In his classic book Taking the Risk Out of Democracy,
Alex Carey argued that corporate propaganda shapes public political
opinion on two different levels: grassroots propaganda aimed at the
masses, and "treetops" propaganda aimed at elites and intellectuals. In
contrast to grassroots propaganda like, for example, the recent Chamber
of Commerce national advocacy campaign,1
"'Treetops' propaganda is not directed at the person on the street,"
Carey wrote. "It is directed at influencing a select group of
influential people: policymakers in parliament and the civil service,
newspaper editors and reporters, economics commentators on TV and
radio." In the words of one former director of a British neoliberal
think tank, it helps to use "intellectual artillery to soften up the
enemy's entrenched strong points," so that eventually the "ground
troops can advance."2
The purpose of this post is
to refute three falsehoods perpetuated by two neoliberal think tanks,
the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, in their
steady campaign of "treetops" propaganda. These falsehoods have in my
experience either been a source of confusion for progressives or have
been cited by moneyed organizations like insurance companies to help
discredit policies that might threaten their profits. A longer version of this post is available on ZBlogs.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) was founded in 1938, partly
by executives from corporations such as Eli Lilly, General Mills,
Bristol-Myers, Chemical Bank, and Chrysler who were disgruntled with
the effects that the New Deal was having on society. Its board is today
made up almost entirely of executives from major corporations, and it's
staffed mainly by intellectuals and former government officials.
Growing rapidly between 1970 and 1980, when its revenue expanded from
less than $1 million with a staff of ten to about $8 million with a
staff of 125, it played an important role in ushering in the current
era of Reaganist, supply side, neoliberal economics.3
It is currently ranked sixth on a list of America's most influential
think tanks, the second highest of "partisan" think tanks, just behind
the Heritage Foundation.4
The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 with help from beer
magnate John Coors. It was instrumental in creating the Contract with
America that helped Republicans win a 1994 majority in Congress. In
partnership with the Wall Street Journal, it publishes the annual Index
of Economic Freedom. The Index notes that this year, "Regrettably,
populist attacks on the free market, fueled by the economic slowdown
and the political temptation of quick interventionist remedies, have
gained momentum." It is currently ranked fifth on a list of America's
most influential think tanks, the highest ranked of those that are
considered "partisan."5,6
Falsehood #1. The US does not spend an excessive proportion of its GDP per capita on health care.7
This statement is so clearly untrue that it doesn't seem to be
quoted much even by other right wing sources, but it's still important
because it demonstrates a total lack of intellectual integrity by the
AEI authors who made the claim.
To understand how they rationalize this, let's start with another
analysis of US health spending by Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt
published on the New York Times Economix blog.8 Here's the graph from that website.
Reinhardt explains:
You'll notice that there is enormous variation in health spending
per capita in different countries within the O.E.C.D. But the graph
also indicates that there exists a very strong relationship between the
G.D.P. per capita of these countries (roughly a measure of ability to
pay) and per-capita health spending. The dark line in the graph is a
so-called regression equation (whose precise mathematical form is shown
in the upper left corner).
That line tells us something important about the relationship between a country's wealth and its health care spending.
An additional insight from the graph, however, is that even after
adjustment for differences in G.D.P. per capita, the United States in
2006 spent $1,895 more on health care than would have been predicted
after such an adjustment. If G.D.P. per capita were the only factor
driving the difference between United States health spending and that
of other nations, the United States would be expected to have spent an
average of only $4,819 per capita on health care rather than the $6,714
it actually spent.
Now let's compare the American Enterprise Institute source. After
listing a similar graph to Reinhardt's, they then explain that it is
irrelevant because the U.S. "residual" is sensitive to "model
specification." In other words, you can just do this:
But as other bloggers have noted,9 they give no justification for why
you would do that. They do state the US is an extreme value, because
it's richer than almost all other countries, but that difference pales
in comparison between differences between many of the other countries
in the model (in other words, US GDP isn't an "outlier" in a technical
statistical sense). And as Reinhardt states, the more intuitive model
is a very good fit:
Just knowing the G.D.P. per
capita of nations helps us explain about 86 percent of the variation in
how much different countries pay for health care for the average person.
Finally,
there's also the small matter that if we extend the above AEI model out
another twenty-five years and assume a reasonable rate of economic growth,
it eats up literally the entire US economy. But doing the slightest
sanity checking is evidently uninteresting to these authors.
Falsehood #2. If you adjust US life expectancy for violent deaths, it becomes #1 in the world.
This is simply a lie. Unlike the falsehood above, though, it's not
completely obvious that it's wrong, and so it's been used extremely
successfully to muddy the debate.
What AEI did was create a model that predicted life expectancy from
two factors: GDP per capita and violent deaths. But despite that the US
ranks #1 in this model if you remove sources of violent death, that
doesn't mean anything because the other factor, GDP per capita, totally
fails to correctly predict US life expectancy. Putting it simply: the
model's wrong, so any conclusions drawn from it are also.10
The OECD explains it thus:
It has been claimed (Ohsfeldt and Scheider, 2006) that adjusting for
the higher death rate from accident or injury in the United States over
1980-99 than the OECD average would increase US life expectancy at
birth from 18th out of 28 OECD countries to the highest. In fact, what
the panel regression estimated by these authors shows is that predicted
life expectancy at birth based on US GDP per capita and OECD average
death rates from these causees is the highest in the OECD. The
adjustment for the gap in injury death rates between the United States
and the OECD average alone only increases life expectancy at birth
marginally, from 19th among 28 countries on average over 1980-99 to
17th. Hence, the high ranking of adjusted life expectancy at birth
mainly reflects high US GDP per capita, not the effects of unusually
high death rates from accident or injury.
It took about a year for this study to be refuted after it was
published, finally prompting the authors to divulge to the Wall Street
Journal that they were "not trying to say that these are the precisely
correct life-expectancy estimates. We're just trying to show that there
are other factors that affect life-expectancy-at-birth estimates that
people quote all the time."11
What is really more interesting, though, than the study itself is
the vast extent to which this keeps being repeated in the (supposedly
more democratic) blogosphere because people are just unaware of the
falsity. For example, when Betsy McCaughey cited these statistics on
the Daily Show, most people even on Democratic blogs like Daily Kos and
Firedoglake did not realize that this study had already been
definitively refuted, though of course they were very skeptical of
McCaughey in general. On Daily Kos not one post mentioned it at the
time, though of course it's possible that people were distracted by
McCaughey's claims of "death panels." But on Firedoglake we still have
people wondering about this in blog posts--and no one pointing out it's
already been refuted--as of a few weeks ago.12
Meanwhile a July post on the "slightly left of center" blog Angry Bear
cited this study as "casting serious doubt" on the significance of the
life expectancy difference, with no refutations in the first few pages
of comments.13
Senators like John Ensign have also cited these statistics in
Congress. Meanwhile Amanda Terkel, a Deputy Research Director of the
Center for American Progress, doesn't realize in her Think Progress
blog response to Ensign that it's all a complete lie despite being
skeptical in general.14 And don't even mention the right wing blogs!
What seems to be happening here is that the traditional media has
mostly ignored the fact that these figures are false, leaving amateur
bloggers to wander about hopelessly in a swamp of misinformation. If
the media was more decent, they would call these people out vigorously
as liars, not write, say, one Wall Street Journal blog post and then
forget about it. (The post cited above concludes ambiguously, "What do
you think? Should certain deaths be excluded from life expectancy? Is
it a solid basis for comparing health systems? Please let me know in
the comments.")
In an effort to promote Z Magazine, ZNet, and ZBlogs, I have made a longer version of this post (including falsehood #3) available exclusively on ZBlogs. Z Magazine is currently in dire financial straits and desperately needs support.
It had to reduce the size of the October issue due to lack of funds and
reportedly may fold up as soon as January 2010 if donors don't help.
Given its extremely valuable perspective and twenty year history, this
would be a tragedy. Also, for those bloggers of explicitly leftist
persuasions, ZBlogs is one of a very few blogs that is too--so you may
want to consider becoming a Sustainer and posting there.
After looking over GOP.com's tag cloud, I'm starting to understand the GOP... Jesus, Velociraptors, Palin pancakes, nazi news night and lizard love lush man McCain mimes. It makes so much sense now.
