Edward Tufte appointed by Obama to help track, and explain stimulus funds

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003e0&topic_id=1#

by voidfiles • 16 years ago

236 108 16 years ago

edwardtufte.com

nkh• 16 years ago

Obama scored some big points in my book for this one.

Edit:

When he did not follow up on his promise to have C-Span follow the health care debates, left a bad taste in my mouth.

I have attended a Tufte conference, and he spent a lot of time discussing the challenger disaster. While he was no where near the as good as Feynman (who is?), he graphically presented the government information very well.

If anything it will draw attention to the problem as he is a big name in this space.

TobiasCassell3• 16 years ago

I am in Shock.. happy shock.. But, shock..

voidfiles5• 16 years ago

What is so shocking, I think Obama has been finding the best-of-the-best and appointing them to the right places.

TobiasCassell3• 16 years ago

Yes, true. I think its shocking when something happens in our political system with absolutely zero downside. I never expected this, and perhaps it means a level of transparency/communication that was previously unattainable. I guess I'm shocked somebody I admire so much will have a voice in our challenges. I think its exciting, and I'm really happy about it.

Edit, I'm pretty jaded.. So anything good is shocking to me..

jamesbritt5• 16 years ago

Can you give some examples of this?

He's appointed several RIAA laywers to positions at the Department of Justice.

He picked Janet Napolitano to run Homeland Security. (I'm a 'Zonie of 10 years.)

While he may also be picking some good people, I'm not seeing "best of the best" as any sort of theme.

MartinCron• 16 years ago

"Visualization Czar", anyone?

opoloqo2• 16 years ago

wow.

opoloqo2• 16 years ago

please accept my apologies for a non-substantive comment.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

I never realized that Tufte was a political science professor. Anyway, I think Obama made a great choice here. (I was going to write a long discussion of why, but it will just lead to political debate, so I am censoring myself :))

jamesbritt5• 16 years ago

Could he maybe do the same for the general US budget?

voidfiles5• 16 years ago

I think this is a first step, its like saying out loud that we need to take visual communication more seriously. Hopefully his teachings can go viral, and effect all the people in the right places.

jamesbritt5• 16 years ago

"I think this is a first step, its like saying out loud that we need to take visual communication more seriously. "

I'm inclined to believe this will only be applied to those topics the administration wants to sell to the public. I don't expect to ever see it applied to, for example, where tax dollars go.

starkfist3• 16 years ago

Do these people receive renumeration for the time they spend on the panel?

pohl3• 16 years ago

s/renumeration/remuneration/

starkfist3• 16 years ago

whoops. I should have just asked outright: how much will Tufte get paid?

100k3• 16 years ago

Well _this_ is going to be interesting!

I look forward to seeing how Tufte designs for an audience (the American people) more used to USA Today infographics.

tjic2• 16 years ago

I just love the gratuitous American bashing that we always see in these sorts of discussions.

Look, the average IQ on the planet is 100. Here, in England, in Germany. Education here isn't great, but it's not noticeably worst than in Mexico, Italy, or Russia. The American people aren't geniuses, one and all, but then again - who is?

I wouldn't complain about women, or blacks, or any other group for a trait that's common across all humans ("stupid women ... never saving enough for retirement!"), and I don't think that bemoaning folks by which country they were born into is any more appropriate.

100k3• 16 years ago

Uh...I'm American and am intimately familiar with the level of statistical reasoning that informs our political discourse.

tokenadult4• 16 years ago

IQ isn't the issue. Most failures in statistical reasoning are failures of rationality, which is not tapped by IQ tests.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/Engli...

blogimus2• 16 years ago

I predict less use of PowerPoint.

voidfiles5• 16 years ago

Hopefully, less slides, because slides aren't inherently bad

blogimus2• 16 years ago

Slides are a crutch (but I use them too) Much better if there are very brief (3-5 page) documents with clean multivariate visualizations as appropriate. Then discuss (This is what Tufte recommends). A nice multivariate visualization method is RadViz. The real metric is "Does it add value to the viewer?" If it is more of a presenter crutch, then get rid of it or boil the slides to the bare minimum. I tend to favor white boards and markers and ask the audience questions. But that is just my style.

CoreDumpling• 16 years ago

I sincerely hope Tufte can successfully counteract the Washington tradition of applying the methods from How to Lie with Statistics. A good visualization can just as well expose the fraud from a contrived one.

ewjordan• 16 years ago

From what I've read of his work, Tufte has almost a compulsion to force data to tell the truth, and do so in an effective manner.

Which makes me fear that his career in Washington will be politically disastrous and end rather quickly...

I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that. We could use more people like him keeping the government honest from the inside.

tokenadult4• 16 years ago

Yes. What if the data plainly presented show that the stimulus plan was plainly a waste of money?

P.S. How many of you, when you hear announcements of how many jobs have been saved by the stimulus plan, immediately do the mental arithmetic to figure out how many dollars of taxpayer funds were spent to save each job? I think I could do better in my family in keeping us all actively employed in work helpful to society with the same number of dollars per employable person.

amalcon• 16 years ago

On the plus side, the Obama administration certainly knows this too. This suggests that they do actually think it wasn't a waste of money (otherwise, they'd get someone they could bribe to say it wasn't). Now, they could easily be wrong, but we might manage to get some idea.

tjic2• 16 years ago

> From what I've read of his work, Tufte has almost a compulsion to force data to tell the truth

I think it's naive to think that there's just "one truth".

What's the truth about NASA spending during the Apollo program?

It was so-many billion that added up to a glorious step into the cosmos?

It was so-many billion that added up to a race with the Soviets to prove that freedom is better than communism?

It was so-many billion that was a big whose-dick-is-bigger game?

It was so-many billion spent to bid up the wages of well payed first world engineers while third world peasants continued to live in poverty?

These are all true, and there's no way that graphic design can pick the one true truth out of the other truths.

Tufte can do some great work on displaying the multi-trillion dollar buget, but it's not going to get at "the" truth.

Here's the visualization I'd like to see:

FDR's Depression budgets weren't concentrated in areas with the highest poverty, but in areas where his political support was wavering. Obama's "stimulus" is similarly spent in areas of the country, and areas of the economy where buying political support is needed. I'd like to see Tufte do THAT visualization.

I'm sorry to hear that he's going to be on the government payroll - I'd love to have his skills deployed as a non-partisan, non-aligned outsider, as opposed to someone inside the tent looking out.

sausagefeet• 16 years ago

Elizabeth Warren has been fairly vocal and, from what I can tell, honest in what has been going on with stimulus money. She also seems to have been fairly successful (or was last time I checked). I don't know anything about this guy but if he is like her I feel like we are in good hands.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

This should be an easy job. Just photoshop an image of a black hole with a giant pile of nearly a trillion dollars falling into it.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

That's what the military spending visualization czar should do, anyway.

hga15• 16 years ago

Also funny, but it would be a challenge for someone like Tufte to go beyond that fantastic chart about Napoleon's campaign in Russia to show us less easily quantifiable things like:

What it means every time a jihadist in Pakistan is notified that "You've got missile."

The benefits of keeping the sea lanes open and free. Bonus points for tracking the historical effects of more and less vigorous suppression of piracy.

How beneficial it has been to keep Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, etc. free in the post-WWII era. Bonus points for comparing their respective increases in economic and political freedom with their climbs up the value chain. A special study of Singapore could be fascinating ("Disneyland with the death penalty").

Etc.

hga15• 16 years ago

Very funny, but if Tufte wants to avoid destroying the brand he's built for the 78% of the American population who don't self-identify as liberals, he'll need to clearly present things like:

How much of the stimulus went to temporarily prop up state government budgets and how it permanently increased the budgets of the states that accepted it. Bonus points for explaining how Texas is so successful while refusing this temporary windfall.

ADDED: The above effect on future state budgets could be illustrated as being caused by synchrotron radiation coming from the dollar bills falling in at relativistic speeds.

How "the most shovel ready" project of weatherizing houses became the slowest because the Department of Labor has to make Davis-Bacon "prevailing wage" calculations for 30,000 localities (still not finished...).

Etc.

I fear he'll either show us that he's a fool or what his price is.

jbooth14• 16 years ago

Answers:

How much went to temporarily prop up state govt budgets? Zero, even though preventing a teacher layoff would've been about the most efficient use of stimulus dollars possible. The twins from Maine held the bill hostage until no money was given to state government. (If you're wondering how much went to tax cuts, that figure is around 40%).

How was texas so successful while refusing this temporary windfall? I don't know, but they definitely didn't refuse anything. Rick Perry made a bunch of noise, got his headlines, convinced you that he's a true believer and then took the money.

The weatherization project you got about right, although those studies finished on schedule a month ago or so.. that was a stupid provision and they should have eliminated it, they probably didn't realize it would lead to a bureaucratic snafu.

Hopefully, what Mr. Tufte will show us, are some very compelling and illustrative graphs that do a good job of explaining where the money went. There seems to be some confusion abounding, especially on the tax cut part.

EDIT: A further hope I have is that people who normally respect things like statistics, figures and Mr Tufte don't immediately do a 180 and disown the guy if he doesn't produce a pie chart of the stimulus money that says "100% = SOCIALISM"

uuilly3• 16 years ago

I wonder if Obama is going to like the result. I also wonder whether Tufte will visually tell the truth. It's heady stuff getting called in by the president and I could see him not wanting to make Obama look bad. Either way the result will be interesting.

warfangle2• 16 years ago

I would feel as if I were held to an even higher standard than usual if I were called in by the President to do something like this.

I can be reasonably assured that no such thing will happen to me, so all I can hope for is that Tufte holds himself to the same ideal.

100k3• 16 years ago

As Kenyes would point out, as long as someone got paid to dig that hole it was worth it.

pohl3• 16 years ago

Not since Feynman on the Challenger Commission have I been so excited about a presidential appointment.

mcantor• 16 years ago

Seconded. After a rocky first year, this decision alone makes me feel vindicated for having voted Obama.

Edward Tufte appointed by Obama to help track, and explain stimulus funds

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