Deron Lee je v Columbia Journalism Review objavil zanimiv primer časopisne manipulacije s strani Stephena Moora, glavnega ekonomista desničarske Heritage Foundation. Moore je pred tedni kot repliko na kolumno Paula Krugmana v časopisu Kansas City Star objavil kolumno (prvotno objavljeno v Investor’s Business Daily) kjer je dokazoval, da so zvezne države, ki imajo nižje davke, hitreje povečevale število delovnih mest po recesiji. No, pri časopisu so kasneje ugotovili, da je Moore manipuliral s podatki in da je zgodba v bistvu nasprotna.
Zgodba je zanimiva iz vidika, da se hard core desničarji ne dajo in da kadar pri ideološko gnani woodoo ekonomiki realnost ne ustreza zgodbi, pač ustrezno popravijo realnost (podatke).
It wasn’t until weeks later that Pepper realized there were problems with it. The bad news came from one of her own columnists, Yael Abouhalkah, who had taken another look at Moore’s op-ed while researching an editorial he was writing, and realized that one key paragraph—the one containing the most specific data in support of Moore’s claim—didn’t check out.
Moore had written:
No-income-tax Texas gained 1 million jobs over the last five years; California, with its 13 percent tax rate, managed to lose jobs. Oops. Florida gained hundreds of thousands of jobs while New York lost jobs. Oops.
The recurring “oops,” intended as a dig at Krugman, took on an unintended irony after Abouhalkah discovered that Moore’s numbers did not match those of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In fact, Moore later acknowledged, he was using BLS numbers not from “the last five years” but from an earlier five-year period: December 2007 to December 2012. Focusing on that period is arguably dubious, because the span captures the depths of the Great Recession and the housing crash, which hit some states harder than others—and whose impact likely would have swamped any tax-rate effect. There are other issues with the quality of Moore’s argument, too, like its glancing-at-best treatment of how factors like housing costs shape population and job growth.
In any case, Abouhalkah found, Moore’s numbers were wrong even for 2007-12, in ways that complicated the “low taxes = more jobs” message. As Abouhalkah wrote in a column this week:
Texas did not gain 1 million jobs in the 2007-2012 period Moore measured. The correct figure was a gain of 497,400 jobs.
Florida did not add hundreds of thousands of jobs in that span. It actually lost 461,500 jobs.
New York, with [its] very high income tax rates, did not lose jobs during that time. It gained 75,900 jobs.
Oops, indeed.
Vir: Deron Lee, Columbia Journalism Review
Update:
DAMIJAN blog 