Monthly Archives: September 2017

The Problem is Civil Obedience

Law, Politics,

Judging by the last few days’ letters to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Trumped-up controversy over NFL players protesting racial injustice has angered that segment of our country’s population that disapproves of civil disobedience. Trust the late historian Howard Zinn to have the perfect response. (Thanks to columnist Will McCorkle for reminding me of this quote.)

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves . . . (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

In this video, Matt Damon reads longer excerpts from the speech from which this passage was drawn. Dr. Zinn delivered it in 1970, when Americans were protesting the Vietnam War.

Of course, it’s more than a little incongruous to hear a speech condemning (among other things) wealth inequality read by an actor who earns $20 million or more for making a single film.

Inequality of Wealth

Economics, Politics,

The Federal Reserve has released its 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances. The charts below were compiled by the People’s Policy Project. The takeaway is that in 2016 the top 10% owned 77% of the country’s wealth, and 38.5% is owned by the top 1%.

Not surprisingly, the gap between rich and poor is increasing. The top 1% owned “only” 29.9% of the nation’s wealth in 1989.

After declining slightly due to the great recession of 2008, the wealth gap between Blacks, Whites and Latinos is increasing again. Mean White family wealth is now greater than it was in 2007, but Blacks and Latinos have not yet recovered from the recession. (By the way, if these dollar amounts seem high, remember that they are means, which are skewed by the wealth of those at the top. The medians are much lower.)

This provides an interesting backdrop for the Republican Tax Plan, which cuts the top individual tax rate from 39.5% to 35%, and reduces the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%. (Since capital-based income is concentrated among the rich, a corporate tax cut is simply another tax cut for the rich.) It also eliminates the estate tax. To partially pay for these giveaways, the President proposes cuts of $4.3 trillion to Social Security, Medicaid, public education and other non-military spending. The House Republican budget calls for a $5.8 trillion cut in these same programs.

Here are the results of an analysis by the Tax Policy Center of who benefits from Trump’s tax plan.

You may also be interested in reading:

On Obama’s Speech

Whose Opinion Matters?

Documenting the Flint Effect

Environment, Health, , ,

In April 2014, Flint, MI’s state-appointed Emergency Manager Darnell Earley made a decision to save $5 million by switching Flint, MI’s water source from Lake Huron to the heavily polluted Flint River. High acidity in the river eroded the protective coating on the city’s lead water pipes, introducing lead into the water supply. Lead is associated with a variety of health and behavioral problems, including impaired growth, kidney damage, high blood pressure, lower intelligence and criminal behavior. Emails show that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a former venture capitalist with an estimated net worth of $200 million, attempted to cover up the crisis for several months. It is difficult to determine what role the racial and socioeconomic composition of Flint—as opposed to Republican business values—played in the origin of the crisis or the delay in addressing it. Flint is 53% Black and 45% of its residents live below the poverty line.

New research demonstrates some of the results of lead exposure for Flint’s citizens. A paper by Drs. Daniel Grossman of the University of West Virginia and David Slusky of the University of Kansas looked at its consequences for fertility and fetal death rates. Dr. Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech—who played an important role in documenting the lead levels in Flint—had previously found decreases in fertility and increases in fetal deaths as a result of lead exposure through drinking water.

The Flint water crisis can be seen as a natural experiment with tragic consequences. Their analysis is an interrupted time series design with multiple comparison groups. The interruption occurred in April 2014, when Flint’s water supply was contaminated. The researchers examined changes in several variables of interest in Flint from before to after that date, using Michigan’s 15 other largest cities as comparison groups. Racial, socioeconomic and other demographic characteristics of the parents and children were statistically controlled. Here are the highlights:

  • The fertility rate after April 2014 was 8.5 births per 1000 women lower in Flint than in the comparison cities. This is a 12% decline in fertility and amounts to between 198 and 276 fewer children born in Flint during the time of the study due to the water crisis. Here are the trend lines.
  • There was a “horrifyingly large” 58% increase in the fetal death rate—defined as pregnancies of more than 20 weeks that do not result in a live birth—compared to other Michigan cities. This explains some, but not all, of the decline in fertility.
  • After April 2014, the overall health of Flint’s babies was not as good as those born in the other cities. They were born half a week sooner, were 150 grams lighter at birth, and gained 5 grams per week less than babies in the comparison groups. They also contained a .74% higher percentage of females. This is explained by the fact that male fetuses are more susceptible to prenatal damage.

Alternative explanations for an interrupted time series design focus on the possibility that something else happened in Flint in April 2014 that did not happen in Detroit’s other cities that affected its fertility rate. Maybe the change in the smell or taste of the water was sufficiently alarming to Flint residents to cause them to have less sex, or at least less unprotected sex.

Even if Flint residents avoided pregnancy during the water crisis, this does not explain the increase in fetal deaths or the differences in the health of newborns.

Dr. Slusky discusses the results of their study in this video.

It is likely that the residents of Flint will be dealing with social problems due to the lead crisis for decades, possibly even for generations. The Michigan Attorney General has filed indictments against 15 individuals for their roles in the crisis, but experience suggests that they are unlikely to be held accountable in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, experts are suggesting that residents of many other U. S. cities are being poisoned by lead. Of course, if we continue to defund the Environmental Protection Agency, we are less likely to be aware of the seriousness of the problem.

You may also be interested in reading:

Get the Lead Out, Part 1

Get the Lead Out, Part 2

Heavy Traffic

A Plague on Both Your Houses

Media, Politics, ,

False equivalencies abound in today’s journalism. When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans.

Thomas Patterson

President Trump’s recent statement that the tragedy in Charlottesville, VA was due to “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” has led to renewed interest in the concept of false equivalence or false balancing. False equivalence occurs when the media, following the journalistic norm of non-partisanship, give the incorrect impression that there is an equal amount of evidence supporting both sides of a controversial issue. For many years, media coverage of climate change implied that there were an equal amount of evidence supporting or questioning the claim that the Earth was getting warmer due to human activity. False balancing usually occurs with a single article, but when discussing several articles over a period of time, false equivalence is the better term.

I recently became aware of a report by Dr. Thomas Patterson, a political scientist with Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, entitled “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.” The data come from a content analysis of all campaign items appearing between the second week of August through Election Day in five newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and USA Today) and the main nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC. They were collected by Media Tenor, a firm which specializes in such analyses. Each campaign news item was classified according to its theme and whether its depiction of the candidate was positive, negative or not clear. Here are some highlights.

First, the basics. Donald Trump received more news coverage than Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign. Whether this was an advantage is not clear, however, given the tone of the coverage.

Those who believe in the folk theory of democracy—that voters have stable policy preferences, attend to the policy statements of the candidates, and vote for the candidate whose position most closely matches their own—will be disappointed by the themes of the 2016 coverage. The candidates’ policy stands were mentioned in only 10% of the stories. As is the recent past, the most frequent theme was “horserace” coverage—that is, who’s winning, usually illustrated by poll results.

The tone of the coverage of the nominees was consistently negative, both during the general election and the entire campaign, including the primaries.

Here it is, by week, for each candidate separately.

In the critical final weeks of the campaign, Trump’s coverage became slightly more positive while Clinton’s veered in the negative direction. This was undoubtedly due to FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Clinton’s emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. This is shown more clearly in this chart of Clinton’s week-by-week “scandal” coverage.

Patterson computed a theme regarding the candidates’ fitness for the office of president, which combined reports on their policy positions, personal traits, leadership skills and ethical standards. According to the media, they were equivalent.

There has been a long-term trend toward greater negativity in coverage of the presidential candidates over the past 56 years.

The negativity is not confined to political candidates. Their coverage of other recent issues has also been negative. In psychology, negativity bias refers to the fact that negative information has a greater effect on human behavior than neutral or positive information. Media coverage of public issues may be both an effect and a cause of negativity bias.

Patterson makes two important points about these results. First, the relentlessly negative tone of the coverage contributes to cynicism and apathy among the voters, which could have reduced voter turnout. Research suggests that lower voter turnout benefits Republican candidates. Secondly, he argues that the uniformly negative coverage created the false impression of equivalence between the candidates. This raises the question of how researchers can demonstrate false equivalence empirically. To what external criterion can the media coverage be compared?

In some cases, external standards are available. For example, in the case of climate change, researchers can compute the percentage of peer-reviewed scientific articles that find evidence of human influence on the climate or can survey climatologists to find out what percentage of them believe that global warming is human-caused.

Patterson is writing for an academic and/or politically engaged audience that is likely to accept his assumptions that Clinton’s email scandal was less serious that the legal and ethical problems faced by Trump, and that Clinton was better prepared to be president than Trump. Obviously, not all voters agreed. Unfortunately, he presents no objective evidence to support these implicit claims, and it’s not even clear what data he could have consulted.

While false equivalence is an important source of media bias, demonstrating its existence empirically will continue to be a challenge.

You may also be interested in reading:

October Surprise

Framing the Debates

False Balancing: A Case Study