Off Topic: The Intersection of Reading and Data

I’ve been fortunate enough recently to be able to take an extended leave of absence that’s allowed me to pour over electoral data, as well as actually keep up with my extended reading list. It’s the closest thing to a sabbatical I’ll likely experience and it’s been mostly great. Having the opportunity to actually sit and watch the news cycle in real time I’m increasingly convinced that much of Twitter is repetitive noise, with a few good articles waiting to be mined. I don’t have any interest in blasting journalists, but an intransigent Congress has made most reporting speculation about electoral tactics and messaging. Coverage is almost entirely process, because there’s no substance to cover, not because journalists are evil. Twitter just amplifies this coverage that I think makes it seem like political coverage is worse than it is.

I’ve always held that reading whether academic work, traditional journalism, or blogs like this one, is both necessary to be a useful member of society, and to also grow as a person. I don’t think that people become conservative over time as a function of the aging process. Rather, the fact that people stop encountering new ideas and stop having their beliefs challenged, makes them closed off from political movements and social undercurrents, they’d otherwise have seen. With the exception of Transparent, the overwhelming majority of support for Trans rights has come from academic circles publishing in Slate, Tumblr, and progressive publications like The American Prospect, or Mother Jones. It’s a movement that outside of parades and protests in major cities, likely goes unnoticed in suburban America. If you’re not actively keeping up with one of several publications you’re missing a trove of information about the evolution of social norms. As a devout Clinton supporter, there’s quite a lot that could be improved in her rhetoric and policy prescriptions if a top Clinton aid were skimming through Jacobin, a smart quarterly, with their fingers on the pulse of young ‘middle class’ America. I’ll freely admit that other than David Frum’s Twitter account and the occasional post from Daniel Larson at The American Conservative, I’m out of step with what’s left of the intellectual conservative movement.

This form of writing has yet to really engage with the growing empiricism and ‘data science’ you see at FiveThirtyEight, or the really great collection of sports analytics writing like Chris B Brown, Kirk Goldsberry, and Chase Stuart. Nate Cohn in my view has easily been the best at contextualizing electoral data from the primaries to really explain the dynamics of the 2016 race. Harry Enten has really done a remarkable job tracking polls and helping you see through the smokescreen of erratic pollsters like ARG that have massively biased polling averages. Writers like Jamelle Bouie are great at using social science literature and empirical data to map out the electorate particularly the Democratic coalition that isn’t fraying, but is certainly starting to diverge. As the Democratic Party seeks to capture the American center, its leftwing is firmly standing its ground. There’s an enormous amount of political writing, and a lot of it is actually really good, but it’s only getting to people with an unrealistic and unsustainable drive to sift through the noise.

If you’re not willing to engage with academic literature (a sentiment with which I’m very sympathetic), to grasp American politics requires both a passion for American democracy and a statistical expertise that likely has to be taught in school, but that undergraduate courses largely fail to support. I’m currently spending countless hours everyday following the news, and I feel that the majority of what I encounter doesn’t add anything to what was written the day before. The more time I spend reading the news, the less satiated I am by it.

Part of my frustration though is that it is extraordinarily difficult to both write well while still presenting and describing even simple empirical data. To be politically literate requires you to understand both, while very few people have the capacity to do it. We need more academics who can actually write to broader audiences, but the kind of person who writes a 400 page dissertation is not likely the best at condensing information into a digestible format. We’re a long way from sorting this out.