Egypt: Democracy and Details

As I write this, Egypt is being convulsed by huge demonstrations, by some accounts larger than those that brought down Hosni Mubarak, demanding the resignation of the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. The Army has said it will step in if there is no resolution.

This presents a dilemma. Morsi is a fairly hard-core member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose dedication to democracy is suspect. Indeed, many say he has shown authoritarian tendencies. And the size of the opposition cannot be disputed. On he other hand, he is the first democratically elected president in Egypt's history.

I don't have a suggestion for the short run. But for the long run, let's look at how we got to this point. Before Morsi was elected he had to get through a primary where the top two finishers went on to the final election. Here's what the results looked like:

1. Morsi 5,553,097 (25.30 per cent)
2. Shafiq 5,210,978 (23.74 per cent)
3. Sabbahi 4,739,983 (21.60 per cent)
4. Abul-Fotouh 3,936,264 (17.93 per cent)
5. Moussa 2,407,837 (10.97 per cent)

Morsi was considered the most hard-line Islamist in the race. Shafiq was prime minister under Mubarak, and was thus considered a representative of the old, pre-Arab-Spring regime. Faced with that choice, people narrowly chose Morsi. But notice that both final-round candidates combined were the first choice of fewer than half the voters

Now suppose that instead of using a top-two primary, Egypt had used what is known as instant-runoff voting, known in Britain as alternative voting. Under this system, people state not only their first choice, but their second choice, third choice, etc. If nobody gets more than fifty percent of the first choice votes, then we go on to second choice votes, and so on.

How would this have worked in Egypt? We don't know for sure, but my guess is that people who voted for one of the more centrist candidates were likely to have voted for other centrist candidates for their second and third choices. So Sabbahi or Abul-Fotouh (probably not Moussa) could have ended up as president. This is how instant-runoff voting is supposed to work; the winner is supposed to be someone that represents the views of the majority.

I discussed the case of Egypt a year ago. My point then, as now, is that there's more than one way to pick a democratically elected president. (More than two, in fact.) It was clear then that it was unjustified to say, "See? When Arabs get democracy, they just vote for radical Islamists." It's even clearer now. And, boring as this topic may be, it matters.

Further Comments on Gas Masks and Settlements

In a recent post, I cited David Harris, the executive director off the American Jewish Committee, as saying, "I have a son who lives in Israel, not on the Upper West Side, and he lives with a gas mask..." The implication, of course, is, How dare an American criticize Israel from the safe distance of New York, when Israelis are the ones living in daily peril?  Apropos of this, the following story:

When I was leaving Israel in the summer of 2001, a guy I had hired to help me pack came across a small cardboard box in my closet. "What's that?" I asked. It was my gas mask. "Well, you won't be needing that!" he said. We had a good chuckle. It didn't seem so funny a couple of months later, in September of 2001.

While it's true that Israel faces a level of existential threat unknown to other countries, that doesn't mean that living there is like being in an Army outpost in Afghanistan. Add together terrorism, street crime, and traffic accidents, and I think it's about as dangerous as the U.S. And if you're hit by a car, there won't be a lot of hassle about whether you have medical insurance.

The reason Israelis now have gas masks is that they were subjected to missile attacks by Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf war. Saddam did this, presumably, to increase his popularity with the Arab street, particularly in the countries that were fighting him. What would undercut  this as a political strategy would be reaching some kind of agreement with the Palestinians. Israelis tend to focus on how much the Arabs hate them, and a peace agreement will not move them from hate to love. More like from hate to indifference. I don't think there's much enthusiasm for being more pro-Palestinian than the Palestinians.

And, of course, all this is irrelevant to the issue of the settlements, whose contribution to Israel's security is zero, if not negative. Here's my take on the Israeli politics of the settlements, and I'm eager to be corrected by someone who knows more than me:

Most Israelis don't care much about the settlements, and don't like the occupation much either. However, Israelis, understandably, place a high value on national unity (where "national" is understood as meaning "among Jews.") The settlers are a small but significant minority who have made it clear that they are willing to resort to violence rather than see Israel leave the West Bank (or, if you prefer, Judea and Samaria). One of them was responsible for the assassination of the prime minister in 1995, an event deeply traumatic to Israelis. Therefore, Israelis prefer to leave the settlement issue untouched, however costly that may be in the long run. [Update: When I say "settlers" I'm not referring to every Israeli living in the West Bank, but rather to members of the settler movement.]

It would make me sound like an arrogant, meddling American to say that Israelis need U.S. pressure on the settlements to save them from themselves. So I won't say it, even though it's true.

Crisis of Zionism? What Crisis?

I just read the paperback edition of Peter Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism. It's a very good book,which you should go out and buy. It's also a pretty disturbing book. But not as disturbing as the reviews.

If you are an American who pays particular attention to Israel, you may have heard of Beinart and his book. Beinart is a former editor of The New Republic who is a practicing Orthodox Jew. His book is an attack on the American Jewish establishment, of which he was formerly a part, for its enabling of what he regards as destructive tendencies in Israel.

Here are some of the main points:

1. Jewish organizations in the US, which once had a liberal outlook in tune with the ideology of most American Jews, have been taken over by by wealthy right-wingers with close ties to right-wingers in Israel.
2. The Israeli government is now dominated by such right-wingers, whose goal is permanent Israeli control over the occupied territory of the West Bank.  
3. In support of this goal, the right, both in the US and in Israel, has funded a huge program of construction of settlements in the West Bank. The settlers are protected by the Israeli military, which has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure their safety.
4. The result is that there are now two Israels. The Israel that is not under military occupation is a democracy. In the West Bank, however, Jews have the vote and Arabs don't; there are roads that Jews are allowed to drive on and Arabs are not; there is one judicial system for Jews and another (much harsher) one for Arabs. In short, it looks very much like apartheid. Moreover, many of the worst tendencies of the undemocratic Israel, specifically its racism and its violence, have begun to infect democratic Israel.
5. A real possibility, therefore, is the destruction of the idea, expressed in Israel's Declaration of Independence, of a democratic, Jewish state with equal rights for all. Beinart would personally feel this as one of the greatest tragedies of his life.
6. Young American Jews do not see Israel as an embattled democracy. They see a militarily powerful country that is oppressing the Arabs of the West Bank. The response has largely been to distance themselves from Israel, even among those who have retained, or developed, an attachment to Judaism.

The book has been received by reviewers with an astonishing combination of vitriol and dismissiveness. A review in The New York Times accuses Beinart of ignoring the contribution of the Palestinians to the conflict ("While there is a chapter called “The Crisis in Israel” and a chapter called “The Crisis in America,” there is no chapter called “The Crisis in Palestinian Society” or “The Crisis in Islam”"), and says that he uses "several formulations favored by anti-Semites."

The Washington Post review says the book is "...calculated to appeal to disillusioned Jewish summer camp alumni, NPR listeners and other beautiful souls who want the Holy Land to be a better place but do not have the time or ability to study the issues... ." The reviewer "heartily endorse[s] many of his talking points," but says that according to Beinart, "if you disagree with the current Israeli administration but don’t regard it as a font of evil and corruption, you are blind, deaf and dumb." And again, Beinart is guilty of absolving the Palestinians: "From this book you would think that Palestinians are just the passive and helpless victims of Israeli sadism, with no historical agency; no politics, diplomacy or violence of their own...."

And so on, through the Wall Street Journal ("Here is what he thinks: Israel is an oppressive, apartheid-type state.") and on out to the extreme right wing, where Beinart is, inevitably, a "self-hating Jew."

This is all complete nonsense. Some of it may arise from mere intellectual laziness or personal animosity; some of it must be intentional deceit.

To begin with, why is the book called "The Crisis of Zionism"? Because that's what it's about. Obvious, you say, but it seems to have escaped the reviewers: Why on earth should a book about the crisis in Zionism have a chapter called "The Crisis in Islam"?

Indeed, the reviewers above have virtually nothing to say about the topic of the book. Nothing about young American Jews' weakened attachment to Israel. Nothing about the settlements. Nothing about the poisoning of Israeli politics. They don't deny these problems. Nor do they affirm them. They simply ignore them.

To fill up the space on the page, they instead go the ad-hominem full monty. Thus, the reviewer for the Washington Post observes, with no supporting evidence, "'The Crisis of Zionism' is most interesting when seen for what it is, at least in part: a political stump speech for...the job of spokesman for liberal American Jews." The online Jewish magazine Tablet, in a feature that largely follows this theme (here's Tablet, being even-handed: "Even his fiercest detractors concede he has a genius for publicity"), quotes former New Republic owner Martin Peretz: “It’s a narcissistic book, and the narcissism of privileged and haughty people is never particularly attractive...I always knew he was a very vain man, but a lot of us are vain, and.. if I had his mother, I’d be even more vain than I am.”

The problem with the argumentum ad hominem, of course, is that it's not an argument at all. Why should anyone care whether or not Peter Beinart is a narcissist? One gets the sense of a magic trick, in which the hand is quicker than the eye and the real issues are made to disappear. Tablet quotes the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris:  "'I have a son who lives in Israel, not on the Upper West Side, and he lives with a gas mask...' The main problem with Beinart’s argument, Harris told me, was that it seemed designed to be maximally appealing to people who don’t want to confront the ethical complexity of the situation as it stands today."

Well, Mr. Harris, I had a gas mask too, and guess what? The situation is not ethically complex at all! Want something Israel can do to improve the prospects for peace, and at the same time, make the lives of Arabs on the West Bank less miserable? Want something that has no effect on Israel's security, and requires no assumptions about whether the Palestinians are ready for peace? Here's the plan: Stop building settlements. Stop building settlements.

The settlements are the rabbit that has disappeared from the American Jewish establishment's top hat. Nobody can explain to liberals (i.e., most American Jews) why Israel should build them, so they are gone in a puff of complexity.

But the rabbit keeps coming back, and more prestidigitation is required. The latest distraction is the tarring and feathering of Peter Beinart.

Fun Quiz: Cops In Your Kindergarten

I won't go into how I stumbled on this, but here are three videos showing small children being arrested by the police: a five-year-old boy, a five-year-old girl, and seven-year-old boy. All had their hands cuffed behind their backs after being arrested.

Fun quiz: Can you spot the characteristic these three kids have in common, one that might have some connection to their being arrested when kids with similar behavior are not? Please post your answer, together with any other remarks, in the comment section below.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/29/michael-davis-5-year-old-_n_1118963.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Ig34hQQXo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idO07rk5YVY

The Antinomy of the Geek

Please watch this video about an award to the inventor of the Graphics Interchange Format (it's less than a minute and a half). Note the paradox: there is no consistent pronunciation that makes the following statement true:

The word 'GIF' is pronounced 'JIF', not 'GIF'.

Flying Low

I was writing a long post about the whole air-traffic control brouhaha in Congress, starting with an explanation of the sequester, but I got so bored I couldn't finish it. So here's a pared-down version.

Thanks to Congress,  across-the-board cuts have been made to military and domestic discretionary spending. They call this "sequestration," even though that's not what what "sequestration" normally means. (They make the laws, after all, so when they use a word it means just what they want it to mean.)

These across-the-board cuts are, everyone agrees, a terrible idea. They were conceived as a way to get compromise on reducing the budget deficit. Republicans would agree to getting rid of tax loopholes to avoid draconian defense cuts, and Democrats would agree to some spending cuts to avoid across-the-board cuts -in domestic spending. But Republicans decided they'd rather be soft on defense than soft on taxes. So the across-the-board cuts went into effect. Oops.

It took a while for anything much to happen, but pretty soon cuts started appearing among the people and places that you don't need to pay attention to: the long-term unemployed, public defenders, food pantries... I mean, drug and alcohol treatment for Native Alaskans? Puh-leeze. No one really noticed. Fox News asked, "Did the White House mislead on sequester impact?"

Eventually, though, the cuts did start to affect people who matter.  Furloughs of air traffic controllers started to cause delays at big airports, and there was talk of having to shut down the small airports. Immediately there were moves to exempt this part of the FAA from the sequester, or at least give it more flexibility.

Democrats in Congress knew full well that the best chance to get rid of the domestic cuts was to hold firm and let the sequester affect more influential people.  But in the end, the bill to bring back the furloughed controllers passed Congress with overwhelming support, 90 percent in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate. Food pantries? Not so much.

Why did the Democrats cave? One possibility is self-interest: nowadays, many members leave their families in their home districts and fly home every weekend. Another is the wishes of people that Congressmen spend four hours a day talking to: the people who can contribute a significant amount to their campaigns. That group includes more than just the Gulfstream crowd; the business-class crowd and the Cessna crowd are also worth calling. All have a stake in the fate of air-traffic controllers.

What's harder to understand is what happened next: President Obama signed the bill. He doesn't fly home every weekend, has all the air-traffic control he needs, and doesn't need campaign contributions. Why didn't he veto it?

Yes, there was an overwhelming vote for it; it's likely the veto would've been overridden. I suspect the opinion of his staff would have been the conventional Washington wisdom: that having his veto overridden would have made him look weak, and if he looked weak, then he would be weak.

Going beyond that view would require the mindset that Obama's been so painfully dragging himself toward: that Washington politics is about more than his relations with Congress, that President shows leadership by talking to the voters, that voters admire a President who has strong convictions even when they don't fully agree.  Try this, for example:

"I know that this bill passed Congress with huge majorities and that a veto of it is likely to be overridden. Nevertheless, I cannot in good conscience sign it.  I cannot see how I can say that air travelers should not suffer from budget cuts, while the long-term unemployed are facing benefit cuts, homeless people cannot get housing vouchers, and children are turned away from Head Start programs. I have no wish for air travelers to be inconvenienced. But suppose you were one of the Medicare cancer patients who have been told by their clinics that they can no longer afford to treat you. That would be really inconvenient."

I think that works. Best case: he shames a third (plus one) of one house into voting against override. Worst case: He fails to stop the override, but pleases his restless base in the Democratic Party. Either way, he shows that he is not afraid to do the right thing even when it's unpopular.

How to Influence a Senator

What does a member of Congress want? Money? Yes, absolutely. But it's important to remember that members of Congress, aside from the few who are outright corrupt, don't want money for its own sake. They want it as a means to an end, and the end is reelection.

If you assume that politicians act in whatever way will help their chances of reelection, you will almost always be right. This need not be cynical self-interest on their part. Perhaps they're playing a long game, and reason that reelection is a precondition for getting anything done in the future. Or perhaps they convince themselves that that's what they're doing. In any case, you'll rarely go wrong by assuming politicians will choose the course that maximizes their chances of reelection.

This brings us to the defeat of universal background checks in the Senate. Given that support for this proposal was around 90%, how can voting against it possibly help senators' chances of reelection?

We have some evidence on that. Here's one of the Democratic defectors, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota:

“I think I always had a reputation as somebody who will listen, somebody who is pretty independent-minded but also believes that at the end of the day, you got to listen to your constituents,” Heitkamp told Politico. “In this office, the calls literally were before the last day at least 7 to 1 against that bill. This was after a series of very extensive ad campaigns done in my state saying call me and tell me to support it."

Then we have Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona. He announced that he would vote for cloture on the background-checks amendment, meaning voting to allow it to come to the floor for a vote. This was in opposition to the NRA position, which was to keep it bottled up forever. You can go to his Facebook page and scroll down to April 10 to read about it. Here are the first ten comments on the screen I was looking at (sorry about the HTML problems):

Jimmy Young we need you defeat this attack on our 2nd amendment right's if not you don't have to worry about us ever supporting you again we will be supporting your challenger.
April 15 at 3:00pm · Like · 2

Gordon Jones Vote NO on more gun control, criminals don't follow laws by definition. "Universal background check" will only apply to law abiding citizens, not criminals. 

Abolish the "Gun free zone" law, it only disarms law abiding people, not madmen intent on mayhem. All celebrities and politicians have armed guards and send their kids to schools with armed security, the average American deserves the same protection.
April 15 at 6:25pm · Like · 1

Jeff -Oliver Madly- Clark You'll never have a chance to even read it.

April 15 at 8:26pm · Like

Joe Hannis Harry Reid cannot be trusted. He has an agenda and will stop at nothing to achieve it. BEWARE.

April 16 at 12:14am · Like · 1

Tim Musa Thanks for letting us down with that douche McCain. I am in AZ and I vote.'I will be happy to vote against you next time around if you go down this path.

April 16 at 12:18am via mobile · Like · 2

Scott Shepherd Jeff Flake, you are a traitor to the American people. You swore to UPHOLD the unites states constitution, not destroy it. I will remember how you vote when it's my turn to vote.

April 16 at 12:46am via mobile · Like · 4

John Crook I am very disappointed in the fact that I supported you by voting for you. NOT one single notch should be made in the second amendment!! I feel that both you and John Mccain have betrayed us!!

April 16 at 12:57am via mobile · Like · 1

David Fischer another rhino...no more votes for you, you should jump the isle, hell the dems probably wont have you either.

April 16 at 1:38am · Like

Steve Eacret I did not vote for you to be another of the sheep. I will not make that mistake again...

April 16 at 2:04am via mobile · Like · 3

Jake Box Vote No on s649! Vote No on Manchin-Toomey! Vote No to Amnesty or a path to Citizenship! Secure the Border!

April 16 at 9:37am ·

Flake ended up voting for cloture but against the background-checks amendment.

Now, are phone calls and Facebook comments a random sample, and thus representative of constituent opinions? Obviously not. So why pay attention to them?

One possibility is that senators are too dumb to realize that these comments are unrepresentative. Here's Heitkamp:

When asked about polling that has consistently shown upwards of 90 percent of Americans supporting an expansion of background checks on gun purchasers, Heitkamp said she doubted that they really reflected public opinion....

Much more likely, though, senators do know that the comments are unrepresentative. But just as politicians care about money as a means to an end, they care about representing constituent opinion as a means to that same end: reelection.

From the standpoint of reelection, politicians have to worry not only about their constituents' preferences, but also about the intensity of those preferences.  A lot of people will have an opinion on issue A, but most of them will decide whether to vote for a politician based on issues A through H. A minority will be single-issue voters, whose entire voting decision will be based on issue A. On that issue pleasing those people is a lot more important than pleasing most people.

Calls and letters are a pretty good way of identifying those people-- if people are willing to go to that trouble, they may feel intensely enough about it to be single-issue voters. I doubt Heitkamp really thinks that all the polls are wrong, but it's pretty unseemly to say in public, "I don't care what my constituents want; I just care what the fanatical minority wants." Note that Heitkamp was just elected this past November and won't be up for reelection for another five and a half years, but she's already worried about it.

You might say, "There's nothing really wrong with this; legislation should reflect intensity of preferences. People who care a lot about an issue should carry more weight than people who don't much one way or the other." Indeed, this is the point of view of one of the best-known theories of political philosophy, utilitarianism.

But in applying that philosophy here there's a problem, one of the biggest problems with representative democracy. We could call it "threshold effects." There are costs to organizing and lobbying. So people with less at stake may choose not to bother, and so may not get represented at all. Their preferences may be not just weighted less, but ignored altogether. It's the same reason there's a milk-producers' lobby, but no milk-drinkers' lobby.

There is a silver lining, though, for believers in democracy. Apparently, you  don't need huge amounts of money to influence a senator.  If you can get a good phone list organized, you may be able to have a significant impact on policy. Of course, it helps if your phone list is made up of paranoid nut cases, but it's time for normal people to step up.

Note: Sometimes you guess wrong about how much the silent majority cares about an issue, as Jeff Flake has found out, to his cost.

I Did Not Know That, OB/GYN Edition

Following a link recently, I came across a New York Times article from over a year ago about the morning-after pill. I learned you have one chance in forty of getting pregnant after unprotected sex if you use the morning-after pill, compared to one chance in twenty without. Maybe everybody knew this already,  but once I did a little math, there were a couple of implications that I found startling:

• The morning-after pill only cuts your chances of becoming pregnant in half, which is not all that reassuring. Half of the people who would have gotten pregnant will get pregnant anyway. 

• Without the morning-after pill, you would need to have unprotected sex thirteen times to have a fifty percent chance of getting pregnant.

If I were the father of a teenage girl, I'd want her to know the first but not the second.

We're the Worst

A brief rant, consequent to the Senate's vote on the gun bill:

Drawing on their abiding ignorance of the rest of the world, Americans are always ready to believe that we're tops in everything. Now, I'm an American, so I think America is the greatest country in the world. The question is, could I convince someone who is not an American? That's not so easy.

Health? We're number 36 in life expectancy, even though we spend more than any other country (and have reduced disposable income as a result). Infrastructure? Number 23. Education? Number 17.

But what is more disturbing, it has occurred to me recently, is that among the industrialized democracies (a group in which I would not include Russia), the U.S. is probably the least democratic.

Just some questions, to which my answer is "not as far as I know":

• Is there any other country (among the industrialized democracies) where legislators spend more time raising money than legislating?

• Is there any other country where redistricting is done solely by partisan politicians?

• Is there any other country where elections are supervised by partisan politicians?

• Is there any other country where in one house of the legislature some citizens' votes count sixty times much as others?

• Is there any other country where lobbyists play as prominent a role as they do here?

• Is there any other country where some people have to stand in line for five or six hours to vote?

• Is there any other country whose legislature is as paralyzed as ours, as obsessed with trivia, as lacking in actual debate?

We invented the idea of sovereignty of the people. Now we think we're still ahead of everyone else on democracy. We're not. We're behind. Maybe that's why we're behind in so many other things.

Hip Fractures: How to Be a Social Scientist, Sort Of

I recently was reading a health column by Jane Brody in The New York Times about people taking calcium supplements to prevent osteoporosis. As seems to be invariably true in her columns, Brody here took an anti-supplement position. She has some evidence: supplements don't seem to do any good in healthy women, and may do some harm, though not all the studies agree.

Brody's conclusion: Eat more dairy products.

The one indisputable fact is that the safest and probably the most effective source of calcium for strong bones and overall health is diet, not supplements. But few American adults, and a decreasing proportion of children and teenagers, consume enough dairy foods to get the recommended intakes of this essential mineral.

But I had some doubts. I had, for some reason, recently read this article from a medical journal, arguing that hip fractures (taken as an index of osteoporosis) were more common in countries that consumed more animal protein and less vegetable protein. (There was a theory behind this, something about "endogenous acid production consequent to the metabolism of animal proteins.")

This article hadn't specifically looked at dairy consumption, but had included a list of the 33 countries studied, ordered by incidence of hip fractures. Among the countries with the highest incidence were some that I thought probably had high dairy consumption, such as the Scandinavian countries. (Little-known fact: the Vikings were big dairy farmers.) Also, some countries with a strong cultural aversion to dairy products, such as China, had very low rates of hip fracture.

So I decided to investigate further. I found a source on dairy consumption worldwide. If I were doing this for a journal article, I wouldn't cite  a source that cited the FAO, I would just cite the FAO.  Using data on the country level rather than the individual level is not ideal, but no individual-level data was available. (I've decided to grit my teeth and treat "data" as a singular noun.) There were a few countries for which I couldn't find dairy consumption data, so I ended up with 28.

I then created an Excel spreadsheet and made a scatterplot of the data. (For complicated reasons,* I eventually used the natural logs of all the data, which is easy to do in Excel. That's what the "ln" on the axes means. The results are similar without doing that.) If dairy consumption reduced hip fractures, you'd expect to see the points form a rough line that sloped downward from left to right. Instead, the line slopes upward, meaning that higher dairy consumption is associated with more hip fractures. The correlation between (log of) dairy consumption and hip fractures is a strong +.91. (The chart will get bigger if you click on it.)

This certainly casts doubt on the claim that drinking milk reduces osteoporosis. But we're not done yet. Here's the hard part about doing social science: correlation just shows that two things tend occur together. The actual relation between those two things may be masked by other things. 

In this case, when we look at the countries that have low incidence of hip fractures, we see places like Nigeria, China, and Thailand. Countries at the high end include Sweden, Norway, and Germany. Perhaps it's higher income that leads to osteoporosis, and since people in higher-income countries drink more milk, we see milk consumption and osteoporosis together.

Is there a plausible theory that would explain why higher income could result in more osteoporosis? Yes: it's well-known that weight-bearing exercise reduces the risk of osteoporosis, and it's probable that people in poorer countries do more physical labor than people in rich countries.

So let's get some data on per capita GDP in these countries. We'll go to the CIA to get the information. Sure enough, the correlation between between (log of) income and hip fractures is strongly positive at +0.87,  and the correlation between income and dairy consumption is also strong at at +0.84. So it is possible that what we're seeing as an effect of dairy consumption is just the effect of higher income.

To go further, we must cross the line that separates bad social science from normal social science, and measure the effect of each variable holding the other constant. To do that, we'll use multiple regression, which is available on Excel by activating the Data Analysis pack. Here are the results


Look at the column "Coefficients". (Ignore the row labeled "Intercept.") This measures the effect of that variable on hip fractures. Roughly, the coefficients indicate the percentage increase in hip fractures for a one percent increase in dairy consumption or GDP per capita (hip fractures increase by 0.84% and 0.73%,respectively). But the important point is that both effects are positive, meaning that an increase in either is associated with an increase in hip fractures holding the other constant.

Now go to the column "P-value". Here we are asking the question, "How likely is it that the effect of each variable is real and not just a random fluctuation in the numbers we happened to collect?" The effect is probably real if these numbers are small; conventionally we want them to be .05 or smaller, and if so we say they are "statistically significant." As you can see, when we take account of GDP per capita, dairy consumption is statistically very significant (that second  number in the "P-value" column is .000098, which is really small), even though GDP is also significant.

But is this plausible? Do we have an explanation for why drinking milk should be bad for you?

There's only one explanation I can think of: the claim, in the paper I linked to above, that animal protein causes osteoporosis. Dairy is chock-full of animal protein. Let's see if dairy has an effect when we take account of the consumption of animal and vegetable protein, using the figures from the paper.

As you can see, consumption of animal protein (AP g/day) has a statistically significant effect on incidence of hip fractures, as does per capita GDP. But when we take account of those things, dairy has no statistically discernible effect. We have to be careful in interpreting this, though. It doesn't necessarily mean that consumption of dairy has no effect on incidence of hip fractures, just that it has no independent effect. It probably means that consumption of dairy has an effect through its effect on the level of animal protein consumed. And the effect is a bad one.

So it doesn't seem that Brody is on strong ground in recommending consumption of dairy products to ward off osteoporosis.

One last point: You may ask, what does all this have to do with social science? This is epidemiology. That's not a social science, is it?

Whether it is or not, the problems are the same: dealing with non-identical humans, and having to reach conclusions based, usually, on non-experimental data. Of course, there are a lot of natural sciences where you usually can't do experiments, but that's a subject for another time.

*Heteroscedasticity.