Minimum Wage Dishonesty - Walter E. Williams - Page full

Minimum Wage Dishonesty - Walter E. Williams - Page full

Michael Hiltzik, a columnist and Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote an article titled "Does a minimum wage raise hurt workers? Economists say: We don't know." Uncertain was his conclusion from a poll conducted by the Initiative on Global Markets, at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, of 42 nationally ranked economists on the question of whether raising the federal minimum wage to $15 over the next five years would reduce employment opportunities for low-wage workers.
The Senate Budget Committee's blog says, "Top Economists Are Backing Sen. Bernie Sanders on Establishing a $15 an Hour Minimum Wage." It lists the names of 210 economists who call for increasing the federal minimum wage. The petition starts off, "We, the undersigned professional economists, favor an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour as of 2020." The petition ends with this: "In short, raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour by 2020 will be an effective means of improving living standards for low-wage workers and their families and will help stabilize the economy. The costs to other groups in society will be modest and readily absorbed."
The people who are harmed by an increase in the minimum wage are low-skilled workers. Try this question to economists who argue against the unemployment effect of raising the minimum wage: Is it likely that an employer would find it in his interests to pay a worker $15 an hour when that worker has skills that enable him to produce only $5 worth of value an hour to the employer's output? Unlike my fellow economists who might argue to the contrary, I would say that most employers would view hiring such a worker as a losing economic proposition, but they might hire him at $5 an hour. Thus, one effect of the minimum wage law is that of discrimination against the employment of low-skilled workers.
In our society, the least skilled people are youths, who lack the skills, maturity and experience of adults. Black youths not only share these handicaps but have attended grossly inferior schools and live in unstable household environments. That means higher minimum wages will have the greatest unemployment effect on youths, particularly black youths.
A minimum wage not only discriminates against low-skilled workers but also is one of the most effective tools in the arsenal of racists. Our nation's first minimum wage came in the form of the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which sets minimum wages on federally financed or assisted construction projects. During the legislative debates, racist intents were obvious. Rep. John Cochran, D-Mo., said he had "received numerous complaints in recent months about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South." Rep. Miles Allgood, D-Ala., complained: "That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country." Rep. William Upshaw, D-Ga., complained of the "superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor."
During South Africa's apartheid era, the secretary of its avowedly racist Building Workers' Union, Gert Beetge, said, "There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances, I support the rate for the job (minimum wage) as the second-best way of protecting our white artisans." The South African Economic and Wage Commission of 1925 reported that "while definite exclusion of the Natives from the more remunerative fields of employment by law has not been urged upon us, the same result would follow a certain use of the powers of the Wage Board under the Wage Act of 1925, or of other wage-fixing legislation. The method would be to fix a minimum rate for an occupation or craft so high that no Native would be likely to be employed."
It is incompetence or dishonesty for my fellow economists to deny these two effects of minimum wages: discrimination against employment of low-skilled labor and the lowering of the cost of racial discrimination.

Meet the Cry-Bully: a hideous hybrid of victim and victor - Spectator Blogs

Meet the Cry-Bully: a hideous hybrid of victim and victor - Spectator Blogs

In the 1970s, there was a big difference between bullies and cry-babies. Your mum would have preferred you to hang around with the latter, but sometimes the former had a twisted charisma so strong that you found yourself joining in the taunts of ‘Onion Head! ’ at some poor unfortunate creature sporting a cranium of a somewhat allium caste. After a bit, of course, if you had anything about you, you realized what a knob you were being and went off to sample the more solitary, civilized pleasures of shoplifting and reading Oscar Wilde with the bedroom curtains closed. But you could be certain, as you festered in your pilfered Chelsea Girl vest, that bullies were bullies and cry-babies were cry-babies and never the twain would meet.

Fast forward some four decades and things are not so simple. This is the age of the Cry-Bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper. They are everywhere, these duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political, from Celebrity Big Brother to the frontline of Islamism. Jeremy Clarkson is a prime cry bully, punching a producer and then whining in The Sunday Times about ‘losing my baby’ (The baby being Top Gear). Perez Hilton, recently of the CBB house, is a good example too, screaming abuse at his wretched room-mates until they snapped and hit back, at which point he would dissolve in floods of tears and flee to the Diary Room to claim that he felt ‘unsafe’. Stephen Fry is one, forever banging on about his own mental fragility yet mocking Stephen Hawking’s voice at a recent awards ceremony.

Esther Rantzen — an anti-bullying campaigner — strikes me as another. An otherwise anodyne interviewer recently felt moved to ask her if she was a bully, due to her reputation as an over-bossy boss during her That ’s Life heyday and the rather vile reports of her yelling out ‘My husband’s ex-wife ’ during a trivia quiz at a TV bash – the question being ‘What burnt in Richmond?’, the locality in which the woman whose husband she took had recently been cremated. Rantzen has re-created herself as a pathetic widow, complaining about having no one to go on holiday with, so desperately lonely for human companionship that she once rang her daughter to say that the Almighty would want them to live together. (Not as much as He’d want people not to gloat over the deaths of people whose lives they had ruined, surely.)

Even social media – the source of so much fun and friendship for most of us – becomes a double-edged sword in the hands of the Cry-Bully. They will threaten women with rape on Twitter then boo-hoo about the invasion of their privacy when called to account. It’ s a sort of Munchausen’s syndrome – causing one’s own misery then complaining about it – seen most sadly in the case of Hannah Smith, the 14-year-old girl who took her own life in 2013 after allegedly being cyber-bullied on the teen website Ask.fm. It turned out that some 98 per cent of the abusive messages came from poor Hannah herself, with only four posts being contributed by actual trolls.

Cry-Bullies do end up isolated, as their determination to be victim and victor eventually wears out the patience of the most forebearing friend. But they can also be found hanging around in gangs; then, Cry-Bullies really come into their own and are not just irritating but dangerous. Islamism is the ultimate Cry-Bully cause; on one hand stamping around murdering anyone who doesn’ t agree with you, on the other hand yelling ‘ISLAMOPHOBIA’ in lieu of having a real adult debate about the merits of your case. Their ‘helpline’ is even called Tell Mama – bless. The British-born Islamist recently sentenced to twelve years had no problem posing with severed heads (‘Heads, kaffirs, disgusting’) and asking friends back home to send him condoms which he planned to use raping women captured as ‘war booty’ but then claimed to be having nightmares and suffering from depression in order to escape jail.

The transexual and pimp-lobbies bring classic Cry-Bully tactics into play whenever they come across someone who doesn’t – shock, horror! – think the same as them, as unashamed feminists from the activist Julie Bindel to the comedian Kate Smurthwaite have discovered. In these cases, the claim that ‘safe spaces’ might be violated by the presence of someone who thinks differently to them; but born women, mysteriously, are expected to surrender the ultimate Safe Space – the female toilets – to pre-op chicks with dicks if they are not to be accused of violent bigotry.

I don’t like much about monarchy, but the old saw they are said to live by – ‘Never complain, never explain’ (if only Prince Charles could do this!) – is a good one. The Cry-Bully always explains to the point of demanding that one agrees with them and always complains to the point of insisting that one is persecuting them. They really are the very worst sort of modern moaner.

A Fascinating Survey on Climate Change of Scientists (and Engineers) in Alberta, Canada | The Lukewarmer's Way

A Fascinating Survey on Climate Change of Scientists (and Engineers) in Alberta, Canada | The Lukewarmer's Way

From the abstract: “This paper examines the framings and identity work associated with professionals’ discursive construction of climate change science, their legitimation of themselves as experts on ‘the truth’, and their attitudes towards regulatory measures. Drawing from survey responses of 1077 professional engineers and geoscientists, we reconstruct their framings of the issue and knowledge claims to position themselves within their organizational and their professional institutions.”

From the paper: “A survey of scientists in Alberta Canada produced 5 broad groupings of opinion.

The largest group of APEGA respondents (36%) draws on a frame that the researchers label ‘comply with Kyoto’. In their diagnostic framing, they express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause. They are the only group to see the scientific debate as mostly settled and the IPCC modeling to be accurate, e.g., ‘I believe that the consensus that climate change is occurring is settled.

The second largest group (24%) express a ‘nature is overwhelming’ frame. In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth. Their focus is on the past: ‘If you think about it, global warming is what brought us out of the Ice Age.’ Humans are too insignificant to have an impact on nature.’

Ten percent of respondents draw on an ‘economic responsibility’ frame. They diagnose climate change as being natural or human caused. More than any other group, they underscore that the ‘real’ cause of climate change is unknown as nature is forever changing and uncontrollable. Similar to the ‘nature is overwhelming’ adherents, they disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal life. They are also less likely to believe that the scientific debate is settled and that the IPCC modeling is accurate.

‘Fatalists’, a surprisingly large group (17%), diagnose climate change as both human- and naturally caused. ‘Fatalists’ consider climate change to be a smaller public risk with little impact on their personal life. They are sceptical that the scientific debate is settled regarding the IPCC modeling: ‘The number of variables and their interrelationships are almost unlimited – if anyone thinks they have all the answers, they have failed to ask all of the questions.’

The last group (5%) expresses a frame the researchers call ‘regulation activists’. This frame has the smallest number of adherents, expresses the most paradoxical framing, and yet is more agentic than ‘comply with Kyoto’. Advocates of this frame diagnose climate change as being both human- and naturally caused, posing a moderate public risk, with only slight impact on their personal life. They are also sceptical with regard to the scientific debate being settled and are the most indecisive whether IPCC modeling is accurate: ‘the largest challenge is to find out what the real truth is… I don’t know what the impact really is. I suspect it is not good.’

They believe that the Kyoto Protocol is doomed to failure (‘can’t do it, even though we should’), yet they motivate others most of all to create regulation: ‘Canada should implement aggressive policies to reduce GHG emissions in the spirit of the Kyoto Accord.’ They also recommend that we define and enact sustainability/stewardship, reduce GHGs, and create incentives.”

Common SJW Phrases Translated into English

Common SJW Phrases Translated into English

1. “Let’s have a Conversation.” The direct translation for this is “your opinion hurts my feelings and you need to change it.” But this fails to capture the essence of the phrase. When an SJW says this, what they really mean is that you have departed from the traditional narrative, and you are being warned that your non-conforming opinion needs to be changed immediately. Failure to do so will result in denunciation and accusations of racism, sexism, etc… Having a conversation means agreeing with the SJW on all particulars.

2. “Educate yourself!” Directly translated, this is “I can’t understand why you don’t agree with the accepted narrative.” But again, there are nuances here. This can be considered a final warning before denunciation and attempts to attack your character. The SJW is warning you that there will be consequences if you don’t agree with the politically correct narrative. Perhaps they will try to get you fired, or dox you, or some other form of unpleasantness. The subtle translation is “obey the dictates of Social Justice or else!”

3. You are a Racist!” You’re white. And probably male, cis-gendered, and straight. Remember, all white men are racists, and any accusation of racism is prima facie evidence of guilt. Progressive white men can be exempted by proclamation by the SocJus community. But this exemption can be revoked at any time, in which case you revert to being a racist.

4. “You’re a Misogynist!” You’re white. And probably male, cis-gendered, and straight. Remember, all white men are sexists, and any accusation of sexism is prima facie evidence of guilt. Progressive white men can be exempted by proclamation by the SocJus community. But this exemption can be revoked at any time, in which case you revert to being a sexist.

5. “You’re an Islamophobe!” You have common sense, which is, of course, a violation of accepted SocJus norms. The only sense you are allowed to have is fed to you by the media. When the media tells you Islam is good and Christianity is evil, you must accept this with no further discussion or demands for evidence.

6. “I can’t be a racist because racism equals privilege plus discrimination.” This means the SJW is a racist and hates white people. Bahar Mustafa, a woman of Turkish ethnicity famously proclaimed that her Turkish heritage meant that she could never be a racist. My Armenian ancestors would disagree, of course. But college feminists are far more oppressed than people thrown into rail cars, shot, beaten to death, and/or crucified.

7. “That’s Triggering!” Directly translated, this statement means roughly: “waaaaaaaah waaah waaaaaaaaaah!” A more nuanced translation would be “this made me cry, and I will throw a temper tantrum unless you make it go away.”

8. “We need a Safe Space!” The SJW wishes to re-institute segregation along racial and ethnic lines. Members of the KKK are currently kicking themselves for not thinking of this idea first. “Damnit,” says the Grand Wizard Dragon of Podunk, “if only we called Jim Crow ‘Safe Spaces for People of Color’ we could have pulled it off…”

....

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Finding the Real Conservative | FreedomWorks

Finding the Real Conservative | FreedomWorks

As yet another primary election season heats up, how do we cut through the rhetoric and evaluate candidates? One sure way is to have a measuring stick based on more than personal opinion.

One such standard is the word “conservative.” I hear candidates and elected officials use it all the time. What does it really mean? In my opinion, the late Russell Kirk spelled it out better than just about anyone. This all-but-forgotten man laid out ten principles of conservative thought many seem to have forgotten. See how many you recognize.

First, conservatives believe in an enduring moral order. This concept is much broader than religious dogma. Kirk said that human nature was a constant, and moral truths were permanent. That’s not surprising considering that 94% of Americans believe in God, according to pollster George Barna. Surprisingly, Kirk said that a society in which men and women are governed by an enduring belief in moral order—by a strong sense of right and wrong—and by personal convictions about justice and honor—that would be a good society, regardless of the political machinery. Politics do not determine the trajectory of a nation—the people do. Nancy Pearcy put it well when she said that politics is downstream from culture.

Second, tradition in a culture is important and should not be tossed out on a whim. Kirk actually calls this “continuity.” What he meant is that order and justice and freedom are the result of centuries of trials and reflections and sacrifice. Change should be gradual and calculated—never undoing traditions as a knee-jerk reaction. Often times, an election cycle bring cries for “change,” but true conservatives should always be wary of change. Wary doesn’t mean completely closed to some change though. It just means “slow change.” If you look at how our bi-cameral system of government loaded with checks and balances was designed, clearly our founders thought “slow” was good. For this reason, Presidential Executive Orders should be used sparingly.

Third, conservatives adhere to Edmund Burke’s mantra that the individual is foolish, but the species is wise. Using that advice, real conservatives stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before them and look to enduring wisdom. That means not only the Ronald Reagans, but other great thinkers and statesmen beyond our lifetime like T.S. Eliot, Adam Smith, Sir Walter Scott, and of course, Burke himself. Not sure you will see any of these authors on display as you walk in your local library.

Fourth, true conservatives look at the long-term consequences of laws and policies. I fear this principle frequently gets tossed in favor of reelection. Kirk said that rushing into legislation or policies without weighing the long-term consequences will actually create new abuses in the future. We should slow down and look as far as we can into the future.

Fifth, conservatives know good and well that you can’t totally level the economic playing field, and in fact, we should not aspire for it. Robbing one taxpayer to pay another truly violates conservative thought because it is not sustainable. In our society, we have tried to make charity the government’s job, and true conservatives have to take issue with that practice. Churches and non-profits should take serious their role in culture.

Sixth, mankind is messed-up. Kirk didn’t exactly quote the Bible, but conservatives believe that because man is flawed from birth that no perfect social order can ever be created. All that we can reasonably expect, Kirk said, is a tolerably ordered, just and free society, in which evil and suffering continue to lurk. Can morality be legislated? Kirk would say that all laws are an effort to legislate morality, and that is okay.

Seventh, conservatives know that great societies are built upon the foundation of private property. We see it in the Ten Commandments. Policies that seek to redistribute wealth and property should be an anathema to the real conservative. That is one of my issues with COP21, the Paris Agreement on the reduction of climate change, and the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. Both are a form of wealth redistribution. While getting rich should not be the conservative’s chief aim, the institution of private property has been a powerful instrument for teaching responsibility, shaping integrity, creating prosperity, and providing the opportunities for people to think and act. It is the opportunity to go from rags to riches. This opportunity has given us the Truett Cathys (of Chick-fil-a fame) and others who worked their way up from nothing.

Eighth, conservatives favor smaller government at a federal level, and champion small governments such as county commissions and city councils. Decisions most affecting the lives of citizens should be made locally, and as Kirk would say, voluntarily. That is how I got started. I ran a city council race for a friend. A strong, centralized, and distant federal government tends to be more hostile to human freedom and dignity.

Ninth, the conservative believes in flattening the power—or limiting government. Real conservatives know the danger of power being vested in just a few even it is called benevolent. Constitutional restrictions are necessary, political checks and balance a must, and enforcement of the law a must—all the while balancing the claims of authority with the claims of liberty.

Finally, conservatives should be slow to change. Any thinking conservative would be resistant to hastily throwing out the old way of doing something in favor of something completely new—even in the name of “positive change.” Progress, or change, is important—for Kirk said a society would stagnate without it. Change has to be reconciled with the permanent though, and both are important.

When Kirk revised these ten principles in 1993 before his death in 1994, he said that the word “conservative” was being abused. If alive today, he probably wouldn’t be surprised that the distortion has not stopped.

You Know Less Than You Think About Guns - Reason.com

You Know Less Than You Think About Guns - Reason.com

Do More Guns Mean More Homicides?

This simple point—that America is awash with more guns than ever before, yet we are killing each other with guns at a far lower rate than when we had far fewer guns—undermines the narrative that there is a straightforward, causal relationship between increased gun prevalence and gun homicide. Even if you fall back on the conclusion that it's just a small number of owners stockpiling more and more guns, it's hard to escape noticing that even these hoarders seem to be harming fewer and fewer people with their weapons, casting doubt on the proposition that gun ownership is a political crisis demanding action.

In the face of these trend lines—way more guns, way fewer gun murders—how can politicians such as Obama and Hillary Clinton so successfully capitalize on the panic that follows each high profile shooting? Partly because Americans haven't caught on to the crime drop. A 2013 Pew Research Poll found 56 percent of respondents thought that gun crime had gone up over the past 20 years, and only 12 percent were aware it had declined.

Do Gun Laws Stop Gun Crimes?

Another of National Journal's mistakes is a common one in gun science: The paper didn't look at gun statistics in the context of overall violent crime, a much more relevant measure to the policy debate. After all, if less gun crime doesn't mean less crime overall—if criminals simply substitute other weapons or means when guns are less available—the benefit of the relevant gun laws is thrown into doubt. When Thomas Firey of the Cato Institute ran regressions of Isenstein's study with slightly different specifications and considering all violent crime, each of her effects either disappeared or reversed.

Is Having a Gun in the Home Inherently Deadly?

Stroebe notes that the two major post-Kellermann studies most often used to demonstrate an association between gun ownership and risk of homicide shared one of Kellermann's fatal flaws: They offer no information about whether the gun used to kill the gun owners was their own. And despite Kellermann's finding that living alone was very risky, one of the follow-ups, a 2004 study by Linda Dahlberg and colleagues, found that it was only those with roommates who faced a higher risk of a specifically gun-related homicide.

While most of the articles in the Preventive Medicine issue were standard anti-gun material, one piece perhaps inadvertently undermined a popular argument for expanding background checks. "Sources of Guns to Dangerous People: What We Learn By Asking Them," by Philip Cook and colleagues, surveyed a set of jailed criminals in Cook County, Illinois. It found that they "obtain most of their guns from their social network of personal connections. Rarely is the proximate source either direct purchase from a gun store, or theft." So the go-to remedy for gun control advocates seeking to limit homicides might not have much impact on actual gun criminals.

How Often Are Guns Used Defensively?

The survey work most famous for establishing a large number of DGUs—as many as 2.5 million a year—was conducted in 1993 by the Florida State University criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Kleck says they found 222 bonafide DGUs directly via a randomized anonymous nationwide telephone survey of around 5,000 people. The defender had to "state a specific crime they thought was being committed" and to have actually made use of the weapon, even if just threateningly or by "verbally referring to the gun." Kleck insists the surveyors were scrupulous about eliminating any responses that seemed sketchy or questionable or didn't hold up under scrutiny.

Extrapolating from their results, Kleck and Gertz concluded that 2.2 to 2.5 million DGUs happened in the U.S. each year. In a 2001 edition of his book Armed, Kleck wrote that "there are now at least nineteen professional surveys, seventeen of them national in scope, that indicate huge numbers of defensive gun uses in the U.S." The one that most closely matched Kleck's methods, though the sample size was only half and the surveyors were not experienced with crime surveys, was 1994's National Survey of the Private Ownership of Firearms. It was sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department and found even more, when explicitly limiting them to ones that met the same criteria as Kleck's study—4.7 million (though the research write-up contains some details that may make you wonder about the accuracy of the reports, including one woman who reported 52 separate DGUs in a year).

The major outlier in the other direction, nearly always relied on for those downplaying the defensive benefits of guns, is the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a nationally representative telephone survey, which tends to find less than 70,000 DGUs per year.

In the October 2015 special issue on "gun violence prevention," Preventive Medicine featured the latest and most thorough attempt to treat the NCVS as the gold standard for measuring defensive gun usage. The study, by Harvard's Hemenway and Sara J. Solnick of the University of Vermont, broke down the characteristics of the small number of DGUs recorded by the NCVS from 2007 to 2011. The authors found, among other things, that "Of the 127 incidents in which victims used a gun in self-defense, they were injured after they used a gun in 4.1% of the incidents. Running away and calling the police were associated with a reduced likelihood of injury after taking action; self-defense gun use was not." That sounds not so great, but Hemenway went on to explain that "attacking or threatening the perpetrator with a gun had no significant effect on the likelihood of the victim being injured after taking self-protective action," since slightlymore people who tried non-firearm means of defending themselves were injured. Thus, for those who place value on self-defense and resistance over running, the use of a weapon doesn't seem too bad comparatively; Hemenway found that 55.9 percent of victims who took any kind of protective action lost property, but only 38.5 percent of people who used a gun in self-defense did.

Could More Guns Mean Less Crime?

Do 'Common-Sense Gun Laws' Work?
Elusive Knowledge

The Perils of Leuchtenburg | Power Line

The Perils of Leuchtenburg | Power Line

When I heard a few weeks ago that there was a new history of the presidency, The American President, by William Leuchtenburg, my first thought was—Leuchtenburg is still alive?? Indeed he is, 92 years old now. It was over 30 years ago that I read one of his best-known books, The Perils of Prosperity: 1914-1932, published in 1958! It was a smug and lazy liberal narrative of entirely typical of the historiography of what might be called “the Age of Schlesinger.” It was not as bad as John Hicks’s Republican Ascendency, 1921-1933, which managed to misquote Calvin Coolidge along to way to delivering what amounted to a partisan Democratic Party pamphlet, but Leuchtenburg’s account is contradictory, superficial, and generally forgettable.

Looks like he has repeated this method in The American Presidency. Louis Gould’s generally kind review of The American Presidency in the Wall Street Journal suggests at one point the kind of breezy superficiality typical of Leuchtenburg:

One sentence seems odd. Writing of Nixon’s infrequent press conferences, the author says: “Eisenhower noted disapprovingly that, while FDR averaged eighty press conferences a year, Nixon held only four in all of 1970.” One wonders how the former president conveyed his disapproval of events in 1970 since he had died in 1969.

So naturally we shouldn’t be surprised that Salon (yes, I know) published an excerpt from Leuchtenburg that revived all of the liberal clichés of the 1980s that were long ago debunked, under the headline “Behind the Ronald Reagan myth: ‘No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed.’”

Where to begin? Well, might as well begin at the beginning, with short comments interspersed in [brackets]:

No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed. [Wrong.] At presidential news conferences, especially in his first year, Ronald Reagan embarrassed himself. [Did Leuchtenburg actually read any of the transcripts? If so he might have quoted something. Or he might have noticed Reagan’s startling economic literacy on display.] On one occasion, asked why he advocated putting missiles in vulnerable places, he responded, his face registering bewilderment, “I don’t know but what maybe you haven’t gotten into the area that I’m going to turn over to the secretary of defense.” [Details please? Would this have been the 1981 press conference where Reagan deliberately emulated Eisenhower’s intentional press conference practice of dissembling incoherently, in this case to clean up after an Al Haig mess? Or was this June press conference where Reagan dissembled in service of diplomatic ambiguity over our stance on Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor, where clarity was exactly the thing to be avoided? Leuchtenburg is consistently uninterested in exploring or providing any such contextual details.] Frequently, he knew nothing about events that had been headlined in the morning newspaper. . . [This is not just wrong but stupid.]

In all fields of public affairs—from diplomacy to the economy—the president stunned Washington policymakers by how little basic information he commanded. His mind, said the well-disposed Peggy Noonan, was “barren terrain.” Speaking of one far-ranging discussion on the MX missile, the Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, an authority on national defense, reported, “Reagan’s only contribution throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he’d watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from War Games.”

Would this have been the legendary 1983 meeting where Reagan’s apparent ignorance was long ago debunked as a deception of the congresscritters present—Reagan knew the MX missile details cold—who only years later figured out that Reagan was having them on at virtually every such White House meeting? Leuchtenburg doesn’t give enough details to know for sure. Reagan explained several times that he didn’t speak up in meetings because he knew whatever he said would be in the paper the next day, and it served his purposes to be underestimated and to deflect the preening congresscritters ruining his afternoon.

The president “cut ribbons and made speeches. He did these things beautifully,” Congressman Jim Wright of Texas acknowledged. “But he never knew frijoles from pralines about the substantive facts of issues.” Some thought him to be not only ignorant but, in the word of a former CIA director, “stupid.” Clark Clifford called the president an “amiable dunce,” [Would this be the same Clark Clifford who was later convicted of bank fraud? Yes; who’s the dunce now?] and the usually restrained columnist David Broder wrote, “The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.” [No mention that Broder later recanted this judgment.]

His White House staff found it difficult, often impossible, to get him to stir himself to follow even this rudimentary routine. When he was expected to read briefing papers, he lazed on a couch watching old movies. [Not true.] On the day before a summit meeting with world leaders about the future of the economy, he was given a briefing book. The next morning, his chief of staff asked him why he had not even opened it. “Well, Jim,” the president explained, “The Sound of Music was on last night.” [So how did Reagan perform the next day at that summit, Mr. Leuchtenburg? Turned out to be a triumph for him by all accounts, including a nice smackdown of Pierre Trudeau. Too much trouble to mention that I guess. More generally, any mention of when and why Reagan wrote his own talking points for his summits with Gorbachev, not to mention how Reagan actually performed in these high-stakes meetings? No mention in this excerpt at least.]

Leuchtenburg does include this:

He was able to forge agreements with Democrats in the capital because he had the advantage, as a veteran of Screen Actors Guild battles, of being an experienced negotiator. (In later years, he said of his haggling with Mikhail Gorbachev: “It was easier than dealing with Jack Warner.”) His chief Democratic opponent in the legislature, who started out viewing Reagan with contempt, wound up concluding that he had been a pretty good governor, “better than Pat Brown, miles and planets and universes better than Jerry Brown”—the two most conspicuous Democratic leaders of the period.

You would think these observations would prompt some reflection on Leuchtenburg’s part about whether there wasn’t some artfulness or depth to Reagan not visible on the surface, but apparently not.

Then there’s this:

When he announced that he was planning to run for governor of California, he encountered ridicule. At a time when Robert Cummings was a prominent film star, the Hollywood mogul Jack Warner responded, “No, Bob Cummings for governor, Ronald Reagan as his best friend.”

Every other account of this anecdote I’ve ever seen has Warner saying, “No no, Jimmy Stewart for governor; Ronald Reagan for best friend,” rather than Cummings. I certainly makes more sense than Cummings, who was no longer very prominent in the mid-1960s. Maybe the book offers a source for this?

I could go on, but I guess I’ll just take this to the bank:

Yet he was to leave office regarded as a consequential president, and a number of scholars were even to write of an “Age of Reagan.”

:):)

A Higher Minimum Wage Doesn't Reduce Welfare Costs To Taxpayers - Forbes

A Higher Minimum Wage Doesn't Reduce Welfare Costs To Taxpayers - Forbes

This might be one of those things about the minimum wage that people will have a hard time quite grasping. For it seems so obvious that if people working for low wages are getting welfare payments that the rest of us taxpayers have to cough up for them, if we raise the minimum wage, we’ll have to cough up less in taxes because welfare payments will go down. And it’s undoubtedly true that that could happen. The important question though is does this happen? And the truth of the matter seems to be that no, it doesn’t happen.

What’s missing is that sure, those people who keep their jobs and their hours with a higher minimum wage gain less in welfare payments. But some people don’t keep their jobs and their hours as a result of this higher minimum wage. And so what is important to the welfare bill is whether the incomes gained and reducing welfare outweigh those lost and replaced by welfare? The answer seems to be that it’s much of a muchness, no great effect either way.

The paper is discussed here:

For years, the union-backed Fight for $15 campaign has argued that raising minimum wages will curb low-wage workers’ reliance on government assistance programs—saving taxpayers money.

Not so, says a new study that found federal and state minimum-wage boosts have had no statistically significant impact on working-age adults’ net use of several such programs, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as the food-stamp plan.

The study, partly funded by the right-leaning Employment Policies Institute, contends a $15 minimum wage is poorly targeted to recipients of these programs. Among those who would be affected by a $15 minimum wage, just 12% are SNAP recipients and just 10% are Medicaid recipients.

Now that EPI, the Employment PI, is rather more nakedly political than we might be happy accepting the unsupported word of. As opposed to the other EPI, the Economic PI, whose every utterance is taken as gospel over on the left but which does still manage to produce respectable and reasonable research from time to time. However, let us be fair to this EPI, their basic underlying approach does seem to be markedly better than an earlier paper which contradicts their results:

One previous study Mr. Sabia is challenging is a 2014 paper updated last year by Rachel West, now a senior policy analyst at left-leaning Washington think-tank Center for American Progress, and Michael Reich, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

That study examined the effects of minimum wages on SNAP enrollments and expenditures. It concluded that a 10% increase in the minimum wage does reduce SNAP enrollments and expenditures by levels that would have saved taxpayers nearly $4.6 billion a year—6.1% of SNAP expenditures in 2012—if a federal bill seeking a $10.10 minimum wage had been approved.

Mr. Sabia said that study’s model was flawed in part because it didn’t examine the impact among workers and nonworkers. A portion of his study set out to examine that using the same model and produced results that made the prior study’s findings hard to believe, Mr. Sabia said.

Ms. West acknowledged that her study didn’t examine the effects on workers versus nonworkers, but she said she stands by her results.

Let’s just think through that starting with our basic logic.

We’re going to raise the minimum wage. Our normal theoretical result is that some workers will lose hours or even their jobs as a result of this. When we move over to look at the effects upon the welfare bill we thus want to know what is the effect of people who keep their jobs earning more, minus the costs of people earning less or nothing and thus requiring more welfare.

So, the paper that says that Hallelujah! the welfare bill is reduced manages not to look at all at the increased welfare costs of people becoming unemployed. That’s not convincing, is it? And then we’ve got the new paper that looks at both results and nets them off and finds pretty much no effect on the welfare bill. I’ll run with that second one if you don’t mind.

However, this then leads us to an insight about the true effects of a rise in the minimum wage. If more poor people get more money as a result of the rise then welfare bills should go down. If welfare bills don’t go down in aggregate then therefore poor people aren’t getting more in aggregate as a result of the rise. And this speaks to the great empirical debate about the minimum wage at present. Because we do still have that theoretical result: that higher wages should increase unemployment. And some studies say this isn’t so in detail: many others say it is. But here we’ve a study approaching the point from a completely different angle, using an entirely different set of numbers, yet conforming with our theoretical model, not the disputed empirics of recent years.

Because the welfare bill isn’t falling, the poor on welfare cannot in aggregate be net gainers from a rise in the minimum wage. We must be having hours restrictions and job losses to make up for the higher incomes going to those who don’t lose their jobs or shifts.

Or, as many people have been saying for a long time now, minimum wage rises don’t help the poor. So let’s not have them, let’s have the only minimum wage that makes any sense at all, $0. As once even the New York Times knew was correct. After all, 96% of employed Americans earn more than the minimum wage meaning that we know very well that there’s something else determining wages.

15 Stats That Destroy Liberal Narratives - John Hawkins - Page full

15 Stats That Destroy Liberal Narratives - John Hawkins - Page full

1) “Muslims account for only about 1 percent of the U.S. population but account for about half of terrorist attacks since 9/11. That means Muslims in the United States are about 5,000 percent more likely to commit terrorist attacks than non-Muslims.” -- Mark Krikorian

2) “Consider, for example, that in 1958 a mere 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. By 2013, that number had grown to 87 percent. In 2012 these once-taboo unions hit an all-time high.
Ku Klux Klan membership has shrunk drastically from millions a century ago to fewer than 5,000 today. The Black Panthers are essentially extinct. While plenty of other hate groups have attempted to fill the void, they have always operated on the margins of society. Black politicians are now common—President Obama’s percentage of the white vote was almost perfectly in line with that received by other recent Democrats, all of whom were white.
Granted, these statistics offer but a snapshot of American society, but the more one looks, the more a trend emerges. America is a lot of things; racist isn’t one of them.”  -- Greg Jones

3) “The harsh reality awaiting these low-income Americans is undeniable: according to 2013 data from a 2014 Merritt Hawkins study, 55% of doctors already refuse new Medicaid patients. According to the HSC Health Tracking Physician Survey, 2008, the percentage of doctors that refuse new Medicaid patients dwarf by about 8 to 10 times the percentage that refuses new private insurance patients.
Such ‘insurance’ from Obamacare not only fails to provide access to doctors, but research in the top medical journals such as Cancer, American Journal of Cardiology, Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation and Annals of Surgery, show that Medicaid beneficiaries suffer worse outcomes than similar patients with private insurance ... all at an added cost of another $800 billion by CBO estimates to taxpayers after the decade.
It is not hyperbole to call Medicaid a disgrace at its annual cost of about $450 billion, and expanding it rather than helping poor people buy private insurance is simply inexplicable.” -- Scott Atlas

4 ) “In other words, all of the disruption, spending, taxation, and premium hikes in Obamacare has only reduced the percentage of U.S. residents without health insurance by 2.7 percentage points, from 13.9% to 11.1%: a remarkably small reduction, and far lower than what the law was supposed to achieve.” -- Avik Roy

5) “Bernie Sanders thinks you can pay for an 18 trillion dollar expansion of the welfare state — to make it align with a Denmark that doesn’t actually exist — simply by taxing ‘the billionaire class.’ There are 536 billionaires in America. Even if you confiscated everything they had — which, by the way, would surely destroy the American economy by triggering the greatest round of capital flight in human history and amount to government seizure of countless businesses — it wouldn’t come close to covering the tab of Sanders’s proposals.” -- Jonah Goldberg

6) “In 2010, 38,329 people died from drug overdoses, twice the number a decade earlier. More people died of drug overdoses than from automobile accidents (30,196), murders (13,000) or gun accidents (700).” -- Ann Coulter

7) “Between 1979 and 2010, for instance, the average after-tax income for the poorest quintile of American households rose from $14,800 to $19,200; for the second-poorest quintile, it rose from $29,900 to $39,100. Meanwhile, per-person antipoverty spending at the state and federal level increased sixfold between 1968 and 2008 — and that’s excluding Medicare, unemployment benefits and Social Security.” -- Ross Douthat

8) “Just last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee received a report that in just four years, 121 illegal aliens who had been released by ICE went on to murder Americans.” -- Mark Krikorian

9) “Officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the food-stamp program has become the country’s fastest-growing means-tested social-welfare program. Only Medicaid is more expensive. Between 2000 and 2013, SNAP caseloads grew to 47.6 million from 17.2 million, and spending grew to $80 billion from $20.6 billion, according to the Agriculture Department. SNAP participation fell slightly last year, to 46.5 million individuals, as the economy improved, but that still leaves a population the size of Spain’s living in the U.S. on food stamps.” -- Jason Riley

10) “Pace Mr. Obama, the state-prison population (which accounts for 87% of the nation’s prisoners) is dominated by violent criminals and serial thieves. In 2013 drug offenders made up less than 16% of the state-prison population; violent felons were 54% and property offenders 19%. Reducing drug-related admissions to 15 large state penitentiaries by half would lower those states’ prison count by only 7%, according to the Urban Institute.

In federal prisons—which hold only 13% of the nation’s prisoners—drug offenders make up half of the inmate population. But these offenders aren’t casual drug users; overwhelmingly, they are serious traffickers. Fewer than 1% of drug offenders sentenced in federal court in 2014 were convicted of simple drug possession, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Most of those possession convictions were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges.” -- Heather Mac Donald

11) “The conservative Heritage Foundation estimated unlawful immigrant households paid $39.2 billion in 2010, but received $93.7 billion in government services.” -- Oliver Darcy

12) “On Wednesday, a Washington Post article announced that ‘The San Bernardino shooting is the second mass shooting today and the 355th this year.’ Vox, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, this newspaper and others reported similar statistics. Grim details from the church in Charleston, a college classroom in Oregon and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado are still fresh, but you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015. At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four ‘mass shootings’ this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.” -- Mark Follman

13) “As Pew Research cheerfully reports, previous immigrants were ‘almost entirely’ European. But since Kennedy's immigration act, a majority of immigrants have been from Latin America. One-quarter are from Asia. Only 12 percent of post-1965-act immigrants have been from Europe -- and they're probably Muslims.
Apparently, the ‘American experiment’ is actually some kind of sociological trial in which we see if people who have no history of Western government can run a constitutional republic.
As of 1970, there were only 9 million Hispanics in the entire country, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, there are well more than 60 million.” -- Ann Coulter 

14) “No fewer than eight major studies from around the world have found homosexuality is not a genetic condition.
Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council says that these numerous, rigorous studies of identical twins have now made it impossible to argue that there is a ‘gay gene.’ If homosexuality were inborn and predetermined, then when one identical twin is homosexual, the other should be, as well.
Yet one study from Yale and Columbia Universities found homosexuality common to only 6.7 percent of male identical twins and 5.3 percent of female identical twins.
The low rate of common homosexuality in identical twins – around six percent – is easily explained by nurture, not nature.
Researchers Peter Bearman and Hannah Brueckner concluded that environment was the determining factor. They rejected outright that ‘genetic influence independent of social context’ as the reason for homosexuality. ‘(O)ur results support the hypothesis that less gendered socialization in early childhood and preadolescence shapes subsequent same-sex romantic preferences.’
‘Less gendered socialization’ means, a boy was without a positive father figure, or a girl was without a positive mother figure.
In light of the evidence, Sprigg said simply, ‘No one is born gay.’” -- Mark Hodges

15) “Over the last year, only 1.3 million Americans of working age have entered the workforce, even as the population of this same demographic increased by more than 2.8 million. Just over 1 million members of this group found jobs. That's right -- of the new additions to the working age population, less than four in 10 found jobs.
The newspapers touted the reduction in the unemployment rate to 5.3 percent as a cause for celebration. Yet for every three Americans added to the working age population (16 and older), only around one new job (1.07) has been created under Obama. At this pace, America will soon officially have a zero unemployment rate. But that will only be because no one will be looking for work.” -- Stephen Moore

Minimum Wage Hikes Really Do Hurt Unskilled Workers

National Review Online

Minimum-wage hikes are politically popular. They’ve long made intuitive sense to voters as a way to boost wages for less-skilled workers. But people on both sides of the debate have generally acknowledged they might cost jobs, until more recent research started suggesting they may not do so at all.

But these findings have been hotly contested, and new research on the role of minimum wages during the Great Recession from UCSD economists Michael Wither and Jeffrey Clemens, ably summarized by UCSD economist James Hamilton, gives us new reason to doubt the wisdom of an increase in the federal minimum wage.

To assess the impact of minimum-wage hikes, Wither and Clemens exploited the fact that the 2007 federal minimum wage hike did not impact every state in the same way, as several states had pre-existing state minimum wages that were higher than the new federal mandate. These states were largely unaffected by the new higher federal wage floor. Wither and Clemens use these states as a baseline to examine the effect of minimum wages in states where federal legislation actually did force changes in compensation.

Their results are striking: minimum-wage hikes hurt low-wage workers through a combination of disemployment (on average, there was a 6 percentage point decrease in the likelihood that a low-wage worker would have a job) and a higher probability of working without pay (internships), which of course not everyone can afford to do. One consequence of this disemployment effect is that the displaced workers in question never had the opportunity to gain experience that might have otherwise allowed them to increase their long-term wages. The net effect was that even taking into account the positive impact of minimum-wage legislation on the wages of those who remained employed; less-skilled workers overall saw average incomes decline through the recession years as a result of minimum-wage legislation.

The authors also find evidence that minimum-wage hikes lead to reductions in mobility. For instance, workers with greater education were more likely to work in internships in response to minimum-wage hikes, while less educated workers remained unemployed. Undesirable though unpaid work might be, it still provided a way for relatively educated workers — many of whom can presumably rely on parental support to meet their expenses — to gain a foothold in the workforce, a pathway increasingly denied to less educated workers. The authors find suggestive evidence that in states where the federal minimum wage had effects, this less-skilled, low-wage population were much less likely to transition into higher wage positions in the medium-term. Where did these workers go instead? Presumably, long-term unemployment: the authors calculate that this episode of minimum wage legislation accounts for as much as 0.7 percentage points in the decline in the national employment-to-population ratio in the period from December 2006 to December 2012, or about 15 percent of the decline during that period.

It is very unlikely that this paper will prove to be the last word in the debate over the minimum wage, not least because the subject is so politically contentious. Yet the authors provide compelling evidence that previous research has vastly underestimated the impact of minimum wages by focusing on broad populations (such as teenage workers, or workers in the fast food industry) rather than isolating the exact populations most affected by minimum-wage legislation: low-skilled workers. It has also largely ignored the role of low-wage work in fostering upward mobility by serving as a stepping stone to acquiring experience and higher-wage employment in the future. In a post-recession environment characterized by the rapid automation of routine job tasks and rising burdens associated with hiring employees, it’s more important than ever that public policy work to ensure that less-skilled workers continue to have access to employment opportunities, including those offering low wages. There’s reason to think a minimum-wage hike might do the exact opposite.

Wages With Minimal Wiggle Room - WSJ

Wages With Minimal Wiggle Room - WSJ

Long the target of progressives looking to increase the minimum wage, Wal-Mart announced earlier this year that the company would increase its base wage to $9 an hour in April and $10 an hour by February 2016. How’s that working out so far?

In November Wal-Mart announced a 10% decline in earnings per share, for the fiscal year’s third quarter. Higher wages were “by far the biggest driver of the decline in consolidated operating income,” as CEO Doug McMillon put it in the earnings conference call. In October Wal-Mart predicted a 6%-12% decline next year in earnings per share—despite the company’s plan to reduce the number of shares in a $20 billion buyback. Wal-Mart’s hourly wage increases accounted for “approximately 75%” of the reduction, according to CFO Charles Holley.

Plummeting earnings wasn’t the plan, and presumably management took other steps it assumed would prevent the decline. The lesson is that America’s largest private employer—known for its ability to control costs and operate efficiently—lost profit because the company couldn’t offset a wage increase to $9 an hour by increasing prices, automating tasks or scheduling employees more efficiently.

Unlike the government, Wal-Mart can’t survive if it isn’t profitable. When profits decline, companies must react—or shareholders will. Wal-Mart’s stock suffered its worst single day in 25 years when the company predicted the earnings-per-share dip. The stock is still more than 10% down.

So at what point do minimum-wage increases force employers to eliminate jobs and reduce growth, hurting the working-class Americans the policy intended to help?

The answer varies by company and industry. For example, Apple is the most profitable company on the Fortune 500. With $39.5 billion in annual profit and about 97,000 employees, Apple’s annual profit per employee is $407,000. This is the amount Apple’s employees contribute to the success of the business, on average.

Apple could absorb a minimum-wage increase easily. Its employees are typically highly compensated and thus not many workers would be affected. Second, each employee produces a hefty amount of profit for the company, on average.

The situation is far different for America’s retail businesses, where a minimum-wage increase would be most deleterious. Combine every retailer, restaurant, supermarket and retail pharmacy company in the Fortune 500 as a proxy for the retail industry. That is more than 20 companies, including Wal-Mart, Target, McDonald’s, Starbucks and Walgreens.

The total adds up to $36.4 billion in annual profit (about $3 billion less profit than Apple alone), 5.8 million employees (about 60 times as many as Apple employs) and annual profit per employee of $6,300 (1.5% of Apple’s profit per employee).

How would a minimum-wage increase affect the retail industry? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hours worked a week in the retail trade sector is 31.5. Assuming an employee earns the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and works only 30 hours a week, an increase to $9 an hour would result in an annual wage increase of $2,730.

Generally, highly compensated employees contribute more to a company’s success than minimum-wage employees, who are often less experienced and entry-level workers. But even assuming that minimum-wage employees contribute $6,300 on average to a business’ success, an increase of $2,730 a year would decrease the profit per employee by 43%.

That makes those jobs less valuable to the company and creates an incentive to eliminate positions. Not surprisingly, the Congressional Budget Office found that increasing the minimum wage to $9 an hour would cost the economy about 100,000 jobs.

At $10.10 an hour, these employee would make $4,446 more a year, decreasing profit per employee by 71%. At this level, the CBO found that the economy would lose about 500,000 jobs.

At $12 an hour, the employee would make $7,410 more a year resulting in a loss per employee of $1,110, eliminating the employee’s entire contribution to the company’s success. At $15 an hour, the employee would make $12,090 more a year, resulting in a loss per employee of $5,790.

There is no CBO estimate for the job losses if the government makes entry-level labor so expensive that companies actually lose money by having such employees on staff. The potential harm seems self-evident.

Both these averages and Wal-Mart’s experience indicate that retail businesses would be unable to absorb such labor-cost increases absent dramatic price increases or severe cost-cutting. With low inflation and the economy growing at an annual average of about 2.2%, dramatic price increases are unrealistic. Most businesses would turn to slashing costs, and hardest hit would be the most vulnerable among the working class.

With the percentage of people working or actively looking for work hovering at lows not observed since the 1970s, does it make sense to use the force of law to drive up the cost of employing working-class Americans? Instead of creating a living wage, the fight for dramatic minimum-wage increases could leave millions with no wage at all.

When Liberals Attack Social Science -- Science of Us

When Liberals Attack Social Science -- Science of Us

I first read Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science when I was home for Thanksgiving, and I often left it lying around the house when I was doing other stuff. At one point, my dad picked it up off a table and started reading the back-jacket copy. “That’s an amazing book so far,” I said. “It’s about the politicization of science.” “Oh,” my dad responded. “You mean like Republicans and climate change?”

That exchange perfectly sums up why anyone who is interested in how tricky a construct “truth” has become in 2015 should read Alice Dreger’s book. No, it isn’t about climate change, but my dad could be excused for thinking any book about the politicization of science must be about conservatives. Many liberals, after all, have convinced themselves that it’s conservatives who attack science in the name of politics, while they would never do such a thing. Galileo’s Middle Finger corrects this misperception in a rather jarring fashion, and that’s why it’s one of the most important social-science books of 2015.

At its core, Galileo’s Middle Finger is about what happens when science and dogma collide — specifically, what happens when science makes a claim that doesn’t fit into an activist community’s accepted worldview. And many of Dreger’s most interesting, explosive examples of this phenomenon involve liberals, not conservatives, fighting tooth and nail against open scientific inquiry.

When Dreger criticizes liberal politicization of science, she isn’t doing so from the seat of a trolling conservative. Well before she dove into some of the biggest controversies in science and activism, she earned her progressive bona fides. A historian of science by training, she spent about a decade early in her career advocating on behalf of intersex people — those born with neither “traditional” male nor female genitalia. For a long time, established medical practice was for the doctor or doctors present at childbirth to make the call one way or another and effectively carve a newborn’s genitals into the “proper” configuration, and in some cases to eventually prescribe courses of potentially harmful or unnecessary hormones. Sometimes the child in question was never even informed that they hadn’t been born a boy or a girl in the classical sense — indeed, sometimes even their parents weren’t. To the medical Establishment, all that mattered — even above patients’ physical and psychological health — was that young bodies fit neatly into one established gender category or the other.

Working together with a group of intersex activists, Dreger lobbied and educated tirelessly, eventually nudging the medical Establishment away from this protocol and toward a new, more humane norm in cases of genital malformation that don’t pose any health risk: Leave the kid’s genitals alone, allow them to grow up a little, and see what they and their family want to do later on. There doesn’t need to be a rush to assign gender and take aggressive medical action to enforce it.

Eventually, as a result of burnout and other factors, Dreger’s work in this area waned, and she moved on to other projects. Through some of the social networks she had developed in her intersex work, she became interested in the broader world of scientific controversies, and began investigating them as thoroughly as possible — interviewing hundreds of people, chasing down primary documents, and so on. What she found, over and over, was that researchers whose conclusions didn’t line up with politically correct orthodoxies — whether the orthodoxy in question involved sexual abuse, transgender issues, or whatever else — often faced dire, career-threatening consequences simply for doing their jobs.

Two examples stand out as particularly egregious cases in which solid social science was attacked in the name of progressive causes. The first involves Napoleon Chagnon, an extremely influential anthropologist who dedicated years of his life to understanding and living among the Yanomamö, an indigenous tribe situated in the Amazon rain forest on the Brazil-Venezuela border — there are a million copies of his 1968 book Yanomamö: The Fierce People in print, and it’s viewed by many as an ethnographic classic. Chagnon made ideological enemies along the way; for one thing, he has long believed that human behavior and culture can be partially explained by evolution, which in some circles has been a frowned-upon idea. Perhaps more important, he has never sentimentalized his subjects, and his portrayal of the Yanomamö included, as Dreger writes, “males fighting violently over fertile females, domestic brutality, ritualized drug use, and ecological indifference.” Dreger suggests that Chagnon’s reputation as a careful, dedicated scholar didn’t matter to his critics — what mattered was that his version of the Yanomamö was “Not your standard liberal image of the unjustly oppressed, naturally peaceful, environmentally gentle rain-forest Indian family.”

In 2000, Chagnon’s critics seized upon a once-in-a-career opportunity to go after him. That was the year a journalist named Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. The book — and a related New Yorker article by Tierney — leveled a series of spectacular allegations against Chagnon and James V. Neel Sr., a geneticist and physician with whom Chagnon had collaborated during his work with the Yanomamö (Neel died of cancer shortly before the book’s publication). Among other things, Tierney charged that Chagnon and Neel had intentionally used a faulty vaccine to infect the Yanomamö with measles so as to test Nazi-esque eugenics theories, and that one or both men had manipulated data, started wars on purpose, paid tribespeople to kill one another, and “purposefully with[held] medical care while experimental subjects died from the allegedly vaccine-induced measles,” as Dreger writes.

These charges stuck in part because Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, two anthropologists who disliked Chagnon and his work, sent the American Anthropological Association an alarming letter about Tierney’s allegations prior to the publication of Darkness in El Dorado. Rather than wait to see if the spectacular claims in the book passed the smell test, the AAA responded by quickly launching a full investigation in the form of the so-called El Dorado Task Force — a move that led to a number of its members resigning in protest. A media firestorm engulfed Chagnon — “Scientist ‘killed Amazon indians to test race theory’,” read a Guardian headline — and he was forced to defend himself against accusations that he had brutalized members of a tribe he had devoted his career to living with and studying and, naturally, had developed a strong sense of affection for in the process. A number of fellow anthropologists and professional organizations came to the defense of Chagnon and Neel, pointing out obvious problems with Tierney’s claims and timeline, but these voices were drowned out by the hysteria over the evil, murderous anthropologist and his doctor-accomplice. Dreger writes that Chagnon’s “career had essentially been halted by the whole mess.” (Chagnon’s memoirs, published in 2013, are entitled Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists.)

There was, it turns out, nothing to these claims. Over the course of a year of research and interviews with 40 people involved in the controversy in one way or another, Dreger discovered the disturbing, outrageous degree to which the charges against Chagnon and Neel were fabricated — to the point where some of the numerous footnotes in Tierney’s book plainly didn’t support his own claims. All the explosive accusations about Nazi-like activities and exploitation, and the intentional fomenting of violence, were simply made up or willfully misinterpreted. Worse, some of them could have been easily debunked with just a tiny bit of research — in one case, it took Dreger all of an hour in an archive of Neel’s papers to find strong evidence refuting the claim that he helped intentionally infect the Yanomamö with measles (a claim that was independently debunked by others, anyway).

In the end, Dreger published the results of her investigation in the journal Human Nature, recounting the full details of Chagnon’s ordeal at the hands of Tierney, and the many ways Tierney fabricated and misrepresented data to attack the anthropologist and Neel. Darkness Is El Dorado is still available on Amazon, its original, glowing reviews and mention of its National Book Award nomination intact; and Tierney’s New Yorker article is still online, with no editor’s note explaining the factual inaccuracies contained therein.

***

Dreger also recounts her earlier investigation into the controversy surrounding J. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychologist and researcher of human sexuality and former chair of that university’s psychology department. In 2003, Bailey released The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, a book in which he relates the stories of several transgender women and promotes the theories of Ray Blanchard, a Canadian sex researcher with a long history of working with patients who were born anatomically male but hoped to undergo gender reassignment.

In his book, Bailey explains that Blanchard believed his patients who had transitioned, or who were hoping to, fit into two rather different categories. Some were “transkids” (a non-clinical term Dreger, not Bailey, uses): folks who were born as boys but had been very effeminate by societal standards since childhood, and who were attracted to men once they hit puberty. In these cases, Blanchard posited, access to sex and intimate companionship might have been one component of what eventually pushed them to start presenting as female. As Dreger explains, the fact that transkids come across so effeminate “means that their sexual opportunities are often limited while they are presenting themselves as men. Straight men aren’t interested in having sex with them because they’re male, and gay men often aren’t sexually attracted to them because most gay men are sexually attracted to masculinity, not femininity, and these guys are really femme.” Transitioning, then, gives transkids an opportunity to have the relationships with men they’d like to — because they’re effeminate, they can pass as women whom straight men find themselves attracted to.

The second, more controversial type of male-to-female transitioner posited by Blanchard consisted of folks with so-called autogynephilia. These individuals have usually presented as male for most of their lives and are attracted to women, but they discover along the way that they are sexually aroused by the idea of being a woman. They tend to transition later in life, often after having married women and started families.

There’s also a really important cultural component to Blanchard’s theory, as Dreger writes:

Blanchard’s taxonomy of male-to-female transexuals recognized the importance of sexual orientation in the gendered self-identities of both those who begin as homosexual males and those who experience amour de soi en femme [the French phrase for “love of oneself as a woman”]. However, he didn’t see sexual orientation as the only thing a male factors in when deciding whether to transition. He recognized that in one environment — say, an urban gay neighborhood like Chicago’s Boystown — an ultrafemme gay man might find reasonable physical safety, employment, and sexual satisfaction simply by living as an ultrafemme gay man. But in a very different environment — say, a homophobic ethnic enclave in Chicago — he might find life survivable only via complete transition to womanhood. Whether a transkid grows up to become a gay man or a transgender woman would depend on the individual’s interaction with the surrounding cultural environment. Similarly, an autogynephilic man might not elect transition if his cultural milieu would make his post-transition life much harder.

There is, to say the least, a huge amount going on here. But what’s key to keep in mind is that some transgender people and activists hold very dear the idea that they have simply been born in the wrong type of body, that transitioning allows them to effectively fix a mistake that nature made. The notion that there might be a cultural component to the decision to transition, or that sexuality, rather than a hardwired gender identity, could be a factor, complicates this gender-identity-only narrative. It also brings sexuality back into a conversation that some trans activists have been trying to make solely about gender identity — roughly parallel to the way some gay-rights activists sweep conversations about actual gay sexuality under the rug, preferring to focus on idealized, unthreatening-to-heterosexuals portrayals of committed gay relationships between clean-cut, taxpaying adults.

But as Dreger explains, Bailey, being someone with a penchant for poking mischievously at political correctness, wasn’t too concerned about the political dimension of what he was arguing in his book. From a scientific perspective, he explicitly viewed the idea that “everybody is truly and easily assignable to one of two gender identities” as an oversimplification; part of his motivation for writing The Man Who Would Be Queen was to try to blow it up, to argue that transsexuality is more complicated than that. So it shouldn’t be surprising that some trans activists and allies didn’t appreciate the book’s argument — and they obviously have every right to disagree with Bailey and Blanchard’s views. What is surprising is just how big an explosion The Man Who Would Be Queen sparked, and how underhanded the campaign against Bailey subsequently got.

A small group of activists led by Lynn Conway, a transgender University of Michigan electrical engineer and computer scientist, and Andrea James, a trans activist, started going after Bailey shortly after the book’s publication. In allegations laid out on a large UM-hosted web page built by Conway, they charged that Bailey — as summed up by Dreger — “had failed to get ethics board approval for studies of transgender research subjects as required by federal regulation; that he had violated confidentiality; that he had been practicing psychology without a license; and that he had slept with a trans woman while she was his research subject.” Central to their argument was the idea that Bailey had dragged his trans subjects out into the spotlight without their consent, that he had callously manipulated them and used them for his own purposes — a particularly potent charge given that outing someone as transgender can, in the most extreme instances, put their life at risk given the scary levels of violence this population faces at the hands of bigots. (Conway’s website originally included Dreger’s own name on a list of trans activists and allies who were furious with Bailey over his book, even though, at that time, Dreger was only faintly familiar with the controversy and had never even expressed a public opinion on the issue. Dreger asked Conway to remove her name.)

James, in Dreger’s telling, went after Bailey with at-times-scary ferocity, engaging in a host of intimidation tactics: She posted photos of Bailey’s young daughter online with nasty text underneath (in one case calling her a “cock-starved exhibitionist”), sent angry emails to his colleagues, and quickly turned on anyone who didn’t join in her crusade — including some who said that they felt that their own life stories had been accurately and sympathetically captured in Bailey’s book. (James herself, Dreger reveals, acknowledged her own autogynephilia — using that exact word — in a 1998 letter.)

The allegations were so serious, and came in such a heaping quantity, that Bailey’s reputation was permanently tarnished in the eyes of many casual observers. What those observers can’t have known was his long-standing history of support for transgender people — he had used his perch as a researcher to advocate passionately for better treatment of this population and for improved access to gender-reassignment resources, and had even, at the request of one of the subjects in his book, written letters to physicians on behalf of a group of young trans women who were seeking reassignment surgery. Before the full weight of the controversy descended, The Man Who Would Be Queen had been nominated for the Lambda Literary Award’s 2004 prize in the transgender/genderqueer category for its textured, supportive portrayal of its transgender subjects. As a result of immense pressure — Deirdre McCloskey, a respected scholar of economics and history who wrote a memoir about her male-to-female transition, and who helped Conway and James go after Bailey, said nominating the book for the award “would be like nominating Mein Kampf for a literary prize in Jewish studies” — the organization voted to yank the nomination.

Just as she would later dive deep into the controversy that ensnared Napoleon Chagnon, Dreger devoted a huge amount of time to untangling what had really happened. It would take pages to even concisely summarize what she found — she eventually published her almost-50,000-word investigation in Archives of Sexual Behavior, in an article which starts, “This is not a simple story. If it were, it would be considerably shorter.”

But to get a flavor of the quality of the evidence amassed against Bailey by his critics, consider one charge: that Bailey had practiced psychology without a license. Conway, James, and McCloskey filed a formal complaint with the state of Illinois claiming that, since Bailey lacked a license as a clinical psychologist, he had violated state regulations by writing those letters in support of the young trans women seeking to transition. Not only was there no legal basis to the claim — if you don’t receive compensation for your services, which Bailey didn’t, you don’t even need a license to provide counseling in Illinois — but Bailey was completely forthright in his letters supporting the women, both about the fact that he had only had brief conversations with them (as opposed to having provided them with extensive counseling) and about his own qualifications and expertise — he even attached copies of his CV. “Presumably all this was why [Illinois] never bothered to pursue the charge,” writes Dreger, “although you’d never know that from reading the press accounts, which mentioned only the complaints, not that they had petered out.”

And that’s just one example. Over and over, in instances that covered every facet of the campaign against Bailey — including the charge that he had had sex with one of his subjects — Dreger discovered an astounding level of dishonesty and manipulation on the part of Bailey’s critics:

After nearly a year of research, I could come to only one conclusion: The whole thing was a sham. Bailey’s sworn enemies had used every clever trick in the book — juxtaposing events in misleading ways, ignoring contrary evidence, working the rhetoric, and using anonymity whenever convenient, to make it look as though virtually every trans woman represented in bailey’s book had felt abused by him and had filed a charge.

Of course, of all the right-thinking people who know, based on surface-level reporting or blog posts they read, that Mike Bailey is an anti-trans monster, only a tiny percentage are ever going to read, or even learn about, Dreger’s investigation. That’s the problem.

***

There’s a risk of getting too cute here, of drawing false, unwarranted equivalencies. In a sense, my dad was right in what he was getting at — conservatives have done a lot of damage to sound science in the United States. It’s conservative lawmakers and organizations who have refused to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change, who have rallied to keep evolution out of textbooks and comprehensive sex education out of classrooms, who have stymied life-saving research into stem cells and gun control.

But that’s in the world of politics and lawmaking, where conservatives often have a numerical advantage. In the halls of social-science academia, where liberals do, it’s telling that some of the same sorts of feeding frenzies occur. This should stand as a wake-up call, as a rebuke to the smugness that sometimes infects progressive beliefs about who “respects” science more. After all, what both the Bailey and Chagnon cases have in common — alongside some of the others in Galileo’s Middle Finger — is the extent to which groups of progressive self-appointed defenders of social justice banded together to launch full-throated assaults on legitimate science, and the extent to which these attacks were abetted by left-leaning academic institutions and activists too scared to stand up to the attackers, often out of a fear of being lumped in with those being attacked, or of being accused of wobbly allyship.

It’s hard not to come away from Dreger’s wonderful book feeling like we’re doomed. Think about all the time and effort it took her — a professionally trained historian as equipped as anyone to dig into complex morasses of conflicting claims — to excavate the full details of just one of these controversies. Who has a year to research and produce a fact-finding report that only a tiny percentage of people will ever read or care about? Who’s going to figure out exactly how some contested conversation between Mike Bailey and a young transgender woman in Chicago in two thousand whatever actually went down? Dreger herself is transparent about the fact that these days she can only afford to do what she does because her physician husband has a high-paying job at a medical school. There aren’t a lot of Alice Dregers. Nor are there, these days, a lot of investigative journalists with the time and resources to understand complicated debates involving controversial science. There is, however, a lot identity-driven content on the internet, because it’s easy to produce and tends to travel well. If you’re a writer or an editor looking for a quick hit, outrage at a perceived slight against some vulnerable group is a surefire bet.

While the false charges against Chagnon and Bailey were certainly helped along by the internet, neither episode occurred in our present age of bottomless social-media outrage. Imagine if the Bailey controversy dropped tomorrow. Imagine how various outlets, all racing to publish the hottest take and all forced to rely on only those sparse, ambiguous scraps of evidence that filter down in the first days of an uproar over an unfamiliar subject, would cover it. If anything, all the incentives have gotten worse; if anything, the ranks of dedicated, safely employed critical thinkers in a position to be the voice of reason have thinned. In all likelihood, the coverage today would be far uglier and more prejudicial than it was when the scandal actually broke.

Science can’t function in this sort of pressure-cooker environment. The way things are heading, with the lines of communication between scientific institutions and the general public growing increasingly direct (a good thing in many cases, to be sure), and with instant, furious reaction the increasingly favored response to anything with a whiff of injustice to it — details be damned — it will become hard, if not impossible, for careful researchers unencumbered by dogmatic ideology to make good-faith efforts to understand controversial subjects, and to then publish their findings. Chagnon and Bailey, after all, were good-faith researchers. They had both demonstrated, in the way only years of diligent scholarly work can, that they were fascinated by and cared deeply about their subjects. In their published writing, both men surfaced and amplified stories about hidden communities that never would have reached the wider world otherwise. And yet all this work counted for zilch, because when controversy erupted, they fit an easy-to-process, irresistible story line: They were white men exploiting vulnerable populations for personal gain. Imagine being a young psychologist genuinely interested in transgender issues, with a genuine desire to study them rigorously. What would the Bailey blowup tell you about the wisdom of staking your career on that field of research?

We should want researchers to poke around at the edges of “respectable” beliefs about gender and race and religion and sex and identity and trauma, and other issues that make us squirm. That’s why the scientific method was invented in the first place. If activists — any activists, regardless of their political orientation or the rightness of their cause — get to decide by fiat what is and isn’t an acceptable interpretation of the world, then science is pointless, and we should just throw the whole damn thing out.