Bankruptcy in the feed
Friday, June 5 2009
This is what I’m talking about; look at these headlines:
The CNN headline is okay: you can say that upwards of 60% of bankruptcies are linked to medical bills, even if linked means the medical bills might account for less than 1/9th of the total debt. And clicking the Reuters link gave me the headline, “Medical bills underlie 60 pct. of US bankrupts…”, which is a bit of a stretch but still arguably valid.
But the NYT and eFitnessNow headlines (the latter article was probably copy-pasted from somewhere else) are not at all supported by the study. There is no way you can get from the paper as published to “Medical Bills Cause Most Bankruptcies”, except with a connecting flight thru Statistical Ignorance.
There is a school of thought that says one should take advantage of the media’s illiteracy and innumeracy to push an particular ideological or financial position. Let’s say you believe whales to be an abomination unto the Lord; so you fund a small-n study and put out a paper that says “Whales sighted at 60% of ship-wrecks”, and trust that a sufficient number of copy editors will headline the story “WHALES SINK 60% OF ALL SHIPS” – and suddenly you have the popular outrage you need for Congress to pass a bill mandating whale abstinence or whatever.
That school of thought has a name: The Republican War on Science. It’s not a progressive modus, and it’s actually contrary to the basic tenets of progressive thought. Not only should we not be mimicking that kind of duplicity, we should be taking great pains to disassociate ourselves from it entirely.
