Month: September 2021

I have two questions for the statistically savvy hive mind.

First: Suppose I have a comparison of two groups that shows one group differing from another by 0.3 standard deviations. Obviously normal people have no idea what this means, or whether 0.3 SDs is a lot or a little. What's the best analogy to make this comprehensible?

In the past I've used IQ because it's one of the few scales that's familiar to most people. So 0.3 SDs would be "about equivalent to four or five IQ points." Unfortunately, this can be confusing if it seems like I'm literally bringing IQ into the conversation for no particular reason. So what's a better way?

Second, take a look at this chart that I posted yesterday:

The point of this chart is to show that homicide and violent crime generally move in tandem. However, they have very different scales (0-15 for homicide, 0-900 for violent crime) so I made the chart with dual scales.

This has never been a well-loved solution, and there's no question that it confuses some people. I have several thoughts:

• Just ignore the complaints. There aren't really very many of them.
• Use some other way of displaying different scales, such as percent growth rates. Like this:
  The obvious problem with this is that you lose the absolute numbers, which are often handy to have. But perhaps you gain clarity?
• Add some annotation to make everything crystal clear. It's a little clunky, but it's best to be clear even if Edward Tufte wouldn't like it.
  

Any preferences? Or other ideas? Remember, the idea behind both of these questions is to keep things as clear as possible for people who aren't especially savvy about statistics.

UPDATE: A reader suggests using height to illustrate standard deviation. In the US, the mean height for men is 70 inches with a standard deviation of 3 inches. So 0.3 SDs would equal about one inch in height—the difference between 5'9" and 5'10". This probably gets the point across fairly well: namely that 0.3 SDs is noticeable but not huge.

Tyler Cowen points to a new paper that says this in the first sentence of its abstract:

A central paradox in the mental health literature is the tendency for black Americans to report similar or better mental health than white Americans despite experiencing greater stress exposure.

This is indeed a well-known paradox, and the authors are naturally on the lookout for explanations. Since we know that Black people experience greater stress, there must be something that helps ameliorate it. In this case they opt for one of everything: higher levels of self-esteem, family social support, religiosity, and divine control.

But what if there's no paradox to begin with? What if it simply isn't true that Black people on average experience greater stress than white people? There's actually a fair amount of evidence for this, but it seems to be something of a taboo to say it out loud. Why? I suppose it's because no one wants to open themselves to charges of downplaying the effect of systemic racial bigotry, even if it's only by implication.

Republicans voted today to filibuster a bill that would raise the debt ceiling and avert a government shutdown. Let's see how the nation's press described things. First up is the New York Times:

The Washington Post:

The LA Times:

The Wall Street Journal:

And finally, Fox News:

One of these is not like the others. And it's the one that millions of conservative voters will see and hear about.

I have a new toy. Can you guess what it is? Well? Can you?

Max Boot tries to defend President Biden's border policy in the Washington Post today. Here's a long excerpt:

This is not Trump redux. The previous president carried out inhumane policies such as separating children from their parents, in part, because he wanted to deter more arrivals — but also because, as Adam Serwer of the Atlantic has argued, “the cruelty is the point.” Being beastly to helpless migrants helped to burnish Donald Trump’s brand with his rabidly nativist base.

Biden, by contrast, expressed horror at the way the Border Patrol treated the Haitians. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating what happened. If abuses occurred, they were contrary to the president’s intent — not in compliance with it as under Trump. That’s a big difference.

Biden is being excoriated for returning some of the migrants back to Haiti, which can’t cope with them. But, while 2,000 people have been sent to Haiti, 12,400 people from the Del Rio camp will be able to request asylum status — which usually means they can stay in the United States while their cases are adjudicated. You would never know from all the criticism that far more migrants are being allowed to remain here than are being sent home.

Biden hasn’t yet ended Trump’s pandemic policy of automatically expelling many of the migrants apprehended along the southern border — a senior administration official tells me that was on the verge of happening before the delta variant of the coronavirus hit in July — but he has considerably relaxed it. In July 2020, 92 percent of migrant encounters resulted in expulsion; by July 2021, it was down to 47 percent. Biden has already ended other inhumane Trump policies such as the “Muslim ban” and family separations. Biden just announced that the refugee cap in the next fiscal year will be eight times higher than the one Trump announced in October 2020. Biden has also reduced “inland” deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents far below the level not only under Trump but also under President Barack Obama.

In short, Biden is doing a lot more to make immigration policy humane than progressives who sloganeer about abolishing ICE have ever done. But he gets no credit.

Over the past few years immigration has become much like abortion: there's almost no middle ground. On one side you have the Trumpies and their wall, settling for nothing less than bringing illegal immigration down to zero. On the progressive side, the 2020 primary debates made it clear that most of the candidates favored policies so loose that they were effectively advocating open borders.

But it's worth noting that Biden was very explicitly opposed to the loose border policies that most Democratic candidates favored. He made that very clear. His immigration policies are far more humane than Trump's, but he's still committed to protecting the border.

I doubt that an investigation will show that CBP officers did anything wrong in their treatment of Haitian immigrants. It made a big impact thanks to a single picture that gave a seriously mistaken impression, but video suggests there was nothing very unusual about the situation. Mounted patrol officers are common; there were no whips; there was no roundup; and the general tenor of the operation was fairly low key. You might still object to it, of course, but it doesn't appear to have been intentionally cruel or harsh.

There's no great solution to our current border problem, which has been caused by immigrants seeking asylum. Conservatives are unhappy about large numbers of immigrants being allowed to stay, but the law provides little choice about that. Liberals, by contrast, are unhappy that asylum seekers are being held at all. The only real answer is to speed up the asylum process, and that requires a huge increase in the judicial infrastructure that governs the border. That's the work of years, not months.

I don't have any brilliant solutions to offer. I don't think anyone does. Until and unless Congress and the president do something about the entire asylum process, this is going to remain a mess.

The FBI released final crime figures for 2020 today, and there were no surprises:

Murders were up by nearly 30%, clocking in at about 6.5 per 100,000. Meanwhile, violent crime in general was up by only a few percent, hitting 400 per 100,000. This remains something of a mystery since normally the two move up and down together.

This is it. We have finally gone over the edge. We had a good run.

A couple of days ago I wrote that Democrats have done little to help the middle class over the past few decades. The poor? Yes. The elderly? Yes. The disabled? Yes. But the middle class has been largely left out.

To illustrate this I listed the seven major programs in the $3.5 trillion omnibus spending bill. This provoked some questions on Twitter that deserve an answer. To refresh your memory, here are those programs:

1. Funds various climate initiatives.
2. Adds dental, hearing, and vision benefits to Medicare.
3. Makes the increased child tax credit permanent.
4. Provides two years of free community college.
5. Provides funding for long-term care done at home.
6. Provides universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
7. Makes the increased Obamacare subsidies from January's coronavirus bill permanent.

How does the middle class make out in each of these? Let me make clear that I'm talking about concrete benefits that a middle-class voter would immediately recognize. Not "that would benefit the economy and eventually be good for the middle class." So let's go through them.

1. Funds various climate initiatives. Nothing for the middle class.
2. Adds dental, hearing, and vision benefits to Medicare. Nothing for the middle class.
3. Makes the increased child tax credit permanent. This one is tricky. Ready? The CTC has been around for a while, bobbing up and down over the years. Before 2021 it was set at $2,000 per child, which means the Biden CTC expansion is not worth $3,000/$3,600 per child, but $1,000/$1,600.
   ..
   But wait! There's more. The pre-2021 CTC provides nothing at very low incomes and slowly increases, so it's not very generous to the poor. The Biden expansion makes it fully available at all incomes, which means the bulk of the benefit goes to the poor. A middle-class family is likely to see an increase of only $100 per month or so.
4. Provides two years of free community college. The provision creates a federal-state partnership grant to eliminate the cost of tuition. In other words, the money goes to community colleges, not to people. Also, its main effect is to allow students greater choice in which school to attend, since local community colleges tend to be nearly tuition free already.
5. Provides funding for long-term care done at home. The middle class likes this as an idea, but the Biden plan is a state partnership that boosts pay for home health workers and reduces the waiting list for home care. In other words, it mostly benefits the poor and tops up state Medicaid coffers.
6. Provides universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds. This is genuinely a middle-class program, though it helps the poor even more.
7. Makes the increased Obamacare subsidies from January's coronavirus bill permanent. In its original form, Obamacare subsidies ended at about $80,000 for a family of three. In reality, though, the subsidies declined so fast with income that they were negligible for families making more than about $65,000. It was mainly a program for the poor and working class.
   ..
   However, Obamacare did raise the cost of individual premiums by thousands of dollars, thanks to its regulations that required insurers to provide more comprehensive coverage. As a result, middle-class families found themselves paying more for coverage but getting no subsidies. Obamacare was essentially anti-middle class.
   ..
   The increased subsidies in the spending bill would help the poor a bit, but mainly they help the middle class. Subsidies would be available at much higher incomes, and no one would have to pay more than 8.5% of their income for coverage. This is a huge deal for the middle class.

In the end, two of the programs are aimed at the middle class in a significant way, with a couple of others providing modest benefits that are largely hidden. In other words, it's not that the omnibus bill literally ignores the middle class so much as it provides limited benefits and does so in a form that hides even those. And Obamacare expansion, which is clearly the biggest middle-class program, appears to have very little support in the Democratic caucus.

It's worth saying a bit more on this subject. First off is presentation. It's not enough just to do something that benefits the middle class. It needs to be visible. That could mean clear dollar amounts that are obvious to everyone. Or it could simply mean a card. For example, in addition to Medicare cards, Biden could issue "Long Term Care" cards that make it clear you qualify for a new benefit. Don't scoff at this: politically, new benefits only work if people know they're getting them. And most people don't pay enough attention to the news to know they're getting something unless you make it absolutely clear. Remember all those folks who never realized that TennCare or KentuckyCare were actually Obamacare?

Second, any benefit that works through the tax code is problematic, and not just because it obscures the source of the benefit. The problem for Democrats is that Republicans own tax cuts as an issue. Any time you provide some kind of tax cut or tax refund, you're fundamentally playing in the Republican sandbox and you're unlikely to get full credit for it.

Third, there are other ways of making economic appeals to the middle class. Republicans use tax cuts, and Donald Trump added revenge against China to the list. This worked even though (a) job losses to China happened in the aughts and haven't been much of a factor since, and (b) Trump's tariffs were largely a hidden tax on the middle class.

Finally, I have to acknowledge that Democrats don't actually have a lot of options here. Ideally they should be united around big programs that help the middle class, but there aren't many to choose from. Universal health care is the only big-ticket item left, along with a few medium-size programs like childcare and long-term care. This makes things harder. On the other hand, Republicans have a similar problem: decades of tax cuts have reduced middle-class income taxes nearly to zero, so there's not a lot more they can do on that front.

That said, politics is always messy. There are still things Democrats can do for the middle class, but it's critical that they be both sizeable and visible. Obamacare expansion is a good place to start.

Leimert Park in South LA is considered one of the centers of Black life in Southern California. It has also been the target of gentrification for years, bringing with it all the usual misgivings among residents who are watching the character of their neighborhood change as Black residents are priced out:

There are a lots of fears....Fears that once new residents move in, they’ll act like gentrifiers and start calling the police on longtime Black residents. “We are diverse. We welcome everyone into our neighborhood. But we hope, just as when they move into Chinatown, or Japantown, that they recognize this town is based on African American culture,” Fields said. “I don’t want to go for a run outside my house and have somebody chasing me down thinking I’m causing trouble.”

But another fear is about what will happen now that California has passed a law that allows developers to build duplexes and 4-plexes on property that was once zoned for single-family homes:

“If we destroy the single-family neighborhood by allowing developers to come in and tear down the single family homes and put up triplexes and duplexes and quadplexes that we can’t afford to buy, we’ve lost,” Fields told me.

I don't get this. If a single-family home near Leimert Park is going for $1.5 million, then a single unit of a 4-plex would go for—what? Maybe $500,000? That's more affordable. If anything, it seems like the best bet the Black community has for remaining a strong presence in the face of gentrification that otherwise has little chance of being stopped.

Am I missing something here?

Here is Paul Ratje's now-infamous photo of mounted CBP agents chasing Haitian migrants at the Texas border:

And here is video of the scene, which presents a considerably different sense of what was going on:

Sorting through my footage from the border. I was in the river during the viral incident between a Haitian migrant and mounted CBP agent. It's shaky - but here's what I captured. pic.twitter.com/fnvxSU83tO

— Sarah Blake Morgan (@StorytellerSBM) September 24, 2021

None of this speaks to whether the Biden administration has adopted good or bad policies regarding the deportation of Haitians. It just shows what was happening on that particular day at that particular time.