PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "Measuring America"

« Back to Measuring America main page

Transcript for:

Measuring America

THINK TANK

WITH HOST: BEN WATTENBERG

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Think Tank is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Donner Canadian Foundation.

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. In the 20th Century Americans became the most ambitious measurers of human activity ever. Today we have numbers to describe everything, our economic well being, health, sexual behavior, attitudes and opinions. More and better data have allowed policy makers to spot problems and craft solutions. But, is there a downside to these statistical imperatives.

Think Tank is joined by: Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wynn chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of the Tyranny of Numbers, Mismeasurement and Misrule; and Seymour Martin Lipset, Hazel professor of public policy at George Mason University and coauthor of It Didn’t Happen Here. The topic before the house, measuring America, this week on Think Tank.

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: This coming Wednesday, PBS will air a three-hour Think Tank documentary entitled The First Measured Century. It’s different. Most end of century programming has looked at what social scientists call anecdotes. Lindbergh, the Titanic, Hiroshima, Elvis, D-Day, OJ, Monica. Ours is a prime time special that looks at America in the 20th Century through the eyes of social science, and looks at the people’s history, data. Today, using several excerpts from the program, one on the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, one on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, we will examine social science measurements. To get us started, here’s a clip about Turner, one of the pioneers of early social science.

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: 1893, Chicago, our story of the first measured century begins at a World’s Fair celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival to what Europeans called the new world. Just outside the fairground, one of the great promoters of the day, William Cody was staging a production of his own. Three times a day Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show celebrating the daring do of gun slinging, cowboys, and Indian warriors. While Buffalo Bill put tales of the heroic West on parade, a young professor came down to the World’s Fair with a new way to tell the same sort of story, but with data. Frederick Jackson Turner, from the fledgling University of Wisconsin presented his thoughts to the American historical association.

MR. CRONON (From video): Turner starts this famous essay by quoting the Census Bureau, which interestingly in 1890 declares for the first time that there is no longer a visible frontier line on the demographic maps that the census is producing. Up until that time, if you drew a map of where people were and were not living in the United States, and drew a line in areas that had more than two people per square mile, or less than two people per square mile, there was a very clear demarcation between those two.

MR. WATTENBERG: From 1790 on, that line had been moving steadily westward. Thomas Jefferson had speculated that to fill the vast open spaces of America, it would take 100 generations. It took about 80 years. By 1890 people had settled throughout the Western territories, and a clear frontier line could no longer be drawn.

MR. COOPER (From video): Turner is picking up on an idea that is very much around, a lot of people are commenting on it. The frontier is closed. The country is industrializing, the place of the greatest growth, quite obviously, is in the cities. We’re now becoming a country of cities and of bigger cities, immigrants are pouring in from Europe, and there’s all this concern, what’s happening to us, what are we becoming.

MR. WATTENBERG: Turner is important, not just for what he said about America, but for the way he told the story.

MR. CRONON: Turner is one of the new group of historians that emerges at the end of the 19th Century, early 20th Century, who are vocal advocates for something they call the new history. And that new history has a couple of characteristics. One is, it is far more committed than any prior body of historical scholarship to social science analysis. It tries to use statistics, it uses data that historians had not used much up until that time, in order to gain new insights and make new arguments. And the other strand of history is, those new insights, those new arguments are pointed toward political interventions, very explicit political interventions, to say, history can make a difference to policy, it can change the way we govern this country by using data in new ways.

MR. WATTENBERG: Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. We just saw on that clip Professor William Cronon talk about something called the new history. Marty Lipset, what was that all about?
MR. LIPSET: Well, they were talking about two things. One thing, they were introducing notions of social forces, not just individuals, so they were talking about class, sections, religion, groups, and their impact on deciding what had happened. For example, one of them, Charles Beard at Columbia, he looked at the first elections in the United States, the elections in relation to the Congress and the Constitution, and analyzed it in terms of economic factors, looking at the more well to do and the poorer areas, and suggested that there were class factors operating in American society. Well, this you wouldn’t get if you were looking at Jefferson and Washington and the like. And so that became --

MR. WATTENBERG: That would have been stories of great men and great ideas. And Beard was sort of looking at, as you say, the social forces.

MR. LIPSET: But, also with numbers, he looked at the way people voted, and not the polls, but the records, and the county records, which counties voted which way and so on.

MR. WATTENBERG: Nick, what happened to this beginning of numerative thinking?

MR. EBERSTADT: It’s exploded. It’s been a tremendous explosion of quantitative skills, and given the explosion of data, of information, the statistical precision which originally was the cutting edge, the kind of cache of economists, econometrics, has spread to political science, sociology, even to anthropology and some of the other social sciences.

MR. WATTENBERG: We really have become a nation of data junkies. You listen to the presidential debates in the year 2000 and it’s all about CPI and GNP, and the poverty rate, the illegitimacy rate, I mean, you just go on, and on, and on. These are all inventions of the 20th Century, aren’t they?

MR. LIPSET: You had censuses before that, but basically looking at numbers in this way, in terms of what kinds of changes are taking place, for example, the co-collection of the birth rate, which Nick as a demographer is an expert on, this is something which became much more accurate.

MR. WATTENBERG: When the social sciences become popular in the late 1890s and the early 1900s, the practitioners, as I have sort of read through in the course of doing this program, they are pretty arrogant, aren’t they? I mean, they really think that they are going to do for human society what physics and mathematics, and chemistry had done in the natural sciences. I mean, is that the way you read it?

MR. EBERSTADT: Well, there certainly was a tendency to have this ambitious, even over-reaching hope that social science could be really, well, a science rather than an art. One is going to be applying mathematical formulae, and some of the theories and thinking about probability and uncertainty that are represented in statistics, and one is going to get into a really -- into a way of being able to approach the world and change that.

MR. WATTENBERG: And once you can measure something and say, I’m a scientist, and I measured it as William Cronon points out, that immediately leads to the idea of political intervention, you say, I know what happened, I know it better than you, I have measurements to prove it, and then the magic word which is, therefore. Therefore, we ought to do X, Y, and Z. And that’s really right at the beginning of social scientists --

MR. LIPSET: Well, causation, that you know the causes now, not just guessing about them, and if you know the causes, some of these causes presumably can be changed. And so you can reduce mental illness, or reduce juvenile delinquency. And the whole -- criminology is an area that goes way back, people have always been interested in crime, and there were criminologists in the 19th Century who were doing measures. They wanted to measure whether all of a sudden genetic factors were involved in crime, Ellen Rosso and others. They measured the cranium, to see whether people of a certain kind of head studied were more likely to be criminal than others. And a lot of that we look back on as sort of ridiculous. But, it was done. It came in the whole area of immigration, because you had a host of people from different countries, and people who were against immigration suggested that immigrants caused all kinds of social problems, crime, delinquency.

MR. WATTENBERG: And through these measurements that they were biologically inferior.

MR. EBERSTADT: Right, the eugenics.

MR. WATTENBERG: The eugenicists, which is a story we tell in this film, which I had heard about it, but I was flabbergasted, the IQ tests that categorized people as idiots, imbeciles, near imbeciles, and morons, and the morons it turned out, they’re the really dangerous ones, because they can pass into normal society and then propagate themselves, diluting the American stock.

MR. EBERSTADT: All of that pseudo-racial science, which bolstered itself with this misuse of numbers, the flip side of the use of numbers is the misuse of numbers. And in a society where numbers are proliferating, the promiscuous misuse of numbers is not an unmixed blessing.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Now, I want to get to that. Marty Lipset, you are a past president of the American Sociological Association. Has the development of the social sciences in the way we are talking been a good thing?

MR. LIPSET: Well, it’s been good and bad. I think there are a lot of things about the development of social science which has had very positive effects, but it also has had negative effects. We know, for example, in the whole question of economics, which is probably the most 'scientific' of the social sciences, economists think they know, and I think they do a lot more about the factors related to depressions, recessions, inflation, and what should be done about it. Alan Greenspan, who has been this most remarkable manipulator, if you will, of the American economy, and so far --

MR. WATTENBERG: Talk about data junkies, I mean, this is a guy who lives and dies by --

MR. LIPSET: And he comes up with all sorts of insights based on the most elaborate analyses of these data. As head of the Federal Reserve Bank, he commands infinite resources. He can get anybody to produce any numbers that could possibly be.

MR. WATTENBERG: And in point of fact, I mean, if you look at the history of the 20th Century, through the lens of the growth of gross national product, you see these wild fluctuations in the first half of the century causing enormous grief. And then, thanks to what Marty was talking about, in some large measure, sound and precise economic thinking, you see this line at about mid-century going like this, growth 2 percent, 3 percent, 4 percent, but without those tragic swings. That has been a plus but, Nick Eberstadt, in your book The Tyranny of Numbers you point to some great negatives.

MR. EBERSTADT: It’s not an unmixed blessing. I mean, taming the business cycle required a tremendous expansion of the scope and influence of the government. And if you take a look at the size of the U.S. government as a proportion of GDP or GNP, next to the fluctuations you’re describing, you’ll see the rise, and rise, and rise of the U.S. government. And that’s the price that one has to pay for that particular smoothing of the business cycle. But, it points to something I think more general. In a society such as ours that is democratic, and meliorist in outlook, we want things to be better tomorrow than they are today, more information, by its nature, leads to wanting to have more action, to having more government action. So the information explosion is almost an invitation for a larger and more intrusive government, with all of the good things and bad things that come with that.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, you gave many examples in your book of how the misuse of numbers has hurt us. And just give me an example of what you’re talking about.

MR. EBERSTADT: One area where I think we’ve done a tremendously bad job of using data is in the war against poverty, anti-poverty policy. In the 1960s, the government decided, as you know very well, Ben, you were involved in this, the government decided under the Johnson administration that there was going to be a war against poverty, and someone in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was ordered more or less, as kind of an overnighter crash course, to come up with a poverty index. Well, they did --

MR. WATTENBERG: Molly Irshanski (sp).

MR. EBERSTADT: Molly Irshanski, and she came up with a poverty rate, a measure of poverty, and poverty lines, which was fine for an overnighter, but it really mismeasured severely the nature of deprivation in the United States. Well, the problem is that Dr. Irshanski was looking through the wrong end of the telescope, she had income figures. What really defines deprivation is a lack of consumption. And looking at spending would have done instead is it would have shown a very different pattern of deprivation was facing American society from what we’d decided looking at income.

MR. WATTENBERG: Now, Marty, do you buy that?

MR. LIPSET: Yes, very much so. And one of the issues that’s been debated, in terms of evaluating the quality of national life, is inequality or equality of income. Now, there’s been general agreement that somehow America has become more unequal. But, if you look at consumption, how many people own their own houses, how many people own cars, how many calories are people consuming, somehow in this period when supposedly people are doing worse economically they’re doing better. A lot of these measures you think just because they’re numbers they’re objective. And therefore, there’s more -- you know, just like accounting, five fingers is more than four fingers. But, it’s not that obvious, there’s little questions of the indicators.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let’s go from the theory of social science to a case history, which we also did in this first measured century program, and it is about a man, a former colleague of yours, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and you were a teaching assistant of his at --

MR. LIPSET: Harvard University.

MR. WATTENBERG: At Harvard University. Let’s take a look at the clip of the show, and then let’s talk about the specific use of data.

In 1965 a young academic in the Johnson administration began a serious study of how culture and economics were intertwined. Daniel Patrick Moynihan examined the data and wrote, The Negro Family, The Case For National Action. The report, published by the Department of Labor, used data to focus attention on the problems of black families.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN (From video): These are accurate statistics, most of them government statistics, most of them available if you dig through those census volumes. The issue is what are we going to do about these facts.

MR. WATTENBERG: Scouring the Labor Department statistics, Moynihan found, unsurprisingly, that when unemployment went up more people went on welfare, and vice versa. This correlation seemed to be set in stone. But, Moynihan noticed that something was changing.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN (From video): In 1963 that correlation had disappeared. Suddenly the unemployment rate for minorities, as well as everybody else, was going down, and the dependency rate, if you want to put it that way, was going up. Now, what was this all about?

MR. WATTENBERG: According to Moynihan, at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.

Tell us about the controversy about the Moynihan report, what it led to, was he right, was he wrong?

MR. LIPSET: Well, the controversy, as I remember it, wasn’t so much about the reliability of the statistics or the data, but about the causal pattern. Initially a lot of blacks, black leaders and others, said that this was, somehow, blaming the victim. And Moynihan was attacked bitterly by a lot of people as a racist, because he was blaming the blacks. It’s interesting today --

MR. WATTENBERG: He made the point that black out of wedlock birth had soared from about 15 percent of all births to about 25 percent of all births, and the white rate today is where the black rate was when Moynihan said it was a crisis, somewhere between 25 and 30 percent. And he said this would cause a tangle of pathologies.

MR. EBERSTADT: Tangle of pathologies, yes.

MR. LIPSET: Dysfunctional family --

MR. WATTENBERG: And therefore he said, what?

MR. EBERSTADT: Much of what Senator Moynihan was --

MR. WATTENBERG: He was not a senator then.

MR. EBERSTADT: Not then senator.

MR. WATTENBERG: He was assistant secretary of labor.

MR. EBERSTADT: Assistant Secretary Moynihan was arguing for was for family support, was for a program in the United States, an income support for families.

MR. WATTENBERG: You would agree that that’s a problem that he described, a real one?

MR. EBERSTADT: Absolutely.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, you would disagree with the idea that there ought to be a government program to deal with it?

MR. EBERSTADT: There could be a lot of different government policies, and different programs to approach this. The devilishly difficult problem in dealing with the problem would be not to intensify or exacerbate it inadvertently. And, of course, over the period from the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s, we had an expansion of any number of anti-poverty programs, which went hand in hand with continuing instability, increasing instability in first minority American families, and now recently in white families.

MR. LIPSET: For one thing is the question, you know, there’s been a tendency amongst people when you find problems of this sort to throw money at them, to say we have to have money. And the throwing money more often than not doesn’t work, if it doesn’t change the underlying social conditions.

MR. EBERSTADT: Government can do many things using quantitative measures, it can craft programs, and interventions, but some of the interventions which may be necessary in a problem like this are not exactly quantitative, they may be moral.

MR. WATTENBERG: So to use this Moynihan situation as a model of your problem with the misuse of statistics, what we ought to underline is misuse. In other words, you are saying not that the numbers were wrong, and not that the intuition was wrong, but that the action taken was wrong.

MR. EBERSTADT: I think it was an excellent analysis, it was an excellent piece of social science analysis. The question is whether as policy research it was successful policy research. There’s a terrible intractable problem which maybe only slightly amendable to government intervention.

MR. WATTENBERG: We are running out of time. I want to read you an excerpt of something that was written by a man who later became President of the United States, James Garfield. Let me read it to you and get a quick closing comment. He says, until recently the historian gave us only the story of princes, dynasties, sieges, and battles. Of the people themselves, he told us nothing. Now, statistical inquiry leads him into hovels, homes, workshops, mines, fields, prisons, hospitals, and all other places where human nature displays its weaknesses and its strength. In these explorations he discovers the seeds of national growth and decay, and thus becomes the prophet of his generation. Has social science lived up to its promise?

MR. LIPSET: Well, it’s become, as Garfield anticipated, important, the social scientists are listened to, particularly economists, but also the other social sciences. So, in that sense, the fields have moved up. Whether they can provide the kind of answers, in reliable terms, that’s less true. But, in some areas yes, in some areas no. In criminology social science is very, very good. In some aspects of economics it’s very, very good. It’s less good in political analysis.

MR. EBERSTADT: It is a mixed blessing, with a great positive side to it. The explosion of information gives us, as in other areas of life, more options, and more potential for freedom. But, information is a tool, and a tool can be used well or misused. And the hubris that one sees is the idea that statistics, and statistical information are unambiguously good, and will every day, in every way lead to something better.

MR. LIPSET: If I may add though, it’s unambiguously reliable, that if somebody makes an argument and bolsters it with a lot of statistics, it’s pretty hard for you to answer, even if you disagree with them. But, much of the statistics are not that reliable, can be challenged. You know, there’s a book, or a saying that statistics don’t lie, but liars can count, or something of this kind.

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, Mark Twain said, figures don’t lie, but liars figure.

MR. LIPSET: Yes, well that’s the same thing. Right.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Thank you, Marty Lipset, Nick Eberstadt, and thank you.

Please remember to send us your comments via email, and please be sure to watch The First Measured Century a Think Tank special. It premiers on most PBS stations on Wednesday, December 20th, at 8:30 p.m. Please check your local listings.

Thanks for watching. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036, or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS Online at pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank.

This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in association with New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content.

Funding for Think Tank is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Donner Canadian Foundation.

(End of program.)

Back to top

Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc.

©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved.

Web development by Bean Creative.