AP puts a big lie about climate change in its headline about a story about the Old Farmer’s Almanac

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Earlier this week the Old Farmer’s Almanac came out with its prediction that the United States will have a colder than average winter this year.  An Associated Press article by Russell Contreras is the version of the news that most people will read about this annual rite of fall, mainly because for most non-business, non-local news nowadays, virtually all small-town and many big city media republish the Associated Press version of this type of feature story.

And if all the websites and newspapers that used the AP version of this story included the headline, as Yahoo did, then they have perpetrated what amounts to a hoax.

The story itself is quite well done.  Contreras contrasts the Old Farmer’s Almanac prediction of a colder than usual winter with two other predictions: 1) the Farmer’s Almanac, which predicts a much gentler winter than last year; and 2) the National Weather Service, which predicts a warmer than normal winter in some parts of the country and a colder than normal winter in other parts of the country.  The story also discusses the rivalry between the two almanacs.

The headline: “Old Farmer’s Almanac: Global cooling to continue.”

This headline is misleading in so many ways that it turns a fine feature story into a piece of propaganda for global warming deniers.  Let’s start with the obvious:

  • The story concerns predictions of weather in the United States only, whereas global weather patterns take into account the entire Earth.
  • The story talks about predictions of a one season’s worth of weather, which as has been discussed before in OpEdge, is subject to a number of local factors.  You can’t judge global weather trends by analyzing one year, or even one decade.  You have to take a look at long-term trends over many decades, which once done, reveals that our planet has been getting consistently warmer for almost 200 years.  It’s like saying that Reggie Jackson or Babe Ruth were bad ballplayers because they suffered a week-long slump.  Or using the bad acts of one paroled criminal to condemn a highly successful parole program, as Bush I did in his infamous “Willie Horton” ads during the 1988 presidential elections.  The propaganda technique is called “argument by anecdote,” and it’s one of the most powerful tools of propagandists because people tend to latch onto stories more readily than statistics.
  • Of the three “expert” sources discussed in the article, only the one featured in the headline has predicted a colder winter than normal.
  • The words of the headline, “global cooling will continue,” assumes that there has been global cooling, a view shared by less than a handful of scientists and based on an analysis of short-term and medium-term trends related to a reoccurring cycle in the activity of the sun.  What that means is that solar activity may make things cooler or warmer for a few decades and thereby act temporarily against a long-term trend on Earth.

The pernicious impact of this headline derives mostly from the way in which people read the news.  Most people skim stories, going from headline to headline until they find something of interest, and then perusing the first few paragraphs of some stories and very infrequently reading the entire story.

In other words, for most people, the headline is all they will read.  And the headline “Global cooling to continue” is a distortion not only of the story that follows, but of what the preponderance of scientific evidence and climate experts say is actually happening.

Unless perceptive editors substitute a headline that would be both more truthful and more accurate to the story, it’s this distortion that most people will see.  We know that Yahoo!’s editors just ran with it.  Let’s hope others showed higher journalistic standards. 

By the way, I found 379 stories on Google news about the Old Farmer’s Almanac predictions for this winter in the United States, and all the ones I checked out either repeated the AP story and headline, or were based on the inaccurate headline and not the story itself.

Before I close, I want to exonerate Contreras from his role in communicating this “big lie.”  I am assuming that like most newspapers, a special headline writer and not the story writer composes headlines at AP.  The theory has always been that writing headlines is a specialized skill that many fine writers don’t have.  It’s therefore likely that Contreras submitted his interesting story and a headline writer and the editors turned it into a misleading propaganda piece.  If I were Contreras I would be completely pissed off to see my work distorted.

Wall Street Journal gives right-wing economist Robert Barro a platform to jigger the numbers on unemployment benefits.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

One of the most important principles of logic, employed by scientists, historians and most other researchers, is that things that correlate do not necessarily have a causal relationship. 

Now that’s a mouthful, but it’s really a simple concept:  Just because two things happen at the same time or happen to the same person or nation does not mean that one is causing the other.  For example, just because two people show up at the same movie theatre for the same show doesn’t mean that one is there because of the other.  Or more famously, just because there are insects hanging around that pile of pig dung doesn’t mean that the pig dung created the insects.

If you read enough about physics, chemistry, geology, history, anthropology and other bodies of knowledge, sooner or later you will run into a discussion of whether or not two trends or set of facts that correlate (or exist together) have a causal relationship, that is, did one cause the other.

But judging from his August 30 article in Wall Street Journal it seems as if this important concept of critical thinking has not occurred recently to Robert Barro, a Harvard professor who is considered a global expert on macroeconomics, which is the study of how national or global economies function.

In the article, Barro declares that if unemployment benefits had not been extended to 99 weeks, the unemployment rate might be 6.8% and not close to 10%.  He therefore blames the Democrats and the Obama Administration for extending joblessness by helping the jobless to put food on their tables.

At the heart of his argument are some numbers he throws around in the middle of the article.  Let’s preview what Barro says, and then take a look at it:  Barro gives some statistics for past recessions like the “mean duration of unemployment” (halfway point between the high and low for how long unemployment lasted), the share of long-term unemployment (what percentage of the total unemployed looked for a job for more than a half a year) and the peak unemployment rate.  Then Barro compares these numbers to today, when they appear to be much worse.  He then concludes: “The dramatic expansion of unemployment-insurance eligibility to 99 weeks is almost surely the culprit.”  As you see, it comes out of nowhere, but is based on an underlying, but unstated and unproved, assumption that these numbers have a causal and quantifiable relationship.

With that explanation as our guide, let’s see what Barro wrote:

“To begin with a historical perspective, in the 1982 recession the peak unemployment rate of 10.8% in November-December 1982 corresponded to a mean duration of unemployment of 17.6 weeks and a share of long-term unemployment (those unemployed more than 26 weeks) of 20.4%. Long-term unemployment peaked later, in July 1983, when the unemployment rate had fallen to 9.4%. At that point, the mean duration of unemployment reached 21.2 weeks and the share of long-term unemployment was 24.5%. These numbers are the highest observed in the post-World War II period until recently. Thus, we can think of previous recessions (including those in 2001, 1990-91 and before 1982) as featuring a mean duration of unemployment of less than 21 weeks and a share of long-term unemployment of less than 25%.

These numbers provide a stark contrast with joblessness today. The peak unemployment rate of 10.1% in October 2009 corresponded to a mean duration of unemployment of 27.2 weeks and a share of long-term unemployment of 36%. The duration of unemployment peaked (thus far) at 35.2 weeks in June 2010, when the share of long-term unemployment in the total reached a remarkable 46.2%. These numbers are way above the ceilings of 21 weeks and 25% share applicable to previous post-World War II recessions. The dramatic expansion of unemployment-insurance eligibility to 99 weeks is almost surely the culprit.”

Barro then goes on to state that if the number of unemployed for 26 weeks or less today hit historical levels, then unemployment would be 6.8 %, blaming the extension of unemployment for the difference, with neither proof nor logic.  He uses phony math to propose a causal effect where none exists.

Barro states the conceptual basis of his argument earlier in the piece:

 “The unemployment-insurance program involves a balance between compassion—providing for persons temporarily without work—and efficiency. The loss in efficiency results partly because the program subsidizes unemployment, causing insufficient job-search, job-acceptance and levels of employment. A further inefficiency concerns the distortions from the increases in taxes required to pay for the program.” 

In short hand: people don’t look for jobs when they can collect unemployment and businesses are less able to hire because they are paying more in unemployment insurance.  It’s the same old right-wing claptrap that makes no sense when you actually examine the statement.

Let’s take a look at the second part first:  To support the unemployment program in each state, employers pay a percentage of gross wages for each employee up to a small amount.  In Pennsylvania, the percentage varies, but for my businesses it has been miniscule, and I only pay on the first $8,000 in income, so maybe it’s a couple of hundred bucks an employee per year.  Believe me, every business that is profitable or would be profitable without financial machinations makes a whole lot more than a few hundred bucks on each and every one of its employees.  So even when a bunch of those hundreds add up to enough money to hire someone else, remember that the total profit has also increased and so the company likely has the funds to hire with or without the paltry sums paid into the unemployment fund.

It’s the first assertion, though, that is truly offensive and an insult to virtually all working Americans—that a large percentage would rather stay home on their duffs than work.  We hear economic right-wingers make this statement all the time, and yet we never see any numbers to back it up.

First of all, I’ll admit that there is a part of our population who would rather sit at home than work, but when it comes to unemployment insurance, we’re talking about a special sub-group: those lazy-assed loafers who had a job and now would rather collect their unemployment than return to work. 

The issue is not how many people are in this loathsome subgroup, but how many can afford to live on that unemployment check and thereby eschew work.  Well, trust fund babies could.  But I’m under the impression that most people who lost their jobs were working at low wages, and a lot of those working for higher wages were living at or close to their means.  Remember that unemployment insurance pays only a part of your former wages and that there is a limit above which you receive no more no matter how much you made in your former job.  And, people who lost low paying jobs are not getting very much. 

Of course people who lost higher paying jobs like school teachers, attorneys or managers may be collecting unemployment checks greater than what they could make flipping burgers or welcoming customers to Wal-Mart. 

That is, if there were any such jobs.  According to the Department of Labor (DOL), there are currently five people looking for work for every job that’s opened, which is down from about a year ago when it was a more than six people searching for every available job.  DOL isn’t the only organization that has concluded that there are a paltry number of jobs for the number of people unemployed: so do such stalwarts of business as the Conference Board and the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.  

It’s for this reason that what Barro says smacks more of Simon Legree than Adam Smith:  If there are no jobs, we as civilized human beings must help the unfortunate fellow citizens who have lost theirs.

And now for the really offensive part:  you know all these economic right-wingers, including Barro, who think that we need to hang the threat of hunger and homelessness over people who have lost their jobs to make them want to work—all those right-wingers also advocate that we should leave regulation of every industry to the high-minded, ethical and socially conscious companies that make up the industry. 

In other words, we act to reign in the base instincts of the workers (most people), but don’t have to reign in owners, since they won’t succumb to a base motive.  That’s the hypocritical and self-serving essence of Barro’s argument against extending unemployment benefits. 

And I reject it as just another way to distribute wealth up the economic ladder, in this case from the unemployed middle class and poor to business owners.

Robert Reich identifies inequitable distribution of wealth as a major problem, but his solutions avoid the issue.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Someone in the mainstream news media is talking about what has been a major theme in this blog for some time now: the need to foster a more equitable distribution of wealth and income in the United States.  (see blogs for November 10, 2009 and June 14, June 15, June 17, June 18, July 22 and August 13 of this year). 

It’s Robert Reich, Clinton’s secretary of labor and now a professor at UC-Berkeley, in his opinion piece in today’s New York Times.  Reich says exactly what I’ve been saying: to fix the U.S. economy, we must address the growing inequality in wages, with much more money going to the top earners and much less to everyone else.  

Reich touches on why the current inequitable distribution of wealth is so bad for the country.  Unfortunately, he gives the same old same old complicated market-oriented anodynes instead of offering the obvious simple solutions that have worked in the past. 

None of Reich’s solutions distribute wealth more equitably, but instead propose to help low-wage earners keep more or earn more from a mythical growing economy.  Here’s what Reich suggests:

  • Give tax breaks to more low and middle-class wage earners, which of course does not raise incomes, only allows those helped to keep more of what they’ve earned.  Since Reich does not link this idea to raising taxes on others, all this suggestion does is provide a government subsidy to the employers who pay the low wages and continue to pay low taxes.
  • Make public universities free and then require graduates to pay back 10% of the first ten years of income after school.  There aren’t enough jobs for qualified college graduates right now, so how will this measure help?  And even if it did help to create more jobs, again, it’s a complicated scheme that insulates the high income/high net-worth crowd from contributing from their copious stash to a more equitable distribution of wealth.
  • And I quote, “Another step: workers who lose their jobs and have to settle for positions that pay less could qualify for “earnings insurance” that would pay half the salary difference for two years; such a program would probably prove less expensive than extended unemployment benefits.”  In other words, we take money away from the unemployed and give it to people who have found work that pays less than what they used to make.  Again, how does this move distribute wealth more equitably?  It sounds as if all we’re doing is robbing a down-and-out Peter to pay a merely diminished-and-struggling Paul.

Here are some of the simple solutions that Reich ignores, all of which have been proven in the past to equalize the distribution of wages and wealth in the country:

  • Raise taxes on the wealthy and either lower them for others or use the taxes to provide simple wealth-shifting programs such as lowering the cost of tuition at public universities or increasing food stamp payouts.
  • Remove the $106,800 cap on individual and employer payments to the Social Security Trust Fund (known sometimes as SSI or payroll taxes), so that everyone pays on all income, which would secure the Social Security system well into the future.
  • Raise the minimum wage.
  • Foster unions by lowering barriers to unionization, ending “right to work” laws and requiring that charter school teachers join unions in areas in which the public school teachers are unionized.  It’s just a fact that the period in which the United States had the most equal distribution of wealth was the same age in which the economy was the strongest and unions were also the strongest: after World War II through most of the 70s.  Unions turn low wage jobs into middle class jobs—they always have and they always will.
  • End government outsourcing for ongoing, non-manufacturing, non-research functions such as operating prisons and public parking and providing military services.  Government pays lower paid workers more and higher paid workers less than the private sector does, so when the government does it, there is a more equitable distribution of wealth.

All of these actions will raise wages.  To those who say that raising wages will make us less competitive in global markets, I answer, not if it means that the pay at the top is lowered and profit margins are thinned.  That’s what happened in Europe, which has suffered less in the current recession and seems to be coming back more quickly.  

Occam’s razor is the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.  Occam’s razor is one of the most important tools in science and philosophy.  So why do economists continually ignore this principle in devising solutions to economic challenges?  For example, they want to establish a carbon exchange market with trading and derivatives instead of just ordering polluters to install equipment or taxing these polluters so that that they and their users pay the social costs represented by pollution and global warming.  Regulation and taxes are easy, establishing a market is complicated.  Yet economists will write pages of gobbledygook to tell us why we’re better off going with the complicated.

And that’s what Reich thinks he’s done: created complicated solutions to the problem of inequitable distribution of the wealth to replace simple ones.  But to propose a complicated solution would require that Reich’s solutions really address and maybe even solve the problem.  Reich’s does neither.  He identifies the problem, but offers complicated, ponzi-scheme-like ideas that will do nothing to help.

Mainstream news media ignores study proving that immigrants increase both overall wages and productivity

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Once again, the mainstream news media is ignoring, at least so far, a study that demonstrates that a common right-wing myth is false.

In this case, it’s the myth that immigrants are bad for the U.S. economy. 

Two days ago, the highly reputable Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a study by University of California-Davis economist Giovanni Peri that uses advanced statistical analysis to measure the short and long-term impact of immigration on jobs, wages, productivity and business investment in the United States over the past few decades. 

The results of Peri’s extensive quantitative analysis support the contention that immigrants are good for the economy:

  • Immigration has no impact on the employment of U.S.-born workers.  In other words, immigrants do not take jobs away from “real Americans.”
  • When immigration increases, the wages of the average U.S. worker increases a little; in fact Peri estimates that the gain in wages from additional immigration between 1990 and 2007 was about 20-25% of the total real increase in average annual income per worker.
  • The productivity of the entire economy also improves as a result of increased immigration.

You probably haven’t heard of this survey because it has been just about completely ignored by the news media.  A key word search in Google News found only 18 stories two days out. Most of these stories were blogs or very small media.  I found only one wire story about the study, from the business-oriented Bloomberg.

Compare the second day totals this important research had on Google News with the second day totals months back for a survey that showed half of all TV weather personalities question the existence of global warming.  As I pointed out in this blog, that survey of the attitudes of a group that has not studied climatology and in half the cases not even studied meteorology made the front page of the New York Times and had 96 second-day hits on Google News.

Or think about the coverage of the on-the-spot estimate that non-demographic expert Minnesota Republican Michelle Bachman made that one million people saw Glenn Beck spew racial code words at his Lincoln Memorial rally last Saturday.  Google reports that 5,369 stories mention this estimate, which she spun out of thin air with no hint of what her methodology might have been.  By the way, Bachman’s estimate got about the same play in the mainstream news media as the scientifically based estimate of 87,000 which CBS News commissioned a third party to determine.

I think my point is clear.  The news media will cover the studies, surveys and estimates that play into its agenda, which today for the mainstream news media is to look right as much as possible as a strategy to keep the country from moving left in hard times.

If it seems as if the mainstream news media is ignoring scientific research such as Peri’s quantitative economic analysis and favoring attitudinal research, it’s only because science is typically not on the side of the right-wing. 

Why won’t the mainstream news media give us a firm number for the Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

It seems odd to me that in general the mainstream news media seems so reluctant to report a substantial number for those in attendance at Glenn Beck’s rally dedicated to the care and feeding of racial code words.   

To my mind, how many people attended would be the most important news about the rally because it would be a measure of the strength of the Tea-and-values movement that Beck and Palin want to spearhead.  And yet the mainstream news media approached ascertaining this fact with the same investigative skills with which they investigated Bush II’s claim that Sadam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

As this small review will show, most of the mainstream media ran away from talking about numbers, burying it near the end of the story and then just taking the claims of other sources without either questioning or backing those claims:

  • I can’t find the link, but Associated Press did the most-widely disseminated version, which puts “thousands” in its headline and first line, and then buries the organizer’s claim of 500,000 near the end of the story, as if the numbers in attendance were one of the least important parts of the story.
  • Los Angeles Times puts “thousands” in its headline and first line, and then buries the organizer’s claim of 500,000 near the end of the story.
  • New York Times’s headline has no mention of numbers nor is there any until near the very end of the story, at which point it says, “Washington officials do not make crowd estimates, but NBC News estimated the turnout at 300,000, while Mr. Beck offered a range of 300,000 to 650,000. By any measure it was a large turnout.
  • Washington Post:  I don’t have a link, but the Post followed the line of calling it “thousands” in the headline and first paragraph and then burying the numbers until the end.  The Post did run a story about the ahead-of-time prediction of a think tank hack paid by the ultra-rightist Koch brothers, along with his completely scurrilous statement that it would exceed the total to watch Martin Luther King deliver his “I have a dream” speech.
  • Many regional newspapers like the Harrisburg Patriot-News did a local follower story, interviewing people at the rally who came from the area; these stories never mentioned total numbers.

Some media finally saw today that the discrepancy in estimates was a story; all of these supported Glenn Beck’s number:

  • Daily News led the way by listing all the estimates except for the one by CBS, the only one in which the estimator told us how the number was derived, AKA the lowest estimate (see below).  While finding no room for the low number, the Daily News was able to print Minnesota Representative Michelle’s Bachman’s truly deranged estimate of one million people.
  • Some one writing for Yahoo! started with the Beck estimate and then spent a good part of the article condemning the CBS low estimate without giving a reason why. Even a movie review site chimed in to defend the high estimates.

Funny that no mainstream media focused on the CBS estimate of 87,000 in attendance except to refute it.  And yet, the CBS estimate was the only one backed by a scientifically-proven methodology, a methodology, by the way, similar to what some civil engineers sometimes use when estimating people or vehicles.

Let’s let CBS talk for itself:

“An estimated 87,000 people attended a rally organized by talk-radio host and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck Saturday in Washington, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News.

The company AirPhotosLive.com based the attendance on aerial pictures it took over the rally, which stretched from in front of the Lincoln Memorial along the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument. Beck and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spoke at the rally.

Beck, who predicted that at least 100,000 people would show up, opened his comments with a joke: “I have just gotten word from the media that there is over 1,000 people here today.”

AirPhotosLive.com gave its estimate a margin of error of 9,000; meaning between 78,000 and 96,000 people attended the rally. The photos used to make the estimate were taken at noon Saturday, which is when the company estimated was the rally’s high point.”

The best way that the mainstream news media can ignore or discount the scientifically-based 87,000 estimate as the closest to the actual number of attendees is to ignore the issue of numbers attending in covering the story.  The mere fact that only 87,000 attended shows how relatively unimportant the Beck-Palin voters really are.  The comparison of Beck’s estimate of a half a million to the probably total of fewer than 100,000 demonstrates once again how willing Beck is to lie or stretch the truth to make his points.  The mainstream news media purposely looked in the other direction from the real news story to protect the radical right from exposure to these painful facts.

It’s not the first time that the mainstream news media has seemed to act in concert to magnify the importance of the Tea party and “values” movements. My conclusion: they and their owners want to keep pushing the country to the right.

The news media keeps busy covering celebrity worship and parents trying to game the educational system.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

A while back I wrote about Parade’s use of the July Fourth celebration as a platform for worshipping celebrity culture.  As I said then, it’s the “modus operandi” (the way it works) in the mass media. 

This past Sunday, Parade once again reminded us to worship actors and entertainers, this time as part of the new rite of passage for American teens—going off to college.

The title of the article says it all: “Schools of the Rich and Famous.”

And who are these rich and famous?  Of the 30 names mentioned, 27 are actors and entertainers, skewering young but ranging from Emma Watson to Joan Rivers.  Two are titans of business, Warren Buffet and Steve Jobs.  The other is a caterer turned home advice expert turned business titan and entertainer, Martha Stewart.  There are no writers, scientists, explorers, astronauts, diplomats, inventors, community activists, physicians, politicians, elected or government officials, classical or jazz musicians; not even an athlete, which is truly weird.

Once again, Parade is telling us that the highest achievement is to be in front of a camera on TV or in the movies.

What’s truly hilarious is how the writer Rebecca Webber presents this list of where celebrities went to college:  She gives us a multiple choice quiz.  The subhead is “Test your knowledge of celebrities and their student days.”  Celebrity trivia is not a body of knowledge, nor will accumulation of information about where celebrities went to college help anyone either to solve today’s pressing problems or to consider the wisdom of the ages.  There is no knowledge involved or discussed in this article at all.

On the other hand, perhaps Webber thinks that taking her quiz will help the kids prepare for their standardized exams.

I think I’ll nominate Webber’s use of the word “knowledge” for a Ketchup award, which this blog will give at the end of the year to the most obnoxious and most absurd bending of language of the prior year.  I call it the Ketchup Award in honor of the condiment that the Reagan administration declared a vegetable for the purpose of evaluating the nutritional value of the federal school lunch program.

Turning to another growing trend, The Sunday New York Times placed an article on the decision to hold a child back for a second year of kindergarten on the front page of the Sunday Styles section, right under its steamy coverage of the breakup of a billionaire’s marriage. 

Now of course, certain children need to start late because of emotional problems or maybe they aren’t ready to learn how to read.  But in many cases, as the Times reports, parents are holding back their children so that they will have an edge in sports and in the classroom. 

It’s another trick of parents trying to give their kids a leg up instead of letting them stand on their own two feet.  It works in sports, perhaps.  But in the case of holding them back so they do better in school, it won’t work and in some cases it may backfire.

The hold-back trend had already taken hold when my son was getting ready to go to kindergarten.  At that time, the cutoff for school had recently changed from December 31 to September 30, but every boy born after June 30 whom we knew in our large middle class circle of acquaintances was held back by their parents.  And virtually all of them had some behavior problems in early grades.  Hey, maybe they were bored.  And years later, it turned out that a lot of the kids who started on time got into top-notch universities, even the youngest, while lots of the kids who started late ended up going to D list colleges.  Now that’s strong evidence, but keep in mind that it’s all anecdotal, based only on my experience.  So don’t put that much stock into it.

But think about this notion: if all parents or even a significant number held back their kids, then the advantage would be lost. 

Parents who hold back their kids for sports should compute the statistical odds of their children becoming professional athletes: There are about 3,700 jobs a year in the four major sports, or about two-thousandths of one percent of the population of U.S. males.  Then again, many athletes now come from other lands, so the odds are even worse.  So, realistically athletics are fun only.  Ask yourself, then, do you want your kids to start their careers or go to graduate school a year later for an edge in a fun activity? 

Be that as it may, in most cases starting kids late, for either academic or athletic reasons, is just another way to extend childhood and another way for parents to interfere in the educational process to give their child an unfair, although in this case a dubious, advantage.

Much feature news in the business pages of the newspaper are really little PR packages for products or services.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Yesterday I analyzed an article by Ron Lieber in the Saturday “Business Day” section of the New York Times. I want to take a broader look at the entire section today, because it exemplifies what has been the norm in business feature reporting for decades.

The business section of virtually all American newspapers and news magazines has always sprinkled consumer finance features into true business news like recalls, market movements, mergers and economic reports.  These consumer finance features seem to always focus on solving a problem or addressing a trend.  But in fact at the heart of all of them is the selling of a product or service.

Let’s take a look at the consumer finance features in Saturday’s New York Times:

  • We’ve already spoken of the Lieber article, which isn’t selling you on any product, except the subtle hint that your journey to love begins by buying an on-line ad.  The Lieber article instead, sells you on the concept that buying things is the essence of any relationship.
  • “The Bean, the Pod and the Battle” sells us on buying the environmental disaster that is the home pod system for brewing espresso.
  • “A Buying Guide for the Cheap” sells us on using an on-line shopping service.
  • “Sizing up FreshDirect” sells us on buying food through an on-line supermarket.
  • “As Private Tutoring Booms, Parents Look at the Returns” sells us on the need to get a private tutor if we want our kids to do well on the SATs and get into a good school.
  • “Birth Control Doesn’t Have to Mean the Pill” sells us on intrauterine devices (I.U.D.) for birth control.

In all these articles, the writers advocate the ideology of consumerism in subtext and asides, typically with unproven assertions such as “a product that has become a must-have among the chic urbanites,” “Some physician practices are not very familiar with longer-lasting, more expensive methods…” and “since money is still no object when it comes to their children.”  The implication always is that money will buy what you want and what you want can only be bought.

The New York Times is far from alone in filling its pages with features that do little more than sell products and services.  Selling goods and services is the primary function of most news media and serves as the core topic for most feature stories in business, lifestyle, entertainment, health and other non-hard news sections of newspapers, broadcast news, consumer and business magazines, e-zines and news websites. 

Financial columnist offers advice on love to the frugal: spend more money on your dates if you want to impress.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Once again we can count on the New York Times Ron Lieber to present the assumptions of the American ideology of consumerism as facts in an effort to convince readers that the way to happiness is to participate in the great American potlatch and spend lots of money, hopefully beyond your current means.

Several months back I wrote about Lieber using an article on how parents answer tough question from their children about the family finances to promote the core American value of consumerism—that the essence of all of life and all happiness is to buy things.   

Now in Saturday’s Times, Lieber offers advice to those frugal men who want to attract the typical American girl, whom of course Lieber implies as only being impressed by ostentatious displays of wealth.  Frugal, according to Merriam Webster, is “economical in the use or expenditure of resources: not wasteful or lavish.”  Sounds like something that most people would look for in a spouse.  But not according to Lieber and the expert he quotes.

Lieber starts the article by citing a recent ING study in which 1,000 people were asked what came to mind when certain words were used to describe a blind date.  Only 3.7% found “frugal” to be “sexy,” while 15% found a person described only with the word frugal to be “boring,” 27 % found frugal to be “stingy.”  Now much further down in the article, Lieber reports that 49% of survey respondents thought it was “smart” to be “frugal,” which to this blogger (who when single tended to go after women who liked smart men) pretty much invalidates the need for the article.  But Lieber buries this survey result deep in the article so he can persist in his veiled attack on those of us who aren’t spendthrifts.

Most of the rest of the article consists of the banter of experts and daters on why women (and gay men) don’t like to date frugal men.  In the very last few paragraphs, however, Lieber gives some advice for those who want to tell potential dates and mates that they are frugal in online ads.

The structure of this article is built on two absurdities: 1) The absurdity at the end which proposes that one would even mention being frugal in an online ad.  Why would it come up in a paragraph introduction?  Frugality or the lack of it could certainly emerge on a first date or even on a get-acquainted phone call or email exchange, but it seems odd and out-of-place to mention it in an online ad.  The advice is stupid because it’s telling you how to do correctly something that you shouldn’t even be doing.

2) The absurdity that a frugal person should be concerned because only 3.7% of the population thought one of the many traits he or she had was “sexy.”  First of all, it’s just one of many traits.  But even if it were all that mattered, so what!  At any given time, we assume that you’re in the market for one person only.  Why would you want to date someone who you know is incompatible because they do not like your frugality? Remember, the frugal members of the sex you are seeking also only have 3.7% of the population from which to select a date, mate or special friend.  Seek him or her, and forget about the others.  That’s what people do when they decide to only date professionals, members of their own faith, people who live within a 20-mile radius, bikers, those who abstain from drinking alcoholic beverages or those who like dogs.

Of course, Lieber’s idea is not to present a reasoned argument, but instead to indoctrinate all of us—frugal or otherwise—that the norm is what sociologist Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” some 110 years ago.  All Lieber really wants to do is tell us that it is the frugal person who is the odd duck in the dating game and must seek to mediate the impact of his or her financial discipline by either changing or using euphemisms to describe it.  It’s just not true.

Wal-Mart makes it official: helicopter parents are a demographic group.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

For the first time ever, I’ve spotted a TV commercial that focuses on helping the helicopter parent.  So let’s give Wal-Mart the credit it deserves for being the first to go after this upscale target market.

I’ve defined helicopter parents before.  They’re the ones who take absolute control of the lives of their children, especially when it comes to school and progressing towards college or other post-secondary education.  They’re the ones who are obsessed about getting in the “right” school, be it college, high school or kindergarten.  They hold their kids back a year so they do better in school and high school sports; have their kids take one course in summer school to have a lighter load during the high school year; hire educational consultants; put their kids through rigorous SAT training; wrestle over the phone with admissions counselors; make their kids go to high school summer camps at prestigious universities; and hire people to write their kids’ college application form essays.  There are even documented examples of parents going with their children to their first job interview.

And now one of Wal-Mart’s back-to-school TV commercials focuses on how the mass merchandiser can help the helicopter parent guide her child to a better elementary or middle school experience.  As with all the lifestyle ads that Wal-Mart has done over the past few years, the focus is on the adult woman shopper.  In the universe that Wal-Mart portrays in their lifestyle ads (as opposed to their ads about low prices), adult men are noticeably absent.

In this ad, shots of the mother shopping for back-to-school items are interspersed with shots of the mother helping the daughter to prepare for either a bake sale or other charitable project at the school or the girl’s campaign to be elected to a class office—I couldn’t really tell because the shots are all quite short to suggest a whirlwind of activity.  In helping the daughter we see some appropriate actions for adults, such as helping to make something.  But there are also some helicopter parent actions, the most obvious of which is a shot of the mother handing out flyers for something to other children at the school.  Now that’s just not appropriate—it should be up to the kid to do his or her own canvassing at school (or anywhere else), especially to other children.  It’s with a soft touch that Wal-Mart shows split- seconds of a parent providing a heavy helicopter touch.

Interestingly enough, the family in this case is African-American.  Let’s analyze that creative decision by Wal-Mart.  I haven’t seen any studies but I’m fairly confident that a helicopter parent is more likely to be upscale or rich than the non-helicopter parent, because the helicopter parent’s unhealthy interference into their children’s lives mostly manifests itself by buying primarily upscale goods and services.  Additionally, the case histories in the media about helicopter parenting skewer decidedly to the wealthier among us.

In the United State, sadly, even almost 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, African-Americans still have on average less income and wealth and a lower percentage of them would be considered upscale or wealthy.  So in a sense, even as the commercial quietly shows us that Wal-Mart can help in some basic helicoptering, it is aspirational for African-Americans, who, with rural white Americans, tend to symbolize the poor and lower middle class in this country in the mass media.  To this group, the message is, at least in part, “You may not be able to afford to send your child to a $1,500 SAT prep course, but you can still support their school career.” 

I’m not saying that Wal-Mart is advocating parental helicopterism.  It is merely accepting it as a new norm and trying to appeal to that segment of the market, while seeking to expand the number of people who have a helicopter motive as their rationale for engaging in a commercial transaction at Wal-Mart 

Arguments of those opposed to gay marriage don’t make any sense.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

While Ground Zero may have become ground zero in the endless struggle for equal protection under the law, the skirmish in California over same-sex marriage slogs on like World War I’s Battle at Verdun.

Every day there’s news about the appeal of Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to overturn the California ban on gay marriage.  Today I want to talk about an argument that the opponents of same-sex marriage (AKA the proponents of Proposition 8, which was the law the good Judge overturned) have been giving as a major reason to oppose allowing people of the same sex to marry: “that the state has an interest in promoting responsible procreation through heterosexual marriages which would be harmed if gay marriages were permitted.”  

The argument is specious because the existence of gay marriage does nothing to harm responsible procreation, and in fact may lead to a slight increase in more responsible procreation. 

Let’s say you believe that responsible procreation can only occur in a heterosexual marriage: What difference does it make to you then if people of the same sex marry?  Does anyone really believe that heterosexuals will stampede to gay marriage just because it’s available? 

Now to the argument that the presence of same-sex marriages in society would be a bad influence on children: that’s pretty absurd.  There is always a difference between the values of every home and those of our diverse society.  Good parents do a good job of instilling their values in their children.  Let me give you the example of our home when my ex-wife and I were raising my son: We actively spoke against tattoos, which are not allowed under Jewish law.  No Disney book, movie or TV was permitted.  We frowned on guns and didn’t allow any toy weaponry (until he got some giant soakers as a teen).  We also frowned on gambling.  To many Americans, some or all of these choices will seem odd, but we made them and they stuck, as my son has no tattoos, doesn’t gamble or carry a gun and is completely uninterested in virtually all manufactured entertainment.  In a similar way, a parent against same-sex marriage can instill those beliefs into their children, and if done with love quite effectively; but be forewarned, if your child is GLBT, it may not take.

Let’s assume that the essence of responsible procreation is responsible parenting. Would allowing gay marriage lead to less responsible parenting?  It is true that the more same-sex marriages there are, the more children, natural or adopted, will be raised in homes in which both parents are of the same sex.  But virtually all responsible studies on the issue of gay parenting show that children of gays grow up the same as children of heterosexual parents in every way.  That means they are no more or less likely to excel in what they do, no more or less likely to get into trouble, no more or less likely to be gay.  In other words, by allowing same-sex marriage, we increase the potential pool of responsible parents, and therefore the possibility of more responsible procreation.

Besides, procreation is not the only reason to marry: Among heterosexuals, there are plenty of marriages of convenience, marriages based on financial considerations and marriages in name only.  I know a number of happily married heterosexuals who have decided not to have children.  It’s their right, and that’s fine with me, and it should be fine with everyone else, too.

There are plenty of people that believe that homosexuality is a sin against their deity, and these people have a right not to marry people of the same sex in their churches, synagogues and mosques.  But we live in a secular country in which everyone is equal under the law.  Our state-performed marriages are civil, not religious ceremonies.  Now I see nothing wrong with the state validating marriages of religions which do not allow same-sex marriage.  By the same token, though, there is no reason that the state—which means our national, state and local governments—should have any bans on same-sex marriage.

It’s going to take a few more years, but I believe that eventually all the legal bans on same-sex marriage will fall in all states.  And after that, I predict that we will see religious organizations start to accept it more, as they seek to keep up with the changing times.  Conservatives have been quite successful turning back the clock on unionism and equitable distribution of wealth in America.  They’ve slowed things down considerably when it comes to matters of global warming and environmental protection.  I don’t know what will happen on these very important issues.  But when it comes to allowing same-sex marriage, I am very confident that victory is close at hand.