Why democratic society is ‘cruel’ to some of its members: Aristocratic society makes people believe their circumstances are inherited destiny and so cannot be helped. But democratic societies encourage people to believe that their destinies depend on their own actions. For some—those who feel themselves to be inferior in some important way—this latter is a […]

In 2016, the HBO comedian and political commentator John Oliver produced a terrific segment on how TV pundits routinely cite garbage science. After showing clips of newscasters and commentators making absurd claims such as, "A new study showing that drinking a glass of red wine is just as good as spending an hour at the gym," and The Today Show's Al Roker commenting, "You find the study that sounds best to you, and you go with it," Oliver commented, "No! No, no, no, no, no, no, no! You don't just get to cherry-pick the parts that justify what you were going to do anyway."

Then Oliver added a useful rule: "If they are going to keep saying 'a study says,' they should have to provide sourcing and context or not mention it at all." (Though the segment specifically targeted the misuse of "scientific" studies, all the same principles apply to the social sciences.)

What's so noteworthy about that 2016 segment is that in his other monologues, on issues ranging from SWAT teams to homelessness, Oliver has routinely ignored the principles he laid out. In his overly simplistic takes on complex policy issues (often designed to dunk on his ideological opponents for comedic effect), he often fails to provide appropriate context and appears to be guilty of choosing research "that sounds best," as Roker put it, or at least that supports whatever point he's determined to make.

Oliver is one of America's most influential pundits, so he should be held to the highest of journalistic standards. And Last Week Tonight is indeed more diligent than many TV news programs. The show employs researchers who interview the authors of the studies it cites. Oliver is a comic, not an academic, so we can excuse him for not posting footnotes, and he routinely cites his sources on screen. When we emailed the show's producers to point out problems with their research, to their credit, they sent back a detailed response that we'll quote from in this article. (In a few cases, they pointed to Reason articles using some of the same studies, albeit with full citations and more context. In cases in which their criticisms were correct, we've annotated the original articles.)

Many of the show's researchers are former reporters and editors who abide by journalistic standards. Nevertheless, the show has a long track record of citing social science findings without the appropriate context, massaging them to support whatever point Oliver is trying to make.

 

Rent

In his excellent 2016 segment on scientific studies, Oliver noted: "There is a lot of bullshit currently masquerading as science. Not all scientific studies are equal. Some may appear in less-than-legitimate scientific journals, and others may be subtly biased because of scientists feeling pressured to come up with eye-catching positive results."

Cut to a 2022 segment titled "Rent," and we find Oliver citing a study that his wiser self would have characterized as "bullshit."

"Right now, there is not a single county in the U.S. where a worker earning minimum wage can afford a modest two-bedroom rental home," he said. He was citing a study designed to produce an "eye-catching" result. It was published not by a reputable journal, but by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group that lobbies for government spending on housing and rent subsidies, including expanding the National Housing Trust Fund and increasing federal appropriations to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The biases are not particularly subtle. Why would a minimum-wage worker need a two-bedroom home? In the study, "can afford" doesn't mean "have enough money to buy the cheapest available," as most English speakers would interpret it. The authors use it to mean renting a two-bedroom home at the 40th percentile price point of the local market (that is, a little cheaper than the median unit), using no more than 30 percent of their income, excluding government benefits, pensions, or other nonearned support.

Oliver also didn't mention who these minimum-wage workers are. In 2025, according to the Current Population Survey, a third of hourly workers paid the federal minimum or less lived in a parent's or grandparent's home, a fifth were married and living with a spouse, and only one in eight lived alone.

When we asked the show's producers why they failed to disclose that their source was an advocacy group seeking government funds, they pointed to the onscreen credit and responded: "We trust our viewers' intelligence enough to think they might be able to read it and conclude that the National Low Income Housing Coalition is interested in building low-income housing, nationwide, possibly even as part of a coalition."

I don't share their confidence that most viewers can read the onscreen source line and tell from the organization's name whether it's an advocacy group. There's a double standard here: When Oliver doesn't like what a study says, he's not content to just trust his viewers; he makes it explicit, as he did with the "ethanol lobbying groups" mentioned above.

Oliver's producers wrote us: "When we rely on studies from advocacy groups, we look at the underlying data and speak to researchers to better understand it; we discard many studies as a result."

This one belonged in the trash.

 

Sports Betting

In a 2025 segment, Oliver cited an eye-catching statistic about how sports betting was driving a spike in bankruptcies. "Unsurprisingly, the rise of online sports betting has been found to correlate with a rise in gambling harms, with one study showing that in states that allowed it, there was a 28 percent increase in bankruptcies, translating to about 100,000 extra bankruptcies a year."

I'll give Oliver credit for saying "correlate with" rather than "cause," but the rest of that sentence ("in states that allowed it, there was a 28 percent increase") implies direct causality.

The bigger problem is that the "100,000" figure is clearly wrong. When I contacted the study's authors, they told me they don't know where that figure came from, and it doesn't appear anywhere in the study. Last Week Tonight's producers told us they pulled it from a Business Insider article, but in the video, Oliver said it came from the study.

If Oliver's researchers had done the same calculation as the authors, multiplying the per-person effect by the at-risk population, they'd have found about 30,000 extra bankruptcies a year, not 100,000, and a 6 percent to 7.5 percent increase, not 28 percent.

Oliver also left out important context: He was citing an unpublished working paper. The peer-reviewed version appeared after the Last Week Tonight segment aired, and it included substantive changes. Working papers from credible researchers, like this one, are valuable, but Oliver should have made it clear he was citing a preliminary draft circulated to other researchers for comment, not a published study.

 

Homelessness

In 2021, Oliver did a segment making a case for a policy called "Housing First," which includes placing more homeless people in permanent supportive housing. The problem is that building and maintaining these units is expensive, so permanent supportive housing doesn't scale easily. Oliver set out to dismiss that objection by citing research showing the alternative is even more costly.

"One study in Florida," Oliver said, "found that, just between money spent on incarceration and emergency medical treatment, their communities and local governments had spent an average of just over $31,000 per person per year, when the estimated cost of providing them with permanent supportive housing would have only been around $10,000 per year."

The Florida study's finding was an outlier. The Central Florida Commission on Homelessness commissioned it, and Housing First advocates promoted it because it produced the headline they wanted. I give Oliver credit for noting that the study "tracked a decade's worth of spending on just 107 chronically homeless people," but he left out additional context.

In 2018, a committee convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine evaluated permanent supportive housing. It concluded that there is "no substantial evidence that [it] contributes to improved health outcomes" and "insufficient evidence" that it's cost-effective.

Studies exist on both sides of this issue, and we can debate whether permanent supportive housing is more cost-effective than the alternative, but Oliver cited one study and implied it was conclusive.

Oliver also neglected to mention that the paper was written by a consulting firm led by a supportive-housing advocate, though if you looked closely, you could see the organization's name on the screen as he delivered his monologue.

 

Ethanol

Oliver and I agree that the federal government shouldn't be subsidizing ethanol. But in a 2024 segment titled "Corn," Oliver pointed to a study claiming that ethanol is more harmful to the environment than gasoline and implied that only self-interested lobbyists say otherwise.

"While ethanol lobbying groups have long argued that it slashes greenhouse emissions," he said, "one recent study found that corn ethanol produced under the renewable fuel standard has a carbon footprint at least 24 percent higher than regular gasoline."

What Oliver doesn't mention is that the 2022 study he cited was highly contested. It was challenged not only by "ethanol lobbying groups" but also by the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Biden administration. The study's claim that ethanol has a higher carbon footprint than gasoline also contradicts a 2010 Environmental Protection Agency projection that ethanol would be about 20 percent cleaner than gasoline. Argonne National Laboratory, running the government's standard model, credits ethanol with cutting greenhouse emissions by more than 500 million tons in 15 years.

The problem isn't that Oliver is wrong; it's how he presented this study. Whether ethanol mandates are good or bad for the environment is a complicated, contested issue, with strong studies on both sides (and plenty of weak ones). Plucking one from the pile and reporting its findings is misleading.

Ethanol subsidies are bad because they involve politicians using mandates to buy farmers' votes, and top-down mandates generally lead to less optimal decision-making. But it's not clear that ethanol increases carbon emissions.

 

SWAT Raids

In a 2014 segment on police militarization after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Oliver said, "There has been a massive rise in both the number and the use of police department SWAT teams," and showed a news clip that stated: "The number of SWAT raids has gone up by 1,400 percent since the 1980s. An estimated 50,000 now take place every year." Instead of mocking the clip, as he often does, Oliver cited it approvingly.

So where did the claim of a 1,400 percent increase come from? It's based on a voluntary mail-in survey, which isn't a reliable way to gather data. No official count of SWAT raids exists, and almost nobody tracks them, then or now, so the figure rests on departments' self-reporting of how often they "deployed," with no shared definition of what that means.

The 1980s figures that form the baseline for the 1,400 percent increase in SWAT raids come from a mid-1990s survey, making them especially unreliable. No one was counting SWAT raids at the time, and there's no way to verify them.

Oliver followed that clip by citing another study: "Just keep that clip in mind," he said, "when I tell you that 79 percent of SWAT deployments are now for executing search warrants, and most of those were for drug investigations."

Again, there's missing context. That 79 percent figure comes from a small, nonrandom sample generated by an American Civil Liberties Union records request; the organization could get data from just 20 of America's roughly 18,000 police agencies.

When we pointed out to Oliver's producers that the data on SWAT teams were stripped of their context, they replied that since this segment aired, "We've become more diligent about critically interrogating the sourcing on studies in our shows." They also argued that more "recent studies," if anything, suggest that the studies they cited "understated the true scope of things." And they pointed to instances of Reason citing the same data.

I agree with Oliver's position on SWAT raids, but he really should be agitating for better data. We're permitting state violence without anyone keeping the detailed records that could help us understand the costs and benefits. But that doesn't excuse citing two studies based on weak data and presenting them as fact.

 

Tipping

In a 2025 segment on tipping, Oliver said, "Recent analyses have found that poverty rates for tipped workers are over twice as high as for nontipped workers."

Twice as high as for which nontipped workers? The analysis he's citing included all nontipped workers in the U.S., including CEOs and neurosurgeons. Oliver, who reportedly makes $30 million a year, also pulled up the nontipped average. The right way to evaluate tipping is to match tipped and untipped workers by job: Waiters have about the same poverty rate as fast-food workers, and hotel maids about the same as other cleaners. If you control for job, age, and hours, the gap closes.

It's another study designed to generate a talking point, which isn't surprising since it was published by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive, left-of-center think tank. The organization's name appeared onscreen as Oliver delivered his monologue, but, once again, viewers would need to hit pause to look it up and figure out what the Economic Policy Institute stands for.

Oliver's 2016 segment on "scientific studies" shows that he should know better. It's possible to construct arguments by citing good research responsibly, while providing the proper context and sourcing. It's possible to follow research where it leads, instead of retrofitting it to preconceived ideas. You just have to be willing to present data that capture reality in all its messiness, even if that means it won't generate an easy laugh line.

To keep up with our video series Wrong Number featuring Aaron Brown, and to receive bonus content and more, click here to enter your email address.

The post John Oliver Warned Against Cherry-Picked Studies. Then He Cherry-Picked His Own. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Well done to The Guardian for telling us about the problems in Malawi without telling us the reason for the problems in Malawi:

‘This petrol station is my home now’: Malawi’s fuel crisis forces desperate drivers to queue for days

Shortages caused by the country’s lack of hard currency have escalated into a national emergency, with drivers waiting for a fuel tanker that may never arrive

People waiting for days for a fuel tanker that never does arrive. Clearly, non-optimal. The reason, in the first instance, is as described. The country does not have enough foreign exchange to pay for deliveries of fuel therefore there are few to no deliveries of fuel into the country. Distinctly non-optimal.

But you can only have a shortage of foreign exchange if you’ve tried to fix the price of foreign exchange. Which is indeed what Malawi has done. The official rate is some 1,750 kwacha per US dollar. The varied unofficial - for which read illegal or black market - rates converge upon 4,000. The government has decided that the kwacha should have a nice high price and others don’t like that nice high price therefore they do not buy kwacha. As the foreign currency that others use to buy kwacha is the FX then used to buy imports like oil products it is this high price of the kwacha causing the lack of foreign exchange and thus oil products.

The whole thing is the result of price fixing. Therefore do not fix prices and the problem will disappear. A truly floating exchange rate will be lower than 1,750 but almost certainly higher than 4,000. Which will mean that petrol and other imports become more expensive when denominated in kwacha, most certainly they will. On the other hand there will not be week-long queues to try to fill up the minibus.

You can only have a shortage of foreign exchange if you’ve tried to fix, set, the currency price. Therefore do not fix, set, the currency price and you will not have a shortage of foreign exchange.

Simples.

Tim Worstall

Underlying many of the wildest spending promises made by the most irresponsible political parties this election is an idea popularised by so-called Modern Monetary Theory, aka Magical Monetary Theory. This is the idea (as articulated by Chloe Swarbrick yesterday) that "the right-wing mythology around a government budget being the same as a household budget is exactly that, a mythology."  

According to MMT theory, government budgets differ different to normal household budgets (to over-simplify just a little bit) in that the money for government spending literally grows on trees.

If you need more, just print more.

To be perfectly fair, there's a little more to it than that. But not much. And for politicians promising billions of dollars of overspending, for whom the seduction of easy money is irresistible, anything close enough is good enough.

So what more is there? For a government like New Zealand that uses its own currency, MMT argues that government spending does not depend on first raising revenue through taxation or borrowing. Why? Because:

Chapter 1 dismantles MMT’s foundational myth that money originated with the state. ...

Chapter 2 diagnoses the “spending illusion” that infects MMT. Joseph T. Salerno shows that MMT is “the unwanted stepchild of the neoclassical quantity theory” ... The spending illusion not only persists in MMT but is put on steroids, resulting in bizarre claims about how the state institutes money and policy prescriptions that “will inevitably distort prices and interest rates, divert resources from those uses that best serve consumer preferences, precipitate inflationary booms and asset bubbles, and generate financial crises and economic depressions.”

In chapter 3, Robert P. Murphy refutes the claim of MMT proponents that government debt represents private sector wealth. The so-called sectoral balance approach ["their debt is your money" say MMTers] is employed by MMT proponents in misleading ways. They imply that the only way the private sector as a whole can save and invest is if the government accumulates debt. Murphy exposes their faulty assumptions and sins of omission. Importantly, government debt is repaid with both explicit and implicit taxation (money creation), meaning that government debt service ultimately comes at the expense of the private sector. ... 

In chapter 4, Patrick Newman demolishes the idea that government spending can ever be productive. ... Government spending ...  should be considered consumption and not investment. Newman reviews the concerns held by Simon Kuznets [the inventor of GDP analysis] about the inclusion of government spending in aggregate production statistics, and then evaluates the growth-inhibiting consequences of government spending in light of its true nature: waste.

In chapter 5, Karl-Friedrich Israel exposes the faulty premises of MMT’s inflation management aspirations. MMT acknowledges that price inflation is an important constraint on government spending. [The author shows that] attempts to measure and respond to price inflation are bound to fail however ... [Furthermore] MMT has no dependable guide for determining if, when, and where government spending is pushing beyond productive capacity [or whether politicians would ever have the capacity to stop spending once started].

In chapter 6, Per L. Bylund points out [that] ... MMT proponents entirely ignore the wealth-creating, resource-economising market process—entrepreneurship and economic calculation are wholly absent from MMT analysis. Instead, they reason from accounting tautologies ... and assume that policymakers can effectively and efficiently manage scarce resources without market prices and the profit-and-loss mechanism.

In chapter 7, Joshua A. Mawhorter shows that MMT prescribes policy from a “privileged position,” taking for granted the laissez-faire preconditions for monetary sovereignty, and instead proposing policies that would undermine it. [Ayn Rand called reasoning like this as committing the Fallacy of the Stolen Concept.] It is this monetary sovereignty, according to MMT, that opens the door for deficit spending, debt monetisation, and government control of resources ... [yet a]chieving monetary sovereignty requires quite the opposite: limited government, sound money, and a flourishing private market economy based on capital accumulation. The US is the MMT proponents’ “monetary sovereign par excellence,” but its economic history exhibits institutions and policies condemned by MMT.

Chapter 8 is the chopping block for the MMT job guarantee proposal [reflected in the Greens's own $8 billion "green jobs guarantee"]... MMT overlooks the fact that apparently idle resources are in such a state for a reason. Resources may have no known valuable use or may be held idle temporarily because the owner anticipates a valuable use in the future. Labourers may withhold their services because they value leisure more highly or as a negotiating tactic in a labour strike. A ... job guarantee programme [financed by printed money] would not reduce idleness in the way MMT proponents desire but merely redirect valuable resources and labour away from productive and economising uses and toward wasteful projects chosen by central planners who are inherently unable to engage in economic calculation.

As you'd expect, the book is filled with countless examples illustrating the arguments. 

It's out officially in December, but fortunately you can download a PDF advance copy now just in time to send a copy to your favourite politician ...

Ayn Rand famously held Aristotle in high regard, describing him as a “philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders.” Given such a statement, it’s not surprising that there are rich connections to be found between Aristotle’s philosophical system and Rand’s, which she called Objectivism. Scholars of Aristotle and Rand have found deep connections between the two in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics.

In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast, Tristan de Liège, Jim Lennox, and Greg Salmieri explore some of these connections, discussing issues such as the nature of logic, how humans form universal knowledge, and what it is to live a good life.

Topics include:

• Axiomatic concepts and the laws of logic

• The problem of universals

• Scientific knowledge as fixed versus dynamic

• What biology can tell us about ethics

• Nobility and virtue

• Convincing academia to take Objectivism seriously

Resources:

• James Lennox and Gregory Salmieri, eds, Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand

• Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri, eds, A Companion to Ayn Rand

• Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox, eds, Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge

• Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox, eds, Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue

• Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox, eds, Foundations of a Free Society

This episode was recorded on October 19, 2026.

Image credit: Pach Brothers