John Hood: Without Us, the Sun Also Rises
RALEIGH — I’m an early riser. I have been since early adulthood — long, long before any hungry children, or a certain German Shepherd, came along to command my early-morning attention.
If you had meticulous records of my wake-up times and compared them against daily sunrises, you’d find a consistent pattern: the sun almost always rises after I do. Since you are not a loon, however, you wouldn’t ascribe superhuman abilities to me. If I slept all morning, the sun would rise, anyway.
To establish a consistent pattern is only the beginning of inquiry. To find a correlation between two variables is insufficient to prove one makes the other happen. You might get the causal arrow backwards — concluding that the last-minute purchase of an umbrella causes the subsequent rain, for example — or fail to detect a third variable that truly explains the correlation between the other two.
A famous example of the latter mistake is to observe, correctly, a correlation between ice-cream sales and shark attacks and conclude, incorrectly, that buying a vanilla cone might antagonize a Great White Shark, or that bite victims often console themselves with banana splits. The real cause of both effects is, of course, the onset of summer.
Political debates are full of causal claims resting on correlations. The legislature passed a tax cut and the economy subsequently grew, therefore the former caused the latter. Or the legislature passed a tax cut and the poverty rate rose, therefore the former caused the latter (perhaps indirectly, by depriving a government program of funds with which it could be combatting poverty).
You’ll see no sweeping condemnation of this practice from me. Correlations are, as I said, a starting point. Multivariate modeling and rigorous evaluation of causal claims are expensive, time-consuming, and far from perfect. When I assert causal claims about policy interventions, I try to cite studies to the extent I can find (or commission) them, but sometimes I resign myself to observing a relationship between two variables of interest and offering what I hope are reasonable explanations for why one is likely causing the other, rather than the reverse.
One of the first magazine articles I ever wrote, for Consumers Research, explored the question of workplace safety. After the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) began operations in 1971, rates of workplace injuries and fatalities fell substantially. By the late 1980s, OSHA officials and advocates were making extravagant claims about the effectiveness of the agency. But they pointed only to the safety improvements since 1971.
Curious, I pulled data from the National Safety Council going back to the 1930s. Zeroing in on the workplace-fatality rate — the measure least likely to be thrown off by changes in the propensity to report accidents — I discovered that the death rate plummeted from 1933 to 1971, then continued to drop into the early 1990s. The slope of the line wasn’t much different before and after the creation of OSHA, severely weakening the claims of its defenders.
I didn’t conclude, by the way, that government intervention was irrelevant. States require that employers purchase workers compensation insurance. Companies with more claims pay higher premiums. This likely did motivate employers to make their workplaces safer (as did the fact that workplace accidents and fatalities impose other costly disruptions).
In a recent study, American Enterprise Institute scholars Richard Burkhauser and Kevin Corinth tested another common claim: that only after the War on Poverty launched by the Lyndon Johnson administration did material deprivation really start to decline among low-income Americans.
Using properly constructed poverty measures that contain multiple sources of after-tax income, Burkhauser and Corinth found that, yes, poverty has dropped substantially since 1963. But poverty also dropped from 1939 to 1963, by 29 percentage points! “While absolute poverty continued to fall following the War on Poverty’s declaration,” they concluded, “the pace was no faster.”
That’s not necessarily an argument against anti-poverty programs. It is an argument for doubting simple answers to inherently complicated questions.
John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
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