Sometimes, you have to draw the conclusions out loud.
We need to talk about the fact that Elizabeth Warren isn’t actually very smart.
I’m a great believer in the “show, don’t tell” school of political commentary, and I try to discipline myself against the cheap temptation to insult political opponents instead of taking on their arguments. Liberals and progressives have a particular addiction to insisting that all of their opponents are dumb. But sometimes, you have to draw the conclusions out loud. This week’s flap over Warren’s comments on Israel and Gaza is the latest proof of something that’s been clear for quite some time: Warren isn’t a smart person with wrong ideas; she’s consistently incapable of logical reasoning.
That’s not her image, of course. Warren was an Ivy League law professor (she taught at UPenn and Harvard), carries herself like a teacher, and brands herself as the person who always “has a plan for that.” If you asked a lot of Democratic voters which current officeholder was the intellectual leader of their party, I suspect Warren would be the top vote-getter.
Warren may be glib, but her arguments are routinely shot through with transparent logical fallacies. This goes back to how she first made her national reputation, with academic research claiming that medical debts were a major driver of bankruptcy because lots of people who filed for bankruptcy had medical debts. Her original 2005 paper claimed that “more than 40 percent of all bankruptcies in America were a result of medical problems.” In 2009, with the Obamacare debate ramping up, Warren and her co-authors “updated that research with an even more startling number: Medical bills were responsible for more than 62 percent of all American bankruptcies.”
This is a “wet streets cause rain” conclusion. First, anybody who has paid bills knows that health-care bills tend to come in slowly, are not collected very aggressively, and don’t rack up interest and late fees. So, people who are drowning in less forgiving credit-card, mortgage, and student-loan debt are highly likely to make medical bills their lowest repayment priority. Second, people often enter bankruptcy when they lose income they need to pay their bills — and that can happen after a major health crisis, car accident, substance abuse problem, or other event that also causes medical bills, even if the medical bills themselves aren’t the source of the problem. In fact, that second problem was baked into the study’s methods:
From the beginning many economists questioned the paper’s approach, which relied on surveys of nearly 1,800 Americans who had declared bankruptcy in 2001 and interviews with about half of them on their views about the causes of their financial woes after the fact. The researchers counted a bankruptcy as due to injury or illness if a person had a medical debt of more than $1,000; said illness or injury caused a bankruptcy; missed more than two weeks of work because of illness; or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills.
Megan McArdle has been calling out this study for years. She noted in 2009: “It seems to disagree with every other study I’ve ever read. . . . It is not just wrong, but actively, aggressively wrong. . . . Could it really be true that most people catapaulted [sic] into a financial crisis by their medical bills don’t even notice that health care expenses are their main problem? . . . My radar is further engaged by the fact that they’re implying a really astonishing surge in medical-bill-driven bankruptcies, in a healthcare environment that just didn’t change all that massively” compared with 1981, when the study says that only 8 percent of bankruptcies were caused by medical debts. Some of this is deliberate deception, of course: McArdle noted that “going by the numbers Warren et. al. provide, medical bankruptcies actually fell by almost 220,000 between 2001 and 2007, a fact that they not only fail to mention, but deliberately obscure.”
A 2018 study critical of Warren’s approach demolished it:
Carlos Dobkin, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender and Matthew J. Notowidigdo did what’s called an “event study.” Instead of looking at bankruptcies to see how many involved medical bills, they started with the illness, and asked how much more likely people were to declare bankruptcy after they got sick. That’s a much better way to tease out causation than asking whether someone who just went through a financially ruinous divorce also owed his or her dermatologist thousands of dollars. The answer they came up with will surprise even critics of Warren et al.: The fraction of bankruptcies caused by medical events is just 4 percent. And even among those bankruptcies, it seems that medical bills may be less of a problem than the other things associated with an illness, such as lost labor income.
The Warren study’s methods made glaring logical errors: “By limiting the sample to those who had already filed for bankruptcy, the study overstated the incidence of medical debt. To truly establish causation, the study sample should have, at the very least, included a ‘control’ group of medical debtors who did not file for bankruptcy.” The original study also “used an overly broad definition of ‘medical filers,’ which included people with any sort of addiction or uncontrolled gambling problems.”
Writing on the controversy, Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times had no trouble finding distinguished scholars who thought Warren and her co-authors had just done shoddy work: Neale Mahoney, a health-care economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said that Warren and her co-authors “wrote the paper in a way that was deliberately provocative, and they got out ahead of their skis.” Craig Garthwaite, a health-care economist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, told Sanger-Katz: “There are no reputable economists who I deal with who believe the number in the paper or the methods in the paper are appropriate in trying to get at the true underlying question.” Amy Finkelstein, a professor at MIT and one of the authors of the 2018 study, “said the Warren paper’s approach is akin to trying to find out how to be successful in business by interviewing big technology entrepreneurs about how they got their start.” Moreover: “Such a study, she said, might lead to the conclusion that you need to drop out of college to succeed, even though most college dropouts do not become billionaires.”
Before her election to the Senate, Warren responded to critical academics by accusing them of being paid shills for the insurance industry; by 2018, safely ensconced in office and with the legislative goal of Obamacare attained, she no longer bothered mounting much of a defense.
McArdle published a longer critique of Warren’s scholarship in the Atlantic in 2010. Regarding Warren’s book The Two-Income Trap, for example, “some of her evidence doesn’t really support her thesis, and can be made to appear to support her thesis only by making some very weird choices about what metrics to use. . . . These are obvious issues she should have dealt with, . . . but they considerably weaken her thesis, and she doesn’t have a good answer for them. That’s a pattern I see over and over in her work.” In a follow-up on that book, McArdle asked, “Does it matter if we have a regulator who can use data consistently? . . . I don’t know which is worse: the notion that Elizabeth Warren understood what she was doing, or the notion that she didn’t.”
This brings us to the present controversy: Warren, discussing claims before the International Court of Justice that Israel has engaged in “genocide” in Gaza, told a crowd at the Islamic Center of Boston, “If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so.” As Noah Rothman observed, Warren’s team unconvincingly tried to walk this back by claiming that Warren was “not sharing her views on whether genocide is occurring in Gaza” but simply predicting the path of the ICJ’s legal process (I say unconvincingly not only because her statement was a declarative and definitive assertion that the court has “ample evidence” to support the charge but also because it’s consistent with how Warren has talked about the Gaza war). She did so when even Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged under oath this week that “we don’t have any evidence of genocide.”
Like some of her shoddy academic work or her hypocrisy, deceit, and baseless hysteria in political debates or her biographical whoppers, one could ascribe this simply to dishonesty and political pandering. But first of all, this is all she does. Her economic arguments and analogies are almost invariably things that a person of modest intellect and familiarity with the world can see right through, like her thinking there’s a monopoly on sandwich shops or straining to compare Big Tech to baseball umpires. Her math is no better. Nor is her legal analysis, such as her claim that, in the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court justices “forced their unpopular agenda on the rest of America” by . . . letting Americans vote on the abortion issue.
The Gaza thing, however, is not just something so easily rebutted and so incautious about the details that it was politically stupid to say. It also reflects an inability to think. Words have meanings, and “genocide” has an easy one to grasp: the purposeful destruction of an entire people. Anybody who occasionally pays attention to the Gaza war and the Israeli military tradition knows that this is not at all what Israel is attempting to do, even if the consequences of the war for Gazan civilians may be severe enough that people of good faith can condemn them. The war is aimed at a clear and distinct goal: to destroy Hamas, not Gaza — specifically, to destroy Hamas’s military and break its governing hold on Gaza. Moreover, Israel is doing so because Hamas is itself an openly genocidal organization devoted to destroying the world’s only Jewish state. The failure to grapple with any of this is a symptom of one’s brain being shut off.
If Warren was simply a misguided but brilliant academic, she would not persistently put herself in the position of defending things that any thinking person can see right through, nor do so with a complete and evident lack of self-awareness. Occam’s razor tells us that the simplest explanation for why she constantly says things that reflect an inability to detect and avoid logical fallacies is that she’s unable to do so.