> The payments — to support both Cruz and Fiorina — have added to the air of mystery around Mercer. Is he motivated purely by conservative ideology? Or is there something more, such as translating his big-data expertise into campaigning? Cruz is building an aggressive voter targeting operation, bringing in a pro-Republican company specializing in personality profiling that has been paid millions by Mercer-backed political committees.
He supports the Club for Growth, NRA, American Crossroads, and GOP Congressional candidates and has since he became wealthy.
Its pretty clear its purely ideological.
I'm not sure why he is considered a "mysterious reclusive" type figure given he has been doing so for nearly a decade.
The article is also odd that it says "The role of a multimillionaire bolstering Cruz’s candidacy stands out in part because of an apparent contradiction." There are plenty anti-establishment donors in the party, plus it ignores an important part of Republican party history (Goldwater for example) and how patron-style donors effect change in the party.
I would say the article uses a lot of loaded words to try to create controversy and contradiction where none exists.
Patron-style donations have a very interesting history in American politics and its a true shame that a journalist didn't take the time to recount some of that history instead of going for clickbait. I guess I can understand some of it, since patron-style donations are often done as a counter to the power and money of newspapers and later TV.
Cruz has been pretty easy meat for some of the sharper anti-Right political journalists - the parody writes itself. So I have to wonder how effective any analytics are.
From experience, it's easy to delude yourself into thinking you can do linguistic analysis without being an actual linguist.
The title makes it out like he is a reclusive lone wolf programmer. He is the CEO of renaissance technologies, a hedge fund with 275 employees. I really feel misled and like they trying to portray him as a mysterious, dangerous loner. As a computer programmer, I take offense.
Here is an interview with James Simmons, the founder of Renaissance, fascinating guy.
From a 'tech culture' standpoint, if anything this is a reminder that there are many more computer programmers and companies (wealthy and profitable ones, even) who operate outside of Silicon Valley bubble and the 'tech industry.' Though it sounds like Mercer and Renaissance Technologies operate in the Wall Street bubble.
(Bubble meaning enclosed monocultural environment, not necessarily economic bubble.)
Yes. The type of person RenTec hires are people like Peter Weinberger or Leonard E. Baum, names I'm sure people here know. Mercer has a doctorate in computer science and is an expert in speech recognition and machine translation. Aside from CS types, it hires a lot of mathematicians, as well as scientists with the normal scientific experience of drawing conclusions from data.
Wall Street is very different. IT is considered to be barely a step up from the people who clear out the garbage pails, even if you are a Java programmer that is making $175k a year (which is considered nothing). There are many signs of this. One is that in IT, a managing director might have hundreds of IT personnel working for him (on Wall Street, titles like partner, managing director etc. have some
importance). In an important, major profit center division or group, it seems like every other person is a managing director.
Hedge funds like RenTec, DE Shaw, Two Sigma, PDT should not have to exist. Investment banks should have been able to spin out groups that do what they do and keep those tens of billions under management. The Wall Street culture and corporate politicsmis such that this can't happen, so these quant/ML hedge funds pop up and get tens of billions of dollars to manage. Which then pay their top quants hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. This can not happen in investment banks. Investment banks have seen these tens and, collectively hundreds, of billions go out the door, but they are big bureaucracies with office politics and inertia, they're taking steps to try to reclaim some of it, but the genie has already left the bottle to some extent.
OK, in the 90's I interviewed at this company, and had not thought of them since. Basically (according to a guy I interviewed with) they looked for patterns in stock prices and then tried to predict when to buy based on similarity to past patterns, independent of knowledge of world events etc. I don't know if that was all they did at the time, or just a part of it. Anyway, I had been a SCO Unix and Linux admin and they were looking for someone to manage their laptops, which they had Solaris on at the time (but were unhappy with). I had done some fractal analysis in my grad work and they were at least passingly interested in that ... I'm really happy I didn't go that route.
Yeah, he seemed to have stopped around the time he started working at the hedge fund and what little was published after 1993 might have been started before he worked there.
Wealthy liberals in coastal communities are NIMBYs. The only time you get change is when the number of renters (and voters) greatly outnumbers the home owners.
Wealthy conservatives do not want regulations because changing the rules force them to reconsider their business.
Most political donations are consumption spending, not investment spending. Lots of people enjoy donating to a political race. (I'm not one of them, but I have my own consumption spending that would bewilder others.)
I'm not sure your link supports your claim. The article focuses on wealthy congress people. It does mention Democratic leaning districts having a higher average income:
"Across the country, Democratic House districts have an average per capita income of $27,893. That's about $1,000 higher than the average income in Republican districts. The difference is relatively small because Democrats also represent a lot of poor districts, putting the average in the middle."
That income level is not considered "rich". As for presidential races: "In the election, Romney carried only one income group: people making $100,000 or more, according to exit polls."
You may also want to look at the money Republicans have raised for the presidential race including super PACs. Republicans have a much larger war chest due to large contributions from many very rich people.
How did the Democrats become favorites of the rich?
"The party and its candidates have come to rely on the elite 0.01 percent of the voting age population for a quarter of their financial backing and on large donors for another quarter."
That article says that the democrats are getting a growing share of their funding from wealthier donors, while Republicans are getting a larger share of their funding from obscenely wealthy donors.
He supports the Club for Growth, NRA, American Crossroads, and GOP Congressional candidates and has since he became wealthy.
Its pretty clear its purely ideological.
I'm not sure why he is considered a "mysterious reclusive" type figure given he has been doing so for nearly a decade.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/11/he...
http://blog.oregonlive.com/mapesonpolitics/2010/10/wealthy_f...
He might have been "mysterious" 5-6 years ago when he had only done a couple of things but at this point? Really?