Collaborator watch: Jesse T. Richman, Gulshan A. Chattha, and David C. Earnest

Jesse Richman is a fascist collaborator. Why do I say that? First, Trump and his far right nationalist supporters are fascists. What else do you call such race/nationality based right wing extremism that scapegoats minorities and has no respect for independent institutions of government, a free press, etc.? Second, Jesse Richman and his co-authors, Gulshan Chattha and David Earnest, collaborate with them. They have done so through disingenuous research into voter fraud that finds that large numbers of non-citizens vote in US elections, despite the fact that no one else has come up with any evidence to support that claim. Voter fraud is extremely rare, non-citizen voter fraud even more so.

But any researcher who wants to make a name for themselves can come up with a junk science study to find otherwise. That’s exactly what Richman et al. did, and it worked. The paper was published in the journal Electoral Studies and received national attention. Jesse Richman has since been hired by Trump’s voter fraud commission to duplicate his dubious work for them. He is literally a collaborator with a far right white-nationalist (aka fascist) political movement.

So what makes their bullshit study such bullshit? Start with the sample size. They use an internet survey that had 32,800 respondents in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010. Sounds pretty big right? But non-citizens made up only 339 respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010, or about 1% in each year. Non-citizens make up 7% of the population of the US. The survey made no attempt to get a representative sample of the US population writ large because the survey was designed for eligible voters, and non-citizens are not allowed to vote[1]. Despite this, the authors claim in their paper that the survey’s sample was “selected to mirror the demographic characteristics of the US population”. They must mean the population of eligible voters, because otherwise that is a lie. Elsewhere they state that “it is impossible to tell for certain whether the non-citizens who responded to the survey were representative of the broader population of non-citizens,” a severe understatement at best.

Of this small unrepresentative group, just under 20% claimed to have been registered to vote or were verified to be on voter registration rolls. The authors could only verify that a minority of that number were registered. Only 3.3% both claimed and were verified to be registered in 2008, and none in 2010. Some self-identified non-citizens claimed to not be registered to vote, but were verified to be registered. The authors leave out any details of the verification and use this finding to assume a higher number of non-citizens were registered than the survey responses and verification process indicated. For example, in 2008 67 non-citizens either reported or were verified to be registered; the authors assume 84 in their estimates.

Of this minority of non-citizen respondents, only a minority voted. In 2008 “71 non-citizens answered a survey question indicating whether they voted, and also had their vote validated. Among these, 56 indicated that they did not vote (but two of these cast a validated vote), while 13 indicated that they voted, of whom five cast a validated vote.” Notice how small the numbers are getting? They are using an un-representative sample size of less than a hundred people to reach conclusions about the voting behavior of millions. This is bullshit social science; that point is hard to understate.

The authors apply population weights so that their teeny tiny sample’s demographic characteristics match that of the non-citizen population as a whole. This is a perfectly reasonable technique when using a large enough sample size. On such a small sample it is unreliable at best. While the average characteristics of their sample may now match non-citizens as a whole it does not mean the distribution of survey responses will match the true figures for the larger population. Basically, their statistical techniques cannot overcome the flaws in their sample.

The authors conclude that “non-voter participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and congressional elections.” How large? Their adjusted estimate is 6.4% of non-citizens in 2008 and 2.2% in 2010. Again, this is all based on an internet survey where 13 people out of 32,800 in 2008 said they were non-citizens and voted; only five of which could be confirmed. What are the chances that five to 13 people out of 32,800 clicked the wrong box on the citizenship or voting questions? The authors gloss over this and instead publish a highly flawed and prejudicial finding that falls apart upon the slightest scrutiny. A 2015 paper published in the same journal finds that observed levels of response error to the survey Richman et al. use can explain the entirety of their results.

Jesse Richman is now selling these dubious techniques to the Trump administration, where his latest finding that 18,000 non-citizens voted in Kansas was based on a sample size of 37. At best the authors wanted some limelight and were willing to slander a scapegoated minority to get it. Perhaps Jesse Richman and his co-collaborators are not hateful xenophobes and are just incredibly naïve. Perhaps they didn’t know they’d become the academic poster children of voter suppression. Whether bigots or fools they do not deserve the positions they hold at accredited universities. They should have known better than to publish such junk. That they did anyway speaks volumes as to their lack of ethical standards and/or lack of understanding of statistics.

An open letter signed by more than 150 political scientists states that “this paper has been shown to be incorrect”. Jesse Richman has offered numerous responses to the criticism on his blog.

Appeaser Watch / The Economist Misses the Point

More like Appeasement, the British Problem

I read the economist quite a bit. Their cover story an issue ago was one of the worst pieces of writing by the Economist since they advocated for the second Iraq war. They appease protectionist and mercantilism instincts with some very fuzzy logic, arguing that it is a bad thing that Germany has a current account surplus (basically a trade surplus). The title says "Why Its Surplus is Damaging the World Economy" but I read it and I still don't know.

The closest they come to explaining anything is: 

"For a large economy at full employment to run a current-account surplus in excess of 8% of GDP puts unreasonable strain on the global trading system. To offset such surpluses and sustain enough aggregate demand to keep people in work, the rest of the world must borrow and spend with equal abandon."

Yes a current account surplus must be balanced out by deficits elsewhere, but why is it a bad thing for the rest of us that a surplus exists in one country? Again, a current account deficit in a country means it also has a capital account surplus (trade deficit means investment surplus, see prior post), so there's no net impact on GDP. Is this just some puritanical anti-debt instinct?

Their solution to the problem they can't fully explain seems to be for Germany to raise wages (which are set by the market and already among the fastest growing in the EU since the Great Recession) so that their exports are less competitive so that their neighbors can catch a break. Why isn't the solution for Germany's neighbors to reform (as Germany did in the late 1990s / early 2000s) and become more competitive? How would a less competitive Germany (such as it was pre-reform) be good for the world?

Anyway, Scott Sumner, one of my fav economists (as I've said before) beat me to this (again). So here's the highlights:

"The Economist confuses trade and aggregate demand, which are entirely unrelated issues...

We know that Italy, Greece, and Spain were not "forced" to run large deficits by Germany, because Italy and Spain have sizable surpluses, and Greece's current account is roughly balanced...

It's true that at a global level a German CA surplus must be offset by an equal deficit elsewhere. But the German economy is only a very small percentage of the global economy, so a Germany CA surplus of 8% of GDP implies a "rest of world" deficit of far less than 1% of GDP...

Even in a world with zero debt, there would be large and persistent CA imbalances as assets are bought and sold across borders."

Perhaps its noticeable, but international accounts is not a strong suite of mine. That's because of how little it matters. This kind of junk used to be important in the world of fixed exchange rates (such as the Gold Standard or the Bretton Woods System), where a change in the balance of a country's international accounts could force it to abandon its fixed exchange rate peg. But in a world of flexible exchange rates set by the market this stuff just takes care of itself and has no significant implications for anything. So from a global perspective Germany's trade surplus is insignificant. 

However, the Euro area is a fixed exchange rate regime. This is the real issue that the Economist missed, instead they are freaking out about symptoms rather than the cause. If Germany and its Euro area trading partners had flexible exchange rates Germany's currency would most likely appreciate and its partners' depreciate, making Germany less competitive relative to them. The result would be a lower trade surplus for Germany. Instead Germany's Euro area trading partners can only become more competitive through structural reform or lower wages or the dumb suggestion that Germany make itself less competitive.

If there are any problems within the Euro zone due to Germany's trade surplus with the world, it is because of the fixed exchange rate regime. But even this may be meaningless; as noted above Italy and Spain also run surpluses despite being in a fixed exchange rate regime with Germany. So why is Germany's surplus a problem? The best answer I can find is that it isn't. Stop appeasing protectionists. Free trade forever.