Wednesday, August 24, 2011

The depravity of mistaking correlation for causation

Via Matt Yglesias, here's David French at National Review Online speaking about poverty:
It is simply a fact that our social problems are increasingly connected to the depravity of the poor. If an American works hard, completes their education, gets married, and stays married, then they will rarely — very rarely — be poor. At the same time, poverty is the handmaiden of illegitimacy, divorce, ignorance, and addiction. As we have poured money into welfare, we’ve done nothing to address the behaviors that lead to poverty while doing all we can to make that poverty more comfortable and sustainable.
French here is committing the sadly common sin of assuming a correlation indicates a causation, and he's doing so in a way that conveniently reinforces his worldview. It is certainly true that people who complete an education and stay married are less likely to be poor. But it is not obvious that the former leads to the latter. Note that the second sentence quoted above:
If an American works hard, completes their education, gets married, and stays married, then they will rarely — very rarely — be poor.
can easily be reversed to say the following:
If an American has money, they will complete their education, get married, stay married, and find meaningful employment.
while still staying faithful to the correlation.

After all, these key things -- education, a successful marriage, and a job -- are a lot easier to come by if you're not poor. What's more, they're a lot easier to come by if your parents weren't poor. But just being born into a poor home means a person is going to have a much harder time coming by these key things that keep him or her out of poverty. That doesn't make the person depraved. It makes the person a victim of circumstances.

Some of that can be remedied, of course, or at least mitigated, through job training programs, a better public education system, and other things. But those generally fall under the category of government, and French doesn't want to cede a space for that. It's far easier to say that the poor are poor because there's something wrong with them.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Exactly, David French is an asshole, because his parents were probably assholes too. We are victims of our circumstances.

Colin said...

Seems to me that you are the one confusing correlation and causation. People don't work hard at their jobs, schooling or marriage because they have money, they have money because they work hard at all of those things. It's about values.

I live in a mixed income neighborhood in Washington DC and see this stuff all the time. Poor people stay poor because of bad choices. Instead of getting an education (granted, government-run schools in DC are pretty poor -- a great argument for vouchers that many leftists bizarrely resist), a job or a successful marriage, we have a plethora of unmarried young women with babies, money spent on tattoos and other ridiculous items, and a lot of loittering rather than working at a job.

This has nothing to do with money. In the same neighborhood I see plenty of other poor people, mostly Hispanic, working hard and acting as fathers and husbands, working their way up the economic ladder. You want to tell me they all arrived here from El Salvador with their pockets bulging?

Why is it that refugees from Vietnam in the 1970s did so well here in the US? Because they were all rich? Of course not, it's because of their values.

My grandmother's family was so poor that they made clothing from the grain sacks used to feed the horses, yet that didn't prevent her from completing an education, holding a job and taking part in a successful marriage.

Your inability to recognize such obvious truths strikes me as willful ignorance. Making excuses for the poor isn't compassion, it's condescension.

Anonymous said...

Yep, you're right Colin. Immigrants from El Salvador are well-represented in the halls of power and wealth in this country.

Anonymous said...

The strawman argument that it is literally impossible for a poor person to get an education and work hard and build a financially (more) secure life is not one that anyone ever makes.

It's just *much* harder to achieve all that if you start out poor.

"Granted, D.C. schools are pretty poor ..."

Right, so maybe for this reason and a million others we can't just compare our Irish and Italian and Eastern European grandparents and great-grandparents with a modern-day poor black D.C. resident.

"In distinctly different circumstances, my people lifted themselves up; why can't everyone do it?"

More to the point, your mention of "values" isn't entirely off-base -- it's just that Values are as much or more the product of environment and community and cultural history as they are some apparently innate virtue carried by successful people.

Anonymous said...

Colin also completely ignores the roll of chance in a person's success or lack of it. What happens to your education if someone gets sick and can't work, so education has to take a backseat to putting food on the table? Even a mild illness can drain away everything a poor family has. What if you were born with a learning disability? What if your eyesight or hearing is bad, and by the time it is discovered you are hopelessly behind?

What if there are no jobs available, as is often the case in poorer neighborhoods?

Colin, like so many of the "successful", are blind to the advantages they were given, and lack the humility to admit that maybe things could have turned out differently for them.

JeffreyME said...

Colin, you are really just making shit up. You have no idea how hard poor people work. Have you ever picked strawberries, worked as a janitor, done manual labor of any sort? Blaming the poor is like blaming crime victims for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Colin makes the same accusations about today's poor as have been made over many generations when the poor were primarily Eastern European immigrants, Irish, Italian, etc. Everybody makes bad decisions at some point in time. Those of us with money just have a better opportunity for second and third chances. Maybe Colin would just like to go back to the time when if someone was bigger, stronger and more aggressive, he could just forcefully take what he wanted from someone else. He seems to hold a similar set of values already.

Andrew Oh-Willeke said...

@Colin

One factor is the "fit immigrant hypothesis." Immigrants are self-selecting. People who aren't more functional than the average person in some respect don't uproot themselves to look for a better life in new country without having wads of cash. If a family wants to take a shot at sending someone to America to send back funds they send the person who they think has the greatest chance of success, not the slow witted troublemaker who doesn't play well with others. And, those who fail in that effort have someplace to retreat to as hundreds of thousands of people per year have in this recession. But, if you happen to be a less academically able person with weak social skills and no parental money you have no place else to go. Until we have a full employment society, somebody is going to be at the bottom.

sunil said...

I was pleasantly surprised by how many commentators at NRO called French out for his obvious errors in logic. They deconstructed every idea he put forth, demolishing his post completely.

Colin said...

Yep, you're right Colin. Immigrants from El Salvador are well-represented in the halls of power and wealth in this country.

Fail. Barack Obama is president of the United States, so I guess blacks must be doing well right? Conversely, there are few Asian-American politicians of note in Congress, so they are doing terribly right?

Colin said...

More to the point, your mention of "values" isn't entirely off-base -- it's just that Values are as much or more the product of environment and community and cultural history as they are some apparently innate virtue carried by successful people.

Well no kidding -- that's essentially what I was saying. Environment, culture and community are much different things than having money, which is what the author of this blog was arguing explained why some succeed and others don't.

Colin said...

Have you ever picked strawberries, worked as a janitor, done manual labor of any sort?.

Erm, yes, I have done manual labor, working at a paint factory (literally, on an assembly line) and also worked fast food. Of course, I assume this was meant as a rhetorical question as I don't expect this to re-evaluate your opinion of me in the least.

Colin said...

@Andrew -- You are correct, and essentially agree with what I was saying. The point is, money isn't the determining factor, it's values and choices made. Those immigrants didn't succeed because they came here with money, it's because they made smart decisions and were willing to sacrifice (eg crammed living situations, taking any job you can get).

Anonymous said...

My pastor has this line about poverty: "The conservatives will blame the lack of moral values or work ethic of the individual for someone's poverty; while the liberals will blame the socioeconomic structure built up over decades that exclude some folks from climbing out of poverty. But the one thing that both agree on is that it's not the fault of the child stuck in poverty."

So, what are we, the rich, to do? Humbly appreciate the undeserved fortune (in parents, values, intelligence, health, cultural capital) that we benefit from every day, and do our part to help those who struggle. Besides, Jesus spoke more forcefully and frequently about the evil (or should I say depravity) of wealth than he did about the poor's supposedly deserved comeuppance.

Andrew Oh-Willeke said...

You are correct,

Of couse

and essentially agree with what I was saying. The point is, money isn't the determining factor, it's values and choices made.

Not really. It has little to do with values and choices made and a great deal to do with individual ability. Immigrants have an edge when they do (involuntary immigrants tend to fit this profile much less well), because they are more able, not because they have better values or would have made any better choices in somebody else's shoes.

Also, while money doesn't matter in lots of respects, it does matter in access to higher education and professional credentials. The typical immigrant pattern if for the first generation to be grossly underemployed relative to their abilities (lots of immigrant lawyers and doctors drive taxis), due to discriminatory factors, in order for their kids to have a shot at a middle class life so that their grandchildren can afford to receive the full privileges of higher education suitable to their real intellectual abilities. Financial resources have a dramatic impact on involvement in higher education holding academic ability and other factors constant.

Even for an immigrant, greater ability means only a lower likelihood of hitting rock bottom and dire poverty, not an equal shot at success.

The status quo is certainly not fair. I agree that it makes sense to solve the root problems of poverty, but I don't agree that values and bad choices under the circumstances someone is in are the main or even very significant root causes of poverty.

Anonymous said...

"People don't work hard at their jobs, schooling or marriage because they have money, they have money because they work hard at all of those things. It's about values."

Colin, if it were only a matter of working hard and values, then, why aren't you a multi-millionaire? why aren't we all? are we, the middle class, lazy and without values too?

no, i don't think so. there are structural impediments to us all becoming millionaires. one, is because we don't know how. we never received the education necessary to land that dream job. another is because we don't have the money. it takes money to make money.

so, before you get up on your high horse about how lazy and valueless another class of people are, take a look at yourself and why you haven't achieved multi-millionaire status.

was it because you wasted your money on a ridiculously extravagant car or home? maybe you spent too many weekends at the beach instead of working toward that great american dream. or, sometimes an unexpected pregnancy puts a damper on the best financial goals.

personally, i'd suggest it's because you've done the best you could with what you have been given. but, if you want to disagree and believe it's because you don't have the "right" morals, have made the wrong choices and are lazy, who am i to disagree?