State Fails To Measure Effect Of Voter ID Law
Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media
The Boston Globe story State reports few problems with voter ID law is a good example of Greenberg’s Law of the Media.
The overwhelming majority of voters who cast ballots this year in Rhode Island had no problems complying with a new voter identification law. Secretary of State Ralph Mollis’s office reported Friday that of 560,000 ballots cast in this year’s elections fewer than 190 provisional ballots were submitted because the voter failed to present a driver’s license, bus pass, or other form of ID. Lawmakers passed the law last year to prevent voter fraud.
This proves that 190 people who had no ID still attempted to vote despite the law. It does not tell you how many people decided not to vote because they did not have the required ID. If these people without ID who did not vote were otherwise legally eligible to vote, then I would say that these were problems. We have no idea of how many such people there were. So while the story appears to be true that the state reported few problems, that does not mean that there were only a few problems. In fact there is no report of the state trying to measure how many problems there were. It is very likely that you will not find what you do not seek.
I predict that the “information” published in this article will be used as a means to justify the continuation of the voter ID law. Perhaps a better headline would be the one I used for this article.
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More Wisdom from the Guy Who Brought You “Rape Can’t Get You Pregnant”
Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media
The New Republic has the article More Wisdom from the Guy Who Brought You “Rape Can’t Get You Pregnant”.
It’s fine for magazines to debunk the pseudo-science of people in the news, but they shouldn’t use pseudo-science in one of their arguments.
In the section titled “Legalizing abortion didn’t make abortion safer” they quoted Dr. Willke as saying:
“If, in fact, the elimination of illegal abortion eliminated back alleys, there should have been a perceptible drop in the number of women dying. That didn’t happen. The line didn’t even blip from 1967 to 1973 and 1974. … It just kept going down at the same slow rate. There was no evidence of a decline in mortality from legalization.”
Then to disprove what he said the article posits:
In any event, evidence that his claim was totally bunk was readily available by 1989. In March of 1987, the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology published a study which read, in part, “Between 1972 and 1982 … [t]he overall death rate resulting from legal abortion dropped nearly fivefold, from 4.1 per 100,000 abortions in 1972 to 0.8 in 1982.”
In one case, Dr. Willke talks about the number of women dying. In the other case they quote the death rate per 100,000 abortions. Now if the death rate went down, but the number of abortions went up, then it is quite possible that the total number of deaths of women did not go down.
I am not saying that this is true. I am just saying that people should not use arguments that are so easily ripped apart. The New Republic is trying to show that Dr. Willke doesn’t know science, but they don’t show a great grasp of science themselves, or at least not statistics, math, or even numbers.
Chalk up another example of Greenberg’s Law of the Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.”
You might find the rest of the article more enlightening. Too bad they had to spoil it with this blunder.
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Doctors dispute Akin’s claim, but some supporters say it was misunderstood
Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media
The Kansas City Star has the generally good article Doctors dispute Akin’s claim, but some supporters say it was misunderstood.
If you are wondering about the supporters’ claims to a misunderstanding,
But Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association — a nonprofit that describes itself as a pro-family organization — told The Star on Monday that “fair-minded people” know what Akin really meant by his statement. Wildmon speculated that Akin was differentiating between forcible rape and statutory rape, which can be consensual.
“What I read from some medical sources, when a woman is raped, her body shuts down in some respects that may prevent her from getting pregnant,” Wildmon said.
Wildmon adds a new wrinkle, but then goes back to repeat the same stupid statement that got Akin in trouble in the first place.
The part of the article that gets my goat is the statement:
A 1996 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, generally considered one of the few peer-reviewed research efforts on this subject, estimated that 5 percent of rapes result in pregnancy.
The above statement tells you nothing about the truth or falsity of the claims of either side. To complete the above half a statistic, there would need to be a statement like, “and it is estimated that X percent of incidents of consensual intercourse result in pregnancy.” If X is significantly higher than 5%, then there could conceivably (no pun intended) be some truth to Akin’s claim. If X is significantly lower than 5%, then it might be true that rape has an enhanced rate of causing pregnancy. If X is not significantly different from 5%, then it might be tru that rape versus consensual sex has no affect on the rate of pregnancy after the act.
So the half statistic has shown that rape may lead to enhanced rates of pregnancy, or it might lead to lowered rates of pregnancy, or it might have no effect at all. In other words, you don’t know anymore about the effect of rape on pregnancy than you did before you read that statistic. You don’t even learn anything about the claim to rarity. Without knowing the number X, you can’t say whether 5% means rare or frequent.
For this reason, I give the article a 5 star rating for proving Greenberg’s Law of the Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.”
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Romney foolishly said the Federal Reserve should not do more monetary stimulus
Filed Under Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior
Reuters has the article Romney says new Fed stimulus would risk inflation.
Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney on Monday said the Federal Reserve should not go ahead with another round of monetary stimulus to boost the U.S. economy, because it would risk kicking up inflation.
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“Another round of quantitative easing is not the solution for the economy, and could mean inflation down the road,” Romney told Faux Noise. “It’s not the right thing to do.”
Of course the Fed wouldn’t have to do monetary easing if the Congress would agree to a stimulus plan that included direct government spending on all the things that Elizabeth Warren would have the government spend it on.
Be that as it may, worrying about inflation at some unknown distant point in the future while the Fed has been unable to produce enough inflation now is a silly thing to be thinking about with the current problems we have. If the fed were able to produce its target rate of inflation, it would certainly be able to take action if the inflation rate exceeded its target. Given how hard it has tried to boost inflation and how unsuccessful it has been, if it finally does manage to create some inflation, all it would have to do is stop its current efforts or perhaps reverse them, to stop inflation from getting out of hand.
Given how hard the Fed has tried to boost inflation and how little inflation we have – we actually have deflation in the housing market – can you imagine the even higher deflation in the housing market that we would have had had the Fed not intervened?
Why is some inflation in the housing market good and large deflation extremely bad? For years, people have made plans based on a fairly small, but dependable rate of inflation in the housing market. The banks have always factored this into their plans as well. The inflation is what allowed homeowners to sell a fairly illiquid asset, real estate, when they had to in order to move to where the jobs are. This inflation is also what allowed homeowners to build their equity so that they would have something on which to retire. This equity buildup due to inflation was magnified to the homeowner because of the leverage they were using with the borrowed mortgage money to finance the purchase of the real estate.
Take this all away, and even deflate the asset on which they borrowed money and you have leverage working against the homeowner. They cannot move to a better job market because they would have to raise money in order to pay off their mortgage on a home that was worth less than the mortgage on it. Not only is the falling house price not adding to their nest egg for retirement, it is actually shrinking their retirement nest egg.
Excess equity in a house is also a resource you can use if there should be unexpected disasters such as unexpected illness, sudden death of the wage earner, divorce, or loss of a job and long term unemployment. If you are underwater in your mortgage instead of having excess equity, not only is the house not a resource you can tap, it is actually an extra burden to bear.
With all these actual or imaginable problems facing the middle-class, they are desperately trying to cut their spending and trying to save money in ways that compensate for the housing problem. This is why businesses have not enough freaking customer to keep their existing employees and factories busy. Giving companies even more than the trillions of cash they are already sitting on is not going to make the middle-class become better customers.
As a matter of fact, companies taking trillions of dollars out of the economy and parking them in non-productive financial derivatives until the economy turns around is one of the many factors keeping the economy from turning around.
So taking money out of the hands of the corporations and putting it back into the economy would be a good thing to do. This means raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy individuals that control them. It makes absolutely no sense to do the opposite by lowering their taxes and allowing them to pull even more money out of the economy. This pulling money out of the economy may be the very reason that the Fed’s pouring money in is having such little effect.
That the Republicans can pretend that they don’t see these realities and then propose solutions that will make matters much worse, makes you want to apply Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior. What are the Republican’s trying to do? The answer involves the book The Shock Doctrine. You may actually have to read more than what I have posted about the book to see the connection. The short answer is that they are trying to shock the middle-class into accepting lower wages, poorer working conditions, and cuts to government investment in the education and health of the people. With globalization, they intend to make money from customers elsewhere. Or maybe they just think they can steal the existing customers from their competitors faster than their competitors can steal customers from them. Somehow, they intend to have enough customers without having to pay living wages to workers. Can they not see that a person who is a worker in one context is a customer in another?
You have to ignore this identity of worker and customer to think that Mitt Romney’s idea of business management being blindly applied to macroeconomics would be successful.
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The CEO Plan to Steal Your Social Security and Medicare
Filed Under Greenberg's Law of The Media, SteveG's Posts
The Nation Of Change has the article The CEO Plan to Steal Your Social Security and Medicare.
Many of the same folks who brought the economy to ruin just a few years ago are now going to come up with a plan that is supposed to set the budget and the economy on a forward path. At the center of their proposal are big cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
It is an interesting article even if I do classify this as an example of Greenberg’s Law of the Media. He talks about an 0.3% change per year in the COLA adjustment for Social Security, aggregates this to 3% over ten years and then compares this to the 3% change in upper income tax rate. 3% is 3%, right? Well 0.3% a year is not the same as 3% a year and 3% over 10 years is also not the same as 3% over 1 year. Putting this aside, the rest of the article might supply you with some information you didn’t know.
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Why Progressive Austerians do the Greatest Damage
Filed Under Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior
In William Black’s excellent blog, New Economic Perspectives, he has written the post, Why Progressive Austerians do the Greatest Damage.
To many people, it seems paradoxical that conservatives target not the worst social programs, but the best. There is no paradox. Bad government programs are desirable from the right’s perspective – they discredit government intervention. Good government programs pose an existential challenge to conservative memes, so they are the prime target for attack.
This is exactly the kind of paradox that falls under Greenberg’s Law Of Counterproductive Behavior, which states:
If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the actor was trying to produce.
I recommend Black’s article to you because it has many other interesting things to say besides the one I focused on above.
As an exercise to the reader, I suggest seeing if you can name the politicians who are most guilty of being progressive auterians. Also ask yourself if you are guilty of being a progressive auterian.
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The Troll On The Elizabeth Warren Facebook Page
Filed Under Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior
In my opinion, there is a troll on the Elizabeth Warren Facebook page. It is possible that the Elizabeth Warren campaign is not getting the full benefit from Facebook that it could because of the behavior of the troll.
Of course, as one would expect, there is much praise for Elizabeth Warren from the postings on her page. Occasionally a Warren supporter, such as myself, tries to convey some constructive criticisms of the way we feel that the campaign is missing opportunities to further promote Warren’s candidacy.
The troll seems to take it upon himself to disparage all criticism in what seems to be an attempt to intimidate people who make such criticisms. It is unfortunate that the campaign seems more intent in quieting criticism than it is in learning from it. This troll just reinforces this image which some supporters find so extremely frustrating.
It is not even clear if the troll has any official responsibility for the Facebook page. One suspects that he does not. If a person with administrative privileges on the Facebook page thought that a post was detrimental, then it would be better to just delete the post rather than try to intimidate the poster from further posts.
I start to wonder why a purported volunteer in the campaign and presumably a supporter would spend so much effort to patrol the Facebook page and turn off people who want to post there.
I would think a truly committed supporter would thoughtfully read the criticism and help to pass on the good ideas to the campaign. If the troll is not the one charged with this responsibility, then who is? Surely the campaign would not consider Facebook to be a one way medium of communication. Surely they would have someone officially responsible for reading the feedback and not just responsible for writing posts. If there is nobody charged with this duty, then this is just another example of missed opportunities to further the cause of getting Elizabeth Warren elected.
Is this a case of Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior? “If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the actor was trying to produce.”
Speaking of that law, why would I want to post this on the Warren Facebook page? Am I being the troll that I have just talked about? That is not my intention. I would like to communicate with the other posters and readers of the Facebook page and urge them to use whatever connections they have to the campaign to get the message through. One or two (or is that a hundred) voices of concern do not seem to be enough.
The question is, can we get our concerns addressed in time to rescue this campaign? Can we stop the people who are doing so much damage to the campaign? Can we break through the wall surrounding Elizabeth Warren and get her to realize who her real friends are?
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The Republican Field Of Hawks
Filed Under Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior
Truth Out has Eugene Robinson’s article A Field of Hawks.
The article starts with:
Unless Ron Paul somehow wins the nomination, it looks as if a vote for the Republican presidential candidate this fall will be a vote for war with Iran.
and ends with:
The United States and its allies should seek to eliminate the Iranian government’s will to make a bomb, not its capacity. I hope Romney realizes that while sanctions and diplomacy may not be working as well as we’d like, they’re the best tools we have — and that an attack at this point gets us nowhere. But if he believes his own rhetoric, this election may be about more than the economy. It may be about war and peace.
I can think of few things that would strengthen Iran’s will to make a bomb than the constant threats and sanctions. Iran may observe that we are a little more careful how we deal with countries that have a nuclear capability. If they are trying to build a bomb, which I might remind you our intelligence agencies say they have no proof of, it could just be so that they can get more fear if not respect from the international community.
So if threatening and sanctioning Iran seems to be counterproductive to the aims of the United States, then it would put our actions in the category of Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior, “If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the actor was trying to produce.”
I don’t know if this is the reason, but the most obvious one would be that our real motives are to gain control of Iranian oil or to at least take it off the market so that oil prices will rise. That may not be the public’s motive, but you can bet the big oil company backers of the politicians would appreciate that.
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Democratic darling has also been critic
Filed Under Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior
Well, this seems to be the week for the press to catch up to my blog. The Boston Globe came out with the story Democratic darling has also been critic, subtitled “In book, Warren targeted key figures”.
In her best-selling book, she charged that Senator Hillary Clinton abandoned her principles and supported a bankruptcy bill in exchange for campaign contributions. Warren accused Joe Biden, also a senator at the time, of selling out women. And she chided Patty Murray – the Washington senator who later helped recruit her into the race and is now leading the national effort to elect her – for wanting to shame bankrupt families.
This mirrors my post back in December, Elizabeth Warren And Hillary Clinton Trade Lessons. The headline on the continuation of The Boston Globe story on an inside page says, “Warren book may help or hurt her run.”
This furthers the point that I have been making to the Warren campaign with zero success. You cannot change the fact that Elizabeth Warren has written several books. I think the books are a tremendous asset to her campaign and should be advertised by her campaign rather than hidden by them. If she doesn’t make a big deal of her books in a positive way, someone else will turn them into a negative. Why wait around for the inevitable? Why not get out in front of the curve?
I don’t know how many times the campaign will have to be hit over the head with these ideas before they finally wake up. One almosts suspects that this behavior of the campaign falls under the category Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior, “If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the actor was trying to produce.”
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The Challenge of the Productivity Revolution
Filed Under Greenberg's Law of Economic Progress
Truth-out is carrying the blog post Bye Bye American Pie: The Challenge of the Productivity Revolution by Robert Reich.
Insufficient demand – as everyone but regressive supply-siders now recognize – is a big reason why the current recovery has been so anemic and the pie isn’t growing faster.
So while the productivity revolution is indubitably good, the task ahead is to figure out how to distribute more of its gains to more of our people.
For a long time I have been promoting this understanding of the problems and potential of productivity growth.
Reich proposes a solution to the problem:
One possibility: higher taxes on the rich that go into wage subsidies for lower-income workers, combined with job sharing.
I have a “market” based solution to the problem that I think will work much better. It is time for the U.S. Government to start enabling the formation of labor unions instead of trying to strangle them. Rather than centralize the planning of wealth distribution in the government, let each union in each industry help decide what will work best in their particular situation. Let the workers negotiate with the capitalists on how the rewards of productivity growth should be shared. Since we are now in a more global economy, we also need to ensure that other countries promote real labor unions also. Unions are not the problem, they are the solution.
Without unions, the only way that people have of enforcing their power of numbers is to take action that will be much less acceptable to the 1% who are hoarding all the wealth.
I think Reich’s post also falls into the category of Greenberg’s Law of Economic Progress:
Any measure of economic growth that counts progress as an increase in the total amount of wealth in the country while a large number of people are still unemployed is a faulty measure.
Corollary:
Any measure of economic growth that counts progress as achieving full employment while decreasing everybody’s wealth to the poverty level is a faulty measure.
The Republicans (and probably the Democrats, too) have tried to fool the public about the health of our economy. While many individuals have realized that their personal economic situation was getting worse, the politicians have been trying to fool the people into thinking they are alone in their problems. They use the faulty measure of growth to pretend the overall economy is growing, when, in fact, the only growth is in the money flowing to the 1%.
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