Research and Scholarship

Comment of the Day: “The Deceitful January Jobs Report”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This epic and must-read Comment of the Day by Chris Marschner—which he had to battle to get posted because of the WordPress glitches that have been plaguing EA commenters (and me, of course) for months, had me rejoicing in the wide range of expertise and experience the Ethics Alarms readers bring to the mission here. Then it caused me to become frustrated and depressed. The media makes no effort to explain these issues and enlighten the public with similar clear exposition, and if it did, I wonder how many Americans would take the time to read it. I also wonder how many Americans would understand such an explanation even if they tried.

Meanwhile, I despair of any politician or candidate for office having the clarity of thought and speech to bring what Chris is talking about into the political campaigns this year—-and there are no more crucial matters than these for voters to understand. In the 1992 presidential campaign, rogue candidate Ross Perot bought time on network TV to explain the national debt and why it was dangerous. He used humble tools: paper charts and a pointer. But Perot understood what he was describing, pulled no punches, and spoke clearly and simply. It was a national service: I voted for him as my gesture of gratitude.

If only Donald Trump could explain and debunk the lies being used to misrepresent the economy as clearly as Ross Perot explained the debt…but Trump couldn’t explain that the square of the hypotenuse in a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides without descending into stream-of-consciousness blather.

Isn’t there some way we could draft Chris Marschner to run for President?

Here is his Comment of the Day, supplemented by his subsequent comment expanding on his original post, on “The Deceitful January Jobs Report”…

***

I was hoping you would address this issue of misleading economic data. The jobs report is one that is always subject to deceit. Beyond the absolute numbers and hours worked we should mention that the growth sectors of jobs were health care, low wage hospitality and government. Many of these jobs are driven in large part by the massive numbers (about 7.5 million) of illegal “migrants” who have been given parole by the Biden administration and dispersed throughout the country.

When I taught first year Economics I would tell my students that numerical values do not tell the whole story and you must dig into the numbers to draw any real conclusions. For example, a higher investment value does not mean our capital stock is increasing which would lead to more output at lower costs. I see the Biden administration as the proverbial glazer who breaks windows to increase business. That activity will increase nominal GDP but we are wasting resources unnecessarily.

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Ethics Observations On The 2023 Gallup “Americans’ Ratings of Honesty and Ethics of Professions”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Not a surprise, but still an ominous trend...

As usual, those polled were asked, “Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields — very high, high, average, low or very low?”

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Observations on Media Research Center’s 2023 Political Joke Survey

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Media Research Center, a conservative “media watchdog” roughly the Right’s equivalent of Media Matters but with a much bigger job, analyzed six of the daily late night comedy shows: Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and “The Late Late Show with James Corden” until its April exit, from January 3, 2023 through December 22, 2023. The results are here. The researchers counted 9,518 jokes they judged political in nature, and broke them down into categories. 1,601 targeted progressive, Democrats and figures on the left of the political spectrum. 186 aimed at people, groups, or institutions not associated with either side. 7,729 or 81% of the jokes were considered barbs at were directed at individual, organization or positions considered to be conservative. 493 targets were the objects of a single joke, with 285 of these on the right, 167 on the left, and the remaining 41 on non-partisan topics.

The unbalanced percentages are only a surprise in that they are less lopsided than I would have guessed, but still obviously showan absurdly unfair partisan bias. If, as was once the norm in all political comedy, all sides and parties were mocked relatively equally with the President in the White House taking most of the fire, political humor can be fairly categorized as entertainment with the primary objective being to make as many people laugh as possible. Distorted to this extent, however, late night comedy becomes a self-evident propaganda weapon that plays a significant part in the mainstream media mission to sway elections and manipulate public opinion.

Some telling findings:

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 6: Pot Users

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The status of marijuana in the U.S. is a mess, with the drug still being illegal under federal law and the states slowly sliding down the slippery slope to legalization, because they see revenue in it. The confusion is going to get worse before it gets better. Ohio was the only state to legalize marijuana for “recreational use” last year. The Kentucky General Assembly legalized medical marijuana this year, but patients will have to wait until 2025 for the program to kick in. Voters in Oklahoma rejected the legalization of recreational marijuana in last March, and Hoosiers voted against legal marijuana in Indiana in early April.

The Department of Health and Human Services sent its latest findings on marijuana to the Drug Enforcement Administration, recommending that it be reclassified as a Schedule III drug. That classification would mean that the substance has a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” However, I wouldn’t trust the now thoroughly woke HHS to do an unbiased study on the topic, since the most stoned American are progressives and Democrats. Throughout the last few years, there have been various studies suggesting that the drug is not as harmless as its proponents have been claiming it is, and there is enough evidence of heavy use of pot causing long-term cognitive problems to tell me that we still don’t know what lurks in the genie’s bottle.

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Ethics Quiz: The Christmas Flash Mob

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A group of about 60 Christmas carolers the the local Cure Church staged a good cheer invasion at a Kansas City, Kansas, Walmart last Sunday. Shoppers and employees stopped to listen and some sang along. Naturally the scene was caught on video, and, predictably, the video “went viral” on social media.

Also predictably, Scrooges were out in force on social media. Reddit patrons were especially hostile. “Not the Bee” was depressed at the reaction, sniffing, “This is Christmas we’re talking about! We used to understand that things were a little more magical and glorious this time of year.”

Well, yes, I am certainly sympathetic, but it was still a disruption in a private business without prior consent, and if anything flies in the face of “diversity” cant, it’s a public demonstration of a particular religion’s beliefs to a captive audience. After all, the group wasn’t singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” One person’s Christmas magic is another’s inappropriate proselytizing.

Your Ethics Alarms Christmastime Ethics Quiz is…

Was the Christmas caroling flash mob ethical?

Musings on Jesse Otero, the Human Broken Window

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jesse Leonardo Otero, 44, has been arrested 90 times for shoplifting in the Bay area of California, most recently this month. He is a drug addict, homeless, and supports himself by shoplifting and selling stolen property, often stealing from the same stores over and over again. He doesn’t discriminate, though, targeting small businesses, big-box stores, or whatever seems convenient at the time. He isn’t just lifting candy bars: when Jesse steals, it’s usually hundreds of dollars of merchandise at a time. Local police and store managers know him by name. The manager of Five Little Monkeys toy store in Albany, California, for example, says she has reported Otero to police more than 20 times. Jesse ranged far and wide in his shopping trips, and is an expert on the BART transit system, which he uses to hit stores at every stop.

Nobody has kept count of the number of days Jesse has spend in jail for his exploits, but it isn’t very many. The usual routine is that police give Otero a citation and release him. Sometimes, as with this month’s arrest, he is arrested and jailed for a short time, then let out of jail free, just like in Monopoly. All of this ridiculous pattern is due to California voters, in their wisdom, passing a law in 2014 that weakened penalties for everything Jesse does, like illicit drug use, vagrancy, petty theft, and shoplifting. Prosecutors now can’t file a felony shoplifting charge unless the items taken top $950 in value.

Multiply Jesse by several hundred (or thousands?) and you can understand why so many stores in California are experiencing ruinous shoplifting. Social justice warriors, advocates of “restorative justice” and those who regard the fact that a disproportionate number of those in prison are black as proof of systemic racism dispute the validity of the “Broken Windows” theory, but California’s experience is one more bit of significant evidence that the theory is sound.

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Now THAT’s Going To Leave A Mark…I Hope!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

[I am especially grateful for this story because it gives me a perfect oportunity to post my favorite John Wayne clip, from “McClintock!”]

One of the scholars that Harvard President Claudine Gay ripped off without proper attribution has issued a full-throated condemnation in the Wall Street Journal. Carol Swain, author, researcher and a retired Vanderbilt professor considered one of the pioneers in the field of race in politics and government doesn’t get into the high weeds of Gay’s pathetic performance before Congress on the matter of her campus’s harassment of Jewish students, focusing instead on the other reason the Harvard diversity hire is demonstrably unqualified for her prestigious position. Swain writes in part,

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Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Geena is right.

A survey conducted this week by Harvard-Harris polling found that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe the answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” The stark contrast between our rising generation and the rest of the American population is truly disturbing. As you can see..

…outside of the demographic that has been indoctrinated into an anti-American, victim-obsessed, extreme progressive ideology by exposure to our education system and social media, the U.S. public is overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and understands that Hamas represents terrorism and genocide. “These individuals siding with evil over democracy should be a wake-up call,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) said, reacting to the poll. “Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America.”

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Confirmation Bias Test: The Rasmussen 2020 Voter Fraud Survey

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Trump’s reaction aside, what is a fair, rational, measured way to evaluate the results of the just-relased Rasmussen survey about voter fraud in the 2020 election?

The headline is “One-in-Five Mail-In Voters Admit They Cheated in 2020 Election.” The findings, in brief:

1. “More than 20% of voters who used mail-in ballots in 2020 admit they participated in at least one form of election fraud.”

2. “21% of Likely U.S. voters who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election say they filled out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child, while 78% say they didn’t.”

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Magic Ethics: Making Sexism Appear Out Of Nothing!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I was not a bit surprised to learn that only around 8% of professional magicians are women, as yesterday’s New York Times feature informed me. Magic was one of my main hobbies well into high school, and I even put on a few magic shows. (I still have a trunk full of magic apparatus under my bed.) It was clear early on that while boys were suckers for magic tricks, girls were mostly bored by them. It is one of those pursuits like fast cars, baseball, ventriloquism, juggling, playing soldier, and poker that somehow tend to be hot-wired into male genes while being mostly absent from the females of the species. I don’t know why, and I don’t care why, frankly.

But that’s not the message the Times wants to convey. Focusing on a few female professional magicians (one of whom is performing because her late husband, Harry Blackstone, Jr, did), it tells us that the dearth of female wand-wavers is due to “sexism, wardrobe limitations and the enduring stereotype that women best serve as the audience’s distraction.”

Yes, it’s the disparate impact fallacy again. “I think for many years, no one really thought of the need for women to be the magician,” Gay Blackstone told the Times. “But now, as we’re coming up with different roles and different things we want to be doing, then there’s no reason why women can’t be just as great as men.”

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