South Carolina Primary Results in One Picture

This is my takeaway from the Republican primary. The voters who voted tonight aren't interested in Newt's proposal for 21 hours of debate with Barack Obama. They just want someone who's going to kick people in the balls. Which is how Newt has made his bones since the early Clinton Administration.

He kicked Bill Clinton in the balls as long as he was in the House of Representatives, beginning with attempts to detonate any sort of compromise health care bill and ending with impeaching Clinton even after the impeachment message had lost his party seats in the house. He kicked Juan Williams in the balls when he dared to suggested that referring to Obama as a "food stamp presidency" might offend African Americans. He kicked John in the balls when he had the temerity to suggest that someone who is a total jackass to both his first and second wives while sanctimoniously going on and on about Bill Clinton's moral turpitude might be the kind of person that some voters might not want as President. Essentially, Newt's campaign was telling voters that a vote for me is a vote to kick some other in the balls. It might be Barack Obama. It might be "the liberal media" or "the elite". It might be African-Americans. But basically, you could vote for Newt, and Newt would find whoever the closest person was who's different from you in some way, and then kick them in the balls.

The exit polls are a little odd. In certain respects, Newt fared better among voters that are closer to the median voter than the typical Republican; he did better downscale voters both in terms of income and education. But/ Romney did better in other respects; he lost by smaller margins among women, among people who identify as moderate, and urban voters (although none of the metro areas in South Carolina are particularly large). I'll have some observations about the exits and the county-level results tomorrow.

South Carolina Repubican Primary Benchmarks

This is what the map looked like on election night in 2008. Romney was mostly a non-factor, with John McCain's strong challenge emerging from Mike Huckabee. Most likely,  Romney has absorbed most McCain's voters, while Gingrich will pick up Huckabee's voters. Polls close in a few hours, so we'll know soon.

My Ideas Want To Be Free (As In Beer)

A couple months ago, I discovered that a book I'd co-edited, and on which I was eligible to receive royalties, was downloadable for free on the internet. I was happy about this! What advances my career isn't people paying money for my book -- it's people reading it and being aware of my contributions to philosophical debates. It's why I was eager to submit the paper I mentioned in the previous post to an open-access online philosophy journal.

So I'm happy to see that Senator Jeff Merkley (to whom I just made another big Leadership PAC contribution) has come out against SOPA and PIPA. I once commented to one of his staffers that they should make sure there aren't any health risks associated with being on the right side of too many issues, because if there are, he might hurt himself.

Ricardian Equivalence And Unequal Vividness

It's not that often that my research directly addresses a major issue of the day, but I had a little footnote on Ricardian equivalence in "The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality," just out in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. So I'll say something about that.

The paper tries to solve a problem for those who accept both of two popular theses about desire and action. First, people do whatever they believe will get them what they want. This is a psychological thesis about how people actually act. Second, it's rational for people to do whatever they believe will get them what they want. This is a normative thesis about what the right choice is. It's only about the right choice in the sense of being rational -- in the sense where it's right for the assassin to load his gun before trying to shoot -- not in the sense of being the morally right thing to do or anything like that.

Here's the problem with the two theses: since what we do and what it's rational to do are defined in exactly the same way, it seems that we can never act irrationally. And that's trouble, because it's pretty clear that people do act irrationally sometimes.

In the paper, I argue that "desire" in the psychological theory should be understood as the immediate motivational force that desires exert on you right when you act. Meanwhile, "desire" in the normative theory should be understood in terms of the dispositional strength of desires. We usually describe a sleeping person as desiring various things, even though no immediate motivational forces are operating then. Similarly, we can say that someone desires to marry his girlfriend even if he's on a roller coaster or something and he's not thinking of his girlfriend at the moment. This is the dispositional sense of desire -- it treats our desires as disposition rather than as immediately active forces.

Setting up the theories that way leaves just the right amount of room for human irrationality. Usually, we pursue what we desire more in the dispositional sense. But if we're presented with much more vivid images of the thing we desire less in the dispositional sense, we may pursue it anyway, because vivid images of something make the desire for it more forceful. Someone who's trying to quit smoking will find it easier to give into temptation and smoke again in a smoky bar than while jogging, because the representations of the pleasures of smoking will be much more vivid there.

What is Ricardian equivalence, and what does this all have to do with it? It's the hypothesis that fiscal stimulus can't actually get the economy going, because any money you spend now will have to be paid back in the future, and people will just save the money you give them to pay taxes towards future debts. Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong have been criticizing this idea lately on grounds that there's no reason people would just save the whole amount of the stimulus immediately.

The commonsense psychological point I'd like to add (it's in footnote 20) is that people have a natural tendency to satisfy desires whose objects are vividly represented before them at the moment. So when someone at the bar chooses between buying another drink and saving to pay future taxes, the drink is going to have a pretty big advantage. Our desires are stimulated by the things right in front of us, not the tax burden 30 years in the future.

I kind of wonder if some economist could make a career out of re-running economic models involving how people plan for the future under psychological assumptions that actually fit how people make decisions.

New Hampshire Primary Meaningless Speculation Thread

Dave Weigel has the final Suffolk poll, which I'll rearrange to make it easier to read:

• 37% Mitt Romney
• 18% Ron Paul
• 16% Jon Huntsman
• 11% Rick Santorum
• 09% Newt Gingrich
• 06% Buddy Roemer
• 05% Rick Perry

Note: figures may add up to more than 100% due to rounding.

With the exception of the brief Newt boomlet, Romney has lead wire to wire here. Meanwhile Huntsman seems to be "hoping he experiences the Santorum effect", which is really something that ought to be kept between Huntsman and Santorum rather than shared with the rest of the world. But indeed it seems to be happening, and given that both Paul and Santorum seem to be falling while Huntsman is on the rise, he just might finish second.

My totally meaningless prediction is that the lower-tier candidates will collapse, Romney tops 40%, and Huntsman squeezes ahead of Paul by a percentage point or two. What this means going forward, I have no clue whatsoever.