Whither humanity? Three NYT snapshots

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The front page of today's print New York Times greeted Sunday breakfasters with what feels like a typical trio of world-going-to-hell headlines above the fold:

• Nearly 80 Die As Blast Strikes Somali Capital
• As It Detains parents, China Weans Children From Islam
• Trump Eroding Role Of Science In Government

As antidote, in the op-ed pages Nicholas Kristof offered up his annual reminder that by quantitative material measures the human condition continues to improve; extreme poverty, debilitating disease and child mortality are declining, literacy is growing, hundreds of thousands climb out of extreme poverty daily. 

In the same op-ed section, Ross Douthat leads with a truly arresting take on the last decade:

Nicholas Kristof, meet Nicholas Kristof

Nicholas Kristof, urging Bernie Sanders not to pull a Nader and help elect Trump, invokes the sum of all Democratic fears:

Presidential campaigns are driven in part by surprises: What if there is a new wave of Central American refugees, or a terror attack by a Muslim recently admitted to the U.S.? Either would bolster Trump’s chances.

Quite so.  But that second horror scenario flashes on a blind spot in Kristof's last column -- a truly remarkable one, relating the saga of a 20 year-old Afghan woman who, denied a formal education and shut up in purdah at home, has used online courses to learn advanced mathematics and other subjects, including English, and now, having gained admission to a junior college in Iowa, seeks a visa to study in the U.S. That's a problem:

Unfortunately, the United States isn’t helping. Last month, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul rejected her application for a student visa. That happens all the time: Brilliant young men and women are accepted by American universities and then denied visas because, under U.S. law, they are seen as immigration risks...

Black, me?

Nicholas Kristof has done yeoman's work patiently documenting the persistence of pervasive racial prejudice in American life. In a series of columns, he has presented the evidence that African Americans face discrimination in hriring, housing, education, policing and sentencing. He's also invited readers to take a self-administered test charting our own unconscious biases -- which, he suggests, are basically hard-wired into human tribal psychology (not specific prejudices, but mistrust of out-groups).

Political scientists (e.g., Brendan Nyhan) tell us, however, that beliefs in which people are emotionally invested are rarely susceptible to facts. In fact, people tend to double down on their beliefs when confronted with facts that contradict them. That tendency often hovers in the back of my mind when I read Kristof's columns in this series -- or recall them, as I did today while reading this corrective history-via-op-ed of African American response to the 1994 crime bill.

When SSI is the only route to health insurance

Re that Nicholas Kristof column alleging skewed incentives in the children's Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program: in a prior post, I looked at a study Kristof cited that does not clearly demonstrate what Kristof implies it does --that an undue proportion of children on SSI transition directly to adult SSI when their eligibility for the children's benefit ends at age 18.

The 2009 study, by Jeffrey Hemmeter, Jacqueline Kauff, and David Wittenberg, does indicate a variety of incentives, some of them potentially perverse, for staying on children's SSI while eligible and for transitioning to adult SSI if possible.  One set of incentives is indeed skewed, thanks to a dearth of resources outside the program.  It's this: SSI, for children and adults alike, can be the only source for health insurance and specific health services:

When Nick Kristof stretches a study

They say that three times is a trend, so I will have to make do with two thirds of a trend regarding Nicholas Kristof's use of social science research. Or more precisely, regarding Kristof's use of research to back what he presents as inconvenient truths regarding the behavior of poor people or the efficacy of attempts to help them.

Instance 1: Kristof is currently taking a lot of heat from liberal social policy experts for using anecdotal evidence to suggest that significant numbers of parents of children receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) deliberately keep their children illiterate to avoid losing the child's disability check.  More precisely, Kristof uses anecdotal evidence supported by statistical sleight-of-hand.

Harold Polllack rather gently points to the questionable deployment of data. I'd like to elaborate a bit. Pollack's case first:

Beautiful speech, but...

I am troubled by my tribalism.

I am susceptible, in case no one has noticed, to Obama's rhetoric.  I see myself, as I once noted, in the self-mocking confession of an old graduate school classmate (I give the provenance, because grad students in the humanities are likely to be of this tribe):

I love Obama...Every time he speaks I emit a small sigh of joy, love and delight.  I know, perhaps my eyes are clouded, but he seems so completely appropriate each time he speaks, that he could be singing the national anthem in Swahili, and I wouldn't care.

So when I read Obama's historic address to the students of the University of Yangon, Burma's principal university, my heart naturally swelled in my breast,  and tears welled up. It was, as you might expect (if you're so susceptible), a beautifully constructed speech -- opening dazzling prospects of freedom and prosperity to the Burmese, applying subtle pressure at all the right points on their leaders (as I heard no less tough a judge than Human Right Watch's Tom Malinowski affirm last night), honoring Burma's dissidents, making a cogent case, as Obama always does, that America's best values are or ought to be universal values, softening the paternalism by acknowledging past American error (i.e., in Foxspeak, "apologizing").

Enough with the "what would China think?" shame spirals

This "whatever can the Chinese think?" meme is getting tired fast.  On Friday, Kerry; today, Kristof:

A bewildered Chinese friend asked me how the world’s leading democracy could be so mismanaged that it could shut down. I couldn’t explain. This budget war reflects inanity, incompetence and cowardice that are sadly inexplicable.

How about "explaining" that when faced with hard economic times extending through two election cycles, the American public twice threw out a set of incumbent officials -- as free electorates do -- and ended up with divided government?  The result is a bitter battle over fiscal policy. Those charged with making policy, instead of knifing out their radically different prescriptions behind closed Politburo doors, fought them out in a public display of negotiating brinkmanship and came up with a settlement in which both sides yielded some (though I personally think that through their own folly Democrats have yielded far too much).  There's nothing here to be embarrassed about before ruthless autocrats who have responded to the latest wave of democratic ferment abroad with a ferocious wave of repression and intimidation of dissent.

The Libyan conundrum, and the blogger's

Those who knew little or nothing about Libya before the current crisis, yet feel the temptation or responsibility to "take a stand, might envy  Nicholas Kristof's understandable pride in the basis of his own judgment:

I opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion because my reporting convinced me that most Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein but didn’t want American forces intruding on their soil. This time my reporting persuades me that most Libyans welcome outside intervention.

For those of us lacking that basis, the demurral of James Downie is refreshing:

A bit of moonshine in Kristof's "Moonshine or the kids?"

Hesitantly, reluctantly, Nicholas Kristof today suggests that the poor in many countries need to spend less money on alcohol and tobacco and more on education -- while also saving more.  It's an "ugly secret of global poverty," he writes,

that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

Kristof's basis is largely anecdotal -- families he interviewed in Congo Republic. But he calls for backup from a study, to which he helpfully provides a link:

Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found that the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.

The results Kristof pulls from this study need some qualifying. First, Banerjee and Duflo reported findings from thirteen countries, with large variations in spending habits among them. It's true that Banerjee and Duflo find that the extremely poor in a range of countries spend between 4.1% and 8.1% of their income on alcohol and tobacco, and just about 2% on education averaged across the countries studied. But: "The reason spending is low is that children in poor households typically attend public schools or other schools that do not charge a fee" (9). Where fees are charged, the percentage of household income spent on education rises: it is 6% in Cote D'Ivoire. The study did not include Congo Republic, but one might imagine that since fees are ubiquitous there, school spending would also be relatively high.