Davos Newbies

Richard Edelman on the current, ludicrous Forbes anti-blog cover story:

The Forbes cover story in the November 14 edition, titled, “Attack of the Blogs! They Destroy Brands and Wreck Lives Is There Any Way To Fight Back?” is a stunning attempt to create a parallel reality. In a style reminiscent of former President Richard Nixon, the article skewers the blogosphere as “the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns.”

Is this the beginning of an effort to deposition blogs? Is it simply a case of Forbes trying to take an opposite stand from Business Week, which published a very positive article, “Blogs Will Change Your Business,” in the May 2, 2005 edition? Whatever the motive, the takeaway for corporate executives is beware the blogosphere, because as the article states, “The combination of massive reach and legal invulnerability makes corporate character assassination easy to carry out.” This is exactly the wrong message at the wrong time.

I increasingly find myself turning to Political Arithmetik for guidance on matters political.

Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, exposes the often-wrong conclusions of Conventional Wisdom through his clear graphs and explanations. He has had two posts recently on the so-called second term presidential jinx. The first shows how few data points there are, and even with those, the results are ambiguous.

It is hard to argue that 3 out of 5 cases constitute a clear pattern of poor second terms. Rather it looks like a toss up.

There is another problem with the second term jinx argument: it ignores those presidents who had a first term “jinx” and never got to serve the second term. Recognizing this selection bias in second term jinxes wipes out any remaining argument for systematic decline in the second term.

We have five postwar presidents with 2nd terms (not counting Bush) three of whom do clearly worse in the second term. Compare that with the four ONE term postwar presidents who had such bad first terms they couldn’t win reelection. (Johnson, and Ford are special cases, neither initially elected but both eligible for another term). So it looks to me like four presidents had “jinxes” in the first term, and three of five had “jinxes” in the second term. It isn’t a jinx.

When you do bad in the first term, you don’t get to have a second. When you do ok in the first, there is still a just about even chance (3/5) that the second term is worse than the first. I conclude there is no systematic difference between first and second terms, at least in presidential approval ratings.

The second post expands the argument.

So, if the second term is not generally worse than the first in mean or median approval, and the second term is not generally more variable than the first (2 of 5 are more variable), and if in the face of scandal some presidents can rebound (Reagan and Clinton), though others resign (Nixon) I think we should say that, at least when it comes to public opinion, there is precious little evidence to support commentary which presumes a systematically worse second term than first.

It’s so wonderful to find someone who looks dispassionately at the data, rather than parroting the notion that all presidential second terms are a disaster. And there’s the bonus of the great information graphics. Definitely right at the top of my reading list these days.

Joel Spolsky provides a valuable lesson even for those of us not in the software industry: “It’s easy to spend on marketing and PR, since that just takes cash, but it’s hard to spend on software development, because that actually takes time and talent.”

Every business has the part that takes time and talent, where intelligent spending is hard. Joel doesn’t seem to make the distinction between intelligent spending and dumb spending, which is always easy, but I think it’s implied in his statement. Wearing my editor’s hat, I’ve always found it difficult to find enough good journalists to lavish my money on. There are times when I’d like to spend more money, but I just can’t find the right person, with the time to do it.

It’s a small thing I know, but I think one of the great glories of Britain is Araucaria’s alphabetical crosswords.

Perhaps a half dozen times a year, the greatest of Guardian crossword setters provides an extra dose of ingenuity. Solvers have to figure out the answers to clues and fit them, jigsaw puzzle style, into the grid. The one thing helping the solver is that Araucaria provides the first letter of each answer (letters A to Z, hence the name).

If you like this sort of thing — and I used to eagerly open my Saturday Guardian in the hope that this week would be the alphabetical — you won’t need to look up araucaria.