Cafe Hayek

Fake news

At first, it seems like a very depressing story (HT: Drudge)

Operators of free food banks say they are seeing more working people needing assistance. The increased demand is outstripping supplies and forcing many pantries and food banks to cut portions.

Demand is being driven up by rising costs of food, housing, utilities, health care and gasoline, while food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are finding they have less surplus food to donate and government help has decreased, according to Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks.

Well, of course. With unemployment in double digits, incomes falling and the economy spiralling ever-downward—

But wait. Unemployment is low. Incomes are rising. The economy is doing well. That doesn't mean  that everyone is doing well. But is really likely that the working poor in America are suddenly doing so much worse than before that food pantries are noticing long lines of hungry people that they weren't prepared for?

Maybe the executive director of a group of food banks isn't the best source of unbiased information. Is government help really down? When did that happen? Food donations down? Why? How did this story get written in the first place? Did a reporter call up a few food banks curious to see how it's going? Or did Lisa Hamler-Fugitt send out a press release?

And if the story did originate with a reporter, can you imagine the food bank director responding to a question about the state of hunger with the answer--"We've got plenty of food. People are doing great. With the economy going so well, demand for our services are down. Have a great holiday season."

I think giving away food is a really good thing. I'm proud that my son and his classmates delivered home-made lasagnas to a local homeless shelter yesterday. I didn't get to talk to him about it yet, but I suspect his insights into the current state of the hungry are about as reliable as those in this story. I'll let you know after we talk tonight.

George Will on the American Idea

The Atlantic asked several prominent people to offer their thoughts on the meaning of "the American idea."  Lots of ideas that are as mistaken as they are trite are served up by bright and talented people -- such as John Updike and E.O. Wilson, each of whom warns that our materialistic way of life is causing us to run out of resources, and that we must alter our behavior if we're to survive.  (Geez, I miss Julian Simon.)

George Will, in contrast, delivers wise counsel:

It is a good and very American idea to avoid the definite article in locutions like “the American idea.” “The”? There are many American ideas pertaining to liberty under a constitutional government of limited, delegated, and enumerated powers. The best of these ideas can be found in the Federalist Papers, which are agreeably untainted by monomania.

It has been often said that any idea is dangerous if it is a person’s only idea. Talk about “the” American idea is dangerous because it often is a precursor to, and an excuse for, the missionary impulse that sleeps lightly, when it sleeps at all, in many Americans. After all, if the essence of America can be distilled to a single idea, it must be supremely important, and there might be a moral imperative to export it.

In 1990, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall still reverberating around the world, Jeane Kirkpatrick wisely warned Americans: “There is no mystical American ‘mission,’ or purpose to be ‘found’ independently of the U.S. Constitution.” With the Cold War over, and the moral and military mobilization it demanded no longer necessary, Kirkpatrick wrote: “The time when America should bear such unusual burdens is past. With a return to ‘normal’ times, we can again become a normal nation.”

If, paradoxically, “the American idea” is that the definite article is definitely inapposite in that phrase, then the greatest challenge to it is the false idea that American patriotism is inextricably bound up with the notion that being a normal nation is somehow beneath America’s dignity. Belief in American exceptionalism is compatible with the idea of American normality: Our nation is exceptionally well-founded and exceptionally faithful to an exceptionally nuanced system of prudential political axioms. But one of those axioms—it is the crux of the Madisonian persuasion—is that no polity is exempt from the passions and failings that make governance problematic, always and everywhere.

Leonhardt on the media

The latest episode of EconTalk is a conversation with David Leonhardt, columnist for the New York Times. We talk about bias at the Times and elsewhere, what niche remains for newspapers, whether global warming skeptics should get any coverage (he says no) and some very interesting stuff on how time from door-to-balloon can save or cost you your life with a heart attack.

A Gray Day for the Gray Lady's Readers

Here's the worst piece of domestic news that I've read in a long time.  It comes from John Tierney writing near the end of his column in today's New York Times:

Whatever they [the Congress] do the next two years, I won’t be here to kick them around. This is my last column on the Op-Ed page. I’ve enjoyed the past couple of years in Washington, but one election cycle is enough. I’m returning full time to the subject and the city closest to my heart: science and New York. I’ll be writing a column and a blog for the Science Times section.

Science journalism will be much improved.  The NYT's op-ed page will be desolate.

Balanced Reporting

Cuba is really poor. True, they've got that high literacy rate and the free health care (though I wonder how many MRI's they have—you don't jsut care about the price), but they're really poor. The Washington Post reports:

Tiny flames jump and sputter in the night here, suspended above the roadbed as if held by an invisible wand.

The uninitiated must pull up close on these unlighted roads to realize that the flames are leaping from small buckets that dangle from wires on the backside of horse-drawn buggies. In the near absence of passenger cars, these buggies serve as taxis and local buses in rural areas of Cuba, and the flaming buckets function as homemade taillights.

Countless chroniclers of Cuba have observed that the vintage American cars in Havana -- the fabulous, hulking Buicks and finned Chryslers -- make the capital feel like a city frozen in the 1950s. But outside Havana, in the vast expanse of the Caribbean's largest island, the ambiance often leans more toward the 1850s.

The roads are there. It's just that the cars aren't.

But the thug who runs the country makes sure he can still collect his share of the national output:

Transportation is a huge problem throughout the island, even in Havana, where many of the vehicles still on the road are connected to state-run tourism or government activities. Hitchhikers are everywhere, and people wait hours to ride oversize buses that seem to break down as often as they run.

It's an excellent article. Read it. But the reporter, Manuel Roig-Franzia, felt compelled to add an explanation for Cuba's plight. And being a good reporter, he felt obliged to offer divergent viewpoints to explain why Cuba is so poor:

Supporters of Castro blame the U.S. trade embargo for the transportation woes and especially for the dearth of personal cars. Cuba makes no cars of its own. Non-U.S. automakers that might normally be eager to ship vehicles and replacement parts to the island are hampered because of U.S. trade rules. Ships are prohibited from entering U.S. ports for six months after making deliveries to Cuba, effectively blocking access for those companies to the world's largest market.

Castro's critics view the situation differently, blaming the failings of Cuba's economic policies after years of communist rule. The government's weak financial position makes it impossible for it to place large enough orders to overcome the limitations created by the trade embargo.

We report, you decide. Two opposing viewpoints. Of course they could both be right. Both could be contributing to the problem. But is there equal logic and empirical support for both claims?

Call a car manufacturer. Is the six month delay a real cost? Is it enforced? If you go to the US first and then to Cuba, is the six month delay relevant? Are there other countries with similar embargoes? Do they have anyone sell them cars?

But more importantly, why is there virtually no meat in Cuba? And why is everything else in such short supply? Is that because non-American exporters are afraid of the costs?

Here's a tragicomic story (scroll down to the middle where it talks about cattle) on the effects of tyranny on human beings:

In communist Cuba, only the state is allowed                                       to slaughter cattle and sell the meat. Citizens                                       who kill a cow--even if they raised it themselves--can                                       get a 10-year prison sentence. Anyone who                                       transports or sells a poached animal can                                       get locked up for 8 years.

"My brother-in-law got a 12-year prison                                       sentence for killing 12 cows," said                                       an accountant who lives in the cattle-raising                                       region.

But it's not unheard of for Cubans to sneak                                       into a pasture at night and butcher a cow                                       on the spot. Residents have been known to                                       descend on a cow struck by lightning, carving                                       it up in minutes even though the meat often                                       is charred and they risk a fine if caught                                       by police.

The same thing can happen if a cow is hit                                       by a car or dies of illness or malnutrition,                                       in giving birth or of old age, even though                                       residents admit the law requires them to                                       leave the carcass alone and notify local                                       officials.

...

Cubans have not always been hard up for                                       beef. Before the 1959 revolution, Cuba was                                       said to have as many cattle as people--about                                       5 million--and one of the region's highest                                       per-capita consumption of beef, experts                                       said.

But Fidel Castro's revolutionary government                                       nationalized the large land holdings of                                       U.S. and other ranchers and slaughtered                                       many of the cattle to make up for falling                                       food production in other areas.

The beef industry never recovered, but                                       dairy herds were built back up through huge                                       investments and imported animal feed, experts                                       said. Years later, when the Soviet Union                                       collapsed and ended $5 billion in annual                                       subsidies, Cuba lacked the money for feed,                                       and much of the dairy herd also was lost.                                     

Today beef is found almost exclusively                                       in state-run restaurants catering to tourists                                       and dollar-only markets beyond the reach                                       of most citizens.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

This article on the cattle industry also presents the debate on whether the beef situation is due to mismanagement due to Communism or the US trade embargo even though the trade embargo doesn't apply to agricultural products! Read it if can handle it.

Secretary Paulson in a remake of Rashomon

Treasury Secretary Paulson made his first speech today. What did he say? Here are some headlines:

Paulson Calls World Economy `Robust,' U.S. Growth `Strong' (Bloomberg News)

Paulson: US Must Welcome Competition (AP)

Paulson Warns on Benefits (Reuters)

Evidently, he gave a special speech to the New York Times. The headline at the Times:

Treasury Secretary Sees Inequities in US Economy

Just a little bit different, huh? The Bloomberg and Reuters stories don't even mention the inequity theme. The AP story mentions it about 80% toward the bottom of the story:

Paulson said his top priorities would be achieving reform of Social Security and the other benefit programs, advancing the nation's energy security, bolstering global trade and addressing the problems of income inequality between the wealthy and lower-income Americas.

(Aim high, I always say, but this is a little ridiculous. After knocking off social security reform, Medicare reform, securing the nation's energy supply and encouraging trade—all in the last two years of a lame duck administration, he's going to tackle income inequality.)

Here's how the Times's story opens:

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., delivering his first public remarks since taking office last month, pledged today to work with Democrats to revamp Social Security and Medicare, and in a gesture aimed at Bush administration critics he said he recognized that the economy was not benefiting all Americans.

“Amid this country’s strong economic expansion, many Americans simply aren’t feeling the benefits,” Mr. Paulson said in a speech at Columbia Business School. “Many aren’t seeing significant increases in their take-home pay. Their increases in wages are being eaten up by high energy prices and rising health care costs, among others.”

It will be interesting to see how the coverage of the speech evolves over the next 12 hours. Will wire services or other papers change their focus to this "concession?"

I know a lot of people find the Times to be a frustrating source of news and that their reporters are biased toward the left. A simpler theory is that the Times, like any other producer tries to please its customers. The average reader of the New York Times finds the Times's interpretation of the Paulson speech invigorating. Finally—the Bush administration admits its doing a horrible job for the average American. Left unresolved is what the Bush administration (or its Secretary of the Treasury) might possibly do to change this state of affairs, but the Times has an idea—it comes later down in the story after some discussion of the rest of Paulson's speech:

Though he spoke of economic inequalities, for example, he did not offer any hint of lack of enthusiasm for the administration’s record on tax cuts.

This isn't as absurd as Krugman's suggestion of raising the minimum wage as a way of fighting the unfair gains of the top 5%. But it's close. If the average American isn't sharing in the growth of the economy, letting the Bush tax cuts expire isn't going to make any difference.

The whole thing is a charade.

There are a bunch of people out there who believe or at least claim to believe that the average American hasn't shared in any of the extraordinary growth of the last 25 years. What these people (and the reporters for the New York Times) don't seem to understand is that if that's true, then increasing the minimum wage and raising taxes on the rich aren't going to solve the problem. If you really believe most of the gains of the last 25 or 10 or even 5 years have all gone to the rich, then the system is totally broken. You should be a real socialist. So either they don't really believe their claims about what's happening to the average American or they don't really want to do anything about it anyway. They just want to posture.

That Toddling Town

The Chicago City Council approved the ordinance requiring big retailers to pay at least $10 per hour in wages and $3 per hour in benefits. The New York Times story opens with inadvertent irony:

After months of fevered lobbying and bitter debate, the Chicago City Council passed a groundbreaking ordinance yesterday requiring “big box” stores, like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, to pay a minimum wage of $10 an hour by 2010, along with at least $3 an hour worth of benefits.

I'm not sure "groundbreaking" is the right word to use about an ordinance that Target and Wal-Mart have said might keep them from opening new stores in the city.

But the real high point of the story comes here:

Some economists say such measures will stifle development and deprive consumers of access to cheap goods, but many poverty experts say that local efforts elsewhere to raise wages have not choked off growth and that the expanding, low-paying retail sector can be safely pressed to raise pay.

Ah, only some economists are worried. But many poverty experts are not. The implication is that the optimists outnumber the pessimists. There's a comfort, don't you think? The Times lets us hear from one of the optimists:

“We’re very confident that retailers want and need to be in Chicago, and the question for the city is what kinds of jobs they will bring,” said Annette Bernhardt of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, which helped draft the Chicago bill and has done economic studies of its likely impact.

It's awkward to have a person from a law school make a claim about the economic impact of the ordinance. So to reassure the reader, we are told that she has done economic studies. So she must know, I guess, of where she speaks.

No economists worried about the impact of the law are quoted.

How Newsworthy are NASA Space Flights?

Karol and I and our nine-year-old, Thomas, are in Houston visiting the Johnson Space Center.  Thomas is fascinated with astronomy and space travel.

I'm impressed with the exhibits and activities available to tourists here.

But why is NASA so self-congratulatory these days?  Why is the current shuttle mission (STS-121) so newsworthy?  Why is any shuttle mission newsworthy?  Space travel -- old news; big deal; been there and done that; yawn.

Oooops!  Sorry.  Of course even the most routine space shuttle flight (or an "STS" as each one is called here in Houston) is a marvel of human achievement.  Nevertheless, I continue to insist that space-shuttle flights are no longer as newsworthy as NASA makes them out to be.

Here's a short essay that I wrote a few years ago on this matter.  (Note that this essay was written before the February 2003 Columbia shuttle tragedy.)  Here's my main point:

It's true, of course, that each shuttle flight is a marvelous achievement of human ingenuity -- scientific and organizational -- but our world is a barrage of similar achievements, almost all of which we regard as mundane and not the least bit newsworthy.  There's nothing so special about shuttle flights to distinguish them from any of the cornucopia of other wonders that we encounter daily.

Is the flight of a shuttle a greater wonder than the flight of a Boeing 747?  Each time a 747-400 takes off, 437 tons of steel, plastic, cloth, fuel, cargo, and people rise gracefully into the sky.  Meals are served and movies are watched.  Passengers eat, sleep, work, sip cocktails, relax, and chit-chat as if  whizzing through the air seven miles above the earth's surface at nearly 600 miles per hour is among the most natural of human situations.

John Tierney on the Punditocracy

Today's column by John Tierney in the New York Times is priceless.  Those of you with subscriptions to the Gray Lady should click on to it now and enjoy!

(Those of you without subscriptions to the New York Times, buy one: the regular opportunity to read John Tierney -- and, now, also my colleague Tyler Cowen's column in the Thursday Business section -- is well worth the price.)

A Deck Chair Off the Titanic

The headline from the lead story in the Washington Post:

Budget Cuts Pass By a Slim Margin
Poor, Elderly and Students to Feel Pinch

Sounds pretty harsh—budget cuts on the backs of the least able members of society.  The story opens:

The House yesterday narrowly approved a contentious budget-cutting package that would save nearly $40 billion over five years by imposing substantial changes on programs including Medicaid, welfare, child support and student lending.

So maybe it's not so harsh.  Forty billion over five years.  Not exactly a big slice or much of a pinch.  And it turns out they aren't really cuts at all.  When you go to the continuation of the story to page A7, the headline reads:

House Votes to Stem Increases in Spending

So they aren't cuts at all.   They're reductions in future spending increases.  Tiny reductions.  Eight billion a year.  If you read all the way through the article, toward the end comes the real measure of what's at stake here:

The impact of the bill on the deficit is likely to be negligible, slicing less than one-half of 1 percent from the estimated $14.3 trillion in federal spending over the next five years.

You could ask why this story makes the front page.  It's not exactly a man-bites-dog story.  More of a man yells atdog story.  But if it makes the front page, the Post might try and describe it correctly as it does on the home page of Post's web site (even though the linked story has the same misleading headline.

How do you feel the pinch from getting a smaller increase than you might have gotten?

Please Do Your Job

The headline:

Study Finds Rich-Poor Income Gap Growing

The story by Mark Johnson of the Associated Press begins:

The disparity between rich and poor is growing in America as the federal minimum wage has remained flat for years, union membership has declined and industries have faced global competition, according to a study released Thursday.

Interesting.  Let me try a different first sentence:

The disparity between rich and poor is growing in America as the Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years, Mars came very close to the earth and the global frog population plummeted. 

I don't actually believe that the disparity between rich and poor is growing.  At least I don't believe the numbers that supposedly tell us so.  Or more accurately, I don't believe that the interpretation of the numbers is the right one.   But even if the interpretation is the right one,  how can an Associated Press story list the supposed causes of that growing disparity as if they were facts rather than the pet agenda items of the groups that put out the study?

The story continues:

The report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, both liberal-leaning think tanks, found the incomes of the poorest 20 percent of families nationally grew by an average of $2,660, or 19 percent, over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, the incomes of the richest fifth of families grew by $45,100, or nearly 59 percent, the study by the Washington-based groups said.

Families in the middle fifth saw their incomes rise 28 percent, or $10,218.

The figures, based on U.S. Census data, compare the average growth from 1980-82 to 2001-03, after adjusting for inflation.

The poorest one-fifth of families, the report said, had an average income of $16,780 from 2000-03, while the top fifth of families had an average income of $122,150 — more than seven times as much. Middle-income families' average income was $46,875.

This is fake analysis.  It's comparing two snapshots over time and pretending that the people in the snapshots are the same people.  The implication is that if you were a poor family in 1980, you barely got ahead while the rich families, turbo-charged ahead of everyone else and left them in the dust.  The rich get richer and the poor basically stay poor.

But they're not the same people in the two snapshots.  The comparison of the two snapshots is close to meaningless.  The bottom quintile of families today includes a bunch of people who weren't there in 1980.  Some of the families are recent immigrants to the United States seeking opportunity.  Some of the families are young and just starting out.  Some are the result of a divorce that has dumped one or both partners into poverty and it will take time for them to recover. 

And most importantly, some of those rich families today that have allegedly zoomed ahead were poor in 1980 but have become rich in the meanwhile, an experience that is the exact opposite of what the headline would have you believe.

In short, the people who did the study are lazy.  But I expect them to be.  They're from the  Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute.  That's their job—to produce pessimistic analyses that make people think the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and to claim a causal connection between bad times and weakened unions.

But that isn't Mark Johnson's job.  Mark, your job is to inform.  Or maybe to help sell newspapers.  But either way, it doesn't speak well of you or your job to simply run the press release from the  Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute under your byline.  If your job is to inform, you might want to interview a few people who don't think about the world in the same way as the CBPP and EPI.  If your job is to sell newspapers, a little tension and counterpoint make more interesting reading.

To be fair to Mr. Johnson, he did call someone who didn't work for the people who did the study to add some "balance" to the story.  So who did he call?   Another pro-union activist:

Trudi Renwick, an economist with the union-backed Fiscal Policy Institute in New York, said globalization, the decline of manufacturing jobs, the expansion of low-wage service jobs, immigration and the weakening of unions have hurt those on the lower end of the economic scale.

After some data on state-level inequality, Mark Johnson finally quotes someone "on the other side," someone from the business community:

Matthew Maguire, a spokesman for the Business Council of New York state, said the money earned by the state's wealthiest residents is "something that everybody who cares about New York should be pleased about."

"New York's wealthy pay huge sums in taxes and those wealthy people and their taxes make it possible for New York to provide the nation's most generous social service programs to less fortunate New Yorkers," he said. "It also reflects the fact the state is a magnet for immigrants who come from the four corners of the globe to a state they see as symbol of economic activity."

Isn't this rich?  (Aren't we a pair?)  The voice from "the other side" accepts the analysis as true but disputes the implication that rich people getting richer is bad.  It's good!  What a loveable counterpoint.

And then Johnson closes the piece giving more space for Trudi Renwick's agenda, the same agenda of the Economic Policy Institute:

Renwick said the government "needs to continue its commitment to correcting the natural outcomes of the marketplace" by raising the minimum wage with inflation and by tax policies like the earned income tax credit.

Renwick also suggested that governments, when giving tax breaks to companies, insist those companies provide jobs that pay higher wages.

That's it.  Not one quote from someone who is skeptical of the analysis.  Not one quote from someone without an ax to grind.

Mark, call someone else other than union-backed economists or business lobbyists.  Call someone at a university.  Or if you want to stick with think tanks, call Robert Rector at Heritage.  He can explain why the numbers you swallowed are silly.  Do your job.

Alan Alda for President

I turned on the TV last night, hoping to see the opening of the Redskins-Eagles game, and I stumble on what appears to be Alan Alda, talking about drug company profits.  But it can't be Alan Alda.  I think of Alan Alda as someone who is hostile to drug company profits.  But he's explaining how profits are OK and how drug companies save lives and how drugs save us from what used to require an operation.  He doesn't say enough about the incentive effects of high prices, but it's pretty good.

It's some kind of debate I'm watching.  Alda's opponent who is evidently a Democrat, touts his economic plan that will create a million jobs.  The moderator asks Alda how many jobs his plan will create.  Zero, Alda says.  In fact, he adds, I'll cut jobs.  I'll cut jobs in the federal government.  Besides, he adds, Presidents don't create jobs, entrepreneurs do.  My job as President is to get out of the way and let the market work.

At this point I know I'm watching a TV show.  No real candidate for President would have the guts to answer the question this way.  (I know, I need to get out more.  Or less actually.  I guess most people knew what this debate was really about.  I just don't watch enough television.)  Then they start talking about drilling in ANWR.  The Democratic candidate is against it--bad for the environment and besides, there's only a year's supply of oil, there.  Alda says, a year's worth of oil is a lot of oil.  And maybe there's more there than we think.  Then he asks the audience--have any of you ever been to ANWR?  Clap if you've been there.  Silence.  Alda says--so why shouldn't we drill in a place that only a few rich people will ever visit?  (He should have mentioned the benefits to poor people of lower energy prices, but hey, it wasn't perfect.)  He asks if anyone in the audience has been to the Grand Canyon and there's tumultuous applause.  I wouldn't support drilling there, Alda says, but why not ANWR?  Why protect caribou having to look at oil wells?

In the closing statement, Alda gives an eloquent defense of freedom, the power of individuals to solve problems via markets, and the importance of limited government as envisioned by the Founders as a way to keep confidence in government doing what it should.

There were a few missteps here and there, but overall, it was the best defense of limited government I've heard from a candidate since Reagan.  It figures, as a friend pointed out, Alda and Reagan are both actors.

Of course, the whole thing was a live version of the West Wing.  But what I found interesting was how little they chose to caricature the Republican's views, at least in the part I saw.  He wasn't a "compassionate conservative."  And he wasn't a heartless monster.  He was about as Jeffersonian as you could imagine.  Whoever gets the Republican nomination the next time around ought to hire whoever wrote Alda's lines.  It would be even nicer to have a candidate to choose from who actually believed those lines as well.

The Fake Energy Crisis

Twice in the last week I've seen mention of a new "crisis" in energy markets.  The crisis?  We may have reached the peak in oil production, meaning that in future years, the amount of oil available will dwindle.  This story is the lead story on today's front page of USA Today.  The headline:

Debate Brews: Has Oil Production Peaked?

The story begins:

Almost since the dawn of the oil age, people have worried about the taps running dry. So far, the worrywarts have been wrong. Oil men from John D. Rockefeller to T. Boone Pickens always manage to find new gushers.

But now, a vocal minority of experts says world oil production is at or near its peak. Existing wells are tiring. New discoveries have disappointed for a decade. And standard assessments of what remains in the biggest reservoirs in the Middle East, they argue, are little more than guesses.

The first expert is an investment banker:

"There isn't a middle argument. It's a finite resource. The only debate should be over when we peak," says Matthew Simmons, a Houston investment banker and author of a new book that questions Saudi Arabia's oil reserves.

In case you think this is no big deal, think again:

If the "peak oil" advocates are correct, however, today's transient shortages and high prices will soon become a permanent way of life. Just as individual oil fields inevitably reach a point at which it gets harder and more expensive to extract the oil before output declines, global oil production is about to crest, they say. Since 2000, the cost of finding and developing new sources of oil has risen about 15% annually, according to the John S. Herold consulting firm.

As global demand rises, American consumers will find themselves in a bidding war with others around the world for scarce oil supplies. That will send prices of gasoline, heating oil and all petroleum-related products soaring.

"The least-bad scenario is a hard landing, global recession worse than the 1930s," says Kenneth Deffeyes, a Princeton University professor emeritus of geosciences. "The worst-case borrows from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence and death."

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?  War, famine, pestilence and death?  They ought to put this quote in the next OED under "hyperbole."  And I thought this guy was trying to really scare us (Ht: Alan Nemes) but it turns out he's a moderate.

This fear that we're running out of oil or some other key resource is a steady feature of the worrying class.  The worriers have a bad track record.  I understand that just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean people aren't chasing you and just because the worriers have always been wrong doesn't mean this won't be the time they get it right.  But I still sleep well.

There's nothing inherently worrisome about a peak in oil production.  Such imagery preys on a quick emotional response--before the peak, we're going up.  After the peak, it's all downhill.  But there's nothing significant about a world where we produce and consume less oil next year than this year.  If that's because remaining oil stocks are increasingly costly to bring up from the ground, that increases the incentive to economize on oil usage and find cheaper ways to get it out of the ground.  That mitigates the harm.

The worriers like to say that we've had cheap oil in the past and now we're going to have expensive oil in the future.  They make it sound like it's a geophysical relationship between production and prices.  As long as we're finding more oil, oil is cheap.  When we're past the peak, it'll be expensive.  Cheap oil means the good life.  Expensive oil means misery.  But prices aren't high or low.  They move around.  They are high or low relative to other prices.  If oil becomes increasingly scarce, we'll do a thousand, (more like a billion) things to find other ways of doing what oil does.

If it happened tomorrow, if tomorrow, there were no gas in the pumps and this persisted forever, it would be a very unpleasant adjustment.  It isn't going to happen tomorrow.  If it happens gradually over the next 30 or 50 or 100 years, it will have little or no impact on our overall well-being.

And wasn't it supposed to be good not to rely on fossil fuels?  Why all this new worrying?  I think the worriers are trying to exploit the recent spike in gasoline prices to push public policy in directions that won't happen otherwise.

Meanwhile, read Julian Simon. Remember that human creativity is the ultimate resource.  Remember that the geophysicists don't understand prices.  Sleep well, despite the worriers' desire to keep you tossing and turning.  And if you hear the sound of hoofbeats in the still small spaces of the night, it's probably just a horse.

Friend of Elian

I missed the interview with Elian Gonzalez on Sixty Minutes.  Jeff Jacoby did not and writes eloquently of the moral bankruptcy of CBS:

''60 Minutes" made much of the fact that Castro came to Elian's elementary school graduation and pronounced himself Elian's friend. ''That's quite something, isn't it," Simon gushed, ''for the president of a country to say he's honored to have a kid as a friend?"

Elian: Yes, and it's also very moving to me. And I also believe I am his friend.

Simon: Do you think of him as a friend?

Elian: Not only as a friend, but also as a father.

Simon: If you had a problem, would you call him up and tell him about it?

Elian: I could.

Well, it is good to know that Elian thinks so highly of Castro. And one must admire the restraint shown by ''60 Minutes," which somehow managed to avoid mentioning that Elian's friend and surrogate ''father" is also the world's longest-ruling tyrant, a sadist who has killed or imprisoned tens of thousands of dissidents, and, not incidentally, the Stalinist thug who drove Elizabet Brotons -- Elian's mother -- to her death in the Florida Straits.

Jacoby's condemnation of CBS reminded me of how CNN coddled Saddam Hussein.  We only know about that because Eason Jordan of CNN confessed on the pages of the New York Times.  His remarkable mea culpa is here if you missed it.  It will cost you $3.95 but it's worth it.  Or you can google around and find it.

If you have any romance left in your heart for Castro, read Against All Hope or Waiting for Snow in Havana.  The former is chilling and deserved to be read to honor the courage of its author and his prison mates.  The latter is a magical book about growing up that also tells of what Castro was really about as almost an afterthought. It is one of the finest books I have read in the last ten years.

How It's Made

One of my son's favorite television show (I proudly reveal!) is a show on the Science Channel called "How It's Made."  (I apologize: I can find no really good link to the show; the link here is just the Science Channel's scheduled airing of the show.)

Each half-hour segment features three or four explanations of how ordinary things are manufactured. Among the familiar items whose manufacture Thomas and I have learned about by watching this program are digital CDs, mozzarella cheese, sliced bread, pantyhose, and toothpicks.

Several things strike me about this program. Here’s one.

The level of automation is truly astonishing. Viewers of "How It’s Made" almost never see a human being. It’s almost all machines – computerized robots – doing the work. Even the most mundane of everyday items such as sliced bread and toothpicks are produced today with truly impressive advanced technology.

Watching "How It’s Made" last night brought to mind Adam Smith’s important insight that one advantage of the division of labor is that as tasks become more specialized they are more likely to become mechanized, thereby releasing scarce, precious human labor to do other valuable jobs.

We live truly in a world of wonders. The lowly toothpick – a splinter of birch wood – is the product of millions upon millions of dollars of investment and unmeasurable human creativity – and, of course, our happy propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,

Fake Story at the Times

In this story in yesterday's New York Times (rr), Eduardo Porter reports more gloomy news for average Americans.  The headline:

How Long Can Workers Tread Water?

Pretty scary metaphor.  After opening with a paragraph about James Barnes, a security guard who has taken a second job delivering newspapers just to get ahead, we get this summary of economic life in America:

The wages of typical workers are treading water, growing roughly at the same rate that inflation eats into their buying power. Last week, the Labor Department reported that average wages for production and nonsupervisory workers in the private sector, about 75 percent of the labor force, reached $16.06 an hour in June, just 2.7 percent above the level a year ago.

If correct, that is disappointing news.  We'd prefer growth to stagnation.  But the news is even worse:

Workers' wages may be barely keeping up, but Americans' average incomes are growing briskly - in part, because of growth in the overall number of jobs, including Mr. Barnes's extra one. But it also reflects other forms of income, flowing mostly to the more affluent, which are fueling the consumer spending that has provided a crucial pillar of support for economic growth over the last three years.

Will this chorus ever cease?  After their mammoth, inaccurate series on inequality, the Times is hammering home the point they have been making for decades: sure times are good, but only for a tiny slice at the top.  The rest of us get crumbs.  There's only one problem with this chorus.  It isn't true.  At least it isn't true based on the numbers provided by the Times.  Here's the chart:

The chart shows two lines.  The first is the growth rate in average hourly wages for production and non-supervisory workers.  These workers make up about 75% of the economy.  The line is basically flat, growing between two and three percent a year, roughly equal to the rate of inflation.  But the key comparison is to the other line in the chart, the growth rate in what the chart calls "employee compensation (wages and benefits)."  This number is for all workers and it's going through the roof.  It's growing at well above the rate of inflation, at 4 and 5 and 6 and even 7% on an annual basis.

Porter's implication is that while the bottom 3/4 of the work force is treading water, the top 1/4 is living like Croesus.  Here's the text in the chart:

While wages for ordinary workers are barely keeping up with inflation, overall incomes are up sharply because of a growing number of jobs and higher pay among the upper ranks.

So what the reporter wants us to conclude is that when you look at wages for the bottom 3/4 of the economy, they're flat.  But the data that looks at all workers is zooming upward.  So that means all the gains are going to the people at the top.

Unfortunately for the reporter these data tell us nothing of the sort.  I spoke to the reporter.  The dramatic zooming line in the chart is taken from this table from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), gathered by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  It's the growth rate in total compensation paid out in the US economy.  It's wages plus benefits.  So the first apples and oranges problem is that the zooming line includes benefits and the flat line doesn't.  Porter conceded that problem, but pointed out that even when you look at just wages and salaries, they're zooming in a similar fashion.  He's right.  But that number has a different apples and oranges problem.  He's comparing average hourly earnings, a per worker measure of compensation to the total payments made to all workers, an aggregate measure.  It includes increases in number of jobs per worker, increases in the number of workers, raises and so on.  It shouldn't be compared to average hourly earnings.  (It also uses a totally different methodology to compute the numbers, one that may not be terribly accurate for measuring employee compensation, but never mind.)

So the bottom line of the story is an anecdote about ONE worker who has taken a second job, a claim that workers are treading water because wages are just keeping up with inflation (ignoring the role of benefits in total compensation), then another fact that is not quite comparable but provocative that suggests that the most affluent workers might be doing very, very well.

How did this story get written?  Who thought of the idea of trying to frame the recent numbers on average hourly earnings as a story on increasing inequality?  I'd like to know.  I don't think Eduardo Porter had an idea to use total compensation aggregated across all workers from the NIPA as a way of framing this story as an example of growing inequality.  I would guess he called one of the sources in the story to talk about the average hourly earnings numbers, maybe someone from the ubiquitous Economic Policy Institute which is quoted twice in the story, and the source said, hey, why not use these data from the NIPA accounts?

No skeptical voice is quoted in the story saying that perhaps these numbers are not really comparable.

Today, comes the news that inflation was flat in June.  From the Washington Post (rr):

With no inflation to offset pay gains, real average weekly earnings for most U.S. workers rose 0.2 percent last month from their level in May, the department said in another report. They were up 0.4 percent in the 12 months that ended in June, the first yearly gain since September.

When the average hourly earnings data are updated, they'll be up too.  So the treading of water is over for now.  Good thing the Times ran its story yesterday.

To Shriek Is Not to Argue

I received today this trackback to an earlier post of mine.  It’s quite hostile.  And its author – one Deb Frisch – commits several mistakes.

I began to write a reply, treating her comments seriously.  But after getting a few paragraphs into my reply, I decided to learn more about Ms. Frisch.  So I googled her name.  A few minutes of exploration convince me that any response would be futile, a waste of time.

A Crotchet

Here’s one of my admittedly trivial crotchets: the increasingly common habit of English-speaking newscasters to pronounce Spanish and Latino proper nouns with a (usually pretend) Spanish or Latino accent.

You know what I mean. If reporter Jones of CNN or ABC is reporting on some goings-on in, say, Mexico City, he’ll not say "Meks-e-ko" (as native English speakers pronounce that country’s name); instead, he’ll say "Mea-he-ko" (the way native Spanish speakers pronounce it). If reporter Smith of NBC or CBS is on air discussing, say, recent elections in Madrid, she’ll invariably pronounce the politicians’ names as if she were speaking in Spanish to a Spanish-speaking audience.

I suspect that pronouncing Spanish and Latino names the way that Spaniards and Latinos pronounce their names is regarded as politically correct, or at least more respectful of Spaniards and Latinos. But why? Do Spanish and Latino reporters, when reporting in Spanish to Spanish-speaking audiences, say "United States" (in a faux American accent) rather than "Estados Unidos"? I doubt it. And I’m glad that they don’t. To do so would be silly as well as condescending to Americans, implying that we Americans are so very sensitive that we cannot bear to hear foreign renditions of the name of our country.

And why do English-speaking reporters do this proper-noun-pronunciation thing only with Spanish and Latino proper nouns? Why not with French or even British-English proper nouns? Why doesn’t the same NPR reporter who says "Mathreed" (in a poor attempt to mimic the Spanish pronunciation of Spain’s capital city) say "Pa-ree" when referring to France’s capital city? Why doesn’t she call the current British Prime Minister "Tyony Blaaa-ay" rather than "Tony Blair"?

It’s a small and unimportant point, I know. But I feel good having vented about it.

The Sugar Mystery

CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, is allegedly not going to pass because of opposition from the sugar industry.  So reports the Wall Street Journal, (sr):

If the Central American Free Trade Agreement goes sour on Capitol Hill, the reason will almost certainly be sugar.

The American sugar industry has become the standard-bearer of opposition to President Bush's top trade priority for 2005. It's the clearest loser under the agreement, which would open the tightly regulated U.S. market to new imports from five Central American countries, plus the Dominican Republic.

On the surface, this seems reasonable.  The US sugar industry is highly protected.  Free trade in sugar would probably destroy the American sugar industry.  No wonder the Journal story quotes Max Baucus, Montana Senator saying:

"Frankly, in my judgment, Cafta faces such a steep climb here -- that unless the administration finds a way to deal with sugar, I'm not betting very solidly on the passage of Cafta," Mr. Baucus warned at a recent congressional hearing.

There's only one problem with this story.  The administration has already found a way to deal with sugar.  They basically took it out of the agreement.  CAFTA already gives incredible special treatment to sugar:

The promised change is modest: In 15 years, the pact would increase annual imports from Cafta countries by just 153,140 tons, roughly 1% of U.S. production.

So over 15 years, CAFTA allows a minuscule increase in imports.  This "liberalization" makes the agreement untenable?  It's too much competition for embattled sugar beet farmers?

There are two mysteries here.  The first is why the Wall Street Journal reporter decided to put this key fact in the bottom fifth of the article rather than the top.  I think I can solve that mystery: the fact ruins the whole theme of the article that competition from foreign sugar threatens political support for CAFTA.  This one fact challenges the whole premise of the article.  How can the sugar industry be so much in arms over such a small change?

But that brings us to the second mystery.  Why is the sugar industry so upset?  The Journal story does take a stab at it:

Sugar-industry officials say the promised imports will upset the balance of the existing price-support program. That program is designed to prop up the price of sugar by controlling the amount of sugar put on the market; those amounts are controlled by import limits and production allotments granted to U.S. farmers. Cafta critics say even small import increases will curb the production allotted to U.S. farmers, cutting income.

Rob Portman, the new U.S. trade representative, is open to helping sugar farmers adjust to Cafta. Under one of the agreement's provisions, the federal government would compensate Latin countries, perhaps through cash payments, for not shipping the sugar to the U.S. He has suggested the program could be bolstered.

But the sugar industry, at least so far, is rejecting that idea. Industry officials see the very notion of reduced trade barriers -- even if imports don't surge -- as threatening. And over the long term, sugar advocates worry Cafta's passage would be a symbolic first step to ever-greater imports. Beyond Central America, sugar is on the table in U.S. bilateral trade talks with Thailand and the Andean countries.

Maybe.  But these hypothetical risks are hard to understand as the source of the opposition.  True, CAFTA opens the door to changes in sugar payments and higher imports down the road.  But is that the reason the industry is so upset and why politicians from sugar states are so vocal?

I have a different theory.  I think the people who don't want CAFTA to pass need a poster boy, someone to lean on to justify their opposition to CAFTA.  So they use sugar.  The politicians say they're worried about the sugar industry but that's just talk.  The real reasons lie elsewhere.  They have to because sugar can't explain the depth of their passion against the agreement.  For the Wall Street Journal to leave the impression in the first 4/5ths of the article that the sugar industry is indeed at risk because of CAFTA is to play into the hands of the politicians rather than serving its readers.  The real story is still waiting to be written.

Can Wal-Mart Pay More?

The New York Times (rr) reports (ht: Drudge) that Wal-Mart is under fire for paying too little.  The headline of the story:

Can't Wal-Mart, a Retail Behemoth, Pay More?

Love that rhetorical question with the easy answer.  Of course it can!  I hesitate to use the word "report" in the opening sentence of this post.  There's no real news story here.  It's not like someone discovered that Wal-Mart is using slave labor or not paying the minimum wage.  That would be a news story.  What we have instead is what I'd call a fake news story, generated by a press release from activists that plays to the sensibilities of a newspapers editors, reporters and readers.  Let's read on:

With most of  Wal-Mart's workers earning less than $19,000 a year, a number of community groups and lawmakers have recently teamed up with labor unions in mounting an intensive campaign aimed at prodding Wal-Mart into paying its 1.3 million employees higher wages.

A new group of Wal-Mart critics ran a full-page advertisement on April 20 contending that the company's low pay had forced tens of thousands of its workers to resort to food stamps and Medicaid, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. On April 26, as part of a campaign called "Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart," five members of Congress joined women's advocates and labor leaders to assail the company for not paying its female employees more.

So do you see the "news" that generates the article?  A group of activists have taken out an ad and started a campaign criticizing Wal-Mart.  Those activists have sent a torrent of press releases to places like the New York Times, hoping to get some free publicity for their cause.   It's working.

Among workers at Wal-Mart's 3,700 stores across the United States, the debate is also heating up.

Not really.  That's a meaningless sentence designed to lull the reader into thinking something is happening that merits New York Times coverage.  The reporter, Steven Greenhouse, has no idea if the debate is heating up, cooling down or not happening at all.  It's a ridiculous claim.  The data that supports it comes from the reporter finding two workers, one fairly satisfied, one fairly dissatisfied, and interviewing them.  Not even an argument in the parking lot that's overheard, but a made-up debate to keep the article going:

Frances Browning, for example, once earned $15 a hour, but now at Wal-Mart, where she is a cashier in Roswell, Ga., she is paid $9.43. She says she is happy to have the job.

"I was unemployed for two and a half years before I found my job at Wal-Mart," Ms. Browning, 57, said. "Like everybody else I'd love to make a lot more, but I have to be realistic."

But Jason Mrkwa, 27, a high school graduate who stocks frozen food at a Wal-Mart in Independence, Kan., maintains that he is underpaid. "I make $8.53, even though every one of my evaluations has been above standard," Mr. Mrkwa (pronounced MARK-wah) said. "You can't really live on this."

You really can, obviously, but we all understand it isn't fun to live on $17,000 a year.  It helps to do it in Independence, Kansas.  It helps to be single, which is apparently, the family structure of Mr. Mrkwa.  The more interesting question is what this has to do with Wal-Mart.  The implication of the article and the claim of the activists is that Mr. Mrkwa's relatively challenging financial life is due to Wal-Wart.  It is not due to Mr. Mrkwa's choices or the quality of the school he attended or the parenting he received.  Those factors are ignored for the obvious reason that Wal-Mart sends him his paycheck.

The rest of the article is a surreal discussion of whether Wal-Mart can afford to pay higher wages or not.

If Wal-Mart spent $3.50 an hour more for wages and benefits of its full-time employees, that would cost the company about $6.5 billion a year. At less than 3 percent of its sales in the United States, critics say, Wal-Mart could absorb these costs by slightly raising its prices or accepting somewhat lower profits.

No doubt they could.  The New York Times could also afford to raise its subscription prices and send the extra money to Wal-Mart workers.  Or they could lower Steven Greenhouse's salary by 5% and send the difference to Mr. Mrkwa. 

That sounds silly, but that's really what the activists want.  They want Wal-Mart to charge higher prices, implicitly taxing Steven Greenhouse and anyone else who shops at Wal-Mart in order to raise the well-being of Wal-Mart workers.  Exam question for economics undergrads: Explore the ramifications of such a policy.   Who wins and who loses?  What businesses will expand and which will contract?  In your answer, please reference Bastiat's insights into the seen and the unseen.

Actually, the Times should raise Steven Greenhouse's salary.  I bet he'd like a better life.  Let's start a foundation to improve salaries at the New York Times.  The paper makes money.  They could afford to make a little less.  And many of the Times reporters live in New York City which is very expensive.  They're underpaid.

The article closes with a fascinating conjecture.  Paying higher wages wouldn't punish Wal-Mart.  It would actually increase profits:

But Burt Flickinger, another retailing consultant, said it would be in Wal-Mart's long-run interest to pay better. "Wal-Mart's turnover will be close to half a million workers this year," he said. "By paying higher wages, Wal-Mart will make its employees happier and will reduce turnover. A lot of its new workers, for instance, don't know where to stock things. Higher wages will mean more productivity per person, and that should help raise profits."

So Burt Flickinger knows more about what's in Wal-Mart's self-interest than Wal-Mart's managers and CEO.  Impressive.  Memo to Burt: you're in the wrong field!  You're wasting your talents—shut down your consulting business and get into retailing! 

This would be funny, but it has the effect on the reader of making the activists even more sympathetic.  Their plan is a free lunch.  Higher pay for Wal-Mart's workers AND more profits.  It's what they call a win-win.

It would be nice if people understood the role of profits in a free society.  Something for all of us to work on.

Not Everything is Rotten in Denmark

I don't speak or read Danish, but if you do -- or if you know people who do -- here's a new blog that you'll want to check out: Punditokraterne.

Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard, of the University of Southern Denmark, alerted me to this new free-market Danish blog.

The Watershed Election

Tomorrow, with at least the voting part of the election behind us (with only the legal part possibly hanging over us), we'll hear talk about the role of blogging and the web and how it came of age. I think that's right but there's a part of it that I haven't heard discussed.

Memogate, Dan Rather's bizarre use and defense of fake documents is often mentioned as the turning point—the blogosphere was instrumental in uncovering the non-story behind the story. There's some truth to that, but its impact hasn't been fully appreciated. What I've noticed happening since Memogate is the use of bloggers as sources in the mainstream media. I've seen at least two syndicated columnists cite bloggers for their analysis or for facts they've uncovered. I don't remember that ever happening before. It's as if the Memogate story gave blogging credibility.

I think the real story of blogging is depth—the opportunity to go deeper into a story than you can in the 750 words you usually get from a newspaper op-ed. And the reason for that depth is cost—the web is cheap. Adding 1000 words doesn't cost much. Information wants to be free, as the saying goes, so I do get a lot of it. But the quality of that information is helped by the low cost of quality. It's a little ironic because one of the attractions of blogging is to make a simple quick comment on something in the news. But the opportunity to go deeper is one of the aspects of blogging that makes it so appealing.

Archaeological Economics

I'm thinking of starting a new field of economics, Archaeological Economics. In this field of economics, you take a news article about some public policy issue and use economics to reconstruct what really happened. There's digging involved and you don't find everything—you have to use your imagination. Here's an example—California has banned hand-weeding on farms. You have to use a machine or a hoe. When I tell people this they either laugh or think it's a humane regulation. But using a little economics, a little digging and a little imagination, you can at least see a skeleton starting to emerge that tells a richer story. Here's my attempt to get at what's really going on. Let me know if you like it. At the end of the piece you'll find a link to another example of archaeological economics. Thanks to Noah Yetter for the pointer to the California story.

How the Media Works

For some folks, Dan Rather's apology will always be the picture in the dictionary next to the definition of "schadenfreude." My pleasure in the events of Memogate has a different source. I'm hoping it will help take the romance out of the news business. And that's good.

I think a lot of folks think newspapers and news programs report on the news of the day. The editors and producers sit around and look at what has happened or they dig around to find stuff that no one has noticed (investigative reporting) and they decide what is important and what is not. Yes, bad news gets a lot of play because people like to read about it and ratings and sales matter. Yes, there may be bias. But in this essentially romantic view of the media, the media sorts through events and decides what's to print or put on the air.

It doesn't really work that way. It misses a central element of the drama. We think the media goes out and finds the news. Sometimes it does. But a lot of the times, it's the news trying to find the media. There are a lot of people out there who try and influence what gets in the paper. You could call them PR flaks or spin doctors, but it's best to think of them as lobbyists. They lobby the media for attention, for ink, for space for coverage. They email, they fax, they stop by. They buttonhole, phone and cajole in hopes of getting attention for their idea, their product, their candidate, their cause.

If you call someone in the media, you might think them rude. They're not. They're just coping with a thousand calls a day and a thousand emails and you're one of them. They have a very short attention span. It has to be that way. They are under constant bombardment from people trying to get their attention.

Newspapers and news programs are filters for this torrent of information. Yes, there is investigative reporting. But much or most of what the media reports comes to them. Virtually every scientific study, every health study, every economics study that you read about in the paper is the result of a press release that someone from the university, think tank or institute wrote and sent to a media outlet. The good reporters try and parse those press releases for bias and exaggeration. They are likely to be both biased and exaggerated becuase the writer of the press release knows that the press release is one of a hundred or a thousand arriving that day. You have to stand out.

A while back I wrote about the CBO study that examined the burden of recent tax cuts. Every newspaper covered that story. Every wire service. All on the same day. How did that happen? Did the economics reporters at those places just happen to notice that the CBO had released the study? No, the Democratic Joint Economic Committee sent out a press release. As I wrote when the study came out, the media didn't quite get the findings of the study right. I suspect this happens all the time. It has nothing to do with bias. It's the way the business works. Too much information and too little time to deal with it carefully.

Consider this delightful health scare from this past summer. The headline: "Pollutants Cause Huge Rise in Brain Diseases." The story opens:

The numbers of sufferers of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, have soared across the West in less than 20 years, scientists have discovered.

The alarming rise, which includes figures showing rates of dementia have trebled in men, has been linked to rises in levels of pesticides, industrial effluents, domestic waste, car exhausts and other pollutants, says a report in the journal Public Health.

Pretty scary, huh? After all, Public Health is a real science journal. I wrote the author and got a copy of the study. The study doesn't control for the fact that 20 years ago, people were less aware of Alzheimer's and lots of conditions and deaths 20 years ago may have been misattributed to other causes. So brain diseases may actually be unchanged. (The press coverage suggests that the study avoids problems of diagnosis by only looking at death rates, but alas, deaths 20 years ago are much less likely to be attributed to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's because people doctors were less aware of them. If you go to the actual study, the authors admit as much.)

But forget that. The really depressing point about the media coverage of this non-story (google: brain disease pollution) is that the study didn't examine the link between pollutants and brain disease. At the end of the paper, the author hypothesized that the measured rise in disease might be attributable to environmental pollutants. There was no scientific link, no statistical analysis showing how these might be correlated. It was just a guess. Here's one version of this "finding":

As to the cause of this disturbing rise, Pritchard said genetic causes could be ruled out because any changes to DNA would take hundreds of years to take effect. 'It must be the environment,' he said.

The causes were most likely to be chemicals, from car pollution to pesticides on crops and industrial chemicals used in almost every aspect of modern life, from processed food to packaging, from electrical goods to sofa covers, Pritchard said.

Or the cause is simply a change in measurement due to greater awareness. That does not get you in the newspaper. I suspect the press release that the University of Bournemouth put out didn't mention this possibility. (Sofa covers? They're actually in decline. Wouldn't that reduce brain disease? Never mind.)

Memogate and Dan Rather's troubles should remind us that what you read in the newspaper and see on the news is not simply the events of the day. Much of what we read and what we see comes from an intense effort to influence us. Some of it is surely true. Some of it is untrue but accurate. Some of it is untrue and inaccurate. The lesson? Read widely and have lots of grains of salt at the ready.

A kind of correction at the Times

The New York Times has corrected the article I