Attack of the monetarist vaccine clowns

A pretty good piece comparing the MMR scare with the Reinhart-Rogoff paper. I think there are a couple of interesting points that don’t make the cut, though.

First of all, there’s the power of plot and story, tragedy and comedy.

Anyone, after all, can have an Excel fart, and I doubt you’ll find many people in the biological sciences who haven’t had an embarrassing lab cockup, especially with something as ticklish as PCR analysis 10 years ago.

But Reinhart & Rogoff’s pratfall seems to have carried the idea that there was something wrong with their work, and with austerity economics more generally, far beyond the limits of economics and far beyond what any more considered criticism could achieve. Holtz-Eakin decides he never liked it anyway. US Democratic pols, the ultimate weathervanes, turn Keynesian. It’s a pratfall, a bit of physical comedy, after all. Further, it speaks to the myth of the emperor’s new clothes. The fact it was discovered by an unheralded student and popularised by a relatively obscure blogger only lends punch to this.

Interestingly, the pratfall seems to legitimise more serious criticism, far from distracting anyone from it, like one of those anti-tank shells with two charges, one to trigger the reactive defences, one to penetrate the armour plate. In the same way, the steel scab ripped off the inside of the tank hurtles around inside doing more damage. Why did R&R leave out some of the data points? Why was the weighting scheme so odd? Why didn’t they make any effort to test for reverse causality? Why did they take so long to let anyone else replicate the result? Why was it a mere technical suggestion now, when they repeatedly claimed it was evidence for action this day in the political arena? Why did they avoid ever letting it near a peer-reviewed journal?

Probably the fart will be what is remembered in 10 years’ time, but that’s more than enough.

The MMR scare spread because it engaged a similar dramatic force, which was tragedy. And all that could stop it was farce. It wasn’t Blairite emoting and spin – God knows there was plenty of that to go around – and it sure as hell wasn’t rational reassurance. It’s far better known that Wakefield was enormously conflicted financially, than that he took over his PCR experiment, exquisitely sensitive to contamination, from a student who knew how to do it properly and who never actually detected measles viruses in the samples, and astonishingly enough got the result he was after.

Another point is pretty simple: reverse causality makes fools of better people than you or I, let alone economists. Both Wakefield and R&R were trying to explain phenomena that occur close together in time, and convinced themselves that this implied causality.

And of course, simple patterns fool us all. The idea that triple vaccination was “too much” had that big simple quality of conviction, as well as seeming to resolve the tragedy. Similarly, the idea of individual thrift, that endlessly cited credit card, was good to think with as part of an economic drama in which we all got over the foolish years of hyper-consumerism – perhaps the myth here is the prodigal son?

That said, the Tories have pratfallen enough that the news takes on a faintly sick and pornographic tone. It’s like the oddly huge misshapen kid given to bizarre and violent emotional meltdowns running up to kick the ball…but for some bizarre reason he’s trying to balance a bucket of jelly on his head…while carrying a rusty tentpeg…running Internet Explorer 6…and already sobbing with rage. Nothing good can happen, and it feels unfair to watch, but you fear to look away in case some combination of elbow, peg, ball, IE6, and jelly comes your way, but surely you should check your privilege, and also you don’t want to get stuck with the clean-up…but you can’t ever look away.

The only people who get away with pratfalls are clowns, and they get away with everything.