Playing Fast and Loose With the Economic Facts

Over the past few years, concerns about fake news have taken center stage in news outlets across the country. But as technology allows audiences to further segment and ideological echo chambers have become the norm, less attention has been devoted to the increasingly prolific genre of merely misleading news.

Complaints about ideological bias will always be with us, but there has been a noticeable increase in misleading stories predicting the coming doom of the American economy or the dismal state of the average American. Predictably, radical ideas are now being floated in response to this seemingly depressing state of affairs, but several of the most popular tropes are based on findings that are misleading at best — and outright false at worst.

Take the issue of extreme poverty. The 2015 book “$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” from Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, garnered sensational headlines as readers learned that the number of American households living on $2 per day or less had reached one and a half million, including nearly three million children. Despite some criticism, the book was selected as a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year,” while the figure was touted by Democratic socialist Bernie Sanderson the campaign trail, and the finding cemented its status as a fact in much of the public discourse.

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