RALEIGH — Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon and a very cool post-Communist man of letters, once observed that “commitment to a scientific theory can be as charged with emotion as a religious credo.” Anyone who has seen social scientists, in particular, make the case for their favorite hypothesis about this or that will recognize the wisdom in Koestler’s remark.
The public policy landscape is littered with corpses of “scientific” hypotheses that manage to continue staggering around, like zombies, animated not by supporting data but by the fervent insistence of their masters that “it must be true, it just has to be.”
One thinks of 100-proof Keynesian economics. In the 1930s it was revolutionary. In the 1950s it was orthodoxy. By the 1970s it was outdated inanity — among those with a willingness to examine actual data in the actual world. Of course policymakers couldn’t maximize prosperity, as Keynesians had advocated, by stimulating the economy with easy money and restraining inflation with higher taxes. Inflation had to be tamed with tight money and growth-enhancing tax cuts (thus creating fewer dollars chasing more goods). Despite all the political huffing and puffing since the early 1980s, pretty much all political actors agree with this policy mix now, and disagree only on the details (no serious Democratic candidate for president, for example, would boost the top federal income tax rate back to 50 percent, the pre-1986 level, or to 70 percent, the pre-1981 level).
More recent and closer to home, my colleague Dr. Roy Cordato has pointed out that a key assumption of environmental activists about ground-level ozone — that when it spikes, people prone to asthma must suffer significantly more — sounds plausible but is not evident in the data. Cordato found in a recent study that North Carolina communities with high ozone levels actually displayed low asthma-hospitalization rates, and vice versa. Perhaps the links between ozone and asthma are so subtle that they are hard to find, but that’s the funny thing about science: it’s supposed to be about data, not rationalizations or wishful thinking.
Another classic example made the Associated Press wire Sunday night. It seems that a UNC-Chapel Hill researcher, Lisa Sutherland, just completed a significant study attempting to explain why obesity rates among teenagers have risen over the past generation. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Sutherland found that teens had not been consuming significantly more calories. From 1980 to 2000, caloric intake went up only 1 percent. The real problem, she found, was inaction. Average physical activity dropped 13 percent, while obesity shot up by 10 percent.
Careful readers of obesity statistics, not just of the conventional wisdom contained in the latest womens’ magazine cover, would not have found Sutherland’s conclusion shocking. As I wrote some time ago in this space, the national debate about obesity has long been fraught with the misuse and misunderstanding of basic facts. For instance, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that the average caloric intake of Americans — 2,344 a day for men, 1,638 for women – is significantly below the recommended daily intake levels for the average man (2,538) and woman (1,982). As I concluded in my previous piece, if there is a huge and growing obesity epidemic, it must be coming from our couches rather than our curly fries.
Speaking of curly fries, the reaction of the nutitionist establishment to Sutherland’s paper has been telling. Many observers have dismissed the finding on calories by claiming that the survey data she used, all from familiar federal surveys, must be wrong. They offered no proof. Instead, they have started reanimating the zombie. “We are pretty sure [teens] are eating too much, no matter what the data say,” said Dr. Nancy Krebs of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, who chairs a national pediatricians’ committee on nutrition. Thank you for your candor, Madame Chairwoman.
And don’t forget the political angle here. Clinical nutritionist JoAnn Hattner of Stanford University told the AP that accepting Sutherland’s conclusion that food is not a big part of the problem could take pressure off food companies to cut the calories they feed the nation. “There is enough clamor throughout the country that we are getting corporations to change,” Hattner said. “We need to continue that clamor.”
Here’s where the science disappears and the politics takes over. Think about it. If Sutherland’s conclusion is correct, then parents and teenagers cannot blame (and, of course, sue) Big Food for their flabby fate. They would have to take responsible for their own actions — or, in this case, inactions. So the “super-size value-meal theory” of teenage obesity, whatever the lack of underlying data, must continue to shuffle and grope its spooky way across the public policy landscape.
Until the governmental busy-bodies and trial attorneys figure out a way to sue Big Video.
In conclusion, here’s a bonus Arthur Koestler quote relevant to the discussion: “Statistics is like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive. What they conceal is vital.”
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.