Breaking: Matt Richtel book homepage bogus statistic removed

For at least three years, the website for New York Times reporter Matt Richtel’s book, A Deadly Wandering, about the dangers of texting and driving, has prominently featured a bogus internet meme statistic claiming that 11 teens per die from texting and driving accidents every day. I first debunked it in 2014, by simply pointing out that not even 11 teens die per day from all auto accidents regardless of cause.

I wrote about it again here. I also complained that Richtel had a financial interest in hyping teen texting deaths, and that it was unreasonable to say traffic fatalities were “soaring at a rate not seen in 50 years,” when in fact fatalities were almost at a 50-year low (down more than 60% from 1966, on a per capita basis, and still below the pre-recession levels).

I emailed Richtel, as well as the publisher. I tweeted. All to no avail — until sometime between last September (the last archived copy at the Wayback Machine) and today, when I saw they had finally removed the bogus statistic. Here’s the change:

The footnote stayed the same, which is funny because it’s not a “statistic” anymore (it never was on the IIHSFF site).

Anyway, because I complained so much it’s important to acknowledge the change.

Meanwhile, while Richtel and his publisher were taking three years to do 10 minutes work to correct an egregious factual error, the meme was still going around. I happened to see it today as I was reading an editorial in the Moscow-Pullman (Idaho) Daily News, in support of our lawsuit against Trump (long story), when I saw this letter:

Letter: Texting while driving is more lethal than school shootings
May 29, 2018

Kudos to the Daily News Editorial Board for having the courage to state (“Our View: Gun reform alone can’t prevent mass killings,” May 23) “it is not the guns killing people, it is the people pulling the trigger …” It sounds like something the NRA would say. And the real problem facing us is ” how to prevent weapons from getting into the wrong hands ” As a longtime NRA member I support all rational steps taken to do exactly that.

Blaming the NRA or gun manufacturers for school shooting deaths is akin to blaming Facebook and/or Apple iPhones and/or Ford Motor Company for teen texting-while-driving deaths, which some reports say cause an average of 11 teen deaths in America every day. It’s not Facebook or the cellphone or the automobile maker that runs that car through the red light or up a tree. It’s the distracted person behind the wheel. Let’s see what kind of reaction we get when we try to separate those young people from their cellphones for their own safety and that of those in the car with them. Mom and dad, have at it.

Texting while driving is vastly more lethal to our teens than school shootings.

Bill Tozer, Moscow

Bogus statistical memes have consequences.

See all the texting posts under this tag.

Trump blocked me on Twitter and that violates the Constitution

On Twitter, users have the option of blocking other users, which prevents them from viewing the blocker’s tweets, getting notified when they tweet, and participating in the comment thread below the blocker’s tweets. Apparently, Donald Trump’s Twitter account has started blocking people who criticize him. As of yesterday, I’m one of those people.

Yesterday, the Knight First Amendment Institute, a new outfit with a hefty endowment at Columbia University, sent a letter to the President outlining why this practice violates the First Amendment and demanding that he unblock users. You can read the letter here, but the gist of it is that the President’s account operates as a “designated public forum” for the federal govnernment and that suppressing speech on the basis of people’s political beliefs in that context is illegal. (See coverage here and here, and an argument against this logic here.)

Here is Trump spokesperson Sean Spicer explaining that Trump’s tweets are “official statements by the President of the United States”:

Spicer: Trump’s tweets are “official statements by the President of the United States.”

Noted. pic.twitter.com/5IWHoszfVt

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) June 6, 2017

My case illustrates how Trump created a public forum, used for official purposes, and then excluded me from participating in that forum on the basis of my political opinions.

When Trump was elected I made a case for “drawing a new line through the political landscape: for versus against Trumpism,” and oriented my political activity as a citizen accordingly. It turns out that the most efficient way I could get this message out was in the Trump threads on Twitter, by making simple memes stating opposition to Trump or mocking him. It’s not a sophisticated operation, but it didn’t take up very much of my time, and for the effort I think it had good results. (Maybe because my Twitter identity is “verified” or I have a relatively large number of followers, my tweets seemed to appear near the top of the thread if I posted them promptly.)

And I discovered that the Trump Twitter threads are a place to meet and argue with real people, strangers from other bubbles, about the most pressing issues of the day. Sure, most of the dialogue is pointless shouting and insults, which I am naturally way above, but not all of it, and for every person shouting there are many people reading along, who may be influenced by what they see. (For example, think of the young people living in Trump families described so well by Amy Harmon.)

My memes and statements were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, according to Twitter’s analytics, often appearing right below a Trump tweet. Clearly, this is not what the President wants, but just as clearly it is one small part of how democracy works these days. Here are a few examples of images I made and posted, or comments, with links for people who aren’t blocked so you can see them, screen images to avoid that (if you follow the links you can see the discussion in the threads).

From June 4:

From June 3:

From June 6:

From June 2:

From May 31:

From May 28:

From May 18:

From May 16:

From May 13:

From May 7:

You get the idea. Maybe putting up these memes feels like carrying a sign at a protest, but in this case it’s a political forum organized by the President and limited to those he selects based on their political statements. I don’t know how this legal argument will fare in the courts, if it gets there, but in this case as in so many others, his actions are bad for democracy.

Explain to me again how marriage is the problem here

This is one of those things you share with all your friends on social media.

Black married parents are 2.4-times more likely to be in poverty, are 2.1-times more likely to be unemployed, and have one-ninth the median net worth compared with White married parents. So explain to me again how marriage is the problem here.

Why?

The other day I picked on someone’s fact meme, and wondered what makes these things work, without offering a constructive alternative. I can’t answer the question I asked in that post (how old are the fathers of teen mothers’ children?), but I can answer some other questions about families and Black-White inequality. So that’s what I did.

Feel free to take these facts (or any others) and make something better.

How?

Here are my sources:

Poverty: 2014 American Community Survey from IPUMS.org. It’s Black and White, non-Hispanic, householders who are married and have their own children in the household. The poverty rates were 5% for White married parents and 11.9% for Black married parents. The poverty variable goes from 0 to 501, with 0-99 being below the poverty line, so you specify the recode like this: poverty(r:0-99 “poor”; 100-501 “not poor”). Here’s how you fill out the boxes in the online analysis tool:

Unemployment: Again, 2014 American Community Survey from IPUMS.org. It’s Black and White, non-Hispanic, householders who are married and have their own children in the household. For this one you limit it to people in the labor force (empstat(1-2)) to get the unemployment rate. I did it for men and women combined, getting unemployment rates of 3.1% for White married parents and 6.6% for Black married parents. The numbers are higher for women (3.7% versus 7.3%) but the Black/White ratio is a little worse for men (2.6% versus 5.8%). Here’s how:

Median net worth: I used the Survey of Consumer Finances from 2013, available here. These are also non-Hispanic Black and White parents living with children. The median net worths were $150,500 for Whites and $16,000 for Blacks (Hispanics, incidentally, have $18,750, and the rest are just coded “other”). This data set combines married people with those who are “living with partner,” so this comparison includes cohabitors. (I don’t know how that affects the results, but I’m sure there’s still lots of inequality.) I put my STATA code in an Open Science Framework project here, so feel free to play with it yourself.

The fathers behind teen births (or, statistical memes and motivated blind trust)

When makes people trust statistical memes? I don’t know of any research on this, but it looks like the recipe includes a combination of scientific-sounding specificity, good graphics, a source that looks credible, and – of course – a number that supports what people already believe (and want their Facebook friends to believe, too).

If that’s the problem, and assuming the market can’t figure out how to make journalism work, I have no solution except seizing the Internet and putting it under control of the Minister of Sociology, or, barring that, encouraging social scientists to get engaged, help reporters, and make all their good work available publicly, free, and fast.

Today’s cringe:

The blogger TeenMomNYC takes credit for creating this, and the Facebook version has been shared tens of thousands of times. Its popularity led to this story from Attn: “The Truth About Teenage ‘Baby Mamas’ is Quite Revealing.” (If anyone did want to study this issue, this is a neat case study, because she posted 8 “did you know” graphics on Facebook at the same time, and none of the others took off at all – why?)

I don’t know anything about TeenMomNYC, but I share her desire to stop stigmatizing and shaming young mothers. I wish her work were not necessary, but I applaud the effort. That said, I don’t necessarily think shaming young fathers (even if they’re not quite as young) is a solution to that, but that’s not the point. My point is, what is this statistic?

According to the footnote (thanks!), it comes from this 1995 National Academies report, and (except for changing “29” to “29.7”) it represents it accurately. From p. 205:

These data highlight an additional component of the sexual abuse picture— the evidence that an appreciable portion of the sexual relationships and resulting pregnancies of young adolescent girls are with older males, not peers. For example, using 1988 data from the NSFG and The Alan Guttmacher Institute, Glei (1994) has estimated that among girls who were mothers by the age of 15, 39 percent of the fathers were ages 20–29; for girls who had given birth to a child by age 17, the comparable figure was 53 percent. Although there are no data to measure what portion of such relationships include sexual coercion or violence, the significant age difference suggests an unequal power balance between the parties, which in turn could set the stage for less than voluntary sexual activity. As was recently said at a public meeting on teen pregnancy, “can you really call an unsupervised outing between a 13-year-old girl and a 24-year-old man a ‘date’?”

This is an important point, and was good information in 1995, when it cited a 1994 analysis of 1988 data, which asked women ages 15-44 a retrospective question. In other words, this refers to births that took place as early as 1958, or between 28 and 58 years ago. That is historical, and really shouldn’t be used like this today, given how much has changed regarding teen births.

The analysis is of the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth, a survey that was repeated as recently as 2011-2013. Someone who knows how to use NSFG should figure out the current state of the age gap between young mothers and fathers and let TeenMomNYC know.

Even if I didn’t know the true, current statistic, this would give me pause. Births to women before age 15 are extremely rare. The American Community Survey, which asks millions of women whether they have had a birth in the previous year, does not even ask the question of women younger than 15. The ACS reports there were 179,000 births in the previous year among women who were under 20 when interviewed, of which only 6,500 were to women age 15 at the interview. So that’s 3.7% of teen births, and 3 out of every thousand 15-year-old women. In 1958 this was much more common, and the social environment was much different.

Another issue is the age range of the fathers, 20-29, which is very wide when dealing with such young mothers. Look at the next phrase from the 1995 report: “girls who had given birth to a child by age 17, the comparable figure was 53 percent.” Realize that the great majority of girls who had a birth “by age 17” were 17 when they did, and the great majority of those men were probably close to 20. I’m not very positive about 20-year-old men having children with 17-year-old women, but it’s pretty different from 29-versus-13.

I can’t find the original source for this, but this report from the Resource Center for Adolescent Pregnancy Protection attributes this table to the California Center for Health Statistics in 2002, which shows that the father was age 20 or older  for 23% of women who had a birth before age 15. And of those, 93% were 20-24 (rather than 25+).

Anyway, this is a good case of a well-intentioned but under-resourced effort to sway people with true information, picked up by click-bait media and repeated because people think it will help them win arguments, not because they have any real reason to believe it’s true (or not true).

So I really hope someone with the resources, skills, and training to answer this question will produce the real numbers regarding father’s age for teen births, and post them, with accompanying non-technical language, along with their code, on the Open Science Framework (or other open-access repository).

Fixing the media and its economy is a tall order, but academics can do better if we put our energy into this work, reward it, and restructure our own system so that good information gets out better, faster and more reliably.

Related posts:

• No Black women are not the “most educated” group in the US
• International Women’s Day breathes new life into the 1% meme

A one-percent-meme-less International Women’s Day?

Today is International Women’s Day.

I dream of a day when International Women’s Day is no longer necessary.

Secondarily, I also dream of a day when International Women’s Day will be commemorated without people repeating the inaccurate claim that women only own 1% of the world’s property and earn 10% of the world’s income.

Here is why:

• March 1, 2011: Stop that viral statistic meme. Showing the origins of the meme and why it’s not true.
• April 29, 2011: What is the 1% meme solution? Showing how widespread it still is (was).
• September 20, 2011: Follow the bouncing 1% meme…. It’s really commonly used.
• September 26, 2011: How much wealth for women? More than 1%. Some quick calculations proving the 1% thing can’t be true.
• March 8, 2012: International Women’s Day breathes new life into the 1% meme. How it comes back on IWD.
• March 19, 2012: A little geographic and demographic awareness might squelch the 1% meme. Disproving the land ownership claim using China alone.

International Women’s Day breathes new life into the 1% meme

I’m told that CNN repeated this old thing today, though I can’t find it on their site. Here is OccupyWallSt.org’s version, though:

[women] perform 66 percent of the world’s work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own less than 1 percent of the world’s property.

Long story short: it’s not true. I’ve dragged this out for more than a year now, since last International Women’s Day (#IWD). The most recent debunking, with links to the others, is here.

This year you could find it on pages put up for IWD by groups such as Opportunity International and Volunteer International — and internationalwomensday.com distributed this from Cosmopolitan UK:

There’s lots of gender inequality. Women bear a disproportionate share of the burden from the world’s overall inequality. That means reducing overall inequality will usually help poor women especially, and addressing gender inequality will often reduce overall inequality.

I really don’t want to be the “gender inequality isn’t that bad” blogger. But the the 1% thing is really very factually wrong, and gender inequality in fact isn’t that bad. Before you think this means I’m not really down with feminism, just consider what this meme says about generations of feminists and all they’ve accomplished when it carelessly exaggerates the state of women’s oppression.

For some sourced statistics on women and gender inequality put up for the day, here’s a reasonable list from CNN. (CNN also ran a good Op-Ed from Stephanie Coontz, drawing from the symposium she put together for the Council on Contemporary Families, which I described the other day.)

On the plus side of the anti-meme effort, my pages on this do draw a lot searchers when this hits the news (a lot for this blog, anyway). There were a few hundred hits on the meme pages today, including ones drawn by these search terms, helpfully reported to me by WordPress, my host:

• do women work two thirds of all hours?
• worlds wealth women
• inequality facts women global 2011
• women work two thirds of working hours 10% of income
• women own less than 1 of the world’s property
• of the world’s income women only reiceve 10%
• women own less than 1% world property
• “united nations” women are half the world’s population, working two thirds of the world’s working hours
• international womens day meme
• women constitute half the world’s population perform nearly two thirds
• how much of the world’s wealth is owned by women
• women work two thirds of working hours 10% of income meme
• women own 1% of the world’s property
• 1% meme
• women are half the worlds population working two thirds
• women are half the world’s population working two thirds of the world’s working hours
• woman two thirds of the workforce own percent property
• what percentage of property is owned by women
• women quote population hours income
• how much of the worlds wealth is owned by women
• women are half the population, working two thirds
• women “10% of the worlds income”
• do women own less than 1% of the worlds property
• women are half the world’s population working two thirds of the worlds working hours receiving of the world income and owning less than 1 percent of the world property
• women are half the worlds population. working two thirds of the worlds working hours.
• meme international women’s day
• women are half the population work two thirds working hours
• women own 1 of property reference
• women make up 50% of the population, but own just 1% of the world’s wealth
• why work women constitute half the worlds population, perform nearly two thirds of it’s work hours
• women own 1% of wealth
• women 1% property false
• women property report 1%
• sfeminism stattisc about women
• feminist statistics 2011
• percentage of the world’s wealth owned by women
• women day own one percent two thirds work