The fine art of twisting data
Dark Heritage
By BILL KELLER, NYT
Last week the Heritage Foundation delivered a report claiming that legalizing undocumented immigrants will create a more-or-less permanent underclass of benefit-sucking, wage-lowering, economy-crippling parasites, with a cost to American taxpayers of — megaphone, please — SIX POINT THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! The report was promptly denounced, not least by reputable conservative economists, for example here and here and here. Then one of the report’s co-authors resigned from Heritage after The Washington Post discovered that he had once proposed blocking immigrants with low I.Q. scores. (More on that later.)
You might think that after such a reception the report would be quickly retired to the Bogus Science Hall of Fame. But not so fast. This one deserves a closer look.
The Heritage Foundation has never made a secret of its conservative political orientation, but it has generally tried to remain within plausible boundaries of analysis. Heritage gives you data with lots of spin, but tends to avoid being downright outlandish. On issues like health care and welfare reform, Heritage scholarship has made serious contributions to the public debate, whatever you think of the policies prescribed.
But on immigration, something else is going on. As the economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economic adviser to John McCain, pointed out at National Review Online, until 2006 the Heritage line on immigrants was comfortably within the mainstream: that immigrants are not welfare sponges but rather — as consumers, workers and creators of new businesses — they, and especially their children and grandchildren, are contributors to the national wealth. Then in 2007, with an immigration bill pending in Congress, Heritage analyst Robert Rector issued the first version of the hair-raising analysis that was repurposed last week.
(More here.)
Last week the Heritage Foundation delivered a report claiming that legalizing undocumented immigrants will create a more-or-less permanent underclass of benefit-sucking, wage-lowering, economy-crippling parasites, with a cost to American taxpayers of — megaphone, please — SIX POINT THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! The report was promptly denounced, not least by reputable conservative economists, for example here and here and here. Then one of the report’s co-authors resigned from Heritage after The Washington Post discovered that he had once proposed blocking immigrants with low I.Q. scores. (More on that later.)
You might think that after such a reception the report would be quickly retired to the Bogus Science Hall of Fame. But not so fast. This one deserves a closer look.
The Heritage Foundation has never made a secret of its conservative political orientation, but it has generally tried to remain within plausible boundaries of analysis. Heritage gives you data with lots of spin, but tends to avoid being downright outlandish. On issues like health care and welfare reform, Heritage scholarship has made serious contributions to the public debate, whatever you think of the policies prescribed.
But on immigration, something else is going on. As the economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economic adviser to John McCain, pointed out at National Review Online, until 2006 the Heritage line on immigrants was comfortably within the mainstream: that immigrants are not welfare sponges but rather — as consumers, workers and creators of new businesses — they, and especially their children and grandchildren, are contributors to the national wealth. Then in 2007, with an immigration bill pending in Congress, Heritage analyst Robert Rector issued the first version of the hair-raising analysis that was repurposed last week.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home