Apparently Lieawatha is a fake scholar, too.
Considering what a heroine Fauxcahontas is (or at least was) to the loony left, this gets more hilarious by the day.
[Update late morning]
Thoughts on Elizabeth Warren, the scholar, from Megan McArdle (who is about to move from The Atlantic to Newsweek — good for Newsweek, hopefully not bad for her):
It matters that we get this stuff right. I am among the majority who would like to see bankruptcies reduced in this country, and we’re not going to be very effective at that if we run around thinking we can cure 2/3 of them by putting a national health care system in place, when in reality a third or less have any strong causal relationship with medical bills. Obviously, this was also held out as an argument for PPACA, making an implicit promise to the American people which I believe to be false.
But it also matters because a large part of Warren’s prominence comes from the fact that she’s an academic. If she came from . . . well, the sort of think tank that publishes this sort of advocacy science . . . she would have considerably less glamor, and power.
And perhaps it mattes most of all because this woman is now under consideration to head a powerful new agency. If this is how she evaluates data, then isn’t that going to hamper her in making good policy? If we’re going to have a consumer financial protection agency, I want one that has a keen eye to the empirical evidence on consumer welfare — not one that makes progressives most happy by reinforcing their prior beliefs.
Well, we know what they want.
That’s ok because the standard they follow is fake but accurate. They don’t need no stinking facts.
Megan McArdle at The Atlantic also has serious issues with Lieawatha’s work.
But while I found the thesis compelling, there were some problems with the book. The first is that Warren simply fails to grapple with what her thesis suggests about the net benefits of the two-earner family. Admittedly, I don’t quite know what to say either, but at least I can acknowledge that it’s a pretty powerful problem for the current family model; Warren kind of waves her hands and mumbles about social programs and more supportive work environments. There is no possible solution outside of a more left-wing government.
But the deeper problem is that 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.
Much, much more in the linked article, and this is just part 1. Part 2 will cover Warren’s public life.