The "Roe Effect" Hypothesis

Have you seen this "Roe Effect" hypothesis? The idea is that those not born are not a random sample of the population, being on average more poor, black, disorganized, etc. Those that are born are somewhat select, so to speak. I don't know if this has a lot of validity, but it certainly has some. Most speculation about this has focused on crime rates, but there is also the possibility of a political effect:

Generation Roe
For another interesting finding of the Post/ABC poll, look at this table, which shows the breakdown of registered voters' presidential preferences by age:

	Bush	Kerry
18-30	53%	41%
31-34	50%	44%
45-60	53%	43%
61+	48%	45%
Total	51%	44%

(To see the original data, go to the link atop this item and then select a breakdown by age.)

Bush's overall margin is 7%, but his 12% margin among 18- to 30-year-olds exceeds that of all other age groups. This is the group born since 1973, when the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.

The Internet Advantage

http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20040913-090118-2482r.htm

The article above is very good, capturing the essence of the internet advantage.

The classic statement of the principle of distributed knowledge was by Freidrich Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society". [HTML format] American Economic Review. Vol. 35, No. 4. (Sept): 519-530. [PDF format version]

Hayek was talking about the necessary failure of centralized economic planning, but the point was the same: "...the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all separate individuals possess." (In other words, the thousands of people out there running donut shops embody a pool of information about making and selling donuts far beyond what any central planner could hope to acquire.)

In a market economy, this widely scattered knowledge is brought to bear on decision-making by the price system, in which prices embody and reflect the current sum total of relevant knowledge, and do so in real time. (This morning's donut price embodies a huge amount of information relating to the current and projected costs of flour, sugar, donut-making equipment, and a hundred other things only someone in the donut business would be aware of.)

The internet is a further development of the principle, but now with information transmitted directly, rather than being reflected in an indicator.

Unless they make use of internet capabilities themselves, a news organization like CBS can never hope to acquire any significant fraction of the enormous fund of specialized information about, say, typographic and document technology that exists in the heads, hands, and experience of the thousands of typographic and document professionals and practitioners that are scattered across the population.

CBS, and Dan Rather in particular, clearly thought they could shelter themselves from a journalistic debacle by the old techniques of information packaging and control, providing selected experts in scripted presentations. But the internet's ability to marshal and distill huge quantities of widely distributed information virtually overnight meant that could not succeed.

CBS and Rather didn't know it, but they never had a chance. They were dead the minute those memos hit the web.

Byron

Why John Kerry Cannot Make Up His Mind

http://acuf.org/issues/issue19/040904pol.asp