Random Blogging – Page 17

Non-Profit Doesn’t Necessarily Mean “Do-Gooder”

I was intrigued to come across an essay by John Dilulio, Jr. in a publication I had previously not encountered: American Purpose.

I have been familiar with Dilulio–a political scientist currently at the University of Pennsylvania–since his work on George W. Bush’s “Faith-Based Initiative.” (Thanks to a generous Ford Foundation grant, I helmed a three-year, three state study of that initiative.) In the 1990’s, Dilulio was best known in criminal justice circles for his hostile analysis of young criminals and his condemnation of violent juveniles as ”superpredators,” a position from which he later–and properly–retreated.

The essay in American Purpose addressed a very different issue: the nonprofit status of American organizations, a status that entitles such organizations to various types of tax avoidance. The “nonprofit sector,” he tells us, consists of organizations

that enjoy one or more of four types of tax exemptions, subsidies, or supports: tax-free property owned by the organizations; tax-deductible donations to the organizations; taxpayer-funded grants, contracts, or fees to the organizations; and taxpayer-funded payments to individuals for purchasing goods or services from the organizations.

Intriguing indeed. But, you ask, why do we need any such “nonprofit sector?” What criteria should be used to determine which existing or new organizations receive some, all, or none of those four tax privileges? Who is supposed to benefit from their existence, and by what measures? And, last but not least, how might we mitigate the moral hazard when some of these organizations inevitably use their tax privileges for private gains or to evade public accountability, or behave in ways that are both deceptive and self-dealing?

The essay began with the good news: something like 92 percent of all nonprofits are small, community-based, and serve local needs. Fewer than 3 percent lobby for government grants or contracts.

At the top of the nonprofit pyramid, however, are less publicly beneficial organizations–and those are especially prevalent in health care.

At its very top, the tax-privileged sector is dominated by the ten nonprofit health systems that in 2021 each collected $14.5 billion or more in annual revenues, and by a dozen nonprofit universities that are among the most well-endowed universities in America. Is enough being done to ensure that these tax-privileged titans’ board members, CEOs, presidents, and other leaders are using their respective tax privileges in the public interest while refraining from individual or institutional self-dealing?

Dilulio cites a 2023 article in which Rice University economists Derek Jenkins and Vivian Ho wrote that, “Nonprofit hospitals, which currently comprise approximately 58 percent of U.S. hospitals, have been repeatedly criticized by scholars and policymakers for failing to live up to a poorly articulated standard of ‘charity care’ and benevolence,” and for failing to justify their tens of billions of dollars a year in federal, state, and local tax breaks. He also cited a 2022 report by the Economic Research Institute, which found that, while nonprofit hospital CEOs are paid, on average, $600,000 a year, the ten highest-paid nonprofit health systems executives made $7 million a year or more; the CEO of Kaiser Permanente was paid nearly $18 million in 2018.

Back when I was a practicing lawyer, I saw how this worked. If a corporation being formed could credibly point to some charitable purpose, and could successfully argue for nonprofit status, monetary gains that would otherwise constitute–and be taxed as– profit could be diverted/mischaracterized as “overhead costs.” These “nonprofits” could divert what would otherwise be profit into generous salaries and lots of perks for management. (Does a health organization executive really need a luxury car supplied by the nonprofit entity? What about that corporate jet?)

The essay has much more information, and offers suggestions for legislative interventions. If you are interested in the various ways in which nonprofit status can be–and has been– gamed, it’s well worth the time to click through and read in its entirety.

My own first reaction was that this situation–the culture of “game-playing” that has allowed greed to infect and distort significant elements of a system originally intended to serve the public good–has become widespread. It isn’t limited to health care and a handful of elite universities.

Assuming we emerge from the November election with American democracy still largely intact, we need to address a multitude of structural distortions, and not just those affecting the electoral system. The misuse of nonprofit status is one of them.

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OK–Let’s Talk About Those Polls

Survey research ain’t what it used to be.

Back in 2020, the Harvard Business Review summarized the changes that have diminished polling accuracy. The article described the industry as “living on borrowed time,” and predicted that its increasing errors would not be soon–or easily–corrected.

The basic problem is low response rates. Thanks to caller ID, fewer Americans pick up the phone when a pollster calls, so it takes more calls to reach enough respondents to make a valid sample. It also means that Americans are screening themselves before they pick up the phone.

So even as our ability to analyze data has gotten better and better, thanks to advanced computing and an increase in the amount of data available to analysts, our ability to collect data has gotten worse. And if the inputs are bad, the analysis won’t be any good either.

It now takes 40+ calls to reach just one respondent. And there really is no reliable way to assess how those who do respond differ from those who don’t. (I know my own children do not answer calls if they don’t recognize the phone number–are they representative of an age group? An educational or partisan cohort? I have no idea–and neither do the pollsters.) There are also concerns that those who do respond are disproportionately rural.

These things matter.

A sample is only valid to the extent that the individuals reached are a random sample of the overall population of interest. It’s not at all problematic for some people to refuse to pick up the phone, as long as their refusal is driven by a random process. If it’s random, the people who do pick up the phone will still be a representative sample of the overall population, and the pollster will just have to make more calls.

Similarly, it’s not a serious problem for pollsters if people refuse to answer the phone according to known characteristics. For instance, pollsters know that African-Americans are less likely to answer a survey than white Americans and that men are less likely to pick up the phone than women. Thanks to the U.S. Census, we know what proportion of these groups are supposed to be in our sample, so when the proportion of men, or African-Americans, falls short in the sample, pollsters can make use of weighting techniques to correct for the shortfall.

The real problem comes when potential respondents to a poll are systematically refusing to pick up the phone according to characteristics that pollsters aren’t measuring…. if a group like evangelicals or conservatives systematically exclude themselves from polls at higher rates than other groups, there’s no easy way to fix the problem.

As the article notes, with response rates to modern polls below 15%, it becomes extremely difficult to determine whether systematic nonresponse problems are even happening.

These problems go from nagging to consequential when the characteristics that are leading people to exclude themselves from polls are correlated with the major outcome that the poll is trying to measure. For instance, if Donald Trump voters were more likely to decide not to participate in polls because they’re rigged, and did so in a way that wasn’t correlated with known characteristics like race and gender, pollsters would have no way of knowing.

Then there’s the failure of likely voter models.

People tend to say they’re going to vote even when they won’t. Every major pollster has its own approach to a “likely voter” screen, but they all include a respondent’s previous voting behavior. As long as that behavior stays stable, these models work. But when something generates turnout among voters who have previously been absent, all bets are off. That happened when the Obama campaign energized previously apathetic voters, and since the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, we’ve seen evidence of significantly increased registration and turnout among women who hadn’t previously voted.

As the Harvard article noted,

It may be the case that standard sampling and weighting techniques are able to correct for sampling problems in a normal election — one in which voter turnout patterns remain predictable — but fail when the polls are missing portions of the electorate who are likely to turn out in one election but not in previous ones. Imagine that there’s a group of voters who don’t generally vote and are systematically less likely to respond to a survey. So long as they continue to not vote, there isn’t a problem. But if a candidate activates these voters, the polls will systematically underestimate support for the candidate.

Polling is broken, and we need to stop hyperventilating about their results. Remember, Trump has consistently underperformed his polling percentages in every primary thus far this year.

As the saying goes, the only poll that counts is the one on election day.

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The Attention Economy

There is a very common complaint–usually voiced by an older person with “know-it-all” pretensions–about “kids these days.” Although that complaint has echoed through history (ever since Socrates, actually), today it tends to focus on the ubiquity of screens…the inescapable elements of our digital world.

It is certainly true that we now occupy an unprecedented environment, and there’s really no telling how or whether it is warping the young of the species. (If I had to guess, young people were different post-Gutenberg than they’d been pre-Gutenberg–and I would wager that some folks weren’t all that happy with that change, either.) The way we socialize the young into constantly changing cultures is inevitably evolving, and determining whether the changes are healthy or damaging is pretty speculative.

We just don’t know.

That said, a recent essay in the most recent Hedgehog Review, addressing that issue, was alternately annoying and thought-provoking. It was titled “The Great Malformation: A personal skirmish in the battle for attention.” After reminding readers of the often-quoted African proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child,” the author indulged in the all-to-common verbal handwringing:

The villagers are too often found behind closed doors, watching television or surfing the Internet. When they do appear in public, they are increasingly prone to do so with portable electronic devices in hand, phoning or surfing or tweeting their way through virtual realms, leaving the village streets full of moving bodies but emptied of human presence. This same retreat from shared physical spaces is observable even—or, rather, especially—in the inner sanctum of the home, where brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, parents and children, are increasingly found alongside each other yet absent to each other, cocooned in mesmerizing solipsism, ghosting even themselves and their own lives. The human race is on its way to becoming seven or eight billion perfect societies of one, each bound in what Stephen Colbert once called “solitarity” with other human beings, somewhere or another—who knows where—who themselves are busy absenting themselves from their families and homes. Where are the children being raised in such a world heading? What are they being urged to care about, cultivated to do and to be? What conception of the human good, if any, is implicit in, supported by, or coincident with this sort of upbringing?

I nearly stopped reading. Agitation about something we all know, without reference to data that illuminates what’s occurring, is just another version of “get off my lawn.” But the essay then took a different direction, arguing that today’s screen fixations come from an intertwining of culture and economics. The article is lengthy, and much less superficial than the cited paragraph suggests.

A few observations that struck me:

The market economy torn free from the rest of cultural life some half-dozen generations ago has now turned upon its parent and consumed her. The work of the polity that Aristotle regarded as most crucial—the acculturation of successive generations—increasingly occurs as the unplanned aggregate effect of corporate profit-seeking, in a direction that few regard as genuinely good for the next generation. This novel experiment in socialization raises anew the concern that we might prove unable to keep our republic (as Benjamin Franklin put it), or even our humanity….

As industrial capitalism matures, it gradually colonizes large swaths of the culture, whose evolution is then subject to being steered by the same decentralized and unplanned processes that serve up the other benefits and burdens of capitalism…We are accustomed to this arrangement and not generally awake to its perversity. When we enter the sphere of getting and spending, our activity is shaped by the pursuit of profits, and unlikely to cleave to any compelling conception of the human good. Presumably we do this in order to gain the resources we need to pursue genuine goods in the remainder of our lives. When the market swallows this remainder and seeks to reshape it to maximize profits, it becomes an impediment, not a contribution, to human flourishing.

This cultural revolution could not have come so far so fast without tapping into a very personal resource, located in the inner realm of conscious experience: human attention. There is growing recognition that attention has become an exceedingly valuable and hotly contested commodity.

From radio and television, to advertising, to video games…it’s hard to argue that today’s culture hasn’t devolved into a competition for eyeballs and clicks. And it is worth asking ourselves what the long-term consequences of that devolution portend.

A brief blog post cannot do justice to the essay’s lengthy analysis. It’s well worth reading the entire article.

I don’t agree with everything in it, but it’s a provocative read.

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About Those Aliens In Roswell

Yes, Virginia, the problem is the media–but not in the way most Americans assume.

Yes, the outlets we call “mainstream” could be doing a better job. The New York Times, especially, seems to have it in for Joe Biden. (My nephew’s husband recently wrote them to complain about their “horse-race” coverage and constant normalizing of Trump, and in response got a letter so smarmy he cancelled his subscription.) But the real problem isn’t the failure of actual news organizations to abandon an unfortunate “click-bait” approach–annoying as that is. The real problem is the widespread availability of faux “news”/propaganda sources that exist to facilitate the confirmation biases of voters.

I have previously shared a statement I routinely made to students in my Media and Public Policy classes: If you really want to believe that aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico, I can find you five Internet sites with pictures of the aliens.

People living in our Internet Age inhabit an informational wild west, in which anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can claim to be a news site. People who desperately want to believe X need only do a brief google search to locate “reporters” who will assure them that X is, indeed, factual. Want to believe that the Covid vaccine causes Parkinson’s Disease? Think those “elitist” scientists are wrong about climate change? That Trump’s 92 indictments are fabricated elements of a witch hunt? Despite the great weight of evidence to the contrary, google will help you find “experts” who will confirm those counterfactual beliefs.

Most of us are aware of the prevalence of online propaganda, and a recent NBC report illuminated its effects on political preferences. It turns out–surprise!–people who follow very different news sources have very different political loyalties. (It also turns out that Trump voters are disproportionately people who know nothing about politics at all.)

Supporters of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are sharply divided across all sorts of lines, including the sources they rely on to get their news, new data from the NBC News poll shows.

Biden is the clear choice of voters who consume newspapers and national network news, while Trump does best among voters who don’t follow political news at all….

The poll looked at various forms of traditional media (newspapers, national network news and cable news), as well as digital media (social media, digital websites and YouTube/Google). Among registered voters, 54% described themselves as primarily traditional news consumers, while 40% described themselves as primarily digital media consumers.

Biden holds an 11-point lead among traditional news consumers in a head-to-head presidential ballot test, with 52% support among that group to Trump’s 41%. But it’s basically a jump ball among digital media consumers, with Trump at 47% and Biden at 44%.

And Trump has a major lead among those who don’t follow political news — 53% back him, and 27% back Biden.

Researchers say that last category is comprised of voters who have decided who they are supporting and have simply “tuned out” information that might reflect poorly on their preferred candidate. If they encounter it at all, they dismiss it as “fake news.” As one scholar put it, “That’s why it’s hard to move this race based on actual news. They aren’t seeing it, and they don’t care.”

Third-party candidates also do well with this chunk of the electorate — a quarter of the 15% who say they don’t follow political news choose one of the other candidates in a five-way ballot test that includes Kennedy, Jill Stein and Cornel West. Third-party supporters also make up similar shares of those who say they get their news primarily from social media and from websites.

There is one bit of positive news in the NBC report: those of us who rely on traditional news sites–sites that follow professional journalism ethics and guidelines–are more likely to vote. According to the report, 19% of those who voted in the last presidential election but not in 2022 and 27% who voted in neither of the last two elections say they don’t follow political news.

The NBC report helps answer a persistent question: how can people support a man who [insert latest outrage here]. The answer is: they either don’t believe the outrage, because they rely on sources providing disinformation and propaganda–or they haven’t heard about them, because they ignore all political reporting.

Ben Franklin is said to have responded to a question about what sort of government the Founders had created by saying “A republic, if you can keep it.”

The question for our times is whether a country in which millions of voters know nothing about their government or politics will even vote, and if they do, whether they’ll vote to keep it.

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Florida Man And Other Strange Political Cases

The question for our age may just be: What is WRONG with these people? What is it about science, tolerance, and ordinary common sense that sets them off?

What has set me off today is a Paul Krugman column about “Florida man” Ron DeSantis’ most recent departure from rationality. As Krugman explains:

It’s possible to grow meat in a lab — to cultivate animal cells without an animal and turn them into something people can eat. However, that process is difficult and expensive. And at the moment, lab-grown meat isn’t commercially available and probably won’t be for a long time, if ever.

Still, if and when lab-grown meat, also sometimes referred to as cultured meat, makes it onto the market at less than outrageous prices, a significant number of people will probably buy it. Some will do so on ethical grounds, preferring not to have animals killed to grace their dinner plates. Others will do so in the belief that growing meat in labs does less damage to the environment than devoting acres and acres to animal grazing. And it’s at least possible that lab-grown meat will eventually be cheaper than meat from animals.

And if some people choose to consume lab-grown meat, why not? It’s a free country, right?

Evidently Florida isn’t part of that free country.

DeSantis has now signed a bill that bans the production or sale of lab-grown meat in Florida. Evidently, other Red states are considering similar legislation. Evidently also, the fact that a a lab-grown meat industry doesn’t yet exist is irrelevant. As Krugman notes, Florida’s law is a “perfect illustration of how crony capitalism, culture war, conspiracy theorizing and rejection of science have been merged — ground together, you might say — in a way that largely defines American conservatism today.”

I am so old I remember when Republicans and conservatives championed limited government. A government that can tell you what you can and cannot eat–that can tell private enterprises what they can and cannot produce or sell– is pretty much the antithesis of limited. Today, when Republican candidates talk about “freedom,” they rather clearly mean “freedom to live a life in accordance with what we decree is proper.” Today’s GOP wants to define and constrain your life choices from reproduction to food consumption.

Krugman tells us that, ridiculous as it sounds, meat consumption has been caught up in the culture wars.

You saw this coming years ago if you were following the most trenchant source of social observation in our times: episodes of “The Simpsons.” Way back in 1995, Lisa Simpson, having decided to become a vegetarian, was forced to sit through a classroom video titled “Meat and You: Partners in Freedom.”

It seems that eating– or claiming to eat– lots of meat “has become a badge of allegiance on the right, especially among the MAGA crowd. Donald Trump Jr. once tweeted, “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday,” improbable for someone who isn’t a sumo wrestler.”

Krugman attributes MAGA’s meat obsession to acceptance of various conspiracy theories, climate denialism, and the growing belief of GOP hardliners that “politics is a form of live-action role play.” We the People aren’t a polity; we’re an audience.

I have another theory. We live in the age of insanity. And it isn’t only MAGA, although that movement is surely the poster child for lunacy. Here’s a recent story from The Independent. The headline says it all: “RFK Jr says a worm ate part of his brain and then died inside his head.”

Anti-vaccine activist turned independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has revealed that a worm ate part of his brain and then died inside his head.

According to The New York Times, Mr Kennedy made the bizarre admission during a deposition held as part of his 2012 divorce proceeding.

That worm explains a lot. At a minimum, this admission sheds some additional light on the recent endorsement of President Biden by the remainder of the Kennedy family.

Americans today are being subjected to performative politics in which a cast of wacko characters whose antics–however entertaining–are utterly divorced from the actual work of governing. Florida Man DeSantis pontificates about the dangers of “wokism” (which he evidently defines as anything that offends him); RFK spouts anti-science, anti-vaccine lunacies; Trump claims victimhood/persecution whenever things don’t go his way; Marjorie Taylor Green sees Jewish Space Lasers.

If this was a sit-com, it would be way too over-the-top.

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