Felix Salmon

Ezra Klein has a good summary of the latest CBO budget projections, which show that the national debt really isn’t going to be a problem at any point in the foreseeable future. The deficit isn’t going away, of course: the smallest it’s likely to get, according to the CBO, is $378 billion, or 2.1% of GDP, in 2015. But that’s entirely manageable, and puts the national debt-to-GDP ratio on a pretty flat trajectory over the medium term.

Of course, in the real world, none of this is actually going to happen as forecast. It’s hard enough to forecast what’s going to happen in 2013, let alone what’s going to happen in 2023: the CBO projection for this year’s deficit has fallen from $845 billion to $642 billion just in the past three months, so it’s worth taking all future forecasts with a large pinch of salt — especially since the one thing that’s certain is that there will be substantial changes to US fiscal policy between now and 2023.

This chart contrasts quite dramatically with the bipartisan consensus that America’s national debt — and especially the way that it is built up by the entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — are serious problems. As Paul Krugman explains wonderfully in his latest essay for the NYRB, America’s social safety net was actually a key channel through which countercyclical government stimulus entered the economy in the wake of the financial crisis. And given how difficult it is to legislate expansionary fiscal policy on the fly, there’s a strong purely economic case for keeping such programs.

With any luck, then, this chart will help us to stop bellyaching about the debt, and create a bit of space where we can try to work out how to really get the debt-to-GDP ratio down over the long term, by concentrating on increasing the denominator rather than decreasing the numerator. But don’t hold your breath. Even the CBO takes pains to warn of debt problems in the future, saying that a debt-to-GDP ratio around 75% “would have serious negative consequences” in terms of interest expenses, lower wages, and worse:

A large debt increases the risk of a fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose so much confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget that the government would be unable to borrow at affordable rates.

In the USA, this risk is de minimis, barely even worth mentioning: not only do we print our own currency, but in general US government bonds are universally considered the safest assets on the planet. So what’s the CBO playing at, here?

Krugman has a fascinating explanation for what might be going on:

Pre-Keynesian business cycle theorists loved to dwell on the lurid excesses that take place in good times, while having relatively little to say about exactly why these give rise to bad times or what you should do when they do. Keynes reversed this priority; almost all his focus was on how economies stay depressed, and what can be done to make them less depressed.

I’d argue that Keynes was overwhelmingly right in his approach, but there’s no question that it’s an approach many people find deeply unsatisfying as an emotional matter. And so we shouldn’t find it surprising that many popular interpretations of our current troubles return, whether the authors know it or not, to the instinctive, pre-Keynesian style of dwelling on the excesses of the boom rather than on the failures of the slump.

My opinion is that it’s even simpler than that. Krugman naturally sees macroeconomic problems in terms of cycles: there are booms and busts, and there are emotional reasons why economists prefer to concentrate on the problems with booms, and apply the solutions to those problems (spend less money) even during busts where they are contraindicated.

But I think the general view of the public, and of our mainstream elected representatives, is even simpler. These people aren’t economists, and don’t think in terms of cycles; they certainly can’t clearly articulate the difference between a financial crisis and a fiscal crisis. Everything just reduces to “we spent too much, we should spend less”, which makes intuitive sense: the biggest problem with Keynes is that, just like Ricardo, a lot of what he discovered is deeply counterintuitive.

In which case, Krugman’s cyclical arguments are not going to carry the day politically: it’s hard to explain that the right thing to do changes according to various measures of resource utilization. Instead, it might be best, on a tactical political level, just to point at the CBO’s debt-to-GDP chart and say look, we’ve solved this problem now. Even if the CBO wouldn’t really agree with that interpretation.

Paul Murphy, watching Cypriot finance Minister Michael Sarris returning empty-handed from Moscow, says that “Medvedev and co could not have played a worse hand during this crisis — and it’s not immediately clear why”. His point is that the most likely outcome right now — he calls it “popping the red pill” — is that big depositors at Laiki Bank (read: rich Russians) are likely to lose some 40% of their money. Since that will make Russia very unhappy, why is Russia doing nothing to prevent it?

I don’t pretend to understand Russian politics, but this move seems to me to be a classic high-risk, high-aggression play; think of Medvedev as a geopolitical hedge-fund manager or poker player, and it begins to make a bit more sense.

Firstly, it’s worth noting that Russia is actually moving backwards on the amount of help it’s likely to extend to Cyprus. When the bailout plan was first announced, it included Russia extending its existing €2.5 billion loan to the country by five years, as well as reducing that loan’s interest rate. Now, Russia is refusing to agree even to that.

More generally, Russia is taking an absolutist stance with respect to Cyprus. No, we won’t restructure the money you owe us. No, we won’t buy a bank off you. No, we aren’t interested in your natural-gas reserves. And underlying it all, of course, an unspoken — and all the more powerful for being unspoken — physical threat to any Cypriot who causes powerful Russians to lose billions of euros.

Why would Russia be acting this way towards Cyprus? The obvious answer is that Russia knows exactly who’s sitting around this poker table: it’s not Cyprus that they’re playing, it’s the EU. If Russia were to enter into good-faith negotiations with Cyprus right now, that would help the EU, by reducing the amount of EU support that the island nation needs. Moreover, any deal that Russia made with Cyprus could be vetoed by Germany, or the Eurogroup, or the ECB, or even possibly the IMF. Russia is too big and too important to try to do deals which could be forcibly unraveled on a German finance minister’s whim.

And while we have a pretty good idea what the Russian prime minister is saying to Sarris in Moscow, we have a much less clear idea of what other Russians are saying to Cypriot lawmakers in Nicosia. The Cypriot capital is reportedly full of mysterious Russians right now, and it might not be all that hard for them to nobble a vote in parliament — especially given that just about any vote is going to be massively unpopular with voters. Remember that if the Cypriot parliament does nothing, then Cyprus collapses; we’re going to need a big show of political unity to prevent that. And so far, the only political unity we’ve seen has been against the bailout, not for it.

Which brings me to the blue pill, as described by Murphy:

Cyprus now has a binary choice: become a gimp state for Russian gangsta finance, or turn fully towards Europe, close down much of its shady banking sector and rebuild its economy on something more sustainable.

Murphy says it’s “obvious” which choice Cyprus should take. But it’s probably much less obvious to Cyprus’s parliament. As Paul Krugman says, Cyprus is very attached to its shady banking sector. And what exactly does Murphy have in mind when he talks about an economy based “on something more sustainable”? Natural gas? Well, given Cypriot national ties, it’s easy to see which company has pole position in terms of getting that mandate: Gazprom.

All of which is to say that there’s a real possibility — maybe not an outright probability, but certainly a good chance — that Cyprus will end up taking the blue pill rather than the red pill, and becoming a Russian client state, either inside or outside the euro. After all, Cyprus is a Eurogroup client state right now, and has wound up in this sorry place as a result. If it pops the red pill, it will have essentially no autonomy for the foreseeable future in any case.

It’s also easy to imagine that Putin’s Russia views its relations with the EU as something of a zero-sum game. Russia also has a more than 150-year obsession with acquiring influence, if not outright control, over warm-water ports in Southern Europe. Looked at that way, the loss of Cyprus from the EU to Russia would be a clear loss to the EU and a clear win for Russia.

Which, in turn, might explain why Russia is doing absolutely nothing which might help the EU. It’s making a risky and aggressive move to essentially seize Cyprus from the hands of Europe, and to gain an important geopolitical foothold in the eurozone. The downside to that move is that if Cyprus pops the red pill, then a lot of Russians, especially the ones with deposits at Laiki, could lose a lot of money. But even if that does happen, Russia will be waiting patiently on the sidelines, with a lot of new money if needed, ready to snap up Cypriot assets at fire-sale prices.

There’s no doubt that the best outcome for Cyprus, and for the EU, would be for Russia to extend its help now, before Cyprus’s banks reopen on Tuesday. But Russia doesn’t want what’s best for Cyprus, or for the EU: Russia wants what’s best for Russia. And the way it’s acting reminds me of nothing so much as a classic Wall Street bear raid, designed to drive down the price of something you want to be able to pick up very, very cheap. What’s more, it might even work.

The fight between the Post Office and Congress is a very peculiar one. Normally, when the government owns some incredibly profligate business, it’s Congress which tries to impose efficiency gains and fiscal discipline, while the business insists that all of its spending is absolutely necessary and that it has already cut to the bone. In this case, however, the roles are reversed: the Post Office wants to change, and it’s Congress which is stopping it from doing so.

The latest move from the Post Office is a bold one: to abolish Saturday delivery unilaterally, starting August 1. This is a bit like Citicorp announcing that it was merging with Travelers: it’s illegal, but that’s not going to stop them, and the clear expectation is that somehow Congress will make it legal, before or shortly after it happens in reality.

As Jesse Lichtenstein details in his amazing 10,000-word Esquire story about the Post Office, the organization does actually have a detailed plan for becoming fully self-reliant over the next few years. Abolishing Saturday delivery is just one small part of that plan; all of it, by law, requires Congressional buy-in. The plan may or may not be successful, but, as they say, plan beats no plan. The big problem is simple, but huge: Congress isn’t playing along, and instead is just making matters worse, unhelpfully micromanaging everything from postage rates to delivery schedules to health-care contributions.

That’s why I love the idea of the Post Office doing something that’s clearly illegal, putting the ball squarely in Congress’s court. The idea is both delicious and dangerous: go ahead an implement the plan whether Congress likes it or not. And then dare them to bring down the hammer, or simply capitulate to the inevitable. They might not like the latter option, but the former would surely be worse for all concerned.

Today’s announcement says to me that relations between the Post Office and Congress have deteriorated so much that the Post Office has given up on getting Congressional buy-in for its plans. At the same time, the plans are necessary (sufficient is a different question) if the Post Office is going to survive for decades to come. And so the Post Office is just going ahead with what needs to be done, and has decided to treat Congress as an adversary, rather than as a key partner in its evolution.

The risks of this move are obvious: Congress is the government, and has awesome powers, should it choose to use them. But there’s a very good chance, here, that Congress will blink first, and end up giving the Post Office at least some of what it wants. Including five-day delivery. Sometimes, you’ve got to get tough with those legislators.

The main problem with trying to explain the fiscal cliff, as I see it, is that people get far too caught up in the details — tax deductions, tax hikes, spending cuts, debt ceilings, and the like. Which are all important, but they’re not fundamentally what the austerity bomb is about. Rather, the reason that everybody’s worried about the effects of the fiscal cliff is simple Keynsian mathematics: if we cut spending and raise taxes, that means less economic activity — and a nasty recession, just when we can least afford it.

So this video is my attempt — with a big red dog, and Superman, and Batman — to get back to what really matters, and to try to underscore something quite interesting, which has been lost in the politics, which is that in terms of the deficit, both Obama and Boehner want something very similar. The deficit is big now — about $1.1 trillion — and they both want it to come down by roughly $200 billion, which is much less than what will happen automatically if they do nothing. In that case, the deficit would plunge by a disastrous $500 billion or so.

Deficits are a good thing, in terms of economic stimulus, and taking away a large deficit too quickly is a great way of causing a recession. I do understand that at some point deficits become a bad thing, especially if the bond markets decide that there’s a real question mark over whether all that borrowing can ever be repaid. But we’re not at that point yet. So it falls to Barack Obama and John Boehner to come together to prevent an entirely avoidable recession. They can do it, and they will do it. But we’ll have to suffer a lot of sturm und drang — not to mention gimmicky YouTube videos — before we get there.

The dominant narrative, the day after the presidential election, is the triumph of the quants. As Simon Jackman notes, essentially every single poll-averaging quant — Jackman himself, Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, you name it — managed to call every single state plus the presidential election: an astonishing 51/51 success rate.

That was part skill and part luck, as all such things are. Here’s the final electoral-vote probability distribution from Nate Silver, the most famous of the quants:

Obama ended up winning 332 electoral votes, assuming that he ends up winning Florida; that was the single most likely outcome in Silver’s model, with a probability of just over 20%. But the mode outcome isn’t the median outcome: the official Nate Silver forecast was that Obama would get 313 votes. Roughly 80% of the time, under Silver’s model, he would have ended up calling at least one state wrong. So Silver did get lucky.

Silver is the most visible of the quants, partly because of his perch at the NYT, partly because he has a new book out, and partly because he’s very good at taking his complex mathematical model and turning it into bite-sized English-language blog posts. If you think that the value of Nate Silver is in the model, you’re missing the most important part: there are lots of people with models, and most of those models are pretty similar to each other. The thing which sets Silver apart from the rest is that he can write: he can take a model and turn it into a narrative, walking his readers through to his conclusions.

Which brings me to Michael Scherer’s great story about the Obama-campaign quants: the people who A/B tested everything and who built an astonishingly formidable ground game. Rather than just blanketing the airwaves with ads they thought were good, the Obama campaign was constantly testing, quantifying, and targeting.

At heart, the campaign was marrying quantitative skills with storytelling, to unbeatable effect. Which stories should the campaign tell, to any given group of people? How should it tell those stories? And who should it get to deliver those stories? The database answered all those questions:

Cash raised online came through an intricate, metric-driven e-mail campaign in which dozens of fundraising appeals went out each day. Here again, data collection and analysis were paramount. Many of the e-mails sent to supporters were just tests, with different subject lines, senders and messages. Inside the campaign, there were office pools on which combination would raise the most money, and often the pools got it wrong…

In the final weeks of the campaign, people who had downloaded an app were sent messages with pictures of their friends in swing states. They were told to click a button to automatically urge those targeted voters to take certain actions, such as registering to vote, voting early or getting to the polls. The campaign found that roughly 1 in 5 people contacted by a Facebook pal acted on the request, in large part because the message came from someone they knew…

“We were able to put our target voters through some really complicated modeling, to say, O.K., if Miami-Dade women under 35 are the targets, [here is] how to reach them,” said one official. As a result, the campaign bought ads to air during unconventional programming, like Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23, skirting the traditional route of buying ads next to local news programming. How much more efficient was the Obama campaign of 2012 than 2008 at ad buying? Chicago has a number for that: “On TV we were able to buy 14% more efficiently … to make sure we were talking to our persuadable voters,” the same official said.

The thing that Silver and the Obama campaign have in common, then, is that they used their databases to tell stories. Or, more to the point, their databases and models were used so that Americans could tell stories to each other. Silver’s site became a virtual watercooler, especially towards the end of the campaign — a place where people would gather to talk about what was possible and what was likely. Nate’s voice helped to guide the discussions, but the real reason that he got such astonishing traffic was not that people wanted to read what he was writing, so much as that people were using his model as a framework within which to hold their own idiosyncratic discussions.

Similarly, the Obama campaign put enormous effort into making sure that when phone calls were made, the right people were talking to each other. Scripts are bad; one-to-one human connections are good. This is the age of Facebook, where big data meets the social graph: I’m sure the Romney campaign had a big database too, but it lacked the same storytelling ability, and lacked the same degree of insight into the possible connections that could be drawn within the universe of supporters and potential supporters.

Here’s another important part of the Scherer article:

For all the praise Obama’s team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists. It was like the FBI and the CIA before 9/11: the two camps never shared data. “We analyzed very early that the problem in Democratic politics was you had databases all over the place,” said one of the officials. “None of them talked to each other.” So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states.

This gave the Obama campaign a massive advantage over the Romney campaign. The Obama campaigns data was centralized and coordinated, while the Romney campaign relied in large part on SuperPACs which by law could not have access to the central database and could not be coordinated.

SuperPACs are dumb money. Their cash can almost never be effectively spent, because they’re not on the inside of the campaign. What’s more, because they’re not official campaigns, they always pay top dollar for their TV ad spots, rather than the discounted rates that stations are forced to offer to candidates. The Obama campaign determined, at various points, that if they approached potential donors with the message that Romney had a fundraising lead, that would help Obama raise more money for his own campaign. But the truth was that Romney’s fundraising lead was never particularly useful, because it wasn’t married to a coherent strategy and database. If anything, it just helped Obama raise more cash.

Obama is never going to run another campaign, so the advantage that Obama had over Romney does not necessarily mean that in the 2016 race the Democratic candidate is going to have a similar advantage. But we do know that the Democrats have the technology. And, at least for the time being, the Republicans don’t.