The results are in, and are being touted by the usual purveyors of "news":
The United States and Britain ranked at the bottom of a U.N. survey of child welfare in 21 wealthy countries that assessed everything from infant mortality to whether children ate dinner with their parents or were bullied at school.
...
One of the study's researchers, Jonathan Bradshaw, said children fared worse in the U.S. and Britain -- despite high overall levels of national wealth -- because of greater economic inequality and poor levels of public support for families.
''What they have in common are very high levels of inequality, very high levels of child poverty, which is also associated with inequality, and in rather different ways poorly developed services to families with children,'' said Bradshaw, a professor of social policy at the University of York in Britain.
A ShrinkWrapped reader sent me a challenging e-mail:
Why are those narcissistic European nations doing a better job of raising their kids? Maybe laissez-faire capitalism isn't the answer?
I will leave aside the question of whether or not the United States, and presumably England which fared even worse in the report, actually practices laissez-faire capitalism, though the Libertarians I know might take issue wit the characterization. However, such a provocative story deserves closer analysis, and I decided to down load the UNICEF report on Child Poverty in Perspective and see what I could learn. Not surprising for a UNICEF report, the intentions are admirable:
The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.
Unfortunately, I only got to the first section on Material Well-Being before I realized the data might have some problems. After some discussion of the risks imposed on a child by falling under the poverty line, the report describes how it determined the child's material well-being:
Relative income poverty
Child poverty can be measured in an absolute sense – the lack of some fixed minimum package of goods and services. Or it can be measured in a relative sense – falling behind, by more than a certain degree, from the average standard of living of the society in which one lives. The European Union offered its definition of poverty in 1984: "the poor are those whose resources (material, cultural, and social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life in the Member States in which they live". For practical and statistical purposes, this has usually meant drawing national poverty lines at a certain percentage of national median income.
....
Critics have argued that relative poverty is not ‘real’ poverty, pointing out that many of those who fall below relative poverty lines enjoy a standard of living higher than at any time in the past or than most of the world’s children in the present. But this fails to acknowledge that in today’s OECD nations the cutting edge of poverty is the contrast, daily perceived, between the lives of the poor and the lives of those around them. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Nonetheless an international comparison based on a poverty line drawn at 50% of the median national income presents only a partial picture in that it makes no allowance for differences in national wealth. It shows, for example, that the child poverty rate in the United States is higher than in Hungary, but fails to show that 50% of median income (for a couple with two children) is approximately $7,000 in Hungary and $24,000 in the United States. The fact that a smaller percentage of children are growing up poor in the Czech Republic than in France, or in Poland than in Italy, does not mean that Czech or Polish children are more affluent but that their countries have a more equal distribution of income. In other words Figure 1.1 tells us much about inequality and exclusion but little about absolute material deprivation. [Emphasis mine-SW]
I am afraid I stopped reading at this point. The authors essentially admit that their measure of material well-being has almost nothing to do with actual deprivation but is almost directly related to their imagined sense of a child's envy of those who have more than he or she does. If I live in a wealthy area but my children have to drive a Honda while their friends are driving BMWs, presumably my children are suffering. (Well, actually, on occasion they have made the claim that they are deprived, but they have received little sympathy from Mrs. SW or me; luckily they haven't thought to call Child Welfare or the UN bureaucrats.)
I have written elsewhere that envy and managing envy are critical aspects of maintaining stability in tribal settings and the modern day derivative of tribal settings, collectivism. I am sure the UNICEF study has many commendable points to be made, but I fear the authors unrecognized bias against competitive systems (capitalism) that still have not been neutered into assured equality of outcome, has already hopelessly contaminated the report.
It would be nice if the methodological short comings of the study were part of every news report of their findings, but wishing the MSM would do their jobs is a misallocation of resources. This study will surely find its way into one of the Democratic candidates platform; when it does, it might be interesting to ask if the candidate has actually read the study.
[Not too long ago I wrote a post about the Psychology Today article depicting Conservatives as motivated by fear, being more rigid, etc. The Sanity Squad discussed the article as well. That study relied heavily on a Block and Block study, “Nursery School Personality and Political Orientation Two Decades Later”. The Iron Shrink has posted an excellent deconstruction of the Block and Block study which is well worth perusal for an examination of unconscious bias, up close and personal. The Iron Shrink writes:
Last month, I examined one of the studies embraced in the current Psychology Today article, “The Ideological Animal” (Dixit, 2007). That study asserted that conservatives, among numerous other deficits, are lower in openness to experience and integrative complexity than liberals, and that people choose conservatism because it serves to reduce their inherent fear and anxiety (Jost, et al., 2003). The poor dears.
As I demonstrated in some detail, constructing a study that debases one’s ideological opponents so thoroughly requires a good measure of abhorrent research methodology. It also requires a body of equally fallacious and substandard literature from which to draw. That literature has been growing for some time now, with no signs of stopping.
Go now and read his post to learn How to Spot a Broken Study: The Baby Conservative Project.]
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