Tom Lee says that the “purple America” images I linked to the other day are actually misleading in their own way for a few reasons:

But also true: visualizing information by using a linear red/blue scale is about the worst way possible to make data legible to the human eye. First: our vision is logarithmic. When a photographer drags out his “50% gray” card for measuring lighting, it’s actually 18% gray. Judging by the triangular key in the corner of Vanderbei’s image, he’s just taking the percentage of vote totals and translating it flatly to 8 bit color — a 100% Republican district gets an RGB 24-bit value of (255,0,0).

The colors themselves are also a problem. As I’m sure you all remember keenly from this post I wrote in 2006, perceptual image codecs spend more bits on brightness than on color because the color-sensing cones in your eyes have a much lousier dynamic range than the light-sensing rods. We’re worse at distinguishing between levels of color than between levels of brightness. And since the percentage of the vote in any given spot on the map should always sum to 100, with negligible green (third party) contributions, the brightness will be relatively uniform (although admittedly not quite due to the perceptual differences between colors — monitor calibration and colorspace begins to enter the picture here, and is just as hideously complex as you might imagine).

He suggests instead a simple grayscale:

That shows the same rough similarity between the two elections, but highlights the geographical variation in a clearer way and lets you see where things did change: “Things are more black and white than they may seem, and certainly less purple.”

Giant infrastructure/stimulus package unveiled by the government of China.

It’s worth noting that ability to do this is one of the things that responsible budgeting gets you. During boom times, China amassed budget surpluses and built up reserves. Now, during a downturn, they’re able to respond with a huge spending initiative at a time when (a) such spending is needed to keep the economy going, and (b) the downturn makes it cheaper than it would otherwise be to complete such projects.

Unfortunately, in the United States the rules governing state and local budget practices essentially ensure that the reverse will be done. During boom times, tax revenues rise and governors respond by combining tax cuts with spending hikes and watch their popularity soar. During a downturn, revenues fall and balance budget requirements force them to reduce services, scale back planned projects, and raise taxes, all of which has the impact of making recessions worse than they otherwise might be and ensuring that infrastructure projects are undertaken at the time when it’s most expensive to build them.

The federal government can and should step in to fill the gap, both in terms of aid to state budgets and in terms of infrastructure spending. But we would have had much greater capacity to intervene effectively had we stayed on roughly the budgetary trajectory that prevailed at the end of the Clinton administration. In light of 9/11 and the dotcom aftermath the predictions of surpluses from here to tomorrow never would have come true, but Bush took the situation and decided on a combination of irresponsible tax cuts for the Americans who needed them least, an enormously expensive new war whose massive costs involved little if any productive investment for the future, and homeland security spending much of which (like complicated-yet-pointless enhanced airport security) mostly serves as a minor drag on economic activity. Had the administration governed more responsibly over the past eight years we could perhaps have avoided the current crisis, but even if we couldn’t we could at least have been in a position to respond more effectively.

Of course I can’t prove that conservatives are wrong to think that George W. Bush became such a huge failure because Americans disapproved of him spending so much money. But it seems like a very dubious theory. Jon Chait explains:

But to these critics Bush’s primary ideological apostasy is that he supposedly presided over vast new spending increases. Both Democrats and Republicans have gleefully taken up the charge–the former in order to discredit Bush, the latter to shield conservatism from the stench of his failure. It’s a trumped-up indictment. Bush did spend generously on defense and homeland security, with conservative approval, but domestic discretionary spending actually declined from 3.1 percent of GDP to 2.8 percent. It is true that Bush approved a vast new prescription drug benefit. But 89 percent of Americans believed in 2000 that Medicare should have such a benefit. Bush’s critics on the right have no explanation for how he could have gotten elected in 2000 without promising one or reelected in 2004 without following through. Still, the critique has taken hold. The Democracy Corps poll found that, by a 17-point margin, Republicans attribute their party’s failures in 2006 and 2008 to its insufficient conservatism. (Voters as a whole attributed it to excessive conservatism.)

Of course arguably it makes sense to respond to defeat by doubling down anyway. The Democratic Party has moved left since its defeats in 2002 and 2004, and done much better in 2006 and 2008. I think some aspects of that leftward shift have been politically helpful, but others have probably been politically damaging, and all things considered I think it would be odd to argue that the party got more successful because its leader started espousing a more progressive platform. But they won anyway. And it’s a good thing that party leaders now embrace strategic redeployment from Iraq and serious action on the climate crisis not so much because embracing those ideas was or is key to electoral victory, but because those are sound views on key issues and espousing them is consistent with winning elections so politicians should be pressed to do so.