Much has happened over the last few weeks, but one of the most interesting things I saw was the presidential debate. While I don't much respect either candidate and thus didn't have high hopes for the debate, I was still surprised and disappointed at just how economically illiterate both candidates seem to be. Hillary was better than Donald, but that is like saying being punched is better than being stabbed. Both are painful and neither one is good for you. From what I heard, you would think the general consensus is that trade is ruining the world. If this kind of thinking gains traction, I genuinely fear for our future. Markets and trade have done more to lift people out of poverty than every charitable and humanitarian effort in history combined. No, I don't have research to back up that statement, but I don't know many serious people who would disagree with it either.
As for what I've been reading lately, I just saw a post this morning that I thought was interesting on Andrew Gelman's blog about air rage on planes with first class seating. The article talks about a poorly done statistical analysis of air rage incidents that managed to get published in a journal despite all the obvious issues. One part I really liked:
I think Andrew points out something here that doesn't get enough thought. News outlets report what they think will be interesting to their readers, but often don't have the technical knowledge about some of the subjects they cover to really know if what they are reporting is true. They rely on gatekeepers, such as field journals, to weed out good information from bad. So when these journals drop the ball and let shoddy work through, we end up with gross misinformation. It goes back to my concern with the presidential debate. When the two most visible candidates for the highest office in the US are spouting nonsense about trade, that matters. People will assume these candidates are smart, or at least have smart people advising them on these subjects, so what they say will heavily influence people.
When posting on this study, I threw gratuitous shade at one of America’s most trusted news sources in my “tl;dr summary”:
NPR will love this paper. It directly targets their demographic of people who are rich enough to fly a lot but not rich enough to fly first class, and who think that inequality is the cause of the world’s ills.The next day I posted a roundup of media outlets that’d fallen for this story, including CNN, the LA Times, and ABC News, along with respected tech sources Science and BoingBoing. I discussed the selection bias that occurs when the best science reporters realize this study is empty and don’t report it, while everyday journalists just follow the PPNAS label and don’t even think there could be a problem. All jokes about “stat rage” aside, this is a big problem in that consumers of the news only see the sucker takes, never the knowledge.
Part of the reason I decided to write this blog, and why I agree with Miles Kimball that blogging is important, is to have another voice to contradict bad information and influence other thinkers. This also provides a forum for me to put ideas I have out in public, which makes me think about them more. An example is a post I have probably rewritten a half dozen times (or more) about the guaranteed basic income ("GBI"). Morgan Warstler had a post a while back that proposed an alternative to GBI that I thought was interesting. But whenever I have put together a post to comment on it, I realize I have more questions that I want to dive into before I post. That process continues to sharpen my own thinking on the subject and I feel more confident that when I do finally post something, I will at least have taken the time to think through many of the issues with such a policy change. From the Andrew Gelman piece, it seems like more journalists need to go through that process as well.
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