Did Comey Infer Or Did He Imply?

June 15, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Language prescriptivists – the people who tell us when our choice of words is wrong – are always on the losing side historically. Words come to mean what people use them to mean regardless (or irregardless) of what experts say. But sometimes the fuddy-duddies have a point.

Infer/Imply. These words often appear on lists of terms that people misuse. To imply is to suggest something indirectly. To infer is to draw a conclusion from the available information. Most of the time, you can figure out from context what the speaker or writer really meant. Nevertheless, the distinction between the two words can be important.

Look at the this sentence in a story today at the Independent Journal Review, a right-leaning news site, (here):

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

(The link at “heavily inferred” does not go to a language Website.)

At first, I thought that Comey, using his powers of deduction and the information available at the FBI, had concluded that the special counsel was conducting an obstruction investigation. But no, what the writer meant, I think, was that Comey had implied that the special counsel was investigating possible obstruction of justice. 

The distinction is relevant. As written, the sentence means that Comey didn’t know and was just guessing. But if the writer meant imply rather than infer, it means Comey already knew and was dropping a big hint to the committee and to the world. That’s especially important because the main Republican talking point is that there is no case for obstruction.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, maybe someone will explain why imply doesn’t rhyme with simply.

This Is Your Deaprtment of Justice On Drugs

June 14, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

As Attorney General Jeff Sessions showed us yesterday in his Senate testimony, he is a master of misdirection. Sessions indignantly defended his honor, vigorously denying things that nobody had accused him of. As for specifics, he mostly refused to answer.

Sessions is using a similar strategy in his letter to Congress  (written on May 1 but made public two days ago) urging Congress to let him punish states that allow medical marijuana.

I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime. The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives.

A third grader could see the flaw in this argument.

• We’re in the midst of a drug epidemic.
• Marijuana is a drug
• Therefore marijuana is part of the epidemic.

Can a politician still get away with tossing anything he doesn’t like into the catch-all bin labeled “drugs”? As most people who are not the Attorney General know, the epidemic consists mostly of opioids, not weed. If there is any connection between medical marijuana and opioid death and addiction, that connection is negative. States that allow medical marijuana have lower rates of opioid problems.

Medical marijuana legalization was associated with 23% (p = 0.008) and 13% (p = 0.025) reductions in hospitalizations related to opioid dependence or abuse and OPR overdose, respectively. [From the Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependency, April 1, 2017 (behind a paywall here)]

Earlier articles from JAMA and NBER reached similar conclusions.  (See this WaPo article for summaries and links.).   

Research on individuals reaches the same conclusion as state-level data.

•  Cannabis use was associated with 64% lower opioid use in patients with chronic pain.     •  Cannabis use was associated with better quality of life in patients with chronic pain.     •  Cannabis use was associated with fewer medication side effects and medications used. [From an article in the Journal of Pain, 2016 (here).]

None of these findings should be surprising. We have long known that marijuana is effective for people who are in pain, and it is far safer than opioids. If people can treat their pain with weed rather than heroin, fentanyl, etc., they’ll be less likely to wind up addicted or dead. If the government makes it harder to get medical marijuana, opioid problems will likely increase.

Scientific American (here) today presents similar evidence, as did the journal Science (here)  a year ago). Of course, scientific Americans and science have little influence in the Trump administration. To head the White House commission on drug addiction Trump appointed Chris Christie, a man whose views of marijuana are similarly without basis in fact. (See this earlier post.)

Getting Inequality Wrong

June 12, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Imagine that you earn $125,00 a year; your spouse earns $75,000. Not so hard to imagine. I probably know a lot of couples in this range. A $200,000 income puts you in the top fifth of US households.

Who do you feel closer to socially and economically: the family whose income is $60,000 or the family bringing home $1.4 million? The $60,000 is  the average household incomes for those in the middle of the distribution. The $1.4 million is the average of the 1%.

If you thought you were closer to the average American, you’re kidding yourself. So says Richard Reeves in a New York Times article that, to judge from my Twitter and Facebook feeds, has been getting a lot of attention. Your perception, says Reeves, isn’t just misguided, it’s “dangerously self-serving.”

The rhetoric of “We are the 99 percent” has in fact been dangerously self-serving, allowing people with healthy six-figure incomes to convince themselves that they are somehow in the same economic boat as ordinary Americans, and that it is just the so-called super rich who are to blame for inequality.

From the end of World War II until about 1980 income inequality in the US had been narrowing. Since then, overall inequality has been increasing. In support of this idea that it’s the top fifth and not just the 1% whose incomes are responsible, Reeves looks at income changes since 1979.

the upper middle class is solidifying. This favored fifth at the top of the income distribution, with an average annual household income of $200,000, has been separating from the 80 percent below. Collectively, this top fifth has seen a $4 trillion-plus increase in pretax income since 1979, compared to just over $3 trillion for everyone else. Some of those gains went to the top 1 percent. But most went to the 19 percent just beneath them.

It’s not surprising that the 1% got less than half the increase, but they got a lot more than 1%. Their incomes grew far more rapidly than did incomes of the rest of the top fifth.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

The above graph comes from a Brookings publication co-written by the same Richard Reeves. The graph certainly makes it look as though the real separation is between the 1% and the rest of US households. Yes, the top fifth is getting richer – more so than the middle-income households. But the differences can still be shown on the same graph. By contrast, the line for the top 1% is so far away from the others that in order to show the increase of the 81st to 99th, Reeves has to remove the 1% from the graph.

Now we can see that yes, the incomes of the rest of the top fifth increased  - from about $120,000 to nearly $190,000. But the average income for the 1% went from about half a million to over $1,400,000. Here’s a graph of those percentage increases – 192% (i.e., nearly triple) for the 1%, 70% (less than double) for the rest of the top fifth.

It’s misleading to talk about “the upper fifth” as though those at the 85th percentile had a lot in common with the 1%; even within the 1%, the differences are striking. In a 2013 blog post (here), Dan Hirschman converted Piketty-Saez data to show increases for different sectors of the top 10%, Most of us would consider all of these folks to be rich, but some got more richer than others.

 

Here is a clearer breakdown of incomes in the top fifth in 2016.

(HT: Philp Cohen)

What’s happened since the 1980s, is that the top 0.01% have pulled away. They have become the super-rich. In 1970, if you were in the 1% pulling down $1 million a year, Mr. and Ms. .01% might have lived in a somewhat larger house down the street. Now, they’re so far away you need Google Earth to find their estate.

Reeves seems to be deliberately fudging over the real gaps in income (and wealth, which he mentions not at all). That’s too bad because his point about the upper-middle class is not about inequality – their economic distance from the middle. It’s about mobility. In their effort to ensure a better, or at least equal, economic future for their children, they are making class boundaries more rigid. In effect, they are building a wall – sometimes, as with gated communities, a literal wall – to keep their families in and others out. Fewer and fewer of those coming from less affluent families will be able to get in. 

Making the Facts Not Matter

June 10, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

People get a clearer picture if you tell them what someone or something is rather than telling them what it isn’t. I’ve said that a few times in this blog (here, for example) in connection with writing. But it’s something that Donald Trump seems to know instinctively.  Here are two True/False items.

True or False: Donald Trump is president of the United States. True or False: Donald Trump is not president of the United States.

Regardless of what you wanted the answer to be, the second statement took you a fraction of a second longer to get. Positive statements are clearer and more quickly understood .

The same principle applies in political combat as well. When the news or opponents point out that Trump is lying or that he’s done something worse, Trump doesn’t spend much time denying. He prefers to go on the attack, making counter accusations. Or he makes positive claims about himself. It doesn’t matter that these accusations and claims are without a basis in reality.*

The front pages of New York’s tabloids the day after James Comey appeared before a Senate committee illustrate the strategy of Trump and his supporters both in the Senate and at the New York Post.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The Daily News, anti-Trump, lists the Trump lies suggested by Comey’s testimony. (For some reason, the News omitted Trump’s statements about Comey and the FBI, statements that Comey said were “lies plain and simple.”)

The Post, supporting Trump, puts “liar” in quotes, highlights Republican criticisms of Comey, Loretta Lynch, the Clintons, and the New York Times, and quotes the Trump camp’s curiously sunny view of the testimony.

Trump did not respond to the Daily News headline. He did not say, “I am not a liar.”** As we’ve learned from Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” that kind of denial turns the spotlight on precisely the question the speaker wants the public to ignore. That denial would link “Trump” with “liar” just as surely as Nixon’s denial linked his own name with “crook.”
                                                                           
If you can get people to make that association – person and trait – even though they may not be fully convinced that it’s true, you’ve gained a lot of ground. Trump senses this. It’s the basis of his name-calling strategy: Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, repeated endlessly. We can already see where Trump is going in the Comey matter. If he hasn’t been tweeting it out yet, it’s probably because he can’t decide between “Leakin’ Comey” or “Leaker Comey.” If Trump can get people to think that Comey is a bad guy – a leaker – they will more easily ignore whatever factual information Comey provides.

The larger point is that, at least in the short run and maybe longer, the facts are less important than overall image. Once we have a mental image of someone or something, we will filter the facts in a way that keeps that picture intact. If Trump can convince his followers (and perhaps others) that the mainstream media is “fake news,” they can more easily discount or ignore any facts reported by CNN, NBC, USA Today.

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* Last week, Trump said “Our tax bill is moving along in Congress, and I believe it’s doing very well.” In fact, there was no tax bill. His administration had not sent a bill to Congress. He also issued a tweet blaming Democrats for the large number of unfilled positions in his administration. But as Politico pointed out, “The Trump administration has formally nominated just 63 candidates – 39 of which have been approved – for 559 key positions that require Senate confirmation.”

** The next day, Trump did deny that he had said some of the things that Comey reported, but more important he said that he would testify under oath. (Don’t hold your breath. Trump has also said that he’d release his taxes, remember?  Anyway, the Congressional committees where Trump would testify are controlled by Republicans. Would they call Trump in to testify under oath when Democrats as well can ask questions?)