Science, Non-Science, Anti-Science, And Scientific Fraud

In the climate change arena, everybody's favorite tactic is to accuse the other guy of being unscientific, or even "anti-science."  As one of many, here is Salon calling "climate deniers" an "anti-science movement."  How do you tell who is following the methodology of science, and who (if anyone) is "anti-science"?

Actually, I think the answer to that one should be easy and not subject to much dispute.  Let me lay it out.

Science is a method.  Here are the fundamentals of the method:

• Someone puts forth a falsifiable hypothesis.  Non-falsifiable hypotheses are not part of the scientific method.
• The falsifiable hypothesis is tested against data, either from observation or experiment.
• If data from observation or experiment are consistent with the falsifiable hypothesis, then the hypothesis survives to be tested by additional observation or experiment.  However, there is no such thing as definitive and final proof of a scientific hypothesis.  No matter how much consistent evidence may be accumulated, it is always possible that further evidence may emerge that may invalidate the hypothesis.
• If any data emerge that are inconsistent with the hypothesis, then the hypothesis is wrong and must be rejected.  Period.

As far as I know, that's really all there is to it.  I think I learned these things in junior high school, although it's so long ago that my memory is hazy.  People who think I have any of the principles wrong should please point out my error, if any.  I wonder: do they still teach these basics of the scientific method in junior high or high school? 

Now, who is a scientist?  I would say that a scientist is someone who works in accordance with the scientific method.  That means that s/he (1) puts forth falsifiable hypotheses for testing, (2) is willing to take on any and all challengers to her/his hypothesis, and (3) is prepared to reject any hypothesis when data emerge that are inconsistent.  Another approach is that a scientist is anyone who has a science degree from some institution and/or works in a lab.  In my view, people fitting that definition may call themselves scientists, but they may or may not be actual scientists in the sense of practicing the scientific method.  Or they may practice the scientific method sometimes and pontificate on things they know nothing about at other times. 

I'm now going to apply these simple principles to my recent article titled "The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part IX" and some of the comments.  As you will see, I think the fundamental problem with much of the press and many of the critical commenters is that they have just lost track of what the scientific method is.

Start with the statement in the CNN article that "the Earth is warming."  As discussed in my post, the truth of that statement entirely depends on who gets to pick the start point against which temperature change is measured.  If the proponent of the statement gets to pick the start point, then the statement is non-falsifiable.  It's classic non-science.  But how about CNN's statement that "scientists who study climate are overwhelmingly in agreement"?  So?  The invocation of "scientists" doesn't make a non-falsifiable hypothesis into science.  They may practice science in some respects in their life, but agreeing with this proposition has nothing to do with it.

So what is the falsifiable hypothesis of the climate alarmist movement?  Funny thing is, I look hard to find it, and I can't.  It's funny because I would think that if they want to claim the mantle of science that would know that you need to have a falsifiable hypothesis that is standing the test of time, or serious people are going to know that you are not dealing in science and are not going to take you seriously.  But in the absence of such a hypothesis from those proclaiming the crisis, let me try to state one for them:  CO2 in the atmosphere, via the greenhouse effect, is the main driver of global average surface temperature (GAST), and if atmospheric CO2 continues to increase at the rate implied by current level of fossil fuel consumption, that will drive GAST increases of 0.2 to 0.5 deg C per decade through the 21st century, irrespective of any countervailing climate forces such as ocean, sun, or clouds.   I'm willing to accept any and all other statements of the falsifiable catastrophic global warming (CGW) hypothesis for purposes of what follows.

Now here is a comment yesterday from someone named bas:

You can't start at an outlier (1998) and then proclaim a trend.  

Here's your problem bas: I'm not "proclaiming a trend."  I'm asking if the evidence is consistent or inconsistent with the hypothesis.  If you want it to be science, your hypothesis needs to be able to deal with all the data.  This is not like the East German figure skating judge in the old days at the Olympics.  If it's to be science, then you can't cherry-pick the data you like and ignore the data you don't like (by declaring them to be an "outliers", or otherwise).  I would call that "anti-science."  We have here a glaring data point in 1998, and another less glaring one in 2010, that are inconsistent with the hypothesis.  If CO2 and its greenhouse effect drive global temperature over and above all other forces, and atmospheric CO2 went from about 360 ppm in 1998 to over 400 today, then how could GAST have gone down?  The trend since 1979 is indeed consistent with your hypothesis.  Great.  But the fundamental principle of the scientific method is, all data consistent with the hypothesis just leave it to survive for another day, while any evidence inconsistent with the hypothesis invalidate the hypothesis. 

Then there's this from a guy calling him/herself factsRfacts:

I love it when the Francis Menton writes about facts and then he cannot even read the chart he himself provided. Now if you would be looking at that chart from a business point of view, then I assure you every businessman would tell you that the overall development is going up.

Funny how it's now the "business point of view."  OK, but how about the scientific method?  If you want to keep the hypothesis alive, you're going to have to modify it to explain how CO2 could have gone up for 18 years while temperatures did not.  Otherwise, it's dead.  Science can be cruel.  And the modifications to the hypothesis to make it explain the decline since 1998 are not going to be easy.  You will have to admit that some force, somewhere, can overwhelm the effect of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2.  OK, what is it?  Is it anthropogenic or natural?  If you can't say, how do you know that anthropogenic CO2 has any effect whatsoever on GAST?

And now you will understand why the guardians of the global thermometer temperature records are so desperate to alter those records to show warming.  Altering data -- that's what I call "scientific fraud."  But then we have the satellites, with data processed by two independent sources and showing virtually identical results for the past 36 years.  They haven't figured out how to alter that -- yet.

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part IX

Perhaps you are wondering if the world truly has gone mad, or if it only seems that way.  If so, take a look at the climate confab that has just gotten under way in Paris.  Yes, the world truly has gone mad.

Time Magazine puts the number of attendees at 40,000.  Holy cow!  That's 40,000 people, every one of them on the taxpayer dime of some country or other, and every one of them dedicated to the proposition that you must be forced to use less energy and/or have your price of energy jacked up until you can't afford it any more.  It's to save the planet!  And all of those 40,000 taxpayer-funded people are also dedicated to suppressing any dissent to climate orthodoxy in order to preserve their own salaries and careers.  And yet all of them somehow fly to Paris on planes burning massive amounts of fossil fuel, not noticing any contradiction between how they demand you live your life and how they live theirs.

Consider the case of our President.  He has called the so-called "climate crisis" "worse than the terrorist threat."   He has also just flown to Paris in Air Force One, and presumably plans to fly back the same way.  An Air Force One 747 consumes 5 gallons of fuel per mile.  It's 3855 air miles from Washington to Paris, 7710 round trip.  Did I mention that Air Force One is actually two planes?  They always keep a spare 747 within about a half-hour, just in case.  So make that 15,420 air miles at 5 gallons per mile.  A gallon translates to 21.1 pounds of CO2 emissions.  So our dear President is emitting some 1,625,000 pounds of CO2 just for his own flight over and back, more than 800 tons.  For comparison, the average American's annual carbon emissions are about 20 tons -- for everything you do for an entire year.  Just for the President, and just for this one flight over and back, he is emitting 40 years worth of your carbon consumption.  Add in the emissions of his massive entourage on this boondoggle, and it's a multiple of what you will emit in your entire lifetime.  Wired here calculates the total emission of all the attendees in attending the conference at 300,000 tons of CO2 -- several hundred times what you will emit in your entire life.  And these people purport to lecture you and restrict you by force on how much energy you can use?

But of course, everybody knows that solving the carbon "crisis" is critically important because "the Earth is warming."  We do know that, don't we?  Acknowledging that you agree that "the Earth is warming" is the main way that you prove to polite society today that you are not a complete fool, an idiot, a "denier," an anti-science crazy.  As summarized by CNN here in August:

According to multiple peer-reviewed scientific journals, scientists who study climate are overwhelmingly in agreement that the Earth is warming . . . .   An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- acknowledged by many experts as the scientific authority on climate change -- says in a major report [in 2013] that it's unequivocal that the climate is warming . . . .  

Of course, the last thing you'd want to do before agreeing that "the Earth is warming" would be to look at the data.  Well, maybe just a peek?  Here's the latest satellite temperature record from UAH, from the time they first put up the satellites in 1979 and going right up to yesterday:

It's rather obvious here that the warmest year was 1998, and indeed the peak was in early 1998.  That's almost 18 years ago!  What does it even mean to say that "the Earth is warming" when the best data show that the warmest time was 18 years ago?  The trend since 1998 is down, not up.  The trend since 1997 is completely flat. 

Candidate Ted Cruz was famously quoted by Time back in August as saying

"If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there's been zero recorded warming . . . .   The satellite says it ain't happening . . . I'm saying that data and facts don't support it."

For that heresy Cruz drew a response from billionaire and former Mayor Mike Bloomberg in a CNN interview on November 25.  Bloomberg referred to "right wing crazies" who reject mainstream climate science, and particularly said he was talking about Cruz:

You've got a guy like Ted Cruz . . .  and he says some of the stupidest things I've ever heard.

Yes, in the field of climate "science," pointing out that the data refute the hypothesis is now "crazy" and "the stupidest thing I've ever heard."  Who again is the unscientific one here?

But, you ask, what about those seemingly monthly press releases from NOAA and NASA, based on ground thermometers rather than satellites, that keep reporting that each successive month and year are "the hottest ever"?  Readers here know that this is what I have referred to as "The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time."  Read some previous articles in this series here.  As reported in those articles, numerous non-government-funded independent researchers have gone to check the raw archived temperature data from many stations against the current NOAA and NASA data bases that generate the reports of "hottest ever," and uniformly they find the same thing: early year data altered downward, and recent year data altered upward, in order to create a warming trend where otherwise none exists.  See, for example, Tony Heller's Real Science here, Paul Homewood's Not a Lot of People Know That, Joe D'Aleo's Icecap. 

Now for the latest on that.  In Germany, a retired geologist and data computation expert named Friederich Karl Ewert recently decided to follow the lead of Heller, Homewood, D'Aleo, et al., and try his hand at comparing archived raw temperature data from many weather stations to currently-reported temperatures from NASA.  Here is the result, reported on November 20 at No Tricks Zone:

From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. […] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed.    

Surprise!  It's "unbelievable."  Actually not, if you've been following this issue at all.  According to my Google search here, the Ewert study has been reported at Breitbart, CNS, No Tricks Zone, Not a Lot of People Know That, Weasel Zippers, Hockey Schtick, Free Republic, The Federalist Papers,  and many others -- all of them conservative-oriented sources.  But somehow no mention at literally any so-called "mainstream" source: New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Bloomberg, etc., etc., etc.  If anybody can find a mention in any mainstream source, I'll be interested to know.  Have the facts really become this partisan?

So 40,000 people, all on government payroll, meet in Paris to seek to put over on the world's people a spending/control program of multi-trillions of dollars, all based on so-called "facts" that all are required to believe but are contradicted by the best available data.  Our primary media sources systematically suppress the data.  Yes, the world truly has gone mad.

How A New President Could Reduce The Poverty Rate By 90% In A First Term

Here's how: by simply directing the Census Bureau to produce an honest measure of poverty, as opposed to the obviously fake and deceptive measures that they currently produce.

In September the Census Bureau came out with its annual report on Income and Poverty in the United States, covering 2014.  The so-called "official poverty rate" was reported as 14.8%, allegedly representing some 46.7 million people living "below the poverty line."  The 14.8% rate actually was an increase from 2013's 14.5%, although the Report admits that the increase was not "statistically significant."

Still, with a trillion dollars or so of spending on anti-poverty programs at federal, state and local levels each year, and with an economic recovery (however feeble) now in its 6th year, how could the rate and number of people in poverty not be going down, and dramatically so? Instead, the number of people reported to be in poverty has increased since 2007 from about 37 million to 2014's 47 million, and the reported rate has increased over that period from about 12.5% to 2014's 14.8%.  On a longer time scale, the failure of poverty to yield to the extraordinary measures to end it is striking: a Census Bureau chart reproduced here shows that going all the way back to 1966 the official poverty rate started just above its most recent level and has never achieved any kind of downward breakthrough; the lowest recorded level was 11.1% in 1974.

The only way this is possible is that the government's "poverty rate" long since ceased to be a bona fide measure of physical deprivation, and instead became part of the ongoing efforts of the bureaucracy to grow the government in general and the anti-poverty programs in particular.  The bureaucrats well know that the best tool to advocate for more anti-poverty spending is a continued high poverty rate, while any dramatic decline in measured poverty would cause many to conclude that the poverty problem had been largely solved and the enormous funding could be cut.  And thus, as more and more anti-poverty programs and spending have been added to the system, definitions have been contrived to exclude the spending from the measure of "poverty," and surveys have been constructed to get answers that obviously omit large amounts of income and benefits received.

Meanwhile, politicians have shown little interest in devising a measure of poverty that meaningfully relates to physical deprivation.  Indeed, at the heights of cynicism, the Obama administration has backed an effort by a gaggle of bureaucratic gnomes to replace the official measure of poverty with a so-called "supplemental poverty measure" that is based on a standard of relative rather than absolute income.  In other words, the "supplemental measure" is explicitly designed to make defined "poverty" impervious to reduction no matter how much taxpayer money is spent to eliminate it.  Fortunately, the "supplemental measure" does not seem to have caught on much with the press or the public.  Meanwhile on the Republican side, the GW Bush administration did not pursue coming up with an honest "poverty" rate, nor is there much pressure to do so from right-side think tanks and pundits.  Perhaps Republicans just enjoy bashing the left with the obvious failure of their programs. 

But suppose we got a new President who decided to have the Census Bureau report honestly to the American people as to a real measure of actual poverty, that is, poverty in the sense that most people think of it, namely, physical deprivation.  By physical deprivation, I mean, clearly inadequate shelter, not enough to eat, insufficient clothes, or some combination of one or more of those three, plus lack of access to any government program to provide those things.  What could a new President do to move toward such a more honest measure of poverty?  As soon as you start to look into it, you realize that obvious modifications of the methodology in the direction of simple honesty could quickly reduce the reported rate of "poverty" by 90% or more.  For example:

• In an April 2, 2015 article in the New York Review of Books titled "The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?" Christopher Jencks of Harvard made what he called a "first approximation" of what would happen to the official poverty rate if just three adjustments were made: (1) counting in-kind benefits like housing and food assistance that currently are not counted, (2) counting the EITC, that currently is not counted, and (3) using the Commerce Department's Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) index, rather than the CPI, to measure inflation since 1964.  In round numbers, USDA's nutritional programs distribute about $110 billion per year; HUD's budget is about $50 billion per year (which way understates the aggregate value of housing assistance); and the EITC distributes about $61 billion per year.  Jencks concludes that counting housing and food assistance benefits would reduce the official poverty rate by 3.0%; that counting the EITC would reduce the rate by another 3.0%; and that making the inflation adjustment would reduce the rate by 3.7%.  Thus, making those three adjustments would reduce the poverty rate by almost 10%, to about 5%.  Jencks does not give details of his methodology, and his estimate for the reduction from counting the vast housing and nutrition programs seems ridiculously small to me.  But let's accept it as a first step.
• Next we have the fact that the poverty rate is calculated from a survey (the CPS) in which (according to Robert Doar in the Wall Street Journal on November 19) respondents are known to omit as much as half or more of the government benefits that they receive; and the Census Bureau, in tabulating the results, just takes the information provided by the respondents without any kind of follow up or double check.  Just counting unreported benefits received could easily knock another couple of points off the poverty rate.
• Dare I mention the underground economy?  Somehow the Census Bureau, Jencks, Doar and literally everybody else just leave it out when calculating a poverty rate.  Perhaps the most thorough scholarly treatment of the size of the underground economy is the Cebula/Feige study of 2011.  That study estimated the underground economy in the U.S. at $2 trillion per year, meaning that around 18% of all income goes unreported to the government.  Of course, not all of this money goes to those deemed to be in poverty, but clearly much of it does.  Please note that the total aggregate amount of income by which all people deemed to be in "poverty" by the Census Bureau fall short of the official poverty thresholds is only about $300 billion.  The underground economy exceeds this amount by a factor of almost seven, meaning that if only a seventh of the underground economy goes to those deemed "poor" there would be no poverty left -- and that's without considering any of the other adjustments discussed here. 
• And, believe it or not, there still are multiple big items that we haven't gotten to yet.  College scholarships and fellowships covering room and board are not counted in the current official measure of poverty.  Do you mean that living in the dorm and eating in the dining hall at Harvard counts as poverty?  They get away with this nonsense because in big towns like Boston the effect of counting well-off students as "poor" gets lost in the data; but then you look at a small affluent town like Ithaca, New York dominated by two colleges, and you find out that it has a reported official poverty rate exceeding 40%.  Ridiculous!  Another omitted category is loan proceeds, meaning, for example, that early retirees living off their home equity by means of a reverse mortgage are counted as "poor."  And finally there is what is likely the biggest category of all: support from family and relatives.  Yes, heiresses who take a year to travel the world on daddy's money are counted as "poor."  Hey, their income is zero.  They are living on less than a dollar a day!

I do not have an exact figure for where this would come out if all the adjustments are made.  But I can confidently assert that making appropriate adjustments to exclude from "poverty" those who are suffering no physical deprivation would reduce the reported "official rate" by 90% or more, that is, from close to 15% to more like 1.5% or less.  And, just as the Obama administration cooked up its "supplemental poverty measure" under a general Congressional authorization to study Census methodology, so could a new President us the same general authorization to put in place an honest measure of real poverty.

How Government Advancement Of "Fairness" Ends In Graft

Here in the capital of the progressive fantasy, the official groupthink holds that the fundamental duty of government is to promote fairness and equality through the exercise of government's coercive powers.  And now we have the simultaneous federal corruption trials of the ex-State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the ex-State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos.   These trials provide insight into how the progressive fantasy plays out in the real world.  How it plays out is graft.

At the current moment Silver's trial has completed presentation of evidence and closing arguments, and is in the hands of the jury.  At another courthouse literally next door, Skelos's trial is still in the evidence phase.  A fascinating aspect of the two trials is the common role played by New York real estate investor Leonard Litwin and his company, Glenwood Management. 

Glenwood is mainly in the business of owning and renting residential apartments.  Compared to the office and condominium markets, the residential rental business in New York is subject to far more government meddling.  To start with, we have rent regulation.  That's how we "preserve" "affordable" apartments to be sure that no "unfairness" occurs, such as that people like Mia Farrow and Bianca Jaggermight have to pay market rents for their multi-million dollar apartments.  Due to reforms enacted in the 90s under then Republican Governor George Pataki, the grip of rent regulation has loosened ever-so-slowly.  But rent regulation still covers about half of rental housing units in the City, or around 1 million units.  And progressive activists in the legislature are constantly agitating to tighten the regulations and re-impose them on the currently free-market units.  In addition, there are tax incentives for the construction of new rental units, particularly "affordable" ones, and those are set to lapse regularly.  Put it all together, and it's the perfect environment for pols to enrich themselves.

So there we have Glenwood, one of the largest rental owners and managers, a sitting duck for predatory government.  In today's market its holdings are worth billions, but that could be wiped out in short order by imposition of sufficiently onerous new rent regulations.  Do we really expect these guys to wade into these waters and then just wait for the crocodile to lunge?  Actually, we know that that's not how it works.  Still, the level of the protection money that the pols exact by explicit and implicit threats of predation is really quite stupefying.  Hedge Clippers here has a list of Glenwood political and related contributions in New York from 2008 to 2015.  As examples, Governor Cuomo's 2014 re-election campaign got $1,214,200; "Jobs for New York" (a real estate industry fund to support mostly City Council candidates) got $587,600; the NYS Senate Republican Campaign Committee got $450,000; the NYS Democratic Committee got $300,000; the Democratic 2014 AG candidate, Schneiderman, got $215,000, while the Comptroller candidate (DiNapoli) got $210,000; and so forth for dozens more on down the list.

Note that there is no particular ideology behind this.  Republicans get money for their Senate campaigns because they have mostly controlled that body.  Essentially, the contributions go to whoever Glenwood thinks will win.  That's who they need protection from!

Anyway, these numbers are public numbers for campaign contributions.  But the Silver and Skelos trials show how a pol can equally squeeze the sitting ducks for personal enrichment.  In Silver's case, he just suggested that Glenwood use his friend's law firm for its "tax certiorari" work.  ("Tax certiorari" means challenging annual real estate tax assessments.  That work for apartment buildings worth hundreds of millions of dollars can be very lucrative.)  Glenwood took his "suggestion."  Silver got one-third of the firm's fees as his "referral" payment, amounting to several hundred thousand from this source.  In the case of Skelos, the alleged personal enrichment via Glenwood is much smaller, consisting of one $20,000 "referral" fee going to his son Adam from a title insurance company.       

So what is the solution?  Plenty of commenters on this situation cheer on Preet Bharara and his prosecutors for exacting punishment for the alleged crimes.  But as I've noted multiple times, the line here between crime and non-crime is by no means clear; and indeed that is the essence of the defense of both Silver and Skelos.  Hey, our friends sent us some business!  So? 

Sorry, but the ongoing effort to achieve "fairness" and "equality" by government coercion is inherently corrupt and corrupting.  The most corrupt states are the ones that go farthest into the big spending "fairness" game (New York, New Jersey, Illinois).  There's probably no such thing as completely eliminating the problem, but the best way to minimize it is for governments to stop trying to achieve fairness or equality in human affairs.     

Literally Everybody Gets Taken In By The Poverty Scam

Readers here know that one of my favorite themes is the government's "poverty" scam -- that is, the obvious fraud by which the government ridiculously inflates the measured "poverty" rate by refusing to count hundreds of billions of dollars of government spending as alleviating poverty, and by willfully ignoring huge sources of income.  And then the government uses the fraudulently inflated poverty rate to justify continuing and increasing some $1 trillion in annual anti-poverty spending.  For an introduction, two representative articles are Poverty: It's Worse Than You Think and The Poverty Deception, Part II . 

What never ceases to amaze is that literally everybody gets taken in by the scam.  By "gets taken in," I mean, treats the government "poverty" numbers as some kind of legitimate effort to get a handle on suffering and deprivation in the country, as opposed to the obvious fraud that they are.  And by "literally everybody," I mean, everybody up to and including scholars at think tanks who make a living studying the numbers and who just don't have any excuse for not knowing better.  (I would give Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation as an exception, but a lonely one.)

As the latest example of the genre, we have on yesterday's Wall Street Journal op-ed page an article by Robert Doar of AEI titled "Mismeasuring Poverty."  Doar calls attention to some recent scholarship by Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and Nikolas Mittag of Charles University that indicates in at least a couple of respects that the Census Bureau may be overstating "poverty" somewhat:

Here’s good news for policy makers—on the right and left—concerned about poverty in the United States. A new study by economists Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and Nikolas Mittag of Charles University shows that public-assistance programs are far more effective in alleviating poverty than many government statistics suggest.    

Doar reports that the Meyer/Mittag research has uncovered that the Census poverty data, derived from its Current Population Survey (CPS), miss large amounts of government handout benefits that, if counted, would lower reported poverty substantially.  In a review of data just from the state of New York, the researchers found that the Census CPS data missed entirely a third of housing assistance recipients, 40% of SNAP (food stamps) recipients, and 60% of TANF (cash welfare) recipients.  Oh, and then, even for those recipients that were identified, the CPS responses underreported the value of the benefits by 6% for SNAP, 40% for cash and 74% for housing assistance.

Now these are rather gigantic omissions -- just these omissions have to come to at least $100 billion per year on a national basis -- and you would think that I might applaud somebody pointing this out.  Instead, my reaction is that the whole article and the underlying research are touching in their absurd naivete.  A few points:

• As I stated in Poverty: It's Worse Than You Think, the most fundamental flaw of the whole Census poverty-measuring game is that they just send out survey forms and accept whatever the recipient sends back without any kind of double-check or verification.  I wrote then:  They take whatever answer a person gives as to his or her household income, without any sort of follow up or double check.   For that article, I interviewed the Chief of the Poverty Statistics Branch of the Census Bureau, and yes, that's what she told me.  And that's not just as to their government benefits, it's as to their income as well.
• Of course people at the lower end of the income spectrum lowball their income and benefits received when they answer this survey.  They know that the lower your income/benefits are the more additional benefits you may be entitled to; and they don't know whether this form may be used to audit or reduce their benefits.
• While it may be difficult or (in some cases) even impossible for the government to check on whether people correctly report their income, they can definitely check on whether people correctly report their benefits.  And, even if they don't do that individually, they can easily calculate the aggregate level of benefits in each category for the country as a whole implied by their survey results and compare that to the government's known budget expenditures.  In fact, if they don't do this obvious double-check, they are either completely incompetent, or (what I am sure is the case) fraudulent.  The Meyer/Mittag study implies that the CPS survey is capturing at best half of government benefit payments.  Absolutely clearly, Census has known this for years or decades and has been willfully suppressing it.
• How could you discover a gigantic discrepancy like this in the reporting of government benefits and not go on to ask the next obvious question, which is how much is income being underreported at the low end?  As I again pointed out in Poverty: It's Worse Than You Think, there is every reason to think that the CPS survey misses almost all, if not all, of the underground economy.  I mean, if you were getting paid off the books as a construction worker or nanny or housekeeper -- or for that matter, as a drug dealer -- and you got one of these CPS forms in the mail, are you really going to just put down the accurate amount of your illicit income and hope the government doesn't use that against you?  The whole idea is ridiculous.  So how big is the underground economy?  A 2011 University of Wisconsin study to be found at the link puts it at about $2 trillion per year, around 12% of the economy.  And there's every reason to think that the lion's share of this money goes to people who show up as low or no income on the CPS survey.
• And then the Doar article somehow just doesn't discuss that most government benefits are intentionally not counted in the measure of poverty as a result of contrived definitions by which they are deemed not to be income.  Of the benefits discussed in the Doar article, only TANF gets counted in the measure of poverty.  The list of benefits intentionally omitted runs from SNAP to housing assistance to Medicaid to EITC to energy assistance and on and on.  The amount of benefits intentionally omitted from the definition exceeds the figure that would be sufficient to eliminate all poverty in this country by a factor of 2 to 3.

So to the $64,000 question:  If you make the corrections to the Census CPS data implied by the Meyer/Mittag study and add the missing benefits to the reported income of the recipients, how much does the poverty rate move?  The answer is not in the Doar article.  How could he leave it out -- or not at least raise the question?  And let me further raise this question:  Suppose you add the Meyer/Mittag missing benefits to the CPS data, and also add the missing underground economy, and also add the value of the intentionally uncounted benefits like SNAP, EITC, housing assistance and Medicaid.  What is the poverty rate then?  You'd be very hard pressed to get it to 2%.  Literally everybody you think of as being poor would be removed by the counting of the benefits, except for a few living like the Unabomber in a cabin in the woods.  The bulk of the people who would be left in "poverty" would be oddball cases you would never have thought of, and would never think of as "poor," like graduate students at Harvard living on fellowships (they don't count either).

Protesting Yale Students Demand To Marginalize Themselves; Administration Goes Along

At my alma mater of Yale a round of student protests continues to rage, said to be concerned with something called "institutional racism."  But one thing that stands out is the lack of concrete incidents of racist conduct or wrongdoing that the protesters can point to.  The closest thing I have found to a specific instance of racist conduct is one allegation of a fraternity party that excluded black women; but that allegation was rather thoroughly debunked by the Daily Beast here.  The fraternity's story is that after a noise complaint they stopped letting in anybody, irrespective of race.  

Lacking specific instances of misconduct, the protesters keep returning to a more general theme: We've been "marginalized" on campus.  OK, that has an initial ring of plausibility to an outsider, but does it have any real meaning?  Or is it just something completely fake that can't ever be proved or disproved? 

I'm trying to figure out what the term "marginalization" could mean in the context of something the school is somehow doing to the student, but I keep coming up short.  In my own day, here was my entire relationship with the academic end of the school:  I chose my classes; I went to the classes; I did the homework; I wrote the assigned papers; I took the tests; I got my grades.  Now, suppose somebody had wanted to "marginalize" me.  What could they have done to me in the context of this relationship?  I can't even imagine what it might have been.  Not let me go to class?  Not let me do the homework?  Not let me take the test?  Never happened, of course.  But more important,  I equally don't believe that anything like this has happened to any of these protesters who claim they have been "marginalized."  Meanwhile, on the non-academic side, I lived in the dormitory and I ate in the dining hall.  Nobody ever tried to stop me.  I also don't believe that anyone has ever stopped one of these protesters from doing the same.

So they must be talking about something else.  But what?  Maybe that they were expecting to develop some kind of deep personal relationships with the professors and it hasn't happened?  For myself, I never had the slightest interest in getting to know the professors personally, and I never did it.  Occasionally there were lunches where professors would come to the dining hall and eat with a table of students, and talk about their area of scholarship.  Those were open to all, and I went to a few of them.  Again, I can't believe for a minute that some students are excluded from those things today, particularly in a systematic way based on race.  If someone has an instance, I'd like to hear about it.

But while I can't think of what it could be that the school could do to the students to marginalize them, I very much can think of things that students can do to marginalize themselves.  As with everything else in life, your time is limited in school, and you need to use every bit of it effectively.  Students need to choose their courses carefully, to take things that are real and challenging intellectually, and to learn the material.  They are very well served if they get to know many of their classmates, and particularly the ones who are intellectually engaged with the world.  (You may be surprised to learn that there are remarkably few of such people at even a top school like Yale.)

Or, you can take the opposite approach and marginalize yourself.  For example, you can take non-challenging and non-serious courses.  You can fail to do the assigned course work.  You can spend your time hanging out in your segregated ethnic "cultural center."  You can let yourself waste your precious time on foolish protests about nothing.  Nobody makes you do any of these things.  You do them to yourself.

On one specific subject, let me be very blunt:  everybody outside of academia knows that nearly all courses in "ethnic, race and gender studies" are not serious and are phony.  Inside academia, most people know it too, but a cult of enforced silence keeps them from saying it to you.  I do not contend that all courses in these areas are unserious and phony, nor am I saying that there is nothing worth learning or knowing in these areas.  But the academic departments at Yale and every other major university that cover these subjects (and, for that matter, much of the humanities) are completely overcome with a metastatic cancer of a combination of anger, groupthink, anti-intellectualism and anti-Western Civilizationism.  If you are majoring in "ethnic, race and gender studies," do you have the sense that people look down on you?  Well, many undoubtedly do; and they are not wrong to do so.  You have chosen to marginalize yourself.  People are going to notice. 

If you think that people at Yale are looking down at you for specializing in "ethnic, race and gender studies," wait until you hit the outside world.  The things you learn in these courses have no value in the marketplaces where people earn a living in the world.  If you majored in "ethnic, race and gender studies," the only job out there for you is something in academia funded by a government handout.  Good luck with that!  Do you think you should get one of those $200,000-to-start jobs at Goldman Sachs?  Then you'd better know cold the very complex math behind bond trading.

If the Yale administration can do something important for its students -- and most particularly for the students of color -- it would be to give them some guidance on how not to marginalize themselves.  It should get rid of unserious and phony courses where they can hide and not learn anything.  It should clearly and promptly discipline students who subject nice professors to hysterical shrieking rants.  It should strongly discourage students from segregating themselves into their own ethnic enclaves.

Do you think Yale would do these things?  No, of course it's exactly the opposite.  To be fair to the Yale administration, the things demanded by the protesters come down substantially to being allowed to further marginalize themselves.  All the administration did (although it's shameful enough) was to go along with much of it.  So two days ago Peter Salovey, President of Yale, came out with a letter addressed to "Members of the Yale Community," containing his response to the demands of the protesters.  Among the items:

• Increased funding for the ethnic "cultural centers":  Starting in 2016-17, the program budgets for the four cultural centers will double, augmenting the increases made this year and the ongoing facilities upgrades resulting from last year’s external review.        
• More courses and even a special "university center" for studies in race, ethnicity and "social identity":  Race, ethnicity, and other aspects of social identity are central issues of our era, issues that should be a focus of particularly intense study at a great university. . . .   Recent events across the country have made clear that now is the time to develop such a transformative, multidisciplinary center drawing on expertise from across Yale’s schools; it will be launched this year and will have significant resources for both programming and staff.          

The end result is that the students who are already marginalizing themselves will be encouraged and enabled to marginalize themselves further.  Well, I guess it's what they asked for.  But shouldn't the school make at least some effort to do the right thing by these kids?