Amount of money spent on buying advertising in Pennsylvania: about $16 million
Total GDP of Cameroon: about $17 million
Instead of advertising campaigns that basically did nothing to change the electoral math, we could have basically doubled the incomes of a nation of desperately poor Africans. Think about this when they start talking about their poverty policy.
Update Yes, I transposed a decimal. I am an idiot. New invidious comparison: with that money, fifty thousand of the world's poorest citizens could have been pulled out of deep poverty for a year.
Now, I didn't look this up or anything, but do you seriously believe that there is ANY country where the GDP per capita is $1? WTF?
While we're at invidious comparisons, I'm sure the organic farming movement in America has starved far more Africans than Hillary's staying in the Democratic primary. Sheesh.
gdp at PPP of cameroon is actually $40B https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/cm.html
Your point is fairly taken -- in principle -- but you're off by a factor of about 1000.
Cameroon is a country larger than California with 20 million people and an estimated 2007 GDP (official exchange rate) of over $20 billion. Twice that at PPP.
$17 million would make a good small-scale grant though - you could replace a fleet of a couple hundred government 4x4s, or treat for a year maybe a fifth of the people who need urgent treatment for AIDS.
I think your old employer has a unit that serves up statistics like this, or failing that you can look them up at the CIA's World Factbook, or any of a half dozen US Govt. or UN sites.
$17 bb nominal according to the World Bank in 2006. Since aid is disbursed in dollars, nominal is the right comparison to use.
Well, we could discuss the amount spent on the entire primary season.
Batman has the answer to this.
Suppose you really, truly want to fight poverty, and that it is the dominant goal of your life, driving your major life decisions, career path, and so on.
I submit that the best tools available to you to do this would be available as the President of the United States. Thus you might focus on becoming President if it were a feasible option for you.
James Gordon of Gotham teaches us the doctrine of escalation: If you bring a knife, so will your opponent. But if you or he brings a gun, then the other must bring a gun as well.
If your political opponent spends $8M on campaign advertising, you may well need to also spend $8M to compete. If your overriding goal is the presidency, and that goal is worth that $8M (or, as in this case, much much more) then aren't you compelled to spend that money? Logically and in terms of the greater good?
What Megan's post does is insinuate, in my mind unfairly, that someone who spends $16M on advertising can't "truly" be committed to helping end poverty because that money could have been put to much better use actually ending poverty. But that insinuation -- she never makes the argument directly -- is refuted by some simple logic.
And the effect of the President of the United States on the global poverty level -- upward or downward as his policies take effect -- is much, much larger than any amount of campaign spending done before he or she is elected.
No, the point is that the primary campaign just wasted a huge amount of money to no benefit to anyone. It might be different if the ad buys had actually had any effect on the outcome.
No, that isn't your point. Your line "Think about this when they start talking about their poverty policy" has nothing to do with "the point" you claim to be making.
You wrote a four sentence post. Out of those four sentences one contained an obvious factual error and you can't explain why you even wrote two others.
That's impressive, even for you.
You didn't "transpose" a decimal. There was no decimal to transpose. Admit it, you confused millions with billions. And for an econoblogger, that should be a fireable offense. Moreover, how could you have possibly thought that Cameroon's GDP was in the millions? You must be one of those people who has no sense of numbers. Sad.
Yes, indeed, everybody who donated to PA campaign could have given it instead to Cameroon. But would it have made them feel as good about themselves?
I contest that as somewhat vague. Specifically:
- Certainly I'm not arguing that there weren't much better uses for all that money. And one could probably actually have pried it out of the hands of it's former owners for worthy causes other than a political primary campaign given enough time, motivation and creativity. I agree with this.
- But the ads didn't have no effect. I'd argue that a lot of Obama's spending did have enough of an effect to lower the 20% initial poll margin (from six weeks ago) to what appears will be a 7-8% margin tonight. That is a noticeable difference and I think the campaign would play out much differently had Hillary won by 20% tonight instead of 7.5% or whatever.
- If your intent is to castigate the wastefulness of the system rather than criticizing the candidates, doesn't the phrase, "Think about this when they start talking about their poverty policy," put the burden of shame on the candidates (who are merely rational actors) and imply that somehow their poverty policies are deficient?
Maybe you should vote for candidates that don't spend money on advertising. There's a whole lot of them out there. Way out there.
I Googled "World Bank GDP" and I got a link to the Bank's PDF file called "Total GDP 2006." I opened the link and it listed every country's total GDP in 2006. Cameroon's (in millions of US dollars) was listed as 18,323. That's not 17 million, even if you didn't understand how to read the figures. It's 18 billion to literate people. But it's not 17 million or 17 billion.
My question to you is where to you get the 17 million figure from? I don't think it's from the World Bank. Did you make it up? Or did you think the name Cameroon is funny so you fudged the numbers a little?
P.S. These comments really need an edit feature somehow so I can go change my "it's" to "its" and make clear that I was replying to Megan's reply.
Also, are you commenters always so pejorative towards Megan? There is a lot more derision and vitriol from some of you than I expected from this variety of blog. Strange.
You can make this argument about anything that other people spend money on that you disagree with.
Seems kind of silly to me, but then again, Hillary's the one starving Africans.
At least the mixer makes bread. Mixers aren't zero-sum.
I don't think it's possible for any item to be "zero-sum" except for zero itself. What exactly are you summing when you talk about a bread mixer?
Are you saying that ad campaign spending is a zero-sum game? If so that only reinforces the point that spending should be matched.
The Game Theory 101 term you are probably grasping for is the Prisoner's Dilemma where if both candidates choose to spend large sums they accomplish less than if both choose to do nothing. But of course, the whole "Dilemma" half of the Dilemma is that one candidate choosing to spend nothing is easily exploitable by the other.
Saying "Mixers aren't zero-sum" is a lot like saying "Bagels aren't isomorphic." Meaningless.
BHO said that ABC's questions kept him from speaking about important issues like jobs. The Cameroon example is relevant in this situation. You don't create jobs by saying 'I care' even if you are BHO. He said he would withdraw from small businessmen $12,500 in FICA taxes, by taxing from 100K to 200K of previously not FICA taxed income. Sending money to Cameroon would create jobs similarly. However, with that money I could invest in a new office building, raise the supply and thus lower the prices of offices and promote job growth but, heh, lets not forget the possibilities of social justice and sending the money to Cameroon.
I think MEgan (unintentionally) brings up an interesting point. What if, instead of buying ads, Obama DID use say, 16 million to donate towards charities? Wouldn't that also get him the desired media attention, as well as providing BETTER media attention?
You cannot lift a country out of poverty by writing a check, as anyone halfway cognizant of the history of Africa can attest.
Where does it end? What do we discuss next? How many people we could lift out of poverty if we took the money spent on professional sports, Hollywood movies, All-Clad pans, and IPods on Third World nations?
We are ALREADY the most generous nation on the planet, so forgive me if I don't choose to wear that hair shirt.
Marcus
PS - Margolis, I'm still waiting for your reply to my last question to you.
Okay, so Clinton and Obama spent $16 million on advertising in Pennsylvania. That money created (or sustained) jobs in Pennsylvania and in the nation as a whole. This is a bad thing?
Sure, it would have created more jobs in Cameroon than in Pennsylvania, but it was donated by people who wanted the candidates to use it to win the election. If they'd intended the money to improve the quality of life in a moderately prosperous African nation, they'd have donated it to the appropriate charities instead.
I had the impression that you were kind of libertarian in outlook, but your post suggests that you've gone over to the dark side.
Someone should really read Nasim Taleb's book about uncertainty where he talks (admittedly a bit hamfistedly) about real world scenarios vs. expert models. In the real world there is a reason you spend 16m on advertising rather than 16m on poverty reduction in Africa. This isn't to say it is a good or moral thing. It may not even be the best strategy. It is certainly not a bad strategy when you are a prohibitive favorite. If you are almost guaranteed to win, you are going to be pretty damn conservative.
Another thing. Am I the only person who is amazed at how little is spend on political campaigns considering their alleged importance? As a percent of GDP how much do we spend on political campaigns? I suspect (and honestly don't know--I'm not in the ad business) that private companies spend a hell of a lot more than politicians in their attempts to educate (or hoodwink depending on your politics) the polis/consumers.
Dyslexia is no excuse but I can't edit (or can I--if so let me know) my posts. Hence my preemptive apology for bad spelling. To wit: what I meant to say is "Am I the only person amazed by how little is spent on political campaigns as a percent of GDP?" If it really, really, mattered, (a) it would take more than a tiny tail to wag the dog; (b) it would be unconstitutional to limit campaign contributions and (c) there would be some meaningful public mechanism to ensure that people without massive financial resources could engage in relevant public debate (maybe teh interwebz?? we shall see). This may be some crazy utopian dream but I think it is a good dream.
You screwed up on the figures.
You are NOT an idiot.
I know what you meant by that, just as I don't think you seriously advocate beating people with 2x4s.
But try to keep in mind some of your commentators take things VERY literally.
Megan, advertising campaigns have a long history of swinging elections. Look up, for example, Johnson's 1964 ad "Daisy", the Swift Boat ads from 2004, or the last-minute attack ads the Canadian Liberals ran in 2004. All three of them won their respective national elections for the ad-running party. And even the less legendary ad campaigns still swing people - the run-of-the-mill ads tend to cancel out, but there's still clear motion imparted from them, and you would definitely know if somebody decided not to run them. Just because political campaigns look irrelevant doesn't mean that they are. There's a hell of a lot going on under the surface, and there's generally a reason why campaigns do what they do more than just "Hey, let's blow $8M of campaign money on nothing!"
Also, aren't you supposed to be at least approximately libertarian? The campaign donors who largely fund these ad campaigns wanted their money to go to a political candidate's campaign, not to poverty reduction. And when are you going to start attacking Coke and GM for their ad budgets - they don't even have the "Getting into office will help us reduce poverty with government money" defence to fall back on.
Advertising works. Companies that don't advertise tend to fail. The problem with political campaigns is that it's an arms race. They have to advertise as much as they can or the other candidate will bury them. There's an incentive to continually increase advertising budgets as fast as possible to hopefully beat the other candidate.
If one candidate spends a lot more on advertising and then loses, then they probably would have lost even bigger if they hadn't. Since they don't KNOW if they will win or lose, they have to spend the money or they might as well pack it in and go home.
It is kind of amazing how much is actually spent, but it's not very surprising that they are spending as much as they possibly can.
It was a careless mistake. Everybody makes them.
Both your critics and suck-ups like Jens Fiederer are off base.
The point is that $16 million would help a lot of poor folks. John and Cindy McCain should sell one of Cindy's estates and do just that.
This post is extremely typical of Megan. It included basic factual error that nullified part of the post. It ignored the real world, in which people will spend money to get elected no matter how many people are starving, making the entire premise a non sequitur.
It criticized liberals while ignoring the same actions in conservatives. To make the post complete, Megan as usual shows up in the comments to evade criticism with another non sequitur.
Megan will end up another Maureen Dowd, an aging, bitter ambitious person taking out her frustrations on strangers in the news.
And you are who exactly to be making such a comment?
Marcus I have no idea what you're talking about. You mean in a different thread? Sorry, whatever you asked me I missed it. I do try to answer things thrown my way.
Also there is no 'o' in my name.
I'm a good-faith debater. Ask again and I'll answer.
Bob, when you said
> It was a careless mistake. Everybody makes them.
it seems to me you were pretty much agreeing with me, while gratuitously calling me a "suck-up".
Just curious whether you consider yourself one of a fellowship of glorious "suck-ups" and don't realize that this has negative connotations, whether you misunderstood what I was saying, or whether you misunderstood what YOU were saying.
Margalis,
Yes, it was in an an earlier thread, one about Iraq. You made a comment about our (US) hegemony of force.
My question was this: If one nation were to be a hegemon, who would you prefer it to be?
Marcus