Smarmy and Lacking Evidence

The BBC has posted one of their gleefully cutting hatchet jobs on the US, “Stark Reality of the American Dream.” The fellow refers to — but doesn’t give any evidence from — a study, as follows:

I had come to Seattle because of a recent survey by the Centre for Economic Performance in London, on how easy or difficult it was to get rich in different parts of the world – or if not rich, at least move out of poverty.

“If you are born into poverty in the US,” said one of its authors, “you are actually more likely to remain in poverty than in other countries in Europe, the Nordic countries, even Canada, which you would think would not be that different.”

Now I’m all in favor of “studies,” so it would have been nice to have found indicated somewhere on the BBC site to just what study they were referring. I’ve not been able to find it on the site of the Centre for Economic Performance. (If anyone does, please let me know.) Moreover, the thesis is that coming to America is coming to a land of poverty and hopelessness; millions of people are, it seems, simply fooled into coming to a country in which they will remain trapped in poverty. No evidence is presented.

The piece ends with a nasty and tacky description of a citizenship ceremony:

At the landscaped Seattle centre, using cards and newspapers to shield themselves from the sun, rows and rows of immigrants at a naturalisation ceremony listened to local officials speak about various aspects of the American dream.

They came from everywhere: Britain, France, Iran, Iraq – the name of every country read out, to cheers, as if we were at the Oscars and, of course, the waving of American flags.

“Why do you want to live here and not in Europe?” I asked a young woman from Ethiopia, who tipped back her Seattle Mariners baseball cap and looked at me as if I were completely mad.

“Europe,” she said disdainfully.

“What do they ever hope for in Europe? Here they have a law that you can dream to be happy.”

It’s worth noting that Europe’s income statistics are rather skewed by the relative lack of immigrants (who tend to enter with little capital and little earning potential, thus skewing the figures downward for the short term); most of the difference in income inequality between the U.S. and western Europe could be “eliminated” by adopting European immigration policies, although how that would help the immigrants is a bit hard to fathom. Moreover, I rather doubt that a large percentage of those who remain in poverty are immigrants, as the BBC write suggests. The evidence suggests that the hard-core who remain in poverty have the following characteristics:

A) they don’t finish high school (not such a great intellectual challenge anymore for most people);

B) they have difficulty keeping a job;

C) they have children before marriage.

In fact, if one manages to finish high school (not, like in many European countries, an especially difficult achievment in the U.S.), keep and hold any job for a year, and wait until marriage before having a child, the chances that one will remain poor are vanishingly small. Those three matters are substantially under one’s own control. What, I wonder, could account for such behavioral traits as A, B, and C? I wonder if it might be the welfare state, especially that portion of it targeted (the term is appropriate in more ways than one) at the poor. It may be why one of the most successful means of reducing the welfare rolls and encouraging people to get jobs has been the realization that welfare benefits are time-limited, as Michael New shows in “Welfare Reform That Works: Explaining the Welfare Caseload Decline, 1996–2000.”

But facts? Too much for a BBC reporter. Better to write “color” commentary and ignore the statistical evidence.

UPDATE: My colleague David Boaz sent me this link to a Washington Post article, also a “color piece,” but with a rather different take:

On Friday morning, I watch as Olga Chikhirkina and Yulia Pereverzeva , two 20-year-olds from Kaliningrad in western Russia, open Kohr Bros. Frozen Custard on the boardwalk.

“It’s different,” Olga says of life in the United States. “You just have to work and you will have everything. If you want to make career, you have to have highest education in Russia. . . . Here I know a guy who was dishwasher for 11 years and now he is a manager in a store.”

What do you think of Americans, I ask.

“It’s very friendly people,” says Olga.

“Very, very friendly,” says Yulia.

“America people smile all the time,” says Olga.

Perhaps this is true, I say to them, but for some reason the ones who seem to smile the least are the Americans doing the sort of jobs that you Russians are doing — smilingly — here in Ocean City.

“We like to smile,” says Yulia.

I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. Mr. Hawksley wouldn’t like to open a frozen custard stand and thinks that the idea of managing a store is beneath him. And he also wouldn’t want to live in a country with lots of immigrants. They do skew those stats on economic inequality….in the short run, at least.