Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

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Today, we will be discussing how unfortunate it is that data often doesn’t drive decision-making, despite claims of economic reasoning. We’ll cover a few upcoming ballot measures, including: unionizing Uber and Lyft drivers, increasing the tipped minimum wage, and addressing widespread misconceptions around progressive policies that supposedly lead to dire consequences—though data often proves otherwise.

This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 61. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to incorruptible mass. Our mission is to help us all transform state politics. We know that we could have a state that truly represents the needs of the vast majority of the residents here.  And that's our goal, is to help us all make that happen. 
So today we are going to be talking about how unfortunate it is that data does not run our decision making –n and how often it happens. That poor logic and people claiming to be using economics or econometrics but actually using them badly is often what happens and what is talked about in the media instead of actual data.
We will be covering things like a couple of the ballot measures that are coming up, the ballot questions that are coming up like unionizing Uber and Lyft drivers. We'll be talking about the tipped minimum wage. And we'll also be going over some of those more well known sort of national arguments for like, oh, you know, what happens when you, God forbid, you do this progressive policy because this terrible thing is going to happen.
Data says so, and then it never turns out to be true. So before we go on to that topic, let us have our, Our lovely co hosts introduce themselves.
I will start with Jonathan. Awesome. Jonathan Cohen, he him, his joining from the south end in Boston.
I've been working on different progressive issue and electoral campaigns for a little over a decade now. Fantastic. 
And Jordan, a little behind the scenes.
Jordan Berg Powers. He him. I live in western Massachusetts and I'm the former executive director of mass alliance.
And I have worked in progressive, in and around progressive Politics for 30 years. And I'm currently a doctoral student for Social policy. And so I'm really excited about this topic because one of the things that happens a lot, we're not going to go down this road.
We're not going to spend 20 minutes just talking about my dislike of how the MeDia so wants to “both sides” everything that you could actually make a Living doing literally almost no work, but just, but just pretending to just be in the faux middle and just make up data to get to where you want to go. And that's a whole profession that brand dice at the Tis.
I mean, that tufts at the Tisch center is currently funding a whole center to just do made up analysis that's officially like, both sides are terrible. But also, I'm really a right winger. Summarize, summarize all of it.
I really don't like people of color to be near me or like any sort of like equality to really actually happen. But I like the theme theory of it. So I'm going to, I'm always going to be for a mediocre version.
I always love, I'm in favor of progressive policies that don't actually change anything economically, but as soon as you want economically, oh, no, the world will end. You know, that's proven by Mathy, Mathy, mathy, math. Right, right. Yeah, yeah.
Don't, but don't look at my numbers, which is my favorite thing. One of my favorite things that ever happened is I called out the media for linking to a press release that said, look at this report. And then the report was just the press release and there was actually no report that they put out, that he put out from the center.
And then it all got taken down. And then later on there was a report, but it was still only like four pages and there was no actual reporting. And it was all just to do a takedown of the millionaire's tax, which then ended up being like, oh, actually it's really great.
Like, it was just like, it was just like layers upon layers of. Just like, no one clicked the link to see, like, is there actually data? That's amazing. Wonderful.
Well, that would be like, also a fascinating study for somebody to do to see, like, how successful that they could be by getting so much coverage for some, for an art, for a report that doesn't even exist. And people will quote the press release. Absolutely.
Use the quotes. They'll use the summary from the press release. It's got to be both sides.
It's got to say like, both sides are terrible. And I have this faux middle. That's the only way.
But if you do that, absolutely get picked up, then you say, like, this policy can do good things, but it could also do bad. Exactly. Exactly.
Our executive director was quoted as saying. And of course, the final analysis has to agree with whatever the speaker wants. Yes, absolutely.
The people in power and the dialysis always has to be that whatever the people in power say is right is the thing. That's right. 
There you go. Yeah, I think it's a good example of just like, what we see with the minimum wage. Anytime they want to raise the minimum wage, we saw all the reports that came out.
There was like, $15 is going to be the end of small businesses. It's going to be the thing. Every time we talk about the minimum wage rating, it's always, the thing is going to fall.
And then my other favorite is you always get this, well, if it's so good, why don't we raise it to a hundred dollars? Because we're tethered to reality. Man, like, I mean, like, I don't know. Like, it's just like, why do we have to, like, I don't want to get into some extreme that just, like, isn't going to happen.
I just want people to love the minimum wage so much. Why don't you marry it? It's essentially the right. That's like the argument.
It's just so ridiculous. It's just. But every time, every time without fail, you know? And to your point, Anna, I think I feel like we should.
We could just like, post in like, just a quick doodle, a google of all the. All the articles that were like, the minimum wage is going to raise the minimum. But people are worried.
Concerns are. Experts say it's going to lead to job loss. This reminds me, I don't know if any of you had the experience of in like kindergarten during the thing where, like, where like, q and u get married as a way of, like, indicating about how, like, that you will always follow the letter.
You will always follow the letter Q whenever, pretty much whenever you appear. And so, like, they get fake marriage. It'd be so funny to be a stats professor and to, like, stage up.
Let's watch correlation and causation. Get divorced. I remind me, the messy divorce.
That shows that these are very, like, not the same thing. So good. I like it.
Your statistics 101. Exactly. Statistics 101 for, for ten year olds. Exactly. 
Well, before we go on, I'm Anna Callahan, she/her, coming at you. Sorry. Okay, no worries.
No worries. And I was actually a math major as a pure math major in college. So this special fondness for this kind of topic of like, evil ways to use mathematics, you know, but, you know, I want to just before we.
And I know we're going to have a little bit of a short one today, but we're going to cover at first. Let's just super quick go over some of the ones that are a little bit more well known. I mean, they always like, you already covered it, Jordan.
The way that whenever there's a minimum wage law, especially the first $15 in Seattle, that's like, the apocalypse is going to happen. Oh, my God.
And economics theory says so that all the small businesses are going to die and jobs are going to leave and, you know, it's going to crash everything. It could crash the whole economy. Seattle.
Well, that didn't happen. You know, Jordan, you have one from freakonomics, which I think you were. Yeah.
I mean, generally speaking, I think that book is a jettison for me. I was in economics. I have several economic degrees.
And I was in economics at the time that that book came out. And I have never wanted a book to become a dollar book as quickly as I wanted that horrifying thing that then became a podcast and things to happen, which is roughly this thing that, like, they themselves go through this whole rigmarole of being like, correlation is not the same as causation, but then make assumptions on all of these things, which are just ridiculous. And one of the ridiculous ones is the reason that crime went down is because of abortion in the seventies, so crime went down in the nineties, and they dismiss all these other reasons for it happening.
And they say it's this actually this thing, but we, but we don't know for sure because it can't cause it. And like, the re, the real thing about the reason why freakonomics is dumb and a lot of econometrics is dumb, is because there's this idea of an independent variable and dependent variable, but all things are dependent on each other to some degree or another. I mean, yes, at some point it's like extraneous.
It's not. Yes, you can say like, one thing doesn't lead to the other, but for the most part, if you're studying different types of variables, they probably having some effect on the outcome that you're looking for. So crime went down for going to give you a little secret.
Crime went down for more than one reason. What? No, there's not just one. You can't just find one thing.
You're going to have to hold multiple truths at the same time. I know it's not in our, not in our way, certainly not the way academia is, which is, I have the one brilliant idea, but it's actually several, several reasons crime went down. And we don't really have a good answer for all of them, because when one of them has changed, it hasn't led to an increase in crime.
So no one theory has been able to say it because we don't actually know for sure. So one thing I want to add is, like, the basic understanding of science is you make a hypothesis and then you test the hypothesis, right? And there's a big thing about being able to repeat tests. So when you submit a scientific paper to one of these journals and you submit it, and if it turns out that, you know, the reviewers cannot replicate this test, or if it turns out later after it gets published that other scientists are not able to replicate your test, then you can go down, down in flames, like your whole reputation can be destroyed, right? Because that's really what science is about is about like taking an experiment, doing a hypothesis and making sure that it's true by having controls, right? You have something that is controlled and you have something that is experimental.
And the social sciences, which includes, you know, economics and all sorts of, you know, politics related things and many other, like, inequality and everything, they are basically impossible to do this on because you can't, you know, you're just looking at real life and thousands of things that have an effect on, you know, whatever, you know, crime, for example, or how many workers there are. And when they say, like, how small businesses are doing or whatever it might be, there are thousands of different parameters. And you just can't make a controlled experiment because that's not, you can't like, put a bunch of people in an experimental lab and force them to only do one thing.
That's not how people are. So this is where economics, economics, like, they create all theories. You know, the basis, my big beef is the essential basics of capitalist economics is the idea that, that people are motivated by selfishness and purely by their own selfish behavior.
Like that is absolutely an understood tenet of capitalist theory. And, you know, you meet any human beings, hopefully, unless you're surrounded by jerks, hopefully you will instantaneously realize that we are motivated by many altruistic things. Aside from just like having fun, I mean, there's tons of that aren't, like, I want the most amount of dollars for myself, you know? So let's go ahead.
I'll just say really quickly, because I do want to, I want to wrap a little for my degrees, which is that just like, I don't think, you can't not do anything in a lab, but you just gotta be really careful about drawing conclusions. I think, like, you know, for example, Covid is a good example of where every social scientist and their was just like, oh my God, my dream has come true. We've reset the world.
And we can, like figure out what has, like, what caused something or not. So I do think we can draw conclusions, we can figure some things out, but I just think it runs amok. And what, and too often what happens is people have a preconceived idea of what they want to believe is true, and then you can always find data to back that up.
And unless you, you know, data is only as good as your eye towards it, or like, how are you evaluating it? Who's putting it together? Like, what are they, what are their assumptions? Right, like you need to. Right, like you, like, as you say, and like, hard sciences where you have to replicate it like you need, I need to see what you've, how you've gotten from point a to point b. And it has to pass some basic logic.
And too often that's where it fails down. But the media just reports on it like it just is what it is. I mean, I think, obviously, I'm not saying that, you know, you can't, you can't come to any conclusions.
All of us have said out loud, like, many know that, x, y, z. Right. So, yeah, modernism.
Yes. I think there is some reality to that. But it's also so easy to hand wave and just, you know, sort of invent reasons, mathematical, supposedly mathematical reasons for your particular perspective.
And I think that's the point because with a lot of, any type of data analysis, it also comes down to what are the questions that you're asking. And when you, however you craft this, the question that you're looking to analyze, you are by nature steering the results a certain way because, and it's like just using an example of that. That's what I always think about polling, is that in the way in which polling, you can often get the answer that you want to get by how you craft the question and you can prime it for different.
Prime, prime people to think more one way, think another way. And it's often going to be the same thing with analyzing data because ultimately you're choosing which things you believe are relevant to what you're studying and which things aren't. I think it's a really good example to, like, the whole rock and roll around, people leaving the state.
And the fact that the media was just like, running with this idea that rich people, as if there's a lot of rich people, which is in itself a funny thing, was the reason that our numbers were going down and that that's the real. And so we needed tax cuts to keep rich people here. And they're, it's like, rich people are leaving.
That's why our numbers going down. They're leaving because of high taxation. Right, right.
Yes, right, right, right. Both things. Right.
Both things are true. Not that just some old people wanted to go to Florida because it's warm. Right.
And like. But the truth. But then when we.
So, so they ran with this. And then, yet when you actually looked into the data, the people, not the people leaving Massachusetts were poorer people, middle class people and young people who couldn't afford to live here. And not only has that not translated to act to how the media talks about the people leaving, they, it doesn't even translate to how policymakers are doing things or how the media talks to policymakers.
They're not trans. They're not asking more. Healy, what are you doing to make transit more, to make transit better? What are you doing to.
Right. Like, it's just like. It's just barely.
It just like, data comes in, but it's like, well, we already believe this thing, so, you know, like, whatever. Not to mention just like, how silly. I don't know.
As I always say, like. Or as Jonathan likes to say, the inheritance tax is not a single alive person pays the inheritance tax. So besides all that, on our next episode, we'll have all of the people, the people experiencing the estate tax as our guests, and it's just the three of us doing a seance.
Are you with us right now? How did it feel when your estate paid all of that money? Exactly. Exactly. Jonathan, do you want to talk about the.
Transit Fee is another good example. Oh, transit fee. I feel like that was another case where.
So that one of my favorite anecdotes is a case of one of the senators who had been opposed to the real estate transfer fee local option was offered research about how it has worked successfully in other cities and responded, I don't need to see data. I just know it doesn't work. And it just speaks to how so often economic data and the talk about people leaving the state is so key with this as well, that it's ultimately vibes for people.
It's things that they hear anecdotally from people who might. Who either might not know a lot about an issue or might have a very clear vested interest in the policy, and that that becomes their. That replaces any actual data analysis.
And they use those anecdotal experiences to shape the entirety of their worldview on a specific topic. Yeah, same with rent control. There's so many economic theories around rent control.
They're like, well, like, Anna, you say that rent control is good, but I know someone who knows, someone who knows made above median income and had a rent controlled apartment in. In New York City for 30 years. So is this actually a good policy? It's like Colbert would say, it's truthiness.
It has the air of truth without actually being truthful. Yeah, it's just, you know, I think, like, it's. We see this all the time with a lot of things.
It's just because it has. If you can make it sound okay, it's just like, well, that must be true. But the things that they make try to sound okay are always to keep rich people rich and keep the system in place.
It's never like, actually, most jobs are created by people buying, like, regular people having money to buy things. And our economy works with a lot of regular people having middle class jobs and middle class things. And that's actually what makes our economy thrive.
Even as much as economics is totally made to be just rich people things, they don't even talk about it correctly. They just. It's just, like, vaguely.
It's just like. It's like, vaguely vibes. Like, rich people run things and everyone's greedy, and so it's okay, whatever happens, it's just like.
I mean, that's vaguely capitalism. But it also makes me think about how, you know, Ford was notorious for being this, you know, totally wealthy. I mean, billionaire.
But he was this incredibly wealthy magnate who just made a decision. He said, I believe that this will be true of the economy. That if I pay my workers more, we'll sell more cars.
Like, wages will go up everywhere. We'll sell more cars. And, like, he was totally right.
Right. I'm not saying that we didn't then. You know, there weren't also laws made that did similar things that created a great middle class in America.
That also happened. But, you know, you get one. One billionaire who actually has a smart idea, economics, and is able to, like, manifest it, and suddenly we see that these things are true.
Let me shift us toward the unionization. Yep. So this is on one of the ballot measures that we talked about last week, unionizing Uber and Lyft drivers.
And here's the theory that it's going to increase the cost of the ride. It's going to curtail usage. People are not going to use it as much.
You know, the cost is going to go up. I mean, we're talking about these international, gigantic mega corporations, and if they decide to raise their rates in Massachusetts, that will be punishment. Right.
That's not going to be market forces, in my opinion. But, you know. Yeah.
So talk a little bit about this theory. So I just. So I just want to say.
So I got. So I was. So I went to.
I went to. I went to Evan Horowitz's center. The center for.
Has such an innocuous name, the center for State Policy Analysis. And he has an analysis of the. Of the.
Of the three of all the questions. All the questions. You can tell how.
It's amazing how you could easily tell how he's gonna vote based on his analysis, which is totally subjective. You know, he's not gonna be for one. He's not gonna be for two, he's not gonna be for three, he might be for four or five.
Right? Like, it's just really clear. And so even just the way he writes about it. And so for three, he says in it, he makes the, he makes the statement that cost is going to go up for regular people and that's gonna make more drunken drivers drive because they won't have access, because they want to be able to afford Uber and it'll limit the ability of people who need it for mobility options, Uber and Lyft, that it'll limit their access.
And I was like, well, that's quite the claim. Like, I would love for some data to back up that claim. So I wanted to is report.
And he goes to likes to tell us how important it is that voters have the information they need to make this thing. And at no point is there substantiation for that claim disappears into the minutiae of a seven page ramble about what he believes about the thing. And my favorite thing about it is that he, so he goes through all the, like the first one for the auditor, he doesn't talk about the fact that we had the auditor used to, as we talked about the last thing the auditor used to do audits.
He didn't research that. What happened? What did they audit? He just talked to people on both sides and reported on it like a reporter, not a, you know, research institution eliminating the MCAs. He just copy and pasted with the, with the chamber said about it and like barely went into it.
And then for this one is the same thing. And I think, like, that's the thing. It's just vibes.
But the media gives him, you know, he was, you know, that this quote unquote, report, which I don't want to call it a report because it's really just his ramp links, which are usually what they are, is like, you know, he's on WBR, he gets a Boston Globe, he's on NBC ten. And this idea, these ideas get infested into our system with the substantiation of economics and theories behind them without ever being questioned. Like, well, how did you get to that? What is your proof? Is there data that says, that says the thing you're saying? My guess is that Uber and Lyft will raise or lower our latest costs based on money and them wanting it and not based on anything we do around this.
And I think that's clear. Totally. Jonathan, any comments on this one? No, none in particular.
Justin, that, like, it is wild when you see that X I was going over them and that they're nothing like so many specific claims would be things that you would need a whole lot of data to back up. And it's just presented as though it's fact based on a good analysis of everything. Yeah.
Let's close up with our ballot question on the tip minimum wage. And it's interesting because I think we were talking last week with this question of, oh, will people stop tipping if the tip minimum wage passes? Which is this sort of economic idea that like, oh, you know, if the prices go up or whatever, whatever. And first of all, the number of people who are actually going to really be cognizant that this passed and really going to go to their restaurant with the knowledge of like, oh, now it's different and that probably is not real.
But Jonathan, I don't know if you want to take this one about the tipped minimum wage ballot question, which since I got on here late, which aspect of it I can talk about again about some of the stuff we were talking about last week, the doom and gloom that if we raise the tip minimum wage, then a lot of people, small businesses are all going to die and then we're going to have fewer jobs. 
It's been very shocking to see because there are think tanks that have done studies on states that have passed this. Restaurants do fine, people have more take home pay.
And yet you continue to see both restaurants being like, this is the end of the world. If this happens, we're all going to collapse. How can we afford to pay our employees? Frankly, if you can't pay your employees a fair wage, you should get into a different business because you're clearly not good enough at managing a business to manage the one that you currently manage as well as it's been an, it's been sad to see the number of people who work in the industry who are like, this is a bad idea.
I'm going to make less money when there's no evidence of that happening from other states. Other states have shown that servers end up with more take home pay because you have a higher base wage. If you see a slight price increase, then people are tipping on a higher base and that the tipping rates largely stay.
But people get convinced, both your everyday people there, as well as those with a very clear vested interest against change, get convinced that it's all going to be terrible based on no act, based on vibes more than actual data. Yep. Because like, especially with something minimum wage, every time there's ever talk about increasing a minimum wage, you will hear a lively from the business community.
This is going to destroy jobs. Places are going to collapse. We can't possibly afford it.
And the minimum wage goes up and they manage. Yep. Yep.
Especially at the end, unsurprisingly, rather than having to pay more money being a cause of, let's say, decline in restaurants. The biggest source of a decline in the restaurant industry that we've seen recently was in the days of COVID when the demand fell. Because in Covid when suddenly, if people weren't going out to eat, you can't sustain a restaurant without customers.
As long as you have good food and a good atmosphere in a good location, people will come to your place to give you money. And if it's in a case where people can't come because they think that they're going to die, they go out. That makes it hard to run a restaurant.
But barring that, if you're doing all of your making a good place, people will want to come. I just wanted again. And so what happens? So people are like, oh, it's the end of the world.
There are states that have eliminated, they are one fair wage, so we don't have to guess anymore about what happens when it happens. And so overall, just like, overall, what happens? Well, first, five in six restaurants were found between 2010 and 2012 to have wage violations. So first they're just like rampant stealing, as with as long with all the other things.
But states that have eliminated tip minimum wage have less poverty among workers in tipped industries. How about that, man? Just basics. In addition to updating, addition to the research, yada, yada, they found no difference.
The one fair wage did not eliminate – restaurants still exist in California. I know it's hard to believe that it's not a wasteland, the things.
And so tip workers specifically saw, not only is there like overall poverty, but their overall pay obviously goes up. So the argument is that actually I make more than the minimum wage with the tipping, which is sometimes true, but often some it's not true. It's actually a little inconsistent.
It really depends on where you work. And what this does is, as Jonathan says, is it just increases the base for everybody. So people who were at restaurants that tipped well just get tipped well based on more money and then they have a base pay that's better.
And so we don't have to guess about like, and it's the thing, you'll see reports that'll say like, oh, it'll hurt things, but like, that's not based on data because you can't find data that says, actually, I think we need to acknowledge that the rise of green juice in some of the places in California is a direct result of minimum wage, where right and left restaurants are closing and they're just being replaced with, like, expensive cold pressed juice bars, which is. It's people. Exactly.
Yeah. So just to be clear, businesses and tipped industries have had the same employment rates. Just, there's no difference.
It didn't actually affect, in any fact, small, in small businesses. And key tipped industry saw faster wage growth in states with one fair wage, which is actually probably nothing to do with the fair wage, but actually just, those are good. If you treat workers well and you pay people well, they have more money, and then what they do is they spend it on those restaurants.
So it's just like, you know, it's just nonsense. But again, but you can just say it. You can just go on tv and say, oh, it's going to hurt small businesses.
They're going to have to figure it out. I mean, yeah, they're going to have to figure it out, but it's also going to be fine. Yeah.
And we won't all be drinking Soylent green. Okay. Well, gang, any final words on the terrible use of math and data before we go to anybody who listens to this, click the link.
When an article says, a report says click the link, that is my advice. Go. These are not, they try to make all these things sound like they're complicated.
They're done by regular people. They're not smarter than you. Just go click the link.
See if there's anything behind it. Nine times out of ten, it's. If you, if it seems like it's. It's hogwash, it probably is. Yep. Click the link.
Sounds good. Thank you so much to everybody. Also, in terms of clicking links, what link should people who are listening to the podcast click? Anna? Well, just below you will see that there's a donation link and you can put in, you know, a price of a cup of coffee, a cup of coffee a month, a cup of coffee a week, a cup of coffee a day.
We would really appreciate it. It all goes towards our young folks who help us out with video editing, social media, graphics design, all those kinds of things, which really does enable us to get this out to a lot more people. Thank you so much.
My entirely scientific study says that everybody who donates via that link is successful, is beloved by everybody around, and is lucky in life. This is the Jonathan Cohn show.
He'll be here all week. Thanks so much. We look forward to seeing you all next week.
Bye.