Fact-checkers: Talking crap in Holland v America

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/fact-checkers

by robdoherty2 • 14 years ago

65 47 14 years ago

To me, this is the absolutely key phrase in the entire article.

" Some question the usefulness of the economic models the CPB uses, which (like all economic models) have never successfully predicted what the economy will do several years down the road."

The problem with any sort of fact checking agency in regards to economics, while useful, is far from a magic crystal ball. Economics is a pretty vague sort of thing that straddles the line between between the humanities and hard science. As a former economics student, I can tell you I've met very brilliant people who have adamantly disagree with one another, yet both have excellent insights. It's tough to definitely say that x plan is better than y plan, because there are so many what if scenarios and assumptions to rely on. That being said, I find it's generally better to trust whoever has articulated their plan better. Simply the act of extrapolating out their assumptions means that while they may be wrong, we can look and see if they've taken into account the metrics that matter.

jules2• 14 years ago

At the very least, the CPB requires that the budget actually adds up mathematically, something that cannot be said of the things that politicians proclaim ("everyone will get tax breaks!! we will close the budget by removing inefficiencies!"). Even though the prediction is not perfect, a group of experts can still detect outright wrong and misleading policies. In the US if a politician says "the middle class will get tax breaks!" you don't know if that actually means anything since another take hike might totally negate a small tax break. Even though the CPB cannot predict the future accurately, it can verify such statements by adding up all the proposed tax hikes and breaks and premiums, and use its statistical model of which policies apply to the middle class population to come up with a number like "on average a middle class person will have €56.30 more per month".

For example, check out this graph, which breaks up the effects of the new government by income level: http://static3.volkskrant.nl/static/photo/2012/14/8/6/201211...

The idea that you would do better by listening to the words of politicians on TV, than a group of experts working on this full time who actually calculate the effects of all the proposed policies sounds preposterous to me.

jd• 14 years ago

One major point not addressed in the article is that the Dutch media aren't afraid to call out politicians on their lies. When a politician is caught in a gross lie the media turn up the heat until the politician publicly apologizes (or at the least ceases to spread misinformation). Politicians are forced to answer tough questions whenever they appear on TV and in addition they get cross-examined during debates. So the blatant dishonesty displayed in the US election won't work here.

So it's a strong cultural thing. There are no mainstream politicians here who hold scientifically untenable positions about evolution, global warming, vaccinations/autism, abortion, and so on. They'd get ridiculed, and rightly so.

This does not mean that rationality prevails in the Netherlands, unfortunately. Austerity measures are seen as the obviously responsible thing to do, even though economists don't agree. As a result we're looking at an economic recovery significantly worse than the one in the US. The GDP growth is projected at a meager 1.5% per year until 2017.

benpbenp• 14 years ago

Not meaning to open a "classic flamewar topic", but when you say,

scientifically untenable positions about evolution, global warming, vaccinations/autism, abortion

What is the scientifically untenable position about abortion? As far as I know there is no scientific controversy concerning abortion in general, but rather it is wholly a moral question.

Luc4• 14 years ago

> What is the scientifically untenable position about abortion?

The argument that can be summed up as 'life starts at conception'.

rauljara• 14 years ago

Well there was that whole Todd Akin saying that women's bodies have a way to shut down conception in the event of a "legitimate" rape thing. That's a case that was so extreme that Akin got punished in the polls for it. But it was actually not a rare point of view among a certain kind of evangelical Christian before Akin made the mistake of saying it on the radio. I suspect more people realize it is simply not true now, but it was accepted as fact by more than just Akin.

DanBC• 14 years ago

I also don't want to discuss the traditional flame-war aspects of this! Apologies if I have. I'm happy to edit this post to avoid that intensely but shallowly interesting stuff.

In the UK there are moves to reduce the time limits for abortion. At the moment it is possible for a woman to have an abortion at under 24 weeks.

The science comes in because politicians say that it's possible for infants to survive if they're born under 24 weeks, and that's one reason to reduce the limits.

The problems are:

- we do not have abortion on demand in the UK. There can be delays in getting the tests and etc. This is one reason why abortions are sometimes carried out over 12 weeks. Changing the law to allow abortion on demand under 12 weeks may increase the numbers of those abortions, but also decrease the numbers of abortions carried out over 12 weeks.

- very few abortions are carried out at over 20 weeks. It's likely to be distressing for the woman and her partner. It's almost certainly because the child has a condition incompatible with life. This isn't just a child who will live a short and miserable life of a few years; it is a child who will live at most a few days. Reducing the time limits will increase the number of women forced to carry this child to term, and to give birth to it, and to watch it die after a few hours or days.

- Survivability of infants born under 24 weeks is not great. Doctors spend a lot of time (and money) making big interventions to keep these children alive. Many doctors and nurses do not feel that these interventions are humane.

You're right that most of the decisions to be made about abortion are purely moral, but some people are making scientificky claims for their position. Those people need to be using correct information.

alan_cx• 14 years ago

Isn't there some Senator, who was trying to suggest that raped women could not get pregnant as the female body rejected rapist's sperm, and there for abortion for rape victims was not necessary? I'm sure that, if I have the assertion correct, is not scientifically correct. That would there for be a scientifically untenable position.

MartinCron2• 14 years ago

There's a lesson in persuasion here: Including a weak argument (scientifically untenable position about abortion) just serves to make your otherwise strong arguments (evolution, global warming, vaccinations) weaker by its inclusion.

nitid_name• 14 years ago

>Aug 31st 2012

Mvandenbergh• 14 years ago

"the actual budget of the Dutch government will look nothing like any of the proposals submitted by the parties"

Understatement of the century.

mynameishere• 14 years ago

So, why does the Dutch media care about the US presidential election to this extent? It would barely effect them, and the population (I'm guessing) is already firmly convinced of the evils of the Republican party, so...what's the point?

notlisted• 14 years ago

Some countries prefer an informed populace.

aerique• 14 years ago

What happens in the US still has a pretty big influence on the rest of the world and the Netherlands (NL) is very dependent on trade. Also NL has pretty close ties with the US historically.

Someone2• 14 years ago

Some/many (I wouldn't know) economists think the fiscal cliff, if handled incorrectly, will put the world into a recession.

So, the election may affect Dutch economy. Doubly so because the economy of the Netherlands is highly dependent on foreign trade. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...:

  - GDP    : $840 billion

  - Imports: $492 billion (5.9% from the USA)

  - Exports: $550 billion

(some economists joke that it isn't necessary to have a Dutch minister of economics, as there is no way local policy can compensate for the effect of foreign economies on that of the Netherlands)

w0utert4• 14 years ago

As a dutchman, I have to comment on this:

>> In the Dutch electoral system, this can't happen. Two months before the elections, every political party is expected to submit a detailed budget plan to a non-partisan agency called the Central Plan Bureau (CPB), which plays a role similar to the Congressional Budget Office in America. The CPB produces an analysis of the economic consequences of those budget plans. The effects are assessed in detail for 2013-2017, and there's also a prognosis for 2040 to discourage parties from larding up their budgets with short-term candy that leads to negative long-term consequences.

So, what happens instead, is that all parties write up their budget plan in a way that they expect will yield the most favorable CPB calculations for their intended audience. Contrary to most voters, they realize full well that most of their plans will never be realized, because the Dutch political systems is built around political coalitions, where multiple parties (typically 2, 3 or 4) have to make compromises. Almost inevitably, this means the sharp edges are taken off, and typically it's exactly the sharp edges that influence the CPB calculations the most.

>> The CPB's report came out Monday, and most parties had their strong and weak points. Of the two parties most likely to win the elections, the Liberals did well on deficit-cutting and long-term job creation but hiked income inequality and hurt household purchasing power; the Socialists did well on purchasing power and jobs in the short run but had low employment growth in the long run.

In the mean time, we had our elections, and the resulting coalition comprises the liberal party (VVD) and the socalist party (PvdA). Together, they negotiated their plans for the coming 4 years. And guess what: the net effect of these plans is almost the exact opposite of what the 2 parties have been advertising during election time.

The liberal party agreed to health care reforms that will actually decrease income inequality, and will have a huge impact on upper middle class incomes, up to 10% net income loss. They also agreed to cut tax benefits for home owners, which again mostly hurts upper middle class incomes. In exchange, the socialists agreed on labor market reforms that will cut unemployment benefits, and on housing market reforms that will increase the cost of living for people who rent, usually people with lower incomes.

The last few weeks there has been a raging debate here, because voters on both sides feel cheated. People who voted the liberal party feel particularly cheated, because the current plans hurt them disproportionally, while at the same time they will destroy jobs, reduce consumer spending, and hence are very bad for economic growth. The only rationale for these measurements is redistribution of wealth, which the socialists traded for reducing social security. All iof this goes against everything the liberal party stands for, never ever have the liberals even hinted that they would agree with such measures.

So tl;dr: Even though the unbiased analysis of the plans the different parties have reduces fact-free policies, it's far from a guarantee that after the elections, the winning parties will simply make a 180 degree turn and screw you over anyway.

Luc4• 14 years ago

How then, would you have the parties govern the country, if not by compromise? It's unpleasant, but unavoidable.

w0utert4• 14 years ago

There's a whole world between making compromises, and doing almost exactly the opposite of what you were promising during election time.

Anyway, my point wasn't that there's something wrong with our political system, or that compromises are bad or something. Just that the fact that it's harder for parties to outright lie about the effects of their intended plans, doesn't automatically make them trustworthy.

microtonal• 14 years ago

Small addition: PvdA (one of the two parties in the new government) is the labor party. The 'socialist party' spoken of in the article is the SP, which still did well in the polls when the article was written, fell out of favor.

w0utert4• 14 years ago

You're right, though projecting to US politics, I think you can safely say PvdA is socialist (they call themselves social democrats by the way). SP would be outright communist by US measures ;-)

dkarl• 14 years ago

Even though the unbiased analysis of the plans the different parties have reduces fact-free policies, it's far from a guarantee that after the elections, the winning parties will simply make a 180 degree turn and screw you over anyway.

Be careful what you wish for. There are only two ways for parties to avoid abandoning their campaign promises. One is for a single winning party to have complete control over government policy. The other is for minority parties to prevent the government from implementing any policy at all. In the U.S. we have politicians who promise to derail the government and leave it a smoking ruin rather than allow any part of the other party's platform to be implemented.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

I think there should be a "Meta-Pundit" site, which would be somewhat like a Wikipedia for pundits, but tailored towards specific kinds of relevant information. There would be a means of entering information on predictions in the public record and marking these right and wrong. The same could be done for facts. The social media aspects of this could be augmented with web crawlers that look for the same data.

danielweber• 14 years ago

You can have both people saying what sounds like opposite things in a debate, and they are both technically correct.

Fact-checkers are not infallible, either. It's usually someone who doesn't know the issue at all looking it up on Wikipedia or interviewing an "expert" with his own biases to get an answer.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/11/05/the-ten-worst-fa... is from a conservative viewpoint, so read it with a grain of salt, but it's should be enough to make you skeptical of the whole process.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

You can have both people saying what sounds like opposite things in a debate, and they are both technically correct.

Yes, but there are enough things that are incontrovertibly right and wrong, like a lot of pundit predictions of this last election. Even if this were not the case with anything whatsoever, there is clear value in being able to look up a pundit and see all of the predictions and statements in one place.

Fact-checkers are not infallible, either. It's usually someone who doesn't know the issue at all looking it up on Wikipedia or interviewing an "expert" with his own biases to get an answer.

So there would be 3 or 5 grades for predictions and factual/nonsense statements made by pundits.

MaysonL• 14 years ago

See: http://www.hamilton.edu/documents/An-Analysis-of-the-Accurac...

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

Exactly. This as a website would be great!

mattmanser• 14 years ago

I really don't get this twisted logic:

It's impossible for a neutral arbiter to preserve its public legitimacy when ruling on subjects of partisan dispute in an election if there are only two disputing parties. Neither side will accept the referee's judgments.

So it works in sports, but doesn't work in politics for some reason?

nollidge3• 14 years ago

I think the point is that if there were only two teams in the league it also wouldn't work in sports.

nollidge3• 14 years ago

As an American, this:

> there are currently ten parties represented in parliament, four to six of which are major contenders.

makes me insane with jealousy. What is it that enables this number of parties to remain viable? My first guess would be that the voting system is not first-past-the-post, but I can't find that info after a cursory Wikipedia search.

ryusage• 14 years ago

You're correct. Their voting system uses proportional representation, in which each party receives a number of seats proportional to the percentage of votes they received.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_Netherlands#Pol...

el_chapitan• 14 years ago

It may just be the "this is the way we've done it in America" in me talking. But I'd probably be OK if we at least had some sort of instant runoff voting, or something similar which didn't make the voter strategize between choosing a candidate that they most agree with and choosing between the lesser of two evils.

Someone2• 14 years ago

In addition, the Netherlands does not have an election threshold. A party that gets 1/150 of the votes gets one of the 150 seats in parliament.

That is different from, for example, Germany, where seats are proportionally distributed among parties that got at least 5% of the votes.

So, the theoretical maximum number of parties in parliament is 150 in the Nethelands, but 20 in Germany.

evgen• 14 years ago

The fact that this works in the Netherlands may have more to do with Dutch culture and a good synergy with their shared values than with the specifics of their electoral system. Contrast it with Israel to see the other extreme of proportional parliamentary representation...

duijf• 14 years ago

Your guess is correct. It is very common for us to have a coalition of three or more parties. Although the current coalition is one of two parties.

This was the result of so-called strategic voters. Left-wing voters people feared that the VVD (the liberals) would become the largest party and voted for the PvdA (labour party) en masse.

Interestingly this resulted in even more right wing voters voting for the VVD, instead of a smaller party. Right now we are stuck with two titans—that also happen to have opposing views.

Fortunately both parties were able to form a coalition. Albeit with the necessary financial consequences. The labour party let the VVD cut mercilessly on government expenses, although it pretty much decided who should get hit the most; the higher incomes.

mahyarm• 14 years ago

Australia is a combination of STV & instant-runoff, and it's still mostly a two party system. Canada is a FPTP westminster parliament with two major parties (Liberal & Conservatives) and two substantial minority parties (NDP & Bloc). It might just come down to culture.

nollidge3• 14 years ago

> It might just come down to culture.

And/or historical accident. Maybe it's like the appendix - not the result of any modern circumstance, but it's here to stay for the foreseeable future.

BasicFacts2• 14 years ago

Paul Ryan was and is the head of the House Budget committee, which under his leadership proposed a detailed budget that was passed in the US House of Representatives but failed in the Senate for both of the last two years. Romney said he supported the Ryan budget. Remarkably, no Democratic Senator has proposed or voted in favor of any budget whatsoever for the last 3.5 years.

So this "fact-check" seems to invert the truth--the Democrats have given no details about their plans, while the Republicans have been very specific about theirs, whether or not you agree with them.

MartinCron2• 14 years ago

That's a fascinating point that I hadn't looked at before. Although it doesn't completely let Romney off the hook for avoiding details, as he both embraced and distanced himself from the Ryan budget.

adamtaylor• 14 years ago

A federal budget does not include how you're going to raise the money to pay for it. The thing that Romney was vague about was which tax loopholes he was going to close to pay for his budget. No Democratic senator proposed a budget in the last 3.5 years because their President did that for them, as is customary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_budget_process).Also, only the House has "the power of the purse", i.e. the right to propose spending bills. And of course Democratic senators voted on budgets during the last 3.5 years. All spending bills have to pass the Senate. Here is the Senate roll call for one of the FY 2012 appropriations bills, which passed the Senate on Nov 1, 2011: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_c... . Note that most Democrats voted "yea", and most Republicans voted "nay". Also, the article in question was not a "fact-check". It was article about fact-checking.

BasicFacts2• 14 years ago

What I was referring to was the fact that no Democratic Senator has voted for or proposed a Budget Resolution for the past 3.5 years, which as your Wikipedia article reference says, is the normal procedure for establishing a budget after the House passes its Budget Resolution. The House and Senate budget resolutions are then normally reconciled through a negotiation process that has not happened because the Senate hasn't passed any such Budget Resolution.

So since September 2010, to keep the government functioning, Congress has passed a series of seven continuing resolutions. In their frustration at the unwillingness of the Democratic Senators to propose a budget resolution, the Republicans even brought President Obama's proposal up for a vote this last year, but it went down 0-99 in a rare show of bipartisanship. Admittedly a stunt, but the point is that Democrats are refusing to negotiate by ordinary procedures.

The Budget Process is clearly broken, and it's a serious problem for the economy and country. The non-partisan "No Labels" organization has echoed Independent former Senator Joe Lieberman in calling for a serious reform of the budget process.

Also, the blog article in question prominently attacked Rep. Ryan, and said the Romney-Ryan campaign did not have a budget plan. At least part of it was a typical partisan hit piece implying "facts" existed where they didn't.

Fact-checkers: Talking crap in Holland v America

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