Tag Archives: evidence

The Silver Effect

Remember facts? Those verifiable observations about that thing we call reality?

Pinch me, because I think they may be coming back. The signs are there, although subject to alternative interpretations (making predictions is not unlike reading entrails).

First, there was Nate Silver. Silver’s dogged focus on data drove a lot of discussion during the election. That focus wasn’t new–he’d also predicted the 2010 Republican blowout–but his insistence upon empirical investigation hadn’t previously gotten noticed by people outside the world of political junkies. When the spin-meisters pooh-poohed his “novel methodology” (aka beginning with facts), they succeeded in illuminating their methodology, the technical name for which is  “making stuff up.” In the wake of the election, there has been a subtle but discernible shift in the media toward actual fact-checking.

Exhibit two: Costco. No kidding. I got my most recent Costco member’s magazine, and was leafing through it, when I came to an article titled “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” It was a story about fact-checking on the Internet. The gist was that more and more fact-checking sites are popping up to join Politifact, Snopes and Factcheck.com. This phenomenon tells me a couple of things: there’s a market for fact-checking the “information” that’s so readily available but so often misleading; and recognition of the need for verification is widespread enough to merit notice from a mass retailer like Costco.

Exhibit three: in an inventive vein, I got an email the other day advertising something called LazyTruth [link]. It’s a plug-in for Chrome that automatically scans email for information that FactCheck.org and Politifact have deemed false. If something doesn’t check out, it’ll provide a few words of correction and a link to where you can find out more. You can then easily pass that verified information on to the crazy uncle or friend who forwarded the email to you in the first place. Down the road, the developer plans to add more kinds of rumors to LazyTruth’s filter — urban myths, hoaxes, false security threats, etc. — but for now the tool is limited to political tall tales.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’ve been very concerned about the loss of journalism–real journalism that deals with verifiable facts about actual events that matter in a democratic system, that gives us the information we need to keep our government and other institutions accountable. These signs that we may be groping our way toward new ways of obtaining the facts we need  are incredibly encouraging. The return of respect for actual facts rather than desirable fabrications is more than welcome.

I think I’ll call it “the Silver Effect.”

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Counterintuitive…and Interesting

The most recent issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article about retail establishments and staffing levels.

The conventional wisdom is that in order to profit, retailers must keep costs low, and the most effective way to do that is to have as few employees as possible. As the article points out, however, “Although leanness is generally a good thing in business, too much cost-cutting turns out to be a bad strategy, not only for workers and customers, but for businesses themselves.”

The author quotes from a recent Harvard Business Review study of four large low-price retailers with much higher employee costs than their competitors. These are stores, like Costco, that pay their employees more, provide benefits, and provide more training. They also employ a lot more people.

And–counterintuitively–they make more money. They have higher sales per square foot than similar businesses with thinner staffs, and they experience much less (costly) turnover.

The article doesn’t just look at the successful retailers with larger sales staffs; it also notes examples of the reverse. When Home Depot and Circuit City slashed employees to cut costs, sales plummeted.

I’m sure there are other business practices that contribute to both the positive and negative results. But assuming the Harvard folks are right, assuming they have controlled for other factors and that they have produced sound, compelling evidence that hiring more employees (to a point, obviously) translates into greater profits, I wonder if that evidence would be enough to overcome the conventional wisdom that favors “lean and mean.”

Somehow, I doubt it.

After all, we have years and years of compelling evidence that tax cuts don’t create jobs–but politicians continue to insist otherwise.

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Why Evidence Matters

Steve Benen has an important post up today at Political Animal, discussing the GOP’s recently-unveiled and badly misnamed “Jobs bill.”

As Benen points out, “the jobs agenda, such as it is, is practically a conservative cliche: the GOP wants massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, more coastal oil drilling, and huge cuts to public investment. Republicans are confident this will work wonders, just as they were equally confident about the identical agenda in the last decade, and the decade before that, and the decade before that.

Indeed, the most glaring problem with the GOP jobs agenda is that it won’t work, but nearly as painful is the realization that it’s already been tried, over and over again, to no avail. They either haven’t heard the famous axiom about trying failure repeatedly and expecting a different result, or they don’t care.

The agenda is the agenda: tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, cut public investments. Good times and bad, deficit or surplus, war or peace, it just doesn’t matter.”

The entire post is well worth reading.

Way back when I became politically active, I bought into the theory that tax cuts for the wealthy would spur investment, and that investment would create jobs. It made a lot of sense; unfortunately, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that it doesn’t work that way.

The ability to change ones opinion when faced with new evidence is how humans learn and thrive. When people “double down” on beliefs even when faced with facts debunking those beliefs, we call that a delusion.

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Ideology and Evidence Redux

Many years ago, when I first starting taking policy arguments seriously, I was persuaded by the logic of tax relief for the wealthy. That argument had two parts: first, if tax rates are confiscatory, people will have less incentive to work and invest; second, if the rich have “extra” money, they will invest it, and those investments will be used by entrepreneurs to create jobs.

I still oppose confiscatory taxes, but it has been a very long time since the days of the 90% marginal rate. And–although the argument about lower taxes generating job creation made sense–all available evidence suggests it doesn’t work that way in the real world.

As one pundit recently noted, “The Mad Men who once ran campaigns featuring doctors extolling the health benefits of smoking are now busy marketing the dogma that tax cuts mean broad prosperity, no matter what the facts show.”

What happens when a firmly-held belief hits evidence contradicting it?

What should happen, I submit, is that–after careful consideration of the credibility of the evidence and a determination that it is sound–we relinquish the unsupported belief. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. It’s hard, for one thing. Most of us resist admitting that we have been wrong about something, and the more devoutly we believed (in religion, ideology, our own righteousness), the more difficult it is to change. So many of us go looking for alternative evidence to support our original ideology. In a recent column, David Cay Johnson lists 9 “facts” about taxes that are widely believed, but demonstrably untrue, from “poor Americans don’t pay taxes” to “the wealthy are carrying the burden” to “corporate tax breaks create jobs.”

There’s a lot of hand-wringing and bemoaning about the loss of bipartisanship in our politics. But bipartisanship requires that people on both sides of the aisle go into political life determined to respect evidence. Such a determination won’t turn free-market capitalists into socialists, or vice-versa, and it won’t eliminate good-faith arguments over what the evidence shows. But we would be spared the spectacle of watching 36 GOP members of the House Energy Committee vote that global warming doesn’t exist, among other things.

I don’t know whether Representatives like Mike Pence and Michelle Bachmann are “true believers” or simply pandering to the true believers in their base, and at the end of the day, it probably doesn’t matter. When you elevate religious and ideological fervor over reason and evidence, you end up with the Dark Ages.

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Political Fundamentalism

I had lunch today with a delightful young woman who, among other things, is active with the League of Women Voters. During our discussion, she remarked (rather plaintively) that she found it difficult to understand why the League was so often viewed as a “liberal” organization. “We don’t take positions until we have studied them carefully,” she said. “We gather evidence for two years, and assess it carefully, and base our position on that evidence.”

There you go! Basing positions on evidence is what is now considered liberal.

The conversation reminded me of an explanation from my book God and Country: America in Red and Blue. I was looking at the paradigm shift caused by the Enlightenment, and the profound effect that shift had on our Constitution.

When Francis Bacon insisted that laws governing the material world could be inferred through careful observation (a notion that, for contemporary Americans, is an unremarkable commonplace), it had enormous implications for the existing, traditional, deductive methods of understanding reality. The “old learning,” had begun with an a priori “given,” the bible, the absolute truth of which was unquestioned. The primary goal of Puritan education was thus directed at biblical understanding; one began with the text and learned—deduced—how to interpret it. Proper interpretation required the application of time-tested methods of exegesis and analysis, and instruction in historical context and meaning (mostly, what important theologians of the past had decreed to be correct understandings and approaches). One started with Truth, and education was the process of learning to apprehend and defend that Truth. Bacon changed the fundamental order of things by teaching that education must begin with observation of natural phenomena.

We are a country that was founded on a radical notion: evidence matters. Today, however, those of us for whom evidence still matters are dismissed as “liberals” by the political equivalents of the Puritans. Like those Puritans, our ideologues (of every stripe) begin with their “truth,” and look for evidence to support it and ways to impose it.

No wonder we find it so hard to communicate.

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