it or boil the
slides to the bare minimum. I tend to favor white boards and markers and ask
the audience questions. But that is just my style.

------
jamesbritt
Could he maybe do the same for the general US budget?

~~~
voidfiles
I think this is a first step, its like saying out loud that we need to take
visual communication more seriously. Hopefully his teachings can go viral, and
effect all the people in the right places.

~~~
jamesbritt
"I think this is a first step, its like saying out loud that we need to take
visual communication more seriously. "

I'm inclined to believe this will only be applied to those topics the
administration wants to sell to the public. I don't expect to ever see it
applied to, for example, where tax dollars go.

~~~
sachinag
Seriously, they publish this every year in all the detail you could possibly
want.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget>

And if you think that the White House is trying to hide it, here:

<http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget_fy2009_default/>

~~~
jamesbritt
Point taken. However, my point (not well expressed) is that no adminsitration
has gone out of their way to ensure that citizens really understand the
financrs of their government. The data are there, but, for example, those
links for the OMB are hardly paragons of clarity.

There's is a _reason_ to hire someone like Tufte, and that is because a) this
sort of data are hard to convey in all their nuance and import, and b) there's
no one currently in place who is doing a good job of it.

~~~
mquander
We spend 12 years of public schooling trying to drill some rudimentary general
knowledge about the world into the heads of people who couldn't give a shit
about it, and only partially succeed. What makes you think that Ed Tufte can
do the same job with a website, or with a cameo on some weekly YouTube
addresses?

The data is available for people who care to inform themselves. Doing better
than that seems to me like a pretty damn hard task in the short term.

~~~
wtallis
Tufte is smarter than at least 99% of public school teachers, and he is one of
the best humans alive at making accurate and concise visual explanations of
complex data. It wouldn't be particularly surprising to see him succeed where
others have failed, because he's better at this kind of thing than pretty much
everybody who's tackled this problem before, and he is able to learn from the
mistakes of previous attempts.

The data has always been accessible, for some definition of "accessible". The
job of a guy like Tufte it to put it into a form where it doesn't take as much
effort to spot patterns and other hidden trends. Essentially, he'll be trying
to lower the barriers of entry to the "informed electorate".

~~~
hga
However remember that he's only one member of a panel that advises the board
that's actually going to be publishing stuff. We and I'm sure he have no idea
how influential he's actually going to be.

How influential has Paul Volcker been?

------
100k
Well _this_ is going to be interesting!

I look forward to seeing how Tufte designs for an audience (the American
people) more used to USA Today infographics.

~~~
tjic
I just love the gratuitous American bashing that we always see in these sorts
of discussions.

Look, the average IQ on the planet is 100. Here, in England, in Germany.
Education here isn't great, but it's not noticeably worst than in Mexico,
Italy, or Russia. The American people aren't geniuses, one and all, but then
again - who is?

I wouldn't complain about women, or blacks, or any other group for a trait
that's common across all humans ("stupid women ... never saving enough for
retirement!"), and I don't think that bemoaning folks by which country they
were born into is any more appropriate.

~~~
100k
Uh...I'm American and am intimately familiar with the level of statistical
reasoning that informs our political discourse.

~~~
evgen
And what country does any better? "People" as a general class are woefully
educated in statistics around the world, or at least all share the common
ability to turn off their ability to make rational decisions based on
statistical evidence whenever their favored group is not supported by the
available statistical evidence.

~~~
abstractbill
Having lived for large amounts of time in both the UK and the US, I would say
the level of political discourse in the UK _is_ generally higher than in the
US (I attribute this mostly to a very strong and reasonably independent media
in the UK that's really not afraid to hold feet to the fire and ask
intelligent questions, and usually doesn't "dumb things down").

~~~
hga
Was this true before 1986 (the Wapping dispute)?

In Gerald Warner's ... eulogy to Michael Foot, "champion of the closed shop"
([http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100028361/sto...](http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100028361/stockholm-
syndrome-rules-as-journalists-laud-michael-foot-champion-of-the-closed-
shop/)), he relates this bit of relevant history:

" _One day in the mid-1970s, shortly after having a comment article published
in the Daily Telegraph and while I was wondering, with the enthusiasm of
youth, if journalism might be my métier, I bumped into an official of the NUJ
who rejoiced in the title of “Father of the Chapel”, or some such quasi-
masonic honorific, who told me he had seen the piece. “I hope you are
remembering,” he said, “you are only allowed to publish two pieces a year (or
perhaps it was a couple more) without an NUJ card… And just try getting one,
you Tory b——,” he added with a sardonic laugh._ "

On the other hand I don't know squat about ITV and any other independent
electronic media, and there's always magazines like _The Economist_ which I
hope didn't also live in a closed shop environment.

------
starkfist
Do these people receive renumeration for the time they spend on the panel?

~~~
pohl
s/renumeration/remuneration/

~~~
starkfist
whoops. I should have just asked outright: how much will Tufte get paid?

~~~
mos1
Is this question a preparation to accuse him of being an unethical shill if
his findings disagree with your ideological predispositions?

Because it really sounds like you're gearing up to find a reason to dismiss
his message if it doesn't mesh with your preconceived ideas.

~~~
starkfist
I want to know how much money I can get paid by the government when I finish
my PhD in statistics.

~~~
anigbrowl
<http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Statistician/Salary>

------
opoloqo
wow.

~~~
opoloqo
please accept my apologies for a non-substantive comment.

