Asymmetrical Information

More on partisan hackery

I'm afraid I haven't time to take on the complete response of Henry Farrell, except to note that in most places he's simply repeating himself, and where he isn't repeating himself, he has now narrowed his claim of partisan hackery on the part of my employer somewhat, to not printing that there had been a legal finding that Smithfield Foods threatened to report its immigrant workers to la Migra if they unionised. All I can do is respectfully disagree that this is the smoking gun Mr Farrell seems to think it is. Again, not because it doesn't belong in the story, but because it doesn't actually deny the objective question of whether immigrants are, or are not, making it country. Slaughterhouses are horrible places to work (which is not necessarily a union/anti-union problem: there are limits to how pleasant the task of cutting up animals can be made, as anyone who has ever been hunting will attest.) Their bosses may (or may) engage in all sorts of nefarious anti-union activity, but that still wouldn't tell us whether immigrants are, or are not, steadily improving their lot. The relevant questions are, how do the immigrants feel about it; not "how do the union organisers at Smithfield feel about it?"

There is one other claim that I must contest: that The Economist is somehow rare and different in its news gathering and reporting from reputable news outlets. Let us compare a piece from The Economist's website on the minimum wage, to one from the Christian Science Monitor, and ask ourselves, which of these is the partisan hack job?

(extended entry for those who feel like reading my opinions on media bias)

First, The Economist:

[Cut section on the political mechanics of the minimum wage, which Democrats are proposing to raise to $7.25 an hour]

At $5.15 an hour, a full-time worker earns less than $10,300 a year, barely above the poverty line for a single person and well under it if the wage-earner supports a child. The real value of the wage is down to its lowest level since 1955. In the late 1960s, the wage was more than half of average hourly earnings for a (low level) production worker. Now it is less than a third.

However, the number of people earning the minimum wage has also declined. In 1980, over 15% of workers received it (or even a lower wage—there are broad exemptions for various classes of workers). That figure is now just 2.5%. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think-tank, estimates that lifting the wage to $7.25 would affect only 4.4% of workers, giving them an average increase of $0.79 an hour.

This would yield an extra $1,580 a year for full-time workers, enough to get a mother and child within shouting distance of the poverty line. But most such workers aren’t in a full-time job. Of the roughly 1.6m low-wage workers who do regular hours, nearly 1m are part-timers, most of them doing fewer than 25 hours a week. This is ammunition for opponents of an increase, who also point out that few such workers support families, or even themselves. They are mostly young (more than half of them are under 25), and according to testimony before Congress from the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2004, only 15% of workers making less than $6.65 an hour live in poverty. Many of them have family incomes well above the poverty line.

Given all this, a minimum wage increase seems like a blunt instrument for attacking poverty. The Earned Income Tax Credit, which already gives a annual bonus to the working poor, targets poverty more directly and effectively. Nor will fiddling with the minimum wage do much to placate the anxious middle class. Raising the wage, say critics, may even hurt the people who are supposed to be helped. Businesses say that higher wages could force them to reduce staff (though economic studies appear to show that is unlikely). More worrying is that unskilled workers may be kept out of the labour market if they are unable to claim jobs with higher minimum wages.

But for Mr Kennedy and his fellow, all this may be beside the point. Minimum wage workers are sympathetic figures, working boring jobs for paltry pay. Most Americans say they support an increase. While that may not get the wage up, it could help put Republicans on the defensive.

Now, the Christian Science Monitor:

Keisha Walker, for one, is happy that Congress is at least debating whether to raise the minimum wage. For her, boosting it to $7.25 would mean earning an extra $1 an hour - enough to pay for eight months of groceries or perhaps a few nights out.

An office assistant for a low-income apartment complex in Atlanta, earning $6.25 an hour, Ms. Walker is one of 139,000 Georgians who would benefit directly from a minimum-wage hike. A technical school dropout and mom in her late 20s, she scratches together a living, relying on her fiancé to pay major bills.

"They need to raise it if only to help people pay for [rising] rent," she says, returning by bus from taking her two sons and a nephew to football practice. "It's getting so you can't survive in this country."

[cut political mechanics and transitional filler]

"The typical minimum-wage worker is not a teenager earning side money," says Isaac Shapiro, an associate director at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington. "Most minimum-wage workers, those most affected by the wage increase and those just above the minimum wage, their earnings can really be vital to their household economics."

ome 48 percent, or 3.5 million, are between 25 and 64 years old who, on average, contribute more than half of the income in their households, experts say.^[1]

Lanky, with a wide smile and a tight-knit straw hat on his head, Thomas, a Liberian immigrant who prefers not to give his last name, worked for five years as a gas-station attendant, never making more than $5.15 an hour. It was so little money he had to quit. He went freelance, selling mattresses on the street from the back of his beat-up Chevrolet truck. He rents a room with a friend in a flop house. He sends his extra money back home to Liberia - or gives it to needy people in his neighborhood.

"There's no way you can depend on one job anymore," says Thomas. "You have to get out there and hustle, have two or three different things going, to make it work. Everyone is suffering. They all tell you the same story."

According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, nearly a third of the workers who start at minimum wage are still working at that rate three years later. A quarter, also like Thomas, stop working - or at least leave official payrolls. Thirty-nine percent move up to better wages.

In Atlanta, working full time at minimum wage amounts to a third of the $32,000 a year it takes for a no-frills life, says the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Only six percent of Georgia residents hold low-wage jobs, while states like Montana, West Virginia, and Alabama have the highest rates, around 10 percent. Twenty-one states have set higher-than-national minimum wage rates.

One reason even some Republicans are mulling the wage hike is that the number of single mothers making minimum wage has nearly doubled in the last 10 years. Of Americans making less than $7.25 an hour, half are over 24 years old, and about half are primary household earners. Sixty-two percent are white, 16 percent are black, and 17 percent are Hispanic. Nearly twice as many are women than men.

"The relative value of the minimum wage has fallen by nearly 20 percent," says Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Resarch. "These families are already living at the bottom, and you're talking about families who didn't have a lot of frills to begin with."

For Ms. Walker, the Atlanta office assistant, rising child-care costs mean that her weekly paycheck is not enough to stay employed, at least when school is out, so she took the summer off to care for her two boys, Derick and Rico. That means she has learned how to cook and takes the bus. Her boys' football program is subsidized. Movie nights are out. Cookouts in the park are in.

"I'm lucky to have someone who can help out," she says. "A lot of people don't."

One of them is Mary Davidson, a single, 50-something dry-cleaning clerk in Charlotte, N.C.. Rising gas prices forced her to look for work closer to home. She found a job at $6.50 an hour, and she took it.

Going out to eat is out of the question. But she finds solace in her church choir, but feels guilty even there. Her income, especially working only 20 hours a week, doesn't allow her the 10 percent tithe that is expected.

"I'm making $6.50 - that's no money!" she says. "People should understand, especially people at the White House behind a desk - put yourself in my shoes. Pay my money for your bills. See if you can make it!"

But some economists say the minimum wage does more damage than good, and see its diminishing value as a sign of its waning importance. After all, they say, the number of people who would be affected by the wage increase has decreased from 10 million in 1996 to some 8 million today, while average wages have risen from $12 to $16 an hour since the last hike.

In fact, they say, upping wages will only create incentives for businesses to hire fewer low-skilled workers - which is what happened when at least 146,000 restaurant workers lost their jobs after the last minimum-wage hike, according to the National Restaurant Association.

Which of these is more partisan? In my opinion, the Christian Science Monitor piece is at least as opinionated as The Economist's piece -- I certainly finished with no doubt about what I was supposed to believe by the time I finished reading. They quoted left-wing think tanks extensively without identifying them as such, slathered on the hard-luck stories . . . and then used as their sole source for the proposition that the minimum wage might not be such a great idea, the National Restaurant Association. The author might as well have come out and said "You could believe these objective think-tank professionals, or you can take the word of these self-serving corporate types. We report, you decide!" That, of course, is if the reader got that far; the writer carefully tucked every bit of disconfirming evidence in the last two paragraphs, which a substantial number of readers will never get to. The Economist piece states its opinions, rather than steering the reader towards them--but the disconfirming evidence is run throughout the piece, the sources are mostly either government statistics or from think tanks that support the minimum wage, the partisan leanings of cited sources are clearly identified, and (she said modestly), the piece leans on economic arguments, rather than anecdotes.

This is not to say that the Christian Science Monitor piece is illegitimate. But I don't think you can make a reasonable argument that it is somehow more objective than The Economist's piece. Nor do I think you can say that the CSM's piece is somehow atypical of the way that issues like the minimum wage are treated in the pages of our nation's newspapers--the ones that Mr Farrell says separate their opinions from the news page in a way so fundamentally different from the operations of The Economist that my attempt to distinguish between an Economist news piece and a New York Times op-ed is disingenuous trickery.

In fact, I'm against "slant" journalism--I think it's dishonest, and our nation's newspapers would be in much better condition if journalists would just come out and state the opinion they have formed from the various facts that they present, rather than putting on a false face of objectivity. But I don't think it's illegitimate . . . just unnecessary.

Yet I believe that the liberals accusing The Economist of unwonted bias compared to other media outlets genuinely believe their claims. If you already agree with the conclusions, the typical American media style of slanting stories, rather than stating your opinon openly, feels more objective; it is only when you disagree that it grates. And in general, of course, we tend to believe things that we agree with . . . which means that we don't search those pieces for the missing facts that might prove them wrong.

A long time ago I wrote about academic bias:

Now, of course, many professors do try to play devil's advocate, presenting views not their own in order to round out the picture. And as a DA of long standing, I applaud them. But I also know that no matter how hard you try, you are never as forceful an advocate for the other side as you are for your own. You don't look as hard for disconfirming evidence. Studies that contradict your opponents do not set off the heart-racing, migraine-inducing, "I'll bet I can prove them wrong" reaction that makes for a vibrant marketplace of ideas.

It is simply not enough just to read the other sides' literature. It is too easy to throw something that disagrees with you aside with a quick snort of "that's obviously ridiculous!" For truly vigorous debate, which I'd argue is essential to the pursuit of truth, you need advocates from both sides right there, mixing it up face to face. (Politely, of course.) There is just no substitute for having someone who thoroughly disagrees with you pin you down and force you to defend each and every one of your assertions.

That sort of debate goes on all the time in academia--about subjects other than politics.

To sum up: we'd all be a lot better off if before they started flinging accusations of bias, incompetence and trickery at the media, bloggers tried to make an honest assessment of whether it's the bias that bothers them . . . or the fact that it's disagreeing with cherished opinions. Because if your accusations of bias are biased . . . well, it would be nice if we could at least try to get our political opinions off of some sort of infinite recursive loop of accusation and self-congratulation.

¹This is rather distorted . . . as mentioned in The Economist piece, according to the Bureau of Labuor Statistics over half of minimum wage earners are under 24, and the overwhelming majority of them work part time, which tends to give credence to the idea that the typical minimum-wage worker is, indeed, a teenager (or other young adult) earning side money.