Lies, Damned Lies, and the Media

As the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. There’s also a corollary: properly used, statistics don’t lie. But when selectively abused, statistics are meaningless.  The kerfuffle that followed President Trump’s interview with Jonathan Swan which aired on HBO earlier this week is yet another example of the phenomenon.

Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfuss was among those who weighed in on the interview. Dutifully following the “orange-man bad” narrative, a Dreyfuss Tweet seemed to imply a belief that Swan had a masterful command of meaningful pandemic statistics, while President Trump was basically clueless:

What made the president a fool and Swan a genius? Trump highlighted the statistical fact that the United States has been more effective in curing, aka reducing the death rate, among Americans who are diagnosed with COVID-19 than most of the rest of the world. This is clearly a testament to the effectiveness of our overall health care system in treating infectious and potentially fatal diseases.

Swan highlighted the statistical fact that more Americans have died of COVID-19 exposure per capita than have died as a percentage of population when compared to nations like Germany and South Korea. Though he didn’t directly say so, Swan clearly implied that this statistic was far more important than the statistic President Trump had mentioned.

Trump disagreed with Swan’s analysis: “You can’t do that,” he said.

“Why can’t I do that?” Swan responded, rudely.

At this point, neither party to this discussion displayed any sort of expertise about how to properly interpret statistics. Trump was stumbling, but so would every other President at this level of detail, going back to at least Eisenhower. American presidents are not masters of detail. Moreover, can anyone honestly believe that Joe Biden could get to that part of so nuanced of a discussion without his head exploding or threatening to punch somebody?

I believe the point Trump was attempting to make was that it is unsound scientifically to use the per capita death rate as the metric with which to judge the effectiveness of the administration’s response to the pandemic. If that is indeed the correct interpretation of “you can’t do that,” then the President’s point is valid.

If the death rate per person infected is relatively low, but the death rate per capita is higher, then the infection rate is the driver. Consider an example: Both Group A and Group B consist of one million individuals each, each demographically similar to the other. In Group A 100,000 get infected, while 20,000 of the infected sub-group die. The mortality rate per capita is 2%, while the mortality rate per infection is 20%. In Group B 50,000 people get infected, while 15,000 of the infected die. The mortality rate per capita is 1.5% and the mortality rate per infection is 30%. Infections are more prevalent in Group A, but treatment of the infection is much better in Group A than in Group B.

Or, let’s look at the following real-world analogy. In many developing countries the motor vehicle fatality rate per capita is far lower than it is in the United States. Does that mean it’s safer to drive in those nations? No, it means they have fewer cars. When you look at a meaningful statistic – deaths per motor vehicle – the fatality rate in most of the very same developing countries far exceeds that of the United States. As anyone who's ever driven in the Third World knows.

Per capita statistics are thus rarely useful analytical tools when considered in a vacuum. One must understand the underlying causes and how those causes may or may not be influenced before citing a per capita stat. In the case of COVID-19 there are at least two important underlying variables that should factor into any analysis: infection rate and treatment effectiveness.

Clearly, infection rates vary by state because the individual states have been driving different isolation and protection policies at varying speeds and implementing different “get back to normal” recovery programs as well. If Swan believes that the Administration could have and should have done something to implement a national isolation policy and national recovery policy, he should have said so.

Could the Trump administration have done something like that? I don’t see how. The states would scream bloody murder if he tried to interfere with them. The President can’t even get blue states to disperse riotous mobs occupying the streets of major American cities. Any attempt by this administration to impose rigid standards involving public gatherings and personal interactions would have been denounced as a violation of federalism and widely ignored.

It’s clear that stemming the spread of COVID-19 is about isolation and protective gear. The highest rate of new infections is now among the 20-29 year old demographic, many of whom ignore such restrictions. That’s understandable. They are at relatively low risk of dying even if they do catch it, and most of us who remember our twenties will recall that following rules – even rules meant to protect you – are not a high priority at that time of life. But this development emphasizes the simple fact that the infection rate part of the per capita mortality rate equation is about personal behavior, not national policy.

Among the parts of the equation that the administration could and did address was providing care for the sick and protection for health care workers. From getting Ford to produce ventilators, to ensuring there was an equitable distribution of face masks among the states in the early days of the pandemic, the Trump administration focused on those things it could do to facilitate research, to ensure that health care facilities were not overwhelmed, and to save as many lives of the infected as possible. Certainly the states and numerous organizations both public and private played a huge role in the success of that effort, but it’s petty partisanship at its worst to pretend that the president’s actions were unimportant or somehow misguided.

Sadly, Jonathan Swan’s abuse of statistics is business as usual for the legacy media these days. He focused on a statistic over which the Trump had no practical control, presumably because it made the president look bad, while ignoring the stat that demonstrated how effective the administration has been in helping to address those parts of the pandemic it actually could influence.

Some Non-Negotiable Demands for Utopia

Just when you’ve started wondering what topic you should write a column about—an activity that mostly leads to hours of more wondering—a lightning bolt strikes and clarifies your duty. On this occasion the lightning bolt took the friendly form of a left-wing petition urging me to save the world, more or less, by signing a petition making certain demands on . . . well . . . the world.

It’s easy to mock such things, and I shall try to do once or twice here, but the idea of petitioning parliaments, congresses, and governments is an ancient, honorable, and essentially democratic one. As a mode of debate it’s greatly to be preferred to hitting the heads of people with whom you disagree with mallets. And it has sometimes brought about peaceful democratic change—notably in the case of the People’s Charter of 1838 which brought millions onto the streets, made the ruling classes nervous, and persuaded Parliament to introduce most of the essentials of the country’s modern democracy over time.

The petition sent to me was somewhat more ambitious. It was addressed flatteringly to “policy makers” and it bore the grandiose title Covid-19 Global Solidarity Manifesto. It is well-designed, having that look of authentic simplicity that disarms skepticism, and it is indeed short, simple and declarative. Its nine main points begin with the words, “We demand . . .”

Or else.

What’s being demanded we’ll come onto in due course, but the petition varies its demands with assurances that these things are going to happen anyway. Oh yes. This kind of writing is known as the “imperative indicative,” but it’s less imperative than they might wish because the element of threat is so understated. Reading it is rather like being held up by a man wearing a Covid-19 health mask and wielding a banana.

Let’s now come to the content—the weak spot here as in so many left-wing manifestos. The first demand is for “strong, universal health care systems and health care as a basic right for all humans.” Such things would certainly be desirable outcomes, but they cannot be granted as rights because they are unattainable in present circumstances and would impose insupportable burdens on everyone everywhere including those countries which currently have good health systems.

Consider this: even in progressive health care systems in rich countries there’s a constant irresolvable struggle to combine three things: universal access, the full range of (ever-expanding) medical treatments, and cost control. Pick any two. The attempt to have all three results in regular crises in which queues for particular treatments lengthen and expensive treatments cease to be available at all.

That discomfiting reality rests on the truth that the demand for health care is potentially infinite. As the former UK health minister, Enoch Powell, wrote in a 1960s book (I quote from memory): Unrestrained by price, the demand for health care rises until it consumes the entire national income. When I quoted that to a distinguished doctor of firmly liberal views on the faculty of Stanford University, he told me that he hated to agree but that he was reluctantly bound to do so.

The end result of Demand #1, therefore, would be the universalization of health poverty as the fruit of an attempt to equalize health care upwards. So Demand #2—a massive reduction in war, conflict, and defense spending—would fail as well since half of its purpose is to pay for Demand #1 and some of the other causes listed (“housing, childcare, nutrition, education, Internet access, and other social needs.”)

There is only one way the world could afford to pay for this catalogue of costly benefits and that is if we were able to achieve a fantasy of high economic growth without end. Unfortunately, that prospect is scotched by Demand #3 which calls for “the fantasy of endless growth” in unsustainable capitalist economies, “[to] be replaced with cooperatively based economies of care, where human life, biodiversity, and our natural resources are conserved and a universal basic income is guaranteed so that governments can work together to combat the existential threat of climate change.”

And here we come to the nub or gist of the problem. In a way, the petitioners are pointing to something important which they misunderstand: endless growth under capitalism is not a fantasy but the experience of capitalism over more than two hundred years. Such growth has proved to be a fantasy, however, under all other economic systems, notably those “cooperatively based economies of care” which provide their citizens with economic security, but which also restrict them to much lower living standards than their capitalist neighbors. Such economies have delivered economic wastelands despite being given a series of Western loans and investments over the years.

Moreover, the various kinds of communist/socialist economies in the last century that attempted a (more realistic) version of this program did not handicap themselves by swearing off cheap fossil-fuel based energy as the main mover of industrialization and prosperity. Quite the contrary. Lenin defined communism as “Soviet power plus electrification,” and unlike some modern environmentalists, he didn’t think that electricity grew on trees (not without the trees being chopped down, converted to wood chips and then transported thousands of miles to power stations across the world.)

But the signatories of the Covid-19 Global Manifesto want to deliver all the benefits above, including a program of universal income grants, without using cheap fossil fuel energy that underpins prosperity worldwide. Their “fantasies” of electrification provided entirely from renewables like wind and sun were recently diagnosed into oblivion by Professor Michael Kelly of Cambridge University in his monograph Electrifying the UK, in which he cites, with examples, the costs of engineering the delivery of energy—even in the cases where its generation is relatively cheap. They turn out to be enormously expensive.

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For instance:

It is often pointed out that electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion engines, and this is true; there is a factor of three involved. But the low energy density of batteries means that much of this advantage is lost in having to carry around a heavy battery. The power pack for a Tesla weighs half a tonne and occupies much of the floor pan of the car: for the same 600-km range in a petrol car, you would need 48 litres of petrol, weighing just 36 kg.

And:

The £45 million battery installed by Elon Musk outside Adelaide, South Australia, can power that city for 30 minutes. It would power the emergency wards (20% of total demand) of Addenbrooke‘s Hospital in Cambridge for 24 hours on a single 80–20% discharge. Back-up is currently provided by two 1500- kVA diesel generators, which run for as long as fuel is available and cost £250,000. So if you wanted to be able to cover a 3 week’s power outage after a major storm, it would cost around 1300 times as much using batteries as it would with diesel generators.

I'm not over-confident that you can simply multiply that cost by the number of hours in a day and days in a year to get an accurate estimate of what it would cost to power Adelaide for a year, but if so, the cost would be upwards of a trillion dollars. And there are similar mind-boggling cost overruns attached to almost every Green technical insight. I doubt Adelaide’s city fathers would think that a practicable proposition. Nor would the government of South Australia, nor the Australian federal government in Canberra. Nor other governments not headed, however temporarily, by visionary idealists.

That may not matter a great deal to the authors of the Global Solidarity Manifesto.  Consider the organizations that so far have signed up to the manifesto. Here was the list as of yesterday:

My guess is that unlike the  Chartists of 1838, these bodies are looking to present their reforms to organizations representing the whole of mankind rather than to narrow nationalist democratic governments that have to pay for their policies by taxing their citizens and justifying expenditures to the voters in elections. Insofar as they seek to change the policies of national governments, they do so by  influencing UN and other globalist bodies which then lean on governments to follow them in ways that Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte has called a fantasia of “global governance.”

In other words, it’s the stage army of transnational progressives mounting another membership drive. They have little or no genuine  democratic credentials, and they frequently proclaim that their favored concerns are "too important to be left to democracy—which is all the more reason for the rest of us to apply democratic criteria to their manifestos.

There are about nine billion people in the world. Yesterday the Covid-19 Global Solidarity Manifesto had 1600 signatures. When the figure reaches five billion, call my office.