Reporting Numbers Truthfully

April 7, 2012

Posted by Jay Livingston

We have a hard time understanding or accepting indeterminacy.  We want our economic reports to have the same finality as sports scores.  The Rays beat the Yanks yesterday 7-6, and Carlos Peña’s grand slam and ninth-inning single had a lot to do with that outcome.  We want the same kind of precision of results and explanations in economic news – for example, yesterday’s jobs report – so  that’s  what the media give us.

Here, for example, is what CNN Money said.

March jobs report: Hiring slows, Unemployment falls

By Annalyn Censky April 6, 2012: 2:47 PM ET

American employers hired 120,000 workers in March -- half of the job gains seen in February.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Hiring slowed dramatically in March, clouding optimism about the strength of the recovery.

Employers added 120,000 jobs in the month, the Labor Department reported Friday, falling far short of economists' expectations.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate fell to 8.2% as the labor force shrank by 164,000 workers, mostly due to white women leaving the job market.

Economists attributed part of the hiring slowdown to an unseasonably warm winter that boosted job growth in January and February [blah, blah, blah . . . ]

 But economic numbers are sports scores.  R.A. at The Economist* rewrites the story:

  There is a 90% chance that employment rose by between 20,000 and 220,000 jobs. The change in the number of unemployed from February to March was probably between (roughly) -400,000 and 150,000, and there's a good chance that the unemployment rate is between 8.1% and 8.5%. Reported changes for important subsectors are too small relative to the margin of error to be worth discussing. In all probability, the employment growth has remained close to the recent trend of a 200,000 jobs per month increase.

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*The Economist, for some reason, insists on initials rather than names in its by-lines.

Injuries and Incentives - Saints and Sinners

April 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Did the bounty system work?

Even people with no interest in sports have heard about the strategy of Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams.  He offered his players a bounty for injuring opposing players – $1000 if a player was carried off the field, $1500 if the player didn’t return to the game that day.

On the audio released yesterday (listen here), you can hear Williams giving pep-talk instructions to to the defense just before the playoff game against the 49ers.  He specifies the injuries he would particularly welcome – a blow to the chin for quarterback Alex Smith, a concussion for receiver Kyle Williams, and as for receiver Michael Crabtree, “He becomes human when we fuckin’ take out that outside ACL.”

Much of the reaction to this story is shock and horror – some of it real, no doubt, by people unaware of football’s backstage, and some of it affected.  Among the players, there is anger and genuine surprise.  (“One word WOW,” tweeted 49rs safety Reginald Smith.)  Others were more sanguine, saying in effect, that football is a violent game where people get injured.  Jets linebacker Bart Scott said that getting rid of the bounties wouldn’t change that. 

But so far I have seen no data on whether the bounties worked.  Did the Saints injure more players than did other NFL teams?  Surely those numbers are available. 

The only evidence I’ve heard is that the Saints had the highest number of roughing-the-passer penalties in the NFL.  That’s probably because they blitz more.  Blitzing is a high-risk strategy, and there’s some question as to whether it’s effective.  In theory, blitzes should increase the defense’s chances of injuring the quarterback.  But the Saints were below the NFL median in sacks. 

None of that speaks directly to the question of injuries.  The bounty system is a recent and distasteful example of “incentivizing” (a recent and distasteful coinage among economists).  Has no sports economist or Freakonmist even counted up the injuries let alone run econometric statistics to see if these incentives worked?

The Jewish Vote, Abortion, and Status Politics

April 4, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The “Jewish vote” came up on Fresh Air yesterday.  The interviewee was Peter Beinart (for the audio and transcript go here), and most of the interview was about Israel, specifically his proposal that Americans boycott products from West Bank settlements. 

Towards the end of the interview though, Beinart said that despite the controversy over his proposal, and despite politicians’ ringing statements of stout support for the Jewish state, Israel was not much of a factor in the Jewish vote.  But if not Israel, then what?

The single biggest driver of the Jewish vote in America is actually abortion.*

On the surface, this makes no sense.  Does the Talmud or any of the commentaries tell us that abortion is a mitzvah?  Does abortion directly affect the lives of many Jews – either as doctors or as patients?  I doubt it.  Instead, at least for American Jews, abortion is a matter of status politics.  Its symbolism far outweighs its practical consequences.

Issues inflated with the air of status politics are important because they signal the relative status of different groups.  These are the issues that usually get classified as “values” issues, a matter of morality.  But the important question is “whose values, whose morality?” because the answer to that question is also the answer to the question, “Whose country is this anyway?” 

My guess is that to American Jews, abortion looks like the flagship of conservative Christianity, with its assertion that America is a Christian country and should be run on principles of Christianity.  Beinart is more circumspect.  He frames the issue as “religious / secular” rather than “Christian / Jewish.”

American Jews are very strongly committed to an agenda of cultural tolerance, probably, in fact, because they're actually very secular. American Jews are much more secular than are American Christians

Maybe so.  Either way, it’s status politics.  It’s about which group – its customs, its morality, its symbols – will be honored as dominant.  So when politicians (invariably Christian politicians) rail against abortion, what Jews hear them saying is “This land is our land, this land’s not your land.”  

(Previous posts on status politics are here and here.)

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* I haven’t checked the data, but Beinart sounded as though he’d done his homework on this one.

UPDATE:  PRRI yesterday released a survey of 1,000 Jewish adults (pdf is here).  The main issue, by a mile, for the 2012 election was the economy.  Israel, as Beinart said, was a minor concern.  But abortion ranked even lower.

Other issues that fall at the bottom of the priority list are national security (4%), Israel (4%), Iran (2%), the environment (1%), immigration (1%), same-sex marriage (1%), and abortion (1%).

Beinart was necessarily basing his statement on earlier surveys. Possibly, when the economy was not so clearly the big issue, the status politics issues were more important.  

The PRRI survey makes clear that Jews are liberals, not conservatives.  One minor factoid.  One question asked how well each of several public figures “represents Jewish values.”  Leading all others in the “not at all well” category was Eric Cantor with 35% saying he was a poor representative of Jewish values.  The figure was significantly higher than Sarah Silverman’s 26%. 

Handling the Truth

April 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

We can’t handle the truth.  We want all the facts to fit with our picture of the world.

The “Mad Men” scripts (see last week’s post ) use words and constructions unknown to real 1966 ad men.   These anachronisms sound “right” to us despite their historical inaccuracy.   And historical facts may sound wrong. 

The Times TV critic saw the “Mad Men” season opener and complained:

The themes of civil rights and equal opportunity thudded into view in a couple of unfortunately ham-handed scenes, one involving the scamps at Young & Rubicam dropping water bombs on picketers (“And they call us savages!” an indignant protester exclaimed) . . .

Bad scene, bad line.  “It’s a terrible line that should have been red-penciled,” said the New York Magazine critic.”  The only trouble is that it’s all taken directly from a 1966 news item in the New York Times.

(This is a screen grab.  To see the full 1966 Times story – and if you saw 

the episode of “Mad Men” you must read it – go here. )

Far from being disarmed by the facts, the critics stood their ground when informed of the historical accuracy.  The Times critic still insisted that the scene was bad and that the line, a true quote, “just rings so false.”

The critics are right, of course.  All the news that’s fit to print does not make for good drama.  A scriptwriter or novelist has to select and shape the facts and edit the language.  What fictional people do and say must not clash with character. 

This preference for a coherent story, a perfect congruence of character and action, becomes a problem when we use it to filter reality and then think that this filtered reality is “the truth.”  But that’s another story.