Month: October 2018

Fisking Slate’s Non-Review of Gosnell

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When Walker saw Slate’s non-review of Gosnell, his response was admirably succinct:

Oh, is Slate Slating again?

Me being me, I went on a smidge longer, and Monica asked me to turn my comments into a post. So, here they are.

Ruth Graham’s hit piece is so by-the-numbers that it serves as a great template for how to dodge an accusation that you really, really don’t want to address head-on. For that reason, even though fisking[ref]That’s the name for the type of post where you quote a piece at length and then rebut it.[/ref] is usually not my thing, I couldn’t resist in this case. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Be vaguely dismissive

That’s even more impressive considering what the movie is: a gory legal thriller about abortion.

Most readers aren’t going to get past the first paragraph (if they even get past the headline), so you’ve got to lead with something that will effectively change the subject. Characterizing the film as a “gory…thriller” is a masterstroke. It fictionalizes the very real horror of Gosnell’s crimes, putting the film in the genre with the Saw franchise instead of real-crime, where it belongs.

Step 2: Seize the moral high ground

It’s true that many media outlets ignored the Gosnell story for too long. And it’s also true that some of the obstacles Gosnell has faced are plausibly evidence of institutional discomfort with the film’s subject matter.

For the rare readers that make it this far, it’s time to switch to defense in depth. That requires occupying the high ground by giving the appearance of a reasonable concession. The appearance alone is enough to make you seem fair-minded and reasonable, but you don’t want to actually concede anything. This means you can either pick a few innocuous, specific aspects of the accusation or some benign generalities and then make a show of conceding them.

Then, having planted your flag on Mount Moral Superiority, you can then proceed with the rest of the piece as though nothing had happened. You can keep this up even if some of your subsequent points contradict–or at least directly relate to–the faux concession that you led with.

Step 3. FUD as far as the eye can see

In August, he said, executive producer John Sullivan inquired about purchasing a sponsorship spot on Fresh Air. An NPR representative told him he would have to edit the ad copy to call Gosnell simply a “doctor,” rather than an “abortionist” or an “abortion doctor.” But NPR’s own reporters had used the phrase abortion doctor in straight news stories, including stories about Gosnell. Gosnell’s producers ended up pulling the ad. (NPR told the Daily Beast, which reported the claim in September, that “Sponsor credits that run on NPR are required to be value neutral to comply with FCC requirements and to avoid suggesting bias in NPR’s journalism.”)

The more valid the accusation, the harder it is to rebut specifically. So don’t try. Just fall back on good, old-fashioned FUD: fear, uncertainty, and denial. FUD isn’t a rebuttal, which is a based on providing contradictory information, but rather a “disinformation strategy…to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information.” [ref]Wikipedia, emphasis added[/ref]

In other words, don’t contradict the accusation directly. Just throw up a bunch of stuff that kind-of, sort-of seems to contradict the accusation but really just trail off into suggestive innuendo.

Did NPR request changes to the copy that would have contradicted their own journalistic standards? That’s the important question, and we’re left with the impression that it was addressed… but it wasn’t.[ref]Not only did Graham not press NPR on the point, she didn’t even ask them. She copy-pasted Buzzfeed’s softball question and called that good enough. This is journalism today, I guess.[/ref]

When they struggled to find a distributor, they called it a “media coverup.”

Well… was it? This is what I mean about the fake concession. Graham stated right at the outset that “many media outlets ignored the Gosnell story for too long” and that there is “evidence of institutional discomfort”. Yet here were are, at the very heart of the issue, and those earlier statements have disappeared down the memory hole. Now we’re putting “media coverup” in scare-quotes as though it were some wild-eyed conspiracy theory.

When some theaters dropped the film in its second weekend—not an unusual occurrence—they suggested it was ideologically driven “suppression.”

Is it an unusual occurrence for films that have cracked the top 10 box office to get dropped? Did “some” theaters drop Gosnell, or was it more widespread? All the quantitative information–information that movie reviewer should have at hand–is conspicuously absent here and what we’re left with is one of the most dishonest sections in the entire article.

Step 4. Attack the accuser

This is what we’ve been building up to. In an honest article–one where you actually tackle the accusations head-on–this is just an afterthought. Maybe you get around to supplying an alternative theory and maybe you don’t. It doesn’t really matter, because you’ve already dealth with the accusaion itself. Going after the accuser is optional.

But in a dishonest article like this one, you haven’t really dealt with the accusation at all. And so attacking the accuser isn’t optional, it’s mandatory. In fact, it’s the whole point. Everything else–the moral high ground, the FUD–just lays the groundwork for the real payoff: an ad hominem response.

In 2015, he staged a drama in Los Angeles based on grand jury testimony from the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that suggested the shooting was justified. When some actors in the show requested changes, and others quit, McAleer claimed censorship and requested more donations on his crowdfunding page. When your audience thrives on stories of its own oppression, it’s easy to turn stumbling blocks into stairs.

See? The Gosnell film and all the controversy around it are just a plot to milk an unwarranted martyr-complex for fun and profit. Also: racism. This is an article about conservatives in Slate, after all. We had to get that in there somehow. It’s in their journalistic policies handbook.

Let me wrap up by getting more specific about the “accusation” that pro-choice folks, like Ruth Graham[ref]No, I didn’t look it up. I don’t have to. When you assume a journalist is pro-choice, the odds are always in you favor.[/ref], want to make go away.

You see, the entire Kermit Gosnell situation is basically a worst-case scenario for pro-choice Americans, because it exposes and then explodes basically all of the myths that the American abortion industry is built on top of.

For starters, there’s the humanity of unborn human beings. The pro-choice lobby likes to focus on the early stages of conception because the issues seems ambiguous and they can get away with “clump of cells”-style rhetoric. Gosnell’s penchant for performing “abortions” by delivering live, late-term fetuses and then severing their spinal cords with scissors makes it just how obvious how arbitrary and capricious the whole born/not-born distinction is while simultaneously underscoring the basic humanity of all human beings, even the unborn.

Then there’s the uncomfortable fact of late-term, elective abortions happening in the United States. Folks like Ruth Graham–liberal journalists who have never had to leave the comfort of their warm, cozy liberal womb echo-chamber–like to look to Europe as a breacon of sane, common-sensen social liberalism. And yet, America’s abortion laws are dramatically out of step with Europe’s. As an example, consider abortion in France:

Abortion in France is legal on demand up to 12 weeks after conception… Abortions at later stages of pregnancy are allowed if two physicians certify that the abortion will be done to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; a risk to the life of the pregnant woman; or that the child will suffer from a particularly severe illness recognized as incurable.[ref]Wikipedia[/ref]

A law like this, one that is typical for “liberal” Europe could never be enacted in the United States. Not without overturning Roe v. Wade. The fact that Gosnell could routinely perform late-term, elective “abortions” without running afoul of American laws underscores how extreme the American abortion regime really is. Only a handful of countries in the world have laws that allow abortion as broadly as ours do. Protecting Roe v. Wade isn’t about protecting common-sense, basic feminism. It’s about protecting a radical policy that is wholly out-of-step with the rest of the developed world.

Then there’s the fact that Gosnell operated a filthy shop of horrors while pocketing millions of dollars from his (often poor, desperate) “patients” underscores another major pro-life argument: legal, elective abortions aren’t a way of empowering women; they are a means of victimizing and subjugating them. Pro-choice activists will tell you that legal abortions are safe abortions, but the fact is that Gosnell operated entirely without any competent medical oversight whatosever because any scrutiny could be seen as violating the pro-choice ethos of protecting abortion at all costs, including costs to women’s lives.

For all the talk about abortion empowering women, it is in fact a part of a systematic transfer of all the burden and costs of casual sex onto the shoulders of women without even the compensation of having those frightful costs acknowledged. In the US, we expect women to be sexually available for men no matter what it costs them, and the same people who prop up this misogynistic exploitation want to lecture us about “rape culture.” Rape culture didn’t aid and abett Kermit Gosnell, pro-choice culture did.

And look, if that seems a little too extreme for you[ref]For the record, I wasn’t being provocative for the sake of provocation. That is what I actually believe pro-choice culture does to our society.[/ref], the final fact that Gosnell killed some of his patients (the adult ones) makes it really hard to perpetuate the myth that legal abortions are safe abortions.

These are the accusations that the Kermit Gosnell episode raise. And these are the reasons that pro-choice Americans desperately, fervently want the entire thing to go away. They emphatically don’t want to talk about a major, successful, independent film that draws heavily from transcripts of the court case to bring these issues front and center. So, this is what you do instead. You write a dissembling, dishonest non-review following this playbook and somewhere along the way you manage to change the topic from, “These guys accuse us of bias for sweeping this under the rug” to “These guys are racist profiteers.” Does that answer any of the questions raised by Gosnell or the secondary questions raised by the refusal of the media to cover Gosnell? No, it does not.

It was never supposed to.

Keys to Ending Global Poverty: Growth and Migration

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Harvard’s Lant Pritchett has an incredible new paper out that looks at the best course for eliminating global poverty:

So think of two ways to help the global poor. One is for rich people (in a global sense) to give a dollar and get roughly a dollar’s worth of benefits for the poor. The other people is for rich people to allow people who would like to work at the prevailing wage of their country to do so and not deploy active coercion to prevent this—which reflects the person’s contribution to product and hence is (or can be made to be) zero net cost to the host country. Of course, a dollar for a poor person could produce vastly more human well-being than had the richer person spent the money as the marginal utility was much, much higher for the poor person, but this redistribution effect is the same for both options. This means, at least in current conditions, the least you can do—just increasing the freedom of people who want to work and people who want those people to work to carry out that mutually beneficially transaction across national borders—is better than the best you can do of trying to directly help people in poverty but without allowing them to move to opportunity (pg. 1-2).

Pritchett looks at the Ultra Poor Graduation program, whose stated claim is “to graduate ultra poor households out of extreme poverty to a more stable state. This 24-month program provides beneficiaries with a holistic set of services including: livelihood trainings, productive asset transfers, consumption support, savings plans, and healthcare” (pg. 9). Pritchett finds that this program led to an average income gain of $344 dollars by the third year for targeted households. “The five country average NPV of costs per household of the 24 month program was $4,545” (pg. 9).

While Pritchett recognizes that redistribution can indeed benefit the poor, its impact is quite small. He concludes,

A large part of the explanation of differences in labor productivity across countries is differences in “A”—total factor productivity. Transmitting A from country to country has proven difficult. This implies that labor with the exact same intrinsic productivity will have much higher productivity (and hence justify a higher wage) in a high A than in a low A country. But, by and large, rich countries have passed extraordinarily strict regulations on the movement of unskilled labor. A relaxation of these restrictions could produce the largest single gains in global poverty of any available policy, program or project action. And since these gains to movers are (mostly) due to higher A which (at the margin) is a “public good” (it is non-rival and non-excludable) in the host country these gains are essentially free to the host country (or could be free to the host country under some technical design conditions).

Comparing the annual gains of the Ultra Poor Graduation program ($344 per household for a cost of $4,545) to those of a low-skill worker simply moving to and working in the United States ($17,115), Pritchett finds that the Ultra Poor Graduation program would have to invest $226,000 per person in order to match the gains of migration. Furthermore,

sustained rapid economic growth in developing countries—that is sustained by improvements in A—can also produce cumulatively enormous gains. And avoiding growth collapses/stagnation can prevent enormous losses. So, even though traditional measures of the country to country transfers of resources via “foreign aid” do not, in and of themselves, appear to be responsible for producing most of the observed differences in economic growth, investments that could bring that about more sustained growth (both more sustained accelerations and fewer sharp and extended decelerations) could also have astronomical returns. 

As Bryan Caplan sums it up, “Virtually all poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration – not redistribution or philanthropy.”

What Does Economic Mobility in the U.S. Actually Look Like?

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Economist Russ Roberts gives us some insights:

Studies that use panel data — data that is generated from following the same people over time — consistently find that the largest gains over time accrue to the poorest workers and that the richest workers get very little of the gains. This is true in survey data. It is true in data gathered from tax returns.[ref]More panel data can be found in a 2007 Treasury Department report, a 1995 Dallas Fed report, and a 1992 Treasury Department report.[/ref] 

Here are some of the studies that find a very different picture of the impact of the American economy on the economic well-being of the poor, middle, and the rich.

This first study, from the Pew Charitable Trusts, conducted by Leonard Lopoo and Thomas DeLeire uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and compares the family incomes of children to the income of their parents. Parents income is taken from a series of years in the 1960s. Children’s income is taken from a series of years in the early 2000s. As shown in Figure 1, 84% earned more than their parents, corrected for inflation. But 93% of the children in the poorest households, the bottom 20% surpassed their parents. Only 70% of those raised in the top quintile exceeded their parent’s income.

Chetty et al find a similar pattern. In an otherwise gloomy assessment of American progress, they find that 70% of children born in 1980 into the bottom decile exceed their parents’ income in 2014. For those born in the top 10%, only 33% exceed their parents’ income.

The poor may find it easier to do better than their parents. But how much better off do they end up? Julia Isaacs’s study for the Pew Charitable Trusts finds that children raised in the poorest families made the largest gains as adults relative to children born into richer families.

In short, “the children from the poorest families added more to their income than children from the richest families. That reality isn’t consistent with the standard pessimistic story that only the richest Americans have benefited from economic growth over the last 30–40 years.” Another “study looks at people who were 35–40 in 1987 and then looks at how they were doing 20 years later, when they are 55–60. The median income of the people in the top 20% in 1987 ended up 5% lower twenty years later. The people in the middle 20% ended up with median income that was 27% higher. And if you started in the bottom 20%, your income doubled. If you were in the top 1% in 1987, 20 years later, median income was 29% lower.” A recent study found that when you follow quintiles, “[o]nly the people at the top gain much of anything between 1980 and 2014.” However, when you follow people, the same study finds that “the biggest gains go to the poorest people. The richest people in 1980 actually ended up poorer, on average, in 2014. Like the top 20%, the top 1% in 1980 were also poorer on average 34 years later in 2014. The gloomiest picture of the American economy is not accurate. The rich don’t get all the gains. The poor and middle class are not stagnating.”

Roberts concludes,

There’s a lot more to study and understand. But what the studies above show is that the economic growth of the last 30–40 years has been shared much more widely than is generally found in the cross-section studies that compare snapshots at two different times, following quintiles rather than people. No one of these studies is decisive. They each make different assumptions about income…which people to include, how to handle inflation. Together they suggest the glass isn’t as empty as we’ve been led to believe. It’s at least half-full.

Does Gender Equality Enlarge Gender Differences?

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Previous research has found that the greater the gender equality, the greater the differences between genders. A brand new article in Science heaps on more evidence. Testing 80,000 individuals in 76 countries on preferences such as risk-taking, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust, the authors found,

Gender differences were found to be strongly positively associated with economic development as well as gender equality. These relationships held for each preference separately as well as for a summary index of differences in all preferences jointly. Quantitatively, this summary index exhibited correlations of 0.67 (P < 0.0001) with log GDP per capita and 0.56 (P < 0.0001) with a Gender Equality Index (a joint measure of four indices of gender equality), respectively. To isolate the separate impacts of economic development and gender equality, we conducted a conditional analysis, finding a quantitatively large and statistically significant association between gender differences and log GDP per capita conditional on the Gender Equality Index, and vice versa. These findings remained robust in several validation tests, such as accounting for potential culture-specific survey response behavior, aggregation bias, and nonlinear relationships.

How do men and women differ?

On the global level, all six preferences featured significant gender differences (fig. S1): Women tended to be more prosocial and less negatively reciprocal than men, with differences in standard deviations of 0.106 for altruism (P < 0.0001), 0.064 for trust (P < 0.0001), 0.055 for positive reciprocity (P < 0.0001), and 0.129 for negative reciprocity (P < 0.0001). Turning to nonsocial preferences, women were less risk-taking by 0.168 standard deviations (P < 0.0001) and less patient by 0.050 standard deviations (P < 0.0001) (26).

The researchers conclude,

The reported evidence indicates that higher levels of economic development and gender equality are associated with stronger gender differentiation in preferences. These findings may also relate to other personality traits, such as the Big Five (34, 35) or value priorities (36). Our findings do not rule out an influence of gender-specific roles that drive gender differences in preferences. They also do not preclude a role for biological or evolutionary determinants of gender differences (37). Our results highlight, however, that theories not attributing a significant role to the social environment are incomplete (38).

In this regard, our findings point toward the critical role of availability of and equal access to material and social resources for both women and men in facilitating the independent formation and expression of gender-specific preferences across countries. As suggested by the resource hypothesis, greater availability of material resources removes the human need of subsistence, and hence provides the scope for attending to gender-specific preferences. A more egalitarian distribution of material and social resources enables women and men to independently express gender-specific preferences.

How much of gender is a social construct?

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Check out this National Geographic article “How science is helping us understand gender.” Author Robin Henig outlines different intersex conditions that can be more complicated than the typical XX vs XY binary. But here’s the quote that really caught my eye:

Gender is an amalgamation of several elements: chromosomes (those X’s and Y’s), anatomy (internal sex organs and external genitals), hormones (relative levels of testosterone and estrogen), psychology (self-defined gender identity), and culture (socially defined gender behaviors).

This is a good summary of the factors that could contribute to a person’s understanding of gender, but it also helps demonstrate why conversations about gender get confusing fast. Two thoughts:

1. Intersex =/= Transgender

To my understanding (which I admit is limited), intersex issues are not the same as transgender issues, and in fact people with intersex conditions don’t necessarily appreciate being used as the wedge to push society to accept transgender issues.

Intersexuality is not the same as a transsexuality (gender dysphoria) and is not a transgender state. Neither of the latter terms is one that we recognise as belonging in any general discussion of intersex. We are not happy with the recent tendency of some trans groups/people to promote transgender as an umbrella term to encompass, for example, transsexuality, transvestitism and intersex. We object to other organisations/individuals putting us in categories without consulting us, especially categories that imply that interexed people, of necessity, have gender identity issues.

2. Gender cannot be just a social construct.

If gender were only a social construct, it would be hard to explain why a trans man could not more easily exist simply as a masculine cis woman, i.e. a tomboy or someone similar. If gender is unrelated to sexuality and genitalia, transitioning seems like an unnecessarily difficult undertaking (financially, emotionally, physically, and socially).

That’s not suggest that gender is wholly unrelated to culture. It seems intuitive to me that at least some aspect of gender, especially society’s understanding of gender, is based more on cultural norms than biology. The extreme and perhaps tired example is that girls like pink and boys like blue. Presumably if we birthed children in a society where the opposite was the norm, they’d just go with it. But here and now dressing a baby in pink is a way to signal to others “this baby is a girl,” and while of course you can dress your baby girl in blue, you will probably confuse strangers who think you’re signaling “this baby is a boy” instead of just “I like blue.” Maybe you don’t care about that (I don’t) but that’s the cultural norm and I expect it influences the relative proportion of boys and men willing to wear pink. I digress.

What does it mean, for example, for a person to have all the biological traits (chromosomes, sex organs, genitalia, and hormone levels) of a male but “feel” female? What is the difference between a biological male who identifies as female and a biological male who identifies as a male who is partial to activities and preferences culturally viewed as female? This distinction especially gets confusing when we add in the idea that your sexuality and sexual preferences are not related to your gender. So what drives the difference between a cis straight male who is comfortable with the color pink, being a stay-at-home parent, and [insert female stereotypes here] versus a homosexual trans woman who also likes all of those things?

I ask these questions sincerely. I recognize that people feel very differently about these topics and I don’t begrudge anyone that. And, in terms of policy, I don’t think it’s a good idea for the government to get very strict about what constitutes male and female, not only because intersex conditions complicate matters but also because it’s not hard to imagine situations that would put trans people in danger if they are narrowed to the options of traditional cis sexuality.[ref]At minimum I can imagine pretty horrific effects of requiring a transitioned trans woman to enter an all male prison population. I’m sure there are other examples similar to this.[/ref] As the New York Times explains:

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters.

I suspect that as we learn more about human physiology and particularly neurology, we’ll gain more insight into the phenomenon of transgenderism. But if that turns out to be the case, to my mind it would be further evidence that gender is biological, as long as we recognize that biology includes more than our genitalia. National Geographic hints at this possibility (same article linked above) when Henig explains:

At least a few brain characteristics, such as density of the gray matter or size of the hypothalamus, do tend to differ between genders. It turns out transgender people’s brains may more closely resemble brains of their self-identified gender than those of the gender assigned at birth. In one study, for example, Swaab and his colleagues found that in one region of the brain, transgender women, like other women, have fewer cells associated with the regulator hormone somatostatin than men. In another study scientists from Spain conducted brain scans on transgender men and found that their white matter was neither typically male nor typically female, but somewhere in between.

Maybe all of this musing is getting to a broader question: can psychology exist independent from biology? If someone is psychologically male can we assume, by definition, that some part of that person’s brain structures, neural connectivity, whatever, will look more similar to cis male brains? I’m interested to see what we learn as time goes on.

DR Editor in Economic Affairs

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Image result for globalization

My article “Is Commerce Good for the Soul?: An Empirical Assessment” was published in the latest issue of Economic Affairs. The abstract reads,

Numerous empirical studies suggest that market exchange helps (a) create the conditions for liberal values to flourish, (b) refine our sense of fairness, (c) promote cooperation with those who are different from ourselves, (d) develop networks of mutual trust and trustworthiness, (e) generate tolerance and respect towards others, and (f) undermine hostility and conflict in favour of peace. This article reviews this empirical evidence and argues that markets make us better people, morally speaking.

You can read the full thing here. Check it out.

What Is the Impact of Minimum Wage Hikes on the Least-Skilled?

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In case you needed more evidence that minimum wage hikes tend to hurt those with the least skills and education, here are the conclusions from a paper from earlier this year:

This paper uses the ACS to generate early estimates of the employment effects of state minimum wage increases implemented between January 2013 and January 2015. Through 2015, our best estimate is that minimum wage increases exceeding $1 resulted, on average, in an employment decline just over 1 percentage point among teenagers, among individuals ages 16–21, and among individuals ages 16–25 with less than a completed high school education. Smaller minimum wage increases and inflation indexed minimum wage increases had much smaller (and possibly positive) effects on these groups’ employment…Due to the short time horizons we analyze, our estimates provide short-run evidence on the effects of the minimum wage increases enacted after the Great Recession. Data on the longer-run effects of this period’s minimum wage changes will be essential for arriving at strong conclusions regarding their effects (pgs. 720-721).

This should surprise no one. As economist Antony Davies explains, “Historically, as the relative minimum wage has risen, unemployment among college-educated workers has not changed, unemployment among high-school-educated workers has risen slightly, unemployment among workers without high school diplomas has increased moderately, and unemployment among young workers without high school diplomas has increased dramatically.”[ref]See Davies’ own research on the topic here.[/ref] 

“I Am Not the Problem”: Economic Freedom and Human Flourishing

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In this passionate TED talk, entrepreneur Magatte Wade explains why the continent of Africa is so poor: bad laws, high tariffs, and excessive red-tape on businesses. “Why is it,” she asks exasperated, “that when I look at the Doing Business index ranking of the World Bank, that ranks every country in the world in terms of how easy or hard it is to start a company, you tell me why African countries, all 50 of them, are basically at the bottom of that list? That’s why we’re poor. We’re poor because it is literally impossible to do businesses in these countries of ours.”[ref]In fact, business-friendly economic policies may actually matter more for per capita income than legal and political institutions.[/ref] She continues, getting even more worked up:

I have a manufacturing facility in Senegal. Did you know that for all my raw material that I can’t find in the country, I have to pay a 45 percent tariff on everything that comes in? Forty-five percent tariff. Do you know that, even to look for fine cardboard to ship my finished products to the US, I can’t find new, finished cardboard? Impossible. Because the distributors are not going to come here to start their business, because it makes no sense, either. So right now, I have to mobilize 3000 dollars’ worth of cardboard in my warehouse, so that I can have cardboard, and they won’t arrive for another five weeks. The fact that we are stifled with the most nonsensical laws out there. That’s why we can’t run businesses. It’s like swimming through molasses.

Doing Business 2018
Economic Freedom of the World 2018

But it was this story that broke me: 

I explained the [things above] to my employees in Senegal. And one of them started crying — her name is Yahara. She started crying. I said, “Why are you crying?”She said, “I’m crying because I had come to believe –always seeing us represented as poor people –I had come to believe that maybe, yes, maybe we are inferior. Because, otherwise, how do you explain that we’re always in the begging situation?” That’s what broke my heart. But at the same time that she said that, because of how I explained just what I explained to you, she said, “But now, I know that I am not the problem. It is my environment in which I live, that’s my problem.”I said, “Yes.” And that’s what gave me hope –that once people get it, they now change their outlook on life.

No, you’re not the problem. 

Most Americans don’t like political correctness.

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According to Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic the following people dislike political correctness:

  • 97% of devoted conservatives
  • 88% of American Indians
  • 87% of those who have never attended college
  • 87% of Hispanics
  • 83% of those who make less than $50,000 per year
  • 82% of Asian people
  • 79% of people under age 24
  • 79% of white people
  • 75% of African Americans
  • 74% of people age 24-29
  • 70% of those who make more than $100,000 per year
  • 66% of those with a postgraduate degree
  • 61% of traditional liberals
  • 30% of progressive activists

In fact “progressive activists” were the only group that overall liked political correctness, a group which Mounk describes as “much more likely to be rich, highly educated–and white.” This description supports previous findings by Pew Research.

Mounk asked his Twitter followers to guess what percent of the country has a problem with political correctness, and they greatly underestimated the true numbers. Mounk theorizes this is because, as he puts it,

They are probably a decent approximation for a particular intellectual milieu to which I also belong: politically engaged, highly educated, left-leaning Americans—the kinds of people, in other words, who are in charge of universities, edit the nation’s most important newspapers and magazines, and advise Democratic political candidates on their campaigns.

In other words, the progressive view (the minority view) benefits from having a particularly large mouthpiece.

The study Mounk is reviewing found that most Americans, described as the “exhausted majority,” see political correctness as “the preening display of cultural superiority” and “an excuse to mock the values and ignorance of others.” Mounk concludes:

A publication whose editors think they represent the views of a majority of Americans when they actually speak to a small minority of the country may eventually see its influence wane and its readership decline. And a political candidate who believes she is speaking for half of the population when she is actually voicing the opinions of one-fifth is likely to lose the next election.

In a democracy, it is difficult to win fellow citizens over to your own side, or to build public support to remedy injustices that remain all too real, when you fundamentally misunderstand how they see the world.

Graphic from the report “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” which Mounk summarizes in his article.

Half of Us Are Now Middle Class

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From the Brookings Institution:

For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty. By our calculations, as of this month, just over 50 percent of the world’s population, or some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered “middle class” or “rich.” About the same number of people are living in households that are poor or vulnerable to poverty. So September 2018 marks a global tipping point. After this, for the first time ever, the poor and vulnerable will no longer be a majority in the world. Barring some unfortunate global economic setback, this marks the start of a new era of a middle-class majority.

The authors classify the middle class as “households spending $11-110 per day per person in 2011 purchasing power parity, or PPP.” They “have some discretionary income that can be used to buy consumer durables like motorcycles, refrigerators, or washing machines. They can afford to go to movies or indulge in other forms of entertainment. They may take vacations. And they are reasonably confident that they and their family can weather an economic shock—like illness or a spell of unemployment—without falling back into extreme poverty…In the world today, about one person escapes extreme poverty every second; but five people a second are entering the middle class. The rich are growing too, but at a far smaller rate (1 person every 2 seconds).” 

Number of people who are Poor, Vulnerable, Middle Class, and Rich Worldwide

Sing it, Paul.