Nonfiction
Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: History of the peoples and animals in the Arctic area claimed by Russia and the US via Alaska. There’s a lot of slaughter as both Soviet and capitalist ideas about what whales etc. were for left very little room for relations that were reciprocal and extending indefinitely.
Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History: Equally mocking of liberal pretensions and conservative indifference to the environment, Farmer traces the history of California via trees-eucalyptus, palm, oranges, redwoods. They’re interesting stories, and some of the sharpest moments come when people import the language of “immigration” to defend or attack certain trees. As he points out, though, the great exclusionist racists of the 19th and 20th centuries were often the most excited to import trees they thought would be good for the economy, so the analogy was never coherent.
Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity: Interesting history of post-Civil-War-to-present American Jewish ideas about race, and alternatives to racial categorizations, as applied to Jews themselves. Understandably focuses more on Jews who fought against racism generally, but does discuss the racism that many endorsed in order to distinguish themselves from Blacks. Jews were both drawn to the benefits of whiteness and pushed towards it by the larger white society: “In many ways it was native-born whites, bent on preserving a stable and optimistic vision of their national culture, who had the greatest stake in seeing Jews take on the role of white Americans.”
The book traces the fraught ideas of a Jewish “nation” which came to sound disloyal; by the 1870s “religion” appeared as a more acceptable substitute, but then came to be problematic too, so more Jews adopted the idea of a Jewish “race” to allow them to express the desire for a distinct identity without unwanted political connotations. Obviously that also didn’t work out so well. Perhaps less obviously to us now, race language expressed something about the social dimension of Jewishness just as Jewish social distinctiveness from other non-Blacks was decreasing, although such language did allow Jews to maintain a connection to persecution even as their economic and social power increased.
Meanwhile, post-Reconstruction hardening of racial lines made Jews increasingly troubling as liminal whites. Many Jews tried to manage this by claiming unqualified whiteness, often by distinguishing themselves from Blacks, with the lynching of Leo Frank a stark reminder of what could happen to racially compromised Jews.
Eastern European Jewish immigrants may have resisted whiteness more, in part because they had more urban experience/skills when they arrived, and rarely competed for jobs with Blacks in ways that other immigrants did. With their status in doubt, early 20th-century Jews hotly debated whether Jews were a race or a religious denomination. “[R]ace ceased to serve as a successful vehicle to set limits on assimilation and to assert Jewish contributions to American life…. Instead, due to white America’s emergent obsession with shoring up its racial boundaries, Jewish racial particularity had become either the basis for anti-Jewish prejudice or a rationale for urging the ‘fusion’ of Jews with non-Jewish society. Zionists “saw race as an essential building block of Jewish nationhood,” but were wary of “casting Jews in the role of racial outsiders and, as a result, often tried to downplay the physical dimensions of race while stressing its spiritual and psychological aspects.” That didn’t work so well. One result: a new focus on intermarriage, including in popular culture, which often framed exogamy as “indispesable to the building of the American nation.” Focusing on religion instead of race offered the prospect of opposing intermarriage without resisting assimilation.
At the same time, calcifying racial hierarchies in immigration laws made a Jewish “race” politically dangerous, so Jewish leaders attacked the government’s efforts to classify Jews as a “race,” successfully lobbying Congress and the Census Bureau to remove “Jewish” as a racial category from census forms and to prevent exclusion of Jews from eligibility from naturalization. They also fought attempts to link Jews, ancient Israelites, and Semites to Africa.
Between the world wars, antisemites focused on the relationship between Jewishness and whiteness. “If they could no longer defuse the danger they saw in the Jews by likening them to African Americans, they aimed instead to study, clarify, and expose their role as an unstable element in white society.” Henry Ford, for example, “aimed at unmasking aspects of Jewish racial difference that were thought to be dangerously masquerading as sameness.” Still, the association of Jews with modernity and of Americans with modernity meant that many other American whites were unwilling to turn away from them entirely, and even many American antisemites held out the possibility of assimilation. Harvard’s Jewish quotas were supposedly designed to end the practice of “Jewish segregation” by keeping their numbers down, not excluding them entirely. President Lowell wanted to segregate Black students on campus, but wanted to make Jewish students assimilate by surrounding them with non-Jewish whites.
What about Jewish interwar attitudes and behaviors towards Blacks? Goldstein characterizes them as mostly better than other whites’, often due to empathy, but deeply inconsistent and partial, often out of fear of losing their own place in white America. One of the best things I learned: Jewish communists staged “white chauvinism trials” in which they convicted their own Jewish members for saying racist things or refusing to participate in Party work in Black neighborhoods.
Some Jews tried to switch from “race” to “ethnicity” to draw some of the sharper stings of race language. But race still had a powerful pull in providing community and connection to other Jews. Gender also showed up as male Jews “sometimes tried to deflect unflattering racial images onto their female counterparts” (never you say!) and Goldstein argues that Jews internalized appearance-based anti-Jewish stereotypes more thoroughly than other anti-Jewish stereotypes. As the interwar period wore on, scholars focusing on pluralism pushed Jews towards more cultural and ethnic categorizations and away from biological “race,” a reformulation that gained much more power after WWII. And whiteness had finally consolidated: the INS introduced new naturalization forms in 1940 that designated European immigrants as “white” instead of using the traditional, narrower designations. During the war, likewise, Black and Asian soldiers were segregated into their own units while Jews, Italians, and Irish were assigned to “white” units along with the descendants of Britons, Swedes, etc.
Postwar optimism (and of course the example of the Holocaust) made the US “more hopeful” and less exclusionary of Jews, which then empowered Jews to voice more empathy and support for Blacks “without fear that it would bring their whiteness into question.” But “ethnicity” didn’t work as a long-term frame for Jewishness because it didn’t meet the “emotional needs” of Jews or the expectations of non-Jews who hoped that Jews would fade into a denomination. “Jews often defined themselves publicly as a religious group while privately pursuing Jewishness as a tribal phenomenon.”
Goldstein takes Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah Song as emblematic of current tensions in Jewish whiteness: Sandler “takes pride in his cast of characters precisely because they have achieved such success in entering the inner circle of white American society. The song clearly celebrates Jews’ status as racial insiders in America, holding them up as the antithesis of notorious racial villains like O.J. Simpson (and in a subsequent version, Osama bin Laden), even as it undermines the Hollywood illusion that makes Jews into undifferentiated whites.” (I was also interested in the statistic that, while about 50% of Jews marry non-Jews, in Hollywood portrayals the intermarriage rate is essentially 100%, Dirty Dancing notwithstanding.)
I was especially interested in the point that Jewish embrace of racial liberalism “allowed them to identify as part of the white mainstream culture without making them feel as if they had abandoned their legacy as a persecuted minority group,” because Jews can ground racial liberalism in the legacy of our own slavery in Israel. But also, “[w]ith their own sense of ethnic difference affirmed or perhaps even augmented, Jews could continue on the path of integration with little fear that they were complicit in the misdeeds of an exclusionary society.” Tensions became more evident, however, as Blacks gained more control over the relations between the groups and didn’t always see Jews as allies; the Jewish narrative of Black-Jewish links undermined claims for Black distinctiveness.
Ultimately, Goldstein argues, growing ethnic consciousness and declining ethnic cohesiveness are “two sides of the same coin.” What is Jewish identity? The very difficulty of the question increases its salience. Some Jews now protest the absence of the category from the census. And a plurality-40%--of Jews said in 2001 that “being a part of the Jewish people” was the most important aspect of their identity, while only 14% said that religious observance was. In the end, Goldstein suggests, only the “dissolution of the dominant culture” can solve the tension that Jews experience between acceptance and group identity.
Guy Lawson, Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con: Israel was a child of privilege who loved trading, watched traders up close during the 80s as they bribed and traded inside information, and decided he was successful enough to start his own hedge fund. When he immediately started losing, he immediately started cooking the books, and as things got bad, he looked desperately for rescue. He thought he found it in the bigger fraudsters who promised him access to secret bond auctions only available to the richest of the rich; though they kept failing to deliver, and though antifraud controls prevented them from stealing most of the money he had already stolen from clients, he believed them for a long time-after all, they were only revealing further depths to an economy he already knew was crooked. Born on third base and convinced he hit a triple, unable to build a real hedge fund, Israel believed that “shortcuts” were available; only fools played by the rules. And why would he believe otherwise?
Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A history of “female husbands” in the 18th/19th century US and England: people assigned female at birth who lived as men and married women, until the category fell apart with the rise of discourses about lesbians. Manion uses “they/them” as the pronouns throughout, which highlights the ways in which we cannot know how they really thought about their genders given that even their own words, if we really believe they spoke those words, were produced in response to legal and social threats. Other interesting points: the consideration of the female husbands’ wives, often mocked by contemporaries for not knowing (a position they may have been forced to take to protect their own interests after their husbands’ exposure)-Manion points out that many may have been perfectly content to have a female husband. And Manion suggests that, during this period, female husbands were judged not for being failed women but for being failed men-often effeminate-which in a way accepts their own gender characterization.
Wes Moore, Five Days: Stories from the protests in Baltimore surrounding Freddy Gray’s death. No pat answers but some fascinating perspectives from police officers, ordinary citizens including the guy who cut a fire hose to interfere with an attempt to put out a burning CVS, and a juvenile justice lawyer who gives a powerful defense of acts of violence that come from despair.
Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: A history of the Chinese workers who built the Western railway, told by reconstructing their world from existing evidence. Of the tens of thousands of letters they sent home, none have been found by historians, but Chang consults other contemporaneous accounts from Chinese workers in the US, stories passed down in families, and even what can be gleaned from records left by suspicious and often confused white people. Among other things, he argues (somewhat optimistically) that the workers’ strike often considered to have been a total failure was actually a success, given that wages began to rise pretty substantially thereafter.
Eula Biss, Having and Being Had: Poetic meditations on ownership, property, capitalism, whiteness, and their interrelations. Hard for me to say much more about the essays, but they could be useful for spurring further thought.
Tracy Campbell, The Year of Peril: 1942 in the US-a year that began with significant fear over whether further attacks on the mainland were coming, and continued with a lot less unity than we remember in retrospect. Racial terrorism continued despite Black leaders’ attempts to win democracy at home; Republicans prepared for a significant midterm that might let them take back leverage; and war production was nowhere near what FDR wanted even as price controls and rationing of gas and even coffee frustrated the public. One of the standard patterns of US politics emerged: in a low-turnout year spurred by vote suppression (the millions of men away from home in the military usually couldn’t vote; people who’d moved recently-and with mobilization there were a lot of them-usually couldn’t vote; and of course millions in the South both Black and white couldn’t vote because of poll taxes and other racial suppression measures), Republican gains convinced the conventional wisdom that the US was too conservative for progressive policies.
Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics: Harford starts out by noting that, while Darrell Huff’s How To Lie with Statistics was important, it also can be used to undersell the importance of the right statistics. Darrell Huff, in later years, wrote a sequel (never published) called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, as he was paid to do. “Yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics-but it’s even easier to lie without them.”
But how do you know whether you have the right statistics, correctly measured? Harford advocates both reflection on your own experience and on what else might be known-being willing to update your priors, as it were. Pay careful attention to what is being counted. For example, Harford explains that some-but by no means all-of the high infant mortality in the US seems to be “the result of recording births before twenty-four weeks as live when in other countries they would be recorded as miscarried pregnancies.” Doctors in different places, that is, are different in the likelihood that they will record a pregnancy that ends at twenty-two weeks as a live birth, followed by an early death, rather than as a late miscarriage. Now we need more information, such as late miscarriage rates in various countries, to get a fuller picture. But: “For babies born after twenty-four weeks, the US infant mortality rate falls from 6.1 to 4.2 deaths per thousand live births. The rate in Finland barely shifts, from 2.3 to 2.1.” So there is something going on with how deaths are counted.
Harford also discusses the replication crisis in psychology and the effects of publication bias. As he points out, data are themselves subject to survivor bias; he notes that the blockbuster book “In Search of Excellence” offered management lessons from studying forty-three of the most outstanding corporations of that time, but within two years, a third of them were at least financially unstable.
His contrarianism also takes him down less fruitful paths. For example, he says, “Very few people have enough wealth to fund their lifestyle purely out of interest payments, and so if we want to understand how inequality manifests itself in everyday life, it makes sense to look at income rather than wealth.” Um, no; doing that makes it harder to understand why Black families get worse mortgages and live in worse neighborhoods than white families with the same income. Likewise, his generic endorsement of curiosity doesn’t account for the way that “do your own research” misinformation (Qanon, vaccine denial) works. But I was interested in the research he reported in which people were asked to rate their understanding of various political issues on which they had opinions on a scale of one to seven and then asked to elaborate on what they understood. Apparently, after doing this, “people became less likely to give money to lobby groups or other organizations that supported the positions they had once favored.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History: Equally mocking of liberal pretensions and conservative indifference to the environment, Farmer traces the history of California via trees-eucalyptus, palm, oranges, redwoods. They’re interesting stories, and some of the sharpest moments come when people import the language of “immigration” to defend or attack certain trees. As he points out, though, the great exclusionist racists of the 19th and 20th centuries were often the most excited to import trees they thought would be good for the economy, so the analogy was never coherent.
Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity: Interesting history of post-Civil-War-to-present American Jewish ideas about race, and alternatives to racial categorizations, as applied to Jews themselves. Understandably focuses more on Jews who fought against racism generally, but does discuss the racism that many endorsed in order to distinguish themselves from Blacks. Jews were both drawn to the benefits of whiteness and pushed towards it by the larger white society: “In many ways it was native-born whites, bent on preserving a stable and optimistic vision of their national culture, who had the greatest stake in seeing Jews take on the role of white Americans.”
The book traces the fraught ideas of a Jewish “nation” which came to sound disloyal; by the 1870s “religion” appeared as a more acceptable substitute, but then came to be problematic too, so more Jews adopted the idea of a Jewish “race” to allow them to express the desire for a distinct identity without unwanted political connotations. Obviously that also didn’t work out so well. Perhaps less obviously to us now, race language expressed something about the social dimension of Jewishness just as Jewish social distinctiveness from other non-Blacks was decreasing, although such language did allow Jews to maintain a connection to persecution even as their economic and social power increased.
Meanwhile, post-Reconstruction hardening of racial lines made Jews increasingly troubling as liminal whites. Many Jews tried to manage this by claiming unqualified whiteness, often by distinguishing themselves from Blacks, with the lynching of Leo Frank a stark reminder of what could happen to racially compromised Jews.
Eastern European Jewish immigrants may have resisted whiteness more, in part because they had more urban experience/skills when they arrived, and rarely competed for jobs with Blacks in ways that other immigrants did. With their status in doubt, early 20th-century Jews hotly debated whether Jews were a race or a religious denomination. “[R]ace ceased to serve as a successful vehicle to set limits on assimilation and to assert Jewish contributions to American life…. Instead, due to white America’s emergent obsession with shoring up its racial boundaries, Jewish racial particularity had become either the basis for anti-Jewish prejudice or a rationale for urging the ‘fusion’ of Jews with non-Jewish society. Zionists “saw race as an essential building block of Jewish nationhood,” but were wary of “casting Jews in the role of racial outsiders and, as a result, often tried to downplay the physical dimensions of race while stressing its spiritual and psychological aspects.” That didn’t work so well. One result: a new focus on intermarriage, including in popular culture, which often framed exogamy as “indispesable to the building of the American nation.” Focusing on religion instead of race offered the prospect of opposing intermarriage without resisting assimilation.
At the same time, calcifying racial hierarchies in immigration laws made a Jewish “race” politically dangerous, so Jewish leaders attacked the government’s efforts to classify Jews as a “race,” successfully lobbying Congress and the Census Bureau to remove “Jewish” as a racial category from census forms and to prevent exclusion of Jews from eligibility from naturalization. They also fought attempts to link Jews, ancient Israelites, and Semites to Africa.
Between the world wars, antisemites focused on the relationship between Jewishness and whiteness. “If they could no longer defuse the danger they saw in the Jews by likening them to African Americans, they aimed instead to study, clarify, and expose their role as an unstable element in white society.” Henry Ford, for example, “aimed at unmasking aspects of Jewish racial difference that were thought to be dangerously masquerading as sameness.” Still, the association of Jews with modernity and of Americans with modernity meant that many other American whites were unwilling to turn away from them entirely, and even many American antisemites held out the possibility of assimilation. Harvard’s Jewish quotas were supposedly designed to end the practice of “Jewish segregation” by keeping their numbers down, not excluding them entirely. President Lowell wanted to segregate Black students on campus, but wanted to make Jewish students assimilate by surrounding them with non-Jewish whites.
What about Jewish interwar attitudes and behaviors towards Blacks? Goldstein characterizes them as mostly better than other whites’, often due to empathy, but deeply inconsistent and partial, often out of fear of losing their own place in white America. One of the best things I learned: Jewish communists staged “white chauvinism trials” in which they convicted their own Jewish members for saying racist things or refusing to participate in Party work in Black neighborhoods.
Some Jews tried to switch from “race” to “ethnicity” to draw some of the sharper stings of race language. But race still had a powerful pull in providing community and connection to other Jews. Gender also showed up as male Jews “sometimes tried to deflect unflattering racial images onto their female counterparts” (never you say!) and Goldstein argues that Jews internalized appearance-based anti-Jewish stereotypes more thoroughly than other anti-Jewish stereotypes. As the interwar period wore on, scholars focusing on pluralism pushed Jews towards more cultural and ethnic categorizations and away from biological “race,” a reformulation that gained much more power after WWII. And whiteness had finally consolidated: the INS introduced new naturalization forms in 1940 that designated European immigrants as “white” instead of using the traditional, narrower designations. During the war, likewise, Black and Asian soldiers were segregated into their own units while Jews, Italians, and Irish were assigned to “white” units along with the descendants of Britons, Swedes, etc.
Postwar optimism (and of course the example of the Holocaust) made the US “more hopeful” and less exclusionary of Jews, which then empowered Jews to voice more empathy and support for Blacks “without fear that it would bring their whiteness into question.” But “ethnicity” didn’t work as a long-term frame for Jewishness because it didn’t meet the “emotional needs” of Jews or the expectations of non-Jews who hoped that Jews would fade into a denomination. “Jews often defined themselves publicly as a religious group while privately pursuing Jewishness as a tribal phenomenon.”
Goldstein takes Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah Song as emblematic of current tensions in Jewish whiteness: Sandler “takes pride in his cast of characters precisely because they have achieved such success in entering the inner circle of white American society. The song clearly celebrates Jews’ status as racial insiders in America, holding them up as the antithesis of notorious racial villains like O.J. Simpson (and in a subsequent version, Osama bin Laden), even as it undermines the Hollywood illusion that makes Jews into undifferentiated whites.” (I was also interested in the statistic that, while about 50% of Jews marry non-Jews, in Hollywood portrayals the intermarriage rate is essentially 100%, Dirty Dancing notwithstanding.)
I was especially interested in the point that Jewish embrace of racial liberalism “allowed them to identify as part of the white mainstream culture without making them feel as if they had abandoned their legacy as a persecuted minority group,” because Jews can ground racial liberalism in the legacy of our own slavery in Israel. But also, “[w]ith their own sense of ethnic difference affirmed or perhaps even augmented, Jews could continue on the path of integration with little fear that they were complicit in the misdeeds of an exclusionary society.” Tensions became more evident, however, as Blacks gained more control over the relations between the groups and didn’t always see Jews as allies; the Jewish narrative of Black-Jewish links undermined claims for Black distinctiveness.
Ultimately, Goldstein argues, growing ethnic consciousness and declining ethnic cohesiveness are “two sides of the same coin.” What is Jewish identity? The very difficulty of the question increases its salience. Some Jews now protest the absence of the category from the census. And a plurality-40%--of Jews said in 2001 that “being a part of the Jewish people” was the most important aspect of their identity, while only 14% said that religious observance was. In the end, Goldstein suggests, only the “dissolution of the dominant culture” can solve the tension that Jews experience between acceptance and group identity.
Guy Lawson, Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con: Israel was a child of privilege who loved trading, watched traders up close during the 80s as they bribed and traded inside information, and decided he was successful enough to start his own hedge fund. When he immediately started losing, he immediately started cooking the books, and as things got bad, he looked desperately for rescue. He thought he found it in the bigger fraudsters who promised him access to secret bond auctions only available to the richest of the rich; though they kept failing to deliver, and though antifraud controls prevented them from stealing most of the money he had already stolen from clients, he believed them for a long time-after all, they were only revealing further depths to an economy he already knew was crooked. Born on third base and convinced he hit a triple, unable to build a real hedge fund, Israel believed that “shortcuts” were available; only fools played by the rules. And why would he believe otherwise?
Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A history of “female husbands” in the 18th/19th century US and England: people assigned female at birth who lived as men and married women, until the category fell apart with the rise of discourses about lesbians. Manion uses “they/them” as the pronouns throughout, which highlights the ways in which we cannot know how they really thought about their genders given that even their own words, if we really believe they spoke those words, were produced in response to legal and social threats. Other interesting points: the consideration of the female husbands’ wives, often mocked by contemporaries for not knowing (a position they may have been forced to take to protect their own interests after their husbands’ exposure)-Manion points out that many may have been perfectly content to have a female husband. And Manion suggests that, during this period, female husbands were judged not for being failed women but for being failed men-often effeminate-which in a way accepts their own gender characterization.
Wes Moore, Five Days: Stories from the protests in Baltimore surrounding Freddy Gray’s death. No pat answers but some fascinating perspectives from police officers, ordinary citizens including the guy who cut a fire hose to interfere with an attempt to put out a burning CVS, and a juvenile justice lawyer who gives a powerful defense of acts of violence that come from despair.
Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: A history of the Chinese workers who built the Western railway, told by reconstructing their world from existing evidence. Of the tens of thousands of letters they sent home, none have been found by historians, but Chang consults other contemporaneous accounts from Chinese workers in the US, stories passed down in families, and even what can be gleaned from records left by suspicious and often confused white people. Among other things, he argues (somewhat optimistically) that the workers’ strike often considered to have been a total failure was actually a success, given that wages began to rise pretty substantially thereafter.
Eula Biss, Having and Being Had: Poetic meditations on ownership, property, capitalism, whiteness, and their interrelations. Hard for me to say much more about the essays, but they could be useful for spurring further thought.
Tracy Campbell, The Year of Peril: 1942 in the US-a year that began with significant fear over whether further attacks on the mainland were coming, and continued with a lot less unity than we remember in retrospect. Racial terrorism continued despite Black leaders’ attempts to win democracy at home; Republicans prepared for a significant midterm that might let them take back leverage; and war production was nowhere near what FDR wanted even as price controls and rationing of gas and even coffee frustrated the public. One of the standard patterns of US politics emerged: in a low-turnout year spurred by vote suppression (the millions of men away from home in the military usually couldn’t vote; people who’d moved recently-and with mobilization there were a lot of them-usually couldn’t vote; and of course millions in the South both Black and white couldn’t vote because of poll taxes and other racial suppression measures), Republican gains convinced the conventional wisdom that the US was too conservative for progressive policies.
Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics: Harford starts out by noting that, while Darrell Huff’s How To Lie with Statistics was important, it also can be used to undersell the importance of the right statistics. Darrell Huff, in later years, wrote a sequel (never published) called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, as he was paid to do. “Yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics-but it’s even easier to lie without them.”
But how do you know whether you have the right statistics, correctly measured? Harford advocates both reflection on your own experience and on what else might be known-being willing to update your priors, as it were. Pay careful attention to what is being counted. For example, Harford explains that some-but by no means all-of the high infant mortality in the US seems to be “the result of recording births before twenty-four weeks as live when in other countries they would be recorded as miscarried pregnancies.” Doctors in different places, that is, are different in the likelihood that they will record a pregnancy that ends at twenty-two weeks as a live birth, followed by an early death, rather than as a late miscarriage. Now we need more information, such as late miscarriage rates in various countries, to get a fuller picture. But: “For babies born after twenty-four weeks, the US infant mortality rate falls from 6.1 to 4.2 deaths per thousand live births. The rate in Finland barely shifts, from 2.3 to 2.1.” So there is something going on with how deaths are counted.
Harford also discusses the replication crisis in psychology and the effects of publication bias. As he points out, data are themselves subject to survivor bias; he notes that the blockbuster book “In Search of Excellence” offered management lessons from studying forty-three of the most outstanding corporations of that time, but within two years, a third of them were at least financially unstable.
His contrarianism also takes him down less fruitful paths. For example, he says, “Very few people have enough wealth to fund their lifestyle purely out of interest payments, and so if we want to understand how inequality manifests itself in everyday life, it makes sense to look at income rather than wealth.” Um, no; doing that makes it harder to understand why Black families get worse mortgages and live in worse neighborhoods than white families with the same income. Likewise, his generic endorsement of curiosity doesn’t account for the way that “do your own research” misinformation (Qanon, vaccine denial) works. But I was interested in the research he reported in which people were asked to rate their understanding of various political issues on which they had opinions on a scale of one to seven and then asked to elaborate on what they understood. Apparently, after doing this, “people became less likely to give money to lobby groups or other organizations that supported the positions they had once favored.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.