CNN Tonight aired a report this evening titled "Government Fat Cats." It’s a great case study of the faulty social-science inference and misleading use of statistics that is endemic to the American press.
Here's the segment. I transcribed the key portions in the body of my argument.
The report gets off to a very bad start:
Unemployment is at 10 percent in this country with more than 15 million Americans out of work, most of them in the private sector.
Huh? If someone is out of work, then by definition they aren’t in any sector. If the report were about layoffs, then the sectors would be relevant. But as articulated, the statement is nonsense.
The report proceeds to its primary thesis:
Government workers’ salaries are skyrocketing.
That’s a provocative claim – let’s see if they can back it up.
The next segment uses a struggling "Anytown, USA" as a contrast to the fat-cat federal government. The unintentional irony, though, is that they used Fredericksburg, VA – a city at the edge of the Washington metro area, a large proportion of whose citizens commute to the District and its suburbs for federal jobs. Anyhow. . .
Congress just boosted the base budget for some of its federal agencies by 12 percent.
This is the first of several numbers they throw at us with no context. The government boosted the budget for "some" agencies by 12%? How many? Which ones? Why? Absent some semblance of context, that number is literally meaningless.
And according to data from the Office of Personnel Management, the number of federal workers now earning six-figure salaries went up as the economy went down. In 2009 nearly 20 percent of the federal workforce earned 100,000 dollars or more, that’s up from 14 percent in 2007.
Well, ok. That’s an interesting figure; and they may be on to something. But again, we don’t know why. Perhaps the newest federal jobs require a higher average educational attainment than existing ones. Or perhaps federal jobs that have been eliminated or outsourced over that period are disproportionately lower-skilled. We simply don’t know from the report. Also, telling us what percent are over an arbitrary threshold tells us nothing about the magnitude of the supposed increase.
The next segment includes a smug, smirking Republican House member reacting with "shock, shock" to the high-paid federal workforce. Yes, that’s correct – one of the highest-paid federal employees is complaining about federal salaries. Though there’s nothing factually suspect about it, Republican hypocrisy always merits a mention.
The federal managers association represents government executives and supervisors. The group declined an interview with CNN, but a spokesperson said those 100,000 dollar-plus salaries are actually on the low end. That in the private sector the same workers who include lawyers, doctors, and PhD holders could make 26 percent more.
This is one of those cases in which the truth is buried in a "he said, she said" exchange. The spokesperson correctly pinpointed the inferential error in comparing federal salaries to private sector jobs. To be valid, any such comparison must control for other factors that affect salaries: skill level, educational attainment, competition for qualified applicants, etc. But to give this fact more than a passing mention would render the reporter’s central thesis invalid. So instead, we get the "but". . .
But other figures indicate the private sector just isn’t what it used to be. Today’s average salary in America is just about 40,000 dollars, while the average federal worker is making more than 70,000 dollars.
Ugh. Again, such figures are meaningless without controlling for education levels and so on. As the industry spokesperson noted, a high proportion of federal jobs require advanced degrees, and fight to recruit among a subset of the workforce that can generally make more money in the private sector.
So, in summary, CNN built a story around a preconceived thesis, and used faulty inference and misleading statistics to confirm the thesis. I know -- I'm as surprised as you are.