Nobel Prize a win for research, logic
David Card shared the Nobel Prize for work that challenges conventional wisdom about unemployment and minimum wage. Credit: UC BERKELEY PHOTO HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock/Brittany Hosea-Small
Every now and then, provable fact prevails.
Professor David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, shared in the Nobel Prize for economic research this week. The awards committee said his work "challenged conventional wisdom."
Card is best known for having demonstrated along with a colleague three decades ago that increases in New Jersey’s minimum wage made no difference when comparing levels of employment between that state and neighboring Pennsylvania.
This had impact. Surveys showed economists collectively changed their long-held assumption that higher minimum wages substantially lower employment.
Card and the other scholars who shared the prize, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens, used a method called "natural experiments." That approach uses real-life situations to examine the impact of government decisions.
This Nobel award comes at a moment when deference to reason and evidence seem fiercely out of fashion. Just note the crazed tone of policy debates over education, health measures, housing, law enforcement, and the environment.
For too many people, emotional triggers, short videos, innuendo, and internet memes have become the preferred methods of defining truth and shaping lobbying campaigns. Superstition, commercialism, and all kinds of identity politics lead away from evidence and rationality.
We are easily distracted from what once would have been big news about American institutions.
Where, for example, is the larger, fact-based debate over how we remain a democratic republic after the constitutional crises of the past year?
The Senate Judiciary Committee this week revealed unsurprising but important facts, from White House documents, that showed beyond doubt that the last president and his aides tried to use the Justice Department to nullify the election Donald Trump lost.
An unprecedented scandal still smolders. In a saner political ecosystem, the revealed facts about this nasty, clumsy scheme — proved by clear primary sources — might lead open minds in Congress to rationally discuss what damage to democracy the last administration did and how to repair it.
It should be the stuff of debate in next year's local House races. Will it?
Beyond our borders looms the serious mystery of the origins of COVID-19. Pundits and politicians have stood by their "theories" about the potential role of a lab in Wuhan, China. Arguments formed based on the presumed credibility of who was saying what rather than the availability of any solid information.
For the sake of pandemic strategies, this question should be answered, and the People's Republic should be pressured to cooperate with the global scientific community.
Here in the U.S., the public schools were created with a political ideal — an educated citizenry that could think truthfully to secure its rights and fend off tyranny. Lacking the ability to discern fact from fiction, let alone examine and discuss a curriculum, makes us more vulnerable to manipulation.
On social media, you can be led to believe anything under the guise of "doing your own research." Last week, lawmakers in Washington hammered away at actual research by Facebook executives into how the company's Instagram platform made body issues worse for one in three teenage girls.
The tech bosses had balked at sharing the results with the public.
There is so much authentic, factual information easily available — alongside false claims — that it becomes difficult for many of us to figure out what's true, what matters, and how much.
The challenge ranges far beyond economics.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
