A few weeks ago I posted an article on the Rebel Yid Facebook Page by local columnist Charles Richardson, Tripping Over Stereotypes.  It addressed a comment from Rick Santorum that assumed that most welfare recipients were black, even in Iowa with a small black population.  It did not brand Santorum as a racist, but addressed some common stereotypes that we often innocently stumble on.

The post received several strong comments.  One reader went on a bit of a racist rant and was blocked, but others made remarks that also caused me some concern.  One reader noted that while minorities were only 3% of the population in Iowa they comprised 15% of the welfare recipients and were thus 5 times more likely to be on welfare.

Some readers stopped following me, claiming I was too liberal.  I have certainly lost followers before but never for that reason.   They may have lent some small credibility to my often challenged claim to be beyond left and right.

In an effort to address the other comments, there are two common fallacies on such statistics. The first is the fallacy of reversal.  If 30% percent of welfare recipients  are minority that does not mean that 30% of minorities are on welfare.  ( the numbers are simply to illustrate the point and are not real.)  In Poland just before WW II,  20% of the small Polish Communist Party was Jewish, but this represented less than 1% of the large Jewish population of Poland- 10% of the population before the holocaust).

These fallacies have enormous implications.  Many American leaders feared opening up the immigration before the war, believing that Jews were largely communist.

This fallacy is common. We have been told that marijuana is a gateway drug to harder drugs because a large percent of heroin users had previously smoked marijuana.  But just because 90% of heroin addicts had previously used pot does not mean that 90% of pot smokers will become heroin addicts.  This same logic could be used to make beer and cigarettes a gateway drug.

The second most common statistical fallacy is that correlation is equivalent to causation.  The correlation of minority status to welfare recipients does not mean that the cause of dependency is the fact of being in a minority.  Whether the assumption is genetic inferiority or social discrimination, the proper research will address the significant number of  other factors that would explain this correlation.

You are more likely to be in poverty if you have dropped out of high school, had a child out of wedlock as a teenager, have been convicted of a crime, use recreational drugs regularly, or are unaffiliated with a church.

If I was to describe two different people:  one was a high school drop out single mother with her first child at 17, and the other was only described as a minority, and you had to guess which one was more likely to be on welfare, you would quickly realize that factors other than minority status may be involved in poverty.

Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart, focuses on the white community only to illustrate that the loss of common values is more critical to understanding these social problems  than minority profiling. Bradford Wilcox reviewed the book in the Wall Street Journal in Values Inequality, 1/31/12.

Excerpt:

Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends instead that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.

Since the 1980s, divorce rates have risen, marital quality has fallen and nonmarital childbearing is skyrocketing among the white lower class. Less than 5% of white college-educated women have children outside of marriage, compared with approximately 40% of white women with just a high-school diploma. The bottom line is that a growing marriage divide now runs through the heart of white America.

Mr. Murray tells similar stories about crime, religion and work. Who would have guessed, for instance, that the white upper class is now much more likely to be found in church on any given Sunday than the white working class? Or that, just before the recession struck, white men in the 30-49 age bracket with a high-school diploma were about four times more likely to have simply stopped looking for work, compared with their college-educated peers? By Mr. Murray’s account, faith and industriousness are in increasingly short supply among working-class whites.

We have a political system that is addicted to race to explain our social problems.  This may be as much of an obstacle to understanding our problem as the stereotypes that remain in our discourse.

Those that have identified themselves in their fight against racism, sexism, and prejudice have become victims of their own success.

Young blacks are better educated and getting better jobs and have not grown up to news reels of black protesters attacked with fire hoses and German Shepherds.   Conservative black political figures such as Herman Cain and Allan West chip away at racist monolithic stereotypes.

But those who have staked their identity on racial divisiveness are threatened by the young who are enjoying the less prejudiced environment and who identify less with the struggles that produced the opportunities that they now take for granted.

Yes black teenagers experience high unemployment but this is the result of economic policies with good intentions disconnected from reality. Higher minimum wages and employment friction costs have led to increased unemployment of white kids and other minorities as well.  In fact as education and experience factor in the problem, race explains less of the difference.

This is not limited to race.  Now that women are nearly half of the new accountants, lawyers, and doctors, equality has become an expectation rather than a struggle.  The women’s movement is struggling as women, now earning more money, are more concerned with taxes and government encroachment into individual rights.  Now that they have the rights to the same opportunities as men, they would like to be able to keep and enjoy the fruits of their work.  Women also respond to economic incentives. Leftist feminists now struggle with educated women in positions of power who are conservative and sometimes, God forbid, pro-life.

The ADL, the consummate organization fighting anti-Semitism in this country, also has to contend with its success.  Anti-Semitism never caught on in this country with the violence it has in Europe and the Middle East, but even this prejudice has subsided so much the ADL has broadened its mission to focus on fighting hatreds against gays and immigrants.  Their ‘No Place for Hate’ programs are representative of their new broader focus, although I find it somewhat ironic that the same voices that still shout the loudest about sexism and racism seem the most tolerant of modern anti-Semitism.

This is not to say that prejudice does not still exist and that we should be callous towards it. Gay rights is probably the new frontier of civil rights.  It just means that we should recognize the progress made and adapt accordingly.  Prejudice has now become more of a political tool than a cultural struggle.  Revenge has become confused with justice.

The problem with winning the war against prejudice is that now the generals are no longer the center of attention and must now find other work.  In a real war the generals would be delighted.

U.S. journalists, economists, an political figures rarely express indignation about the super-high incomes of anyone except corporate executives.  Scarcely anyone professes outrage about Forbes list of the twenty best-paid  actors, who average $23 million apiece in 2005. U.S. business magazines and newspapers do not even bother with annual surveys of the incomes of the best-paid trial lawyers, TV news anchors, executives of private companies, investment bankers or portfolio managers.

New York magazine’s 2004 survey of local talent managed to turn up three famous hedge-fund managers who earned between $540 million and $1.02 billion in 2004. Those huge incomes were in no sense “distributed” at the expense of ordinary workers.  They were earned from fees willingly paid by affluent and sophisticated investors (hedge-fund managers usually keep 20 percent of profits they earn for investors).  The Irish rock group U-2 grossed $260 million from concerts alone in 2005, but that was from tickets willingly paid by Bono fans.  Readers of Parade magazine were supposed to be amused rather than outraged that rapper Sean “P. Diddy” Combs earned $36 million in 2005 while radio talker Howard Stern got by on a mere $31 million.  … there is no reason to believe that if Combs and Stern had been paid millions less their loss would have somehow benefited those with lower incomes (including most of their fans).

Many people share a voyeuristic fascination with what other people earn yet regard it as none of their business –except when discussing corporate executives.

From Income and Wealth by Alan Reynolds

HKO comment:   the author’s critical comment is the extent that high corporate compensation is deemed to come out of some other peoples’ pockets while celebrity salaries are not.  I do believe that many corporate salaries are excessive and on average not indicative of shareholder success.  Buffet, Jobs and Gates of Berkshire, Apple and  Microsoft became very wealthy because of their long term commitment and ownership of the shares of their company and few of their fellow shareholders hold any hostility to their wealth.  Many corporate executives, on the other hand, benefit from short term events outside their control that are too often mistakenly attributed to their talent.  The bigger problem with corporate bonuses is not that they are too high, but that they are too tied to short term ‘performance’ that is often mistakenly attributed to talent.

Mistakes are undramatic. We all make them, but many would prefer the drama of sinister motives and conspiracy theories  to the realities of bad judgment and human error. It makes for better headlines and fodder for book titles.

Conspiracy theories are often just thinly veiled prejudices. Behind so many such theories is a distrust of Jews who have been the brunt of endless conspiracies, most notably the endlessly enduring fraud, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But conspiracy theories are certainly not limited to Jews.  Neocons, the Federal Reserve, and various councils formed to address social, political, and economic problems are often deemed to be mere conspiracies to achieve power and wealth at the expense of the rest of us.  But that fact that so many of these organizations fail at their mission does not mean they are a conspiracy.

Conspiracies usually are the result of preordained conclusions that read for confirmation rather than information.  If I want to believe that George W. Bush was responsible for 9/11 I will be able to collect reports of meetings and events that appear to confirm that theory, and simply ignore any contradictory evidence.  There were similar claims that FDR intentionally grouped our ships in Pearl Harbor to drag us into war.  Many in the Middle East believe that Israel caused 9/11 to drag the U.S. into a war against Islam. They repeat the falsehood that the Jews knew not to go to work at the World Trade Center on the day of the attack.  This theory persists even after Bin Laden took credit for the attack.

If you find yourself falling for a conspiracy theory remember the following:

• Never attribute to a conspiracy that which can be explained with simple incompetence or error.  Humans do tend to err, often dramatically.
• There are few people who can keep a secret.  Just witness the leaks of confidential and privileged information.
• Ask yourself what information would you accept that disproves this theory.  If every bit of evidence that disproves the theory is twisted to just further prove the theory; if  your theory can not be disproven then it is likely a conspiracy theory.  When a Swiss court in the 1930’s determined that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fraud the Nazis just claimed that was proof that the Jews controlled the courts.
• In the face of irrefutable evidence you can still reach the wrong conclusion. Many conspiracy theories are believed because they rely on facts that are true. But part of the truth can be more misleading than all of a lie. By reading for confirmation, the theorists ignore the conflicting evidence.
• We often prefer the comfort of lies rather than to question our own beliefs.  It is easier for us to believe in a villain than to accept the uncertainty of human fraility.  Unwavering certainty in explaining very complex events is the hallmark of a conspiracy theorist.
• Just because one is well read does not mean the theories they espouse have validity.  The very intelligent and the well educated are not immune from the intellectual biases that accept evidence that supports their views, while rejecting evidence that refutes it.

The best remedy for conspiracy theories is an open mind, skepticism, and curiosity.

According to the July 26, 2010 print version of Newsweek:

There are 141 million active blogs, up from a mere 12,000 ten years ago.

Daily e-mails are up 20 fold from 12 to 247 billion in the same period.

Daily Google searches are up 20 fold to 2 billion.

Text messages are up from 400,000 to 4.5 billion.

We spend six times as much time online; from 2.7 hours a week to 18 hours per week.

The cost of hard-drive storage has dropped from $10 to 6 cents per gigabyte.

Yet daily letters mailed has dropped only a little 207.88 billion to 175.67 billion, the number of daily newspapers from 1,480 to 1,302.

What does all this mean?  I really don’t know, but the cynic in me doubts that we’re better informed as a result, but I could be wrong.  More data, more information, and more opinions do not automatically translate into more wisdom.  In fact the more we are overloaded with information the more we seemed starved for wisdom.

I do think that we are defining some new sense of community especially when the new social media are thrown in. It is distant enough to be less likely to be civil that personal contact, but the individualized nature lets everyone set rules of conduct.  It is so much easier to stay in touch with friends and family there may be some real positive impacts on family and community networks.

How this digital community affects communities that are geographically defined will be interesting to see.