The scream test

Imagine two policies.

Policy A would have government nationalise all liquor companies and distribute their product, for free, for anybody who wants some, with costs borne out of general taxation. There would be no compensation of the liquor companies.

Policy B would strengthen alcohol intervention programmes for prisoners with alcohol abuse problems. They'd spend a fair bit on it and work hard with prisoners, both while in prison and during their re-integration back into the community, to help them to avoid falling back into substance abuse.

Now Alcohol Action NZ proposes a "scream test" to tell whether some proposed policy would reduce alcohol harm. In their model, industry profits are increasing in the harm imposed by alcohol, and industry screams when profits are threatened. Anything that reduces harm reduces profits, so the scream test tells us which policies are likely to reduce harm.

I suggest instead that industry would scream a lot about Policy A, and would likely support Policy B. I also suggest that Policy A would increase harm and Policy B would reduce harm. Note further that National is already implementing something like Policy B - kudos to them. I've yet to hear screams from industry.

The scream test is a bad one. Profits are perhaps increasing in total consumption, but they're likely decreasing in alcohol's harms not only because of the policy reaction function but also because moderate consumers' consumption is likely decreasing in perceptions of harm.

The one spot where Sellman's scream test could be right would be policies potentially hitting the very heaviest consumers. There are discrepancies between median reported consumption figures and total alcohol available for consumption suggestive of that there is a small group consuming booze by the barrel. Policies disproportionately hitting that group could potentially reduce both harm and profits. But I hardly expect that mandatory 1 am bar closing times fit the bill.

Knowable, but not known to me

In the futile hope that maybe, just maybe, folks' views about welfare policy might just stand to be informed by data, here are a few testable hypotheses I've seen floating around. They posit things that are knowable, and I'm sure data exists to resolve things. Let's walk through a few of them.

First, how do poor people use money? I tend to say we ought to just give money to poor people if we want to make poor people better off. Other folks think that they'll just waste it on booze and cigarettes rather than helping their kids. I don't discount that that's also possible; it's an empirical question.

@ericcrampton Is there any research on how people on low incomes spend their money, and what changes when get more cash per week?
— Jackson James Wood (@_jjw_) May 28, 2013

Now why does this matter? If you think that parents will waste money given them, you might prefer in-kind benefits provided directly to the children of poor parents rather than cash transfers. School breakfast programmes can fall into that category, despite that they're rather ineffective and largely go towards feeding kids who would have been fed anyway. I think that some of the support for wrecking the GST by exempting merit goods also comes from this kind of view, though I think this rather misguided: vouchers for merit goods could be a rather less ruinous way of achieving the desired end.

So, the test. Get household consumption survey data, look for some shock to benefit payments, and check the effects on different consumption categories. If extra money going to poor households disproportionately increases consumption of lotto tickets and booze, then the paternalists who want to make sure that money given to the poor is used for particular things are right in wishing for more in-kind benefits; if not, then the paternalists should back down on such assertions.

I can't imagine that this empirical test has not been done by somebody somewhere; I just don't know the results. I also don't expect that it will change many minds. Paternalists will want paternalism for its own sake, and anti-paternalists won't mind that poor people enjoy some consumption goods. I'm one of the anti-paternalists, but if the data showed little benefits to kids of cash transfers to families intended for kids, I'd shift towards preferring rather more in-kind benefits to kids. Any readers able to point to relevant NZ studies are welcome to do so in the comments.

Second, "can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em". Twitter and the NZ blogs have a bunch of folks yelling at each other about whether the main problem in child poverty stems from poor people's unwillingness to engage the prudential constraint or whether it's bad luck. Those on the right note that if poor people stopped having kids they couldn't afford, then child poverty would be less of an issue. People on the left instead remind those on the right that birth control can fail and that people in good financial circumstances can fall on hard times for reasons outside of their control and after they've set their family size.

So, a test. Start with DPB numbers. What is the current fertility rate of women receiving the Domestic Purposes Benefit, and how does it compare to the fertility rate of women of similar age and marital status who are not receiving government support for the raising of children? If the fertility rate among women on the Domestic Purposes Benefit is roughly what we would expect given known rates of contraception failure, then score a point for the left. If women on government support are instead choosing to have more children while in poverty, then score a point for the right. I would bet that the data shows rather more childbearing than would be expected from contraception failure alone, but less than the fertility rates among similar-aged women not on the DPB, but I've not seen the data.

Again, I'd be surprised if this kind of data didn't exist somewhere. I expect that the data could actually potentially make some difference here, though it depends which way it goes. If current rates of childbearing by women in poverty are consistent with failure rates of reliable and available birth control methods, I don't think many on the right would shift to demanding abstinence and abortion. But if current rates of childbearing by women in poverty are consistent with deliberate choice to bring more children into poor households, I expect that most on the left would shift to a fairness argument about that those in poverty shouldn't be constrained against choosing to have more children. And then there'd be the obvious counterargument about how it's a bit perverse that richer households deciding to have fewer children because of the costs are compelled to subsidise the fertility decisions of those happy to raise a kid in very bad circumstances; those on the right then might wish to advocate for that reliable birth control be a precondition of welfare receipt. Those are values-based arguments I can't adjudicate, though I expect that if, for many, the point of social insurance is to insure against bad outcomes, and if there were reasonable evidence of that many on the DPB were choosing to have many more children, there could be reasonable support for that birth control be among the conditions of welfare receipt.

A second test: what is the elasticity of childbearing among the poor to changes in benefit rates? Those on the right worry about paying women to have children they can't afford and think that paying more to benefit existing poor kids does a lot to bring more poor children into the world; those on the left think that the elasticity is pretty low and that we need to focus on the potential first-order benefits of higher transfers to existing poor children. I don't know if this elasticity is known, but it's definitely knowable. Find some shock to the generosity of payments to poor children and see whether it has any effect on subsequent fertility decisions. If little to no effect, score a point for the left; if things are reasonably elastic, score one for the right.*

Again, those with data or studies that might help resolve the second question are welcome to provide pointers in the comments.

If this stuff turns out to be in the "knowable, but not known to anybody" category rather than just "not known to me", file this under "future honours projects".


* I'm on some orthogonal dimension where I reckon it's good that more kids be brought into existence conditional on their enjoying their existence, even if they are poor. I worry instead about net effects when higher income people forbear from having their third child because of the income effects of the taxes taken from them to subsidise the bringing-into-being of a lower income person's third child. And then we get into the empirical question of relative elasticities and some rather thorny questions about trade-offs.

Measuring the influence of golf caddies

Over at the Dismal Science, a correspondent, Ross, commented on my post about the wage contracts for golf caddies, syndicated from here on Offsetting.

Ross suggests a neat natural experiment that could potentially identify an exogenous effect of caddy on a golfer's performance. The imposed exogeneity comes from the fact that for years all players in the Masters were required to use an Augusta National Club caddy, whereas in the other three major tournaments, golfers could use their own caddy. So one way of looking at the effect of caddying is to see how much predictive power player rankings at the other tournaments have for performance at the Matser's relative to how much predictive power they have for each other. If there had been no change of rule, such an exercise might be suggestive but hardly conclusive, as  there might be something about the Master's that encourages a different kind of player. (My little bit of golf knowledge suggests that this might not be a huge deal--the major tournament that is the most different from the other three is the British Open.) 

But the rule did change in 1982, after which golfers could use their own caddy at the Master's. So here is my suggested test. Take the 5 years prior to the rule change and the 5 years after. For each major tournament in those 5 years, find the subset of players who played in that tournament and each of the previous three (i.e. all 4 majors over a 12-month period), and note the ranking out of that subset of players in each tournament. Then for every pair of players the player with the highest average ranking in the three previous tournaments also had a higher ranking in the 4th. If caddying is important, we would expect to see that the fraction of pairs where the pairwise ranking stayed the same was lower for the pre-1982 Master's than for the other three tournaments (due to the effect of randomly  assigned caddies), but that that difference disappeared after 1982. 

I don't have time to do this, so I put it out there if someone wants to jump in as a co-author and do the legwork. My guess is that golf is such a high-variance game that there simply won't be enough data to tease out any statistically significant result, but it might be interesting. Or maybe it could be an Honours project. 

Efficient excusing

I have twice been excused from jury service when the jury duty conflicted with exam preparation and supervision; fortunately, I haven't been called during times of the year when I'm not teaching.

The Herald wonders whether lawyers Googling jurors helps them craft more convincing arguments for that particular jury. But that's gotta be a massively second order effect relative to Googling's effect on jury selection. Any Crown attorney Googling me would find I support jury nullification* in drug cases or for any other victimless crime and would knock me out before I made it onto the jury. Any Defence attorney would find I support that those actually imposing harm be made to make the victim whole, and likely would knock me off the jury on that basis. So it's efficient that I not be in the jury pool at all: the odds that I'd fail to be knocked out by one side or the other are exceedingly low, my time is worth something, and the process of being excused from a series of trials because of challenges is lengthy.

But think about the pool of people who would not be challenged by either side in a world where a rather substantial portion of potential jurors blog, tweet, or put stuff on Facebook.

It actually makes for a fun option value / optimal stopping rule problem. Here's the game, as described on the Justice website:

 The sequence of events at the beginning of the trial is as follows: the persons who have been called for jury service ("the jury panel") are brought into the courtroom where they sit at the back.⁷ Once court staff, counsel, the accused and the Judge have entered the court room the counts in the indictment are put to the accused, who pleads to them. Then the jury is chosen by ballot from the jury panel. The Registrar calls out each name as it is chosen, and that person walks from the back of the court to the jury box. If the person sits down before being challenged, they become a member of the jury unless they are discharged.

The page above is out of date; the number of peremptory challenges has dropped from six to four; I trust that the rest of it hasn't fallen out of date. But here's the basic game. Each side can challenge potential jurors as they are drawn from the pool of 30-40 who sit at the back of the room. If a juror is actually not qualified to serve, he can be challenged. Each side can challenge four without cause - peremptory challenge. I am not sure if there is a limit to the number of challenges for cause that can be made, but the judge has to be happy with the cause. Presumably my "anybody caught smoking a joint, and who admits having smoked a joint, is nevertheless innocent regardless of the law" views, as well as my three-day-a-week-anarchist status, would have me challenged for cause.

Suppose you're a lawyer who has to decide when to use your challenges to best serve your client's interests. So, when you got the list of potential jurors a couple days before the trial, you Googled them and gave each a score on the [-1, 1] interval indicating how hostile they were likely to be to your client's interests; you might also have noted your uncertainty about each score.** If you're the defence attorney on a drug trial where it's only a possession or trafficking charge, you give Crampton a +1 with zero variance (but you also know the Crown will veto); if you only find that somebody has 420 on his Facebook page, maybe you give him a +0.5 with a wider confidence interval. When you walk into the room, you check to see who is in the jury panel for the day; you then array the jurors from most to least hostile along with the scores you'd already given them. As each juror is called, the composition of the panel and of the jury changes, and so too then should the value of a held peremptory challenge: you have to weigh the hostility of the juror you reject with certainty against the odds that a more hostile juror might come up when you've run out of challenges.

I'd be pretty surprised if this hasn't been modeled before. But if it hasn't been, it would be a fun honours project. It would also be fun to see whether you can make an efficiency case for the reduction in peremptory challenges from 6 to 4 as lawyer certainty about juror views tightens up when they can Google potential jurors. File it under "Potential Honours Projects", if it hasn't already been done.

* UPDATE: It occurs to me that many Kiwis will have no clue about jury nullification. In short, it's the idea that a juryman must evaluate both the facts and the law. If the law is unjust, the jury must acquit no matter what the judge says. Juries are only a bulwark against tyranny if they are willing to overturn unjust laws by refusing to convict peaceful people for doing peaceful things. That's the point of juries. Expert judges will beat juries in assessing the facts, and especially so in complicated cases. Read Lewis Carroll on the competence of juries. But juries can assess whether it would violate the community's norms if the law were upheld. Consequently, there are no circumstances under which I could render a guilty verdict in a case involving victimless crimes. And so I know that I would never be chosen to be part of a jury. I do not expect or purport that most people here or anywhere else agree with me about the desirability of nullification; if they did, there wouldn't be prohibitions in various places on telling juries about nullification.

** Doubt lawyers do this explicitly; would expect decent ones do it implicitly such that a Friedman "as if" move works. Note that most of my knowledge of actual jury selection comes from an old Al Pacino movie. Keanu Reeves couldn't really Google the jurors in 1997. But things have changed....

Kiwi Freedom

New Zealand is the best country in the world if you weigh up a bundle of economic and personal liberties. I've argued this more than a few times, and I've teased American libertarians about their commitment to liberty if they're unwilling to consider emigrating here because of the drop in income or difficulty in convincing relatives to come along. This is no problem for a pluralist who weighs liberty up among other values, but it is a problem for folks who claim to put a very strong weight on freedom and who wear Live Free Or Die t-shirts.

For rather a while, we've had world economic freedom rankings that have placed New Zealand at or near the top. The Fraser Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Liberales Institut have today released an aggregate Human Freedom Index.

Using indicators consistent with the concept of negative liberty—the absence of coercive constraint—we have tried to capture the degree to which people are free to enjoy classic liberties in each country: freedom of speech, religion, individual economic choice, and association and assembly. The freedom index is composed of 76 distinct variables including measures of safety and security, freedom of movement, and relationship freedoms such as assembly or legal discrimination against gays. In this preliminary index New Zealand ranks as the most free country in the world, followed by the Netherlands and then Hong Kong. Australia, Canada, and Ireland follow, with the United States ranking in 7th place.

I have a few quibbles with the index (here is the full index), but I expect that they're all things that would be tough to incorporate with data for any large number of countries.

The index of government threats to individuals rightly includes extrajudicial killings, torture, political imprisonment and disappearances. But it doesn't include the number of individuals imprisoned for victimless crimes like prostitution and drug use. The US would fare poorly here, but New Zealand wouldn't do well on the drugs side either. Potential variables here could include an indicator for whether sex work is legal or illegal; an indicator for whether drug possession is legal or illegal; annual expenditures on drug enforcement; proportion of the prison muster whose offending relates to drug use or drug trafficking.

Threats to private property rightly include theft, burglary and inheritance takings, but miss civil asset forfeiture. I can't easily see how this could be quantified in a big cross-section.

One of the biggest regularly experienced differences in personal freedom between New Zealand and America is airport security. There is zero risk that this kind of thing happens in New Zealand. Again, I don't know how you could quantify this for any large number of countries.

Further, our police are unarmed and remain so despite the police rather frequently asking the government that they be allowed to carry weapons. One option that might capture the overall level of "police state" impositions would be to include the total police budget as a bad while also counting experienced crime rates as a bad. I suppose that America's ranking of 5 on "Extrajudicial killing" captures some of this (NZ scores a 10).

Finally, there's no accounting for the growing scourge of paternalistic regulation around alcohol, tobacco, and the like. Sin taxes as proportion of aggregate government revenues could be a start, and should be feasible, but it would be harder to get comprehensive data on whether you're allowed to brew your own beer, ease of starting a brewery, and restrictions on smoking on private property. I love that, in New Zealand, people can move really easily from goofing around in their garage with a completely legal home still or beer-making kit to selling their product to willing customers. In America...

The index a great start though, and I'm especially glad that this data has come out in this, the "setting honours projects" time of year. I'm consequently putting this up as a potential honours project; incoming Canterbury honours students, take note, but also note that this is my working draft of the project and that I might improve it based on comments.

The weight of freedom: economic and personal liberties in a gravity model of international migration.

We typically assume that people move from country ito country j because doing so makes them better off. But what precisely proves attractive? Karemera et al (2000) show that a modified gravity model can explain a decent share of international migration: origin-country population, destination-country income, and origin-country restrictions on emigration explain much. Lewar and Van den Berg (2008) show that institutions and distance also matter. Ashby (2007) shows that, within the United States, those states with greater economic freedom draw more migrants, but only because of increased expected income rather than because of the direct effects of freedom per se.

In this project, you will start by figuring out gravity models. Your supervisor has no experience with them either, but we can likely work things out.

Next, you’ll take the Fraser Institute’s newly created Freedom Index which compiles both economic and personal liberties to develop an aggregate freedom score: note that New Zealand is the best country in the world by this measure. The index compiles 76 separate variables relating to economic and personal liberties.

You will add these personal and economic liberties as explanatory variables into a gravity model of international migration to find out:

1. Does liberty enter positively into migration decisions? 
2. What’s the elasticity of migration with respect to economic and personal liberties?
3. What is the value of freedom? A standard deviation increase in personal or economic liberty counts as much as whatin a gravity model? I want you to be able to say something like “All else equal, a standard deviation increase in personal freedom [economic freedom] is the equivalent of reducing (or increasing, who knows) the distance between two countries by XXX kilometres or increasing the expected income jump from migration by $YYY.” How much less attractive would New Zealand be to international migrants were we to fall in this ranking? People deciding to emigrate often have choice among country destinations. Singapore is richer than New Zealand but ranks 39^th in overall freedom and scores only a 6.6 in personal freedoms. How much extra income does a move have to provide, in expectation, to make it worth dropping a point in personal freedom?

You’re going to have to sort out how to work with the OECD migration database, figure out what scope is feasible given that data within an honours project, and then run things. Do not select this project unless you have done reasonably well in undergraduate econometrics. But it’s going to be hellafun and I think it could be publishable if you do a decent job of it.

Initial Sources:

Ashby, N. 2007. “Economic freedom and migration flows between U.S. states”. Southern Economic Journal 73:3 (January), 677-97.
Karemera, D., V.I. Oguledo, and B. Davis. 2000. “A gravity model analysis of international migration to North America”. Applied Economics 32:13, 1745-55.
Lewer, J. and H. Van den Berg. 2008. “A gravity model of immigration”. Economic Letters 99:1 (April), 164-7.
OECD Migration Database available at http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=MIG[or, if you can find a better database, go for it]
Watkins, T. and B. Yandle. 2010. “Can freedom and knowledge economy indexes explain go-getter migration patterns?” Journal of Regional Analysis & Policy 40:2, 104-15.

I love setting honours projects.

Flynn effects

Professor Flynn is trying to help you improve your mind. My review of his latest book should be in today's Christchurch Press. They gave me 450 words; I took 480. Here they are.

Professor Jim Flynn sets a clever trap in his latest book, “How To Improve Your Mind”. Promising that all readers will “be far more able to defend their position after reading it than before”, Flynn instead provides the critical tools necessary instead for reassessing the irrational beliefs each of us hold and, in so-confronting, end them. For your own good, you should let yourself be trapped. Jim Flynn is arguably New Zealand’s best social scientist. I disagree with him on some aspects of economic policy, but Professor Flynn is a truth-seeker. And, even better, he’s very often a truth finder. Here, he helps the rest of us be better truth-seekers. This is no mean task. Thinking rationally is hard and, often, unpleasant. Worse, there is no payoff to rational thinking in many areas of life; you will hardly be less successful in most occupations if it gives you pleasure to believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old. But I’ll return to this.

Flynn ably demonstrates the methods of rationality through a series of case studies of beliefs that contravene the methods. He also warns against the tricks used by policy advocates against those not appropriately armored against them.

I disagree with a few of the finer points in Flynn’s chapters on economics. For example, even if the reservation wages of second earners are lower than those of primary family earners, this will not drive down female wage rates unless we add assumptions around segmented labour markets. Further, decent labour standards seem to owe more to higher incomes and increased productivity than they do to Twentieth Century regulatory interventions. In developing countries, child labour is very sensitive to family income; when parents can afford to do so, they send their kids to school. And he is perhaps a bit too optimistic about the feasibility of ameliorative regulatory reform in financial markets. But Flynn has a sharp nose for the failures of rational thinking about economics among those whose values he shares – he correctly sees negative income taxes as better than a minimum wage for helping those he would wish to assist, though he misses that cleverer forms of the negative income tax solve some of the problems he highlights.

The bigger question, and the one harder to answer, is why to choose rationality in the first place. Flynn writes, “If you learn how to use logic and evidence to examine your own principles, and the principles other people urge upon you, you can enlist in the ranks of mature moral agents rather than in the army of stones.” But it’s an expensive endeavour – not unlike taking the Red Pill offered Neo in The Matrix. I’d be surprised if more than a quarter of the population even tries to choose rationality over comforting illusions. But if you’d like to try to try, Flynn’s book is a good start.

I should be reviewing Eliezer Yudkowski's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" for next weekend's Press.

One bit that wasn't relevant for the Christchurch Press but I found awfully interesting was this observation:

"Academic competition for grades in a particular course selects out an elite that gets an A+. But within some areas, the correlation between courses is far more perfect than within others. Within mathematics, the best student in differential equations is likely to be the best student in algebraic geometry and in number theory, and so forth. Within political studies, the best student in political behaviour is less likely also to be the best student in areas as diverse as international relations, political philosophy, and quantitative methods. So, talented math students will come to scholarship committees with a string of A+s, and talented political studies students with  a mix of A+s and As. Rather than putting all the math students at the top, the obvious thing would be to alternate science/math students with arts/social science students. Observe how quickly math professors forget what they know about regression to the mean when such a proposal is put."

I'm on the Scholarships Advisory Committee as the Commerce rep; we help advise on policy around scholarships. I wonder how much this affects our University-wide awards. Economics probably doesn't do horribly out of this kind of overall effect: more than any of the other arts or social sciences, there's likely an underlying e-factor - thinking like an economist - that explains variance across students. At least in microeconomics. But arts and social sciences in general will do worse than the bench sciences and maths.

I wonder if anybody has run the test. If Flynn is right, then we expect lower variance in course grades for maths and science majors than for arts and commerce majors. We can use incoming high school grades as a measure of baseline ability. We could observe higher variance among the best students in arts courses than among the best students in maths courses simply because of grade truncation issues if the very best of all students pick maths over arts. I think I'll add the "future honours project proposals" tag; this seems testable.

Update: Oops...didn't see it in today's paper. Likely in next week's then.

Texting while driving

Texting while driving is dangerous and increases your chance of accidents. Bans on texting while driving seem to increase accident rates.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that 3 of every 4 states that have enacted a ban on texting while driving have seen crashes actually go up rather than down.

It's hard to pin down exactly why this is the case, but experts believe it is a result of people trying to avoid getting caught in states with stiff penalties. Folks trying to keep their phones out of view will often hold the phone much lower, below the wheel perhaps, in order to keep it out of view. That means the driver's eyes are looking down and away from the road.

So, here's a potential difference-in-difference study in this, the "thinking about honours projects for next year" time of year.

New Zealand banned texting while driving a few years ago. If we can get data on age-by-age participation in texting (presumably more prevalent among young people than among older people), we'd expect that the ban would have no effect on older cohorts' rates of single-vehicle accidents, that accident rates among youths will depend on the elasticity of texting risk-taking with respect to the law (could go either way - if the number of texting kids drops enough to offset the increased risk-taking by those still texting, accident rates drop; otherwise, they increase), and that multivehicle accident rates will change proportionately to the types of drivers involved (no change to multivehicle accidents where elderly drivers smash into each other, other cross-effects depend on the elasticity found in the single-vehicle accident rates).

Data we need:

• Age-by-age texting participation rates (don't know if any proxy exists)
• Age-by-age accident rates  (near certain this exists)
• Accidents broken down by ages of all drivers involved and single- or multi-vehicle status
• Checking whether other age-specific interventions coincided with the texting law change:
• The zero-alcohol limit for young drivers (which itself would make for a great diff-in-diff study not only on accident rates but also on crime rates)
• The 'Crusher Collins' crackdown on 'boy racers'

Hints on data warmly accepted.

Update: the original study is here.

Stadium subsidies - a new hypothesis?

Football is for Republicans, baseball for Democrats? 

StubHub is the secondary market for sports and concert tickets in the States. Their data analyst has been playing with the numbers and finds that states that have a lot more trade in football tickets than in baseball tickets break GOP while those with a higher proportion of baseball tickets like the Democrats.

Here's the infographic from StubHub:

They also put up some evidence showing that changes in the BFR correlate with changes in polling data in the swing states in the leadup to the 2008 election. 

So do baseball or football sales really cause states to move politically? No, not really. Just because the two are correlated doesn’t mean that one action caused the other. But it shows that sports and politics may have a deeper connection than previously thought. Political pundits sometimes say “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation”. I don’t think they’ll ever say “As BFR rankings go, so goes the nation”, but they’d be right if they did.

If the culture wars are a long game, it would be fun to check whether Republican governors/mayors are more likely to throw money at football stadiums while Democrats fund baseball stadiums. We'd then expect periods of unified state/local government to coincide with greater sports stadium subsidies and divided government to hinder it. You'd have to run the latter kinds of checks because if a Democrat state were also a baseball state, it would be no surprise if Democrat governors put money into baseball stadiums. Focus on swing states and on unified vs divided government.

Economists tend to say that stadiums are an incredibly wasteful public investment; do Republicans cite economists against baseball stadiums proposed by Democrats and vice versa?

It is the time of year when I have to start thinking of honours projects to propose for next year....