A few more notes on Big Bird

Note 1:  As a political advertisement I don't like the Obama campaign's Big Bird spot.   A campaign only has so many opportunities to convince voters to adopt their narrative about a campaign.  Every campaign piece you do should either further extend your narrative or deflect the opponent's narrative.  When a voter steps into a voting booth does the Obama campaign really want the contending narratives to be

1. Romney:   The economy is a mess.  Obama didn't fix it.  I will.
2. Obama:  Romney will defund Sesame Street

I guess it is possible that the intent of the ad was to take the media's mind off the rest of the debate - in that case maybe it worked.  Or maybe it tested well with audiences.  I still don't think it is a very good ad.

Note 2:  My previous post on this topic Thinking Fast Slow and Large used Gov. Romney's Big Bird claim as an example of people's difficulty in thinking about large numbers.  To reiterate:  If I were to say "Steve and Alan and I buy a Giordano's cheese pizza. Then I give half of the pizza to Steve and give half of the pizza to Alan and I take half of the pizza."   That intuitively looks wrong - because each of the three of us cannot have half of the pizza.  But when you start throwing around "millions" and "billions" and "trillions" the numbers may not add up but they don't look intuitively wrong in the same way.  A second point that I should have made more explicitly is that it matters how you express the dollars.  If you say the US government is giving the Corporation for Public Broadcasting 445 million dollars that sounds like a large number.  But if you frame it as it costs you $1.41 per year to fund PBS - that sounds very reasonable.

Note 3:  Some on the right are defending Gov. Romney's claim by saying that PBS doesn't need the money.  That may be a defensible position.  Amazingly - there have been a few (like Congressional Republicans and former GOP chair Ed Gillespie) who have actually defended the proposal as a means of deficit reduction.  Maybe their thought is that if they agree with Gov. Romney on this then he doesn't look as stupid for making the claim...actually no it still looks stupid.

Note 4:   There is a lot of evidence that long term economic growth is in large part due to development of human capital (see here and here and here and here) .  If you also believe that young children have the greatest ability to assimilate new information...then how many institutions do you think contribute more to America's long term economic growth than Sesame Street?
 
Note 5:  Apparently in Jim Henson's early sketches Big Bird was originally a giant chicken and Oscar the Grouch was Pink.  Pink as in...a leftist?  That explains a lot!  Actually Oscar has always seemed to me as more of a libertarian leave-me-alone type.