“I can hardly wait to see the front page”, I wrote…
… and here it is.
With this front page (main story), the Plain Dealer’s coverage of census “news” has officially crossed the line into self-parody. Apparently, statistics about poverty now sell newspapers. Who knew? Maybe Yahoo is actually making money off my old “Cleveland wages pages” site — which I put up way back in the pre-blog days of 2002 because, at that point, the PD was pretty much ignoring the 2000 Census’ very bad news about Cleveland incomes.
Well, that worm has certainly turned.
Okay, there are three separate issues here.
1. Are Cleveland incomes among the lowest in the country by every measure, because we have lousy job growth, a shift of job openings into the worst-paid (and non-union) sectors, a low level of educational attainment, crappy public schools, a large number of residents living on disability and Social Security, etc.? Yes. Duh.
2. Do we “know” anything significant about ths problem today that we didn’t know a week ago… or four years ago, for that matter? No. The annual poverty “ranking” of cities is meaningless, if only because of the stated error margins of the American Community Survey data. (This means the PD’s headline and lead are, for all practical purposes, false. And they know it.) The ACS data itself is methodologically soft compared to the real Census, and questionable on other grounds. Cleveland’s year-to-year “persons in poverty” number in the ACS has hopped up and down like a jumping bean.
If the PD writers had told us all these things — which they haven’t — then their breathless account would be more truthful. But it wouldn’t be any more front-page-newsworthy, because there isn’t any real news in it.
(I also think some of the featured “findings” here are serious misstatements of the published data, but I need to do more checking.)
3. But (says the other half of my brain) even if the Census reports are less than they appear, isn’t an annual front-page spread on Cleveland’s poverty a good thing? It’s still all basically true, right? The PD hypes a lot of other things… what’s wrong with grabbing a handy excuse to stir this pot, especially in an election year? If the PD wants to editorialize on the front page in support of a minimum wage hike, more child-care funding, more college assistance and entrepreneurship training — all of which I think are good and to the point — why give them grief about details?
If that’s actually what the PD is up to, I could respect it, I guess. But remember, this is the same paper that told us a year ago — on the same slippery evidence — that the city’s poverty rate had fallen (and actually allowed people like Claudia Coulton to try to credit the Poverty Summit for the “improvement“.) So I’m reluctant to excuse more bad reporting on the basis of good intentions.
If the PD really wants to stir up a discussion of “what needs to change”, however, I do want to offer one successful anti-poverty strategy that they failed to mention. There’s a group of several hundred local residents, mostly from Cleveland’s East Side, who’ve managed to raise their hourly pay from less than $8 to more than $10, move from part-time to full-time work, and get health coverage into the bargain — all in the past three years. They’ve done it privately, with zero public subsidy. And they’re eager to help other residents like themselves to do the same thing.
Who are these miracle workers? They’re the members of Service Employees International Union Local 3 who work as custodians and cleaners in downtown office buildings. How’d they do it? Through two rounds of collective bargaining, in 2003 and then again this year.
Seems like other low-income Cleveland residents would be wise to look at that innovative private-sector solution.
August 31st, 2006 at 8:32 am
Completely agree that the only way out of this is collective bargaining. Absolutely. 100%.
However, Bill, I rarely come to the defense of the PD (I even more rarely read the print edition), but the story you mention here did in fact quote several people on the reliability of the statistics, using much the same arguments you use here.
As I commented to Beckman in the BFD thread, this line of argument over statistics is not even just a bit like arguing over how many chairs are on the deck of the Titanic. It’s like arguing over what sort of lacquer is on the front left Queen Anne legs of the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s completely meaningless, and does nothing to help the sinking ship.
What is happening in Cleveland, and in the US as a whole (of which Cleveland is the starkest, most urgent example), is a regression from high wage high benefit, high safety, high dignity jobs, to Victorian era, robber baron, Dickensian exploitation at a pace that would make even Andrew Carnegie blush with shame. Only difference is that the workers aren’t losing limbs. They’re losing plenty else.
If the stick we use to measure this precipitous decline is just a bit off, who cares. I don’t. The better argument is the rest of what you argue here, which is that it is high time these issues get more attention, and their solutions get more traction and support.
August 31st, 2006 at 10:30 am
Tim, the only person quoted in the article on the inherent shakiness of the ACS statistics is good old reliable Zeller, and they didn’t get to him until paragraph 21. Rosentraub was a couple of paragraphs earlier, but all he said was, it’s not so bad because our cost of living is lower than those other guys.
Look, I know I’m exhibiting my data fetish here. But public data is an important part of the feedback system for democracy, and as in any feedback system, horseshit is not helpful.
The ACS itself isn’t horseshit, it’s just polling, with all the problems thereof. What is horseshit is the PD’s packaging. If you quote polling results as the Word Of God without mentioning the error margins or the sampling assumptions, you’re misleading your audience. And if you turn a marginal horse-race advantage in one poll in the middle of an election into a front-page banner headline, and don’t get around to mentioning that it’s all within the margin of error until the 21st paragraph, you’re committing media malpractice. Which is something I think you’d care about, if the topic was politics (or sports).
Nonetheless, in the case of the poverty numbers, I agree that the bottom line is not in dispute, and the horseshit factor (Are we first? Are we fourth?) is more annoying than dangerous. In the case of the “shrinkage” story, though, the PD/ACS story could actually be false. A story that the city’s population is shrinking 2-3% a year — which has never happened before — is both politically explosive and a likely self-fulfilling prophecy. If it’s true it needs to be confirmed; if false, debunked. But it can’t be reported uncritically and then just left hanging.
(Incidentally, a large part of the variation in the ACS “poverty rate” comes not from the numerator — the number of poor people — but from the supposed shrinkage of the denominator, i.e. total population.)