Ensaio (mínimo) sobre a preguiza

Let me paraphrase a tweet I saw today:

The Spanish political crisis is a slow-moving disaster that is too slow for many to be noticed and yet is has grown so huge now.

I cannot think of a better example than the drift towards an obsessive nationalist paranoia of two of the main right-wing newspapers in Spain. Just take a look at two recent covers:

ABC (daily circulation, 243,154 in 2011): The Anglo-saxon press charges at Spain (May 20, 2012)

La Razón (daily circulation, 109,166 in 2011): Gibraltar, on the warpath (May 19, 2012)

Not that I was expecting more from an already yellowing press in Spain, but this blatant diversionary strategy surpasses my wildest and most pessimistic dreams.

I am starting to think that sometimes you are better-off not asking and just guessing the answers to a survey instead:

We report four findings of note. First, consistent with research on social desirability, in each election a meaningful fraction of those who say they will vote, do not. Second, in each election a surprising proportion of respondents who say they will not vote, in fact, do vote – a proportion that rivals the proportion who erroneously predict that they will vote but, in fact, do not vote. Third, past vote history is a much better predictor of turnout than self-reported intention to vote. [...] Fourth, using a survey experiment we rule out two possible memory-based explanations for why respondents are so inaccurate at predicting their likelihood of voting.

The paper can be found here (via Francisco Cantú).

Yes, we are all thinking the same thing: which systematic factors explain the decision not to cooperate with the interviewer?

“Every citizen is obliged to resist the enemy with weapons of all kinds, not to obey their orders and directives and to harm them by any possible means if they try to enforce them”

Landsturm decree of April 1813.

Hippler considers this document to be the Magna Carta of partisan war, in the sense that it reflects “a state that organized its own abolition in a partisan and insurrectional war.” However, I would have probably chosen the Spanish “Reglamento de partidas y cuadrillas” of 1808, that tried to regulate the formation of guerrillas during the Peninsula war. Besides, the Reglamento has this particular realist touch of appealing to bandits and smugglers by allowing the irregular units to keep the plunder for themselves.

I am very interested lately in predictive modelling:

Vast amounts of data are being generated in many fields, and the statistician’s job is to make sense of it all: to extract important patterns and trends, and understand “what the data says.” We call this learning from data. (Hastie et al., 2001).

This quote reflects an approach that is the exact opposite of my training as political scientist, at least to the extent that we are only interested in statistical relations that either prove or disprove a theoretical claim: the data can only say things in the language of a previously specified theory. However, I think that it is worth spending some time trying to understand the other side of the coin, mostly because I believe that there are very valuable lessons about the idea of generalization from data waiting there for us. That is part of the reason I have decided to devote some attention to Machine Learning in my free time. I would normally work through some basic textbooks on my own just to satisfy my curiosity, but this time I have decided to try a new approach: I have open a blog and a code repository to which I will upload some of my (elementary) practice code.

I am a beginner in the subject and in some of the technologies I will be using, and my daytime job is moving me in a completely different direction. That is why I think it is convenient to remark that I do not plan to become anything close to an expert in the field: I just want to be acquainted what is going on with the sexiest job in the world.

Any suggestion will be more than welcome.

A few weeks ago I was able to install Python on my server. Since then, I have been using it to run very simple scrapers via a cronjob, to collect all kinds of information in real time, such as mentions to coups d’état on Twitter. It is a very simple way to feel the pulse of some small events and rumors that otherwise would be very difficult to follow. Who knows, the dataset may even become handy for some future research projects.

The next figure shows one possible output: the number of tweets using any of the words that I am currently tracking, separated by the country that is mentioned in the text. Obviously, not all tweets contain meaningful geographical information. In order to make it readable, I restricted the histogram to those countries above the 75 percentile of mentions.

The code is here.

My work on the military is mostly theoretical. In fact, I prefer to call it “coercive apparatus” just to avoid looking like a battles-and-uniforms nerd. Fortunately, this inclination does not stop me from reading about actual military organizations.

Yesterday, I spent a few minutes skimming through some of the websites of the U.S. Army, and found something that struck me as surprising: the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff has a considerable amount of public presence, to the point that he has a blog, and accounts in Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. I am not going to equate social media with openness towards society, but it made me think for a moment about how radically different the situation is in Spain. The U.S. military  is a perfectly normalized institution, and everybody thinks it is natural that its highest-ranking officer addresses the public from time to time. On the contrary, in Spain –and we had this experience not even three days ago– we all instinctively tremble every time a top brass appears in the media, as if we assumed he is doomed to say something terribly irresponsible. Think about it this way: the U.S. is the kind of country that has a healthy and growing academic literature on the political attitudes of its soldiers and officers; while in Spain we have bizarre discussions every time it is suggested that it might be a good idea to ask ours about their ideological preferences.

I bought a used tablet (an iPad 2) a month ago, and the experience so far has been extremely positive. I am using it for almost everything in my daily routine that does not involve writing. The most significant change for me is that I now read considerably more than before. The gadget is always in my backpack, which means that I can use it to fill every spare moment I find, and, more importantly, it is fantastic to adapt my readings materials to whatever I fancy at the moment. Taking into account that half of my work consists in reading, it constitutes a invaluable improvement in my productivity. I obviously miss the touch of the dead-tree format, but this is work we are taking about, so I do not mind leaving those caprices as special treats for the holidays.

I am still figuring out the ideal workflow for me, but it is likely that it will involve three elements:

• Papers2. It is a nice solution for storing and organizing documents, even though it does not integrate well with LaTeX and it is awfully limited in terms of annotation. It is the lesser evil among the document managers I know.
• Dropbox.
• iAnnotate. A fantastic PDF reader for iPad.

Any suggestion will be most welcome.

The recent events in Mali perfectly exemplify one recurrent type of military coup in which a faction of the army removes the incumbent, and installs a transitional government that tries to step down as soon as possible. Indeed, the agreement signed two days ago between the military junta and the ECOWAS is representative of the strategic calculations that typically arise in the post-coup stage.

The contract establishes that the rebel military men will not be held accountable for their actions, thus providing the necessary condition to ensure that they peacefully return to the barracks. The commitment problem on the side of the civilians is obvious: why are they going to tie their hands and not prosecute the coup leaders once, or better yet if, the new government strengthens its support within the coercive apparatus? It is obviously difficult for civilians to let bygones be bygones. No matter how usual the Leyes de Punto Final are, we see that they are repelled as soon as civilians can ensure no retaliation from the former rebels. It is likely that, in this case, the weakness of the Malian state might be enough to enforce them, specially if the military government does not initiate a repression process against its political rivals.

But the problem has another side to consider. Is it a good idea for civilians to let go and forgive? The lack of punishment poses a terrible incentive for other disgruntled officers, as it reduces the cost of subverting what it should be the First Law of the military: “Thou shalt not involve thyself in politics.” I am curious about how events evolve until the promised elections take place.

ABC, the oldest of the conservative Spanish newspapers, runs today an op-ed defending that a Monarchy is the best political system we can hope for. It usually does not trouble me to see that there is still some need to debate about fundamentals of modern political theory on this time and age. What is special about this piece is that everything in it, including its writing style, has a scent of the 19th century. In fact, I would say that some of the arguments would be outdated even by the Restoration standards.

Just a tibdit (my own translation):

A Republic is a more natural system, i.e. it is more elemental, more backward-looking. Everything in civilization is a subtraction from what is natural. Everything that is more natural is also more inferior. Common-pool goods are more natural than property. Everything in civilization –Kings, property, the marriage contract– adds an overlaying element of modernity and complication and artificiality as a brake and limit to such naturalness.

I find fascinating that monarchists in Spain do not feel the necessity to modernize their rationalizations.

I am still not sure why this book ended up on my shelf, but I can assure you that it is one of the most enjoyable readings of this year so far. Piece of advice: do not trust the title. It is indeed a very detailed (813-pages-detailed) description of the decline of the British aristocracy, but I prefer to think of it as a history of the super-rich and as a summary of conservative political theory:

For members of the titled and genteel classes, this was the fundamental and most powerful objection against plutocracy: it was neither decent nor disinterested. The justification for government by a landed and leisured class was –as Gladstone had always believed– that they ruled out of a sense of duty and in the national interest. They were not men on the make: the government of the country was to be carried on, not ripped off. [...] Moreover, they [financiers, capitalists, speculators] usually possessed no territorial stake in the country, no feeling of historical association, no loyalty to a locality.

For those of you with theoretical inclinations: compare this paragraph with the standard models of political delegation.