More Grist for Benj's Mill IV

Leiter creams David Bernstein's reasons for rejecting Leiter's claim that the stats show the average person is better-off---will live longer, is less likely to have children die at birth, less likely to have them killed in their youth, less likely to be poor, more likely to be highly literate, etc.-- in the social democratic nations than in the United States. Bernstein's off-point, fact-impaired and persistently fallacious reasoning is a nice case study in the right's being less reliable than the left. One of Bernstein's "arguments" is that the stats are unreliable (as Leiter says: "when all else fails, deny the facts!"):

[Bernstein] says, bizarrely, that "infant morality is measured differently in the U.S. than in Europe" (in the U.S., they count all dead babies, while in Europe they only count the ones who are really, really dead?). I have no idea what Bernstein is talking about.

Bernstein also cites Tom Smith's claim that the comparative poverty statistics are unreliable. The considerations for Smith's claim are, as Leiter shows, irrelevant to the question at issue. But the real response to skepticism about the stats is as follows:

But let's put this challenge the other way around: can Bernstein or Smith or someone else on the right produce credible data showing that the U.S. fares better than the social democratic nations on measures of per capita well-being? There are various ways to measure poverty, and every way I've seen over the last 20 years gets the same result: poverty is worse in the U.S. than in Canada or France or Germany. Does anyone, other than Rush Limbaugh and his acolytes, really not know this?

In a sense this is an odd debate, and only partly because only one side has adduced pertinent evidence. It is odd because, on the terms set by Smith in his original posting (the comparative well-being of the average or randomly chosen person), the right can't even pretend to win--except by following the Bernstein route of no facts, no pertinent evidence, and vague and not even prima facie plausible speculations. The best bet for my friends on the right is to admit the facts, and point to a different set of facts: to wit, that in a reactionary country like the U.S., it is possible for an individual to accumulate greater wealth--at the expense, of course, of per capita well-being. This, as best I can tell from the evidence, is true. But it is a tougher sell to the public at large if one is candid about the probabilities, of course.