`Report blames Meigs for lake pollution.”
The headline, from the MetroChicago section of Thursday’s Tribune, was an accurate enough description of the story that appeared beneath. A coalition of environmental groups and open-space advocates had issued a “report” which, they claimed, “demonstrates that Meigs Field should be closed and Northerly Island returned to the people of Chicago.”
The newsiest item in the report–that Meigs Field is polluting Lake Michigan–was backed up only by a simple assertion that because storm water from the airport ends up in the lake, and because de-icing chemicals and aviation fuel are spilled on the runway, these “toxic” and “hazardous” materials end up in the lake.
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Which is probably true, as far as it goes, though there was no effort to quantify (through periodic water sampling, for instance) the frequency or intensity of the pollution, or to compare the scale of it with pollution caused by, say, boats in nearby Burnham Harbor, or the occasional dumping of jet fuel into the lake by planes en route to O’Hare International Airport.
My purpose here is not to criticize the new “report” nor to repeat the argument from a previous column about why Meigs should be kept open. No, what I’m bemoaning is the proliferation of one-sided “reports” and “studies” in just about every corner of the nation’s public policy forum.
Raw advocacy is no longer enough. Nowadays, if you want to advance a position in the public arena, if you want to get it noticed by the press and acted on by political decision-makers, it is first necessary to produce a “study” or a “report” that proves your side is right and the other side is wrong.
Because it’s my job is to write about public policy, much of the mail I open every day consists of studies and reports. Now and then I’ll get a genuine piece of non-partial research, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, for instance, or the Census Bureau or the Federal Reserve Board. But most often, if I know the issue and recognize the return address, I can predict what the report will conclude before I open the envelope.
Consider one of the big issues this week on Capitol Hill: Whether to raise the minimum wage.
The liberal Economic Policy Institute, in a study titled “Raising the Floor,” concludes that hiking the minimum wage from its current $4.25-an-hour would not, as conservatives claim, cause thousands of jobs to disappear. “Increases in the minimum wage,” says EPI, produce no significant changes in employment, either up or down, among low-wage firms.” Authors William Spriggs and Bruce Klein say their own research, based on surveys of restaurants in Mississippi and North Carolina, confirm earlier findings of researchers David Card and Alan Krueger at Princeton University; Lawrence Katz at Harvard University; and Alison Wellington at Davidson College.
Sounds impressive . . . until you open the next envelope.
Number-crunchers at the pro-business Employment Policies Institute (another EPI) draw a completely different conclusion. Their author, David Neumark of the University of Pennsylvania, concludes that, all things considered, “imposition of minimum wages decreases employment opportunities for workers at or near the minimum wage . . . thus harming the very people the wage is designed to protect.”
Who’s right?
My strong suspicion, after years of opening contradictory envelopes, is that neither can be trusted. Nor, for that matter, should we put much store in any of the so-called “research” being pumped out by advocacy groups. Much of it is the kind of phony scholarship that begins with an ideological answer (government is good, for instance, or government is bad) and works backwards, selectively marshalling evidence to prove the thesis.
That otherwise reputable academic institutions would allow their faculty to participate in these charades is, I suppose, a credit to academic freedom. It’s also good for laughs, as when the libertarian Heartland Institute trumpeted that “one of the nation’s top educational researchers (Herbert Walberg at the University of Illinois at Chicago) today warned against increasing the state’s share of funding for public schools;” or that professor Daniel Polsby (Northwestern Law School) has shown that “gun control laws may be a factor in increasing inner-city violence.”
Leftist academics are just as guilty of crimes against common sense, I’m sure, but judging from my mail it’s the rightists are doing a better job of promoting their eggheads.
All of which can make one cynical, which is not a healthy thing to be in my line of work, nor in anyone’s effort to become an informed citizen. So I find myself, the older I get, taking the “studies” with a grain of salt and asking myself whether this claim or that claim stands up to common sense.
Take minimum wage. Can you raise a family on $4.25-an-hour, or $8,840-a-year? (Answer: I sure couldn’t.) Will some businesses lay people off rather than pay a $5.15 minimum? (Answer: Of course some will.) Would the benefits to the country outweigh the damage? (Answer: I’d think so, though I don’t know for sure.)
And neither, you can be sure, do the so-called experts.