Our "Data-Driven" Governor, My Op Ed on Just in Time Teaching, We've Seen the EV Market in General, What is Actually Available in Colorado?
I'm going to pick on Jared Polis here because I disagree with his policy and I also disagree with how he sells it.
As you can see in the little photo collage I attached to this post, Polis sells himself and his policy as data-driven. He follows "The Data" and "The Science" (both capitalized on purpose to drive home the point that I think he and others who use that phrase want to make--that it's a proper noun and they are its proper exponents).
I said I was going to pick on Polis for this, but take note that one need not assume any ill intent on Polis to sustain what I'm about to write below. Regardless of what you think of Jared Polis, he is a human and as such is just as apt to make the same kinds of mistakes in his reasoning as you or I or anyone else.
The mistake I want to zero in on here is called the Confirmation Bias. I included a little Wikipedia link below as a good jumping off point for you if you want to learn more, but it's enough for our purposes to know that confirmation bias is a fault in reasoning all humans have where we tend to pay lots of attention to things that confirm what we believe and ignore or downplay evidence that refutes what we believe.
We all do it, sadly, that includes yours truly. I can tell you from personal experience that it's a struggle and an act of will to crawl out from under it. Even at that, I'm sure I fail on a regular basis.
The thing is that this fault in our reasoning is not new and is well-known. In fact, it's so well known that science as a process contains numerous checks to this tendency (recall that science, the verb, the process, can be thought of as a series of steps that reasoned people take which minimize the tendency to faulty reasoning that all humans have).
There's more than one check, but I want to focus in on one in particular: the idea of letting others review your data. One tenet of science is transparency and letting others review your data so as to check your conclusions.
For example, let's say that you believed that brown horses were taller than white horses. You want to test this and so go out and measure a bunch of horses of all colors and then compare heights.
Confirmation bias could creep in by maybe labeling some white-ish horses as brown and some brown-ish as white to juke the stats. The backstop here would be to share your data (measurements, photos, etc.) with other researchers to check on your scheme for what you call white vs. brown, how you measured the height, etc.
Maybe the reviewers find that you did exactly as they would, and they see no fault in your method. Maybe they do. The point here is not whether or not you are correct, the point is that you submitted your information to someone for review to prevent you from fooling yourself.
Do you recall our "data-driven" governor doing this? Has he shown you what data he used? Has he shown which studies informed his decisions?
When I looked for instances of this, the closest I could find was what is linked second below. It's Gov Polis' own website and it details how his budget office uses evidence-based practices to help guide budget decisions. I couldn't find any other instances of Polis' office sharing its process and/or data.
This doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means I couldn't find any. If you are aware of any, please share with us in the comments below.
Gov Polis is free to use whatever rubric he wishes in making the decisions that are part of the governor's work. There is no requirement anywhere that he use any particular method or that he share anything at all. I also don't know enough to claim that he doesn't use data in his decisions. As I said above, a lack of evidence doesn't mean a lack of process. There is also, again as above with the brown and white horses, no guarantee or implication that he's deciding wrong based on what he's looking at.
All that being said, however, the claim that he's "data-driven" is his own. I didn't make it. He made it. If he does make decisions based on data and wishes to be believed in that claim, he should share it.
To make the claim and not share is to invite the questions: what data? Where is it? Can I see?
It is to invite speculation that perhaps he's just looking at things that would agree with what he wanted to do from the get-go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
https://www.colorado.gov/governor/research-evidence
A recent op ed of mine on Just In Time teaching and a different take on school funding.
https://gazette.com/denver-gazette/guest-column-finding-a-workable-strategy-in-education/article_7b3f24d0-8de2-11ed-ade2-bb1bc5638f8d.html
What kinds of EV's are available in Colorado, if you could afford it?
I said in my EV post yesterday that the cars I was looking at were general information and did not necessarily reflect the kinds of cars that were currently available for sale.
What is currently available in terms of cars that would fit what I need? I copied over the stats on my current car and what I'd need as screenshot 1 for convenience.
Returning, again, to Xcel's site to look, but this time asking what the local EV car inventory is, I get what you see in the first link below. It should come up with the search criteria I used because I just used the default values.
Maybe it's just that I haven't shopped for new-ish cars in a while, but my first reaction at the prices was "Dear God!" Not a one below $26k.
I was not able to find a button on this search to automatically figure in the incentives in the prices, so what I'm going to do for comparison's sake from here forward will be to deduct $9000 (the maximum current used subsidy in Colorado) from the purchase price. That means the lowest-price EV at $26899 would actually come in at $17899 for me (and this assumes too that the tax credits come off the price immediately when I buy the car).
For comparison's sake, I popped over to cars.com to see what kinds of gas-powered cars I could get with a max price of $15k (closest I could get to $17899( and younger than 2017). Found a pretty decent, low-mileage hybrid car with good mileage. It's in screenshot 2. That's going to be my comparator.
Let's look at car payments. That will be the real difference in price to buy this car because in both cases I'll have to borrow and thus in both cases I'll need full insurance (we'll ignore any difference in vehicle cost driving a difference in insurance premium to replace it).
I used the car payment calculator linked second below and entered the prices above, along with a $5000 down payment (what I can swing--see screenshot 1), and a $1500 trade in on my current car (again, screenshot 1). I kept the term at 60 months, the interest at 4.5%, the state as Colorado, and figure that I'll pay taxes and fees out of my savings so I don't pay interest on those.
The EV above, the cheapest one, would have a payment of $212.51 per month.
The gas-powered car, the one in screenshot 2, is $102.15.
Quite a disparity, but to be fair, let's look at operation a little bit. I drive about 1020 miles in a month. The lowest-priced, available EV would nominally meet my needs (I'd either need to charge in Denver or be really careful about errands to make it there and back) as far as range and etc., and, of course, the gas-powered hybrid would too.
For the EV, according to Xcel's EV site I'd pay about $12 a month to charge it up. Let's de-rate that to $6 a month since I live in a small town and am almost always making short hops.
For the hybrid, at today's gas prices, I'd pay (at today's average gas price of $3.42 per gallon) $91.80 a month for fuel (1020 miles per month and 38 mpg).
So a better comparison would be to say the EV comes in at about $218 a month and the gas at about $194 for the hybrid.
As I said in my earlier post, and in screenshot 1, I don't really have the budget to borrow at all. If you held a gun to my head, however, and forced me to and told me I had to buy a car today, I'd go with the hybrid because even with subsidies and no need to buy gas, I can do better on the combustion market right now.
https://ev.xcelenergy.com/inventory
