Logic, knowledge and NYT reporters

One of my recurrent themes is about the quality and nature of decision-making and of the poor quality of argument seen in many articles or posts. In the New York Times, For Americans Under 50, Stark Findings on Health by Sabrina Tavernise, there is a classic example. The article reports on a recent study comparing international health outcomes, focusing on those under age 50 in which Americans came out at the bottom of most measures.

If you have read my post, The Texas-Wisconsin Paradox you will be aware of the extent to which the US comes off poorly in these sorts of comparisons because of the heterogeneous nature of US culture. To understand the nature of the comparisons, you really have to be comparing apples-to-apples which rarely happens.

Without having read the original study referenced in this report, it does seem likely that this is an advocacy study whose results are intended to support a predetermined outcome. Regardless of that though, what caught my eye was the final paragraph.

The United States is a bigger, more heterogeneous society with greater levels of economic inequality, and comparing its health outcomes to those in countries like Sweden or France may seem lopsided. But the panelists point out that this country spends more on health care than any other in the survey. And as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study.

Three simple sentences packing a powerful one-two punch of reportorial foolishness.  Its almost as if the reporter knows that technically she should be skeptical of press release advocacy studies but can't quite bring herself to the brink of critical thinking. Just from the perspective of logic, this is a failed paragraph, providing a classic illustration of a non sequitur. In what way does the fact that the US spends a great deal on health care have to do with the argument that international comparisons are false because they are not comparing apples-to-apples. It doesn't. How did those two sentences come together at all?

Having opened herself up to criticism from the perspective of logic, the reporter then doubles down by betraying a lack of knowledge about the topic on which she is writing - "And as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study." Its as if she is unaware of two critical facts. First, in the 1950's the US was at the apex of global inequality, i.e. post-World War II, the US was disproportionately richer than the rest of the world and every decade since then has seen a slight improvement in the productivity of the rest of the world's economies (and the beneficial health outcomes that come from increasing wealth).

More critically, she seems unaware of the fact that the 1950's were the tipping point for the familial cohesion of the African-American community and the legion of bad sociological outcomes (health, wealth, violence, etc.) arising from that collapse as initially pointed out by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and documented and measured by the economist Thomas Sowell. The US has five major cultural groups with dramatically different sociological measures from one another. The bleakest measures are those associated with the third largest group, African-Americans and their measures have worsened dramatically in the decades since 1960. These facts support the argument that the problem with international comparisons is that they are comparing apples-to-oranges and yet, by apparently being unaware of this information, the reporter offers this sentence as if it contradicted the argument. Compounding the fault is the fact that apparently fact checkers and layers of editorial quality control all missed correcting the final paragraph and forestalling the embarrassment that ought to go with having written such nonsense.