post-truth

Post-truth word of the year
I worry a lot about a post-truth society, community, workplace, school, home ...
Remember anti-intellectualism???

Next DNC Chair

Slowly...very slowly, I am starting to let political news back into my life. What have I missed?

Anyway, we talked a bit on Saturday about who should lead the DNC going forward. Slate's Michelle Goldberg makes a compelling case for Ellison as the next DNC chair. I'm particularly swayed by her argument that Ellison will be a more credible voice and leader for the people most threatened by this presidency.

But...Dean does have a successful track record in the role and this election broke my faith in my own political instincts. So I really don't know which would be the best choice right now. What do you all think?

#ReportHate

A Muslim woman I know from my childhood neighborhood posted today about being harassed. It's hard to tell if it happened recently or in the past but she felt inclined to use her example to encourage people to report incidents. She included a link to the Southern Poverty Law Center's form for reporting hateful intimidation and harassment. I think we should all keep this resource in mind but also do our very best to not stand idly by if we witness something. It's a terrifying thing to consider but important. It's easy to avoid getting involved--I know that's my reflex reaction to difficult situations--but I will remind myself that people being harassed do not want to be involved either, they just have no choice.

Organizations to Support, Local Version

Great new list from Chicagoist of groups to donate to in Chicago on a wide range of issues from supporting Muslims and gays to protecting the environment to books for prisoners.  Good stuff.

Organizations to Support

In addition to newspapers and other investigative journalism outlets (see below), I know we are all looking for non-profits and other organizations that we can support to help push back against the expected Trump administration overreach and to help populations most likely to be impacted. Jezebel posted this list a few days ago. Be sure to follow Bridget's advice and check out the comments, too, where people have listed other good organizations. Let's do this!

Four vital years for WAPO, NYT, and the MSM

The business model for traditional media outlets like the The New York TImes and The Washington Post has been fragile for years.  The next four years adds this additional challenge of a bully President who is tweeting about "the very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the Trump phenomena." This is from a man who famously wrote in The Art of the Deal: "The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business."  He also wrote:

Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post have to do what they have done forever: keep us all informed with excellent thorough reporting.  (How to get people away from the terrors of "fake news" is a different issue.)  And I'll say the obvious to myself and to everyone else: we have to read these pieces, whatever the message.

The Washington Post is offering 6 months of free coverage for Amazon Prime subscribers and an unlimited digital subscription for .EDU, .GOV, or .MIL email addresses.  That's great!  Thanks Jeff Bezos!  But if we want these outlets to do what they are doing, we need to subscribe to media outlets that are doing their job.  The industry is stable for now, but we all know that it is a financially precarious industry -- and an extremely precarious institution in other ways as a result of what happened this week.

Let's Do This

Welp, we're turning the electricity back on in Salon Sassy.  As you may recall, this blog was started in 2008 so that me and my friends had a place to pour out all of our excitement and anxiety around the Obama v McCain presidential election.  Remember the halcyon days of mocking silly Sarah Palin? The excruciating joy that was election night in Grant Park?  The last 8 years have been great fun and we have seen America expand in such beautiful ways: gay marriage, universal health care, two women added to the supreme court, the Paris agreement, and Hamilton!

Unfortunately, the times have changed and this blog is now meant to serve a much different purpose. We will be meeting here to transmute our anger and fear into action and change and love and peace, in particular to be allies for those most vulnerable to what is coming, to what is already here.

Roll up your sleeves, folks. Post volunteer opportunities, share organizations that need donations, analyze smart reporting on our new world, and bring your own new and crazy ideas and insights and inspiration.

I'll meet you in the arena.

Voting in Chicago

Hillary Clinton won 84% of the Chicago vote in Tuesday's election. There has been a lot of conversation in the media about whether and how Latinos and Blacks voted.

I will try to shed light on the "how" question with some data.  Chicago is remarkably evenly divided among Whites, Blacks, and Latinos. In the 2010 census, out of a total of 2,695,598 residents, there were 872,286 Whites, 854,717 Blacks, and 778,862 Latinos. The next largest group were Asians at 144,903.

To get a rough idea of voting tendencies by race, I looked at the vote counts for all of Chicago's 77 communities. For example, in my community of Hyde Park, 91.94% of residents voted for Clinton and 3.88% of residents for Trump. Hyde Park is also 46.7% White, 30.4% Black, and 6.3% Latino. Hillary Clinton, in contrast, garnered 49.4% of the vote in Edison Park, which has the highest percentage of whites (88.4%) of any community in Chicago and only 0.3% Blacks and 7.8% Latinos.  At the other extreme, 97.3% of the vote in Auburn Gresham, which has the highest percentage of Blacks at 97.8% of any Chicago community (and 0.3% Whites and 0.9% Latinos).

I ran a regression to estimate voting by race in Chicago. I ran separate regressions to predict Clinton votes, Trump votes, and other votes, regressing share against the percentages of Whites, Black, and Latinos in each community. (For the geeks, I included squared terms for racial shares.) The obvious shortcoming of this analysis is that it assumes that groups vote equally. They do not for many reasons.

The regression says that

• 51.4% of Whites voted for Clinton, compared to 96.7% of Blacks, and 90.0% of Latinos. 
• 43.5% of Whites voted for Trump, compared to 2.0% of Blacks, and 6.3% of Latinos. 
• 5.2% of Whites voted for another candidate, compared to 1.3% of Blacks and 3.7% of Latinos.

It is also interesting to identify the communities which over- and under-voted Clinton according to the model.  The biggest pro-Clinton outlier is Lakeview, which came in at 82.8%.  With a population of 80.4% White, 3.8% Black, and 7.6% Latino, my regression preidcted Lakeview to vote 62.9% Clinton.  On the other side, the biggest pro-Trump outlier is Mount Greenwood, which went 36.2% Clinton.  The model predicts Mount Greenwood to have voted 60.5% Clinton, due to its composition of 80.4% White, 3.9% Black, and 7.6% Latino.

The graph below shows predictions and actual voting for Clinton for all 77 communities.  To keep the graph from being too cluttered, I've only labelled the extreme residuals on one side or the other.

The New Economics of Well Being and Happiness

Just got back from 3 days at Claremont Colleges in CA where I was tempted to abandon all Chicago ties in order to enroll in a PhD for positive psychology. Penny and George, we must discuss some day; I feel like you both must have some expertise on the subject? Relatedly and meanwhile, I love how this article is applicable to so many disciplines in which so many of us work: sustainability, economics, education, nonprofits, art, philanthropy ... good stuff.

The New Economics of Well Being and Happiness
http://theconversation.edu.au/wellbeing-happiness-and-sustainability-hallmarks-of-a-new-economic-paradigm-6301

Not a Done Deal Yet...Yet

I know that we're all enjoying the chaos of the GOP nomination race and hoping that Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich continue beating each other up for a while longer. But, the math is starting to look more promising to Romney after he won Ohio and 5 other states last night. But, that doesn't mean the fun is over.

Santorum has a couple reasons for staying in the race. First, he's narrowly lost Michigan and Ohio to Romney despite Mitt outspending him 4 to 1 in those states. Second, he correctly surmises that if Gingrich drops out, the conservative wing of the GOP will unite behind him. Ultimately, Santorum still looks to be heading for defeat (which is hard to feel bad about) and is going to face increasing pressure from the party to bow out but he can still do some damage.