The New Myths.(myths in public life)(Abstract)
(National Review)
The common wisdom usually isn't wisdom at all.
A YEAR ago, Congress got worked up about HMOs that forbade doctors
to tell patients about some of their treatment options. So it banned
the practice. The problem: as the General Accounting Office told Congress
a year later, these "gag rules" never existed in the first place.
When we make bad decisions, it's often not because of what we don'
t know but because of what we do know that isn't so. And reporters,
politicians, and policymakers know all sorts of things that aren'
t so. That's one reason they have periodic fits of hysteria over the
crise du jour (before "gag rules" there was "corporate downsizing"
). We are in the midst of a national seminar on the importance of
truth in public life. What better time to dispose of some of the persistent
myths that impede sound public policy? 1. "Guns in the home are 43
times more likely to kill a family member or friend than an intruder."
Ellen Goodman wrote that in 1993, but let's not pick on her. This
factoid is endlessly repeated by congressmen, by Handgun Control,
Inc., by TV crime shows, and even sitcoms. It isn't exactly false,
but it's extremely misleading. The original source is a study of
Seattle deaths written up by Dr. Arthur Kellerman for the New England
Journal of Medicine. It has been fiercely criticized. For one thing,
using a gun for defense kills the assailant only 1 or 2 per cent
of the time, according to Florida State University criminologist Gary
Kleck. What about brandishing it to scare an intruder off, or for
that matter wounding the intruder? Neither outcome counted in Kellerman'
s body count. The vast majority of the tragic deaths, meanwhile, are
suicides who may well have killed themselves some other way absent
a gun. (Many countries with fewer guns than the U.S. have higher suicide
rates.) 2. The SAT is biased against women and minorities, and it
doesn't predict college performance. This argument has been around
for years, but it's getting a vigorous workout now that racial preferences
are facing serious challenges. If universities can't have double standards
for admissions, the civil-rights lobby is concluding, maybe objective
standards should be junked altogether (or at least given less weight).
Thus Lani Guinier, as ever on the cutting edge of civil-rights thinking,
suggested in a 1997 op-ed that the argument over preferences has
"ignored the real problem, which is that we are basing admissions
for all students mainly on test scores." The Department of Education'
s Office of Civil Rights is investigating whether such admissions
criteria are discriminatory. Some advocates seem to think that the
mere fact that women and minorities tend to get lower scores than
white boys proves that the SAT is biased. Beyond that, groups like
the National Center for Fair and Open Testing cite examples of culturally
loaded questions, such as the famous one which involved the word "
regatta." But the very fame of this example, which appeared in 1975,
suggests that it has few peers. (The College Board, by the way, says
blacks didn't do particularly badly on this question.) The SAT is
a pretty good predictor of first-year grades at selective colleges;
in fact, minorities' grades tend to be lower than predicted. It is
not as good at predicting how, say, students at Harvard will stack
up against one another, for the same reason that height is not as
good a predictor of basketball ability in the NBA as in the population
in general: the group has already been sorted. David Murray, author
of a defense of standardized testing in the September Commentary,
concedes that there is something to the argument that tests like the
SAT chiefly measure the ability to take tests; but tests of some form
or another are, after all, a large part of college. Lefty education
gadfly Peter Sacks said in 1997, "The case against standardized mental
testing may be as intellectually and ethically rigorous as any argument
made about social policy in the past twenty years." So much the worse
for the past twenty years. 3. "[T]he military depends upon women."
Thus spoke Sen. Olympia Snowe (R., Me.) in June, during the debate
over an amendment introduced by Sen. Sam Brownback (R., Kan.) to mandate
separate training for men and women. Sen. Snowe was echoing the fact
sheet distributed by the army's own Office of Legislative Liaison:
"The Army cannot accomplish its mission without women-21 per cent
of recruits are women and 60 per cent of all recruits serve in gender-
integrated [job categories]." Sure, gender integration causes problems:
pregnant sailors; disregard for military rules about sex; the potential
for abuse; lowered physical standards and unit cohesion. But there
is no alternative. The military just can't get enough men. This is
not true. The services have so many women not because they can't find
men but because they maintain "goals"-i.e., quotas-for female recruits.
And since women tend to be rather less gung-ho about joining the Armed
Forces, recruiting them is much more expensive per person than recruiting
men-at least 50 per cent more in the Army, according to testimony
for the President's commission on women in the military in the early
Nineties. While women have always filled some auxiliary and support
roles in the military, the Armed Forces could do without all of them
if it had to, says Elaine Donnelly, head of the Center for Military
Readiness. But this myth could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As Thomas Ricks reported in the Wall Street Journal in 1997, Pentagon
officials and many Army officers fear that male enlistments are down
"because a macho image is being diluted," not least by gender integration:
"Overall, the decline of interest is especially precipitous among
blacks and Hispanics." The branch of the Armed Forces with the least
recruitment difficulties, the Marines, is also the one that has allowed
the least cultural change. 4. High infant-mortality rates and low
life expectancies show our health-care system is failing. We heard
a lot of this in 1993-94, when the Clintons were pushing their grand
overhaul, but it hasn't gone away. Actually, it is in part a tribute
to American health care that our infant-mortality rate is higher than
those of other countries. Doctors here will go to great lengths to
try to save babies who would elsewhere be treated as stillborn. That
makes our statistics look worse. Another reason for the high infant-
mortality rates, as Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise
Institute has explained, is that Americans have a high rate of low-
birthweight babies-a result of high rates of teen pregnancy, illegitimacy,
and drug abuse. The average life expectancy also reflects American
lifestyles: high rates of crime, drug abuse, unsafe sex, and fat consumption
take their toll. Neither national health insurance nor, for that matter,
medical savings accounts are likely to do much to change this. 5.
The tax code can redistribute income. Liberals are for redistribution
and conservatives against it, but not many people challenge its feasibility.
Maybe they should. Everyone who has looked at the issue agrees that
America's post-tax distribution of income doesn't look much different
from the pre-tax distribution. Alan Reynolds, director of research
at the Hudson Institute, thinks redistribution can't work in principle.
He argues that progressive tax rates amount to a tax on the returns
to education. When you tax something, it becomes more scarce-and the
pre-tax market return therefore rises. Thus, he has written, "Taxes
that appear to fall on supposedly affluent owners of capital can,
in fact, exacerbate inequalities of income by making capital more
scarce relative to labor. Capital scarcity raises the return to owners
of capital but lowers real wages, by depressing productivity." The
great counter-example is Japan, where high tax rates at the top coincide
with greater income equality than here. But as Reynolds notes, "That'
s clearly because executives [in Japan] get paid in perks to an extent
not seen in other countries." 6. "[T]hirty per cent of the teenagers
who commit suicide in this country are gay." That's what viewers of
60 Minutes heard from Lesley Stahl on August 16. In a story on Ellen
DeGeneres a year earlier, Diane Sawyer had cited "a government statistic"
that gay teens were three times as likely as their straight peers
to kill themselves. After that report aired, Delia M. Rios debunked
both statistics in the American Journalism Review. She found that
the data just aren't there: "A panel convened in 1994-with representatives
of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Mental Health,
the American Psychological Association, the American Association
of Suicidology, and gay and lesbian advocacy and service groups-made
this finding: 'There is no population-based evidence that sexual orientation
and suicidality are linked in some direct or indirect manner.'" The
original source of the myth was a San Francisco social worker's extrapolations
from flawed studies; his essay was included in an HHS task-force report,
and a "government statistic" was born. 7. The American people will
not tolerate casualties. This one is practically a truism among the
foreign-policy intelligentsia, who have taken it as a constraint since
the Vietnam War. The myth was reinforced when America cut and ran
after the bombing deaths of 239 soldiers in Lebanon in 1983 and the
killing of 18 in Somalia in 1993. Fear of the public reaction to substantial
American casualties was one of the reasons why President Bush ended
the Gulf War when he did. Edward Luttwak even wrote an essay in Foreign
Affairs explaining decreasing tolerance for casualties as a function
of decreasing average family size: mothers have fewer sons to spare
these days. In fact, studies by the Rand Corporation and others suggest
that the American public will accept casualties if it perceives them
as the unavoidable consequences of an important mission with a clear
strategy. It will not accept the wasting of lives on an ill-conceived
mission with no end in mind. Support for the interventions in Lebanon
and Somalia bottomed out before the debacles. As Lt. Col. (ret.) Ralph
Peters wrote in Proceedings, "the conviction of our governing elite
that Americans are unwilling to countenance death for any cause tells
us far more about that elite than it does about our citizens in general."
8. Everybody does it (i.e., commits adultery or lies about sex).
How many times have we heard this in the last eight months from defenders
of President Clinton? Katha Pollitt in The Nation: "At least the lies
he's told about sex are ones we can all identify with." Dick Morris
on Fox News (courtesy of Hotline): "[W]hen you get to an issue like
adultery, the American people are experts on that issue. There is
virtually no American who has not directly or indirectly been scathed
by adultery." Kate Moses in Salon: "The Clintons, it is clear, are
no different from any of the rest of us, except for having chosen
to conduct their family life under the intense scrutiny of the American
voting public." Oh really? The best available figures come from the
sex survey released by the University of Chicago's National Opinion
Research Center in 1994. It reports that just 22 per cent of men and
14 per cent of women commit adultery over the course of their lives.
And the typical infidelity is not a serial extravaganza. "They all
do it" isn't true of Presidents, either: nobody ever breathed a word
against Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan. While most of these myths are
the inventions of liberals, they aren't the only myth-makers, of course.
People across the political spectrum like to cite an apocryphal survey
finding that teachers in 1940 worried most about students talking,
chewing gum, and making noise, as opposed to drug abuse, alcohol
abuse, and pregnancy these days. (This was debunked by Barry O'Neill,
a professor at Yale University, in the New York Times Magazine in
1994). Conservative myths, though, tend to be caught quickly. So,
for instance, when Bill Bennett asserted in The Weekly Standard that
the life expectancy for gay men was 43 years-a point which NR praised
him for making-he was immediately and vigorously challenged. The figure
turned out to be based on a survey of obituaries in gay urban newspapers,
hardly a representative sample. Christina Hoff Sommers, whose Who
Stole Feminism? debunked bogus feminist statistics, thinks that one
reason for this political asymmetry is that "when you're exaggerating
victimization people assume your heart's in the right place." Correcting
the record, on the other hand, can come across as callous. But nobody'
s real interests are served by perpetuating falsehoods. Their consequences
are not always predictable: the factoid about gay-teen suicides, for
instance, could increase support for "gay rights"-or harden attitudes
about gays' proneness to instability. By the same token, dispelling
the myths does not settle whether we should have gun control or national
health insurance. But at least it allows these issues to be debated
intelligently.
Ponnuru, Ramesh, The New Myths.(myths
in public life)(Abstract). , National Review, 11-09-1998, pp 42(1).