What’s Worse Than Being Wrong? Being Uncivil. An Apology
I quit Twitter for a couple of weeks last month. I was frustrated by how closed off so many people are to non-ideological evaluation of argument and evidence and by how readily some people impute nefarious motives to other people with whom they disagree. I had just been through an exceedingly unpleasant multi-front debate over much-publicized findings about inequality I'd argued were not robust to methodological changes I found more defensible. That argument led to repeated mischaracterization of my point in writing the piece and to accusations that I'd cherry-picked my results to mislead readers.
Most frustratingly, this charge of cherry-picking–from the researcher whose findings I criticized–was based on a claim about data analysis that was obviously wrong to anyone who has done any sort of income trend analysis. As angry as I was at the cherry-picking charge, I was equally incensed at the researcher's unwillingness to admit that she was just wrong about her analytic claim. I was also nearly as bothered that no one outside the debate stepped in to adjudicate it and back me up.
It was a perfect distillation of everything I hate about the policy-politics-journalism nexus–my chosen professional ecosystem. It was only the latest in a series of such episodes I've experienced over the past nine years I've lived in Washington D.C., first as a moderately-left-of-center Democrat arguing with other Democrats and more recently as a moderately-right-of-center Independent. When I tell “civilians” from outside my ecosystem what I do, I regularly am near-apologetic about it, emphasizing how I hate the political polarization of my profession and the incivility.
But of course, I also have contributed to it.
There is some irony in the fact that I recently accused researchers at the Center for American Progress of an “amateur-hour” mistake that involved double-counting, since I had been accused of double-counting in the debate that drove me off Twitter. As in that earlier dispute, the charge was incorrect, a fact that only became apparent to me as the accuser after my piece had been published and after I'd made more than one condescending remark about CAP's analysis on Twitter. (Unlike the earlier dispute where I was the accused, I never suggested the CAP researchers were trying to mislead anyone.)
People who know me–even those who regularly disagree with me and who don't like me, I think–know that I value integrity above nearly all else. Valuing integrity means admitting when one is wrong, and for reasons that end up being technical but beside the point, I was wrong in my specific charge of double-counting against the CAP researchers. I have requested that both National Review and my economics21 colleagues update the piece in question with a note to this effect and I have no reason to think they won't. Obviously they bear no responsibility for my mistake.
To be clear, I do believe that other statements in the report I criticized and a comment by CAP president Neera Tanden in the Vox.com piece that highlighted the report do in fact double-count in the way I (incorrectly) said that a specific chart did. And I have other criticisms of that chart and the report in general. I strongly disagree with many of CAP's “middle-class squeeze” claims and think its “middle-out economics” strategy is misguided. But the charge I leveled of an “amateur-hour” mistake was unquestionably wrong.
But really, even if the charge had been right, I should still be apologizing. We can disagree (strongly!) with each other but do it in a respectful way. The tone I used in my piece and in a few subsequent tweets–one into which I have slipped before–was unproductive and uncivil. For that, I apologize unreservedly to Tanden and the CAP researchers (and for that matter to any other targets of past incivility).
This piece originally appeared in Forbes
This piece originally appeared in Forbes