Journalistic Malpractice From Leavitt and Dubner
Superfreakonomics appears to contain a lot of nonsense climate contrarianism. Major media organizations are normally extraordinarily bad at policing the people who write for them in terms of accurate presentation of scientific information, so I’m pretty sure Leavitt and Dubner can get away with totally misrepresenting the climate impact of solar power. Still, it is worth dwelling a moment on the fact that their critique of photovoltaic literally rests on the idea that PV cells are black whereas in reality they’re usually blue:
Correctly ascertaining the color of widely available macroscopic objects is not much to ask from authors.
That aside, something journalists typically do understand is the idea that you’re supposed to correctly represent what sources tell you. So for example compare their characterization climate scientist Ken Caldeira’s views (”Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.”) with Caldeira’s characterization of his views:
I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero. I believe that it is essentially immoral for us to be making devices (automobiles, coal power plants, etc) that use the atmosphere as a sewer for our waste products. I am in favor of outlawing production of such devices as soon as possible….
And Caldeira’s explanation to Joe Romm of how his views came to be so grossly misportrayed:
If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do.
Dubner and Leavitt’s editors at The New York Times have some ’spainling to do. This is not conduct that they would deem acceptable from any of their reporters.
38 Responses to “Journalistic Malpractice From Leavitt and Dubner”
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October 16th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
The whole “abortion is public safety” argument where poor and minority women were supposed to be responsible for having criminal sons and therefore should get abortions was just as bad.
The better books in the genre, like Landsman’s, care more about being interesting and showing you a new way to think than they do about shocking you. But that’s not what made for a NYT best seller.
October 16th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
This is not conduct that they would deem acceptable from any of their reporters.
This is empirically false. The NYT’s editorial standards rank somewhere around those for this blog post.
October 16th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
To be clear, it is not the black-vs.-blue issue that’s a problem here, even if Dubner/Levitt also get that wrong.
Their argument is basically:
Solar panels are really dark, and so instead of reflecting light they get hot, and that incrementally contributes to global warming.
The first minor response to that is: Frequently the thing that the solar panel sits on is also really dark (e.g., a dark roof), so in that case you’re no worse off for putting a solar panel there.
The second minor response to that is: If you create the same energy by burning fossil fuels, you are also creating some waste heat energy, so you’re also no worse off for using a solar panel in that respect.
The major response to that is: If you create the same energy by burning fossil fuels, you are creating carbon dioxide, and its effect on global warming is SEVERAL ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE worse the incremental warming created by the solar panel. THAT IS, INDEED, THE WHOLE POINT OF USING SOLAR PANELS. I AM NOW SENDING THE IDIOT POLICE OUT TO CONFISCATE LEVITT’S CLARK MEDAL. WHAT A MORON.
October 16th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
The whole “abortion is public safety” argument where poor and minority women were supposed to be responsible for having criminal sons and therefore should get abortions was just as bad.
I don’t have an informed opinion on whether Levitt’s thesis was true, but it’s absolutely nothing like what you just said. They didn’t say anything even remotely implying that poor and minority women “should get abortions.” They also never said that they’re “responsible for having criminal sons.”
October 16th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
It is imperative that we let the New York Times know that this kind of Journalism is unacceptable to their readers. George Will may be able to spread his climate denial lies in the Wall Street Journal, but the Times shouldn’t be participating in this nonsense. If we can get companies like Nike and Apple to drop out of the US Chamber of Congress over Climate Change Denial we can get these fools dropped from their column at the NYT.
As a regular reader of their blog I’m not completely suprised by this. They regularly take a very fiscally conservative view of the world that blames the poor for their situation and excuses extreme income disparities. They truely have a Randian view of the world where the amount of money a person has directly corresponds to their value as a person. To be rich is to be good and to be poor is to be bad.
October 16th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
I don’t know which is more prevalent, but I own both black and blue solar panels. I have more black ones than blue ones.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Ken Caldeira is someone who needs to be locked in the attic as soon as possible if we’re going to have a chance to save the planet. The minute people hear that he wants to legally ban cars and electricity-generation-as-we-know-it “as soon as possible,” they’ll jump over to the denialist do-nothing position as fast as a frog dropped in boiling water jumps out of the pot.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
@RealitasMordet:
There’s a strong case to be made that the incrementalist, do something (but not too much, too soon!) position is just as dangerous as the denialist, do nothing position.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
This looks pretty damning. I guess it’s time to toss out my copy of their first book; everything in there is now suspect, since these guys clearly aren’t very honest.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
This sort of thing makes me more sympathetic about economists who have been complaining about Levitt for quite some time, at times getting ’shrill’. For instance here:
October 16th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
In my 1999 debate with Levitt in Slate, I pointed out the major empirical flaws in his abortion-cut-crime theory:
http://slate.msn.com/id/33569/entry/33571/
October 16th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
In 2005, Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz tried to replicate Levitt’s work on abortion and crime and found out he got the results he did because of a couple of programming errors:
http://www.isteve.com/freakonomics_fiasco.htm
None of this had any effect on Levitt’s book sales: once a celebrity, always a celebrity.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Thank you Matt.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
“If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do.”
I wonder if it ever crossed your mind to correctly ascertain the context of “controversial” statements Rush Limbaugh has made, or if you blithely assume whatever people choose to make up about him is true. Nevermind, I don’t actually wonder.
October 16th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
In 2005, responding to Bill Bennett’s citation of his theory that legalizing abortion cut crime, economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the bestseller Freakonomics, asserted on his blog that “Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics.” Indeed, Levitt left out any mention of the much higher abortion and crime rates found among blacks from his best-selling book. However, his 2001 academic paper with John J. Donohue contains this passage:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=174508
In other words, race accounts for 39% of the putative Levitt Effect on supposedly reducing homicides. You can judge for yourself whether 39% is “not an important part.”
October 16th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Speaking of “Journalistic Malpractice From Leavitt and Dubner” … it’s spelled “Levitt,” not “Leavitt.”
October 16th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
MY has a spelling exemption from Congress.
October 16th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
But Matt, Caldeira is a scientist, and everyone knows that scientists can be misquoted or misrepresented if it makes the story more interesting.
Seriously. This doesn’t come up much around here, because most science stories are completely irrelevant to politics or to most people’s lives, which is probably why journalists can get away with doing such a bad job of science reporting. But I’ve never spoken to a scientist who doesn’t just assume he’s going to be misquoted, quoted out of context, and misrepresented basically every time he talks to a journalist.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Nah, context doesn’t make Limbaugh’s race-war shtick look any better. It just confirms that, yep, he really did mean that.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
It is a real relief that Levitt and his accomplice’s prejudice, ignorance and unpleasant right wing reductionism has been highlighted.
I got two chapters into Freakonomics before its Chicago School stink became overpowering and I had to put it down. I was very, very disappointed that none of its myriad postive reviewers had told me it was a kind of “Milton Friedman’s Fables”.
Good riddance to them.
October 16th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Herfe’s another take on the Levitt book from Tim Lambert of Deltoid. It should be noted that neither Levitt or Dubner have any expertise in climate science and AFAIK, neither of them has ever published a paper in the subject in a peer reviewed journal.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/?utm_source=bloglist&utm_medium=dropdown
October 16th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
It was only a matter of time before Levitt and Dumber clocked global warming in at 18 times the speed of light. Besides the ideological motivation, controversy sells books.
October 17th, 2009 at 12:40 am
Damnit, i bought their first book. To my defense, it was really cheap and i stoped reading after 15 pages. The thing that stoped me was reading their blog in between, where they touched subjects i knew enough about to know they just talked bullshit and always try to divert from the facts with bad math.
Basically they seem to have an ultra right wing world view and just search for numbers to back that up without any effort to check if they made a mistake in their numbers when they fit their worldview.
October 17th, 2009 at 8:34 am
This looks pretty damning. I guess it’s time to toss out my copy of their first book; everything in there is now suspect, since these guys clearly aren’t very honest.
Read Daniel Davies’ reviews…
Part 4 is good. You should look up the rest.
Freakonomics is a work by economists who have no idea that economic methods were developed to work on a very small subset of data on human events out there, and then they go, without every arguing how they can do this methodologically, and apply those methods to data sets they’ve happened to find, data sets for which there is no good reason to think econometric methods will be useful.
October 17th, 2009 at 9:43 am
I find that the lack of even minimal understanding of basic scientific priciples to be very unsettling. If we, as a people, are really this dense, then we probably deserve whatever is coming to us.
“Solar panels” basically fall into two groups. There are those designed to collect thermal solar energy to heat the water that circulates through them. Thus they are DESIGNED to be black or some other color that maximizes the absorption of solar energy. This is GOOD.
Other “solar panels” are designed to convert solar radiation directly to electricity. These are the ones that are the color of the composite material that enables the conversion, thus they are often blue, or some other color.
Hope this helps.
October 17th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Daniel Davies links to a killer, indeed, an overkiller review of Freakonomics which shows that, for the sake of contrarianism, Levitt even misquotes his own papers. Intellectual corruption of this type is really… freaky. http://www.noapparentmotive.org/papers/DiNardo_on_Freakonomics.pdf
On the other hand, I do like reading the Freakonomics column, for the same reason the peasants in transylvania would have appreciated a newsletter from dracula’s castle. You want to know what the theologians for the bloodsucking rich are chirpinng to themselves. It is then milled up and will come out of Fox news, and every braindead GOP politician (a group that composes 99 percent of the GOP politicians). This then will form the new “center” for the media, with which the Obamanoids will have to compromise, and eventually it will be cycled through the work of liberal bloggers, who will assure us that “x” policy is not “politically viable”, but that we can tweak some Bush era policy and achieve a liberal orgasm that way.
October 17th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias: Superfreakonomics appears to contain a lot of nonsense climate contrarianism. Major media organizations are normally extraordinarily bad at policing the people who write for them in terms of accurate presentation of scientific information, so I’m pretty sure Leavitt and Dubner can get away with totally misrepresenting the climate impact of solar power. Still, it is worth dwelling a moment on the fact that their critique of photovoltaic literally rests on the idea that PV cells are black whereas in reality they’re usually blue. [...]
October 17th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
[...] misleading as the Superfreakonomics chapter on climate change seemed to me yesterday, the email that Steven Dubner sent to Brad DeLong really compounds the sin. Dubner whines that Joe [...]
October 17th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I’m curious, is it possible the Freaky team actually did quote Caldeira’s views the causes of global warming correctly?
Perhaps it’s true that Caldeira really does think that CO2 is not the guilty party in the global warming equation, and yet is also opposed to burning fossil fuels for entirely different reasons. There’s plenty of good, sound, scientific and environmental reasons to oppose burning fossil fuels, without attributing global warming to them.
this is important to the debate, in that if we find out that Caldeira is correct that CO2 is not the driver of global warming, we might not agree with his opposition to burning fossil fuels for the other reasons.
I personally agree that CO2 is not the driver of climate change, and I also agree that it would be great to eliminate the burning of fossil fuels. But I think if the first is true, it takes away a lot of the urgency about the second. Those who care about the basic facts of the debate should care about this distinction.
October 17th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
[...] the color of widely available macroscopic objects is not much to ask from authors”): Journalistic Malpractice from Leavitt and Dubner Steven Dubner Digs The Hole [...]
October 17th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Conradg, anyone that bothered to read the link knows.
October 18th, 2009 at 12:18 am
How about you provide us with an example where a cherry-picked quote from Rush Limbaugh represented the exact opposite of what Limbaugh really means?
Until then I wonder if it ever crossed your mind to stop lusting after sheep, or if you blithely assume that if it feels so right it can’t be wrong.
October 18th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
[...] and mischaracterized his views—a glaring bit of journalistic malfeasance. And, as Matt Yglesias points out, one of Dubner and Levitt’s arguments rests on the (demonstrably wrong) premise that solar [...]
October 18th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
“and its effect on global warming is SEVERAL ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE worse the incremental warming created by the solar panel.”
What an embarassing mistake. I know nothing about global warming, yet after 30 seconds of thinking about this “black solar panel” claim I figured something like this must be true. After all, you always hear about how the world’s energy needs could be provided by solar energy from an area the size of Rhode Island, or whatever. So if you painted RI black but cut off worldwide carbon emissions, what do you think the net effect on warming would be?
It’s a category error, like having the wrong units. That the units (heat) are technically the same here actually just makes it more embarassing. I enjoyed reading Freakanomics, but yeah, it’s pretty hard to justify defending someone who let this slip into publishing.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:23 am
[...] Journalistic Malpractice From Leavitt and Dubner [...]
October 20th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Now that it’s come out that Romm’s full of shit, are you going to retract this post?
October 21st, 2009 at 2:38 am
Now that it’s come out that Romm was completely right about absolutely everything, is Hmmm going to start up that Heaven’s Gate spinoff he’s been contemplating?
It may seem counterintuitive, but I say go for it, “Hmmmm” – life’s short.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:56 am
[...] with the global warming chapter as well. Fall 2004 Ath speaker Paul Krugman, fall 2008 Ath speaker Matt Yglesias, spring 2009 Ath speaker Andrew Sullivan, and others noted problems and factual errors in the [...]