Humanities desk
< October 24	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	October 26 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 25

Second Terms

Who was the last US president to not win a second term? Overall, what percentage of US presidents win a second term? Thanks Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 10:58, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The list is not so long that you couldn't look for yourself: List of presidents of the United States. --Wrongfilter (talk) 11:33, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Simple answer to the first question: George H. W. Bush ran unsuccessfully for a second term in 1992; before him, Jimmy Carter in 1980. Beyond that, look at the list linked above. --Xuxl (talk) 12:54, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There are also some caveats in reading the list; some of the Presidents died in office during their first term; they would have been ineligible to run for a second term, being dead. Also, there's someone like Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was eligible to run for a second full term, but did not. He technically served more than one term but less than two, because he completed his predecessor, John F. Kennedy's term (he being one of the dead people who could not be elected again, even if he wanted to run, being dead). Indeed, serving two, full, terms is the exception rather than the rule for presidents. Only 14 presidents served as long as 8 years in the office (and one of those did it non-consecutively), and there are long stretches where no one served two full terms; from 1837 to 1869 not a single President served two full terms, and again from 1961 to 1981. Indeed, the longest stretch of two-full-term presidents in history is three, which has only happened twice: Jefferson-Madison-Monroe and Clinton-Bush II-Obama. --Jayron 32 13:42, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

So, would it be accurate to state that statistically it is highly probably that Trump will gain a second term based on the last 100 years of US election results, and sitting presidents gaining second terms? Thanks Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 14:50, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No, that is basically the exact opposite of what statistics show. Only 14 out of 44 Presidents have served two full terms. Only 20 of 44 sitting Presidents have won an election while in office. That means it is statistically UNLIKELY for Trump to do so. Of course, statistics are not causitive, so that statement, while true, is entirely meaningless in trying to understand if he will or will not. However, the statistics are clear; it is rarer than not for Presidents to serve two terms, or even for any sitting President to win another election. --Jayron 32 16:43, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know. Wouldn't a question of probability and statistics best be asked at the Mathematics desk?--Wehwalt (talk) 14:54, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that OP is seeking an affirmation rather than an answer. He would be hard pressed to find one at Mathematics. 93.136.55.123 (talk) 04:40, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The 2016 election was an aberration, as it was nowhere close to representing the majority or plurality will of the voters as previous elections had been. The 2020 election results will depend on how well Trump does in the battleground states this time around. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:04, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The "battleground states" always determine who wins, as things are now. The national vote is irrelevant to the outcome. At the extreme, a candidate can win with just 23% of the national vote. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 02:01, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"Statistically", "highly probably", and related terms in this situation refer less to mathematics, and much more to fuzzy measures of likelihood. Probability can be thought of as a measure of quantity and quality of information, and we have a lot more information than just how many previous presidents have served two terms. Not sure why the info about previous 2-term presidents would be more useful than all the other info we have (economic factors, betting markets, polls, impeachment proceedings, public tolerance for evil, to name a few). I believe the answer, using all available information, is probably "who knows?" --Floquenbeam (talk) 16:36, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It's also important to note that statistics only has predictive power when there is a large enough sample size. See law of large numbers. It is also not predictive for individual cases, but only for similarly large-sized samples. Thus, if we had a billion presidents data to work with, then that data set can be expected to be quite predictive for the statistics of the next billion presidents. We have only 44 people to work with, far to many to have any meaningful predictive power (and even if we had more, it wouldn't be predictive in the individual cases anyways.) So, we can actually do the math and get numbers and do the calculations as the OP asks, but the results of that math is at once true (since that is what the math says) and meaningless (in the sense that it doesn't help us at all understand what will happen in the next election). --Jayron 32 17:06, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Somewhat relevant to using statistics to predict who will become president is the xkcd cartoon Electoral Precedent.-gadfium 21:39, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This is not really a thing you can reliably analyze much about with statistics, because it's not a controlled experiment or a large population sample (as some have noted). Most scholars think there is some incumbency advantage, though, again, this is hard to quantify. This means it's a stretch to say "statistically, X is likely to win/not win a second term". --47.146.63.87 (talk) 02:01, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If we assume Trump will again run for President as a Republican in the next election, then the most meaningful stat would be "of those Presidents who ran for a second consecutive term, in the same party, what portion won ?". Presidents who failed to be re-elected due to death or choosing not to run are irrelevant. However, Trump's chances of winning can be far more accurately determined by poll results, etc. Of course the last pres to lose re-election broke a "No new taxes promise", so has Trump broken any promises ? Obviously not; those coal miners are all fully employed again, Mexico paid for the wall, North Korea gave up all the nukes, and Trump released his taxes, all as promised. :-) SinisterLefty (talk) 07:22, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if its funny or scary, but you can probably get a not insignificant number of people to agree with the above... --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:39, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'd have to say scary. Welcome to the "post-truth era". SinisterLefty (talk) 12:34, 27 October 2019 (UTC) [reply]

EU Established

On 1st November 1993 the European Union was established. Of the individuals in place to administer it as an entity, are there any which remain in situ to this day, perhaps in another role but still within the upper echelons of power? Thanks Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 10:58, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It would be difficult to answer comprehensively, as there are thousands of bureaucrats who are employed working in an entity like the EU, many of the anonymous and who are not notable enough to attract any public record without some serious digging and investigation. That being said, the place where you probably want to start your research is at Delors Commission, because Jacques Delors was President of the European Commission at the date you are interested in. If you check through the other members of the Commission, perhaps you can get some information on who may still be working for the EU. --Jayron 32 12:01, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Jayron, I will ;look into the Delors Commission. Just FYI, I am only interested in the top handful of people not necessarily the bottom rungs where people can be employed for decades. Thanks Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 12:56, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The European Union goes back a ways prior to 1993. One ironic thing about Brexit is that the UK pushed for getting into it, and Charles DeGaulle tried in vain to keep them out. Somewhere in that great chateau in the sky, he's probably saying the French equivalent to "Told ya so!" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:59, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, not exactly, the European Union was created in 1993. Precursors to the European Union, such as the European Economic Community or the European Parliament, date back to earlier than that, but the amalgamation of these and various other semi-independent agencies under a single aegis, being the official European Union, came into effect in 1993 under the terms of the Maastricht Treaty. While it is true the Union was not created out of whole cloth in 1993, it did not become the European Union until 1993. --Jayron 32 16:38, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In Europe, EEC is typically treated as a proto-EU since about the biggest role of Maastricht was to bring everything under one umbrella, more so than creating new relationships/integrations between countries. Hence one typically talks about EU before 1993 although it wasn't called by that name. 93.136.55.123 (talk) 04:43, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A quick flick through some prominent EU Commission members suggests that they often alternate between EU appointments and ministerial posts in their home governments, sometimes finding sinecures on the boards of commercial companies before retirement. Alansplodge (talk) 00:16, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This is 26 years ago. Not sure what you mean with "individuals in place to administer it", but I guess this does not mean the average bureaucrat, only the very top, and I find it hard to imagine a guy at a top position then and not retired by now. He would have been ~40. As for personnel of political background, 26 year is also very long, but long lived Jean-Claude Juncker seems to qualify: as minister of finance for his country, he "chaired the Council of Economic and Financial Affairs (ECOFIN), during Luxembourg's 1991 presidency of the Council of the European Communities, becoming a key architect of the Maastricht Treaty.", and has been a key member of the rulers of EU ever since. Gem fr (talk) 17:11, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Cities in Manchukuo

I'm trying to find a list of cities in Manchukuo sorted by their historical (any year from 1934 to 1945 would be fine) population. Thank you. --2.37.200.57 (talk) 22:46, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I take that you have already seen Manchukuo#Population of main cities (Source: Beal, Edwin G (1945). "The 1940 Census of Manchuria". The Far Eastern Quarterly. 4 (3): 243. doi:10.2307/2049515. JSTOR 2049515.). Alansplodge (talk) 00:11, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Why does that give 2 population figures for most cities, which vary by as much as 4X ? SinisterLefty (talk) 02:07, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I can only speculate, but a) 1940 was not the most stable time in Chinese history, so exact numbers may be hard to get or b) it may be just the population of the city proper vs. the population of the conurbation. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:54, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Reading the first page which is visible on the JSTOR link, the first figure may represent the previous census at 31 Dec 1932. Does anybody have a JSTOR account who can read the rest of it? Alansplodge (talk) 09:10, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It seems odd that the populations of the cities would grow that rapidly. Would those in the country have fled to the cities at that time, thinking they would be safer during the war ? SinisterLefty (talk) 22:03, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know much about Manchukuo other than having heard of some of the atrocities committed by the Japanese there. But our article says there was a fair few Japanese settlers and that the Japanese had an migration programme. It's unclear from what our article says, precisely when they came, some were there before the invasion, but since the Japanese only invaded in 1931 and completed in early 1932, it seems likely there was still a fair amount of migration going on after December 1932. Our article seems to suggest many of those migrants were farmers but it's somewhat unclear as it does mention e.g. them representing 25% of the population in Xinjing. Maybe more to the point, our article also mentions the rapid industrialisation undergone. This would surely have been in the cities and generally entails people moving from rural areas to work in the factories. The article attests that they mostly weren't treated very well, but I'm not sure things would have been much better in rural areas either. (This still often the case, where we read about horrible conditions in factories in various places but there's plenty of workers to fulfill the demand since as bad as it may seem to us in the West, they tend to get a better income and more stable life than in rural areas.) Further, our article mentions shrinking farmlands with the land being redistributed. Which shouldn't be that surprising, I don't know how much good unused farmland was available but those Japanese settler needed to go somewhere even if they were farmers. In any case, if the Japanese needed workers for their factories, I don't think you have to know much about how they operated at the time to know they would have gotten them somehow. A quick look at articles like Mukden and the aforementioned Xinjing also mention these to some extent. Nil Einne (talk) 12:44, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, forced "conscription" by the Japanese to work in factories makes the most sense. SinisterLefty (talk) 12:54, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Forgot to add with such rapid development of the cities and considering the technology of the time, it's also quite likely you'd need a fair few to build the cities. Nil Einne (talk) 12:57, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Not so many if they were just wooden shacks. I can't picture the Japanese allowing them to build much more than that. SinisterLefty (talk) 14:00, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You think the factories were wooden shacks? Nil Einne (talk) 01:44, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Anyway our Changchun#Manchukuo and World War II includes examples of some of the buildings of the era which definitely don't look like wooden shacks. The Japanese had been building around there since 1906 Changchun#City planning and development from 1906–1931, but it seems clear from the article the construction greatly accelerated after 1931. I don't doubt that these facilities were not really intended for the Chinese, the Shenyang#Warlord Era and Japanese occupation says as much but still someone needed to build them. This source [1] also discusses some construction. I'm not even convinced all the Chinese primarily lived in wooden shacks. While again I don't doubt they mostly did not have flash residences, there are advantages to intensification. And while no one was building sky scrapers, not very safe 2 or 3 storey buildings with tiny apartments were likely doable for low cost in that era. It seems clear from what the article says that the Japanese had clear goals and while these did not generally entail giving much luxury to the Chinese population, there's no reason to think they did stuff which went against their goals of building major industrial cities (for the time) just to spite the Chinese especially when they could just as easily use them to construct what they wanted at minimal cost. They clearly expected to be there for a long time. Nil Einne (talk) 02:09, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

But they considered the Chinese to be inferior, and may have felt substandard housing would help to "keep them in their place". SinisterLefty (talk) 02:21, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have now received a copy of the source material for the population list from a nice editor at the WikiProject Resource Exchange. I can only match three of the municipalities in the article with the 1940 census tables. The other figures remain a mystery. I admit defeat on this one. If anybody else would like to take this on, please let me know and I can forward the pdf file to you. 19:50, 31 October 2019 (UTC)