What value do they add?

A very interesting example of false meme propagation. It appears that the initial report is produced in Huffington Post indicating that were McDonalds to double their employees' salary, the cost of McDonalds' food would only increase by 17%. The research was originally indicated to have been produced by a researcher at University of Kansas.

It then turns out that the author of the original article, Arnobio Morelix is not, in fact, a researcher but an economics student at University of Kansas. The deconstruction of the very basic accounting and economics errors which allowed Morelix to reach his conclusion are more or less documented here, McDonalds Math, Or, Latest Lib Talking Points Fail by Tom Maguire.

There are a number of observations arising from this incident.

The errors in Morelix's logic and reasoning were apparent on the face of it. You don't have to be an accounting major or an economics major to be passingly familiar with quotidian concepts such as supply and demand elasticity, proportionality, capital/labor substitution, market competition, ceteris paribus fallacy, cost-push inflation, etc. Each and all of these concepts completely undermine Morelix's argument. By assuming a ceteris paribus world where actions (increase wages) have no consequences (higher inflation, increased unemployment, reduced revenue for McDonalds, increased cost of living for the poorest people, etc.) Morelix is able to conjure a wonderful outcome. Meanwhile, in the world where magical thinking is not the currency of intellect, all sorts of bad things happen as a direct result of this mode of presumptuous thinking (thinking that presumes that ideology trumps reality, where opinions matter more than facts, where other peoples' choices are deemed irrelevant, where there is no linkage between causes and consequences).

An incapacity to think conceptually (economics and accounting) was exacerbated by an inability to think contextually. Morelix's erroneous conclusion was that a doubling of McDonald's employee income would only increase the cost of food by 17%. Notice that only. Even if you are so besotten with the desirability of conclusion, you would still think that there was the ability to take the thinking just a couple of steps further. Step 1) Who are the primary consumers of McDonalds food? - almost certainly people in the bottom three quintiles of income. Step 2) Is a 17% increase in the cost of food a significant factor for those people? - For the poorest 20% of Americans (the bottom quintile of income), expenditures on food represent nearly 25% of their income. If they are spending $500 a month on food, then, per Morelix's erroneous calculations, they will now need to find only another $85 a month (an extra $1,020 a year) to keep eating only as well as they have in the past. If you are a privileged student at a state university, that might seem entirely inconsequential. If you are in the bottom quintile, that might seem an entirely arrogant, unconscionable, cruel and catastrophic assumption.

The conclusion was more important than the logic and the data. Huffington Post, TruthDig, Daily Kos, ABC, UPI, MSNBC, all ran with this story without any apparent effort to consider the validity of the study. These are just the mainstream outlets with reputations and awards and supposedly with bright reporters and layers of fact checkers. Really? These are supposed to be media on which we can rely in order to make sense of our complex world. If they can't even vet the most obvious fallacies, then what value do they add?

So a deeply flawed and erroneous opinion, masquerading as a research study, is picked up and propagated through the cognitive ecosystem simply because it fits a set of ideological assumptions and without any effort to apply common knowledge, experience and critical thinking to the proffered argument. No wonder we waste so much collective time on non-productive discussions.