Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics About Lies

May 7, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

We all know that Barack Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya and that his campaign was funded by Hugo Chavez.

Yes, I know, presidents going back to Washington have been the subject of rumors. But it seems that with the arrival of Obama, presidential rumors have become something of a growth industry (maybe our only growth industry these days.)

J.L. Bell blogs mostly about comic books and fantasy literature at his Oz and Ends. But two weeks ago he posted some numbers about presidential rumors on the Internet.* For his data, he went where most of us would go – Snopes.com. Here’s what he found.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

In less than two years, Obama rumor-mongers have had nearly twice the output that their Bush counterparts managed in eight years – 87 to 47. And while the Bush rumors split almost evenly true-false, false Obama rumors dwarfed the true ones.** The false rumors about Obama outnumbered the total number of rumors about Bush. And while the lies about Obama are almost all negative, some of the false rumors about Bush are quite flattering, along the lines of the George Washington cheery tree rumor – like the rumor that had Bush paying for the funeral of a boy who had drowned near the Crawford ranch.

Is there really a right-left difference? If the “epistemic closure” hypothesis is accurate – if conservatives, even the chattering intellectuals, live and write in a bubble that keeps out any realities that might conflict with their ideology – then conservatives of all sorts might also welcome into the bubble even the most preposterous and unfounded rumors.

Surely, there must be a sociology of rumor. What are the demographic correlates, if any? What are the conditions under which rumors are more likely to arise and spread? I would imagine that lack of trust is important. The less we trust others who are outside our relatively small circle, and the less we interact with them, the more likely we will be to rely on rumor.

Trust, at least trust in government, has been decreasing generally, but conservatives, when they are not in control of the government, are especially mistrusting. Under any circumstances, false beliefs are frustratingly resistant to facts. It probably doesn’t improve conservative’s grasp of reality when they have a major TV network giving airtime to these rumors and when their leaders tell them about death panels.


* His post was picked up by Salon.com and then by Brendan Nyhan, who has had some interesting posts on the epistemic closure discussion.

** The other categories were “mixed,” “undetermined,” and “unclassifiable.” In the graph, I collapsed the latter two categories into “other.”

Messenger NAEP - or Charles Murray Channelling the Left

May 5, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

How fitting in these weeks of final exams to be reminded that tests are irrelevant – at least if you don’t like the results. They are the messenger who brings bad news. But will killing the messenger solve the problem?

I remember the good old days when academics railed at standardized tests like the SAT. If the tests showed group differences – between black and white, male and female – that just showed that the tests were biased and should not be used.

Now, Charles Murray, the man on the right that everyone on the left loves to hate,* has joined the anti-test chorus and, on the Times op-ed page today, he’s singing lead. Murray, like most conservatives, is a supporter of charter schools. He’s badmouthing standardized tests because they show that charter schools do no better than traditional public schools at educating students, especially the kinds of kids who are most in need of effective schools.

The volume of studies on school “choice” – comparing charter schools and voucher programs to traditional public schools – is now large. Most commonly, these find no difference in the progress of students in charters and those in publics. A few charters do better; a greater number underperform their public counterparts.

Rather than dismissing the research as merely wrong or turning up the volume on the few studies favorable to charters and ignoring the rest, as do some conservatives I know, Murray goes radical. What these studies really show, he says, is that tests don’t matter.

Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another?

I’m not going to search through Murray’s oeuvre to see how many times he has cited test scores as meaningful or where he stood on No Child Left Behind. But I am going to guess that if the results had been different, if research showed that charters consistently outperformed publics on standardized tests, Murray would be putting up billboards praising NAEP and the rest.

But Murray goes way beyond the idea that tests are irrelevant. He says that when it comes to teaching kids to read and do math, the schools themselves are irrelevant.

Cognitive ability, personality and motivation come mostly from home. What happens in the classroom can have some effect, but smart and motivated children will tend to learn to read and do math even with poor instruction, while not-so-smart or unmotivated children will often have trouble with those subjects despite excellent instruction. If test scores in reading and math are the measure, a good school just doesn’t have that much room to prove it is better than a lesser school.

Murray is deliberately ignoring one inconvenient fact: that some teachers and some schools consistently do a better job of teaching hard-to-teach populations. But instead of wanting more effort to figure out just what those teachers and schools do so that others can also do more of it, Murray denies that they have any meaningful effect.

What Murray mostly wants is not good education, though he would probably not oppose such improvement. What he wants is charter schools. Since test scores that measure learning don’t support charters, Murray goes back to another song from the old left fake book – School as Ideology. The left used to complain – maybe it still does – that what schools really did was not so much teach subjects but indoctrinate kids into the dominant capitalist ideology so as to turn out a compliant labor force.

Right on, says Murray. But the dominant ideology, in his view, is now liberal and therefore to be avoided. Charter schools “would give parents a choice radically different from the progressive curriculum used in the county’s** other public schools.” Charters are a way for conservative parents to keep their kids out of the hands of the liberals – a sort of home-school away from home.

He has a point. If I lived in Texas, I might want the option of sending my kid to a state-funded charter school that included in the curriculum some of the arcane figures from America’s history that will now be excluded – people like Thomas Jefferson. Such choice would be welcome to middle-class parents like me and Murray, who are not much worried about our kids learning to read. But a choice of ideology is probably not high on the list of concerns of the parents whose kids are in schools where most of the students are years behind in reading and math.


* The mention of Murray’s name has been, for at least fifteen years now, a Pavlovian ringing of the bell curve, guaranteed to set lefties to frothing at the mouth. I actually used to admire Murray, at least for his writing. When a Marxist colleague asked me to review a manuscript she had written, a rather tendentious book on violence, I told her that she should try to write more like Murray – to present radical and probably offensive ideas in language that makes them seem calm and reasonable.

** Murray is referring to a specific charter proposal in the Maryland county where he lives, but for the argument he is making, he might just as easily have said country instead of county.

The Adoption Option

May 1, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m on my way to another baby shower today. It’s a celebration, but as Lisa at Sociological Images pointed out a couple of weeks ago, how you view a pregnancy depends on where you are in the society. Lisa was responding to the recent PSA video by Bristol Palin (see the video and Lisa’s comments here .) Lisa’s take is that while the ad is telling teens to be cautious about sex, it also makes the point that the consequences of teen pregnancy are much harsher for girls who have little financial or social capital.

For me, the ad was a reminder of how different my own world is from the world of the intended audience of that ad. One obvious difference is abortion. For the cosmopolitan, educated, relatively well-off women I know, abortion is always an option. Not so for the Bristol Palins.

But there’s a cultural difference regarding adoption too.

Alice Eve Cohen’s memoir, what I thought I knew, gives a personal, poignant example. It’s a very complicated story, for as the title implies, everything that the medical experts tell her about her own fertility turns out to be wrong. She is told she can never conceive because she is a DES daughter, but in her forties, she becomes pregnant. Then she is told that the baby will have severe physical and mental defects, but she does not know this definitely until late in the pregnancy. A late-term abortion would be risky.

“I think adoption is the right path,” she writes, but her husband, sisters, and friends all disagree.

In this liberal, Upper West Side community, where abortion is accepted as a woman’s inalienable right, giving up a baby for adoption is inconceivable. . . . Where I live, I’d be more harshly judged for giving up my baby for adoption than for having an abortion.

[Full disclosure: where she lives is three short blocks from where I live, and we’ve known each other for 17 years.]

The debate about abortion – pro-life vs. pro-choice – may have something to do with religious beliefs. But, at least for those most deeply involved, as Kristin Luker pointed out a quarter-century ago in Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, the debate has a strong subtext: clashing ideas about the position of women in society. Should a woman be more honored for success in her role in the family or her success in the world of work and career?

Luker’s explanation may be less useful for understanding the culturally different views of adoption. Adoption is not so much about the role of women; it’s more about the role of babies and children. For some women, babies are a gift from God, and the gifts just seem to keep on coming, even to those who are unmarried and who took abstinence pledges (see my earlier post on this here.) There’s no shame in sharing with people who have not been similarly gifted.

But here on the Upper West Side, the more typical woman’s plight is not so much that she didn’t want to get pregnant but did. It’s that she wanted to get pregnant but couldn’t. For these women, babies are rare and precious. You’d no more give one away than you would (forgive an extreme analogy) give away a winning lottery ticket.

It's Your Decision

April 26, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The sitcoms of my youth often featured a plot line that might be called “It’s Your Decision.” Typically, a teenager, though sometimes a younger child, faces some moral dilemma:

• go out with the handsome football player even though it means breaking a previous commitment to your best friend?
• help your friend keep his drug use a secret or betray him and let grown-ups know about it?
• take the offer of a wonderful summer in a villa on the Riviera with a rich friend or stay home and help out the family, who really need you right now?

Inevitably, at about five minutes before the end of the half hour, the child finally discusses the dilemma with the parent. And inevitably, after a thoughtful and sympathetic analysis of the problem, Cosby or Roseanne or whoever says, “I can’t tell you what to do. It’s your decision.”

Despite this disclaimer, the parent’s desires are quite obvious, and the child, no surprise here, always winds up making the right decision. (And, this being American TV, after the child makes the right decision, some deus ex machina Hollywood ending removes the cost of the decision. It turns out that her friend had always wanted her to go out with the football player anyway and has brought him along; the rich friend invites the whole family to the Riviera, etc.)

I was reminded of this plot-line when I started reading Claude Fischer’s new blog, Made in America,* a companion to his new book of the same name. In his most recent post, he takes on the question of American individualism. The post is a response to a right-wing song of praise to American exceptionalism by conservatives Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru writing in the National Review. America, they say, is “freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth.”

Is it? Fischer provides some data from international surveys showing that when you compare the US to some of these other nations, we’re not always the most individualistic. Given a choice between individual conscience on the one hand and the law on the other, Americans are nowhere near the top in choosing individual conscience. In other hypothetical conflicts – individual vs. country, individual vs. marital norms, individual vs. conventional morality – several European countries are more on the side of the individual than are Americans. In fact, in all these cases, less than half of us put the individual ahead of the group. (See all of the Claude’s graphs here.)

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

How can we keep insisting that we are individualistic – the most individualistic nation on earth?

Fischer offers some ways to explain the apparent contradiction, and the one he seems to favor is that America combines individualism with “voluntarism.”

Voluntarism is about being part of a community, but belonging voluntarily. Americans have long held that people can and should join or leave groups – families, congregations, clubs, townships, and so on – of their individual free will.

But once you voluntarily join a group, you must play by its rules. “Love it or leave it.”

I’ve commented elsewhere in this blog that a substantial part of the right wing in the US applies this ethic only to Democrats, not to themselves. When conservatives are in power, they see dissent as disloyalty (“Love it or leave it”), but when Obama is president, dissent (i.e., their dissent) becomes the higher patriotism).

Fischer’s formulation resolves the apparent contradiction between our professed love of liberty and our conformity, but only if you recognize that the voluntarism isn't really all that voluntary. As de Tocqueville noted 170 years ago

I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America. In any constitutional state in Europe every sort of religious and political theory may be advocated and propagated abroad. . . . .In America the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them. (DIA, Vol. 2, Ch. XV.)

O.K. I know de Tocqueville seems like a long way from Cosby. But here’s my point. Other cultures – especially stable, aristocracy-like cultures – allow the individual a wide range of opinions and behaviors. They can tolerate eccentricity because the group is certain that the individual will never defect. He will always be a member of his class or his family. But in America, affiliation is voluntary and therefore not necessarily permanent. Because of our ideology of individual freedom, we must worry that the person who does not love the group might well leave it. So we must be on guard against anything that hints at deviation from the group's norms.

The more efficient solution is socialization – to instill in people both the desire to conform and the idea that their choices are their own and not influenced by the group. That's basically the message of Cosby and the other sitcom parents.**

As David McClelland,*** years ago, put it, the American is saying to himself, “I want to freely choose to do what others expect me to do.”

It’s your decision.

Yeah, right.
-----------------------------

* Hat tip: Chris Uggen.

** Not all sitcom parents are like Cosby. We also have the sitcom tradition of dad-as-buffoon, a TV line that extends back from Homer Simpson to Chester Riley. It probably has roots in radio and even earlier media.

*** I’m pretty sure that Claude Fischer began his graduate studies in Harvard’s Social Relations department when McClelland was on the faculty there, but I somehow doubt that their paths crossed very often.