What Noah Smith Gets Wrong about Poverty

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Noah Smith has offered a stale slab of conventional wisdom under the hectoring headline: “Stop Blaming America’s Poor for Their Poverty.” The essay compounds sloppy thinking with tedious writing, but it reflects a common line of thinking, the defects of which are worth taking the time to understand.

Smith argues that conservatives err in taking a moralistic view of poverty (he cites my writing on the subject) and offers as a point of comparison the Japanese: “In Japan,” he writes, “people work hard, few abuse drugs, crime is minimal and single mothers are rare. The country still has lots of poverty.”

Almost none of that is exactly true, or true without qualification.

To start at the end and work backward, a technical matter: It is not obvious that Japan “has lots of poverty.” Real data about poverty in Japan are notoriously difficult to find (it is almost as if the government does not want to talk about it!), and Smith here relies on a useless measure of “relative” poverty, the share of the population earning less than half of the median income. You can see the limitations of that approach: A uniformly poor society in which 99 percent of the people live on 50 cents a day and 1 percent live on 49 cents a day would have a poverty rate of 0.00; a rich society with incomes that are rising across-the-board but are rising much more quickly for the top two-thirds would have a rising poverty rate, and some people who are not classified as being in poverty this year might be in poverty next year even though their incomes are higher, etc. It would be far better to consider poverty in absolute terms, but our progressive friends are strangely resistant to that.

Secondly, it is not entirely clear that the Japanese are as free from the pathologies that attend poverty in many other places as Smith suggests. It is true that Japan as a whole has low rates of chronic unemployment, drug use, single motherhood, etc., but the relevant question here would be how Japanese who are poor compare on these metrics with Japanese at large. To assume that the situation with the poor can be approximately deduced from national averages is pretty sloppy analysis, if it counts as analysis at all.

Third, it emphatically is not the case that Japan is a society that is largely free from substance abuse. In Japan, as in the United States, the most socially significant and destructive mode of substance abuse is legal: alcohol abuse. Japan has a big problem with alcohol, and alcohol abuse is related to joblessness and poverty, although the question of causality (Are they unemployed because they drink, or do they drink because they are unemployed?) gets complicated, and some studies suggest that in Japan some kinds of destructive drinking increase with income.

Smith is correct that Japan has high work-force participation, and that it has a universal(ish) national health-insurance scheme. To which he adds: “Too many people fall through the cracks in the capitalist system because of unemployment, sickness, injury or other forms of bad luck.” This is an odd thing to write immediately after noting that Japan has 1. low unemployment and 2. a national health-care system that helps people through sickness and injury.

Perhaps those things are not sufficient?

“Capitalism” is a very broad term. The United States is a capitalist country, and a rich capitalist country at that. So is Japan. So is Singapore. So is Sweden. So is Switzerland. These countries have radically different health-care systems, tax codes, family lives, cultural norms, etc. Unsurprisingly, these produce different outcomes on a great many social fronts — but all of them are comprehended by “capitalism.”

So, not obviously correct about Japan, and not obviously correct about capitalism. Smith is batting about his average here, the usual mishmash of tendentious platitudes and misunderstood truisms.

But what about conservatives and our judgmental, “moral” approach to the question of poverty? I do not think Smith really quite understands this either. And, since he uses my work as his example, I will do my best to make it more clear.

The thing about moral truths is that they are truths. Take the example of a problem drinker. We can be reasonably sure that his life will improve if he stops drinking two liters of bourbon a day, or at least that it is much less likely to improve if he does not stop drinking two liters of bourbon a day. Some people see drunkenness and understand it as a character defect; others see alcoholism and understand it as a disease — in either case, the diagnosis is the same: Stop drinking two liters of bourbon a day. Perhaps it is the case that the world has been cruel and unfair to him. What now? Stop drinking. Maybe his parents abused him, he was discriminated against because of his race or sexual orientation, and wrongly convicted of a crime. What now? Stop drinking. It is not that those other factors do not matter — of course they do, especially if they can help us to understand the source of the problem. But the remedy is going to be the same.

To argue that the problem is “the capitalist system” is to retreat into generality and to refuse to consider the facts of the case, each on its own merits. To insist that the problem is capitalism also is to assert that phenomena such as homelessness are fundamentally economic problems, which does not seem to be the case. In New York, Los Angeles, and other big cities, it is common for people to sleep on the streets even as beds in shelters go unoccupied. There are many reasons for that, but the main one almost certainly is mental illness (and substance abuse as a subset of that). That is the nearly universal opinion of the professionals who work with the urban homeless.

There are better and worse ways to deal with mental illness in a wealthy, complex society, and we in the United States have settled on one of the worst: After the “deinstitutionalization” of the 1960s and 1970s, in which left-wing liberationist thinking combined with right-wing penny-pinching to gut the public mental hospitals, we punted the problem to the police and to the jailers, who are ill-equipped to handle it. The United States is not alone in this. Many (perhaps most) Western European countries have more effective social-welfare systems than we do, but even in Sweden, with its fairly comprehensive welfare state, mental illness is the leading cause of “work force exclusion,” as they call it.

Smith insists that poverty is “related to the economy’s structure.” I suppose that must be true in some trivial sense. “Structural” is a favorite word in these kinds of arguments, but I am not convinced it actually means anything other than, “This problem is complicated and has lots of variables that I intend to replace with a single adjective.” But the big changes that progressives generally propose for the United States — a national health-care system like Japan’s, an enlarged welfare state more like Sweden’s — do not seem to have been entirely effective in the places where they have been tried. And there is good reason to believe that Swedish or Swiss practice cannot simply be imported into Eastern Kentucky or Baltimore and replicated locally. That does not mean that there is nothing to learn from Japanese or European practice — perfection is not our criterion — but it does complicate the conversation. We have, in fact, spent a tremendous amount of money on anti-poverty and economic-development programs, and much of that has not delivered anything like the promised return.

And that is where this “moral” stuff that bothers Smith comes in, again.

The United States is a very, very rich country, one that can well afford to be less than scrupulous about distinguishing between the so-called deserving poor and the undeserving. (Whatever that means. A related thought: Christians citizens, who believe themselves to be the recipients of the greatest unmerited gift in the history of all things, could probably stand to be a little less persnickety about who is deserving and who is undeserving of considerably less precious benefices. We should act like we believe our own dogma.) Given that, we should be less worried about some “undeserving” person getting over on us than we are about doing active harm to individuals and communities through well-intentioned programs. And, indeed, thoughtful conservatives (and, once upon a time, thoughtful progressives) are very much attuned to that. Social spending of all kinds creates incentives and disincentives. Some of these can have big, unintended social consequences. There is a moral question there, to be sure, but there also is a question of program design. Economic treatments of fundamentally non-economic social problems are not likely to produce good results.

In my own reporting on poverty in the United States, I have tried to present the facts as unsparingly as I can. Perhaps Noah Smith thinks that I do this in order to savor the exquisite delights of moral condemnation. But the intended purpose is to scour away the crust of sentimentality that poverty has acquired in order that we may deal with the actual facts of the case in a way that is productive and that does not end up deepening the very problems we hope to mitigate. There are people who are poor because they have terrible disabilities and no family support; there are people who are poor because they drink two liters of bourbon a day; there are people who are poor because they simply will not work; there are people who are poor who are willing to work but cannot or will not relocate to places where there are opportunities; there are people who are poor because the education system has failed them; there are people who are poor for all sorts of other reasons. We have to sort those out, not because we want to elevate the “deserving” and abandon the “undeserving” but because those are fundamentally different problems that demand fundamentally different solutions.

We could try to do that. Or we could blame “the capitalist system.”

A Little More Noah Smith

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Having made an embarrassing error (as we all do, from time to time), Noah Smith of Bloomberg Opinion has done the intellectually dishonest and chickensh** thing of deleting the erroneous claim without acknowledging it or correcting it. Given that he was making a false claim about me and what I have written (see above), this is vexatious. But that’s how it goes, now. Predictable, and predicted.

There Is No Epidemic of Racist Police Shootings

By Heather Mac Donald

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

The Democratic presidential candidates have revived the anti-police rhetoric of the Obama years. Joe Biden’s criminal-justice plan promises that after his policing reforms, black mothers and fathers will no longer have to fear when their children “walk[] the streets of America” — the threat allegedly coming from cops, not gangbangers. President Barack Obama likewise claimed during the memorial for five Dallas police officers killed by a Black Lives Matter–inspired assassin in July 2016 that black parents were right to fear that their child could be killed by a police officer whenever he “walks out the door.” South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has said that police shootings of black men won’t be solved “until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O’Rourke claims that the police shoot blacks “solely based on the color of their skin.”

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.

The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.

Earlier studies have also disproven the idea that white officers are biased in shooting black citizens. The Black Lives Matter narrative has been impervious to the truth, however. Police departments are under enormous political pressure to hire based on race, despite existing efforts to recruit minorities, on the theory that doing so will decrease police shootings of minorities. Buttigieg came under fire from his presidential rivals for not having more black officers on the South Bend force after a white officer killed a black suspect this June. (The officer had responded to a 911 call about a possible car-theft suspect, saw a man leaning into a car, and shot off two rounds after the man threatened him with a knife.) The Obama administration recommended in 2016 that police departments lower their entry standards in order to be able to qualify more minorities for recruitment. Departments had already been deemphasizing written exams or eliminating requirements that recruits have a clean criminal record, but the trend intensified thereafter. The Baltimore Police Department changed its qualifying exam to such an extent that the director of legal instruction in the Baltimore Police Academy complained in 2018 that rookie officers were being let out onto the street with little understanding of the law. Mr. Biden’s criminal-justice plan would require police hiring to “mirror the racial diversity” of the local community as a precondition of federal funding.

This effort to increase minority representation will not reduce racial disparities in shootings, concludes the PNAS study, since white officers are not responsible for those disparities; black crime rates are. Moreover, lowered hiring standards risk bad police work and corruption. A 2015 Justice Department study of the Philadelphia Police Department found that black officers were 67 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect; Hispanic officers were 145 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect. Whether lowered hiring standards are responsible for those disparities was not addressed.

The persistent belief that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings is a creation of selective reporting. In 2015, the year the PNAS study addressed, the white victims of fatal police shootings included a 50-year-old suspect in a domestic assault in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who ran at the officer with a spoon; a 28-year-old driver in Des Moines, Iowa, who exited his car and walked quickly toward an officer after a car chase; and a 21-year-old suspect in a grocery-store robbery in Akron, Ohio, who had escaped on a bike and who did not remove his hand from his waistband when ordered to do so. Had any of these victims been black, the media and activists would probably have jumped on their stories and added their names to the roster of victims of police racism. Instead, because they are white, they are unknown.

The “policing is racist” discourse is poisonous. It exacerbates anti-cop tensions in minority communities and makes cops unwilling to engage in the proactive policing that can save lives. Last month, viral videos of pedestrians in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn assaulting passive New York Police Department officers showed that hostility toward the police in inner-city neighborhoods remains at dangerous levels.

The anti-cop narrative deflects attention away from solving the real criminal-justice problem, which is high rates of black-on-black victimization. Blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, overwhelmingly killed not by cops, not by whites, but by other blacks. The Democratic candidates should get their facts straight and address that issue. Until they do, their talk of racial justice will ring hollow.

Al Sharpton Is Not a Civil-Rights Hero

By Kyle Smith

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Imagine David Duke being a regular, esteemed guest and former honored host on Fox News Channel. Imagine every Republican presidential candidate scrambling to praise him whenever he’s in the news. Imagine David Duke being given a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention or President Trump welcoming him to the White House and openly soliciting his support. Imagine Duke appearing on White House visitor logs more than 70 times during Trump’s administration.

Imagine all of this and you’ll have some idea of how the right and even, I think, the center of American political thought reacts to seeing Al Sharpton continue to be cosseted by the Democratic party and its allies in the media. Sharpton should long ago have been ruled out of bounds.

Employing the morally disastrous logic that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, the Democrats have allowed President Trump to troll them into extolling Sharpton. Trump is incorrect about many things, but he fairly described Sharpton as a racist. Sharpton is a “con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score,” Trump tweeted. “Hates Whites & Cops!” That’s a lot closer to the truth than the framing of Democrats, who bent the knee to Sharpton as though he were some sort of civil-rights hero rather than a huckster.

Sharpton holds the position of America’s Senior Spokesman for Civil Rights only because it’s been some time since he’s done anything so egregiously contemptible that it made the front page; the Left simply assumes short memories have sanitized Sharpton’s reputation. I almost wrote “inflammatory reputation,” but that word might be too literal given the arson attack that followed one of his most notorious hate campaigns.

After a black boy, Gavin Cato, was accidentally killed by a motorcade of Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991, Sharpton delivered an incendiary eulogy at the funeral:

All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no coffee klatch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’.

For extra incendiary effect, he urged the crowd to think of Jews as “diamond merchants” responsible for apartheid in South Africa, and he marched at the head of an angry group of demonstrators on the Jewish sabbath. Rioters subsequently murdered Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish youth, in retaliation. Twenty years later Sharpton issued a watery not-quite apology in the form of a Daily News op-ed.

Four years later, in 1995, Sharpton inflamed tensions on Harlem’s 125th Street that culminated in the murders of seven people in an arson attack. The owner of the building in dispute was actually a black Pentecostal church, whose leaders had asked a Jewish tenant to evict a black subtenant, who enlisted the aid of Sharpton and other race-baiters to whip up street protests. At one such demonstration, Sharpton shouted,

There is a systemic and methodical strategy to eliminate our people from doing business off 125th Street. I want to make it clear . . . that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.

A fellow protest leader said, “We’re going to see that this cracker suffers. Reverend Sharpton is on it.” One protester, wielding a gun, entered the store in December, crying, “It’s on now, all blacks out!” He set fire to the store and killed seven before shooting himself dead. Sharpton didn’t apologize.

It can hardly be stated often enough that the reason Sharpton first came to prominence was for promoting a vicious lie. In 1987, Tawana Brawley, a black upstate New York teen who wished to conceal from her father the fact that she had run away from home, concocted a story about being raped for four days by six white men, smeared with feces that spelled out racial slurs, and left in a dumpster. At the time, hate-crime hoaxes were all but unknown, and New York was still reeling over a genuine hate-crime attack, of a black youth in Howard Beach, Queens. After a jury ruled that the Brawley case was a hoax, state supreme-court justice S. Barrett Hickman wrote, “It is probable that in the history of this state, never has a teenager turned the prosecutorial and judicial systems literally upside-down with such false claims.” A local district attorney accused by Sharpton of being one of Brawley’s attackers, Steven Pagones, lost his job. It took him ten years to carry out and win a defamation action against Brawley, Sharpton, and another civil-rights activist. Sharpton never apologized for any of this.

A few years ago, progressive reporter Wayne Barrett dug up a detail worthy of Bonfire of the Vanities. He found that Comcast had paid Sharpton’s outfit, the National Action Network, some $140,000 as it was preparing to buy NBC/Universal. By remarkable coincidence, Sharpton gave his blessing to the merger, which was being opposed by black leaders such as Jesse Jackson on diversity grounds. By a still-more amazing coincidence Sharpton was, after the merger, given his own hour-long talk show on MSNBC, though today he is merely a frequent guest on the news network. Stuart Stevens at The Daily Beast wrote, “Sharpton is hardly alone in having spent decades vomiting hate, leaving innocent victims in his wake. What distinguishes Sharpton is the willingness of powerful people and organizations to look past the hate when they believe it may benefit them.”

Al Sharpton is a not a leading voice of anything except anti-Semitism. He seeks only to leverage racial resentment to advance the interests of Sharpton, to go “as far as his bullhorn audacity will carry him,” in the words of the New York Post columnist Bob McManus, who took Sharpton out to dinner once but drew the line at paying for the $350 glass of cognac Sharpton indicated he wanted. Making a career out of lies and hate has worked nicely for Sharpton, but only because the media and the Democratic party have served as his public-relations team.

Mario Lopez Was Smeared. Score One for the Mob

By Heather Wilhelm

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

When it comes to writing, I’ve been rather quiet lately, and friends and acquaintances occasionally ask me why. The answer is fairly simple, really: It is because the world of social media is ruining both journalism and public discourse as we speak.

Do you doubt this? Does this seem a bit over-the-top? Let me regale you, then, with the sordid details of the latest would-be online-outrage witch hunt, flagrantly manufactured by people at two major media companies right in front of our very eyes.

The target, at least this time, was affable television personality Mario Lopez. Mr. Lopez, as you might recall, first shot to stardom on the teen sitcom Saved by the Bell. There, he played the hunky high-school rebel dreamboat A. C. Slater, a young man so desirable that NBC would occasionally pipe in an instant recording of a bunch of girls screaming “Wooooooooooo!” when he entered a room.

Anyway, remember Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals? Remember that book’s detailed instructions on how to fight dirty when it comes to political warfare, including the maxim that one should “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”? That’s what a writer at Yahoo and the good folks at Twitter did to Lopez this week. It should alarm us all.

“Mario Lopez: It’s ‘dangerous’ for parents to support transgender kids,” blared an insistent headline Wednesday on Yahoo News. Not long after, a Twitter Moments headline popped up — what a coincidence! — declaring that “Mario Lopez’s comments from June on the #BelieveWomen movement and embracing gender expression in young children are receiving backlash.” Oh, wow! An online “backlash”! How very unusual! How exceedingly rare! The supposed evidence for this sweeping Twitter Moments statement, of course, was a link to the article at Yahoo News.

Here is a useful tip for navigating our bonkers new media culture, which is unfortunately dominated by a sizable group of over-educated knuckleheads who spend almost every waking hour on Twitter and wouldn’t know reality if it walked up in a clown suit and personally invited them to a Maoist struggle session: If you read on the Internet that something or someone is receiving a “backlash,” there is a sizable chance that the “backlash” in question actually consists of three or four tweets from random anonymous accounts. These accounts may or may not be run by middle-schoolers, the Russians, or the criminally insane, and they also usually have about 16 followers each.

If you take the time to actually read the Yahoo story targeting Lopez, you’ll not only find that he didn’t say what the headline claimed he did — more on that later — but that the “backlash” in question consisted of five anonymous tweets. I will repeat: FIVE ANONYMOUS TWEETS. At press time, the very first tweet cited as evidence of a massive online “backlash” had — wait for it, because this is actually kind of funny — a grand total of three followers. I wish I was making this story up, but the writer at Yahoo beat me to it.

But, hey, it’s 2019, so who cares, right? By promoting the Lopez “scandal” in its “Moments” feature, Twitter decided that this could be a good bullying opportunity — ahem, excuse me, I mean an important story. And lo and behold: It became an important story. By midday, tens of thousands of people on Twitter were passionately arguing about a controversy that did not actually exist. What a country!

In case you care about what Lopez actually said (and apparently not that many people do), here is a brief summary: When it comes to gender identity, he suggested, parents should exercise caution when a three-year-old makes a declaration that, if acted upon without question, would affect the rest of the child’s life. He also said that sexual-assault cases should be addressed with due process, because false accusations unfortunately do exist.

No, really, that’s pretty much it. This doesn’t seem that outrageous to me, especially given the fact that when my youngest was three, he spent an entire year earnestly waiting for his T-Rex teeth to come in. Also, due process seems like a good idea, does it not? Have we still not yet processed the disasters that surrounded the false accusations at the University of Virginia and Duke?

Moreover, even if you do find Lopez’s comments wildly offensive, whatever happened to the idea of people being free to say things that other people disagree with and we all simply move on with our lives?     

Well, never mind. Score one for the mob: Lopez apologized, and it didn’t even take a day. “The comments I made were ignorant and insensitive, and I now have a deeper understanding of how hurtful they were,” he said in a statement. Moreover, he says, “I am going to use this opportunity to better educate myself. Moving forward I will be more informed and thoughtful.”

Well, good luck, Mr. Lopez. I’m sure you’ll be more careful in the future, lest you be dropped yet again into a real-life version of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Meanwhile, out in this wild, wacky world, others will watch and learn. Call me crazy, but I doubt the results will be good.