Look who’s being taken seriously in the New York Times!
By John Lott, that’s who!
(In case you’re not a pathological blog-reader, here’s a backgrounder on Mr. Lott).
Pay careful attention to how the article is constructed. The goal of the piece is to demonstrate that economic reporters are all lefties who can’t report economic matters straight (same goal as the crappy “research” it purports to report on), and to that end it contains howlers like this:
For instance, they said, the unemployment rate in the Clinton administration averaged 5.2 percent, only three-tenths of a percentage point less than it has under George W. Bush. But while 44 percent of Mr. Clinton’s headlines on unemployment were positive, only 23 percent of President Bush’s headlines on the subject have been upbeat.
Hmm. Why could that be. Must be bias. Or, it could be because the unemployment rates went down consistently during Clinton’s tenure, which GWB has failed to do. There’s a reason only one month with solid job growth data under Bush (March 2004) is cited–they’re pretty rare–and in the context of Bush’s own purported expectations of job growth, it falls pretty short. (By the way, what don’t those liberal economic reporters harp on how far short of his own job growth goals team-Bush has fallen?) Of course, there are lots of reasons the current unemployment rate is probably too low.
I could go on and on about the misprepresentations in the article itself, but greatest sin is the set-up. They quote an acknowledged and thoroughgoing fraud who is known for manipulating and abusing data. They do actually report that Lott is “controversial,” but the only reason they give is the Mary Rosh sock-puppet incident, rather than his more serious (but less amusing) statistical sins. This simply doesn’t convey the depth of the problems there are with Lott and his research.
Then, they end the article with this:
“To even base a story on Lott’s work at this point in time is to demonstrate a pronounced bias toward right-wing hacks,” said Brad DeLong, a liberal-leaning economist at the University of California at Berkeley.
Brad DeLong is, of course, correct, but the factual basis to make that clear is excluded from the article. The article is, in fact, designed to make DeLong (a liberal economist! I knew it!) look shrill and intolerant.
Paper of record, my ass. What the hell is wrong with these people?