Tag Archives: data

Data? What Data?

It’s bad enough that a substantial percentage of our fellow Americans reject probative evidence that is inconsistent with their preferred realities. What is arguably worse is the administration’s effort to erase such evidence–its conduct of a war on data that might undercut Trump’s fantasy realities.

The New Republic recently focused on that war.

Trump has always made things up. Remember that he entered politics promoting the hoax that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But what’s new about Trump’s second presidency is that not only have his lies escalated in dimension and scope, becoming increasingly brazen and weird—London is under sharia law!—but he’s also waging a concerted all-out war on facts that contradict his narrative, which is to say, all reliable sources of data.

As the article notes–and as most academics know–for many years, the government has been one of the best sources of data available; not only has it been an important source of probative, vetted information, it has made that information easily accessible to journalists and citizenry alike.  That informational history is under attack by Trump, who–as the article notes– doesn’t want any facts to get in the way of his made-up stories.

To declare that Trump has been right and the scientists have been wrong about climate change is so counterfactual that it requires a massive suppression of available data. Good thing Trump has thought of that. Through a combination of layoffs and weird directives, his administration has dramatically reduced its ability to collect data on industrial pollution that causes climate change, extreme weather caused by climate change, greenhouse gases contributing to climate change—really any facts related to the climate crisis. To take just one example, an effort launched by the Biden administration to collect emissions data was canceled by Trump on his first day in office. The same could be said about his Tylenol claims; lucky for him he has made significant cuts to autism research.

What about the autism claims unsupported by any credible medical research? Or the wild and dangerous claims from Trump and RFK Jr. about vaccines? As the article points out, those vaccine claims will be insufficiently challenged since he has cut vaccine research by more than half a billion dollars.

It goes on. And on.

Trump’s commitment to falsehood—and to eradicating facts at their roots—is not limited to science and public health. This summer he claimed that his policies were leading America into “another golden age” and that economic growth under his presidency “shatters expectations.” The data said otherwise: Whether you’re talking about job growth, inflation, or just about any other measure, the numbers did not chart in a direction favorable to the president. Here again, Trump is not willing to tolerate the facts: When the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month reported numbers that contradicted his sunny narrative, he fired the head of the agency.

Trump constantly says bizarre and unsupportedd things about crime–at least, in cities run by Democrats. He claims violence is surging although it’s  decreasing, actually, in some places, at historic rates,  He constantly blames immigrants, although relatively little crime is committed by immigrants, and he and MAGA are now trying to blame mass murders on transgender Americans, despite the fact that only 0.1 percent of mass shootings are committed by transgender people—and very few murders of any kind.

Are these and multiple other assertions inconsistent with the data? Well, there’s an easy “fix” to that–stop gathering and reporting the data.

Trump’s Agriculture Department cut its annual food insecurity survey, so Americans won’t know how many people are going hungry as a result of Trump’s cuts to food stamps and his inflationary tariffs.

We also won’t know how children are doing in school after his massive cuts to K-12 education, since the administration gutted the Department of Education’s research offices and the National Center for Education Statistics.

States, universities, and other nonprofits are trying to make up for the loss of the data, but in many cases the information provided by the federal government was irreplaceable.

When every day brings a new assault on our constitution and the rule of law, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that data, research, and facts are dangers to authoritarian regimes. Trump doesn’t know much, but he does understand that “data provides the basis for arguments, and he does not want any arguments. He also understands that facts and knowledge can only be nourished and sustained by institutions and experts, so he is destroying those institutions and pink-slipping those experts.”

If and when we rid ourselves of Trump and the MAGA plague, rebuilding and restoration will take many years…..

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Missing Information

At a recent doctor’s appointment, the assistant began by asking  the routine questions with which we are all familiar, concluding with “have you been depressed lately?” When I responded “Ever since the election,” that opened the floodgates–she confided to being terrified, angry, and desperately worried about the world her small daughter will inherit.

Millions of Americans are having similar conversations.

Given the firehose of rash and destructive assaults on poorly-understood agencies and programs, most of us are worrying about personal effects of the chaos: will my Social Security payment arrive? Will Medicare/Medicaid benefits be cut? What will Trump’s love affair with tariffs do to the stock market and my retirement accounts? Will the confirmation of an anti-science kook with a brain worm invite another pandemic?

Others wonder why we are spitting on America’s allies.

Given the sheer number of things to find appalling, it’s understandable that relatively few of us are focusing on an even more ominous aspect of this effort to destroy the federal government: the erasure of data from government websites. A recent report from In the Public Interest spelled out some consequences of those erasures.

The collection and dissemination of accurate data and findings fuel research all over the nation, in academic programs, think tanks, hospitals, private labs, and in state and local governments. But this isn’t just a problem for researchers whose projects or even life’s work have been interrupted or derailed. It’s the human cost of this loss that should worry all of us.

More than 8,000 web pages across a dozen U.S. government websites were purged, and while it covers everything from a veterans’ entrepreneurship programs to a NASA site, the purge of webpages and datasets related to public health is particularly alarming. The purges, which include more than 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have removed information and articles about vaccines, tuberculosis surveillance, veterans’ care, women’s health, HIV testing and prevention measures, Alzheimer’s warning signs, and overdose prevention training, among many other topics.

The datasets that have disappeared include large-scale national health surveys, indices, and data dashboards that are essential for policy makers and the public.

I spent 21 years teaching law and policy, and a bedrock principle of both was the importance of facts and evidence–the rather obvious connection between an accurate understanding of the reality of a situation and efforts to adjudicate it fairly or remedy its deficits via policy change.

The political disputes that have gotten us to this point have been significantly affected by the vast amounts of misinformation, disinformation and lack of information that have bolstered various bigotries while ignoring reality. (If you accept Musk’s description of programs with which he disagrees as “fraud and waste,” discussion of the merits of those programs–or the consequences of their sudden termination– becomes irrelevant.)

The erasure of data accumulated in rigorous studies–studies we taxpayers have funded and to which we are entitled–is an attack on knowledge and reality. The erasures are in service of MAGA bigotries– efforts to eliminate any mention of gay or trans people, avoid recognition of racial and gender realities, distort medical science and ignore climate change.

A  Guardian essay (link unavailable) noted the ridiculous extent of the purges.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s sweeping executive orders attacking “gender ideology” and DEI programs, the word “women” – along with a number of other terms – is quite literally being erased. The likes of NASA have been busy scrubbing mentions of terms related to women in leadership from public websites in an attempt to comply with Trump’s executive orders, for example. Agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have taken down numerous webpages related to gender in the wake of Trump’s orders – although a federal judged ordered on Tuesday that they should be reinstated.

Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has an internal list of hot-button words (which include “women”, “gender”, “minority”, “biases”) that they are cross-referencing against active research projects and grant applications. The Washington Post reports that once one of these very dangerous words is identified, staff then have to go through a flowchart to see whether a research project should be flagged for further review.

The National Institutes of Health and multiple university research departments are going through a similar dystopian exercise. Researchers at the University of California at San Diego, for example, have said their work is now at risk if it contains language deemed potentially problematic, including the word “women”.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak was the language created by Oceana to meet the Party’s ideological requirements. It limited people’s ability to think critically–after all, if you lack the word for something, does it exist?

Welcome to Oceana.

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Why Definitions Matter

You may have noticed that we Americans have trouble communicating. We may–or may not– talk to each other, but talking is not the same thing as communicating.

One of the reasons we are so polarized is that we not only occupy different realities, we use the same words to describe very different things.

I’ve previously pointed out that “conservative” does not accurately describe a radical MAGA movement filled with White “Christian” Nationalists. Labeling every social program, no matter how modest, as “socialist” confuses modern mixed economies with soviet-style, authoritarian regimes. But the problem goes beyond propaganda and intentional misdirection, because we can’t solve our problems if we can’t describe those problems accurately.

In an article awhile back Vox illustrated that problem. The first paragraph was eye-opening:

A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can’t find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1%, according to an important new dataset shared exclusively with “Axios on HBO.”

The article then noted that the official unemployment rate excludes people who might be earning only a few dollars a week, along with people who have stopped looking for work for whatever reason–perhaps a lack of available jobs or child care. The definition of “unemployed” that we use affects our evaluation of the severity of the problem. As the 2020 article pointed out, that year, if we had identified as unemployed anyone over 16 years old who wasn’t earning a living wage, the overall rate would have been 54.6%. For Black Americans, it would have been 59.2%.

The Axios article gave the backstory of our current measurement metric:

The official definition of unemployment can be traced back to the 1870s, when a Massachusetts statistician named Carroll Wright diagnosed what he referred to as “industrial hypochondria”.

By restricting the “unemployed” label to men who “really want employment,” Wright managed to minimize the unemployment figure.

Wright went on to found the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and he brought his unemployment definition with him.
To this day, to be officially counted as unemployed you need to be earning no money at all, and you need to be actively looking for work.

More recently, Gene Ludwig, a former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, founded the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.  According to calculations by that institute, in January of 2020, when the official rate of unemployment was 3.6%, the true rate was seven times greater — 23.4%. Whether you agree with Ludwig that the higher number is the “true” unemployment rate is less significant than the fact that most Americans don’t understand what the official number measures.

What would be helpful–what would allow us to actually communicate about jobs and wages– would be a report that broke down the data into categories: these are people actively searching for jobs who don’t have one; these are people whose jobs don’t pay a living wage; etc. That sort of report would allow voters and policymakers to focus on the actual issues involved. As it is, a single number that excludes everyone who has any sort of employment–whether part-time or poorly paid–obscures reality.

We can’t fix a problem we can’t properly define.

Insufficient jobs and insufficient wages are two very different problems. The Biden administration has done an admirable job of creating new jobs, and various economic reports indicate that the administration has also presided over significant wage gains, but few of us have the time or ability to delve into the official data of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and to calculate what percentage of workers has escaped the “under-employed” category.

This problem of accurate–or at least agreed-upon–definition isn’t limited to employment figures. Some years ago, I was looking into arguments about the U.S. balance of trade, and realized that those official calculations only included tangible goods–not services or other intangibles. So if we were sending printed books (or cars or widgets) abroad, those got counted; but if Americans were selling publishing rights (or providing design services) to consumers in other countries, the value of those exports wasn’t included. (I don’t know whether that is still the case.)

What was that bible story about the Tower of Babel?

We live in a very complex society, and wide differences in culture, education and expertise add other complications to even the most sincere efforts at communication. But–assuming we elect people in November who are committed to running a functional government–we really need to look at the way official data is compiled and reported.

Using the same words to talk about the same things would be a start….

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Majority Rule

Majority rule in our democratic republic is more complicated than we like to think.

For one thing, our particular form of government carves out matters that are specifically insulated from what the Founders called the “passions of the majority”–the individual liberties enumerated and “reserved to the people” by various provisions of the Bill of Rights. For another, in those areas where majority opinion is supposed to count, our mechanism for determining what a majority of citizens really wants  is the vote–and not every citizen entitled to cast a vote does so. (The differences between what popular majorities want and what gets enacted can often be seen by comparing polling and survey research with legislation passed by victorious candidates.)

And don’t get me started on the Electoral College.

Then there’s the distortion regularly provided by media–very much including Twitter and Facebook, etc. We too often assume that the loudest and most persistent voices reflect the opinion of majorities–and that is not a well-founded assumption.

Take, for example, the issue of vaccine mandates.

A recent report by the Brookings Institution’s William Galston suggests that requiring vaccination is a lot more popular than we might imagine if we only listened to the hysterical purveyors of misinformation and conspiracy theories. (Recently, those vaccine deniers were accurately–if intemperately–labeled “assholes” by the Mayor of West Lafayette, Indiana. I don’t know him, but I’m pretty sure I’d really like him.)

Galston did a deep dive into the data. Not surprisingly, he found that unvaccinated Americans were less concerned about COVID than those who’d had the sense to get vaccinated.

In the face of massive evidence to the contrary, more than half of unvaccinated adults regard getting vaccinated as a bigger risk to their health than is getting infected with the coronavirus. Only one in five of the unvaccinated say that the spread of the delta variant has made them more likely to get vaccinated. These data do not support hopes that the recent outbreak will suffice to increase vaccination rates enough to bring the pandemic under control.

The data also reflects surprisingly robust support for vaccine mandates.

Since the beginning in March 2020, government’s response to the pandemic has occasioned intense controversy, much of it along partisan lines. Although the level of conflict remains high, recent events have solidified public support for the most intrusive policy government can undertake—mandatory vaccinations. According to a survey conducted by the Covid States Project, 64% of Americans now support mandatory vaccinations for everyone, and 70% support them as a requirement for boarding airplanes. More than 6 in 10 say that vaccinations should be required for K-12 students returning for in-school instruction as well as for college students attending classes at their institutions. And the most recent Economist/YouGov survey found that more than 60% support mandatory vaccinations for frontline workers—prison guards, police officers, teachers, medical providers, and the military—and for members of Congress as well…

“Solid majorities of every racial and ethnic group support vaccine mandates, as do Americans at all levels of age, income, and education.

The data also supports the growing recognition by sane Americans that the GOP has  devolved into a cult of anti-science, anti-evidence, crazy folks: Only 45% of Republicans support vaccine mandates, compared to 84% of Democrats.

When I sent my children to school, I was required–mandated– to provide evidence that they’d been vaccinated, and thus did not threaten the health and safety of the other children with whom they would be taught. When I was young myself, Americans lined up with gratitude to receive the polio vaccine that would allow them to avoid the alternatives–death, or imprisonment in iron lungs.

When providing for “the General Welfare” requires rules–mandates– a majority of us understand that such mandates not only do not infringe our liberties, but actually give us more liberty–allowing us to go about our daily lives without the danger of infection (or the need to wear a mask).

Vaccine mandates are supported by medical science, by law, by morality, and by a majority of Americans. We periodically need to remind ourselves that “loudest” doesn’t equate to “most”–and that a fair number of the hysterical people shouting about “personal freedom” can’t define it and don’t want their neighbors to have it.

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When Good Ideas Get Bad Slogans

Among so-called “woke” Americans, certain verities seem obvious–so obvious, in fact, that it becomes easy to believe that most other people see things the same way, and to dismiss folks who fail to agree as dishonest or racist. As a result, they downplay or entirely ignore the need to educate and communicate, a need they often denigrate as “PR,” with the result that they often end up undermining support for the reforms they want to see.

Perhaps the most vivid example of this phenomenon was the slogan “Defund the Police,” which gained currency after the murder of George Floyd. A March USA Today/Ipsos Poll found that voters opposed “defunding the police” 58-18.

When most Americans hear “defund,” they hear only “take money away.” They don’t hear “change funding formulas to supplement policing with social services so that police can be freed up to focus on actual criminal behavior.”

The repeated use of that unfortunate phrasing allowed a variety of political candidates– Republican and Democrat alike–to reinforce a number of widely accepted misconceptions about crime and policing. The Brookings Institution recently addressed seven of those misconceptions, which it called myths.

 The most obvious–and intellectually dishonest– was the assertion that “defunding” really meant “abolish.” Granted, the “defund” language was misleading, but only the most partisan observers actually thought the movement wanted to eliminate policing.

More understandable–if equally incorrect–was the belief that reducing the presence of police would usher in an increase in social disorder.

Another misconception is that police forces are what maintains order. However, studies have found that the best tools to establish peaceful societies are equity in education and infrastructure. Indeed, research shows that lack of education and illiteracy are some of the most significant predictors of future prison populations.

When it addressed the notion that police protect society from violence, the Brookings article included some rather shocking (at least to me) data. Evidently, research shows that 70% of robberies, 66% of rapes, 47% of aggravated assaults, and 38% of murders go unsolved each year–a rather daunting catalogue of police performance.

Research also rebuts the belief that spending money on community programs wouldn’t affect crime rates; the article links to studies demonstrating–among other things– that individuals who receive a quality education are less likely to become involved in the criminal justice system.(interestingly, the article also notes that police officers who have had more education are less likely to be the recipient of misconduct complaints.)

And although there is a widespread belief that police work is primarily focused on crime prevention, that also turns out to be a misconception.

There is minimal evidence that police surveillance results in reduced crime or prevents crime. For instance, research showed 90% of the people that were stopped in the NYPD’s controversial stop and frisk program were not committing any crime. While it is true that police do apprehend individuals that violate the law, this is one of several components of their responsibilities.

Finally, the article debunks the notion that “Defund the Police” was simply an emotional response to the appalling sight of a police officer killing George Floyd.

Some opponents of cutting police budgets view the movement as an emotional response to police misconduct rather than a well-thought-out campaign. However, a study with 60 years of data indicates that increases in spending do not reduce crime. Which begs the question, how is 60 years of a failed objective any better? Yes, the movement gained attention because of tragic events in 2020, but the evidence supporting the movement is based on hard data and proven methods.

Police reform is long overdue,  and we have had thousands of opportunities to make the appropriate changes. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd garnered national attention that has caused many to take a long, hard look at our democratic systems, cultural identities, and the necessary steps towards equal protection. We do know that more traditional policing is not the answer.

Those in the legal community who have long been aware of the research and the problems with current police culture were appalled by the “defund” slogan, knowing that–rather than calling attention to mountains of data and the necessity of different approaches–it would only antagonize police and frighten the public, rather than communicating the need to alter a currently ineffective approach to public safety.

People who really want change rather than an opportunity to pontificate understand that language matters.

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