Here Are a Few Things Lots of Liberals Believe That They Shouldn’t

What should I do to ring out the decade? I know! Let’s make people mad at me. With that in mind, here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of things that lots of liberals believe even though they shouldn’t.

  1. Head Start (and similar pre-K programs) raise student achievement. There’s evidence that they have positive effects on many things, which makes universal pre-K one of my favorite social programs. But their effect on long-term academic performance ranges from zero to small, depending on the study.
  2. American health care is expensive because of private insurance. Nope. It’s expensive because health care providers charge way more than they do anywhere else. This includes doctors, nurses, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, hospitals, and so forth. Insurance adds a little bit to that, but it’s nowhere near our biggest problem.
  3. We have a retirement crisis. There’s virtually no evidence that retirement is any worse today than it used to be. Ditto for future retirement. In fact, the over-65 demographic is doing better than any other age group. That said, Social Security for the bottom third of the income distribution has always been too stingy, and we ought to increase it.
  4. The black/white test score difference is all about test prep, biased tests, etc. At most, the best evidence suggests that things like test prep account for a small fraction of the black-white difference in test scores. This is important. The black-white gap in education is one of America’s biggest failures, and the only way to fix it is to acknowledge that it’s real, not to toss it off as merely a statistical artifact.
  5. The 1994 crime act was responsible for mass incarceration. Mass incarceration started in the mid-70s, and by the mid-90s prison space had more than quadrupled. The 1994 crime act had only a tiny effect on prison building, and by 1998 the total number of prisoners had already begun to decline. For what it’s worth, black incarceration rates have also dropped substantially over the past couple of decades.
  6. Charter schools don’t work. Some of them work, some of them don’t. Instead of pretending that they’re all failures, we should be putting our energy into figuring out why the good ones work and how we can learn from them.

I would now like some good conservative to create a similar list for his colleagues. Obviously you can start with the whole business of tax cuts supercharging the economy, but I want half a dozen more beyond that.

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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