Coyote Blog

I could easily make reported crime in this country skyrocket tomorrow with one simple change:  Imagine Congress passed a law, roughly equivalent to how things like school lunches are funded, that federal law enforcement dollars would flow to cities in proportion to the number of crimes they experience.  Suddenly, at the next reporting period, it would appear that crime has skyrocketed -- without any real change on the ground -- as cities scramble to harvest as much money as possible to report as much crime as possible.  The cities that choose not to submit data into the various FBI data bases today would suddenly be sending in full disclosures.  With time, cities might even get creative by tweaking the definition of crime -- maybe assaults would be expanded to killing someone's pet or to forcing someone to watch the View.

An observer in 2045 without much detailed knowledge of this dataset would write that there was an explosion in crime in 2025.  As they often do, those who are politically active would ascribe the cause to whatever they are already against -- perhaps they might blame it on Trump, or immigrants, or "defund the police", or racism or whatever.  They would argue and argue about the causes of what in truth was a just a change in how the data was collected and defined.

I have reported this phenomenon before.

• Critics of the US healthcare system often point out that our infant mortality is much higher than in Europe, but it turns out that the US and Europe use totally different data definitions so the numbers really are not comparable (TL;DR:  US counts all born alive babies as a birth while countries like Norway don't count very low birth weight babies as a real birth, and most of the mortality is in this category they do not count).
• Some years ago I called BS on a climate report that showed a huge rise in weather-related grid outages as a proxy for increasing severe weather.  I hypothesized it was a change in data definition and data gathering rather than an enormous change (in less than 2 years) in the weather.  Contact with the data owner proved me right
• Speaking of climate, one of the best examples of this is the rise in reported US tornado numbers since 1950, which was initially blamed on climate change (of course) but turns out to be almost entirely an artifact of better tornado detection equipment (eg doppler radars and storm chasers).
• This is a frequent problem in the cancer world, where better detection often is hard to untangle from changes in the underlying cancer rates

The latest example involves RFK Jr and the MAHA/vaccine set.  Via Flowing Data, which quotes the NY Times

Many large studies have come to the same conclusion: Vaccines don’t cause autism. The role, if any, of environmental toxins is still to be determined, but there is no known environmental factor that can explain the sudden jump in diagnoses. The changes we made to the diagnosis in the D.S.M.-IV can.

Why did autism-related diagnoses explode so far beyond what our task force had predicted? Two reasons. First, many school systems provide much more intensive services to children with the diagnosis of autism. While these services are extremely important for many children, whenever having a diagnosis carries a benefit, it will be overused. Second, overdiagnosis can happen whenever there’s a blurry line between normal behavior and disorder, or when symptoms overlap with other conditions. Classic severe autism had so tight a definition it was hard to confuse it with anything else; Asperger’s was easily confused with other mental disorders or with normal social avoidance and eccentricity. (We also, regrettably, named the condition after Hans Asperger, one of the first people to describe it, not realizing until later that he had collaborated with the Nazis.)

I am sure you have seen various rankings where the US falls way behind other western nations in terms of infant mortality.  This stat is jumped on by the left as justification for just how cold and heartless America is, and just how enlightened socialized medicine must be.  However, no one seems to bother to check the statistic itself (certainly the media is too incompetent to do so, particularly when it fits their narrative).  Statistics like this that are measured across nations are notoriously unreliable, as individual nations may have different definitions or methods for gathering the data.

And, in fact, this turns out to be the case with infant mortality, a fact I first reported here (related post on medical definitions driving national statistics here).  This week, Mark Perry links to an article further illuminating the issue:

The main
factors affecting early infant survival are birth weight and
prematurity. The way that these factors are reported "” and how such
babies are treated statistically "” tells a different story than what
the numbers reveal.  Low
birth weight infants are not counted against the "live birth"
statistics for many countries reporting low infant mortality rates.

According
to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, and Austria, a
premature baby weighing less than 500 kg [sic, likely means grams] is not considered a living
child.
But
in the U.S., such very low birth weight babies are considered live
births. The mortality rate of such babies "” considered "unsalvageable"
outside of the U.S. and therefore never alive "” is extraordinarily
high; up to 869 per 1,000 in the first month of life alone. This skews
U.S. infant mortality statistics.Norway
boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world. But when
the main determinant of mortality "” weight at birth "” is factored in,
Norway has no better survival rates than the United States....

In the United States, all infants who show signs of life at birth
(take a breath, move voluntarily, have a heartbeat) are considered
alive.

If a child in Hong Kong or Japan is born alive but dies within the
first 24 hours of birth, he or she is reported as a "miscarriage" and
does not affect the country's reported infant mortality rates....

Efforts to salvage these tiny babies reflect this classification. Since
2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g
(0.9 lbs.) were born in the United States.

Hmm, so in the US we actually try to save low-birthweight babies rather than label them unsalvageable.  Wow, we sure have a cold and heartless system here.  [disclosure:  My nephew was a very pre-mature, very low-birthweight baby who could have fit in the palm of your hand at birth and survived by the full application of American medical technology.  He is doing great today]